"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.
The manager-a middle-aged man with short, dark hair cut up over his ears and collar-looked to be ex-military; probably put in his twenty, Sara figured, retired and took the job of managing this place in trade for rent. The man seemed happy to see them-prospective renters, possibly-right up until Brass flashed his badge.
The office was small and cramped, the air stale despite the best efforts of a window air conditioner about ten years past its prime. Howard Thomas-as he'd been announced by a scruffy brass nameplate on his forty-dollar do-it-yourself-kit desk-sat grumpily drumming his fingers on the desktop.
"Let's make this short," he said. "I'm a busy man, and some of my tenants are allergic to police."
"Perhaps," Brass said, "they can build up a tolerance, if we have a patrol car stop by here, on the hour. Maybe they'll feel a little safer."
"You don't have to be unpleasant."
"We need to talk to you about a couple of your ex-tenants."
Thomas shrugged. "If you mean Candace Lewis, she was a model tenant-everybody liked her, everybody got along with her."
None of them was surprised that the manager had skipped a step and gone straight to Candace Lewis-as big as the story was in the media, as important as the case had been, this manager had no doubt already answered more than his share of questions about the mayor's late personal assistant.
But the manager explained anyway: "She's all you cops want to talk about. You and the TV and the papers and the FBI, you guys are sniffin' around here, every other day, seems like-and I can't get a decent renter to walk through the door."
"I hear life's a bitch," Brass said. "Now, let's talk about another former tenant-David Benson."
Thomas shrugged. "That's a new one. Who the hell is he?"
Sara said, "Lived here for two years. Left about two years ago?"
Grissom said, "That's four years, Mr. Thomas."
"Hell if I know."
Brass asked, "You keep records, don't you?"
Thomas pointed at a file cabinet. "You don't expect me to take my time sorting through there, do you?"
Sara was starting to understand why Grissom preferred insects to people.
A lanky guy in his thirties strolled into the room; he wore threadbare jeans and a tan workshirt with the name Kevin stitched in an oval over a breast pocket.
"Finished 4B," Kevin said, oblivious to the crowd in the tiny office.
"What about the bum washer in building six?"
"I don't wanna start that till after lunch."
Thomas waved dismissively and "Kevin" slipped back out the door. After Grissom shot them a look, Sara and Warrick were on the guy's tail.
The sun was high and hot, but a breeze from the west made it cooler out here than inside that stuffy office. Kevin strolled through the parking lot; he climbed into a red beater of a pickup, the box stacked full with plywood, two by fours, empty pop and beer cans, and some loose hand tools. He didn't start the pickup up, however; he was brownbagging it.
And as he unwrapped a sandwich from what might have been an evidence bag, Sara came up on the driver's side, Warrick looping around to the passenger side.
"Are you the maintenance engineer?" she asked, reaching for the most complimentary term she could muster. She gave him a nice smile.
He had just taken a bite of his sandwich, and looked up-ready to give hell to whoever'd interrupted his alfrecso dining-but then apparently liked what he saw, including her gap-toothed smile. He nodded slowly, still chewing, closing his mouth while doing so, indicating chivalry wasn't dead.
"Mind if I call you 'Kevin'?" she asked, gesturing to the name on his workshirt.
He swallowed a bite, then grinned. "Call me anytime."
Then the maintenance man seemed to sense Warrick, on the other side, and glanced at him with a frown. Warrick gave him a friendly nod.
The maintenance man returned the nod, guardedly, then turned back to Sara. "So who are you guys? Saw you talkin' to Howard."
She lifted the I.D. on its necklace. "Sara Sidle and that's Warrick Brown. We're with the crime lab? Can we talk to you while you eat?"
If Warrick had been the one asking, the maintenance man might have said no; but Kevin seemed intent on keeping Sara happy. "Sure, if you don't spoil my lunch with some gross-out shit from the morgue or somethin'!"
Kevin chortled at his own witticism and Sara managed a light laugh.
"What do you guys wanna talk about?"
"A couple of former tenants-Candace Lewis and David Benson."
"She was a babe," he said. "He was a dork. Anything else?"