Body of Evidence

'Helping break a big case, and getting Benson's ass in a sling! You know-I'm feeling better!'

The trio practically sprinted to the street and around to the back of the Tahoe where Sara and Warrick loaded in their gear. Then they moved around to the far side, so the vehicle was between them and Hamilton's house.

'What do you think?' Brass asked.

Warrick still kept his voice down. 'So who checked Benson out?'

They all took turns looking at each other.

Warrick groaned.

Sara was getting her cell phone out, to fill Grissom in, when it twittered on its own.

'Sara Sidle.'

'We overlooked something,' Grissom's voice said.

She glanced around the neighborhood as if he were somehow shadowing them. 'We just figured that out too.'

'Kyle Hamilton's car may be a wild goose chase,' Grissom said, 'the killer sent us on.'

'That's right. The broken tail matches, but the car is cleaner than Martha Stewart's sink. How did you know?'

'I was just talking to Nick and Catherine about their case, and how they'd neglected a key aspect…and it dawned on me we'd made the same fundamental mistake…'

And in unison, Sara and Grissom said: 'First on the scene, first suspect.'

Sara said, 'Hamilton's a rival of Benson's in the security installation game.'

'Now we know why Benson was such a great eyewitness. Get back here.'

'We're on our way,' she said, but it was too late, as Grissom had already hung up.

Within the hour, they were all working different angles, trying to learn more about David Benson. Warrick was tracking the man's work history while Sara dug into his past, looking for a connection between Benson and Candace Lewis. Grissom spent the time dealing with the various labs about the physical evidence they had, such as it was.

He was, in fact, the first one to announce any progress when he came into the room where Sara was working.

'Mobley's in the clear,' he said. 'Greg reports the sheriff's DNA doesn't match any of the other samples we have.'

'How about Ed Anthony?'

'Clean, too. He may be our favorite suspect, but he's not the guilty one.'

'Pity. How's Warrick doing?'

'Nothing so far. How about you?'

She glanced up from the monitor and gave him a small shrug. 'We know Candace was a workaholic and spent very little time with friends or family. Benson's sort of a cipher, himself. Bought his house two years ago, pays his bills, seems like a regular guy.'

'He may be a regular guy whose hobbies include necrophilia and framing the competition for murder. Keep digging, there's got to be something.'

'You know, Gil, our eyewitness may not be the killer. He could have just used this opportunity to cause trouble for this business rival.'

'I don't buy that. There's no way he fit Kyle Hamilton for a frame without having something to do with this.'

'What's that,' she asked innocently, 'a hunch?'

He just looked at her blankly; and then his expression turned into a little grin. 'Okay, that's one for you. Get yourself another, by finding the link between Candace Lewis and David Benson.'

And he was gone.

Warrick Brown finished Benson's work history and came up with nothing; but rather than just sitting around, he tracked down Grissom, finding his supervisor in the trace lab bent over a work table.

'What have you got, Gris?'

'If we've learned one thing in this case, it's not to ignore the basics. So I'm going back to the one thing that can't lie.'

'The evidence,' Warrick said.

Peeking over his boss's shoulder, Warrick saw a strip of duct tape on the table.

'I already did the smooth side and got nothing,' Grissom said. 'But I thought maybe we might get lucky on the adhesive side.'

'Gentian Violet?'

Grissom shook his head. 'What makes duct tape strong is the fibers running through it. Those fibers absorb Gentian Violet, and if we do raise a print, we wouldn't be able to tell what it is.'

'Sad but true.'

'Well, I remembered this detective I met at a conference a few years back, from the Midwest-Jeff Swanson. He told me he'd been experimenting with small-particle reagent on duct tape. We haven't really had a chance to use it until now.'

SPR, or molybdenum disulfide, Warrick knew, was a physical development procedure that involved the tiny black particles adhering to the fatty substances left in fingerprint residue. Though it had been successful on many different surfaces-glass, metal, cardboard, even paper-Warrick had never heard of it being used on duct tape.

'Is it working?'

'Yes. I photographed it as it was, then put on a small amount of SPR, which gave everything a charcoal color. Then I rinsed it with just a tiny bit of tap water, and that made the print appear to be floating in the water. The SPR helped remove the fibers and other background noise.'

Pulling out his Polaroid MP4, Grissom took three shots in quick succession.

'What kind of film?' Warrick asked.

'Six sixty-five positive-negative.'

That meant prints in less than a minute. Warrick almost patted Grissom on the back. Almost.

The boss was saying, 'Swanson even said that if we use lifting tape when it's not saturated, but still moist, we can lift the print. I've been wanting to try this for some time.'

The man was giddy with the science, and Warrick couldn't help but smile.

When Sara Sidle found what she needed, it was so obvious she almost tripped over it.

She printed two pages, then tore off down the hall in search of Grissom and Warrick. She found the two of them in Grissom's office, both looking beat, which was unusual for the CSI supervisor, who sat behind his desk, his shoulders hunched, arms heavy on the desktop before him. As for Warrick, he leaned against a set of shelves, likely to slide down the front and fall asleep right there.

Understandable that even bricks like Grissom and Warrick would show the strain: few cases in recent years had inspired more overtime, more double shifts than the Candace Lewis case. But Sara was about to wake her colleagues up….

'And you're this chipper why?' a sleepy-eyed Warrick asked her.

'I found it,' she said, holding up the pages.

Grissom sat up, instantly alert. 'The link?'

'They were neighbors,' she announced, and handed her boss the sheets. Then she leaned on his desk with both hands, grinning, unabashedly pleased with herself.

'Who were neighbors?' Warrick said, coming over beside her.

She looked from Warrick to Grissom. 'Before Candace moved into her condo, and Benson bought his house, they were neighbors in an apartment complex in Green Valley.'

'What kind of neighbors?' Warrick asked.

'The next-door kind,' Sara said.

Im midday traffic, it took a while to get there, even with Grissom giving Warrick carte blanche behind the wheel.

The apartment complex-a sprawling series of three-story buildings near the corner of Green Valley Parkway and Pebble Road-had been the latest thing, twenty years ago. Now it was a weathered roost for those unable to manage a down payment on a house trailer.