T he crime scene was still and lovely, sunlight dancing off the white expanse, with almost no wind. Sara was taking photos when the hotel manager trudged back up into the crime-scene area, a thermos under either arm. His expression was grave, but he sounded cheerful enough as he called, “Hot coffee!”

Grissom and Maher immediately slogged over to where Cormier had set up shop at the tree that served as their watch post. Maher in his parka might have been reuniting with his Eskimo brother, when he approached the similarly attired Cormier. The hotel manager poured the brew into Styrofoam cups he’d withdrawn from a coat pocket. Sara finished her latest series of photos, then joined the group. Cormier handed her a steaming cup, which she blew on before taking a hesitant sip.

“I was just telling your partners here,” Cormier said, “the sky’s plannin’ to dump more snow on us.”

She looked from Grissom to Maher, their faces as grim as Cormier’s. “More snow,” she said.

Cormier nodded. “Weather report is not encouraging. Could be as many as ten more inches.”

“So much for the forensics conference,” Grissom said.

“Officially canceled,” Cormier said. “Got an e-mail from two of the state board members who set it up.”

Maher sighed over his cup, and the cold steam of his breath mingled with the hot steam of the coffee. “Is anybody getting in?”

With a quick head shake, Cormier said, “No one gettin’ out, either. I don’t look for the State Police to even try, till later.”

“Define ‘later,’ ” Grissom said.

“Not right now,” Cormier said, ambiguously.

Sara sighed a cloud, and in exasperation said, “What next?”

Grissom turned to her and spoke over the ridge of his muffler. “Finish our coffee and go back to working the crime scene. Just because it snows doesn’t change the job, Sara.”

Yes, out here in the beautiful snowy woods, Sara was experiencing a true Grissom moment. Only her boss would provide a literal answer to what a billy goat would have easily perceived as a rhetorical question.

Grissom was asking the Canadian, “What’s the story with the sticks over there?”

Sara had been wondering that herself.

“It’s a technique developed by two Saskatchewan game wardens,” Maher said. “Buddies of mine—Les Oystryk and D. J. McGill. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Maher led the CSIs to the stick he’d planted at the downhill end of his line. “It’s a pretty simple theory, really,” he said, gesturing with a gloved hand, as if passing a benediction. “I placed a stake where the bullet entered the snow.”

Eyes tight, Grissom asked, “Denoted by the beginning of the streak you saw yesterday?”

“Exactly. Normally, we’d run a string or flagging tape twenty feet to a second stake, aligning it with the streak in the snow that showed the bullet’s path. But with snow this deep, I simply ran the second stake as straight as I could, and planted it without the string.”

Sara asked, “And the bullet never deviates from the path in the snow?”

“ ‘Never’ isn’t in my lexicon,” Maher said. “If the slug hit a rock or something, deviation is possible, even probable—but with snow like this to slow the bullet, the path won’t be altered much.”

Grissom gestured back toward the toboggan. “Which is where your metal detector comes in.”

“Yes,” the constable said. “Lucky I brought it along for my presentation, eh?…I think we’ll find the bullet within three feet of that line, on either side.”

“This technique,” Grissom said. “How often is it successful?”

“Most of the time…‘Always’ isn’t in my lexicon, either.” He turned toward the hotel manager, who was still under the tree, and called, “Mr. Cormier!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Need a favor!”

Cormier came over. “What can I do you for, Mr. Maher?”

Pointing just beyond and to the left of the body, Maher said, “Take the shovel and clear me a space in the snow, oh, three by three feet.”

Nodding, Cormier asked, “How deep?”

“Down to the dirt, please. We’re creating a control area.”

“Shovel’s just about my level of high tech,” Cormier said, and marched off to the toboggan, where he fetched the shovel and went over to start digging.

While Grissom worked on casting footprints, Sara helped Maher get his metal detector assembled and running. Giving him room, she accompanied the Canadian as he and it traveled back and forth over the track the bullet had taken. Every time he pointed at a spot, she placed a smaller stick.

She’d marked only two spots when he stopped, stared at the ground in confusion, and said, “Well, that’s weird, eh?”

“What is?”

“Gettin’ a beep here, on something a whole lot bigger than a bullet.”

“Any idea what?”

Maher shook his head. She inserted a stick at the spot and he kept moving. When he finished, four different places had been marked by Sara in that fashion.

Sara asked, “Now what?”

“We run the metal detector over our control area,” Maher said.

She watched as he ran the detector over the bare spot Cormier had created.

“All right,” Maher said. “It’s clear—no metal in the dirt. Sara, get a garbage bag from the sled, would you?”

Sara trotted over, grabbed one of the black bags, came back and handed it to Maher.

As he ripped out the seams, Maher said, “Now we’ll cover the bare spot Mr. Cormier made for us.”

“Oh,” Sara said, understanding. “We’re going to put the snow we marked onto the plastic, and sift through it.”

Maher nodded. “But first we dig. You take those two,” he said, pointing at the two marked spots nearest the downhill end of the line. Then he went over and knelt in the snow, next to two spots further up the line. “And I’ll take these two.”

Sara had hardly begun to dig down when she saw something pink, and froze. “Constable! Grissom!…I think you both better see this.”

They came over.

Grissom crouched over her find. “Blood…”

Maher, hovering, asked, “What the hell’s that doing here?”

Reflexively, they all glanced back toward the snowy hump of the body almost ten yards uphill; but the victim wasn’t talking.

Maher looked from Grissom to Sara. “Didn’t you say the only blood was near the body?”

“That’s right,” Sara said. “We didn’t see any this far down.”

Grissom asked, “Could this patch of blood have already been covered by snow?”

“I don’t think so,” Sara said. “Not in the time between our hearing those shots and coming onto this crime scene.”

Maher’s expression, in the fuzzy cameo created by the parka, was thoughtful. “Could be someone covered it on purpose, hastily kicked snow over it…. Besides those footprints, you see any other disturbed snow?”

Grissom said, “No,” and Sara shook her head.

Then she asked her boss, “Do you have one of those bug specimen bottles on you?”

A small bottle materialized in Grissom’s gloved palm; he handed the container over to her.

Using the cap, she shooed the pink snow into the bottle, then closed it. She handed the little bottle to Grissom and went back to her digging, only now she was more careful, much slower, searching every inch to make sure she didn’t miss any evidence. Maher went to work on his spots, and Grissom returned to footprint duty.

Stripping off her gloves, she started digging with her fingers, not trusting the shovel or even her gloves to keep her from contaminating any more evidence. The cold and wet of the snow was kind of refreshing at first, but it only took a couple of minutes before her fingers turned red and the tips started to numb up.

She was just starting to think taking off the gloves was a really dumb idea when she touched something hard.

Her hand jumped out of the hole as if she’d been bitten by a snake.

“Are you all right?” Grissom asked, running over to her. He sounded genuinely concerned.

“Something metallic,” she said. “Not small…”

They both looked toward Maher, working at his own spot; but his eyes were on them, as well. The constable came over and drew a forceps from a pocket. “Can you get it with this?”

“Should be able to.” She accepted the tool, inserted her bare hand and the forceps down into the hole. Maneuvering carefully, she worked the ridged jaws around the object. Squeezing, she dragged the object out of the snow, like pulling a tooth. It felt heavy and came out slowly. When the object finally appeared from the snow, they all froze, as if the cold had finally caught up with them.

Only it was not cold, rather shock.

“A knife?” Maher asked, as if he wanted confirmation of what his eyes had shown him. “You said our vic was shot.”

“He was,” Grissom said.

Sara held up the knife in the jaws of the forceps, squinting at it. The thing wasn’t that big—blade no more than four inches long.

“Our victim was shot, all right,” she said. “And so…how do we explain this?”

“More blood,” Grissom said, almost admiringly.

A pink sheen covered much of the blade.

They all traded looks.

“There’s no knife wounds in the body, right?” asked Maher.

“None plainly visible,” Grissom said. “Does this mean our killer took defensive wounds away from this scene?”

All three looked up the hill to where the body lay, almost thirty feet away. Still not talking…

“Blood,” Maher said. “How is that possible?”

“There’s not much blood here,” Sara said, meaning both the knife blade and the snowy stuff she’d gathered.

“Which means?”

It doesn’t start out as a chase. The victim-to-be and a companion come partway up the hill together. They’re talking, arguing even, and a verbal confrontation turns ugly and physical…and the vic-to-be stabs the companion, who pulls a gun in self-defense…

…and now it’s a chase, beginning somewhere down the slope. The companion is running and shooting, and by the time the two reach this point, the killer’s missed twice, two wide shots. The vic drops the knife, in the process of trying to escape, running for his life; but he only makes it another ten yards, before he catches a bullet in the back and goes down. Then the companion goes to the fallen victim, dead now, and decides to disfigure or disguise the body. The killer goes back to the hotel, collects the gas can, and returns for the impromptu funeral pyre.

“It plays out similarly with three participants,” Sara said with a shrug.

Grissom and Maher were both nodding.

“It’s a scenario that suits the evidence we have,” Grissom said. “Let’s keep working and get some more data, and see what we can build from that…. Sara, put your gloves back on. We don’t want to have to amputate your fingers.”

Ruefully, Maher said, “Looks like our vic was one of those poor bastards who brought a knife to a gunfight.”

“Not much of a knife, at that,” Sara said.

“Still,” Grissom said. “Pretty big for a pocket knife.”

“But not big enough,” Maher said, “to go up against bullets.”

Moving in from the sidelines, Cormier asked, “Is…is that blood the killer’s?”

Maher said, “Good chance of it.”

“Don’t mean to tell you experts how to do your job,” the hotel man said. “But can’t you just get the killer’s blood type from that, and identify him?”

“In a lab we could,” Grissom said. “Not out here.” He spread his gloved hands, indicating the forest. “Anyway, the blood on that blade froze overnight, and the red cells will all have ruptured. If we had the lab, we could type it through the plasma, but not under these conditions.”

Going back to work, they carefully emptied the snow from the other holes one shovelful at a time. When they had emptied twelve-inch circles around each of the markers and placed the snow on the spread-out garbage bag, Maher went over the smaller pile again with the metal detector as Sara and Cormier watched.

When Maher got a hit, Sara dropped to her knees, and slowly sifted through the area. After a moment, she found it. Holding it up, she stared at the tiny ice ball with the dark, lead center. “What happened?”

With a little grin, Maher said, “Snow happened. The hot bullet melted it, then the condensation froze around the cartridge as it slowed the bullet down.”

They repeated the process with all the snow from the places they’d marked, but they found only one more bullet and a coin, a quarter.

“Here ya go, Gordy,” she said, flipping the quarter to the Canadian.

“Not that much less than I usually get,” Maher said, catching it.

“Yeah,” Sara said, with a grin, “but that’s American.”

“Good point, eh?”

Moving over to Grissom, Sara said, “Two bullets. When I get the ice off ’em, we’ll have a better idea what we’ve got.”

“Good work,” he said. Then, rising from the print he was working on, he picked two different left-foot castings from the line he’d done. “What do you think of this?”

She studied the castings. “They’re the same boot.”

He nodded. “Two different sets of tracks made by the same boots. One killer, two trips out and back.”

“That confirms my reconstruction.”

“Far as it goes…We need more evidence.”

Maher joined them. “How are the castings coming, Dr. Grissom?”

“Finished. Just getting ready to pack up.”

“All right. I’ve got the bullets. Don’t think there’s anything else we can do here.”

Sara asked, “What about the body?”

Maher gave Grissom a hard look. “What do you think, Dr. Grissom? Are we done with the scene?”

Grissom glanced around, eyes tight with thought; then, slowly, he nodded.

“I agree,” Maher said. “I suggest we take the body with us…which is part of why we brought the toboggan.”

“Hold on!” Cormier called from the sidelines, where he’d been listening. “How come you can take the body now, when you couldn’t before?”

“Before,” said Grissom, “it was part of an active crime scene. Now that we’ve worked the scene, we can remove the body.”

Shaking his hooded head, the old man walked away.

Maher glanced toward the sky, saying, “If we can pack up quick enough…”

“We have a shot at the parking lot,” Grissom finished.

“Let’s go sledding, then,” Sara said.

Grissom and Maher carefully dug out the body, wrapping it tightly in the space blanket and binding it to the toboggan. As they worked with the remains, Sara gathered up the tools and added them to the load. Within fifteen minutes, they were starting back down the slope.

Again, Cormier was in the lead, Maher dragging the toboggan, Grissom and Sara bringing up the rear, making sure their package stayed wrapped up. As they trudged along, they discussed what to do with the body.

When they reached the edge of the parking lot, its scattering of vehicles so topheavy with snow they resembled big white mushrooms, the CSIs were still hashing over the subject.

Maher said, “Maybe we should just bury it in the snow again.”

Sara made a face. “We just dug it out!”

The Canadian nodded, saying, “Yes, but the killer set it on fire for a reason…”

Grissom said, “And you’re worried that by bringing it into the hotel, we’re giving the killer a chance to finish the job.”

The constable shrugged. “It is a consideration.”

“If we bury it outside again, we’ll have to set up another rotating shift,” Maher said, “to guard it from predators.”

“Please God,” Sara said, the hotel and its promised warmth so nearby, “let there be another way.”

They had reached the shoveled area near the rear door of the hotel, parking the toboggan alongside.

Grissom looked toward the manager. “Mr. Cormier, do you have a walk-in cooler?”

Cormier snorted a laugh. “Can’t run a hotel this big without one…. You’re not…?”

Cormier’s eyes followed Grissom’s to the blanketed body strapped to the toboggan.

Grissom asked, “Does the cooler have a lock?”

“Well, padlock, yeah, but—”

“Who has keys?”

“Me, the Missus, and Mrs. Duncan, she’s the head cook. But you can’t seriously—”

“What about the fry cook?” Maher asked. “What’s his name?”

Cormier said, “Bobby Chester. He doesn’t have a key. Usually, he only works during the day, and the Missus or me is always around. But gentlemen, you can’t honestly be considering…”

Grissom and Maher were trading looks.

Then Maher said, “Mr. Cormier, we’re going to have to ask you to collect the keys and give them to us.”

The hotel man was shaking his head. “You can’t really be suggesting we stow that…corpse, in the walk-in cooler?”

Grissom and Maher just looked at him. Sara, astounded herself, was enjoying watching this play out.

“There are sanitary issues,” Cormier was saying, “there are laws we’d be breaking…”

“Not more serious than murder,” Grissom said. “We have to insist. We’re commandeering your cooler.”

“Tell me this is some sick joke,” the hotel manager said. “What would I tell the health inspector?”

Maher said, “Mr. Cormier, it’s really the only option that makes sense.”

“But the guests, what will they say?”

“You’re not to tell them,” Grissom said. “The fewer people that know what we’re doing, the better.”

“Well, now,” Cormier said, “finally we agree on somethin’!”

Maher smiled pleasantly, but in an entirely businesslike way. “Would you get us that padlock key, please?” He turned to Grissom. “We really should start to hurry on the parking lot.”

The hotel man sighed and it hung in the air. “Be back in a few minutes.”

Cormier started away, and Sara called out: “Sir!”

He turned. “Yes, Ms. Sidle?”

“You might not want to mention this to Pearl.”

The hotel man’s eyebrows rose, then he nodded, saying, “Good thought, Ms. Sidle. Good thought.”

They watched as the dejected-looking Cormier went inside.

Maher asked Sara, “What’s this about Mrs. Cormier? We got another suspect?”

“If our host really wants to keep the news about a stiff in the cooler from the guests,” Sara said, “he’ll be wise to keep it from his wife…. She’s one of the few communications systems around here not affected by the storm.”

“Ah,” Maher said.

“Now about the blood on that knife blade,” Sara said.

Maher and Grissom faced her.

“What about it?” her boss asked.

“That waitress, Amy Barlow? She’s got a bandage—cut on her hand.”

Grissom nodded, remembering. “She said she got it slicing onions in the kitchen. Do we believe her?”

Sara shrugged. “She’s the only person I’ve seen with a cut.”

“There’s the waiter,” Maher said.

Sara frowned. “The one who dropped the tray?”

“Spot on his sleeve, eh?”

Sara smiled. “Oh, you noticed that…. I couldn’t tell what it was. He’s working with food and liquids, so that stain—”

“Might have been blood,” Maher said. “Could explain why he dropped that tray. Weak arm, sore arm.”

“Have we narrowed the list of suspects,” Grissom asked, “or increased it?”

Maher shook his head. “We still don’t really have any significant evidence pointing toward anyone.”

Sara asked, “Is there any way to cross-match the blood on the knife?”

Grissom shook his head as well. “Doubtful the hotel has the tools for that.”

Cormier emerged and trailing him—surprisingly enough—was Tony Dominguez, the tall, slender Hispanic waiter. Instead of his white-shirt-and-black-slacks uniform, the young man wore a loose-fitting white sweatshirt with an orange Syracuse logo on the front, and new black jeans. In white tennis shoes, Dominguez did not venture into the snow, rather stayed on the shoveled sidewalk near the rear door.

The investigators were trading what-the-hell expressions when Cormier strode over and said, “You said you all were in a hurry—I thought you might need some help carrying the…uh…package inside.”

“Thanks,” Grissom said tightly, “but we can probably manage.”

Cormier gestured toward the building. “You sure? We’ll be going in through the delivery entrance down there. It’s a long haul.”

Maher said to Grissom, “I know it’s not exactly what we had in mind, but why don’t you and Herm and…what’s your name, son?”

“Tony,” the young man said, hands dug in his pants pockets.

“You should have a jacket, son.”

“Mr. Cormier said this wouldn’t take long.”

“It doesn’t have to. If you three will escort the…package inside, Ms. Sidle and I will get started out here. Snow’s coming and the sooner we’re at it, the better our chances of finding something useful.”

Grissom, clearly not liking this a bit, nonetheless said, “All right.”

Then Maher, Sara, and Grissom stripped the lawn tools and CSI equipment off the toboggan, and Sara and Maher—weighed down by their load—went off across the parking lot to where the tomato stakes barely peeked out of the snow.

While Sara worked with the constable, Gil Grissom took command of the corpse-hauling detail.

He said to Dominguez and Cormier, “You’ll have to lead the way, gentlemen.”

Cormier, who’d already shown himself to be squeamish around the remains, didn’t make a move. And the young man just stood there staring at the sled.

“Is that the…body?” he asked.

Grissom shot an irritated look at Cormier, who shrugged and shook his head, his expression saying, I didn’t tell him!

“So much for discretion,” Grissom said to the hotel man. Then, with a tight smile, he said to the waiter, “This is a body, yes. It needs refrigeration. We’re preserving evidence.”

“Ohmigod…” The young man swallowed. “I thought it was just a rumor.”

Grissom, whose patience had run out already, said, “Are you up to helping with this? I can get Ms. Sidle back here, if you two aren’t capable.”

Dominguez, his eyes still riveted to the space blanket lashed to the toboggan, said, “I…I’m up to it. Do we…undo this, unwrap it, or…are we moving the toboggan, too?”

“Toboggan and all,” Grissom said. “There’s other perishable evidence here, and it’s all going into the cooler until the police arrive.”

Grissom hated having another of the suspects this close to the remains, but at this point there was nothing to be done. It was almost as if Cormier were trying to complicate matters.

He glanced over at the work going on in the parking lot, Maher with the leaf blower, again dispersing snow, clearing the footprints near the blue Grand Prix, Sara assisting. Already snowflakes were drifting to earth all around, the wind picking up too, and Grissom knew that the only way they had any chance of getting the prints from the parking lot was to get the body inside with the help of the waiter—suspect or not.

“Can we do this, please?” Grissom asked.

Intimidated, the waiter took the front end and Grissom the rear, facing each other as they lifted it between them.

“I’ll get the doors and clear a path,” Cormier said, moving out ahead; but Dominguez was already backing toward the little receiving dock at the far end of the parking lot.

They were off the shoveled area now, shuffling through high snow, taking care to keep their balance. The sled and its charred cargo seemed surprisingly heavy to Grissom. The victim hadn’t been a particularly large man, but with the added weight of the toboggan, Grissom might have been helping haul anvils. Having the corpse buried in snow overnight, with the beginnings of the freezing process kicking in, had cut the foul odor of the roasted flesh, at least.

“Who is this?” Dominguez asked suddenly, eyes on the space-blanket-wrapped “package.”

“No ID,” Grissom said. “Don’t look at it yet.”

The two of them made eye contact then, the waiter backing toward the loading dock, Grissom with the corpse before him, the pair working together, Cormier slogging through the snow to get ahead of them.

“Stairs,” Grissom said, for the waiter’s benefit, and they halted for just a moment so Cormier could kick the snow off the four concrete steps that led up to the dock. When the man had finished, the waiter took a moment to get his bearings, then nodded at Grissom and backed up the first step.

Starting up the steps put even more of the weight on Grissom, and he let the young man set the pace—if Grissom pushed, they might lose their grip and wind up dumping their cargo. But Dominguez—slightly built though he was—was doing fine, taking the second and third steps with no trouble. Cormier was unlocking and opening a door on the loading dock when Dominguez reached the landing…and slipped.

The weight came forward, as if Grissom was on the down end of a seesaw, and Cormier—to his credit—quickly grabbed on to the waiter’s abandoned end of the toboggan, bracing it.

In the meantime, Dominguez had sat down, rudely, on the loading dock, the baggy lefthand sleeve of his sweatshirt hiking up to reveal a white-gauze-bandaged arm. Quickly, obviously embarrassed, the young man got to his feet, tugging the sleeve down over his bandaged arm, and took his end of the sled back from the older man.

“You all right, Tony?” Grissom asked.

“Caught some ice—sorry.”

Grissom, gritting his teeth and supporting most of the weight himself, asked, “Ready?”

“Sure.”

Cormier had returned to his post, holding open the door, as they once again started moving.

“Just a littler further,” Cormier said.

The complex arrangement of rope and bungee cords that bound the body to the toboggan had held tight all the way down the hill, but now—as Grissom and the waiter turned the sled on an angle, to fit it through the narrow door—a rigor-stiffened hand slipped free.

No one but Grissom had noticed this—yet—and the CSI wasn’t about to call attention to it, not and risk winding up holding the heavy end of the load alone, again. Once they were through the door, the CSI and the waiter tipped the toboggan back upright, the hand sliding partway back under the space blanket.

The hall was concrete—floor, walls, ceiling. Lightbulbs encased above in wire cages, every fifteen feet or so, half-heartedly lit their passage down this damp, cold hallway, which had all the charm and ambience of a Tower of London dungeon. Slipping by on Grissom’s right, on the side away from the exposed hand, Cormier moved on ahead of them, boots clomping like horse hooves.

Grissom heard the click as Cormier tripped the padlock, then the cooler door yawned open, the rubber seal at its base scraping along a floor already scoured to a high sheen.

“You almost expect the Crypt Keeper to step out,” Dominguez said with a nervous laugh.

Grissom, having no idea what the kid was talking about, nodded noncommittally.

“All the way to the far wall, now,” Cormier said from behind the open door. “I keep the meat on the left, and I don’t want this thing near it…. Tony, you know where to stow it.”

“You got it, Mr. C,” Tony called.

The refrigerated room was about the size of a holding cell. Shelves on the left wall were stacked with boxes marked with the names of individual cuts and types of meat, fish, poultry, and pork. The wall at right was lined with wire baskets, small bins brimming with bags of lettuce, stalks of celery, bunches of radishes, bags of carrots, sacks of onions, and also some fruit—grapefruit, oranges, melons. Behind Grissom, on the wall the door opened from, were stacked cartons of ketchup and mustard bottles, jars of pickles and relish, gallon tubs of salad dressing and the like. The far wall was a blank metal slate, nothing even piled there, and that was where Cormier directed them to deposit this delivery.

Cormier was throwing together a basket of food—meat, vegetables, fruit, as if he’d been shopping. “I need to get tonight’s food out of here—rest of this stuff is probably gonna be condemned.”

“Fine,” Grissom said.

The hotel manager was scurrying out as Grissom and the waiter set the sled down with great care on the concrete floor, parallel to the steel wall. They both stood and then Dominguez glanced down and saw the hand. Kneeling, he raised the edge of the blanket to tuck the hand back under.

“I’ll get that,” Grissom said.

But Dominguez had already seen more than any of them had bargained for; his expression was horror-struck.

Grissom said, “You know this man?”

Gasping, the waiter was backing away, then turned and ran, almost knocking Grissom down and bumping into Cormier, who was on his way back in.

The young man collapsed against the corridor wall, in a sprawled sitting position, heaving sobs, hugging himself.

Grissom exited the cooler. To Cormier he said, “Keep an eye on him.”

“What the hell happened?”

“He recognized the victim.”

While Cormier stayed with the waiter, Grissom went back inside and carefully repackaged the body under the blanket. When Grissom emerged, Dominguez was still sitting, leaning against the wall, his head in his hands, Cormier crouching next to him, a hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“You have the keys?” Grissom asked Cormier.

The hotel man nodded.

Grissom snapped the padlock shut. At least the body was secure, now.

Still crouching by his employee, Cormier handed up a ring with three identical keys to Grissom. “This is all of them.”

With a dismissive nod, pocketing the keys, Grissom turned his attention to the waiter. The CSI pulled off his stocking cap, stuffed it in a jacket pocket, removed the muffler, did the same with it; gloves came off, too. All the while he was watching Dominguez as he might an insect specimen, observing as the waiter seemed to implode there against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, face buried in his hands, sobs racking his body.

“If you can get ahold of yourself,” Grissom said to the waiter, as gently as he could, “we should talk. All right?”

Dominguez didn’t acknowledge Grissom’s presence, much less his question.

Cormier remained at Dominguez’s side, that supportive hand still on the boy’s shoulder. Taking the other side, Grissom sat beside the boy, too.

“How did you recognize the victim?” Grissom asked. “Without seeing his face?”

Dominguez looked up at Grissom, finally; tears pearled the handsome boy’s long eyelashes. The waiter’s voice was a pitiful rasp. “I knew…know…the coat. I gave it to him. To James.”

“James? Jim Moss?” Cormier interrupted.

Dominguez nodded.

“He’s a waiter here,” Cormier explained.

Grissom nodded, his attention on the boy.

“You gave that coat to James. You must have been good friends.”

Dominguez shrugged. “We were lovers.”

Cormier’s eyes widened and he blew out breath, like Old Man Winter; but whatever Old Man Cormier might have thought about such a relationship, his hand never left Dominguez’ shoulder.

“He really loved that coat,” Dominguez was saying.

A coat, Grissom knew, wasn’t near good enough for an ID. “Does James have any distinguishing marks?”

“Well…a tattoo.”

“Where? Could you describe it?”

“On his back.” Dominguez touched a spot just over his own shoulder. “A rose. A tiny rose…for his mom. Her name was Rose. She died when he was in high school.”

Suddenly Dominguez grabbed the front of Grissom’s varsity jacket, startling the CSI. “That’s the kind of person James was! Remember that! You tell people that! Be sure to!”

“I will,” Grissom assured the boy, who released the CSI’s jacket and sat back again, deflated after the outburst.

Cormier, whose hand had been jerked away when Dominguez sat forward, was sitting quietly, just watching his employee.

“Tony,” Grissom said, each word emerging with care, “I’m going to need you to identify that tattoo.”

The waiter’s eyes went wide again and he shook his head rapidly. “Oh no, oh no! I can’t go back in there!”

“You can,” Grissom said. “You have to.”

“I do not have to!”

“If you want to help James—”

“He can’t be helped now!”

“We have to determine what happened to him. That’s the only help we can give him, now…. All right?”

The boy thought about that.

Then he swallowed and nodded.

“Herm,” Grissom said, “please sit here with Tony.”

“No problem,” Cormier said, and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder again.

Grissom rose. “Now, Tony—just wait here. Stay calm. I have to go in and get things ready. Then all you have to do is identify the tattoo…if there is one.”

Another swallow, another nod.

Grissom arched an eyebrow. “Remember, this could be someone wearing a coat like James’s, or even wearing James’s own coat. We have to be sure.”

The boy’s eyes brightened. “You mean, it might not be him!”

“That is possible.”

“It could be someone else wearing his coat! Somebody he loaned it to, ’cause of the cold. He was always helping people…”

The CSI supervisor noticed that Dominguez had used the past tense. Did that mean anything, or was the boy’s mind already accepting the inevitability that the corpse in the cooler was James?

Grissom unlocked the door. Inside the cooler, he uncovered the body, rolled it over to get at the victim’s back, which hadn’t been burned at all, and slowly peeled away layers until he got to the dead man’s shoulder…

…where could be seen a small red-and-blue rose, a rather delicate tattoo.

After covering as much of the body as he could, leaving only the area with the tattoo exposed, Grissom called, “Mr. Cormier! Would you bring Tony in here, please.”

Cormier’s arm was around the boy, who entered on wobbly legs.

“Is this James?” Grissom asked. He was kneeling next to the body, gesturing to the red-and-blue rose. “Do you recognize the tattoo?”

Dominguez stepped away from Cormier’s protective arm, staggered over and glanced down. Again he swallowed, nodded, and tears immediately began to flow again, sobs shaking his chest. Grissom covered the victim up, nodded to Cormier to lead Dominguez back to the corridor, which he did, and then Grissom exited and relocked the cooler door.

Cormier was standing beside the boy, who again sat slumped against the wall, staring hollowly, breathing hard, but the tears and sobs had ceased, for now anyway.

“Give us a few moments, Mr. Cormier,” Grissom said.

The hotel man nodded, said, “You’ll be fine, Tony—Dr. Grissom here is a good man…. I left my basket of food out on the dock. I’ll cart it up to the kitchen.”

“Do that,” Grissom said.

And then Cormier left them alone, the inquisitive CSI and the heartbroken waiter.

“What was your friend’s full name?” Grissom asked.

The reply was sharp, angry; that was bound to come. “He wasn’t my friend. He was my lover…okay?”

“What was your lover’s full name?”

“James R. Moss. The ‘r’ stood for Rosemont. It was a family name. Maybe that’s why his mother was named Rose…. You’re a doctor?”

“Not a medical doctor, Tony. Tell me about James.”

Dominguez answered with his own question. “How did he get burned like that?”

Grissom wondered if the question was serious or calculated to keep him from suspecting Dominguez. He had no reason to doubt that this boy had loved James Moss; but love, like hate, was among the most common murder motives.

Grissom gave it to him straight: “He was shot and killed.”

“Oh my God…”

“And whoever did that, for some reason, set fire to the body afterward.”

“What? Why?”

“That’s part of what I’m trying to determine. That’s the kind of a doctor I am, Tony. Forensics.”

“…for the conference this weekend.”

“Right. Tell me about him.”

Dominguez wiped his eyes with the back of a sweatshirt sleeve, the one belonging to the arm without the bandage. “James was sweet and funny and kind. Honest, too, very honest. Nobody would ever want to hurt him.”

“Did the two of you have any problems?”

“Oh, no! We were happy. Very compatible.”

Grissom gestured toward the boy’s sleeve. “When we almost dropped the sled out there, I noticed you have a kind of nasty cut, there.”

Unconsciously, the waiter touched his wounded arm. “How could you see that?”

“Well, I mean…I saw the bandage.”

Dominguez pushed up the loose sleeve and exposed gauze running from his elbow nearly to his wrist. “Looks bad, huh? Hurts worse.”

“How did that happen, Tony?”

The boy took a moment, then said, casually, “Working on my car.”

“I need you to be more specific.”

He shrugged. “Cut myself putting on a new exhaust system.”

“Really?” Grissom said, with an insincere smile. “People still do that themselves?”

Dominguez found a small grin somewhere, relieved by the apparent subject change. “Well, I do. I’ve got an old car. I do it to save money, but I’m into it, maybe ’cause it’s so…so…” He laughed a little. “…butch.”

“Is your car in the hotel lot right now?”

His smile faded. “No. Why? Does that matter?”

“James was your lover.”

“I told you that.”

“The evidence indicates that James fought back. That his assailant was cut. That fact, along with your intimate relationship with the victim, makes you a suspect in James’s murder.”

Dominguez’ eyes widened. “You think I killed James? That’s bullshit, man, I loved the dude! He was the only thing that kept me going in this hellhole!”

“I said you’re a suspect…and you are. And so is everyone else in this place. Even me, and my assistant, because we found James, and the first people to discover a body…they’re always the first suspects.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Just don’t get bent out of shape. Try not to give in to this grief. Help me find who did this to James.” Grissom paused, drew a breath, went on. “Tony, being a suspect doesn’t make you guilty; but we should both recognize that the probability is…James was killed by someone he knows.”

“Why? Everybody loved him!”

“Love can be a murder motive. And the statistics say that most murder victims know their murderers…often intimately. None of this makes you guilty or makes me believe that you’re the killer…but, Tony, you’re bright. You must see how this looks.”

Calming down, Dominguez finally nodded. “I can see how it looks,” he admitted. But then he bitterly added, “Two gay guys—one must be a homicidal maniac.”

Grissom shook his head. “That’s not the issue.”

“The one you should be hounding is Amy.”

“Amy Barlow? The waitress?”

“That’s right,” Dominguez said. “Amy Barlow, the waitress. She was with James before, you know…me.”

Grissom’s eyes tightened. “James was bisexual?”

“Whatever. I’m not into labels.”

“What do you know about his relationship with Amy?”

Dominguez shrugged. “She latched on to him when he started here. Maybe a year and a half ago. They went together for, oh…six months, I guess. Then he and I got to be friends—we liked the same music, same movies. We were just made for each other. Really clicked.”

“That’s nice.”

“It was nice, and Amy, she didn’t like it at all. When James started seeing me, she really flipped. She just would not let it go.”

“Even though James told her it was over?”

Dominguez shrugged again. “Truth is…he never did really break it off with her, not entirely. His dad is this retired master sergeant from the marines—Born Again, superstraight. And James just didn’t think the old man could’ve understood his lifestyle—he would’ve died if his dad ever called him a faggot.”

Grissom winced at the word.

“Anyway, I don’t know, I guess James just couldn’t let it go. He kinda did keep stringing Amy along.”

“How did you feel about James living this double life?”

The waiter’s face turned to stone. “What do you think? I hated it.”

“It had to make you angry, that he hid your relationship.”

Dominguez said, “I hated it, but I could never be angry with James. I knew he loved me, and that’s all that mattered. I was his real love—Amy was the sham.”

“All right, Tony.” Grissom stood. “I appreciate your frankness.”

The boy got to his feet, too. “You need to talk to Amy. You really do.”

“Oh, I will. But I’ll be talking to a lot of people. By the way,” Grissom added, glancing down at the waiter’s tennis shoes, “those surely aren’t the shoes you wore to work, yesterday.”

“These are strictly for the dining room. You don’t live up here and not have good boots. I got a kick-ass pair of Doc Martens…. James gave them to me.”

“Generous of him,” Grissom said.

“He was a wonderful guy,” Dominguez said.

“Honest, too,” Grissom said.

“As the day is long.”

Grissom did not point out that the days were getting shorter. He merely walked the waiter out into the cold air of another gathering storm, anxious to report what he’d learned to Maher and Sara.

He knew who the murder victim was, now; and, he felt confident, soon would know who the murderer was, as well.

Honest.