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Authors
Note: Cold Vengeance is set early in season 5,
right after Down the Drain/Harvest, and is the first of a series of 5 stories
under the heading "Love And Revenge".
Disclaimer:
CSI does not belong to me. No infringement
intended.
Chapter One - Of Acid and Bugs
Police lights were red and blue strobes
through the windows of the dank warehouse. Grissom peered through the gloom,
his trusty maglite in his hand, the beam of which illuminated a truly horrific
sight.
Mutilated, burned flesh. A man with no
face.
"Acid," commented Catherine. She
crouched down at Grissom's elbow for a better look, wrinkling her nose.
"Hope for his sake it was done post-mortem".
Grissom contemplated the scene for a
moment, looking from the victim's non-existent face to his hands, which also
bore the hallmarks of severe acid burns.
"So, was the perp being vicious? Or
was he trying to hide his victim's identity? No way are we going to get any
usable ridge detail off his hands," he commented, finally looking at his
colleague.
"There are always dental records.
They'll just take a little longer."
Behind them, Brass entered the warehouse.
"Just finished interviewing the two
that found the vic," he informed them. "Couple of kids. Just came in to..."
he sardonically glanced at his notes, "'hang out'". I'm thinking it's
more like make out. Though why anyone would want to come down here at four in
the morning is beyond me."
"The warehouse isn't in use?"
Grissom wanted to know.
Brass shook his head. "Doesn't look
like it at the moment. I'm trying to get the owner on the horn to find out for
sure. No sign of the victim's car, assuming he drove here."
"Maybe he was driven," Catherine
suggested.
Brass shrugged as his cell phone started
to ring. He answered before the second ring.
"Brass," he said, moving outside
the warehouse to get a clearer signal.
Grissom gently pulled back the victim's
ruined shirt. Several beetles and maggots crawled over the body, around the
large exit wound in the victim’s chest.
"Oh, some of your friends have
decided to join the party," Catherine wryly observed.
Grissom frowned. Gently extending a gloved
finger, he picked up one of the beetles.
"There's something wrong here. This
is a Carpet Beetle. And that…" he said pointing at another creature,
"is a Silphid Beetle. They belong to completely different stages of the
timeline. The Carpet Beetle shouldn't be here yet."
"Oh, yeah, I remember. The body-farm
case. That type of beetle doesn't appear until the corpse is nearly a
skeleton," she said, looking around. "But there aren't any other
bodies here. Can't be cross-contamination this time, can it?"
Grissom considered for a moment. The
conclusion he was forming wasn't a pleasant one.
"I think it might be worse than that
Catherine. All these maggots are of different ages. I think the killer might
have planted them," he observed as he began to collect the entomological
evidence.
"So we're looking for someone who
knows enough about bugs to plant a whole mess of them on the body to, what...
throw off the timeline?" Catherine got to her feet shaking her head.
"That's all we need, a killer who's as smart as you."
"Well, we won't know much until I get
these guys back to the lab for a closer look," he said evenly, continuing
his collection.
She moved away from the body for a closer
look around the warehouse. The beam from her flashlight came to rest on a
table, with a half-empty bottle of beer resting on top.
"Maybe our perp was thirsty?"
she said wryly, stooping to get a closer look. Angling her light, she finally
spotted what she'd been hoping for. "Visible ridge detail."
Grissom looked over and gave her a small
smile. "Maybe we got lucky and he got sloppy."
Turning back to the body he spotted something
that made him smile a little wider.
"Very lucky, even..." he
commented, as he used his tweezers to lift a long, dark hair from the victim's
clothes. "Skin tag still attached."
Catherine moved around the warehouse some
more. She let a low whistle out.
"Look at that crater," she
remarked to Grissom. "Looks like the perp used a cannon."
A large hole was visible in the warehouse
wall. Catherine shone her flashlight at it and bent closer for a better look.
"Bullet's deformed. It's opened out
like a flower with really sharp petals," she told him. "I’m thinking
high performance ammo. Someone really wanted this guy dead."
"See if you can extract it without
further damaging the bullet," Grissom told her.
As he was about to move away from the
body, he caught a glimpse of white, poking out from the victim's jacket pocket.
Reaching in with a clean pair of tweezers, he withdrew a creamy piece of paper.
"Catherine?" Grissom called in a
worried voice.
"Yeah?"
"Killer left us a note."
Grissom stared at the note. Its words set
alarm bells off in his head.
Follow the evidence
bravenet.com