An Angel/CSI crossover. This story is set immediately before Angel episode 3.01 "Hearthrob", and contains minor spoilers for that episode and for Buffy 6.15 "As You Were". All characters are the intellectual property of their respective creators and publishers; this story may not be sold or distributed on a profit-making basis.
This is the first of a series of BtVS / Angel / CSI crossovers which can be found archived on various sites, most notably fanfiction.net and Twisting the Hellmouth.
Should Have Gone To Vegas...
By Marcus L. Rowland
Part 1 of 3
Catherine sighed, saved her report, and picked up the phone. "Willows, CSI."
"Gil here. Got a body for you, room 1267 at the Seven Stars hotel. No obvious cause of death. Warrick and I are still on the treehouse killings, Nick and Sara are on the exploding nun, so you'll have to take it on your own."
"Okay, on it." She stretched, logged off from the computer, picked up a fresh crime scene kit, and went down to get a van. Plenty of time before her shift ended, maybe she could wrap things up quickly. Fat chance...
The radio in the van was set to the news. The big local crime story was the nun, the dead children in the treehouse were last week's story and getting much less attention. Both took a back seat to the impending marriage of a minor rock star, and new shows opening at two casinos. National news like the aftermath of the World Trade Centre was there too, of course, but you had to listen hard for it. You don't emphasise terrorism in a resort city.
The Seven Stars was a small hotel at the low-rent end of respectable, wedged between a service station and a Burger King a few blocks from the main casinos. She'd been there before. Not quite sleazy; the food wasn't good but the rooms were rented by the night, not the hour. A bored bellboy showed her to the elevator, which was clean but needed a lick of paint. A couple of uniforms and a paramedic were waiting outside the room when she reached the twelfth floor, while a detective she'd met a few times talked to a maid. Catherine guessed she'd found the body. She didn't interrupt; she wanted to get her own impressions of the place before anyone bothered her with opinions. One of the uniforms gave her the minimal facts. "Booked in as John Smith at five yesterday morning, said he'd been travelling. Booked the cheapest room in the hotel, paid a week's deposit in cash. Yesterday he put out a 'do not disturb' sign, this afternoon it was gone so Pamela there went in to clean the place and found him. The paramedic says no obvious cause of death, suppose it might be natural. Nobody's touched anything, they say."
The room was dimly lit by a single bedside light, its curtains tightly shut. From the doorway she could see the bathroom and the foot of the bed. There was a small mound of towels dropped on the floor. For the moment she turned her attention to the bathroom, taking a dozen pictures of the floor, walls, and shelves with the digital camera. Not that it looked like anything had happened there; if it wasn't for the tub of hair gel and toothbrush and paste she would have thought that nobody had used it.
She listened, realised the questioning was over, and went out again. "Did you clean the bathroom?" she asked the maid.
"Yes... I must have missed seeing him somehow when I came in, or I wouldn't have started on it. Not that there was much mess, just a couple of damp towels."
"Thanks. Are those the towels on the floor?"
"I dropped them when I saw him."
Catherine shone a halogen light around the entrance. Nothing obvious.... Wait a minute. There was something on the wall and the edge of the door, traces of some sort of crystalline powder glinting there. Concentrated in an area about five to six feet from the floor. A couple of bare patches, one on the door and one on the wall, vaguely hand shaped. She had a mental image of someone standing inside the door, one hand on the door and the other on the wall, with someone else spraying something into his face. Jumping to conclusions already, Grissom wouldn't approve.
Carefully Catherine scraped samples - the powder was purple under the light of the corridor, which didn't sound much like any drug she knew - and made a note to check the door and frame for prints once she'd looked at the body.
Next stop the open wardrobe, at the entrance to the room. A black jacket and a long leather duster. Why on earth would anyone bring something like that to Vegas, even at the end of summer? Playing cowboy? She checked the pockets. Nothing... no, wait, a badly creased card in the inside pocket of the jacket. She took it out and looked. 'Angel Investigations' and an LA phone number and address, with a logo that looked like the outline of a half-dissected rat. No name on it. Nothing to indicate what they investigated, probably some sort of fly-by-night P.I. outfit. She put it in an evidence bag and dropped it into the case.
Time for the bedroom, and Mister Smith. She looked around, with a nagging feeling that she was missing something obvious, but whatever it was seemed to be determined to stay in the back of her mind.
The bedroom was warm, in the eighties. Someone had turned the air- conditioner off. Catherine sniffed cautiously. A body at that temperature for any time... No, nothing. First impression then, not long dead. A couple of battered-looking canvas suitcases in the corner. Clothing stacked neatly on the chair, all blacks and dark greys, a jacket on the arm. Watch on the bedside table, looked like a Rolex or a good fake, set to local time. Mobile phone, cheap, might be worth checking for the numbers it had recently dialled and had in memory. No evidence of a struggle, if anything the place looked too tidy. No marks on the walls or floor. She took some pictures of the room, then turned to the body.
He was lying sprawled on the bed, on top of the covers, with his legs slightly apart. She took out her pocket recorder and began to dictate as she took pictures. "Male Caucasian, early to mid thirties, height about five eleven, say a hundred and eighty pounds. Excellent physical condition. Pale skin, dark hair, used hair gel. Naked, not circumcised." And kind of cute for a corpse, though she wasn't going to say that... Something caught her eye - the faintest trace of a white mark, possibly a scar. She bought the light over for a closer look. Another.. more... "Extensive well-healed scarring on torso and arms. Could be knife wounds, a couple that look like bullet wounds, several burns. Cross-shaped scar on the chest, multiple puncture or burn scars on the chest, abdomen, thighs, arms and the soles of the feet. All very well healed and extremely faint, must be years old." As she spoke she saw more. The last time she'd seen scarring that extensive was on a political refugee from Chile, who'd been tortured over several weeks nearly twenty years earlier. He'd needed crutches to walk. Smith seemed to be in perfect health. Apart from being dead, of course. "No signs of recent wounds or trauma. Hello... Purple powder again, on the face and shoulders, traces on the pillow." Again the same image crossed her mind - Smith opening the door, and someone blowing the powder into his face. She brushed another sample into a specimen tube, then pushed an electronic thermometer into the mouth.
"Air temperature eighty-four, oral temperature.. also eighty-four. Okay, he's been dead a few hours then. Doesn't smell like it. His core temperature might tell us more." She dug in her case for a long probe and attached it to the thermometer, then moved to insert it. A strong hand grabbed her wrist, and a drowsy voice with an odd accent said "Don't you think we should be introduced first?"
* * * * *
"Considering where I was going to put the thermometer, I guess he was quite understanding," Catherine said two hours later.
"Cataleptic fits? Abnormally low body temperature?" mused Grissom. "Odd he didn't have a medical alert card or bracelet. And downright weird that the paramedic couldn't pick up a heartbeat or ECG."
"What can I say? He was alive, he said that he was okay, he didn't want to sue us, he didn't want to talk about himself past the bare bones of his medical condition, and he wouldn't let the paramedic back into the room. No evidence of anything that concerned CSI. When I left the paramedic was running diagnostics on the ECG, said it must be faulty. It's as good an explanation as any."
"Maybe so, but let's see the pictures."
Catherine pulled the memory card from the camera and downloaded it to Grissom's computer. "Okay. Door frame and door, some sort of powder there. You got samples?"
"Naturally."
"Four of the bathroom. You said the maid had cleaned there before she found the body?"
"That's right. Certainly looks clean enough."
"Maybe too clean. The wardrobe. Nothing much there. Find anything in the coat or jacket?"
"Business card for a detective agency in LA. No name on it, so it may have been his, maybe someone he met."
"And you took the details?"
"I've got the card, forgot to give it back to him."
"Okay. Now, let's see the pictures of the bedroom. Okay, a couple of bags. Did you look inside?"
"Didn't get a chance. I was going to go back to them after I finished with the body."
"Notice anything odd about them?"
"Not really."
"See how they're close together in that space between the chair and the TV? There was plenty of room there, why would they be jammed together like that? Now, if there was a third bag that size it would just about fill that empty space. No way to be sure, of course, but it seems possible."
"This from the man who tells everyone not to jump to conclusions."
"Man lying on a bed. What light were you using?"
"Halogen lamp."
"Not UV?"
"No, I hadn't got that far."
"Even so... Really pale skin, almost luminous, can't have been in Vegas for long. Can't have been in the sun at all recently. Maybe an ex-con? Lots of faint scars. Did you see his back? Any scars there?"
"Only a glimpse when he was dressing, I didn't get close enough to see faint scars. There was a tattoo on his right shoulder; black ink, some sort of animal, looked like a cross between a sheep and an ostrich, perched on a letter A with crossed legs."
"Could it be a military unit crest? Or paramilitary? You said he was Irish."
"Nothing I recognised. Looked old, heraldic or something. The accent was more Irish-American than Irish, I think."
"You see anything else odd about these pictures?"
"Not really... though I did have a feeling that there was something that wasn't quite right."
"I think I know what it was. This is the first picture you took from the doorway. Shows the entrance to the room, the foot of the bed, and the wardrobe, which was wide open. See something strange there?"
"Not really."
"Look at the bed reflected in the mirror inside the wardrobe door. You can't see much of it, but if I zoom in here you can just make out a few of the buttons on the padded headboard. Just there, there's a hole where one is missing. What you can't see is our friend Mister Smith."
"So the angle was wrong, I guess."
"Maybe, but take a look at this picture, number seventeen, you took from the foot of the bed. Same headboard, more or less the same angle, but his head is in front of the missing button. The other pictures make it clear that it's the only one that's like that. Time five minutes and twenty seconds after picture one."
"That is a little odd... maybe he moved between the pictures?"
"Not if he was in a cataleptic trance deep enough to fool you and a paramedic."
"So he came round after I took the first picture, and before I took number seventeen."
"If he did, he stayed completely immobile through pictures seventeen to thirty-nine, another five and a half minutes, while you prodded his skin and put a thermometer in his mouth. I couldn't do that, could you?"
"No. Weird... Bearing in mind that we have no evidence of any crime, and all our usual cases to handle, what do you want to do about this?"
"Take that powder down to the lab. I'm going to see if I can get an ID on Mister Smith."
* * * * *
"Where did you get this stuff?" asked Greg the following afternoon, staring at the screen, "Sure as hell it isn't anything I've ever seen before. It's not a single chemical; it's a cocktail of at least a dozen different organics, with some very complex processing to put it all together. I've got haemoglobin in here, seven plant alkaloids, two amino acids I'm not sure of, something that's close to DMSO, and traces of monosodium glutamate and calcium carbonate."
"Haemoglobin? From human blood?" asked Catherine.
"No way to tell. Mammalian, certainly. It's about a third of the mix. It looks like it was mixed thoroughly, almost down to individual molecules, probably in water, heated and cooled repeatedly, filtered, dried into crystals, then crushed to fine dust. The calcium carbonate might come from that if a marble mortar and pestle was used. I think it was exposed to ultra-violet or possibly radiation too, some of the molecules have odd energy levels. I'm not sure I could make this, even if I knew all the ingredients."
"So what does it do?"
"If this oddball molecule here does work like DMSO it would get into your body really fast - it'd be absorbed if you swallowed it or inhaled it, maybe just by sniffing it or touching it. But apart from that, and the negative reaction some people have to MSG, I can't see it doing anything good or bad for you. I'm checking it against the pharmaecopia and narcotics databases, nothing so far but the search is still running. If it's there, it's something really obscure."
"Thanks. Let me know if anything comes up."
"My pleasure."
"What's this about? Drugs? Murder?" asked Nick, who was making coffee. "Please don't tell me it's more important than the nun, I need those results."
"One of Grissom's hunches," said Catherine. "Don't worry, I'm not trying to grab priority."
"The nun samples are still processing, you'll get them ASAP. But I'll keep the powder search running too," said Greg "Weird stuff..."
Grissom came into the lab as they were talking, logged on to one of the terminals, and called Catherine over. "I ran the pictures through the ID computer and got a match. Here we are..." He showed her a blurry photograph, a man in a leather duster striding through a mall or some other large building. Probably from a security camera. The face was familiar. "Name of Angel, no first name or middle initial on record. The face matches, and he's supposed to have a tattoo on his shoulder."
"Certainly looks like him, and the card in his pocket said 'Angel Investigations,' sounds like he's our man."
"LAPD put out a want on him last year, kidnapping and murder, cancelled it the next day. One prior arrest for harbouring a fugitive, released without charge, several other arrests on various charges, all dropped. No current wants, no charges pending, no convictions. Oh, and no investigator's licence, although he works for a detective agency."
"Works for? I thought it had his name?"
"Apparently he founded it then someone called Wyndham-Pryce took over a few months ago. Now Angel works for him. There's a lot more. I called one of my LAPD contacts and asked a few questions. Ever heard of a law firm called Wolfram and Hart?"
"Brass told me about them once," said Catherine, "client list like a Who's Who of the rich and crooked, if you ever hear of them on the case you can be sure the perp is as guilty as hell. This Angel is one of their clients? That'd explain the charges being dropped."
"Not exactly. A few months ago something really strange happened. A dozen or so Wolfram and Hart lawyers were at a wine tasting in an old bomb shelter. Someone locked them in and threw the key away; for some reason they started fighting amongst themselves, by the time they were found there were only two survivors."
"Angel was there?"
"Angel allegedly got mad at them and locked them in the cellar. But there's never been any proof, just rumour."
"Wow. Any idea why?" asked Nick.
"Not a clue. On the positive side, my contact says he's given LAPD a lot of unofficial help, including information that let them catch a couple of serial killers and wrap up some organised crime cases. Some of them were perps Wolfram and Hart were defending. Angel's main contact on the force was a detective called Kate Lockley, but she was fired a few months ago, moved to New York. She's supposed to be a little strange - my guy says she's 'gone Scully', believes in ghosts and aliens, and that this Angel was involved in whatever made her believe that."
"Scully's the one that doesn't believe. It's Mulder that believes," said Greg.
"I wouldn't know. One other thing; apparently he checked out of his hotel an hour or so after you left, Catherine. No idea where he's gone."
"Great. Okay, let's just recap here," said Catherine. "He's given us a false name, but that isn't illegal since we weren't charging him with anything. He's allegedly committed some crimes, but there's no proof and all charges were dropped. We have no evidence whatever that there is anything going on here beyond someone sleeping unusually soundly and checking out of his room without giving a forwarding address. I'd agree that things do look a little suspicious, but half the people in Vegas are suspicious one way or another. And we do have other work to do."
"Humour me. Catherine, I know you have a lot of reports to complete, but here are the contact details for Lockley, see what you can find out from her. Greg, keep running the analysis of that powder through the computers. Nick, you stay on the nun of course, but try to find time to take a look at these pictures and see if you can spot anything that looks odd. I have a feeling about this one."
Nick, Greg and Catherine exchanged glances, shrugged, and set to work.
* * * * *
"Angel... haven't seen him in a while, why would you want to talk to me about him?"
The voice at the other end of the line sounded cagey. Catherine wondered why. "I ran into him yesterday under rather odd circumstances. When we checked him out your name came up."
"Odd circumstances and Angel. What a surprise." She didn't sound even slightly surprised.
"What can you tell me about him?"
"Tall, dark, and handsome. Fights well. Knows some odd people. Saved my life three or four times, but he's one of the reasons I was kicked off the force. People thought I was cutting him too much slack, maybe I was. Then there was that business with the lawyers..."
"Wolfram and Hart?"
"Are they involved in this? If they're around count your fingers before and after you shake hands. Better yet, don't shake hands."
"We have no reason to believe that they're involved. As I said, we're just a little curious about this Angel, and the name came up."
"Well.. tell me what happened, and I'll tell you what you need to know."
"Need to know? Is this something to do with national security?"
"No. But there are things that I might not want to tell you if he parked on a yellow line, but would tell you if you think he's a mass murderer."
"We've no reason to think he's committed any crime. Briefly, he was found in a hotel room yesterday, the maid and a paramedic thought he was dead. I was called in to examine the room and the body, I'd just started to examine him when he came to and stopped me putting a thermometer up..." Catherine stopped; the voice at the other end of the line was laughing.
"Sorry, that's a vivid image... Okay, you say he was unconscious. Any signs of injury?"
"No, a lot of faint old scars but nothing recent. But the paramedic couldn't even detect a heartbeat."
"Really." Catherine blinked as she realised that there was still no surprise in Lockley's voice. "Any signs that he was drugged or zapped some other way? He said once that someone hit him with a cattle prod that put him down for a while."
"Well, no burn marks. There was some odd purple powder around, but nothing that would knock anybody out so far as we can tell."
"Doesn't sound familiar. Look... if Angel's got problems you probably don't want to get involved in them. The best thing you can do is stay out of the way and leave him to handle them by himself."
"I don't understand."
"Believe me, you don't want to. I told you he saved my life a few times? Most of those times I wouldn't have been in danger if I hadn't gotten in his way, if I hadn't gotten involved in his world."
"His world? Could you be more explicit?"
"I could, but I won't. Let me make a guess - from the way you've been pussyfooting around I'll bet that someone told you that I'm a flake. I know that the word is that I've 'gone Scully.'" She gave the words a sneering intonation.
"Scully is the one that doesn't believe in things. It's Mulder that believes."
"Well, this Scully doesn't believe; this Scully knows. You don't - cherish your ignorance. And stay out of Angel's way." There was a click, followed by the dialling tone. Catherine shrugged, made a few notes, and went back to yesterday's reports. After a few minutes she realised she'd typed the same sentence four times. She saved the file, got her bag, and drove back to the Seven Stars Hotel.
* * * * *
"Two things," said Nick that evening. "First, Greg identified the powder. It wasn't in the Bureau of Narcotics database or the pharmaecopia, but he realised that everything in it could come from natural sources. So he did a search on folk remedies, alchemy, voodoo, that sort of thing. And eventually it popped out. Calynthia powder."
"And what is Calynthia powder?" asked Grissom.
"Well, as far as I can figure out it's a really old spell against demons. Binds them or controls them, something like that. The source is in ancient Greek and worded pretty oddly; you'd need a better translator than I am to get precise details. I found some modern sources, but I'm not sure they're reliable."
"Okay, I can't say I was expecting that. What else?"
"Before I go on, I just want to make one thing quite clear. This isn't someone's idea of a very elaborate joke, is it?"
"No."
"I was afraid of that. And there's no possibility that any of your pictures were taken in another room?"
"Of course not."
"Okay. Did there seem to be anything odd about the placement of furniture in that room? The TV in particular? Or the actual shape of the room? Were you using a polarising filter on the camera? Or holding it unusually low or high?"
Catherine shook her head. "No - I was just back there to look for prints. Didn't find any, just unusable smudges. The room is the usual sort of oblong box, roughly square; the TV was in the corner, placed diagonally. And no, I wasn't using filters or holding the camera oddly. What about it?"
"Picture fifteen, general view of the room showing the bags and the TV." He clicked icons on the computer, bringing up a 3D model of the room. "That's a twenty-one inch screen, normal curved tube, and as you say placed at an angle of about forty-five degrees. The size of the screen in this picture gives us a fairly accurate idea of your distance from it; we can place you horizontally and vertically by measuring the casing and seeing whether it seems to taper to the left or right, top or bottom. With a margin of say six inches you were about here," he put a figure in position in the model, near the centre of the room "with the camera at your normal eye level."
"Sounds about right."
"OK, taking lines of sight from the camera to the screen, and factoring in the curvature of the screen," He added more lines to the model, diverging from the corners of the TV across the room towards the bed and entrance to the room. "Anything inside this area should have been reflected in the screen. Probably more, I'm being conservative. That includes you, the armchair, the bed, and anyone lying on it. And we can see you quite well, the armchair and bed rather dimly. What we can't see is your man Angel. Unless he moved a lot in the minute or so between this picture and the first of the body, number seventeen, he ought to be in view. With that pale skin he ought to be quite easy to see."
Catherine shook her head, confused. "I don't understand that. I can't have been turned away from him for more than thirty or forty seconds, just looking around the room and taking shots to establish positions."
"That's confirmed by the timing on the photo files," said Grissom "And you saw no movement at all?"
"I thought he was dead. You don't get moving corpses."
"Anyone got an explanation?" asked Grissom. For the first time Catherine could remember, he seemed a little lost.
"Not one you're going to like." said Nick. "When Greg identified the stuff as Calynthia powder I did a web search on it; narcotic effects, uses, that sort of thing. Not many hits, and all of them were references to demons and vampires. One of them was a site called 'Demons, Demons, Demons', which had its own search engine and database for the supernatural. Here, I'll show you." He opened a web browser, already set to show a web page with a drawing of a snarling demon.
"OK, now if I put in 'Calynthia' I get this description. Summarised, what it's saying is that it makes demons sleepy and suggestible, may also cause temporary amnesia. Basically, the supernatural equivalent of something like Rohypnol. Put in 'Angel' and you get a couple of dozen hits. Most of them are the usual guys with the halos and wings, but near the bottom we've got this." He pointed at a line that read 'Angel (Angelus)', and clicked on the last word. The illustrations on the new page included sketches of a familiar face and an odd tattoo. The room was suddenly very quiet.
"Here we go. What we have here, according to nutjob central, is a two hundred and fifty year old vampire that killed hundreds of people in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was cursed by gypsies and got his soul back, and is now a warrior for good who founded a detective agency that 'helps the helpless'. You guys sure this isn't a joke?"
There was a long pause. "If it is," said Grissom, "It's being played on all of us. We'd better keep this to ourselves for now, and try to figure out what we do about this."
The phone rang. Nick picked up, listened, and said "Okay, I'll tell her. Catherine, you have a visitor asking for you at the desk. A guy named Angel."
TBC
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