Binding Ties

Nick took the lead, Catherine right behind him, as they chased the shirtless eternal hippie along the concrete walkway. The skinny figure took the stairs two at a time but by the time he made ground level, Nick was closing the distance. Carlson perhaps took speed, but he didn't have it: What the suspect had was the wind of an inveterate dope smoker, and with each step, Nick drew nearer.

Carlson had just made it across the parking lot when Nick hit him with a solid tackle.

Nick pulled down his prey, the two of them rolling across the sidewalk and into Baltimore Avenue, the pavement biting into the flesh of Nick's hands and elbows, but he hung on.

Catherine was right there, ready to deal with traffic, but the pair had wound up, fittingly enough for the suspect, in the gutter.

'Aw, maaan,' Carlson moaned, under Nick, the suspect's stubbly face dripping blood where it had connected with the concrete. 'Not cool! Not cool!'

'Resisting arrest,' Nick said, 'is not so hot, either, dude.'

'I'm not under arrest! Am I…?'

'Oh yeah.'

Nick heard a siren wail and he realized his partner had a cell phone in hand; she'd already called in backup, and a patrol car, luckily, had been nearby. The officers showed up moments later and loaded a hang-dog Carlson into the back.

'That's what I get for praying,' Nick said gloomily.

Catherine frowned in amusement. 'How so?'

'I asked the Supreme Being to spare us from that apartment turning out to be a crime scene. Now, while Carlson spends the afternoon cooling his jets in an air-conditioned cell, we'll be combing every square inch of his hellhole apartment.'

'Maybe God has a sense of humor,' Catherine said, laughing a little.

They were walking back toward the building.

'Oh God has a sense of humor, all right,' Nick said. 'Trouble is, seems about the same as Grissom's….'

And they returned to the apartment, to photograph, process, and dismantle the shrine to CASt; as they did so, they would try to figure out if Carlson had actually constructed a temple to himself….

Sara Sidle knocked on the frame of Gil Grissom's open office door.

The CSI supervisor sat behind his desk, glasses perched on his nose as he slowly scanned a page in a file. He looked up and said, 'Hey.'

'Hey,' she said.

She strolled in, dropped an evidence bag containing the Las Vegas Banner magnetic key onto his desk and flopped into the chair across from him.

'Prints?' he asked.

'Couple of partials, but nothing that pops up on AFIS.'

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System had been helpful to them on numerous cases, but the system contained only prints of bad guys that had been caught.

'So it's not easy,' he said. 'Are we surprised?'

She shook her head. 'What's next?'

'I'll call Brass. Maybe we can identify the key through the newspaper.'

'Really think the Banner big boys will make every employee who has one show it to us?'

Grissom considered that for a moment. 'If it wasn't the Banner or some other media outlet, maybe. My guess is they won't do anything until they talk to their lawyers.'

'And the lawyers will say?'

'That it's a Fourth Amendment issue,' Grissom answered, 'even though it really isn't.'

'Kill all the lawyers.'

Grissom said, 'Actually, that quote's always taken out of context. In Henry VI, Shakespeare was in reality implying that lawyers are valuable to-'

'Fine, right. But the Banner's lawyers won't cooperate.'

'No.'

'And we'll try anyway.'

'Yes.'

An hour later, sitting in the office of Banner publisher James Holowell, with Grissom and Brass, Sara heard Holowell make the same argument, minus the typically Grissom-esque interpretation of the Bard of Avon.

A big window in the publisher's office overlooked a bustling warren of reporters' desks. Holowell's office was leanly furnished, a large mahogany desk taking up more than its fair share of space, the top neat but not bare, a computer monitor sitting at an angle on one corner. The evidence bag containing the magnetic key sat in the middle of the blotter like a three-dimensional ink stain.

Grissom, Brass, and Sara sat in three chairs fanned around the desk, opposite Holowell, a barrel-chested African-American with a bald (or possibly shaved) head and tortoise-shell glasses. He wore a gray dress shirt, the cuffs rolled up one turn and a blue-and-silver Frank Lloyd Wright-patterned tie.

Thus far he had been pleasant, professional, and not very helpful.

'How many employees have these?' Brass asked, pointing to the bagged key on the publisher's desk.

Holowell shrugged. 'I wouldn't really know.'

'Who would?' Grissom asked.

'I don't really know that, either.'

'Could you find out?'

'I suppose I could.'

Brass asked, 'Will you?'

'Not this second, but of course I'll look into it. I have every intention of helping you, within the parameters of my responsibility to this paper.'

In other words,Sara thought, no.

Grissom, who'd been studying the publisher, asked, 'Approximately how many magnetic Banner keys are out there?'

'Maybe twenty,' Holowell said. 'Perhaps thirty.'

That sounded low to Sara. Even at that, the Banner-the city's third largest daily paper-had a couple hundred employees, and now at least ten percent of them were possible suspects.

'Only twenty to thirty?' Brass asked. 'Best guesstimate, who would they likely be dispersed to?'

'Myself, of course, all the editors and reporters,' Holowell said with a shrug. 'And a couple of supervisors in the press room.'

They thanked Holowell for his time and rose; handshakes had already been passed around on entry, and no one bothered to repeat the ritual.

Grissom picked up and pocketed the evidence bag off the publisher's desk, then the two CSIs and the detective stepped out into the reporters' bullpen. The bustle and mild roar of the newsroom gave them a peculiar privacy.

Sara turned to Grissom and Brass. 'How about, 'Kill all the reporters?''

'Shakespeare was silent on that subject,' Grissom said.

Sara said to the detective, 'Are we in a better place than we were before that interview?'

Brass said, 'Hell, I don't know.'

'Of course we are,' Grissom said. 'Two steps forward, one step back, is still one step forward. When we arrived we had a pool of two hundred suspects who might have a card. Now, if the publisher can be taken at his word, we're down to thirty or less. And we may be able to get a list of names.'

Sara made a face. 'But the card could have been stolen.…'

Grissom nodded. 'If in that case we can determine from whom it was stolen, we're at an advantage-we have a starting point.'

'Okay,' Sara said, seeing it.