Body of Evidence

Shaking his head, the detective hauled himself to his feet and followed her out.

While Catherine went to the lobby, Nick asked Janice Denard for a master employee list.

Nick explained, 'We need to track who we have and haven't spoken to.'

Denard rose to her feet; her eyebrows rose, too. 'Take me a little while without the computer.'

'I hear that,' he said, giving her the sympathy she clearly craved.

In the lobby, Catherine was confronting the grumbling crowd, while off to various sides of the lobby, three detectives were pausing in the midst of interviews. After introducing herself, she said, 'As you've gathered, we're looking for a suspect in a serious crime.'

'What crime?' a voice yelled, echoing.

With a tight smile and a shake of the head, Catherine said, 'I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to talk about it at this point; but here's the deal-in order to eliminate each of you as suspects as quickly as possible, we would like you to voluntarily submit to being fingerprinted.'

'How about-no,' a red-faced man said near the front of the crowd.

From behind him, another man suggested, 'How about hell no!'

Catherine shrugged and remained low-key, even light. 'There's another option. We can get court orders for each and every one of you, and that could take quite some time considering the number of people who work here. Then we'll just wait until the court orders arrive. Another possibility is releasing you now, and then you can come into the crime lab for fingerprinting. Maybe you think that would make an interesting day trip.'

'You don't have to be sarcastic,' a woman snapped. 'We're just trying to do our jobs.'

'I know the feeling,' Catherine said.

This seemed to make the point as well as anything.

'I'm going to ask a show of hands,' Catherine went on. 'Who is willing to be fingerprinted, without a court order?'

Gradually, all of the employees raised their hands, as if in half-hearted surrender.

They were in that posture when Nick came in carrying their print kits and the employee list he had gotten from Denard.

Nick said to Catherine, quietly, 'Let's not drag them into the crime scene.'

Catherine, nodding that this was a good idea, pointed toward the receptionist's desk and he nodded. Going down the list, they printed twenty-two employees, while O'Riley and the three other detectives completed their preliminary interviews. All the while, the employees and CSIs watched Nunez's guys hauling the very guts of their business outside to the waiting truck.

When Nick and Catherine finally finished up, they cornered Janice Denard one last time, in her office. Neither Catherine nor Nick confronted her about her lack of 'paving the way' with the employees, re the fingerprinting. But the personal assistant clearly read displeasure on their faces, just the same.

'What's the problem?' Denard asked.

'I thought,' Catherine said, 'you told us twenty-seven people had computer access.'

'That's right.'

'We've got prints for twenty-two.'

Nick said, 'Mr. Gold is out of town-where are the other four?'

'Who are they?' Denard asked. 'You must have their names, you cross-checked-'

Nodding, Nick read from the list, 'Jermaine Allred, Ben Jackson, Gary Randle, and Roxanne Scott.'

With a one-shoulder shrug, Denard said, 'Well, for starters, Roxanne Scott is my counterpart.'

'Counterpart, how?' Catherine asked.

'Ms. Scott is Mr. Newcombe's personal assistant and the assistant office manager. She just started her vacation today.'

Catherine was frowning, partly in confusion. 'Mr. Gold's gone, and Roxanne is gone? One partner and the other partner's personal assistant? Isn't that unusual? Doesn't that put the business at a disadvantage?'

'Not as much as having our computers hauled out of here,' Denard said, somewhat acidly. Then, gathering herself, she calmly explained, 'The two partners have different responsibilities, which I would say is typical, not at all odd.'

'Go on.'

'Mr. Gold works on the client side, Mr. Newcombe on the fiduciary side. With this arrangement, they don't both have to be here all the time, and they can nonetheless have an understanding of what the other is up to, which is key, since major company decisions are still made jointly.'

'But Roxanne was here Saturday?' Catherine asked.

'Yes-her vacation started when she went home that day.'

'Do you know where she is?'

Denard smiled, and it seemed vaguely strained. Was there, Nick wondered, a hint of jealousy in that near smirk?

'Roxanne and her beau,' Denard said, somewhat archly, 'went to Tahiti for the week. Frankly, I wish I could say the same….'

'All right,' Catherine said, finally processing all of that, sighing. 'How about the other three?'

'Give me a few minutes to check on the others, will you? Without my computer-'

'Yes,' Catherine said, a little sharply. 'It will be difficult.'

'Well it will.'

And Janice Denard went briskly from the office.

Nick considered, briefly, making a cat growl, but thought better of it.

While the two CSIs waited for Denard to track down the three absent employees, they packed up their gear and walked through the empty office. The place really was like a big haunted house, empty even of its ghosts, all the employees having slowly filtered out to go home, as their fingerprinting obligation was fulfilled.

Now the place reminded Nick of some end-of-the-world movie, where vampires or zombies or mutants awaited around every corner. Like the empty streets of those B-movies of his adolescence, the Newcombe-Gold offices-stripped only of their computer equipment-were at once weirdly normal and strangely wrong, as if the human race had vanished from the planet overnight, though Nick was relatively sure no zombie waited around the next corner. Then he turned it and almost ran into O'Riley.

Nick jumped and the stocky detective gave him a quizzical look.

'What?' the detective asked.

Catherine was looking at Nick, amused.

'Sorry, Sarge, you just startled me,' Nick said.

Wryly, Catherine noted, 'He sometimes has that effect on people.'

O'Riley made a little face-repartee was not his long suit-and fell in step with them and the trio made their way to the front door where Tomas Nunez watched the last of the computer equipment being loaded into the truck. Twenty-nine computers, thirty counting Newcombe's laptop, and all the zip disks, CDs, floppies and tape backups that Nunez could find, were piled into the back of the Ryder. It was a haul that came close to filling the rental truck.

'How goes it?' Nick asked.

'That's the load,' Nunez said. He heaved a huge sigh; there'd been lots of sighing, today. 'Now comes the hard part-we take all this stuff back to the lab and dig in. Wherever the perp has the stuff hidden, we'll find it.'

'Good to hear,' Catherine said, exhaustion in her voice.

Janice Denard walked out to join them in the parking lot. 'I have the rest of the information you requested.'

'Yes?' Catherine said.

'Ben Jackson left Friday to go out of town, and took a vacation day, today, for his return flight.'

Squinting in sunlight, Catherine asked, 'You know where he went?'

Denard held out two open, empty hands. 'I think maybe he said something about Idaho-that's where he's from.'

'And the others?'

'Jermaine Allred called in sick this morning.'

'He didn't talk to you?'