Binding Ties

Sara said, 'Partial prints on the bell and front doorknob? Didn't belong to Sandred.'

'Do we know whose they are?' Grissom asked.

Nick said, 'I ran them through AFIS and got a goose egg.'

Sara added, 'I went through the Gaming Commission, the military…came up empty.'

'Any trace?' Grissom asked.

'Just those black threads you found,' Nick said. 'Polyester.'

Grissom turned to the coroner.

Dr. Robbins said, 'Victim died of asphyxiation due to the ligature around his neck. Quite a bit of struggle. I'm afraid I don't have a lot more than that to offer.'

'You've gone over the original CASt files?'

'Yes-this death is consistent with those.'

Grissom nodded and the coroner did the same, then rose, slipped the cuff of his crutch over his arm, and headed out, but then paused at the doorway, file of photos under one arm.

'It wasn't a pleasant death,' Robbins said. 'It'd be nice not to have to add any more pictures to my collection.'

Catherine said, 'See what we can do, Doc.'

Robbins nodded somberly, then exited.

'Takes one sick perp,' Nick said, 'to bum out a coroner.'

Grissom turned to Nick. 'You were working the lipstick database…'

'Yes-this one's called Bright Rose, made by Ile De France. Similar to, but not the same as, the Limerick Rose that was CASt's preference years ago.'

Catherine said, 'Limerick Rose was also an Ile De France.'

Nick found a meager grin. 'Ask an expert…. Problem with the Bright Rose is, it's sold everywhere, from the cosmetics counter at a Fashion Mall department store to Walgreens. We'd have about as much chance as tracking a bottle of soda.'

'The rope?' Warrick said. 'Same deal-sold in every hardware store. But I did get epidermal cells off both sides and both ends of the rope.'

'I'm still testing them,' Greg said. 'Trying to figure out which are the vic's, which the killer's. Where the rope was around the vic's neck, that was easy-but the rest of the rope, well, key is trying to find where the vic fought against it, and where the killer might have been pulling it. Then we can determine whose cells are whose.'

Grissom's head tilted to one side. 'Matter of time?'

'Matter of time-not much of that, really.'

'All right, Greg. Keep me in the loop.'

'In this case,' Greg said, 'you might not want to be in a loop.'

Grissom said, 'I'll do the gallows humor, Greg-and I'm not in the mood.'

The lab tech lifted his eyebrows and set them down and looked anywhere but at Grissom.

'Come to think of it, Greg,' Grissom said with a ghastly smile, 'don't you have work to do?'

'Yes. Yes I do.' Greg rose, his smile one of the most strained in the history of man. 'Work. To do. 'Bye. Everybody….'

And Greg took his files and went.

So much for the only upbeat attitude at the table.

Travelling from face to face of his CSI team, Grissom said, 'All right-here's what we're going to do.'

Brass said, 'You're going to tell me what to do, Gil?'

Grissom said, 'Yes.'

Brass thought about that; then said, 'Okay.'

'You want to talk to that reporter, Jim, be my guest. But first, sit down with Catherine and Nick.'

Brass gave Grissom a tentative nod.

Grissom said, 'Cath, I want you and Nick to go through the old case file, all five kills, all the old suspects, find out everything you can, cross-reference and collate and stay alert. Sit down with Jim. Find out where our suspects are…here in town, moved away, in the ground, but find their whereabouts. And keeping in mind what the files have told you, develop theories about whether any of them might be back in business with an adjusted M.O.'

'Theories?' Catherine said, wondering if she'd heard him right.

'That's right. Not wild guesses.'

'Glad to.'

'Warrick, Sara, and I will continue to work the evidence from the Sandred house and see if we can turn something we've missed. Call it the first of the theories if you want. But I'm on record: This guy is just getting started.'

Not a wild hunch, Catherine knew, as they all recognized the mark of a serial killer when they saw it, and there could be no question: This creep was just amping up.

'And another troubling aspect,' Grissom said. 'If, as with our would-be Jack the Ripper a while back, we have a copycat who's following the pattern of an original, then we might have a finite number of victims…five in this case…after which our homicidal performance artist stops, and fades into the night.'

'Like the original Ripper,' Nick said.

'Hell,' Warrick said, 'like the original CASt!'

Grissom, Warrick, and Sara surrendered the conference room to Brass, Nick, and Catherine, who huddled around one end while Brass pulled the large cardboard box closer to him, to lift items out.

Businesslike, nearly robotic, Brass withdrew the first file. 'First vic was November 1994. Guy's name was Todd Henry. He lived in an apartment downtown. No family, no friends. He'd been dead better part of a week before we got the call.'

'Who found him?' Nick asked.

'Smell got so bad one of the neighbors called in a public-nuisance complaint, and we went in. Guy was on the living-room floor, rope still around his neck.'

Catherine asked, 'Was the full M.O. established from the start? Lipstick, semen, noose?'

'Yeah,' Brass said. 'This perp had either been setting this up, planning it out, for a long time, fantasizing maybe…or he'd been doing it somewhere else. However you look at it, when the killings started in Vegas, the M.O. was full blown and never deviated.'

Nick said, 'Obviously you and Vince checked other jurisdictions.'

'Nationwide, but nobody ever matched up. We checked out Canada, too, and finally Europe. Anyway, after Todd Henry, John Jarvis showed up dead a month later. Everything was exactly the same as the previous case.'

Catherine asked, 'Jarvis have any connection to Henry?'

'Other than a basic physical similarity? No.' Brass tapped a forefinger in a palm. 'Henry was a transplant, Jarvis a lifelong Vegas resident. Henry did odd jobs, Jarvis was an accountant. Henry lived alone, Jarvis had a family, wife and a son. Lived in a nice house in Boulder City, while Henry hung out in that downtown rathole. The only thing they had in common was appearance. Fiftyish white males, overweight.'

'What about the others?'

'George Kim, the third vic, was half-Asian-other than that all five…Henry, Jarvis, Kim, Clyde Gibson and Vincent Drake…were overweight white men around forty-five, fifty. Although each had some things in common with one or two of the others, nothing other than physical appearance could be seen as a common denominator.'

'Nothing?' Nick asked, hardly believing it.

Brass shrugged elaborately. 'Kim worked at the Lucky Seven, Drake worked as a supervisor at the city garage and Gibson was a self-employed furniture maker. Some had kids, some didn't. Some were married, some weren't. The only other thing that changed was CASt's frequency-month between the first two, barely a week between the last two. The guy was definitely picking up speed-really getting into it. Then…he stopped cold.'

'Okay,' Catherine said, trying to regroup mentally. 'What about the suspects?'

Brass blew out air. 'There were hundreds at the beginning. Serial confessors, heavyset men calling in saying their neighbors were acting suspiciously, all kinds of dipsticks. When we got through weeding 'em out, we were down to three-loser named Dallas Hanson, scumbag named Phillip Carlson, and this complete psychopath, Jerome