Sara said, "Didn't they live next door to each other?"
"That's right."
"Did they get along?"
He shrugged. "She was nice to him. Hell, she was nice to everybody. Real doll. But Benson, he followed her around like a lovesick puppy. Carried her laundry up and down to the laundry room. Brought her groceries in for her and stuff. I always thought it was so he could try to get a whiff of her panties, pardon my French, but she thought he was harmless."
Sara frowned. "How do you know that, Kevin?"
He shrugged. "You can just tell. You know, some dorks fall for anything a babe hands out."
Warrick smiled a little, for Sara's benefit.
Kevin was saying, "That nerd had the hots for her, big time. Man, I told her she should've got a restraining order against him, but she kept sayin' he was 'sweet.' "
Reading between the lines, Sara said, "And she thought you were kind of…jealous?"
He straightened in the pickup seat. "Hey, we weren't an item. But we talked, 'cause I'm the maintenance guy, I helped her out, fixed stuff."
"And she was a nice person?"
"Yeah! I mean, she knew she was a babe. Babes know when they're babes, know what effect they have on gullible guys. Right?"
Sara didn't know how to answer that.
"But she also seemed kinda…naive. Like she didn't know she was playin' with fire. A weirdo like Benson, leadin' him on, that's dangerous, man."
Sara asked, "Did you ever talk about this with any other police, or possibly the FBI?"
"That guy Culpepper?" He shook his head. "None of them ever asked about Benson-you're the first ones." His eyes tightened. "You think the tabloids'd go for this?"
"They might," Sara said. "You could call them, if you don't mind Benson suing you."
"I don't need that shit!"
Warrick asked, "Would it be possible to see her old apartment?"
"Can't. Somebody's living there now. You'd have to get their permission, and they ain't home."
Sara asked, "What about Benson's old apartment?"
"That I could show you. Tenant after him just moved out last week."
The maintenance man finished his sandwich quickly and Sara kept an eye on the office door; but Grissom and Brass were still in there with the manager.
She and Warrick followed Kevin two buildings over and up two flights of concrete stairs to the third floor. The maintenance man led them around the building to an apartment almost at the far end of the walkway.
"Benson lived here," Kevin said, pointing to the door in front of them, "and she had the apartment on the end."
Using his passkey, the maintenance man let them in. As promised, the apartment was vacant. Tan carpeting covered the floor except for tile floors in the kitchen and bathroom. All the walls were painted white, the kitchen/dining area, the living room, the two bedrooms and the bathroom, all painted that chunky white textured paint that showed hardly any wear.
"Doesn't look too bad," Warrick said.
Kevin shrugged. "Not now. Guy that lived here last left it spotless. Even got his security deposit back."
Picking up on the implication, Sara asked, "What about Benson? Not so spotless?"
The maintenance man snorted. "You don't know how much time I spent in this dump, patching it up! Thomas charged that dork a couple hundred over the deposit."
"Why?" Sara asked.
"The asshole had holes drilled everywhere!"
"Holes? What for?"
"His goddamned shelves and video equipment."
Warrick asked, "So he had a lot of video stuff?"
"Yeah, he was really into it. See, he sold the shit, so he got it at cost. He put holes in the walls to support these metal shelves all over the place-the joint was lousy with them." He walked over to the wall and pointed to a couple of spots where there were obvious patches.
The two CSIs both looked around the apartment and finally Warrick called the maintenance man over to the far wall of the dining area where a patch was on the wall, almost at ceiling level; the patch looked larger than the others.
"Kevin, did Benson have shelves all the way up there? Be hard to reach."
"Naw, below that. I don't know what the hell he was doin', drillin' holes so high."
Sara felt something tense in her stomach. "Did you have to patch any holes in Candace's apartment, Kevin, when she moved out?"
"Few nail holes from some pictures."
Warrick said suddenly, "These shelves-Benson had lots of equipment, right? Or were the shelves mostly for videotapes?"
"Videotapes."
"Tapes, like big movies? Or homemade videos?"
"Homemade, mostly. Just plain old VHS in black sleeves…They were everywhere, shelves full of 'em, boxes of 'em."
A chill ran through Sara.
"What's on the other side of this wall?" Warrick asked, gesturing to where the high hole had been drilled.
"Other side?" The maintenance man stared at the wall, like Superman exercising his X-ray vision. "Lemme think…That would have been Candace's bathroom. Yeah-shower stall."
11
NEXT SHIFT, CATHERINE WILLOWS AND NICK STOKES SPENT most of their time working a murder on Marion Drive.
A drunk had chased his wife down the street before finally catching and stabbing her to death at the edge of Stewart Place Park. It wasn't exactly a locked-room mystery-the man still at the scene, cursing his dead wife, covered in her blood when the responding officers had shown up.
Nonetheless, a crime scene was a crime scene and required due and proper processing. Collecting the evidence from the murder site and all along the chase route back to the couple's house had made for long, tedious toil on an unseasonably warm (supposedly) spring night under the gently mocking soft-focus glow of streetlights.
Now-the two CSIs sitting in the IHOP on the Strip-they were finally getting the chance to read the financial records of their child-porn suspects, over breakfast.
Catherine had Janice Denard's payroll information in front of her, and Nick was proving his walk-and-chew-gum proficiency by alternating bites of pancake with reading Roxanne Scott's payroll history.
They had picked up Newcombe-Gold's paperwork on the seven employees on whom they zeroed in, as well as the disk that Randle claimed to have been working on last Saturday, which they'd already turned over to Tomas Nunez.
Nick-after taking a long pull on a glass of orange juice, not quite as tall as the nearby Stratosphere-nodded toward the file. "I told you advertising pays."
"Wow," Catherine said, eyes wide as she took in Denard's yearly salary.
"Roxanne Scott makes almost twice what a CSI3 makes."
"Tell me about it. Ever think you made the wrong career choice, Nicky?"
Nick grinned. "Like last night, dancing with that drunk?…Ahh, I wouldn't know what to do if I had real money."
"Well, you probably wouldn't ever have anybody shooting at you on the job," she said, alluding to a case they'd worked together a while back. They had gone to a house to collect evidence and wound up ducking gunfire.
"At least we know that's a possibility," Nick said with a shrug. "Most people who get shot at their workplace don't get a warning." He glanced down at Roxanne Scott's payroll record. "How many hours d'you suppose we'd have to work, to get a five-grand bonus?"
Her brow furrowing, Catherine looked at Janice Denard's history again. "Five thousand?…When did Roxanne get that bonus?"
"First of this month."
"That's funny," Catherine said, and licked a muffin crumb off her finger before tracing a line on the sheet of paper in front of her. "That's when Janice Denard got a ten-thousand-dollar bonus."
Nick frowned. "I thought these women had identical jobs."
"So did I." She handed him the sheet of paper.
He studied it for a moment and said, "Maybe Janice worked more hours or something."