"Fast boat," he said.
"If you say so," Grissom said, eyes on the hunt for something pertinent.
Nick and Warrick climbed up into the craft while Brass and Grissom remained on the cement floor. Warrick started at the stern, Nick in the bow, and they worked toward the center. To the naked eye, the boat appeared pristine, and the lingering scent of solvent and ammonia suggested a fresh cleaning.
"When was the last time Sadler had the boat out?" Nick called down.
Shining his flashlight on his notebook, Brass said, "If our charming cooperative witness can be trusted, right after the Fourth of July. He was in lockup most of the time after that."
Nick glanced back at Warrick. "Then where's the dust?"
"Boat's way too clean," Warrick said, shaking his head. "Ask me, somebody used it, and cleaned it."
From below, Grissom said, "Don't ask yourself-ask the evidence."
Nick and Warrick dusted the controls and the wheel for prints. Everything had been wiped. Opening the fish box, Nick shone his beam inside and saw that it too had been hosed clean.
"There's nothing here," Warrick said finally. "There'd be more dust and dirt if it had come straight off the showroom floor."
"Keep at it," Grissom said, working the cubicle itself.
Up in the boat, the indoor/outdoor carpet covering the cockpit floor was a mix of navy, light blue, and white swirls. Even on his hands and knees, with the beam of his light barely six inches off the deck, Warrick doubted he would see anything even if it was there. Fifteen minutes of crawling around later, he had proved himself correct.
Nick jumped down onto the cement, nimble for the big guy he was. "I don't know what to say, Grissom."
Grissom's smile was barely there. "Remember the old movies when the Indians were out there, about to attack? 'It's quiet…'"
"'Too quiet,'" Nick finished, with a nod. "And this is too clean, way too clean for sitting as long as it's supposed to…but we can't find anything."
Grissom's head tilted and an eyebrow hiked. "If a dismembered body was disposed of from the deck of that boat, Nick-what should we expect to find?"
Nick smiled, nodded, went to Warrick's field kit, picked out a bottle and tossed it up to him.
"Luminol, Gris?" Warrick called down. "You don't really think he cut her up on the boat, do you?"
"I don't know," the supervisor said. "I wasn't here when it happened…see if anything's still here that can tell us."
Nick walked forward to where Brass stood with his arms crossed.
"I thought we had the bastard," said the detective.
Shrugging, Nick said, "Grissom's right-the cuter they think they are, the smarter they think they are, the surer a bet that they slipped somewhere." He looked down, his gaze falling on the end of the trailer. "Anybody dust the hitch?"
Brass looked at him, a tiny smile beginning at the corners of his mouth. "Not yet."
With the luminol sprayed over the cockpit, Warrick turned on the UV light source. He moved from bow to stern on the port side: nothing; going the opposite way on the starboard side, Warrick made it as far as the console before he saw the first glow…
…a fluorescent dot.
His breath caught and he froze, willing the tiny green spot to not be a figment of his imagination. Two more drops to the side, one more on the gunnel, and Warrick knew he was seeing the real thing. Retracing his steps to the center of the boat, he opened the fishbox. Though it had appeared clean at first glance, it now had a tiny fluorescent stripe on the bottom, against the back wall. One bag of body parts had leaked, he thought.
"Got blood," he called down, coolly. "Not much, but it'll give us DNA."
Grissom smiled at Brass. "If Lynn Pierce's dismembered body took a trip on that boat, we're going to know."
Removing the tape from the trailer hitch, Nick shone his light on the tape to reveal a nice clean thumb print. "Got a print off the trailer hitch!" he called.
The quartet locked up the garage feeling pretty good about themselves-they knew to a man that they were finally making progress in this frustrating case.
"Next stop," Grissom said, "the home of Kevin Sadler."
"And more puzzle pieces?" Nick asked.
"Maybe," Grissom admitted. And then he went further: "Maybe enough pieces to tell us what picture we're putting together."
The house, a rambling ranch in need of repair and paint, squatted on one of those side streets that never made it into the "Visit Vegas!" videos, much less the travel brochures.
Brass unlocked the door and the CSIs moved in, carrying their silver field kits in latex-gloved hands, their jobs already assigned by their supervisor, the detective ready and willing to pitch in on the search. Nick took the kitchen, Grissom the bedroom and bathroom, Brass the living room, and Warrick the basement.
Arrayed with contemporary, apartment-style furnishings, many of them black and white (the walls were pale plaster), the place was tidy, perhaps-like the boat-too tidy. On the other hand, Sadler had been away for some months, and only recently returned; so it was not surprising that the place had been cleaned while he was away (while watching the place, Pierce had let the housekeeper in, the dealer had said), nor was it startling that Sadler hadn't had time yet to get it very dirty, since.
The television in the living room was smaller than a Yugo-barely; next to it, stacks of electronic equipment thumbed their noses at Brass, who knew what little of it was. A large comfy-looking white leather couch dominated the center of the room with chairs set at angles facing the television on either side. Thick white pile carpeting squished beneath the detective's feet, the type that particles of evidence could hide themselves away in; still, Brass knew there was little hope of finding any evidence in here, which (he also knew) was why he'd drawn this room in the first place.
In the bedroom, on the nightstand, Grissom found an ashtray full of smoked joints and, in a drawer of the nightstand, a large resealable plastic bag full of grass. As he went through the closet, Grissom began to realize he wasn't going to find anything to help him in here. He had hopes for the bathroom, but found nothing there, either. To his surprise, luminol showed no blood in the tub…or the sink….
In the kitchen, Nick found some blood in the drain, as if someone had washed it off their hands. And luminol showed a few spots of blood in the sink. He took samples of all of it, but found nothing else.
"You're gonna wanna see this!" Warrick called from the basement.
They trooped downstairs, an eager Grissom in the lead. The windowless room was illuminated by a single bulb dangling from the ceiling, Psycho-style. In the far corner, a shower head was attached to the wall, feeding a drain in the floor a few feet away. Though a curtain rod made a square enclosure, the shower curtain was long gone, bits of it still entangled in the metal rings of the rod.
The latter detail struck Grissom as possibly significant.
Next to the shower, a large sink was mounted on the wall, with a toilet along the same wall beyond that, no walls around any of the fixtures.
With the others looking on, a calm but focused Warrick said, "I sprayed the shower, the floor, the sink and the toilet with luminol."
No one said anything as the lanky CSI turned on the UV light. Nor did they speak when the entire room seemed to supernaturally fluoresce before them, freezing even these seasoned investigators into shock.
Shaking his head, Brass finally said, "Oh, my God…"
His expression grim, Grissom hung his head, the vision of it playing before his closed eyes.
Pierce has a key to the house. He comes down here, into this cement dungeon, with the body of his wife. He places her in the shower like the lump of flesh she's become, and goes back upstairs for his chain saw. Soon, he returns, and fires it up….