Fic: Backtrack Creek, Chapter 9 (CSI / CSI Miami, Nick Stokes / Greg Sanders)
Title: Backtrack Creek, Chapter 9
Pairings: Greg Sanders / Nick Stokes,
Ryan Wolfe / Eric Delko
Rating: PG
Genre: AU
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Summary: A deranged serial killer is terrorising a small isolated town of Backtrack Creek. CSI Ryan Wolfe and a pesky reporter Greg Sanders end up in the middle of it, and there is no shortage of suspects.
What is the local police officer Nick Stokes hiding? Does Catherine Willows, the madam of the local full-service Inn, have her own ideas of customer service? Has Lindsay, the owner of the tiny diner mummified something else besides her pastries? Is Eric Delko, an enigmatic mechanic, as good under the hood as he says he is? What is Warrick, the man without a past, running from? Has the long lack of bathing finally snapped garage owner Timmy Speedle`s fragile mind? Who wanted to kill a perverted science teacher Gil Grissom and the police chief Brass, the patron saint of the local doughnut shop?
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Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
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Chapter 9
“Honestly, this place looks like some twisted serial killer lives here.” Greg complained before Nick had even fully opened the door. “Middle of the woods, crummy old shack, I could picture a horror movie happening right here. Are you going to let me in or not?”
“First you insult my house and then you want in?” Nick sighed and gave the blond an exasperated glare. “I’ve had a tough day. Whatever it is-”
“It can’t wait. I already waited for Danny to get back to me with what he had and then I couldn’t find you. The station was closed and then I asked the yokels where you live and they just pointed to the woods.”
“This is less than a mile from the town, so it’s not exactly in the middle of nowhere-”
“This whole town is in the middle of nowhere.” Greg walked in and Nick quietly decided to give the man five minutes, before he would kick him out. He hadn’t had time to clean up, but there wasn’t that much to clean in the two room cabin anyway.
“So what do I owe this pleasure? It can’t be what happened to Vartann, because the whole towns knows about it by now. Nothing left to tell they don’t already know.”
“Willows.”
“Excuse me?”
“Catherine Willows and her handyman. I heard them talking and they are definitely involved.”
“Not much of a surprise.”
“Not with each other. With the killings! I don’t know how much involved, but I think that man was the one who dumped the bodies. And he said they can’t keep doing it much longer.”
“You sound just like the serial story in the local paper.”
“Listen! When the guy said that, Willows said he wasn’t leaving her and that if he did he would end up in jail. Not in exactly those words, but something like that.”
“Did she mean he was the killer?”
“I think she was talking about something else.” Greg pulled his bag off his shoulder and opened it. “So I called Danny again.”
“And?”
“And he had found the guy.” Greg pulled out few printed pages from his bag. “He finally remembered where he had seen the guy. It was two years ago, when he was covering a trial in Las Vegas. Warrick Brown was originally suspected to be part of a fraud team. They used to con different casinos and finally got caught.”
“Was he indicted?”
“No, he seemed to be totally clueless about the illegal stuff. The team had set up a company that offered security consulting specifically tailored for casinos, the leader had done it professionally for years for a legitimate security company. They got in, set up the security so that the cameras and other safety measures had convenient loopholes and some time later… they robbed the casino. They had access to the schedules, they knew when there was a lot of cash in the vault waiting to be taken to the bank at the end of the day, and they knew how to get in without leaving signs of their visit or ending up on the security footage.”
“But they got caught.”
“Yeah, when the cops finally realized the same firm had been employed by all the robbed casinos a few months before the robbery. Brown was supposed to testify against them in court.”
“You mean he didn’t?”
“He was under protective custody when there was an attempt on his life. Car bomb went off too soon and killed one cop, another one is scarred for life. Brown went missing right after the bomb, and they couldn’t find him. They thought he went underground to avoid new attempts.”
“He needed a remote place to hide…”Nick was beginning to understand what Greg was hinting. “…and he knew someone who owed him a favor.”
"Yep."
“How did he and Willows know each other before he came here?”
“Las Vegas, the Sin City.” Greg stated in his best tourist guide voice. “That was the link.”
“Well?”
“You really think it’s polite to treat an important informer like this? You haven’t even asked me to sit down. Or offered me some of that coffee.” Greg pointed at the half-full and lukewarm pot of coffee in the small kitchenette that was lodged to the corner of the living room. “We dig up stuff you cops didn’t even think about and this is what we get-”
“Would you like to sit down?” Nick gritted as politely as he could manage. The story had caught his attention, and he wasn’t in the mood to play hardball. “Milk or sugar?”
“No.”
“Keep going, I can listen and pour at the same time.”
“I love a man who can do two things at once… Anyway, like I said, Vegas was the missing link.”
Nick filled a mug and handed it over to Greg.
“Have you heard about Willows’s big adventure in the big city?”
“Just that she left town and came back to help her mom at the Inn.”
“It was a bit more than that. She left to try to make a career in acting, Danny tracked down some people who knew the audition circles back then. She wasn’t very good and when her meager funds started drying up… she took up the same sort of work her mother’s girls had done.”
“Is that when she met Brown?”
“Don’t go too fast there. Her time in Los Angeles was a bit spotty, but little bit later she showed up on the radar again. This time in Vegas.”
“Do you know how she met Brown?”
“She had gone there as a hired companion of a certain wealthy doctor, who by the way had a wife waiting at home. They had booked a suit in a hotel, and then they got into some sort of disagreement. He beat her up pretty badly.” Greg took a long gulp from his coffee. “One of the porters intervened and broke the guy’s jaw.”
“Brown?”
“Yep. The creep didn’t wanna press charges, probably didn’t want to explain the thing to his wife. Little bit later Willows showed up here again.”
“She probably told him where she was going and Brown remembered it when he needed to get off the radar.” Nick nodded at the conclusion. “I should have smelled the rat when he first came here-”
“It doesn’t mean he actually is the killer. He might have just taken care of the bodies.”
“You think so?”
“The way they talked about it… it sounded like he was doing it as a favor to her, and he wasn’t too pleased about it.”
“Doctor Woods said the killer could have been a woman.”
“She has a nocturnal job, and a lot of nosy neighbors. They don’t talk about it, but they do see what happens. If she had left every time there was a killing, someone would have noticed.” Greg sipped down the rest of the coffee. “I think they are both covering someone else’s tracks.” He tilted his head to the side. “But that doesn’t really make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Right, you didn’t know about the older killings. Or did you?”
“Older killings?”
“So you didn’t. A similar killer was on a rampage about thirty years ago right here in Backtrack Creek. A lot of dead men and then finally he snatched one last victim and disappeared. Didn`t show up again, until now.”
“I’ve never even heard about it.”
“The younger locals are too young to remember it, and older ones don’t want to talk about it. Brass actually worked on the original killings.”
“And ended up killed thirty years later.” Nick’s brain was slowly making connections, but it felt sticky, like he was walking though a marshland. “The paperwork from the original spree would be in our achieves.”
“Where the guy broke into.” Greg smirked pleasantly. “Did your guy figure out if anything was missing?”
“Henry’s still trying to shift through it all.”
“By the way, you haven’t asked why Willows doesn’t sound like a likely candidate to help with the killings.”
“Was she somehow involved in the old case?”
“You could say that. Her older brother was the last victim.”
“I didn’t even know she had one.”
“See? This is why we’re so great together. I do the brainwork, you’re the muscle, we catch the killer and I’ll write about it. Actually I could write a whole book about this case-”
“Sanders-”
“After we get the guy, of course. Those trashy crime novels can sell like-”
“I havent even found the killer yet, and there’s more people involved in the investigation than just the two of us.”
“Yeah, but for dramaturgic reasons their roles will be cut down a bit.”
“You’re already planning it, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, when I’m not horrified that the guy will bump me off too. My mouth is my defense mechanism.” He was in full-on babble mood and he pretended to count the players with his fingers. “But there’s you and your Stokes’s Angels, Wolfe, and then that-” He caught himself before he got to Vartann. The topic seemed too fresh to be joked about. “I’ll keep working on that.”
“You do that.” Nick groaned. It had been a long day, and he had already been ready to get some sleep when he had heard the knock on the door. “I’ll go take Brown to the station in the morning.” He waited a minute, but Greg didn’t show any signs of departing anytime soon. “I’m going to go to bed now.”
“Okay.”
“Shouldn’t you be heading back for the night?”
“Through a dark forest when there’s a killer on the loose?” Greg’s eyes grew wider and Nick had a sudden flashback of his sister’s old dog whining next to the dinner table, waiting for someone to give up and feed him. He knew he had no way to win, but it was embarrassing to get beating by a pair of big brown eyes.
TBC