Robbins bent over his new patient. 'Some decomposition. She's been dead for a while.'
Nude, the woman had matted black curly hair cut into a low-maintenance pageboy. Her face was still basically intact, although both jaws seemed to have been broken post-mortem, and were now offset by at least three inches, the flesh around her mouth having begun to tear away.
Her eyes were closed; her face, composed and peaceful. But a bizarre aspect struck them all: she wore too much makeup, almost clownishly so-crimson lipstick, an abundance of rouge, mascara nearly dripping from her eyelashes. Applied way too heavily, and carelessly, and perhaps hastily.
Was the makeup post-mortem, too? It seemed…fresh.
'Area around her right eye,' Sara said, clinically, 'swollen…heavy makeup layered over the welt can't disguise the fact she's been punched in the face.'
'Good,' Grissom said, as if to a student.
But then, they were all students of Grissom's.
'She was beautiful once,' Grissom said.
Sara looked up, almost shocked. 'That's not very…scientific.'
'Beauty is a subjective thing,' Grissom admitted, staring down at the face. Was that sadness in his eyes? 'But by the standards of our culture…even with the damage, the camouflaging, perhaps ritualistic makeup…this was a beautiful young woman.'
Warrick could only agree. The woman's olive skin had gone drab and gray, but in her long straight nose and wide full lips, the shadow of the beauty that had been seemed obvious to Warrick.
Gently thumbing open her eyelids, Robbins revealed large, lifeless brown eyes that Warrick imagined might well have sparkled with life…before her death.
'Petechial hemorrhaging,' Grissom said.
Robbins nodded, studying his patient. 'Sign of asphyxia.'
'The welt tells us she was punched before she died-question is, how long?'
Robbins shrugged facially. 'We'll know when I've finished the autopsy.'
Her skin was a mottled gray, blue and white mess that would indeed tell them a long, detailed story about her death, once Robbins completed his work. Her torso and limbs seemed to be in relatively good shape, but for a dark necklace of torn flesh that suggested the cause of death-strangulation-and something, in its own way, even more disturbing. A vicious tearing of the flesh around her vagina, coupled with the broken jaws, gave Warrick an unsettling notion of what this body had endured after the murder.
Sara's eyes were tight, but if the horror before them, and all it suggested, had shaken her, she was not letting it show. Clinical, professional, she was the first to say it.
'Necrophilia?'
Grissom nodded.
Sara bent to study the victim's face-specifically, the broken jaws causing the bottom half to be offset; this, with the swollen eye and garish makeup, gave Cleo a slightly surreal appearance.
'My turn,' Sara said. 'For an unscientific observation.'
'What?' Grissom asked.
'Something familiar about her,' Sara said, cocking her head a little. 'It's hard to look past the makeup and the distortions caused by beating and death, but…I'd swear I know this woman from somewhere.'
Warrick and Grissom both took a closer look too; they had been looking at a corpse, and now they looked at the person, trying to see through the destruction and obscene face paint.
'Yeeaaah,' Warrick said. 'I do feel like I've seen her somewhere before. Damn! What is it that's so familiar about her?'
Gil Grissom felt a cold burn settle in his stomach; he recognized this woman.
'Meet Candace Lewis,' Grissom said.
The two young CSIs looked at him with wide eyes. Then they looked down at the autopsy tray.
Warrick was first to find his voice. 'Oh, shit….'
Sara was studying the face through narrowed eyes. 'You think this is Mayor Harrison's personal assistant? I don't know about that….' But Sara kept looking, then finally she said, 'No,' but it wasn't a disagreement. 'No, no, you're right. Yeah, I see it, guys. It
In the three weeks since Candace Lewis's disappearance, the young woman-previously all but unknown to the media-had garnered more Vegas coverage than Danny Gans, Clint Holmes and Siegfried & Roy combined.
The twenty-eight-year-old brunette, personal assistant of Mayor Darryl Harrison, had attended a political dinner not long after the first of the month; and then, on her way home that evening, she had fallen off the planet.
Her car, a three-year-old Lexus, had been found in the driveway of her townhouse within a gated community near the intersection of Green Valley and Wigwam Parkways. Fingerprints in the car matched Candace's and Mayor Harrison's prints were found on the passenger doorhandle and seatbelt; but no one else's prints were found anywhere in or on the vehicle.
Given the arid nature of Vegas, Grissom hadn't been that surprised that no other prints had been found. Fingerprints exposed to the weather didn't last long here; and even those protected by being inside the car and under a carport didn't have a terribly long lifespan. For his part, Mayor Harrison explained his fingerprints in Candace's car by saying, 'On the day she disappeared, we went to lunch together…and that was the only time I ever rode in her car.'
The mayor's story had been backed up by Jill Ganine, a KLAS reporter with a nose for news and the teeth to hang onto a story. She arrived at CSI HQ with a videotape shot by her cameraman that showed Mayor Harrison climbing out of Candace's Lexus on the day in question. But almost from the moment the tape had aired, tongues had wagged around the city that the 'lunch' was actually a euphemism for something else altogether. So, whether the tape had exonerated Harrison, or merely suggested a motive for him, was still an open question. To Gil Grissom, anyway.
Most of the media though-KLAS and Jill Ganine excepted, their take on the story having been established at the outset-did not have Grissom's open mind or need for proof.
Mayor Harrison had been vilified for the alleged affair, particularly in the newspapers; and of course the political and sexual aspects of the case, added to the glitzy Vegas backdrop, caught the attention of the national media. In a matter of a few weeks, a promising political career-the result of years of hard work and meticulous grooming-had been reduced to a talk-show joke.
'How deep are we standing in it?' Warrick asked.
'I don't think science has come up with that measuring tool as yet,' Grissom said, mock-pleasant.
Sara said, 'So it's a media crime. How does that affect us? Can't we just fly in under the radar? Doesn't it help that we're night shift?'
'Well, let's take it point by point,' Grissom said.
He held up one finger.
'Until just now,' he said, 'Candace Lewis was a missing person, and a probable kidnapping, with the investigation under the jurisdiction of the FBI; and now she'll be ours again.'
'Isn't that a good thing?' Sara asked.
He answered by holding up a second finger.
And saying, 'Let's not forget that we picked up the body at the doorstep of a federal installation, in a high- profile political case. So, maybe the FBI isn't out of our hair just yet.'
'Not a good thing,' Sara admitted.
Grissom ticked off a third finger. 'The late Ms. Lewis is the personal assistant to the mayor and, rumor has it, his lover.'
A fourth finger came up.
'Not to mention,' he continued, 'that Mayor Harrison's chief political rival right now happens to be the man likely to run against him in the upcoming election….'
'Unnnggggh,' Sara said.
