Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Gil woke following a dream he didn’t remember and blinked a few times before rolling over and checking his phone where it was charging in on his nightstand. It was six o’clock in the evening. That was plenty of time for him to shower, get dressed, have breakfast, and get to the lab in time for shift change. He had solved a case two nights ago, finished the reports yesterday, and was ready to move on to something new.

He took a moment, staring up at the off-white ceiling as the fan lazily circled, thinking ahead to his night. Schools and universities had not yet reconvened, so it would be another busy Friday night full of tourists, night clubs, and everything else Vegas had to offer at the end of a sweltering summer.

In terms of cases, that could mean almost anything, but they’d been homicide heavy lately. According to a recent study conducted in the US, for every one degree celsius above average, the homicide rate increased by .0048. It was mostly statistically insignificant, but most people Gil knew tended to grow more stressed and frustrated in the excessive heat and it was proven that the crime rate spiked during the summer and holidays.

The temperature had been 117 degrees fahrenheit today, which matched the recorded high in Vegas back from 1942. He was anticipating a corresponding night of crime.

Gil rolled out of bed. He had showered when he’d gotten in this morning, but he could feel that he’d sweated in his sleep and he wanted another shower. He turned the light on in the bathroom and peered at himself in the mirror briefly. There were smudges of dark beneath his eyes, showing he hadn’t been sleeping well lately. He didn’t feel excessively tired, but once they were past the summer wave of crime and heat, he was considering taking a few days off.

He turned on the water in the shower so it could warm up, twisting the handle all the way to the left, and then stripped his boxers and tossed them into the hamper. He’d been sleeping with nothing but boxers and a sheet this summer - even with his air conditioning running it was too hot for anything else. Sticking his hand into the water, he gasped and pulled it back at the stinging heat. He fiddled with the handle, tested the water again thirty seconds later, and then climbed in.

Once showered and shaved, he dressed in his usual business casual clothes, combed his hair, put his glasses in his shirt pocket and his now charged cellphone into his pants pocket, and then went to the kitchen.

Breakfast was two slices of wheat toast and a banana. Since it was the last banana, he added bananas to his shopping list, which was posted to his fridge on a magnetic notepad. He added bread while he was at it and then checked the inside of his fridge before adding milk and cheese. He would try to go to the grocery store on Monday morning when it wouldn’t be busy.

He hadn’t done the crossword this morning, so he sat at the kitchen table and ate breakfast while filling it in.

Following breakfast, he tidied up the kitchen, put on his shoes, collected his wallet, keys, and kit, and then went to his car.

It was a good thing he’d left early, because there was an accident on southbound I-15. He arrived at the lab right on time, dropped by his office to check his messages. He deleted a few emails, saved a voicemail from the DA for later, and then went down to dispatch to collect their assignment slips. They had three, all dead bodies, and it was a good thing he had his full team with him tonight.

He ambled back to the lab, watching as shift change occurred and the graveyard lab techs headed to their labs, quietly greeting and consulting each other.

David Hodges attempted to wave Gil down, but Gil held up the assignment slips and kept going. He didn’t have time for whatever speech Hodges had concocted today.

His team was assembled in the conference room and Gil took a moment to look over them, trying to decide how he was splitting them up for the night. Greg was still a level one and needed to be with someone more experienced, but at this point that was any other member of the team. He trusted Greg’s skills enough now that he knew Greg would ask if he was uncertain about how to handle any particular piece of evidence.

Gil’s gaze paused briefly on Nick. It had been three months since Nick had been abducted and buried alive. He’d seemed a little unsteady for a bit while he recovered, but Gil thought he was alright now. He wasn’t worried about sending him out.

Everyone seemed to be their normal selves, and they were all dressed for the heat. Catherine had done her hair up, and both she and Sara were in tanks. Warrick, Nick, and Greg had all opted for short sleeve cotton shirts.

He checked the assignment slips again. One was a homicide in a casino on the Strip. One was a dead body with suspicious circs in Henderson. The last was a homicide on Fremont Street. He generally avoided giving Warrick casino cases if he could help it, and those cases often required a little bit of finessing ruffled feathers. But it was also at The Tangiers, which meant he couldn’t involve Catherine.

“Sara and I are taking a homicide on the Strip. Nicky and Greg, you have a homicide on Fremont Street. Catherine and Warrick, you’ve got suspicious circs in Henderson,” he decided, holding the slips out. “Avoid southbound I-15, it’s backed up all the way to North Vegas.”

“Got it,” Catherine said, grabbing the slip he was holding out to her.

“See you,” Nick said, slapping Greg on the shoulder as they took their slip and left.

“You and me. Where are we going on the Strip?” Sara asked, raising her eyebrows at Gil.

“The Tangiers,” Gil said.

The corner of her mouth twitched. “And you’d rather not have Catherine face off with her father.”

“I’d like to avoid that if at all possible,” Gil agreed, leading the way out of the conference room.

“Together or separate cars?” she asked as they approached the parking garage.

“Might as well go together and avoid a parking fiasco,” he said. Traffic was bad enough this time of night without both of them trying to force their way through it.

“I’ll be right back.” Sara darted away.

Knowing she was going to get her kit, Gil went to his car and turned on the engine and the AC. He’d only been parked for maybe forty five minutes and it was already hot. They saw a lot of heat stroke deaths this time of year, along with the handful of infants and toddlers accidentally left in car seats.

Gil hated those cases. In the summer, there was a death of an infant or toddler on average once every ten days in the US from being left in a hot car. It often took less than an hour for them to die, as babies and children under the age of two didn’t have fully functioning heat regulation.

Most of the time it was an accident by a tired and overstressed parent, but Gil had seen enough infanticides committed this way that they had to carefully investigate each one.

Sara returned, carrying her kit and with her camera hanging around her neck from its strap. “Oh good, you started the air. When I woke this evening my apartment was sweltering even with the air going. It’s a relief to be in the lab.”

“I think we’re inside tonight.” Gil was thankful for that too. He had a cooler in the trunk with water and ice packs, both to keep himself and the team hydrated and to keep sensitive evidence cool. The casinos were usually at a comfortable temperature even in the height of summer because they wanted people to stay for as long as possible.

“Do we know anything?” she asked.

“Assignment slip just said homicide and an address. That’s all I know at the moment.”

“Well, Tangiers is a casino, resort, and convention center, and it’s Friday night. It could be just about anything,” she said with a shrug.

Gil focused on traffic as he merged out of the parking garage and headed toward the Strip. Tourists appeared to be out in full swing and it took several green lights on Flamingo Road before they were able to turn onto Las Vegas Boulevard. It took just as long for them to navigate down the Strip and into the parking garage attached to The Tangiers.

“I’ll be glad when tourist season is over,” Sara said as Gil pulled into a parking spot reserved for the police.

“You and me both,” he told her. Even during their slow season, there were a lot of tourists in Vegas - the daily average was over a hundred thousand extra people in the city at any given time. But Vegas was built for this. The vast majority of their economy revolved around tourism, hotels, and resorts. Approximately twenty five percent of jobs in Vegas were in the tourism and leisure industry.

They got out of his car, each of them carrying their kits. Though the garage was dimmed, it was open to the outside air and was more warm than was comfortable. Gil could feel sweat prickling on his back and chest by the time they made it to the elevators. The elevators took them to the ground floor and it was a short walk into the side entrance of The Tangiers.

“AC,” she said, tipping her head back once they were inside.

Gil smiled. Air conditioning was expensive, but was worth every penny in his opinion.

They went down the hallway that joined the parking garage to The Tangiers proper, seeing advertisements for shows, the casino, the buffet, and a wide variety of other entertainment that could be found nearby. They could hear the sounds of the casino long before they could see it - slot machines had a very distinctive sound.

Deputy Mitchell was waiting inside the lobby for them and waved them down when he saw them.

“I take it we have a scene somewhere around here?” Gil asked, since he didn’t see any other emergency services personnel.

“In the casino. In a private room,” Mitchell said.

That just about figured. “Lead the way,” Gil told him.

Following Deputy Mitchell through the casino, Gil took in the atmosphere. People were busy at the slots and the tables, not seeming to realize anything was wrong. Management would appreciate that. They’d want to minimize the impact of this on their daily operations as much as possible and Gil would rather not have an encounter with Catherine’s father if possible.

Sam Braun - Catherine’s biological father, even though he hadn’t raised her - had given Catherine the money for Nick’s ransom when he was abducted. They hadn’t had a case with him since then, but Gil wasn’t sure how to navigate that. The man had helped to save Nick’s life, but he was also a criminal even if they couldn’t prove it.

Gil had tried to have a hands off approach about the whole thing since then, but that resolve hadn’t been tested until now. Maybe they could handle this with just the casino staff and not involve Sam Braun at all. If wishes were horses, as the saying went.

They found Brass outside a closed doorway with a notebook in hand.

“What’s this room usually used for?” Gil asked.

“High stakes games where they want quiet and immediate catering and no one watching,” Brass said.

Gil had been afraid of that.

“What about witnesses?” Sara asked.

“You’re pretty much shit out of luck,” Brass told her.

He had been afraid of that too. “Let’s start with the body and work our way out.”

Brass nodded and opened the door for them.

Gil took a moment to take in the room. High end. Very high end. Gil had made a fair amount of money from poker in his college days, but this was so far out of his league that the stakes they were dealing with wouldn’t even seem real. There was a bar on one wall, which would have a full time cocktail waitress staffing the room when it was in use. And there was a craps table and a table that could be used for card games like poker, blackjack, and baccarat.

There was one occupant of the room: the deceased.

Gil eyed the carpeted floor before moving closer. There was no getting footprints off carpet unless they were in blood, mud, or another staining liquid.

The victim was male, caucasian, approximately six foot tall, girthy - maybe hitting the scales at two sixty or two seventy - and very dead. Based on the blood, both on the victim’s abdomen and pooling around him on the carpet, Gil was leaning toward stabbing.

“ID?” he asked.

“Haven’t searched his pockets yet. Figured you’d want to see him as is,” Brass said.

“Thank you.” He did appreciate people not touching the victim before he arrived, unless it was paramedics in an attempt to resuscitate. Life came first, then evidence.

“Okay, so we’re here for a reason. Who called in?” Sara asked.

“Casino security. So far the story is a staff member came into the room to clean it between uses, found the body, and told security. Security came in to look. Then they called 911. Whether or not that’s actually the way it happened, who knows,” Brass said.

Gil nodded to himself. There were undoubtedly more people in that chain. “I want to see everyone who was in this room.”

“I’m working on getting them set aside with deputies, but I figure we’re going to have to interview them to find out who was in here.”

“On the bright side, we have the prints of every casino employee thanks to the work card program. If they touched something, we should be able to pin them down,” Sara said, the click of her camera showing she was working on overall shots of the scene.

“That’s a start,” Gil agreed. He took another look at the victim and then went to the card table. There was a stack of cards on the dealer’s side. The casinos used a fresh deck of cards for every private game that was played, and new packs of cards at every public table every night. It cut down on the possibility of anyone cheating or on accusations of the casino rigging the game. All casino games were rigged in favor of the house, but people didn’t seem to care that much given how popular casino gambling was. Everyone had dreams of hitting it big.

These cards had clearly recently been used and since cards had a thin layer of varnish on them, they were good for holding finger prints. He dropped a marker by them so they could be photographed before they were collected. There were six chairs gathered at the players’ side of the card table, but that didn’t necessarily mean all of them had been in use today.

Gil wandered over to the craps table but found no evidence the table had been in use. Casino dice were typically changed out every eight hours, though they’d use fresh ones for a private game, just like the cards.

“DNA,” Sara said.

He came to her side at the bar and looked down to see that there were used glasses and snack bowls behind the counter. “Excellent.” Those were good for both prints and DNA.

“You know what else I saw?” she asked.

“What?”

She pointed up. “Cameras. Two watching the tables, one from each side. We also have a view of the bar from the second camera.”

That was unsurprising, but it was very useful for them. Casinos generally surveilled every angle possible where people would be playing games or placing bets. “Good. We’re going to need a warrant for the footage though,” he said, glancing in Brass’ direction.

Brass nodded. “Anything else we want from a warrant?”

“Let me get ID on him first, and we can ask for his room if he’s staying here and surveillance footage from the elevator and the hallway he’s in,” Gil said, not wanting to have to disturb a judge in the middle of the night more than once. He’d dealt with The Tangiers often enough to know they weren’t getting anything without a warrant.

“Okay, assuming he was playing a game in here, do we have any way of finding out who he was playing with?” Sara asked.

“The casino should have that information on the high rollers. I’ll include it in the warrant,” Brass said.

“Let’s start with processing this room and we’ll go from there. At least we know the general public wasn’t walking through our crime scene,” Gil said. “Can you have a deputy meet David and guide him here? He should be on his way.”

“Will do,” Brass said.

Gil and Sara got to work, photographing, dropping evidence markers, collecting evidence, and printing and swabbing various surfaces. So far, what Gil saw was a lot of circumstantial evidence and no murder weapon. He turned sometime later as he heard the door open and watched as David entered with a gurney. “Can we start with time of death?”

“Sure thing,” David said, collecting his medical kit.

They joined him at the body and watched as he made his various assessments.

“He’s entering the first stages of rigor. Lividity is fixed. I see six stab wounds to the abdomen,” David said, shifting aside the victim’s suit jacket and white button-up shirt to insert the liver probe.

Gil looked at the stab wounds as they waited for the thermometer to work. It was hard to be certain underneath all the blood, but he thought he could see the impression of a hilt, which meant their weapon was likely a dagger of some kind. Given the location of the stabbing, he thought the cause of death was likely to be bleeding out from the liver. The hepatic artery delivered blood to the liver through the celiac artery and when the artery was severed, it generally took less than five to ten minutes to bleed out.

Stabbings to the gut could be variable. He could tell by the smell that the intestinal tract hadn’t been perforated. If a victim survived a gut wound, they needed a hospital quickly, both to repair the damage and to attempt to prevent infection from spreading.

The thermometer beeped and David checked it. “Assuming he didn’t have a fever, I’d place time of death four to five hours ago.”

Gil and Sara both looked at their watches. It was now moving on to eleven o’clock. “So around six to seven o’clock tonight,” she said. “What time was our 911 call?”

“Eight forty eight,” Brass said.

And they’d been on the scene maybe a little half past nine. “That means our victim was here on the floor for maybe two to three hours before he was found,” Gil said.

“That’s a long time for a public place,” Sara said. “I saw a keyhole in the handle. I assume this room is supposed to be locked between gaming sessions?”

“Locked when it’s not in use. Unlocked when there are people in here because it’s the only egress and the fire code,” Brass said.

“So who was responsible for locking this room when people were done using it?” she asked.

“That’s a good question,” Gil said, because he’d like to know that too. “I’d also like to know who was in here tonight dealing and serving.”

“Do you want to start with the person who found the body?” Brass checked.

“Let’s start there,” he agreed. ”I want this room sealed off so we can come back to it. Do we have a wallet on our victim?”

David patted down the pockets. “Wallet and cellphone,” he said, passing them over.

“So not a robbery,” Sara said, accepting them from David. “Let’s see. Our victim is Zachary Bursh. He’s fifty two years old. Driver’s license says Manhattan. He’s got about six credit cards and maybe four hundred in cash.”

“Hotel key card?” Brass asked.

“Right here,” she said, fishing it out.

“He should be a guest then,” Gil said, which meant they weren’t trying to track him to another hotel or resort. “The body can go back. Can you ask Al to send blood to Wendy for a tox screening? I want to know how inebriated he was during all of this.”

“Will do,” David said, prepping the body to be moved.

“Let’s run evidence back to the car and then we’ll deal with people. Where should we meet you?” Gil asked Brass.

“Over by the security office. Back of the casino, you can’t miss it,” Brass said.

“We’ll meet you there,” Sara said as they began collecting their bags of evidence.

A quick trip out to the parking garage was enough to make Gil grateful once again for the air conditioning inside the casino and they paused long enough to each drink a bottle of water. As Gil had gotten older, he’d learned the importance of staying hydrated.

“What do you think?” Sara asked as they started the walk back.

“I think someone stabbed our victim.”

She sighed and shook her head, though she was smiling. “I think we need to find out what game he was playing, with who, and whether or not he was winning or losing, and by how much.”

“Those are good questions, but our suspect might not be someone he gambled against,” Gil said.

“Possibly not, but given the location, our suspect pool is mostly people who were gambling, casino employees, and anyone who came with him to Vegas.”

“Add disgruntled people he’s met since coming to Vegas, and that probably rounds out our list,” he tentatively agreed.

“Nothing like winning a bunch of money off people to disgruntle them,” she said, sighing again once they were back inside the air conditioned building.

“Or having sex with them.”

Sara grinned. “Well, if you’re doing it right, hopefully the person you had sex with isn’t disgruntled afterward.”

Gil felt the corners of his mouth quirk up. “Depends on how many other people are involved.”

“That does have a way of complicating things.”

Their conversation stopped as they entered the casino floor and both of them looked around as they walked through the casino busy at work. Despite David having moved a gurney through the rooms, people didn’t seem perturbed. They were all busily involved in losing money.

One one level, Gil did understand the allure of the casinos. It was preying on human nature and a general misunderstanding of how casinos, gambling, and statistics worked. Some people did it the smart way. They set aside a certain amount of money they could afford to lose and had fun for a few days. Some of them even made their money back. Then there were the people who came back over and over, compulsion to reach the next win driving them. There were places in casinos for people to cash their social security checks, because they came back month after month and lost their money while seeking the million dollar win that would keep them secure for the rest of their lives.

Gambling could be an insidious addiction and he knew Warrick was still fighting his way out of it. As far as he knew, Warrick was clean, but being clean wasn’t necessarily being free of the compulsions of an addiction. He tried not to send Warrick to casinos for the same reason he tried not to send Sara to bars. There was no sense in putting temptation right in front of them.

As far as he knew, Sara was clean too and had been since her DUI. She seemed to have the issue under control, but Gil hadn’t seen it until it had reached the point where she’d been driving drunk and he knew he should have seen the warning signs before then. He was trying to pay better attention now.

They reached the security office and found Brass waiting for them. “First up, we have the staff member who found the body. His name is Nathan Wright.”

“Lead the way,” Gil said.

A young man in a casino security uniform used his key card to open the door for them and led them to a small room down a hallway. Another young man was sitting in the room, clutching a water bottle and looking pale and drawn under his summer tan.

“Nathan Wright?” Gil checked.

“Yes, sir,” he said, his frightened eyes looking them over.

“My name is Gil Grissom. This is Sara Sidle. We’re with the crime lab. You’ve already met Detective Brass. We have a few questions for you,” he said as they took seats. They didn’t need to take evidence from Nathan - they should already have a work card for him.

Nathan nodded. “I really don’t know anything.”

“That’s okay. We just want to hear about what you saw tonight. That’s all,” Sara said. “Can you start when you came on shift?”

He took a few deep breaths. “I work swing. I arrived at two and I was supposed to get off at ten.”

“Okay. What do your duties usually entail?” Gil asked.

“I move through the casino cleaning up after people. And after people use the private rooms, I clean up in there so they can be used again. That’s what I did tonight.”

“How do you know when a private room is ready to be cleaned?” Brass asked.

“There’s a board in the back room with room numbers on it. When a room is in use, they put a red magnet by the number. When the dealer leaves, they move the magnet to yellow, meaning it needs to be serviced. After I or one of the other janitors service it, we move the magnet to green to show it can be used again,” Nathan explained.

“Is there any way to know what time the magnet was moved to yellow?” Gil asked.

He seemed to think about it and then shook his head. “It was still red when I was in the room at six thirty, but it was yellow when I went back a little after eight.”

If the dealer was in the room at six thirty, that meant their murder likely had to be later. “Alright. You saw the yellow magnet at a little after eight. Then what?” Gil prompted.

“I collected the supplies I needed for the room. I went to the room. And then I saw a man on the floor. And blood.”

“Before we get to the man, was the door locked?” Sara asked.

Nathan looked surprised and shook his head. “I tried to put my key in the lock, but the door was already unlocked when I tried to turn it. The dealer is supposed to lock the room when they leave.”

“Why are those rooms with a physical key instead of a key card?” Brass asked.

“I don’t know. More secure, I guess,” he said with a shrug.

Neither a physical key or a magnetic key card were particularly secure if someone really wanted in, but Gil knew if those rooms were on physical locks, there was a reason somewhere. “The door is unlocked. You go inside. You see a man on the floor. What then?”

“I drop my supplies and rush over to him. All of the casino employees are trained in first aid. You wouldn’t believe what happens on the casino floor sometimes.”

Gil thought they would believe it - they were called to casinos on emergencies often enough. “What first aid did you provide?”

“I watched his chest. I held my hand above his mouth and felt for breathing. I put my fingers to his neck and tried to find a pulse. He was…not exactly wet. Clammy maybe? And a little cold. I thought about trying CPR, but I couldn’t figure out how to safely do it when there was so much blood. Then I radioed the head of security,” Nathan said with a nod.

“What did you tell the head of security on the radio?” Gil asked, guessing those channels weren’t secured.

“That there was a dead body in one of the private rooms. I gave him the room number. And he arrived about five minutes later. He told me to stay with the body, which I really didn’t want to do, so I stood outside the room.”

“What’s the name of the head of security?” Sara asked.

“Thomas Watkins. He showed up. He looked at the body. He felt for a pulse. He radioed for security guards to come stand out the door. And he told me I could go back to work, but to put the magnet on red so no one else would try to come in here. I put the magnet on red, and then I washed my hands for a while. And I sort of sat down for a bit. I’ve never seen a dead body before. My grandma’s funeral was closed casket,” Nathan said.

“It can be a scary thing to come across a dead body unexpectedly. You did fine,” she assured him.

“Do you know anything about the people who were in the room before you went in?” Gil asked.

“No. I don’t generally interact with the guests. I just clean up after them.”

“Alright. Thank you, that’s all we needed,” Gil said.

Brass guided Nathan out and then returned a moment later with another man.

He was in a security uniform, had a radio at one hip and a gun at the other, and appeared to be in his mid-fifties or so with his hair starting to streak gray.

Gil had noticed his own light brown hair starting to have strands of gray sneaking in, though it currently blended enough that it wasn’t noticeable in the same way it was on this man. “Thomas Watkins? Head of security?”

“That’s me,” he said, taking a seat. “Vegas PD?”

“Detective Brass, LVPD. This Doctor Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle with the crime lab.”

“I assume you want a statement?” Thomas asked.

“Yes, please. Anything you can tell us about that room or the occupants would be helpful,” Gil said.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the occupants of the room. The gaming staff oversee who is using the private rooms. I was summoned on the radio at eight fifteen, saying there was a dead guest in one of the private rooms. I instructed Nathan to stay there with the body until I could reach him and asked about first aid. Nathan indicated that he’d done all the first aid he could do, though I didn’t ask for specifics over the radio,” Thomas began.

“Who has access to that channel on the radio?” Gil asked.

“Any of our radios can be turned to the security channel to reach a security officer, though the only people whose radios are supposed to remain on that channel are the security officers.”

“So theoretically, any staff member with a radio could have heard Nathan make that call?” Sara asked.

“Theoretically, yes,” he agreed, looking mildly puzzled.

“So you received the call at eight fifteen. What then?” Gil asked, deciding to leave it alone for now.

“I went to the private room Nathan indicated. I found him outside the doors. I went inside. I verified that the body was beyond resuscitation. I posted two security guards outside the door to ensure the scene was not disturbed. Then I went back to the security office to make the 911 call.”

That roughly matched up with their timeline given it was about a seven minute walk from the private room to the security office. “We’d like surveillance footage from inside the room and the areas surrounding it,” Gil said.

“Not without a warrant, I’m afraid,” Thomas said.

“And a list of the people who were in the room earlier?” Sara asked.

“From our casino guest services, with a warrant,” he said steadily.

“We’ll be back with the warrant,” Brass said. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

“That’s all I know at this time,” Thomas said.

Gil doubted that, but he nodded. He would be surprised if Thomas hadn’t already watched the surveillance footage from the room. “Thank you for your time. We should be back in a few hours.”

Thomas nodded to them and left the room.

“Alright. Surveillance footage. Access to Bursh’s hotel suite. List of names of people who were in the room with Bursh tonight. Anything else while I’m at it?” Brass asked once they were alone.

“That will do for now,” Gil said. “Let’s head back to the lab and get started.” By the time they had autopsy results and the victim’s clothing processed, they should have surveillance footage as well.

*****

Gil was in his office. He’d looked over his emails, he’d emptied out his physical inbox, and he was currently going over the information for the last case Sam Braun had been involved in. That Braun was working with the mob was clear, though catching him was an entirely different matter.

This wasn’t a mob hit. That was obvious enough. The mob didn’t stab guests in the middle of a casino. Which likely meant Braun wasn’t involved beyond The Tangiers being his casino. Gil could work with that. Ideally they wouldn’t cross paths with Catherine’s father at all during this investigation.

His cellphone buzzed and he checked his messages. Al was ready for him with a preliminary from the autopsy. He left his office, feeling the case out in his mind. Cause of death was fairly obvious - or it should be. That was why they had the autopsy, to be sure.

Inside the autopsy lab, he found Doctor Al Robbins busy at work, music playing in the background.

Al glanced up and nodded at Gil. “You got my message.”

“I did. At a first glance, sharp force trauma perforating the liver?” Gil asked.

“At first glance, yes,” Al agreed.

“Complications?”

“He was dying. Maybe had another two years on the outside,” Al said.

“What from?” Gil asked.

“Colon cancer, stage four. Fairly common in men of his age. A lot of people avoid those screenings because they’re invasive and uncomfortable,” Al said. “People need to go to the doctor when they find blood in their stool instead of simply assuming hemorrhoids.”

Gil nodded. After enough autopsies, most of them in the lab were proactive about their health. None of them wanted to wind up on a table with a doctor saying their deaths were unnecessary and could have been prevented. “What about the stab wounds?”

“Six stab wounds. If your suspect was aiming for the liver, they did a good job. Victim bled out in maybe five to ten minutes as the hepatic artery was severed. Your weapon is a double edged dagger. After clearing the blood away, we have the clear impression of a rectangular hilt around the edges of the wounds. Your suspect was very forceful.”

“Can we cast the wounds to see our blade?”

“Already did, your cast is over there,” Al said, nodding to a table.

Gil picked up the cast. The dagger was about four inches long, starting with a very narrow tip and spreading into an isosceles triangle. “Alright. Thank you. Anything else I should know at the moment?”

“Not at the moment. I’ll let you know if anything else comes up on the final,” Al said, returning to the body he was currently working over.

Gil retreated from the autopsy lab carrying the mold of the weapon. If they could find the murder weapon, they had something to match it to. If they ran into trouble, there was a knife shop who was willing to consult with them and they could likely tell them exactly what they were looking for.

Checking his watch, Gil saw that it had been four hours since they’d returned to the lab. That should have been enough time for a warrant and to have surveillance footage sent to them. He ambled down to the AV lab and found Sara and Archie sitting together, both of them frowning down at a computer.

“Are you sure?” Sara was asking as Gil entered the room.

“Positive. I’ve been over the files twice,” Archie said.

“Problems?” Gil asked, causing Sara to jump and turn.

“Quite possibly,” she said, glancing at Archie.

“The Tangiers sent over their footage as you requested, from three in the afternoon until nine in the evening,” Archie said.

Gil nodded once. “Good so far. What’s wrong with it?”

“Missing files. There’s no recordings for your private room and Sara said there should have been two cameras in there. There’s no recording of a camera directly outside of the room, and Sara said there’s tables nearby, so there should be cameras,” Archie said. “Given that this is a snapshot of their security footage of those six hours, it means either those files never existed-”

“Or they were deleted before the snapshot was taken,” Sara said. “Remember how Thomas said anyone listening on the security channel could have heard the call that there was a dead body?”

“I recall. We also don’t know what Thomas did after he called 911,” Gil said.

“Someone might have deleted the files before the 911 call. Wouldn’t take long,” Archie said. “And that’s if we’re going with evidence tampering. If we want premeditation, the cameras could have been turned off prior to the murder so there was no incriminating footage.”

Gil thought about this for a moment. Technology was a little bit of his weak spot in investigation. He knew some - enough, usually - but when it came down to what computers could or could not do, he typically had to rely on an expert. That’s one of the many reasons they had Archie. “If you could access their computers and servers, could you tell if the files had been deleted?”

“It would have to be onsite. And soon. Most deleted files aren’t overwritten right away, they’re just moved to another area of storage.”

“So we could potentially retrieve these files?” Sara asked.

“No promises, depending on how their system treats deleted files, but possibly,” Archie said.

“Could you tell who deleted the files?” Gil asked.

Archie shrugged. “Depends on how their system works and how savvy the person who deleted them is. Again, this is assuming those files ever existed.”

“Say they didn’t. Can we tell who turned off the cameras?” she asked.

“I’d have to look at how their system works. Possibly.”

Sara turned to look at Gil. “What would it take to get Archie into their system?”

“A subpoena and a judge who isn’t scared by the mob or willing to take bribes,” Gil said.

“Do we have any of those?” she asked.

“I’ll see if I can find out,” he said, wondering who they could possibly find who would be willing to cross Sam Braun. “In the meantime, can you look to see if we can find our victim anywhere on this footage? If that’s missing too, that says something.”

“We can look. He had to get into the room from somewhere,” Archie agreed. “Do we know his room number?”

Sara consulted her notebook. “1119. Did we get a search warrant for the room?”

“We did, but wait for me. We’ll go together,” Gil said.

She looked steadily at him. “Concerns?”

“If someone is sabotaging evidence at the casino I’m not sending anyone there alone,” he told them. “If we get Archie in, people are staying with him the entire time he examines the system.”

“No arguments from me,” Archie said.

“I’ll be back within thirty minutes,” Gil said before leaving the AV lab. He spent the walk to Brass’ office thinking about how they could possibly handle this - and the implications for their case.

Brass was at his computer, his forehead creased as he read something.

Gil knocked on the door frame and Brass glanced up and nodded to him. Gil pulled the door closed behind him, getting Brass’ full attention.

“That kind of night?” he asked.

“It’s turning out to be,” Gil said, taking a seat across from Brass.

“What’s the problem?”

“Archie has reviewed the surveillance footage. The footage from the cameras in the room and the camera outside the room weren’t included. According to Archie, that means the files either were deleted or don’t exist.”

“Sabotaging evidence or collusion,” Brass said after a moment, his hand coming up to rest against his chin.

“It looks that way with the information we currently have,” Gil agreed.

“What would it take for us to tell which one it is?”

“Archie would need to access their system on site. Do you know any judges who would be willing to issue a subpoena for full access to The Tangiers’ security system?”

Brass sighed and rubbed his hand over his eyes. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“As far as I see it, we have three possibilities. The first is that someone deleted the files after the murder. That’s felony evidence tampering. The second is that someone turned off the cameras before the murder. That’s aiding and abetting, which is also a felony. The third option is that they had an extraordinarily coincidental system failure.”

“Right,” he said with a huff. Brass stared off into the distance for a moment. “I’m just trying to think of a judge suicidal enough to take on Sam Braun.”

“What sort of evidence would the judge need to grant the subpoena?” Gil asked, trying to take a problem solving approach to this.

“Evidence that they aren’t going to be murdered in a hit for issuing the subpoena,” Brass said.

Gil did not have that evidence, and if Sam Braun was involved, the possibility was a very real one. “If Archie compiles the files in a way that shows we’re missing that footage, will that help? We have photos of the crime scene.”

He sighed again. “Get me what you can that supports this and I will see who I can find, but-”

“It’s a long shot.”

“It is,” Brass said, shaking his head.

“What about a list of the people who were in that room?” Gil asked.

“One dealer, one cocktail waitress, and six players, including our victim. I have people trying to track everyone down. I’ll let you know as soon as we have someone.”

They could probably find the cocktail waitress and the dealer at their homes. Everyone else was going to be trickier. “I’d like to borrow a deputy,” Gil said, moving to the next topic.

“What for?”

“To go with me and Sara to examine the victim’s hotel suite. I…”

“If they’re covering up evidence, they may not take too kindly to CSIs sniffing around. You can have Mitchell. Keep him close,” Brass said. “When are you going?”

“Now, before they have a chance to tamper with the room,” Gil said, knowing they’d already had that opportunity.

“I’ll have him meet you in the parking garage. Have Archie send the stuff to me for the subpoena request.”

“Will do,” Gil said, leaving Brass’ office. He made his way back to the lab and found Sara and Archie where he’d left them.

“Look at this,” Sara said, glancing over at Gil.

Gil joined them and peered down at the monitor.

Archie hit play and they watched as Zachary Bursh left his hotel suite, walked down the hallway, and boarded the elevator. “So we know where he was at four nineteen yesterday afternoon,” Archie said, glancing up at Gil when the clip finished.

“That’s a good start. Try to trace him from there. Sara, we’re going to go check out that hotel suite,” Gil said.

She followed him out of the lab, grabbed her kit and camera, and then climbed into his passenger seat while Gil coaxed the AC to blow cold air at them. It was nearly six in the morning and it was about as cool as it was going to get - and it was still hot enough to bring sweat to his skin just from stepping outside.

“What are you thinking?” Sara asked once they were underway.

“Searching for reasons that The Tangiers either wanted Bursh dead or was willing to cover it up. This was too messy for a mob hit. If it was a mob hit, it wouldn’t have taken place in the casino,” Gil said.

“I don’t suppose this could be a set up?” she asked. “Another casino trying to sabotage Braun and The Tangiers?”

Gil considered it. The morning traffic hadn’t started yet and the roads were emptier than they’d be all day. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but by the thin colorless light in the eastern sky, it was on its way. He intended to be hiding inside during the hottest period of the day. Graveyard was the superior shift in Vegas for a lot of reasons.

“If it’s sabotage from another casino, how did they arrange for the missing surveillance footage?” he asked her, not dismissing the idea out of hand, but not sure how it would have been accomplished.

“If it’s a long con, they get one of their people hired to the security team. Either that or we’re looking at a hacker,” she suggested. “Bonus if they have a beef with Bursh. We need to look into him.”

“I have, a little. Native New Yorker. Married. Two college-age children. He’s an investment analyst. Well off, as expected for playing in a room with high rollers.”

“I don’t suppose we know if anyone came with him on this trip to Vegas?” she asked.

“That I don’t know. We should check if there was anyone else on his account,” Gil said.

“Do we know where his kids go to college?”

“I checked, not here. East coast schools,” he said, since Bursh coming to Vegas to get a child settled at college would be reasonable when schools were back in session next week.

Sara was quiet for a long moment as she stared out the window. “I guess we’ll see who else is on his account. If he’s the only one, he might have been here just to gamble. Sometimes people come to Vegas specifically for that.”

“Surveys say that seventy nine percent of tourists gamble when they come to Vegas. It’s a ten billion dollar a year industry,” Gil said, pulling onto the Strip. It was much quieter now than it had been last night. Even the people who stayed out late to party were usually in bed by six in the morning. Tourists in Vegas weren’t generally known for being earlier risers unless they intended to go hiking in the canyon and wanted to be done before the heat of the day. Emergency services fished a lot of overheated and dehydrated tourists out of Red Rock Canyon this time of year.

“I’ve never understood the appeal of the casinos,” she said, watching the passing Strip out the window. “Showgirls and boys, sure. People like looking at attractive people, it’s mostly biological. But casinos just take people’s money from them. It’s like a factory farm, processing people through their wallets.”

Gil chuckled. “Most people really don’t understand how the house advantage works, and the idea that they could win a lot of money is enticing. Who doesn’t like free money?”

“Free money for the casinos,” Sara said, shaking her head.

“For most people it’s harmless fun over a weekend vacation.”

“And for others it’s an addiction,” she said, glancing at him.

He nodded as he pulled into the parking garage. “For some people, it is, and the casinos prey on them.” He didn’t know what could be done about that. Sometimes people needed more help and support than they were being given. Shutting down the casinos wasn’t the answer to a gambling addiction, just like shutting down bars wasn’t the answer to alcoholism.

Parking in the same place he had eight hours ago, they exited the car and found Deputy Mitchell waiting for them.

“Brass says there may be a problem?” Mitchell asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Possibly. Keep your eyes peeled,” Gil said.

“Any idea for what?” Mitchell asked.

“Anyone approaching us with the intent of harm,” he said, since that was the best answer he could think of.

Mitchell nodded once, looking mildly disturbed.

They took the elevator back to the ground floor and then the hallway into The Tangiers. This time they bypassed the casino, which was much quieter at six in the morning than it had been at eleven at night, and went to the check-in desk for the resort.

Gil held out his badge. “We have a warrant to search room 1119 and we have a few questions before we do so.”

The young woman behind the front desk nodded once. “I’ve been provided a sheet of information that I’m allowed to give you. Here is a key for the room,” she said, passing him a thin packet of paper and a small paper envelope containing a key card.

Gil accepted both and scanned the paper while Sara leaned in to read with him.

Zachary Bursh had arrived at The Tangiers on August seventeenth and was due to check out the morning of the twenty first. He was the only person listed on the reservation. He had a bill for room service these past few days, a massage that was billed to his room, and dinner at one of the restaurants in The Tangiers.

“Is there an accounting of his time at the casino?” Sara asked.

“That’s a separate account. You’ll have to speak with the casino staff for that,” the young woman said.

Naturally. “Thank you,” Gil said, and they moved away together. A short elevator ride later put them on the eleventh floor. He glanced around as they walked down the hall, but no one was in evidence and it was quiet except for the soft hum of filtered air being moved through the building.

They stopped outside of room 1119 and Mitchell held out his hand. “Brass told me to clear the suite before you go in.”

“That’s fine. We’ll be here for anyone who tries to sneak out around you,” Gil said, noticing Sara resting her hand on her holster. He put the key card into the plate around the door handle and removed it, hearing the lock click, and then stepped back for Mitchell to enter.

“Las Vegas Police,” Mitchell called as he entered the dark suite with his gun in his hand.

Gil and Sara stood ready, Sara’s eyes trained on the opening while Gil kept watch of the hallway around them.

Mitchell returned less than five minutes later. “We’re clear.”

“Thank you,” Sara said, picking up her kit and leading the way into the suite.

Gil followed, taking in the sitting and dining area. “Two plates on the table. He didn’t call for room service to pick up the plates when they were done.”

“One plate per chair, he had someone with him,” Sara said. “But not someone who left his room with him at four o’clock, we would have seen them on the surveillance. Room doesn’t look particularly rumpled. Air conditioner is on high. Drinks on the coffee table. We need to see what Wendy found about BAC and the tox screening.”

“That would be a good idea. He shouldn’t have been obviously impaired in the casino. They’re not supposed to let people who are drunk or high play,” Gil said.

“You wouldn’t know it considering the comped drinks,” she said, moving to the large picture window and peering down into the city before moving on. “Bedroom. And I think I know why there were two plates on the table.”

Gil joined her at the doorway and nodded as he saw two pairs of handcuffs hooked to the headboard and rumpled and messy sheets. “If his wife is in town, she’s not staying on the same reservation.”

“I assume Brass hasn’t made the familial notification yet.”

“Not just yet. We were hoping for a little more information before doing that.”

“I don’t suppose you saw handcuff marks on his wrists at the autopsy?” she asked, entering the room.

“No, I think his partner was the one who was handcuffed,” Gil said, heading to the garbage can and was not surprised to see both a used condom and empty single serving bottles of alcohol inside.

“Well, people come to Vegas for many reasons. It’s not called Sin City for nothing,” Sara said, checking out the handcuffs on the other side. “Makes you wonder how much the wife knows.”

“And if the wife is in town after all,” he said, moving to check out the bathroom.

“You know, you’re supposed to use padded leather cuffs for this kind of thing. Handcuffs can leave marks and wounds. But even if we don’t have their DNA on the sheets, we definitely have it here,” Sara said.

“DNA is nice. We’ve got plenty in here too,” Gil said as he looked over the mess in the bathroom. It was clear housekeeping hadn’t been in today given the pile of towels on the floor. Towels were great for epithelials, but Gil wasn’t sure how knowing who Bursh had sex with and showered with was going to help their case, unless that person had also been in the private gambling room.

Infidelity potentially left them with a few options, but that generally relied on someone else in the situation knowing there was infidelity for homicide to come into play, and there was a good chance Bursh’s partner was a prostitute.

“We’ll take the sheets, handcuffs, and the contents of the trashcan, and I think that’s all we need here,” he told Sara. “I’ll grab prints at the dining table so we can see if their sexual partner is in AFIS.”

“Sure,” she said, already at work.

They wrapped up in about thirty minutes and left the hotel suite carrying their kits and the bundled evidence.

“Where to next?” Mitchell asked.

“Back to the casino. I want to know what Bursh’s gambling history is during his stay,” Gil said.

They took the elevator back to the lobby and then went from the resort to the casino, Gil leading the way to the cashier’s row since they should have the information he’d need. It was empty this time of day, which was useful for them, and one tired looking teller was finishing out his shift by himself.

Gil showed his badge. “Doctor Gil Grissom with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I’d like information about one of your guests. Mr. Zachary Bursh. There was a warrant involved.”

“I have that information here for you, sir. This is everything we’re allowed to disclose about Mr. Bursh,” he said, passing Gil a manila envelope.

“Thank you,” Gil said, though he was having concerns. If the casino had tampered with the surveillance footage, would they have tampered with this too?

He left without opening the envelope, Sara and Mitchell tagging along. They’d be back, hopefully next time with a subpoena for the computers in the security system.

“That’s everything,” Gil told Mitchell when they reached the parking garage. They’d just about reached the end of everyone’s shift and day shift would be coming on soon.

“I’ll let Brass know we finished,” Mitchell said.

They stowed their evidence and kits in Gil’s trunk, Gil passing Sara the envelope before they climbed into the car.

She immediately opened it and started paging through while he drove. “Our victim is a consummate gambler. He’s been playing steadily since he checked in on Wednesday. Texas Hold’em is his preferred game. And he’s a winner.”

“How much are we talking here?” Gil asked.

Sara flipped through the pages again and let out a low whistle. “As of seven o’clock yesterday, he was up a total of three hundred thousand dollars. That’s some serious cash.”

“That probably meant buy-in at his games was at least twenty thousand,” Gil said, shaking his head slightly. “Which means everyone in the room except the dealer and the cocktail waitress is an excellent suspect.”

“Any ideas on how we find five random wealthy tourists in Vegas?”

“Not yet.” They would have to think of something.

Back at the lab, they bundled the evidence they’d collected inside. “I’ll start processing this, just in case it’s relevant,” Sara said.

“And I’ll see where we stand on everything else.” His first stop was the DNA lab, where he found Wendy wrapping up for the morning. “Did blood get sent to you from Zachary Bursh for a tox screening?”

“Yep, got it right here,” she said, picking up a file and handing it to him. “Preview, the only thing that hit was alcohol. He had a BAC of point one three. So he shouldn’t be behind the wheel, but I’m guessing he was probably still pretty with it, especially if he’s accustomed to drinking like that.”

“Evidence suggests he was. He was winning at Texas Hold’em, so if he was counting cards, he was in pretty good capacity,” Gil said, quickly reviewing the sheet.

Wendy laughed. “I can’t count cards sober, let alone drunk.”

“It tends to get more complicated the more inebriated you are,” he agreed. Gil could count cards quite successfully in small games, but he knew better than to take on the casinos. “Anything else I should know?”

“Hodges and I processed the glasses you and Sara brought in. I have five sets of unknown DNA, three male, two female. Three of the glasses were a match to your victim. If you can get DNA samples, we can at least confirm who was in the room.”

“Alright. I’m not sure how likely that is, but thank you. I know you’re done for the day, but Sara should have some DNA swabs that we’d like a check on from the bed and bedsheets. I’d like to know if that DNA matches anyone in the room.”

“I’ll do it first thing tonight,” Wendy said.

“Thank you,” Gil said, leaving the DNA lab, ducking to avoid Hodges in Trace, and then making his way to Archie in the AV lab.

Archie glanced over as Gil entered the room. “I sent what I had to Brass for the subpoena request. He didn’t look too hopeful, but he said he was going to try to get me access to their security system tonight.”

“Alright. We’ll see what happens,” Gil said, thinking of judges he had at least a moderately good relationship with. If Brass wasn’t successful, he’d give it a try. “Assuming we get to go in, I’m going to be with you, and we’ll have at least one deputy with us, possibly Brass too.”

“You really think they’d go after us?” Archie asked, meeting Gil’s eyes.

He had stopped taking things like that for granted after Nick’s abduction. “Probably not, but I want to cover all of our bases. They did something to that surveillance footage and I’d rather not take unnecessary risks or give them another opportunity for sabotage. What else can you tell me from the surveillance footage?”

“Here is Zachary Bursh heading into the casino from the elevator, directly after leaving his room. Here he is at the casino concierges, checking in for his private game. Here he is mid-casino. And that’s the last I have of him. Is there someone else I should be looking for?”

“I have a list of names of people who were in that room. I’m not sure how feasible it is for you to find them with just the list,” Gil said.

“Can we get photos of them from driver’s licenses?” Archie asked.

“I don’t have birth dates or states of residence. Yet. I will see what I can do. I don’t suppose it’s possible to see who might be heading in the direction of the private room?”

“Not with what we have,” he said with a shake of his head.

That figured. “Alright. Let’s put it on hold until we have more information. The casinos should have more information on these people because they would have needed to file tax documents for their winnings. I’ll see if we can get it. Let’s wrap up for the day. It’s getting late.”

“Just let me know,” Archie said.

Gil went to his office, ignored the light on his desk phone saying he had a voice mail, and pulled out his cellphone. He didn’t want to call Brass in case he was currently with a judge, but he could text him. ‘Can we get more info on the five players with Bursh from the casino? DOB, state of residence, and whether or not they have a room at The Tangiers?’ he sent, frowning as he poked at the tiny keyboard.

Catherine poked her head in the door. “Warrick and I are heading back out.”

He glanced at the clock. It was now nearly nine in the morning and past the end of their shift. “Problems?”

“Most likely. This should be the last thing we have to do today, then we’re going to take a break and come at it tonight,” she said.

“Alright. You have deputies with you?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she called as she left.

He did worry about it, now more than he used to.

It was time to send people home for the day, so Gil shut down his computer, decided he’d deal with the voicemails tonight, and then went looking for the rest of the team. He found Sara, Nick, and Greg processing evidence.

“Everything good?” he checked.

“Have you been down to Fremont Street?” Greg asked.

“A few times. Why?” Gil had worked cases there, but it wasn’t somewhere he’d ever go of his own volition.

“It’s crazy down there!”

“It is, a bit. Eighties night,” Nick said with a small smile.

“Better you than me,” Sara said. “I processed the bedsheets and the handcuffs-”

“Handcuffs, kinky,” Greg said with a sly grin as Nick flushed a little.

She laughed. “Condom is set up for Wendy for tonight. And that’s everything we currently have.”

“Alright. We’ll see if we have that subpoena tonight,” Gil said. “You two are taken care of?”

“We’ve done what we can for now. PD is trying to track some people down for us, but no luck yet. We’ll come back at it tonight,” Nick said.

“We’re still trying to get them to give us surveillance footage,” Greg added.

“You have a warrant?” Gil checked.

“Yeah, but they say the footage is stored on a server off-site and they need to get someone out there to send it to us,” Nick said. “It’s supposed to be here later today.”

“Let me know if you have trouble with them and it’s not here by tonight.” Sometimes places needed an extra push to comply with a warrant or subpoena.

“Goodnight,” Sara said when he turned to go.

“Goodnight,” Gil said.

Traffic was not bad on the drive home, most people were heading toward downtown, not away from it. He collected his mail and the newspaper after parking in his garage. He dropped the junk mail directly into the paper recycling bin and set bills aside to deal with later.

His fridge and pantry were woefully empty, but he managed to cobble together a meal and added several more things to his grocery list. He got a text from Brass while he was eating. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Gil left it at that. He’d see what was available tonight.

He put away his dirty dishes, started the dishwasher, settled down with the book he was reading - he was currently rereading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath - and finished another sixty pages before he got ready for bed.

In just his boxers, he pulled the blackout curtains on his bedroom windows closed, turned on the ceiling fan, and settled beneath the sheet. It didn’t take long for him to fall asleep.

Chapter Text

Gil checked the time on his phone when he woke up. It was six in the evening, which gave him plenty of time for his routine before he went to the crime lab. He spent a moment laying on his back and staring up at the rotating ceiling fan, putting together what he remembered of the case.

They needed that subpoena. Somehow that missing surveillance footage was the clue to the entire case. Not because the footage would show them who committed the murder - though that would also be useful. But because it meant something that the footage was missing, and what it meant would depend on why it was missing.

He also wanted to speak to the people who had been in that private room. Hopefully by now someone would have rounded at least a few of them up, the casino employees at a minimum.

If Brass hadn’t made the familial death notification by now, they needed to do it in the morning before someone reported Zachary Bursh missing. Judging by the state they’d found the hotel bed in, Gil was willing to believe that Bursh was giving his wife perfunctory phone calls at best. He supposed some marriages functioned like that, but it wasn’t what he’d want in his life.

Gil generally tried not to let himself think too much about what he wanted, because he shouldn’t have it. Or rather, he shouldn’t have her. There was the lab to think of, their jobs, their careers, everything.

Shaking the random thought aside, Gil got up and shuffled into the bathroom, peering briefly into the mirror. He still had dark circles under his eyes. Was his sleep really that poor lately? Maybe he needed to check if he was low on vitamin C or iron. Or maybe this was just him getting older.

There wasn’t anything he could do about it at the moment, so he turned on the shower and shucked his boxers into the hamper. He put his hand into the water and then jerked it back, remembering that the water heater had been on the fritz lately. He needed to look at that when he had a moment. And in the meantime, he needed to be more careful where he set the handle.

A minute later, with the water at a more tolerable temperature, Gil showered, his thoughts still ahead with the case. He dried off, shaved, combed his hair, and put on deodorant before getting dressed and heading to the kitchen. He put the last two slices of wheat bread in the toaster and discovered he still had a banana. He’d thought he’d eaten the last one.

He paused at the grocery list on the fridge door, frowning for a long moment. He was almost positive he’d added a number of things to the list yesterday. Almost positive.

Picking up the pen, he added bananas and bread, then checked inside the fridge and added milk and cheese, though he was having a bizarre sense of deja vu.

His toast popped up, so he gathered it and a butter knife and his banana and a cup of coffee and sat at the table to do the crossword.

He stopped two words in, blinking at the paper. He was sure he’d done this crossword yesterday evening. Positive. He flipped the paper over and read the date on the front and the headline. August 19, 2005. It was yesterday’s paper.

Gil got up and went to the front door and checked the porch, but there was no paper there, and he did remember collecting the paper this morning. They must have sent him yesterday’s paper by accident, though he didn’t know how such a thing could happen.

Closing the door, Gil went back to his breakfast before his coffee could get cold. It was late enough in the day that he wouldn’t reach anyone at the newspaper office if he tried the customer service line. The lab should have the paper, they had a subscription. He’d try to find a copy there. He’d be surprised if Zachary Bursh’s death had gone unreported and he liked to know what the news was saying about his cases. And to do the damn crossword.

Once he finished eating, he moved to unload the dishwasher, but paused when he found that it was still full of dirty dishes. He was positive he’d started a load this morning too. Placing the dirty plate, butter knife, and coffee mug into the dishwasher, he stood still for a moment. Maybe this was what getting up on the wrong side of the bed felt like, or mild disorientation.

Gil was getting older. He’d turned forty nine years old two days ago - and hadn’t celebrated. No one at the lab knew his birth date because he did not want them to celebrate it. Surely that was still too young for memory loss like this? His mind was sharp. He purposefully kept his mind sharp.

He kept his mind sharp for cases, but maybe he was letting other things slip. He ran the dishwasher two or three times a week. Maybe he was just remembering some other morning when he started the dishwasher. That was the most reasonable explanation. He was just having an off day. He didn’t remember dreaming, but maybe he’d had disturbed sleep and he didn’t remember it. Being overheated could lead to disrupted sleep and it had been hot yesterday.

Heat and the lack of sleep was interfering. Hadn’t he just noticed he had dark circles under his eyes? And maybe after the tourist season was done he’d take a week or two off and see what he could do about resting and relaxing a little. It had clearly been too long since he’d taken time off.

Satisfied that he’d found the answer, Gil finished getting ready for the day and left his house. Now that he had the answer to this, he wanted the answer to his case, which meant finding out if they had that subpoena. Ideally he’d be inside The Tangiers security office within the next two hours figuring out exactly what had happened - and then likely charging someone with tampering with evidence.

Traffic on I-15 southbound was bad again and Gil tapped his fingers against the steering wheel as he waited for traffic to crawl forward around the accident. Apparently that was a more dangerous section of the freeway than he’d realized if there had been two accidents there in the space of two days.

Eventually he reached the exit ramp and he drove onto the slightly less crowded surface streets and made his way to the parking garage. He parked, walked into the lab, nodded at Judy at the front desk, and then paused by the break room to see if they had the newspaper. There was one sitting on the table, but when he opened it, he found it was yesterday’s paper as well.

Giving up, Gil went to his office, booted his computer, and saw that he had a voicemail. He pressed the button for it to play and listened as the DA told him they needed to talk about a case that was coming to trial next week. It was the same message as had been on his voicemail yesterday. “Impatient,” Gil muttered. It was the weekend. Gil had been planning to call him back on Monday, but he supposed he would do it in the morning if it was that urgent.

He logged into the computer, loaded his email, deleted some spam and other things he didn’t need, and then wandered down to dispatch for their assignment slips. Depending on what they got and where his team stood on yesterday’s cases, they might be juggling things tonight.

There were three slips, which meant they were going to be very busy, and he headed back toward his office while looking over them. He paused in the hallway, rereading the first one. It was a homicide at The Tangiers. He looked at the time and date. These were yesterday’s slips.

But that was impossible. He had yesterday’s slip. This slip was sitting in his case file.

Gil went back to his office, ignoring David Hodges trying to flag him down, and searched his desk for the case file. It wasn’t there. And he knew he had left it on his desk to review when he came in today.

He sat down behind his desk and very carefully looked through the three slips. A homicide at The Tangiers. Homicide on Fremont Street. Suspicious circs in Henderson. The dates all read August 19, 2005, with the time within the last hour.

Taking a slow breath through his nose, Gil tried to clear his mind and slow his racing heart. He had worked this case. He knew without a doubt that he remembered working this case.

After a moment of thinking, he pulled his cellphone and flipped it open to check it. It read August 19, 2005. A check of his computer gave the same date. But he remembered August nineteenth. He was sure he did. He had sat here twelve hours ago and put together this case file. The case file that no longer seemed to exist.

He looked back at the slips, willing them to say something different. The words stared back at him, taunting him.

Gil had heard of retrograde amnesia and of people missing time, including whole days and weeks. That happened sometimes in cases, where victims had been drugged or received head injuries, and then they had to help them reconstruct what had happened to them. He’d never heard of someone having the opposite of amnesia - foreknowledge, maybe? He seemed to recall an entire day that hadn’t happened yet.

The better part of him wanted to say that was impossible. The rest of him said that he’d seen things that had seemed impossible at first glance and he’d always found an explanation after investigating. That’s what he needed to do now. Investigate.

If he actually had foreknowledge, then he knew what happened on his case. Gil grabbed a pen and a blank piece of paper and started writing all the details he could remember from the case - how they’d found the body, the number of stab wounds, the victim’s name, his colon cancer, the missing surveillance footage, the number of players in the private room, the handcuffs in the hotel bedroom. Then he dated and time stamped it at the bottom.

Now he had to figure out what to do with it.

The problem was solved for him when Catherine appeared in his doorway, peering in with her eyebrows raised.

“I need to ask you some questions,” Gil said, motioning her inside.

“Alright. What sort of questions?” she asked, coming to stand in front of his desk.

“What case did you work on yesterday?”

“I wrapped that Baker homicide with Sara,” she said, her brow furrowing as she looked at him.

“And what case did I work yesterday?” he asked.

“You were finishing wrapping up the Carbuckle case with Warrick. You made an arrest, but Warrick said it was likely going to trial assuming the DA didn’t flake out on you.”

“And you weren’t in Henderson?”

“No. I haven’t been to Henderson in about three weeks. Gil? Are you alright?” she asked, sitting down.

“We’ll see. I haven’t decided yet. I am going to put this letter in an envelope, seal it, and give it to you,” he said, holding it up so she could see there was writing on it. “My signature is there, along with the date and time I wrote it, just now. Later, around six or seven in the morning, you’re going to find me and Sara and you’re going to ask her the details of our case. And then you’re going to read the letter.”

She continued to stare at him. “And what exactly does this accomplish?”

“Outside confirmation that I’m not completely losing my mind.”

“Is that a possibility we should be concerned about?”

Gil blinked a few times. “I’m not sure yet, that’s why I’m gathering evidence. To prove it one way or the other. Will you keep this with you? Fold it, put it in your pocket, don’t let it leave you at any point?”

“If it will help. How does it help, exactly?” Catherine asked, watching as he dug an envelope out of his drawer, and folded the letter.

Gil sealed the envelope, paused for a moment, then wrote ‘Zachary Bursh case. Open with Sara Sidle on August 20, at 6-7 am.’ Then he handed the envelope to Catherine. “I just need to know. You witnessed me putting the paper in the envelope and sealing it. And now I don’t have access to it.”

“Alright,” she said, drawing out the word as she read the front of the envelope, put it in her pocket, and then looked back at him. “Gil, be honest with yourself. Should you be working a case right now?”

“I need to be. I need to work this case. Here, look over the assignment slips. I just picked them up from dispatch about ten minutes ago,” he said, passing them to her.

She accepted the assignment slips, still looking wary, and then read them. “Okay. Two of us per case, it should be fine. I take it from the Henderson question earlier that you want me on suspicious circs in Henderson?”

“Yes. You and Warrick are going to Henderson. Sara and I are taking The Tangiers. Nick and Greg can have Fremont Street,” Gil said, deciding he wasn’t going to change anything intentionally. He wanted to know if something different happened on its own.

“Alright. You’re sure you’re alright? Migraine? Heat exhaustion?”

“No migraine,” he said as he stood. If anything, his mind felt abruptly clear, like if he could just observe the right things, connect the right pieces, he could figure out what was happening to him.

“You’re staying hydrated?” she asked as they left his office.

“I am. Make sure you take water with you today. It’s still hot,” Gil said.

“I’ve got some in the cooler in my trunk. We all do. We’ve been working summers in Vegas for how long now?”

“I know. Just…take care of yourself,” he said.

“I’m not the one who needs worrying about at the moment,” Catherine said, glancing at him again.

Gil led the way into the conference room and glanced around at his team as they looked between him and Catherine. He supposed he was a little late. “Catherine and Warrick are taking suspicious circumstances in Henderson. Nicky and Greg have a homicide on Fremont Street. I’m taking Sara with me to the Strip. Avoid I-15, they’re still clearing up after an accident.”

Catherine passed out slips and they left the room as a group.

“The Strip, huh? Do we know anything more than that?” Sara asked as she stepped up to walk next to him.

Gil thought for a moment and then decided he couldn’t bias her. He could already tell from her response that she didn’t remember doing this yesterday. As far as he could see, no one did but him. What that meant, he wasn’t sure yet. “The Tangiers. You can ride with me, traffic is bad right now.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Didn’t want Catherine to face off with her father.”

“Not particularly,” he said, having that sense of deja vu again. This was almost the conversation he’d had with her yesterday.

“Let me grab my kit, I’ll be right back,” she said once they reached the parking garage.

Gil went to his car and sat in the driver’s seat, trying to decide what he could say and what he couldn’t say. His goal had been not to change anything, but he could feel that he already had. Small things, but still.

Another thought crossed his mind. What if he could get to that surveillance footage before it was deleted? That would be changing something radical, but it might be worth it. Maybe, if he allowed that this whole thing had a purpose, that was what he was supposed to do.

How, he had no idea. They weren’t getting into that office without a subpoena. And it took time to get a subpoena. Enough time that the footage would be erased by the time they got there - assuming it had been erased at all and the cameras hadn’t been turned off before the murder.

Sara arrived and climbed into the passenger seat. “Can you hit the AC? It’s sweltering out here.”

Gil could feel sweat rising on his chest and back, and he immediately remembered that last time he’d had the AC running by the time she’d arrived. It was very easy to accidentally change something. The concept of the butterfly effect crossed his mind. Even if he wasn’t trying to change something, he was, and those changes might add up to something.

He turned on the engine and adjusted the AC so they weren’t being blasted with warm air.

“Thanks,” Sara said, settling her kit at her feet and her camera on her lap. Most of the team stowed their kits in the trunk when they were driving places, but Catherine and Sara were short enough that they were comfortable setting their kits at their feet.

Gil drove, watching the traffic, though he didn’t recall enough from the last drive to notice whether or not anything was different. Most people blocked out their daily commute unless something outrageous happened.

He pulled into The Tangiers’ parking garage, they collected their kits, and then took the elevator down to the ground level.

“I’m glad we’re inside tonight. It’s been hot lately,” she said once they were in the connecting hallway.

“Record breaking heat. The last time it was this hot in Vegas was 1942,” Gil said, though he was pretty sure he hadn’t told her that last time.

“Wonder why,” she said, glancing around at the advertisements as they walked through the hall. “Hopefully the heat wave breaks soon. It’s nearly September.”

Gil was less certain about that than he had been yesterday. They met Deputy Mitchell in the lobby and let him guide them back to the private room, where they found Brass waiting for them outside the room.

“What do we have?” Sara asked.

He abruptly remembered that last time - yesterday? - he had asked a question to Brass first.

“Deceased male in a private high stakes gambling room. Looks like a stabbing,” Brass said,

“What about witnesses?” she checked.

“You’re pretty much shit out of luck,” Brass told her.

And Gil was sure he remembered Brass saying that. He followed Sara and Brass into the private room, quickly checking to see if everything was as he remembered it. He was pretty sure this was beyond deja vu now. This was…something else entirely.

Sara edged over to the victim, raising her camera. “Male. Fifties, maybe. Blood pool around the abdomen suggests multiple stab wounds.”

Gil joined her and stared down at Zachary Bursh. He wished he could have somehow kept the photos so he could make an exact comparison. He assumed they were wherever his file wound up…if they even existed.

“Okay, so we’re here for a reason. Who called in?” Sara asked.

“Casino security. So far the story is a staff member came into the room to clean it between uses, found the body, and told security. Security came in to look. Then they called 911. Whether or not that’s actually the way it happened, who knows,” Brass said. “I’m working on getting them set aside with deputies, but I figure we’re going to have to interview them to find out who was in here.”

“On the bright side, we have the prints of every casino employee thanks to the work card program. If they touched something, we should be able to pin them down,” she said, the click of her camera showing she was working on overall shots of the scene.

“Gil?” Brass asked.

Gil blinked at him a few times and realized that he should have said something by now. “Surveillance footage?” he asked, not remembering if he or Sara had asked about that.

“Looks like we have two cameras in here. There should be at least one more outside the door,” she said.

“I’ll put it with the warrant,” Brass said.

“Any chance we can get a sneak peek in the security room? Just the period around the murder?” he asked.

Brass huffed. “Some places, maybe, but not here. Security at The Tangiers is too tight for that. They won’t let us in there without a warrant.”

Gil considered pressing, but he couldn’t come up with a good reason for a judge to grant them access to the security computers and server without them first knowing the footage was missing.

“What about the people who should have been in here?” Sara asked. “Dealer and a cocktail waitress, minimum. Plus whoever else was playing.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Brass said.

“Actually, can you try to grab them now before they go off shift?” Gil asked, impulsively deciding to make a change. They hadn’t managed to interview them yesterday.

“Might be too late, but I’ll try. You’re good here with Mitchell?” he asked.

“We’re fine,” he said, glancing around the room as Brass hurried away.

They got to work, Gil feeling odd as he collected the evidence he’d collected yesterday. He bagged the used playing cards, though he figured they had other methods of proving who had been here.

“DNA,” Sara said from by the bar maybe twenty minutes later.

“Good,” Gil said, returning to Zachary Bursh and looking down at him, searching for anything he’d missed before.

“Are you alright?” she asked suddenly.

He glanced over to her. “Why do you ask?”

“You’ve seemed a little off tonight. Quiet. Catherine had to come and find you because you were late handing out assignments. Is everything okay?”

“I’m not sure yet.” That was the truth. Right now, he felt on the precipice of not okay at all.

“Did you want to talk about it?” she offered.

“Not yet,” Gil said. They’d talk about it in the morning, when Catherine opened that envelope.

Sara paused for a long moment, watching him. “When you’re ready. I don’t want to put pressure on you. You’re alright to work the case?”

“Yes, I need to work this case,” he said, the same answer he’d given Catherine. He needed to do this.

“Alright. Just let me know if there’s something I can do to help,” she said, going back to work swabbing the glasses from the bar.

Gil returned to his own evidence collecting, seeking out something he hadn’t seen the first time. He and his team were generally thorough and practiced at evidence collection, but he’d never had the opportunity to reprocess a scene for the first time before. Maybe something he could find here would fix their lack of surveillance footage.

David arrived and Gil checked his watch. He didn’t remember exactly when David had arrived before, but it seemed about right.

“Would you mind getting us time of death?” Sara asked, though Gil remembered that he’d asked yesterday.

“Sure thing,” David said, collecting his medical kit. “Wallet and cellphone,” he said, passing them up as he patted the victim down.

Sara opened the wallet, looked at the driver’s license and then leaned over to show it to Gil. Everything was as it had been yesterday.

“What do you know about advanced cancer and body temperature?” Gil asked while David worked.

“Fevers caused by cancer are called neoplastic fevers. Why?” he asked.

“How much would it raise the temperature by for someone who had advanced colon cancer?”

“It would depend on a lot of factors, such as the treatment he was receiving and whether or not he’s recently been somewhere hot. Cancer can reduce your ability to regulate your temperature. Under those circumstances, it could maybe raise the temperature by one to two degrees, possibly higher depending on how sick he is,” David said.

“Meaning the death might be up to an hour earlier than what we’d ordinarily assume?” Gil pressed.

David checked the thermometer and then his watch. “Based on riger, lividity and temperature, I’d say he died four or five hours ago. If he had a fever, it might have been as much as six hours ago.”

Gil checked his watch. “That puts our time of death range anywhere from around five thirty to seven thirty. Which still means the body was here at least an hour before someone discovered it.”

“That’s a long time for a public place,” Sara said. “I saw a keyhole in the handle. I assume this room is supposed to be locked between gaming sessions?”

“I would imagine it’s supposed to be,” Gil said, remembering that Brass had answered that question, but he’d sent Brass away.

“What makes you think he has cancer?” David asked, looking up at Gil.

“A hunch,” Gil said.

“You usually don’t like us having hunches unless they’re evidence based,” Sara said, raising her eyebrows.

“Mild jaundice and swollen abdomen that can’t be accounted for by the stabbing,” Gil said. Now that he knew what to look for, he could read the symptoms, though he wouldn’t have guessed without Al having told him.

Both Sara and David leaned in to look at the body.

“The tan almost hides the jaundice, but you’re right,” David said, looking impressed. “Good catch. I’ll tell Doc Robbins to screen for cancer and liver failure.”

“Anything else we should see on the body, since apparently you’re more than a doctor of entomology?” Sara asked.

“I’ll let Al do the rest,” Gil said, grateful he’d been able to pass his foreknowledge off with clear symptoms. Cancer was a stretch just from the jaundice and inflammation, but they hadn’t seemed to notice.

Brass arrived a moment later. “I have the dealer and the cocktail waitress. Do you want them one at a time or together?”

“One at a time,” Gil said. If surveillance footage couldn’t tell them what had happened in this room, maybe their witnesses could. “Let’s start with the dealer. Not in here.”

“I’ve got them back in the security offices, separated,” Brass said.

“I’ll get the body back for Doc Robbins unless you need anything else from me,” David said.

“That’s everything, thank you,” Gil said, collecting his bags of evidence and his kit. He and Sara walked away with Brass, leaving David to handle the body.

“So, what is it that we want from the dealer?” Sara asked as they walked. “It seems pretty clear they weren’t in the room during the murder unless we’re missing something big. If it was another player, maybe they saw the start of a grudge, but I’m not sure what else they would have seen.”

Just before speaking, Gil remembered that they didn’t yet know that Zachary Bursh was about to walk away with about three hundred thousand dollars. “If our victim either won a lot of money or lost a lot of money, that could precede a conflict. The dealer should have some idea of who came out on top. They should also have seen if anyone remained in the room when they left.”

“Are they allowed to leave people in the room?” she asked, looking between him and Brass.

“Probably not, but if a high roller asked the dealer to give them the room for a minute, I bet they would,” Brass said.

That was a bet Gil was willing to take as well. Casinos and resorts bent over backwards for their high rollers. Possibly up to and including covering up a murder.

They arrived at the security offices and a young man in a uniform let them in. Brass retrieved the dealer and they gathered together in the same room where they’d conducted questioning yesterday. Gil and Sara set down their evidence and kits as everyone took seats around the table.

“My name is Detective Brass. This is Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle with the crime lab. Do you understand why you’re here?” Brass asked.

“I was told a guest was killed in the room I was working in earlier,” the young man said, looking exceedingly nervous.

“What’s your name?” Sara asked.

“Ethan Frome. F-R-O-M-E.”

“How long have you been working at The Tangiers?” Gil asked, thinking he looked a little young to work in a casino, especially with the high rollers. The minimum age to be a dealer in a casino in Vegas was twenty one years old, and they usually started them on the floor at the low stakes games.

“Six years now,” Ethan said, wincing at their obvious surprise. “I’m twenty seven. I just look young. I’ve been told I have a baby face.”

“It’s your full cheeks. I get it sometimes too,” Sara said. “People usually think I’m around five years younger than I really am.”

Gil knew this was true. The first time he’d met her at a forensics conference, nearly seven years ago, he’d thought she was still a student. He’d been surprised to learn that she’d been in the field for several years already and had a graduate degree.

“It’s a curse,” Ethan said.

“It won’t be so much of a curse when you’re my age,” Brass told him. “Do you usually work tables with high stakes?”

“For the past few years, yes. They, uh, like that I look young. They think I’m gullible,” Ethan said, flushing underneath his tan.

“They think they can push you around,” Gil filled in.

“Sometimes, and for certain things I let it go, because that’s what management says to do. There are different rules depending on how much money you’re spending.”

Gil nodded, because that was the same everywhere. The more money you had, the more you could get away with. “We’d like to hear about tonight, from the time you were told to go to the room with the high rollers until after you left the room.”

Ethan took a deep breath and blew the air out between his lips. “Then I can go?”

“Then you can go,” Brass agreed.

“Alright. I was told to deal in room nineteen. I think that was at about four thirty. I went directly there. Everything we need is supplied in the room. I was told they wanted Texas Hold’em, which is easy enough to deal for. Some of the more complicated games can be difficult, not because dealing them is difficult, but because sometimes people are used to playing with different house rules. Everyone knows Texas Hold’em and it’s straightforward.”

“Was anyone in the room when you arrived?” Sara checked.

“Not yet. Karina came in to tend bar. We always have a dedicated waitress at the private games. After that the guests joined us. We were told to expect six guests and that’s who showed up. There were four men and two women.”

“Did it seem like any of them knew each other? Were they friendly with each other? Joking around?” Gil asked.

Ethan shook his head. “No. Serious game. There are people who come to Vegas to have fun, but these weren’t them. They were here to win money.”

“How does the casino arrange for high stakes games if the players don’t know each other?” Sara asked.

“Guests can let the casino know that they’re interested in a game and under what terms and the casino matches like minded people according to their schedules. This particular request was for poker with a twenty thousand dollar buy in,” he explained.

“So all six of the guests will have been staying here at The Tangiers?” Gil checked.

“Yes, unless they’re locals. There are a few people who live in Vegas with requests for certain types of games, and if we have a spot we can’t fill, we extend an offer to them.”

That was better than Gil had expected. They could include that information in their warrant request and a judge should grant that without an issue. “Thank you, that’s very helpful. So you and the waitress are in the room, and six guests. What next?”

“Everyone got a drink and snacks were set out. The casino has their snack and drink preferences on their profiles, so Karina would have stocked any unusual requests before the guests arrived,” Ethan continued.

“And the door was locked when you arrived? With a physical key?” Brass asked.

“Yes, but the same key opens each of the private rooms,” Ethan said. “Dealers and waitresses all have those keys as well as anyone who might be called on to suddenly stock something.”

That was not what Gil had wanted to hear, but he supposed it wasn’t surprising that most casino employees would have access to that room. They weren’t his primary suspects anyway. “And you unlocked the door when you went in?”

“Yes, and left it unlocked. Fire code says it has to stay unlocked when people are in there,” Ethan said. “Once everyone had refreshments, I did a quick rule refresh to make sure everyone was on the same page, and then we started playing.”

“And from your description, it sounds like it was an intense game?” Sara asked.

“It was. Some of the high rollers are like that,” he said with a shrug. “You learn not to let it bother you.”

“What can you tell us about Zachary Bursh?” Gil asked.

“I was keeping an eye on him. He was drinking pretty steadily, but it never became a problem. And he raked in probably close to three hundred thousand over the course of nearly three hours, so he was obviously not that impaired.”

“Three hundred thousand dollars?” Sara repeated, her eyebrows up. “Was he counting cards?”

“All of the decent players do, but the more a player drinks and the more they win, the more impressive the counting is,” Ethan said.

“How much did he drink?” Brass asked.

“Three or four drinks an hour. Karina should be able to tell you for sure.”

Sara frowned, her eyes darting back and forth. “Bursh was around two seventy maybe. That puts him maybe at point one one or point one two.”

“About that,” Gil agreed, knowing from Wendy that Bursh had a BAC of point one three at the time of his death.

“Was anyone having a problem with Bursh winning? Someone he took a lot of money off?” Brass asked.

“I mean, no one was thrilled, but everyone was polite about it. It didn’t descend into a fight or anything. That happens sometimes,” Ethan said.

“Threats? Significant looks? Aggression?” Gil asked.

Ethan shook his head. “I didn’t see anything like that.”

“What time did you leave the room?” Sara asked.

“Just before seven,” Ethan said.

“And everyone left the room at this time?” Brass asked, all of them intently watching Ethan now.

“No. Bursh asked to stay to finish his drink in private, and this is one of those things where when someone spends a lot of money, we let them. I left with Karina, and so did everyone else. Fifteen minutes later I put the marker on the room in the back so the janitorial staff could clean it up. And that’s all I know. I was supposed to get off shift almost an hour ago.”

“So when you left just before seven, Bursh was the only one in the room, but the door was unlocked?” Gil checked, trying to align that with what the janitor had told him yesterday.

“That’s right,” Ethan said with a nod. “That’s the last time I saw any of them. From there I was assigned break duty, where I went to different tables to let people take a fifteen minute break. Then my shift was over. I didn’t hear about a murder until I was in the break room getting ready to leave, and then I heard it was my table. Then security talked to me. Now you.”

“I don’t suppose you can give us a list of the people who were at that table?” Brass asked.

“I was told that I’m not allowed to release guest names without a warrant demanding the information and to refer that request to our head of security,” he said.

“Alright. Anything else you think we should know?” Gil asked, figuring that security would have gotten to Karina as well.

Ethan shook his head. “Usually you can tell when a fight is about to break out. People get twitchy, they start making fists, they make comments to try and rile the other guy up. None of that.”

“Thank you. That’s everything we needed, but if you think of anything you think we should know, you can reach us here,” Brass said, handing Ethan his business card before escorting him out of the room.

“Stabbing and being in good control of your temper don’t often go hand in hand,” Sara said once they were alone.

Gil nodded. “It’s a very visceral way of killing someone. You have to want someone dead when you stab them. You can be detached while firing a gun, but not while stabbing someone and the blood is spilling over your hand.”

“I checked over the bar, but I didn’t see anything that seemed like it could be used in a stabbing. There were butter knives, but they were all clean. I didn’t find ice picks or anything like that.”

“Meaning they had the weapon with them,” Gil said, thinking of the cast that Al had given him. That dagger wasn’t something someone could just pick up anywhere. They had been carrying it, or they had gone to retrieve it once they left the room, or they’d been lying in wait for some reason.

“Losing that much money is a good motive, but it doesn’t sound like anyone stands out in particular. Would the casino have kept track of how much each person lost?” she asked.

“Yes. We’ll ask for it with our warrant request,” he said, looking up as Brass returned with a young woman in a short cut waitress outfit.

“My name is Detective Brass. This is Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle with the crime lab,” he said as everyone took seats.

“Karina Matthews. I really didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear that someone was dead until I got off shift,” she said, smoothing the skirt of her dress as she crossed her legs at the knee, showing off pale skin that went from her thighs to her black high heels.

Gil did not understand how women got around in heels. It seemed both uncomfortable and like it hobbled them from running if they needed to. “That’s alright. We want to hear about before that. Can you start when you were assigned to room nineteen?”

“Um, just before four thirty, I was asked to waitress in one of the private rooms. I was given a list of our guests preferences so I could stock the bar. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes we get really weird requests, but this time was fine,” she said.

“What then?” Sara prompted.

Karina shrugged. “Ethan was dealing, he’s a good dealer, keeps things chill. We went to the room together, I finished stocking the bar while he got set up for poker, fresh cards and chips. When people started arriving, I took their drink and snack orders and got them settled with what they needed.”

“The room was locked when you and Ethan arrived?” Gil checked.

“Yeah, we both have keys. Ethan unlocked it.”

Good so far. “And once everyone had snacks and drinks the game started?” he prompted.

“Yeah. Everyone had a drink. Snacks were on the table. Ethan explained the rules and started dealing.”

“Can you describe the atmosphere of the room?” Sara asked.

“Tense. This was serious business. Some games are more like a party with people chatting and hanging out. This was like a business meeting, but one of those ones where HR is there and they’re about to fire someone,” Karina said.

Gil got the picture. “Was the tension coming from anyone in particular?”

She shrugged again. “I didn’t notice any snipping at each other or anything like that. This was about money, pure and simple. They wanted to win.”

“It sounds like this was a pretty high stakes game too,” Brass said.

“All the private room games are high stakes. It’s too expensive to run them for anything less than a five thousand buy-in, and that’s a very low threshold. You have to have an in with the management or a lot of players to run a game like that.”

“Were any of these particular players favored by the management? VIPs?” Gil asked, his mind going to the absent surveillance footage again. He wasn’t sure what it would take for the casino to be willing to cover up a murder.

“They’re all upper mid-level. We tell them they’re VIPs, and we make a fair amount of money off of them, but they’re not our really big VIPs - those are celebrities, high class politicians, people who bring an entourage with them. These were all weekenders. They come five or six times a year and drop maybe fifty to a hundred thousand while they’re here,” Karina explained.

He knew the casino wouldn’t cover up a murder for just that. It wasn’t worth the scandal. Then why was the surveillance footage missing? Nothing he’d heard so far explained that.

“Alright. The game is pretty intense. How long were you all in there?” Brass asked.

“Um.” Karina checked her watch, seeming to think about it. “Two and a half to three hours, maybe? I think we left around seven.”

“Were people drinking pretty heavily? Abnormally so?” Sara asked.

“Well, drinks are comped, it comes with the private room, so people weren’t shy about ordering. One woman switched to soda about thirty minutes in, but she spoke with me in advance and said that when she said she wanted a rum and coke, she just wanted a coke.”

“She wanted the other players to think she was still drinking?” she checked.

“Yeah, it’s a pretty common tactic, especially for smaller women. People our size can’t really drink at the same rate as people their size without winding up under the table,” Karina said, nodding to Gil and Brass.

“Anyone else using this tactic?” Gil asked.

“No, just her, but the other woman was only drinking lightly as well. I think I only served her about a drink an hour.”

“And the men were drinking more heavily?” Brass asked.

“Two of them were. They weren’t falling down drunk, I didn’t have to cut them off or anything, but I was refilling drinks for them about every fifteen minutes,” Karina said.

“Which two?” Gil asked.

“Um, I’m not sure about names. Both of them were older and were heavy set. Not old. Like, your age,” she said, nodding to Brass and Gil again. “There were two men who were maybe in their thirties or so, and they were drinking more moderately, maybe only two drinks an hour.”

The older Gil got, the more acutely he felt it when talking with people who were in their twenties. “What about at the end of the game?”

“One of the older guys was cleaned out, the other one had taken the pot a bunch of times. He was pretty flush. Everyone else was low. The guy who won called it a day. He wanted to stay, I’d just refilled his drink, so I left the room with Ethan, took a break, and then finished out my shift at the main bar.”

“And everyone but the man who wanted to stay left?” Sara asked.

“I think so. I didn’t count them or anything,” Karina said. “He’s the one who died?”

“Yes. Can you tell us anything else about him?” Gil asked.

“Not alcohol poisoning, I can tell you that. I didn’t serve him enough for that to be a problem,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “We cut people off long before that point.”

“He was stabbed. Was anyone carrying a knife that you saw?” Brass asked.

Karina’s eyes were wide. “People aren’t supposed to bring weapons into the casino. It’s against the rules.”

Gil knew they weren’t patting down their high rollers though. “Do you remember anything happening right at the end? Did anyone seem like they were holding a grudge for losing?”

“I don’t think so. No one seemed ready to fight. When they are, there’s usually some harsh words, maybe some yelling or fists. I didn’t see anything like that.”

“Alright,” Brass said when neither Gil nor Sara asked anything else. “I’m going to give you my card. You can call if you remember anything you think we should know.”

“Okay. I can go?” Karina asked.

“That’s everything we needed,” Gil said.

“Ready for the person who found the body?” Brass asked, turning back after guiding Karina out.

“Yes, then the person from security who called 911,” Gil said, figuring they might as well do this again.

They interviewed Nathan Wright, the janitor who had found Bursh, and Thomas Watkins, the security manager who had come to the scene and called 911, and Gil didn’t learn anything new. The interviews went roughly as they did last time.

“Anything else we want for right now?” Brass asked when they were done.

“I want their security footage. And if possible, a list of people who accessed that security footage. Can we get that?” Gil asked.

“I’m not sure. Why do you want it?”

“I want to know who at the casino has been looking in on this,” Gil said.

“Can their system show that?” Sara asked.

“I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I assume we want the list of the people who were playing with Bursh?” Brass asked.

“And their room numbers here at The Tangiers,” Gil said. He wanted to track them down as soon as possible. “If you can get anyone, get the guy who was cleaned out.”

“I’ll try,” Brass said.

“And access to Bursh’s hotel suite and anyone who had access to his suite,” Sara said, standing and collecting her kit.

“That one I can do. I’ll check in with you in a bit,” he said before leaving.

They collected their kits and evidence and followed Brass out.

“What do you think?” she asked once they reached Gil’s car in the parking garage.

Gil handed her a bottle of water. “I think we haven’t heard everything just yet.”

*****

A few hours later, after spending some time writing down his observations and a timeline, Gil’s phone buzzed on his desk. It was a message from Al saying their autopsy results were ready. Gil took a moment and texted Sara to meet them at the autopsy lab. He wanted her to hear this firsthand.

At a minimum, their window of death had narrowed to between seven o’clock and eight - after the dealer and the cocktail waitress left, but before the custodian arrived at just after eight. Which suggested maybe the victim’s temperature was lower, not feverish as he’d first theorized.

He left his office and headed in the direction of the autopsy lab.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Sara said as she came up to him. “Do you want to know now, or after the autopsy?”

“You can tell me now,” Gil said, since he knew what she was going to say.

“The surveillance footage for room nineteen and the cameras around it is missing.”

“Does Archie have any theories?” he asked as they entered the autopsy lab.

“He says either the footage was deleted or it never existed, but he can’t tell which from what he has. I assume Brass told you that the judge wouldn’t give a subpoena for whoever accessed those files?” she asked.

“That’s what I heard,” Gil said, wondering how he could possibly get that information, and within the time limit he was coming to fear that he had. What happened tomorrow - if there was a tomorrow - would tell him more.

Al had looked up from his work. “David told me you diagnosed bowel cancer by jaundice and abdominal swelling.”

“I guessed,” Gil said, not ready to spread his theories far and wide just yet.

“Well, it was a good guess. Stage four colon cancer. He would have been dead within two years.”

“He’s only fifty two. That’s not old,” Sara said, shaking her head.

“That’s why it’s important to get those screenings on a schedule. A lot of people avoid them because they’re uncomfortable and embarrassing, but when it’s caught early, it’s far from a death sentence,” Al said.

“What about the stabbing?” Gil asked.

“Six stab wounds. If your suspect was aiming for the liver, they did a good job. Victim bled out in maybe five to ten minutes after the hepatic artery was severed. Your weapon is a double edged dagger. After clearing the blood away, we have the clear impression of a rectangular hilt around the edges of the wounds. Your suspect was very forceful.”

“Were you able to get a cast of the wounds?” Sara asked.

“I did, your cast is over there,” Al said, nodding to a table.

Sara went to the cast and brought it to Gil. “This looks like a dagger and that’s not something they could get in The Tangiers. They brought it with them from somewhere else. Which means they thought they were going to have a use for it.”

“Only so many uses for a dagger,” Al said.

Gil thought it through. “We know Bursh was in the room at seven.”

“And we know he was dead by eight, but based on body temperature, probably closer to seven than to eight, right?” she asked.

“Could he have been at a lower body temperature when he died? I’ve heard of cancer causing fevers. But what about temperature drops?” Gil asked Al.

“Cancer can sometimes cause temperature regulation issues, so if he was somewhere chilly in the hours preceding his death, he might have been a degree or so colder than we might ordinarily expect,” Al allowed.

“The casino was pretty thoroughly air conditioned. We can manage it just fine, because our immune systems are good, but for infants, the elderly, and the immunocompromised, they might have been chilled,” Sara said. “Which maybe puts our death as late as seven thirty. Enough time for someone to go back to their room and get a dagger and bring it back with them?”

“Between the casino, the lobby, the elevators, the trek to the room, and back again, I have my doubts,” Gil said. “Question would be why Bursh stayed there alone for thirty minutes if that’s true. Probability says someone already had the dagger in the room with them, or they weren’t in the room at all.”

“And without that surveillance footage, I’m not sure how we tell which it is. Do we have the list of names?” Sara asked.

“Brass has it.” Gil stared down at the body of Zachary Bursh. At the moment, Gil wasn’t even sure what the motive to kill him was, let alone who. Why was this man dead? Why had someone tried to cover it up?

And why hadn’t they done a better job of covering it up?

He checked his watch and tried to figure out what they had time to do. “Let’s talk with Brass and get that list of names.”

“What are we doing about the surveillance footage?” Sara asked.

“I take it something is wrong with the surveillance footage?” Al asked when Gil didn’t answer right away.

“It’s missing. The footage from the cameras on the scene is missing,” she said.

“David told me Bursh was brought in from The Tangiers. They’re not going to let just anyone have access to that.”

“No, they’re not.” Gil still didn’t see a way for them to get in that room, and he specifically needed Archie in the room because no one else on his team had the computer skills to get the information they needed.

“If we can’t get in the room, can we get a list of people who do have access to the room?” Sara asked.

Gil thought. “Possibly. I’m not sure what that will tell us without some kind of corroborating information, but it’s a start.”

“Everything has to start somewhere,” Al said with a nod.

“And we should get started. Clock is ticking,” he said, nodding to Al. “Thank you.”

“I’ll let you know if anything else comes up on the final.”

“Thanks,” Sara called as they left the autopsy lab. “Now what?”

“Brass,” Gil said. He’d already been in the victim’s hotel room. He wanted the people who’d been at the game. At some point he wanted the person who had been in Bursh’s bed, but he hadn’t yet figured out how they were going to find them. At least they had names for the other people at the game.

“Do we have a plan?” she asked as they walked.

“Not yet. In progress,” he said, because he was trying to figure out what they could possibly do without the surveillance footage or the people who had played in the game. Eventually they needed the murder weapon, or blood evidence, but that was so far down the line that he wasn’t sparing it any thought just yet.

Brass was at his computer, his forehead creased as he read something.

Gil knocked on the door frame and Brass glanced up and nodded to them. Gil pulled the door closed behind them, getting Brass’ full attention.

“That kind of night?” he asked.

“It’s getting to be,” Sara said. “We’re running into a few problems.”

“What’s the problem?”

Sara glanced at Gil and he nodded to her. “Our surveillance footage is missing.”

Brass frowned. “What? All of it? I know they sent a drive.”

“The two cameras in the room and whatever cameras outside the room. We should have the murder on camera. Archie says he’d need to see in their system to tell if the footage was deleted, or just never recorded at all,” she explained.

“Which is either felony evidence tampering or aiding and abetting,” Gil added.

Brass sighed and rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Did Archie say if anything could be done about it?”

“He’d have to be in their system. We might be able to tell who deleted the footage or turned off the cameras. If the footage was deleted, he might be able to recover it. But we can’t do anything from here,” Sara said.

“Do you know any judges who would be willing to issue a subpoena for full access to The Tangiers’ security system?” Gil asked, wishing he’d found this out yesterday before he’d restarted this day.

“Not likely, but I’ll see what I can do,” Brass said.

“Okay, what about the people who played in that game?” he asked, wanting to accomplish something this morning.

“I have deputies out looking for them with orders to either bring them in to talk, or to keep them there until we can get to them.”

“These people all have money, which usually comes with an unwillingness to talk to the police,” Sara said. “Do you think they’ll actually come in?”

Brass shrugged. “We can only do what we can do. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear. Anything else?”

“Can I see that list?” Gil asked. He’d never gotten a good look at the first time.

He sorted through his desk and then passed over a piece of paper.

Sara scooted closer and they read the list together.

Mark Halford - 1402

Alejandro Ramos - 822

Tracey Stephens - 1218

Benson Jones - 1509

Victoria Arbor

“What about this one? Victoria Arbor. There’s no room number,” she asked.

“She’s not staying at The Tangiers,” Brass said. “Judge wouldn’t give us a subpoena for the W-G2s, so I don’t have an address.”

“But from our interview with the dealer, that means she should be local, right?” Sara asked, looking at Gil.

“Stands to reason,” Gil said. “Can you look up her name in the DMV?”

Brass turned to his computer and worked over the keyboard for a moment. “If this is her, she lives out in Summerlin. Name isn’t that common, she’s the only match here in the Vegas metropolitan area.”

“Can we have someone go out there?” Gil asked.

“I’ll send a deputy and see if anyone is home,” Brass said, checking his watch. “It’s nearly six, so unless she’s an early riser, she should be there.”

It was a start. “Call us. I want to talk to anyone you can get,” he reiterated.

“I will. I need something to bring to a judge for this surveillance thing. In English, not in tech speak.”

“We’ll talk to Archie and get it to you,” Gil said. At least now he knew more than he did yesterday. He glanced over the list of names again. On the off chance this was still a problem tomorrow - if there was a tomorrow - then he wanted to have these memorized in case he could do something with it.

He and Sara returned to the lab, Gil looking over the list and trying to figure out what else they could do. Without knowing the state they’d come from or their birth dates, he couldn’t see what they could learn with the DMV database, which meant they didn’t have photos to compare with the surveillance footage.

They entered the AV lab five minutes later and Archie turned to look at them. “I have a little, but it’s not much.”

“We’ll take whatever you’ve got,” Sara said as they joined him around the computer.

Gil watched patiently as Zachary Bursh left his hotel suite and went down to the casino concierges and then headed into the casino. Given what they’d been told, he should have been in the private room less than ten minutes later. “Can we see the hallway outside his suite before he leaves?”

“I already took a peek. We only have from three o’clock on and no one enters or exits the victim’s suite during that time,” Archie said.

That meant they didn’t have a look at their suspect’s mystery lover. If this happened again, he’d request surveillance footage from earlier in the day. “Alright. Brass would like you to state what has happened with the footage and what evidence we could get in their security system to support that, in language a judge who may not use a computer very much will understand,” Gil said.

“Not a problem, I can translate techie,” Archie said. “Is that going to you, or straight to Brass?”

“Straight to Brass. I want us in the casino’s security system as soon as possible,” he said, knowing that was unlikely, but they needed to at least try.

“Is this one of those computer things where sooner is better?” Sara asked.

“Yeah. If there are deleted files, we need to get to them before they’re written over,” Archie said.

“Tell Brass that and include it in the request so they understand that this is urgent,” Gil told him.

“I will,” he said, turning to get to work.

Gil left the tech lab with Sara and they nearly bumped into Catherine in the hallway.

“It’s just before six. Is it time?” Catherine asked.

He thought about it for a moment before nodding. They’d done enough. “Let’s take a quick break and talk this through,” he said, leading the way to the break room.

“What exactly are we doing?” Sara asked.

“I’m going to have you tell Catherine about our case. I want you to be detailed,” he said, pausing while they stopped to get cups of coffee.

“Is Catherine joining us on the case?” she asked.

“Am I?” Catherine asked, both of them looking at Gil.

“Not exactly. This is something a little different,” Gil said, motioning them to take seats around the table. “Start at the beginning of the night and go through now, just like you would if you were briefing someone on a case,” he told Sara.

“Alright,” Sara said, eyeing him for a moment before turning to Catherine. “We started our night in a private room at The Tangiers.”

Gil listened while Sara took them through the case, finding it interesting to see what details she focused on, when he had caught something different. This was why he usually tried to assign at least two people to a case - different perspectives brought different results.

She glanced at him when she finished. “Anything you think I missed?”

“That will do.” Gil turned to Catherine. “You saw me seal a piece of paper inside that envelope last night, right after I got the assignment slips. And you’ve had the envelope sealed on your person this entire time, correct?”

“I have,” Catherine said. “Can I open it now?”

“Please do, and then read the piece of paper.”

Sara glanced from Gil to Catherine and they both watched as she pulled the folded envelope from her pocket, opened it, and began to read.

Catherine stopped a few sentences in and looked at Gil.

“Finish reading it, then we’ll talk,” he said.

She blew air out between her lips and finished reading it. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Can I see, or am I not allowed?” Sara asked.

“I think you better see. Did Gil tell you about the envelope?” Catherine asked, handing her the piece of paper.

“No, he didn’t,” she said, her eyes darting back and forth while she read it. She frowned at Gil, read it again, more slowly this time, and then put the paper down on the table. “How?”

“I’ve seen some good magic shows in Vegas, but this is on a whole new level,” Catherine said.

“No, but how?” Sara asked, looking at Gil.

“I lived today, yesterday,” he said, which was the simplest way he could think to explain it.

“Okay, we can take that at face value for a moment,” Catherine said.

“We can?” Sara asked.

“For a moment, for the sake of argument,” she said, shaking her head. “What exactly do you mean by today and yesterday?”

That was probably a reasonable question, given the circumstances. “I woke up at six o’clock in the evening on August nineteenth. I came here to the lab. I worked Zachary Bursh’s case. I went home. Had dinner. Went to sleep. When I woke up, it was six o’clock in the evening, on August nineteenth. I didn’t realize at first, but I did by the time I got to the lab and read the assignment slips.”

“So, for the sake of argument, you already had the memory of what happened tonight?” Sara asked.

“I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” he said after a moment.

“And you didn’t diagnose Bursh with colon cancer because he had jaundice and a swollen abdomen. Doc Robbins told you the first time?”

“Yes. Once I knew what to look for, it was more obvious. I didn’t see that the first time around,” Gil admitted.

“Okay, so did we catch the guy?” Sara asked.

“No. We were waiting on the subpoena we just asked Brass to get.”

“This is clearly bigger than just the case,” Catherine said, meeting his eyes.

“It’s…I don’t have an adequate vocabulary to describe it,” he said.

“I mean…it’s basically time travel. But instead of sending an object through time, it’s a memory, which is theoretically more plausible, because a memory doesn’t have mass,” Sara said, nodding to herself.

“Are we really getting into the plausibility of time travel?” Catherine asked after pausing to sip her coffee.

“Do you have another explanation for that letter?” she asked, nodding to the paper.

Catherine seemed to think about it for a moment. “I don’t have any explanations for that letter.”

Gil didn’t either and he wasn’t sure he was ready to go to time travel just yet. “I think the existence of the letter says this isn’t some kind of complex hallucination or delusion. I had factual information from what was essentially the future. Or the past, depending on how you look at it.”

“Oh! And you knew the footage was missing!” Sara said suddenly. “Back at the casino, you asked if we could get into the security room, even though you knew the answer was no.”

“I still haven’t figured out how we’re getting into that room, especially if we have a time limit,” he said, because he couldn’t see a path forward there.

“Because you think this is going to happen again,” Catherine said after a moment.

“The possibility has crossed my mind,” Gil agreed.

“Like a time loop, where you’re stuck reliving the same twenty four hours over and over again,” Sara said, evidently latching onto the idea.

“I hope not.” He didn’t want to fully consider that until he was faced with it.

“Again putting aside how that is even remotely possible, what do you want to do about it?” Catherine asked.

“I don’t know. At first I wasn’t going to change things, to see if things happened exactly the way I remembered, but that was more difficult than I expected. Just me missing a cue for saying something sometimes completely changed the direction of a conversation.”

“But clearly by this letter, things almost happened the way you remembered, except in the letter, you went to the hotel suite,” Catherine said.

“We didn’t get that far this time.” Seeing the hotel suite again had not been a priority since he knew what was in there.

“So what does it all mean?” Sara asked.

Gil shook his head. He wasn’t about to try to assign meaning to this. Not yet anyway. For now he was back on what to do with it since it was happening.

“I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. I think the question we need to ask while there is still time is what do we do about it?” Catherine asked.

“I don’t see what we can possibly do about it until we know what’s causing it,” Sara said.

“Let’s stick with facts for right now,” Gil said. “The fact is I remember an entire day before it happened, but wasn’t compelled to have the exact same day. I could change and influence certain things.”

“Which maybe proves certain theories of time travel wrong on its own,” Sara said with a shrug.

Gil did not want to find himself reading up on theories of time travel. He did not want the situation to get that far.

“What’s the biggest thing you changed?” Catherine asked.

He took a moment to think about it. “In terms of information and people being in different spaces, having Brass detain the dealer and the cocktail waitress.”

“And given that they were released, it was only a slight aberration. You didn’t make any big changes,” Sara said. “No one new died or was arrested, that we know of.”

“Maybe they need to,” Catherine suggested. “Maybe you need to make a big change. And that will stop this somehow.”

“If we figure out who murdered Bursh, that would be a big change,” Gil said.

“Or let’s say there is a purpose to all this, and that’s it. You figure out who killed Bursh, but too late, they’ve already fled the coop. But then you go back in time, and you arrest them before they flee, and you know where the evidence is needed to convict them,” Sara suggested.

“Why this case?” Catherine asked. “Out of all the cases we’ve worked, why this case?”

“I have no idea. As far as I know there’s nothing special about today,” Gil said.

“What about my case? Do we solve it?” she asked.

“Not that I know of. Last I’d heard, you and Warrick were heading back out, but you didn’t say what you were doing.”

Catherine frowned. “Warrick and I are going back to Henderson to talk to the neighbors. That was our next step. Did you assign cases the same way you did…yesterday? Last time you experienced today? I don’t even know how to refer to this.”

“I did,” Gil said, catching her meaning.

“So what do we do?” Sara asked.

“See if we can solve the case, I suppose,” Gil said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Did you…disappear, loop time, whatever you want to call it, at six in the evening?” Catherine asked.

“I don’t know. I was asleep. I went to bed around eleven thirty or noon.”

“Are you going to try staying up and seeing if that fixes the problem?” Sara asked.

“That seems like a good idea,” Gil said. Whatever happened at six might tell him more. And if nothing happened, maybe that was the end of it.

His phone rang before they could theorize more. “Grissom,” he answered.

“Alright. My deputies have tracked down one of the people from the game and he’s agreed to talk with us. I’m heading to a judge to see about this subpoena. Mark Halford is going to meet you at the Cabana restaurant in The Tangiers for breakfast at seven,” Brass said.

Gil checked his watch. They had just enough time to make that appointment. “Is a deputy staying with him?”

“Halford apparently told the deputy to buzz off and told him where and when he’d be if we wanted to talk to him, so make of that what you will,” Brass said.

“Alright. We’ll be there,” he said, anticipating this was not going to be a fruitful conversation.

“Where will we be?” Sara asked when he hung up.

“At the Cabana restaurant for breakfast at The Tangiers with Mark Halford. Apparently he told the deputy where he would be and to, and I quote, ‘buzz off’.”

“Should be fun,” Catherine said. “So I take it the plan from here is to work the case and see what happens?”

“Unless you can think of another strategy?” Gil asked, hoping she had something in mind.

Catherine seemed to think for a minute before she shook her head. “You always tell us that when in doubt to collect evidence and interpret it. I’d say the same thing applies here. You can’t have a strategy until you understand the situation.”

“I’d say wait and see is a sound strategy at this point. If it’s a one time thing, the problem sort of solves itself. If it’s not…well, then we have to figure something out,” Sara agreed.

Gil was generally someone who wanted to think ahead, to consider all of the possible contingencies, but that seemed counterproductive here. “Let’s work the case and see what happens. I take it you and Warrick are heading out to Henderson?”

“Yes. Hopefully the neighbors can give us some ideas about what happened yesterday evening,” Catherine said as she finished her coffee and stood up.

“Your assignment slip said suspicious circs. Did Al upgrade it to homicide?” he checked, taking a moment to finish his own coffee while he had the chance.

“He did. Teen girl was suffocated in her own home. Parents say they weren’t there at the time,” she said, washing her coffee mug. “I’ll check in with you later.”

“Please do,” Gil said. He’d like it if at least one of their cases was solved before the day was out.

Sara finished her coffee and stood as well. “Do we know which one Mark Halford is?”

“No idea,” he said, deciding he’d have more coffee at the Cabana restaurant if he was planning on staying up another eleven hours. “I suppose we’ll figure that out when we interview him.”

They cleaned up their coffee mugs and left the lab. It was still warm outside in the parking garage, but it was as cool as it was going to get all day. Gil drove back to The Tangiers, appreciating the lack of morning traffic.

“Are you doing alright?” Sara asked while they were stopped at a red light. “I probably should have asked earlier. If it were me, I’d be freaking out right now.”

“I’ve been a little disoriented,” he admitted after a moment. “The more I change things, the less of that deja vu sensation I feel.”

“Maybe that’s a good sign,” she suggested, turning to look at him. “Maybe that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Supposed to implies that there’s some sort of goal or purpose to all of this.”

She shrugged. “Do you believe things happen without a reason?”

“I believe things happen because of a confluence of events that builds up to them,” he said, since his approach was less fate and more a building of probabilities to certain actions. One plus one equaled two, though the equations of life were much more complicated than that.

“So what confluence of events built up to this?” Sara asked.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Gil said, because according to everything he believed in, this couldn’t possibly be happening. He’d been trying not to think about that too much.

“In this job, I’ve learned not to say something is impossible. We’ve seen a lot of things that should be impossible,” she said, showing her thoughts were trending in the same direction as his.

“But nothing that violates the laws of physics and the universe as we understand them.”

“I’m not sure this does violate the laws of physics. Transporting mass back in time would be different. At most, if we accept this is time travel, electrical impulses would have been transported to provide you with those memories. Nothing has physically been out of place from what you’ve observed, right?”

Gil continued to drive as he thought about it. “Nothing that I have observed has been out of place, no. But I’m not sure I accept that this is time travel.”

“What would you call it?” she asked. “I’m not sure psychically foreseeing the future is any better, if we’re talking about impossibilities.”

“I think it’s too early to put a name to the phenomenon. We need more evidence. This is like trying to predict the cause of death before the autopsy.”

“And Doc Robbins really told you about the colon cancer the first time around? That’s how you knew?”

“Yes. That’s how I knew.” He understood her skepticism. He was still trying to wrap his mind around it too.

“Okay, tell me what we’re going to find in Bursh’s hotel suite,” she said.

“Two sets of handcuffs on the bedframe and DNA evidence that shows he’s having a good time without his wife.”

Sara laughed in surprise. “I suppose that’s very specific. Did we get to process the DNA evidence last time?”

“No, I left it with Wendy with the intent that she’d do it tonight,” he said, wondering if anything would be gained by having that processed now. “Oh, she had our tox screening results. No drugs. BAC was point one three, just as you calculated from his number of drinks.”

“So moving on toward drunk, but given that he was winning at high stakes poker, he could clearly handle it. Is it going to help us to figure out who was in that room with him if we don’t see them on the surveillance footage?”

“I don’t know. At a minimum, they might be able to tell us Bursh’s mindset before the game.”

“How likely do we think it is that this person is a hooker?” she asked as Gil pulled into The Tangiers parking garage.

“Given the set-up, I’d give it at least fifty fifty,” he said, finding a parking space in the area reserved for the PD. “Also, at this point, we don’t know where the wife is.”

“Infidelity murder in a casino? I suppose we’ve seen stranger things,” Sara said.

“We have. I’d like to know what Bursh’s wife and college age children have been up to in all of this. Bursh wouldn’t be on their casino list for these games if he wasn’t a semi-regular,” Gil said. Their conversation paused for a moment while they exited the car and collected their kits.

“If I was married, and my husband was heading to Vegas alone a half dozen times a year, I’d have some concerns,” she said as they began walking to the elevator. “Vegas has a reputation.”

“It does, not entirely unearned,” Gil agreed. “If it’s not prostitutes, it’s showgirls and strippers, and I can’t imagine any wife being pleased that their husband is in a strip club.”

She looked at him, eyebrows up. “Have you been to see strippers?”

“Not on purpose.”

Sara grinned. “What does that mean exactly?”

“It means I have been in strip clubs on cases and there are some things you can’t help but see.” He didn’t particularly find women being forced to take off their clothing to make ends meet attractive and most strippers were in that situation. There were some who were more high end that didn’t have that sort of poverty enforced situation, but those tended to be few and far between. Sex work was work, but Gil still found it exploitative.

“Well, you can’t help that. You have to go where the crime and the witnesses are,” she said.

They took the elevator to the main floor and went through the hallway and the casino and into the resort, where they found the Cabana restaurant setting up to serve breakfast. Gil had a moment where he wondered how exactly they were going to find Mark Halford, but then saw a girthy man about the victim’s age approaching and looking at his watch.

“Mark Halford?” Gil asked.

“Depends on who is asking,” he said, looking over them.

“I’m Doctor Gil Grissom and this is Sara Sidle. We’re with the crime lab.”

“With the police?” Mark asked.

“Yes, we work with the police,” Gil agreed. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about a game you played in yesterday evening.”

“Let’s start with coffee and we’ll go from there,” Mark said, leading the way into the restaurant.

Gil and Sara exchanged a glance and followed him in, taking seats across from him at a table. A waiter joined them with menus and a pot of coffee.

“Coffee, four eggs, over easy, double bacon, and french toast,” Mark told the waiter, not bothering to open the menu.

“Coffee and the fruit bowl,” Gil said after a quick glance at the menu.

“Same for me,” Sara said, and they passed their menus back to the waiter.

They each took a moment to prepare their coffee and Mark looked at them. “Fruit bowl. I see you’re living dangerously this morning.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Sara said.

“I like fruit,” Gil said, though he was looking forward to something that wasn’t a banana.

“To each his own, I suppose. Or her own,” he said with a nod to Sara. “You have until our meals arrive to ask questions. You should have ordered something more complicated.”

“Did you know Zachary Bursh before the game yesterday?” Sara asked, not wasting time.

“No, I didn’t know any of the people we played with. I hadn’t seen them before and I haven’t seen them since. I prefer to play poker that way. When you know someone, they start to know how you play, and things become more complicated and not in a good way.”

“And you’re a regular here at The Tangiers?” Gil checked.

“I drop by Vegas once a month for business reasons and stay at The Tangiers because they know my preferences. I usually play a few games in the evenings after business meetings,” Mark said.

“What sort of business? Where do you reside?” he asked, deciding to cover all of his bases.

“Construction. I’m based out of Florida, though I spend probably half of the year on the road meeting with people. I invest in new suburbs and Vegas has been growing steadily.”

Gil knew Vegas couldn’t afford to continue to grow the way it had been for the past thirty years. There was only so much water, even if they had plenty of land.

“What about this trip? How long have you been staying here at The Tangiers?” Sara asked.

“I arrived on Monday and my flight leaves this evening at seven.”

It was time to cut to the chase then. “We were told you lost quite a bit of money to Zachary Bursh yesterday.”

Mark shrugged. “Depends on what you mean by quite a bit.”

“We were told he cleaned you out,” Sara said, since they didn’t know exactly how much he’d lost.

He shrugged again. “One game of many. It’s like life, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and all the varying shades in between. Do you want to know how much money I’ve made in the past week here in Vegas?”

“How much?” Gil asked, willing to go along.

“Between poker and business contracts, over two million when all the paperwork is settled. Losing one game was not a problem for me, and certainly nothing to throw a fit about. I offered to shake hands with Bursh at the end and told him he played well. Everyone in the room can attest to that.”

“Alright,” he said, since they could ask the others about that. “Let’s talk about the end of the game and what happened after.”

“I assume you simply wish for me to narrate?”

“That would be helpful,” Sara agreed.

“We played the last hand. As you so eloquently put it, I was wiped out, and I was ready to be done regardless. We’d been in there for nearly three hours and I wished to stretch my legs.”

“Do you recall what time this was?” Gil asked.

“I checked my watch as I left the room. It was around seven and my next stop was a show with a business associate. I had time to shower and change before the eight o’clock start time.”

That roughly lined up with what the dealer and the cocktail waitress had said. “Alright. It’s around seven and you’re finishing the game. What then?” he prompted.

“People were collecting themselves to leave. Bursh continued to sit. I’d been matching him drink to drink, roughly, but he was still nursing his last one. I felt he should have been happier to have won, but he didn’t seem particularly happy,” Mark said.

“Any idea why he didn’t seem happy?” Sara asked.

“No idea.”

“Had he been that way all night, or was this a new thing?” Gil tried.

Mark seemed to think. “He was reserved, but the more he won, the less happy he seemed. Might have just been the drink. It does that to some people.”

“Alcohol sometimes has sedative and depressant effects,” she said, glancing at Gil. “But usually when people respond that way they prefer to drink alone.”

Gil knew enough about Sara’s struggles with alcoholism to know that was how she preferred to drink, which was why he’d been keeping an eye on her at the end of bad cases that might prompt her to do so.

“Well, he wasn’t being strongly affected enough that he couldn’t play. He was clear headed enough to win, and I could see that everyone in the room was counting cards. People get a certain expression when they’re doing math in their heads,” Mark said. “It seemed to me as though he didn’t want to be at the game, though I have no idea why.”

That was interesting and new information, but Gil didn’t know what to make of it. “So at the end of the game, Bursh is still at the table with his drink?”

“Yes. I overheard him asking the dealer if he could stay for a moment and gather his bearings. The dealer agreed. I left, I had places to go, and I saw other people leaving as well, though I can’t tell you if someone stayed behind, which is most certainly what you were looking for, isn’t it?” Mark asked.

“It would be helpful to know that,” Sara agreed.

“Because Bursh was killed in the room, is what I’ve been hearing,” he pressed.

“Yes, that’s true,” Gil said, as that wasn’t confidential information.

“Unfortunately for you, I have no idea who did it. I didn’t see anyone have any difficulties with him during the game. Everything seemed perfectly normal,” Mark said.

“Did you happen to notice if anyone was carrying a knife?” he asked, deciding he might as well.

Mark’s eyes went wide. “A knife? No, I’ve never seen someone carrying a weapon in the casino. If someone was carrying a weapon openly, security would require them to hand it over. If there was a knife, it must have been a pocket knife.”

Their weapon definitely wasn’t a pocket knife, but daggers could be kept in a sheath at the hip or in a boot. “Is there anything you think we should know?”

“I really can’t think of anything. If someone from the table killed him, I didn’t see anything that would suggest it. If it was someone else, then I didn’t see anything like that either.”

“Would you mind if we take your fingerprints and DNA to exclude you from what we found in the room?” Sara asked.

“Not without a warrant, and it seems our time is up regardless,” Mark said as a waiter approached with a tray. “Coffee refill, if you would.”

Gil and Sara ate their fruit and drank their coffee while Mark ate his breakfast, asking them questions about living in Vegas and what they thought of the housing market and the population growth. At the end of the meal, Mark tried to wave them off from paying, but Gil insisted, and put down the money for his meal and Sara’s as well as a tip.

“Now what?” Sara asked once they had left the restaurant.

“Let’s collect evidence while we’re here, and then figure out what’s next,” he said.

They collected Zachary Bursh’s hotel information from the front desk, collected DNA and handcuffs from his suite, collected his casino information from the casino teller, and then paused for a moment while Gil made a phone call.

“Brass,” he answered after three rings.

“We spoke with Mark Halford. According to him, he made about two million on this trip and wasn’t bothered by losing to Bursh and didn’t see him either before or after the game,” Gil said.

“That figures,” Brass said.

“Any luck on tracking anyone else down?” Gil asked, wanting to do this while they were here instead of driving back and forth.

“Not yet. My people are working on it, but we might have to wait until they show back up at the resort this evening.”

Gil glanced at his watch. The later it got, the more concerned he became that he wasn’t going to see the evening of August twentieth. “What about the security system subpoena?”

“In the hands of a judge. It’s going to take him a while to look through everything and make a decision. I don’t think we’re going to hear before tonight,” Brass said.

“And there’s nothing we can do to speed it up?” he asked, watching Sara’s eyebrows raise.

“Not unless you want me to go back and for the judge to tell us no because we’re bothering him. Archie did tell me this was time sensitive. I went to Judge Bastings. He tends to understand tech stuff, but he also wants to take his time so his subpoena doesn’t get thrown out in court. We’re asking him to go out on a limb here.”

“I know.” Gil knew what Brass was really saying was that they were asking the judge to potentially invoke the wrath of Sam Braun.

“Let’s call it a shift and come back to it in the evening. We’ll know by then. I’ll call in the meantime if we get anything,” Brass said before hanging up.

“No go?” Sara asked.

He shook his head. “Let’s go back to the lab.” He led the way out of the casino and back to the parking garage.

She sighed as she settled into his passenger seat and Gil turned on the air conditioning. “I’m not trying to borrow trouble, but what if you go back in time again?”

Gil sat in the semi-darkness of the parking garage and allowed himself to consider the possibility now that it was drawing closer. “I’m not sure that there’s anything I can do. Without knowing the cause, I don’t see how to possibly prevent it.”

“I more meant, what will you do if you wake up in a few hours and it’s August nineteenth again?”

“Try to solve the case, I suppose.” He didn’t know what else to do. His life for the past two decades had revolved around solving the case.

“Say you do solve the case, and that doesn’t fix it?” she asked, looking at him.

Gil shook his head again. “That is borrowing trouble. We try a solution. If that doesn’t solve the problem, we reassess and try another solution. Right now, solving the case seems like the obvious solution.”

“Does it? I mean, we solve most of our cases. A twenty four hour deadline is arbitrary. I bet if we get that subpoena and interview the rest of the people, we’ll be able to solve the case. So why is it so important that it’s solved in twenty four hours?”

“I think we need to test more variables before we decide anything. This is like watching an unknown insect pupate and guessing what its adult form will be. We solve the case by looking for evidence and putting it together. Same thing here.” He was trying to believe that and it was almost working.

When she didn’t say anything else, he backed out of the parking space and drove back to the lab. Traffic was busier now that it was morning rush hour.

“What can we do to give you more information before you go back in time, assuming that you do?” Sara asked once they reached the lab.

Gil thought about it, trying to see what might shake something loose that they could actually control. “You already processed what we took from the room and we didn’t come back with anything new on it. I suppose we could watch surveillance footage and see if we see Mark Halford walking away.”

“Let’s start there then,” she said.

By the time they reached the tech lab, day shift was in full force and Archie was absent. Gil and Sara squirreled themselves in the corner with one of the computers and got to work. Fortunately Archie had left everything neatly in folders for them.

It took some doing, but they finally saw Mark Halford on his way out of the casino at seven oh nine yesterday evening.

“It doesn’t necessarily rule him out, it doesn’t take that long to stab someone,” Sara said. “He doesn’t look bloody on the footage, but it’s hard to tell.”

“Let’s try to find the dealer and the cocktail waitress, just to confirm they were where they said they were,” Gil said, and then glanced at his watch. “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

“I’m staying. I want to see if you disappear at six o’clock.”

He didn’t point out that if he did disappear at six o’clock, she would never remember it.

They spent a few hours watching the seven to eight window from different points in the casino. It would help if they knew what the other people on their list looked like, but the only ones they’d met so far had been Mark, Ethan, and Karina. Ethan and Karina exited to the side of the casino together and were briefly on camera before they went into one of the staff exits.

Gil looked up Mark Halford in the DMV database. He was fifty four and lived in Jacksonville, Florida. His photo roughly matched what they’d seen, though he’d gained some weight since he’d last renewed his license.

“Well, we don’t see anyone running away from the direction of room nineteen,” Sara said. “No one is obviously bloody. No one is freaking out.”

“Our killer is good at moving unnoticed,” Gil agreed and then covered a yawn. He wanted more coffee and it was probably time to eat again. They had enough time for food to be delivered before six o’clock. “What do you want to eat?”

“Oh, anything,” she said, checking her watch. “What happens to me if you disappear? Does the world I’m in just stop existing?”

He hadn’t thought of it that way. Had he essentially erased an entire world when he’d woken up this evening. Or yesterday evening? Again. “I don’t know if I’m ready to go into the philosophical implications of this on an empty stomach.” He needed at least two more cups of coffee for philosophy.

They went to the break room and started with coffee, Sara slumping down at the table. “If I do disappear, or if you disappear, however we want to phrase that, will you tell me again?”

“Would you want to know?” Gil asked, knowing he had seriously disrupted her day and had probably unsettled Catherine as well.

“Yes. I want to know. And I know myself well enough to know that whatever happens, I’ll want to know.”

“Alright.” Gil flipped through the file and began fresh notes. He wanted to memorize what he’d learned while he had the chance. If he got much more information, and did this more than a few times, he was going to need to learn shorthand or something.

Sara watched him write, her chin resting in her hand.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked her when she continued to stare.

“Just trying to come up with what would be most helpful that we can actually do. I mean, ideally we’d recover that deleted surveillance footage, but I can’t come up with a way to get us in there within twenty four hours of receiving the case.”

“Less than that. I wake up at six and don’t get the assignment slip until eight thirty.”

“Is it bad that I’m hoping this was just some unexplainable fluke and everything goes back to normal?” she asked.

“I’m hoping that too,” he admitted. He wasn’t generally a person to bury his head in the sand, but he’d be willing to do it if it meant not repeating the past twenty four hours again.

He set to work memorizing names, times, room numbers, and any other information that seemed like it might be helpful to have from the get go. He wasn’t sure what he would do with it yet, but he wanted to have it on hand just in case.

“Five minutes until six,” Sara said, checking her clock on the wall.

Gil exhaled and willed for all of this to have been some odd mental blip and that he’d stayed up for no reason.

They sat together, watching the clock count down.

At the last moment, Gil met Sara’s eyes. He felt himself blink. 

Chapter Text

Gil woke up and fumbled for his cellphone where it was charging and checked the date. The display read: August 19, 2005 6:01 PM.

“Damn it.”

He flopped back onto his mattress and pillows and stared at the ceiling fan making lazy circles in an effort to ward away the heat. If he was going to be stuck reliving the same day in perpetuity, the universe could have at least had the decency not to do it in the middle of a record breaking heat wave.

In perpetuity. The phrase rattled around in his skull. He was stuck here until he found a way out. Assuming there was a way out. There had to be, didn’t there?

Yesterday - assuming the word yesterday even had meaning anymore… When speaking with Sara before he’d gone to sleep - except he hadn’t gone to sleep, he’d been sitting with her in the break room at the lab seconds ago.

Before right now he had resisted applying any sort of meaning or purpose to these repeated memories, time loops, or foretelling experiences - for whatever terminology they wanted to use - but now he did have to ask.

Why? Why him? Why today?

Gil’s concept of fate and higher powers and all of that was a little murky. He’d grown up Roman Catholic, but as he’d become older he’d discovered he had some serious ideological differences with the church and had left. He was still a man of faith. He believed there was a purpose to life. He believed people had certain ethical standards they should try to maintain. And he believed in free will.

If he allowed the idea that a higher power had intervened and arranged this, then he had some questions about his own faith and the concept of miracles…or the concept of punishment.

This felt more like a punishment than a miracle.

It couldn’t be about the case, could it? He felt Sara was right and that they’d be more likely to solve the case if they had longer than twenty four hours to do it.

And if the case was incidental, what was the point?

Sometimes his team would search for meaning in the particularly difficult cases. Gil understood that. It was natural to want meaning when a tragedy occured, though he also encouraged them to save that searching until after the case was solved. For the vast majority of experiences, he believed meaning was what you made of it.

If you wanted to believe that the world was a terrible and cruel place, well there was plenty of evidence to support that. If you wanted to believe that there was hope and beauty and people going out of their way to help each other, then there was evidence for that too. Gil saw plenty of both while working cases.

For this though, if he decided all of this was not a random occurrence, then figuring out the meaning became a necessity. If he figured out why this was happening, he could find a way to stop it.

With this nebulous goal in mind, Gil got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Despite not having slept, he physically felt as if he had gotten at least four or five hours. He supposed his body reset to the condition it had been when all of this had started. At least it hadn’t been on a day where he’d been up all night and day working a case or having a migraine or a bout of insomnia. Small mercies, he supposed.

Gil reached to turn on the shower, remembered about the hot water heater, and turned it so that it was about three quarters of the way to the hottest setting. When he stuck his hand in about a minute later, it was at a comfortable temperature.

He showered, shaved, dressed, pocketed his cellphone, and went into the kitchen. He didn’t bother with the newspaper or with adding things to his grocery list, but rummaged around in the pantry until he found oatmeal. He was not going to eat a banana every day for the foreseeable future, but he also did not have a lot of food in his house. He supposed that’s what he got for putting off tasks that needed to be done.

By the time the oatmeal was ready, so was the coffee, and Gil sat down and ate and considered his approach here. After a moment, he got up, grabbed a pen and notepad, and then had breakfast while recreating as much of his notes as he could recall. Learning shorthand so he could do this more efficiently was added to his nebulous to-do list.

He would tell Sara again. She had said she’d wanted to know and telling her the first time had gone fairly well. He could do roughly the same thing, writing a letter to prove that he knew the future, except he would show her much earlier.

This loop his goal was to speak with as many of the players who had been in the private room as possible. He had their names and room numbers listed here. He could have Brass stick deputies on each of the rooms and that should take care of things as they came back during the evening and early hours of the morning. And he was sending Brass to get a warrant first thing. Anything to speed up that process.

Resolved, Gil finished his breakfast, got ready for the day, and left his home. This time, he remembered not to use I-15 southbound and discovered it was about five minutes faster to use the surface streets, at least until he reached downtown.

His first stop was the locker room, where he found Sara and Greg settling their badges and holsters. “Sara, can I see you for a moment?”

“Sure,” she said, exchanging glances with Greg before following Gil from the room.

Gil got settled in his office, motioning for Sara to take a seat. “Blank piece of paper. I don’t have the assignment slips yet. You’re going to watch me write a letter.”

“Is this a magic trick?” she asked, her eyebrows raised.

“Unfortunately it’s very real, though the results will seem like a magic trick,” Gil said. “I’m going to write this letter and seal it in an envelope, and you’re going to watch me. I’m going to give you the envelope, which you’ll keep on your person, and then you’ll open it when I tell you to.”

Sara gave a little laugh. “I never know what to expect when I come to the lab, but usually that’s with cases, not with you.”

“I’ve discovered I’m perhaps more predictable than ever,” he said as he began to write.

“I wouldn’t say you’re predictable,” she said, watching him write.

He’d see how she felt about that after he’d written this letter. He wrote in detail about the scene of Zachary Bursh’s murder, including things he was sure she would see. He wasn’t going to mention cancer this time, especially considering it wasn’t important to the time of death.

He paused, and then wrote a few things down, such as the names of the people who had been in the room and their room numbers and what they found in Bursh’s hotel suite. It wasn’t that he was concerned about Sara believing him, but he wanted her to have that information right away.

“You’re really not going to tell me about this until I open the letter?” she asked, accepting the sealed envelope from him.

“Soon. In…” he checked his watch, “approximately three hours. Now we need to go get the assignment slips.”

“Sometimes you are a very strange man,” she said, folding the envelope and putting it in her pocket.

“You have no idea,” Gil told her, leading the way out of the office and motioning for her to come with him again. “Give the slips to her,” he said when they reached the dispatch office. “I haven’t seen them yet.”

Sara still looked puzzled, but she accepted the slips and looked over them. “If you want someone other than you to assign cases, it should be Catherine. She’s the other supervisor on our shift.”

“I will assign the cases. I just want you to see that I haven’t seen the slips before I wrote that letter.”

“Okay,” she said, dragging the word out as they began walking back to the lab. “I’m guessing you don’t want Catherine at The Tangiers, unless you’re ready to tangle with Sam Braun.”

“We might need to tangle with Sam Braun at some point, but I don’t want to do it today,” Gil said.

“And you generally don’t assign Warrick casino cases. I’m guessing you’ll want The Tangiers one for yourself, and given that you’re dragging me around, you want me with you.”

“Yes,” he said.

“The others don’t have a lot of information, but you’ll probably send Catherine on suspicious circs. Warrick with her. Nick and Greg get to suffer at Fremont Street because Greg hasn’t worked a case there yet,” she said, glancing at him again.

“And here you said that I wasn’t predictable,” he said, taking the slips from her.

She looked puzzled again, glancing to the side briefly as Hodges tried to wave them down, and they entered the conference room.

“Catherine and Warrick, you’ve got suspicious circs in Henderson. Nicky and Greg, homicide on Fremont Street. Sara and I are on the Strip,” Gil told them, holding out slips.

“Avoid I-15 southbound,” Catherine told everyone. “It’s backed up to hell tonight.”

Gil had forgotten to give that warning since he hadn’t taken I-15 tonight, but it was nice that his team was on the ball.

Sara disappeared to grab her kit and camera and Gil settled in the driver’s seat and turned on the engine and the AC.

“Oh good, you started the air. When I woke this evening my apartment was sweltering even with the air going. It’s a relief to be in the lab,” she said, climbing into his passenger seat.

She hadn’t said that last time, but Gil thought he remembered her saying it the time before. This was going to get confusing quickly. Gil drove out of the parking garage and tried to get his mind focused on the road.

“Are you alright?” Sara asked suddenly.

“That depends on what you mean by alright,” he said, deciding to be somewhat honest.

She was quiet for a moment. “I suppose if you have to ask, it sort of answers the question.”

Gil sighed. “It’s been a long day. That’s all. I think you’ll understand more when you’ve read the letter.”

“Alright. I can be patient. I just worry a little.”

“About me?” he asked, finding the idea odd.

“What? Am I not allowed to care about you?” she asked. “We’ve known each other for seven years now and have worked together for five of them.”

Gil realized he’d wound up in a deeper conversation than he’d meant to be in and he wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened. This hadn’t happened the first two times.

“You’ve just been very odd today and I’m a little worried that something is going on for you, that’s all,” she said when he didn’t say anything.

“The letter will explain everything. I promise,” he said, hoping it did and didn’t lead to another conversation like this.

She looked at him for a long moment and finally nodded. “Alright. We can talk about it when you’re ready.”

It was less about him being ready and more about him having proof. He wanted her to see for herself what was happening and to have evidence to support it. If someone came up to him and told them they were reliving a day over and over again, he’d be referring them to a doctor for a CT scan.

He pondered that for a moment, coming to a stop at a light on Flamingo - the same spot they got caught in every night as they tried to turn onto Las Vegas Boulevard. The fact that he knew what happened in the future meant that this was real, didn’t it? He couldn’t be having some sort of hallucination or nervous breakdown. He had facts. Right?

Maybe it would be worth getting his brain checked out, just to be sure. If all the tests came back normal, then he’d know that wasn’t the problem.

“I’ll be glad when tourist season is over,” Sara said, peering out the window as Gil turned onto the Strip.

Gil hid a grimace as he realized that not only was he stuck in a perpetual heat wave, but that tourist season would never end. Not for him. He needed to find a way out of this. Quickly.

He needed more information. Then he needed goals. This was an experiment. He tried different things, compared the results, and figured out a plan. Just like working a case. He needed to collect evidence, though of a different type than what he usually collected.

After parking in the same spot he usually parked in, collecting their kits, and taking the elevator to the ground floor, Sara and Gil entered the side hallway and Gil purposefully looked around as they walked, noting the regularly placed cameras. If their killer wanted to escape The Tangiers directly after killing Bursh, and their car was in the parking garage, this was the way they would come. Maybe watching these cameras between seven and eight would be illuminating.

“See something?” Sara asked, attempting to follow his gaze.

“Just familiarizing myself with their surveillance system,” Gil said, since that was entirely true.

“I wonder how many exits to the parking garage there are,” she said, clearly getting the idea.

“One leads directly to the lobby of the resort. This one leads to the casino. I don’t know if there is one connecting to the shops and theater area.” Resorts with casinos attached usually wanted guests to walk through the casino to get where they were going in order to tempt them.

Deputy Mitchell waved them down and they followed him back to where Brass was standing outside of the door to room nineteen.

“What do we have?” Sara asked when Gil didn’t speak.

“Deceased male in a private high stakes gambling room. Looks like a stabbing,” Brass said.

“What about witnesses?” she checked.

“You’re pretty much shit out of luck,” Brass told her.

Gil shook his head. At some point he needed to intervene so he didn’t hear this over and over again. It still felt very odd to hear them repeat the same words over and over, like he was trapped in a stage play that ran every night and he didn’t seem to know his lines.

They entered the private room, Gil took a brief look over things to make sure everything was the same, and then turned to Brass. “Can I send you to get a warrant right now? I have a feeling that we need the security footage as soon as possible.”

Brass glanced around the room and nodded at the security cameras. “Seems pretty straight forward. Given the angle, we should have the whole thing on camera. What else do you want?”

“Names of everyone who was in this room, along with their room number at The Tangiers and anything else about them we can get, such as a home address.” Gil paused for a moment and then added, “I’ll try to get that information too. Once we have it, we need to send out deputies to try and find these people.”

“You want the person who found the body set aside, along with our 911 caller?” Brass asked.

“Yes.” He could pretend he got names and room numbers from them, that would be faster than the warrant.

“Alright. Let’s get started,” Brass said, moving away.

Gil and Sara began processing the room. At some point he would get out of this time loop thing and he would actually need the evidence gathered here to prosecute, which meant collecting it each time. As he worked, he kept an eye out for anything he hadn’t seen before.

“DNA,” Sara said from behind the bar.

“Good,” Gil said, though he wasn’t sure what they were going to use that DNA for. It established someone was present, not murder.

Some time later David showed up, the wheels of the gurney clattering as he entered the room.

“Would you mind getting us time of death?” Sara asked as they joined David at the body.

“Sure thing,” David said, collecting his medical kit. “Wallet,” he said, passing over that with the victim’s cellphone as he patted the victim down.

Sara flipped open the wallet and showed Gil the ID.

He nodded, glad to see everything was as it usually was. If things started changing that he didn’t change, then something very strange was going on.

David checked the thermometer and then his watch. “Based on riger, lividity and temperature, I’d say he died four or five hours ago.”

Sara checked her watch. “Between six and seven, give or take thirty minutes. Surveillance should be able to narrow it down. Thank you.”

“Anything else?” David checked.

“Should be everything,” Gil said. He assisted David with getting the body on the gurney once Bursh was safely ensconced in a body bag and walked him to the double doors. Then he shut the doors.

Sara glanced over at him. “Problem?”

“Time for you to read the letter,” he said.

She seemed bewildered but peeled off her gloves and dug the letter out of her pocket. She stared at him for a long moment before she began to read. While reading she paused several times to look over at him again. Her face was maybe a shade paler when she’d finished. “I watched you write this.”

“You did.”

Looking back at the letter, she closed her eyes, breathed deeply, then looked at Gil again. “I assume you have an explanation?”

“I’ve lived this day before. Twice now.” He watched and waited, wondering if he’d somehow gone about this the wrong way. He’d assumed her knowing earlier would be better.

“Alright. And you’ve clearly worked this case before. You described the scene pretty exactly. Even if Brass had called you and told you about the case, he wouldn’t have seen these details. And the rest of this information, the names and room numbers, they’re from the future?”

“Essentially.” Future and past were getting murkier to him all the time. “We got that information with the warrant that I just sent Brass to get.”

“But we need it sooner for some reason?”

“The only people we’ve managed to talk to on that list are the dealer, the cocktail waitress, and Mark Halford.”

She nodded. “And we’re reasonably sure it isn’t them?”

“As sure as we can be with what we currently have. I’m not necessarily ruling them out, but I’d like to see everyone else before we narrow down our suspects. I’m going to have Deputy Mitchell dispatch people and see who he can find while we talk with the person from security and the person who found the body. I’m going to let you lead those interviews to see if we get something from them we didn’t last time. Hopefully by then we’ll have a new person to interview,” Gil explained.

“How is this possible? I mean…what you’re describing is essentially time travel. Which is a lot less impossible if we’re just talking about sending memories than sending you physically back in time, but still.”

“I don’t know yet. I’ve sort of set aside impossibility for the moment.”

“So what am I going to do next?” she asked.

“I don’t know that either. I’ve already changed enough things today that you’ve mostly stopped repeating yourself.” He didn’t want to do this enough times that he was able to completely predict her or anyone else.

“Weird,” she said, shaking her head. “I suppose repeating myself makes sense in the absence of a change that would cause me not to. Have we had this conversation before?”

“A similar conversation, but much later in the day. I thought it would be better to tell you earlier. Last time, you did tell me that you wanted to know. Was that wrong?”

She blinked at him a few times. “No. I want to know. And it explains a lot. Not about time travel or time loops or foreknowledge, but about why you’re so unsettled today.”

He wasn’t aware that he appeared unsettled. Usually he was better at concealing his emotions than that.

“Alright. So we interview the security guard and the person who discovered the body. And then whoever else we can get. And hopefully by then Brass has the warrant.”

“Warrant won’t do us much good. The surveillance footage for this room and the cameras around it are missing,” Gil said.

“Which is why you sent Brass right away,” Sara said with a nod.

“I’m trying to get Archie into that security room to discover who deleted the footage. I’m hoping discovering that earlier will help us.”

“Alright. Anything else I should know right now?”

Gil thought it over, trying to see what he’d missed. “Seeing who is fleeing The Tangiers might be helpful. If we can get visuals on our remaining suspects, we might be able to use the footage we have to see who flees.”

“It’s a start,” she said.

They collected their evidence and left the room. Gil found Deputy Mitchell waiting and passed him a separate piece of paper he’d prepared. “These are the names and room numbers of the people who were in this room with our victim. I’d like you to have deputies see if you can locate them.”

Deputy Mitchell blinked at him and then nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll let you know when we have someone. We have the security guard and the janitor who found the body waiting for you in the security office. Do you need an escort?”

“We can manage,” Gil said, since he knew the way very well by now.

He and Sara went to the security office, identified themselves to the guard there, and were escorted inside. “Can you tell me how many people typically man your surveillance room during the afternoon and evening?” Gil asked.

“Standard is to have five people per shift. One manager and four people to watch the monitors,” he said. “But we have fifty monitors to cover nearly two thousand cameras. We don’t see everything.”

“And your swing shift works two to ten?” he checked, since that significantly narrowed down the possibilities for who had access to delete the footage or turn off the cameras.

“Yes, sir. Who would you like to speak with first?”

Gil glanced at Sara, nodding to indicate that it was her call.

“We’d like the person who discovered the body,” she said.

“That can be arranged. You can set up in here,” he said, leading them to the same room they’d used the previous two loops.

Gil stood to the side and watched and listened while Sara interviewed Nathan Wright and Thomas Watkins, the janitor and security manager respectively. There was no new information to be discovered there, but at least their stories were consistent regardless of who had interviewed them.

“Anything we should look into?” Sara asked when they were alone again.

“No. I don’t see that either of them had anything to do with this,” he said, thinking back to the room. “I know based on my interviews that people left the room around seven. Our victim remained behind to finish his drink. No one can say for sure that he was entirely alone when they left.”

“Which means Zachary Bursh must have died between seven and eight. That’s a pretty narrow window. You’re thinking someone in the room either doubled back or managed to stay behind unnoticed?”

“Our other option is someone was watching the room and picked that moment to attack Bursh. I’m not sure that makes sense,” Gil said. “Based on what we saw in the suite, infidelity is likely. But the wife should be in New York. I’m going to have Brass call her this morning and give the death notification. We haven’t done that yet. Maybe she can tell us something.”

“Are you going to tell her that her husband was cheating? We don’t usually like to do that unless the person they were cheating with was the murderer,” Sara said, looking a little doubtful.

Gil shrugged and then shook his head. “I’m not sure what the best approach would be, but if she can tell us more about Bursh’s trips and whether or not he intended to meet someone here, that might be helpful. If he’s in town for business, we might be missing an entire suspect pool.”

“Business deal goes wrong, our suspect follows our victim, waits until he’s alone, stabs him in a public place to reduce suspicion. It almost makes sense until we consider the missing surveillance footage.”

“I haven’t found anything that explains the missing surveillance footage yet. As far as I can see, The Tangiers has no reason to cover this up.” He suspected that would be the missing piece that would put the case together. He just didn’t know how to get that information yet.

His phone buzzed and he fumbled it out of his pocket. This hadn’t happened before. “Grissom.”

“Sir, we’ve found one of the people you’ve asked us to find. If you’d like to join us at the blackjack tables on the west end of the casino, you can speak with Alejandro Ramos,” Deputy Mitchell told him.

Progress. Finally. “Thank you very much. We’ll be right there,” he said before hanging up.

“We’ve got someone?”

“Alejandro Ramos. Apparently he’s currently at the blackjack tables,” Gil said as they began collecting their kits and evidence.

“And he’s willing to talk to us?” she asked.

“I suppose we’ll see.” He led the way out of the security offices and over to the west side of the casino, scanning the Friday night crowd. The casino was busy and no one seemed aware that a murder had taken place just two rooms over. Gil approved. He liked when operations continued as usual. Suspects were a lot harder to pick out of a panicking crowd.

He spotted Deputy Mitchell standing at the edge of the room. Next to him was a blackjack table with three players and a dealer. There were two men and a woman playing, all of them focused on the game. Gil saw they were playing with hundred dollar chips as he approached.

“Alejandro Ramos?” he asked once they were at the table.

“In a minute,” one of the men said, still focused on his cards. “Hit me.”

Gil waited and observed. Alejandro appeared to be in his mid-thirties or so and of hispanic descent. He wore his dark hair long and tied back and was dressed in what Gil would term as casual mid-west clothes, with a pair of dusty cowboy boots sticking out of the ends of his jeans.

Alejandro won the round and was about to play again when Gil waved his hand in front of him.

“We just need a few minutes of your time. Would you prefer to have this conversation somewhere private?” Gil asked.

“No, I don’t want to lose my seat. I’m on a streak,” Alejandro said, not looking at them. “Ask your questions.”

Sara and Gil exchanged glances. “We were hoping you could tell us about a game you played in this evening,” she said.

“You’re going to have to be more specific. I’ve played in four games today.”

“From about four thirty to seven, you were in a private room with five other players. High stakes Texas Hold’em,” Gil clarified.

“Oh, yeah. Rough crowd,” Alejandro said, pausing to stretch his back.

“Rough in what way?” Sara asked.

“Eh, you know how it is.”

“Not really. Can you tell us how it is?” she persisted, her eyebrows raised.

“You’d have thought it was someone’s funeral. That’s not the sort of game I’m here for. I nearly left early, but the casino doesn’t like it when you do that, and you got to stay on their good side, you know? And besides, I was down a hundred thousand and I would have looked like a sore loser.”

That seemed to match what other people had said; it had been an intense game. “Was anyone in particular causing this atmosphere?” Gil asked, since he hadn’t gotten a clear answer on that from anyone yet.

Alejandro shrugged. “Sometimes you just get a bad mesh of personalities. Two of them were drinking like the bar was about to close. The ladies were all stiff and snooty. Me and this other guy kept looking at each other, like can you believe this shit?”

The blackjack table had come to a standstill and the two other players were unabashedly listening while the dealer looked uncomfortable.

Gil knew the two heavy drinkers had been Zachary Bursh and Mark Halford, which meant the guy Alejandro had been exchanging looks with must have been Benson Jones. “And you didn’t know any of the other players before going into the room?”

“Never seen them before, but that’s not unusual. It just depends on who is in town and it’s not a holiday weekend or anything,” Alejandro said.

“And it didn’t seem like anyone else knew each other?” Sara asked.

“Not that I saw. You’d think people would have been friendlier if they’d known each other. Real uptight. All of them. And the guy who was winning, let me tell you about him.”

“Yes, please do,” she said with another glance at Gil.

Alejandro had realized he had an audience and had shifted so everyone could see him. “So this guy. Brush, I think, Bush, something like that. Real asshole. As I said, drinking like a calf with a teat. He didn’t want anyone to talk to each other. Anytime anyone tried to lighten the mood, he’d say something like, ‘are you here to play cards or talk?’”

The woman sitting next to him laughed and Alejandro shot her a grin. “Smarmy asshole, right?”

“And he was winning?” Gil prompted.

“Oh yeah. He was taking all of us. He knew what he was doing. Guy next to me got cleaned out.”

Gil knew that had been Mark Halford. “And how did he feel about that if the game was so intense?”

Alejandro laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies. No one plays for those sort of stakes if they can’t afford to lose a couple hundred thousand. Actually though, he offered to shake the guy’s hand at the end. But the guy waved him away.”

“And he was offended by this?” Sara asked.

“Not really. Sort of huffed and rolled his eyes and walked away. I was just glad to be out of the room.”

“Was anyone offended?” Gil asked.

“No. Just a game. Nothing to be offended about,” Alejandro said, turning to the other two blackjack players. “We’re just having a good time here, right?”

They both nodded agreeably.

“So what’s with all the questions? Was that guy cheating? I didn’t know they had the police investigate that sort of thing.”

“Zachary Bursh was killed in that room,” Gil said, watching him closely.

Alejandro blinked at them a few times, looking from Gil, to Sara, to Deputy Mitchell, and then back to Gil again. “You’re not jerking my chain?”

“I’m afraid not. What time would you say you left the room?” Sara asked.

“Uh, seven, I guess. I went in search of a new game. Played baccarat with some folks. Had a late dinner at the casino restaurant. Now I’m here.”

Gil scanned Alejandro, but didn’t see any blood spatter on him. “You haven’t been back to your hotel suite at all?”

“Nah, my wife is up there watching tv. She doesn’t like the casino, but she likes the spa. Spends the day getting massages and all that, room service, resting and relaxing. It works for us.”

“Do you often come to Vegas for trips like this?” Gil asked, wanting to know about Alejandro’s relationship with The Tangiers.

“Couple of times a year. Every other month maybe. The Tangiers comps our rooms and meals, so we always stay here,” Alejandro said.

“Just for pleasure, or on business?” Sara asked.

“Just to take a break and get away for a few days. Live a little. Life in Nebraska can get dull. I love the work, don’t get me wrong, but taking a break is good too. We’re here more often in the winter than the summer, but it was time for a vacation.”

“Alright. Is there anything you think we should know?” Gil asked, not seeing that they were going to get anything more here.

Alejandro paused, looking uncertain for the first time. “You think one of those people we played with killed this guy?”

“We don’t think anything just yet. We’re examining all of the possibilities,” Gil said.

“I’ve seen people lose their tempers at games before. We all have, right?” he asked, looking at the table.

The two players and the dealer all nodded.

“I didn’t see anything like that here. The only person in the room who was odd was the guy who died.”

“What was odd about him?” Sara tried.

Alejandro seemed to think about it for a minute or so. “He was not having a good time. He was drinking and raking in the chips, and most people who are doing that are in a pretty good mood. He looked like he was at a funeral.”

Mark Halford had said something similar. “It maybe seemed like he didn’t want to be there?” Gil asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, no one was forcing him to play. And he played well. But every time he put down his drink he was desperate for another one, like he was trying to escape something.”

“Thank you,” Gil said, though he didn’t know what that meant in terms of the case. “I’m going to give you my card. If you think of anything else, please let us know.”

Alejandro shrugged. “‘Fraid I don’t know anything else. I left the room. Joined another game. I don’t know anything beyond that.”

“Thank you,” he said again, not bothering with DNA and fingerprints. He didn’t see how they’d be useful at this stage. He also didn’t ask how long Alejandro was staying in Vegas. Gil wouldn’t be here past six pm to do anything about it.

Gil motioned for Sara and Deputy Mitchell to walk with him and they paused in an out of the way alcove, the sounds of the slot machines and craps tables covering their conversation. “We still have deputies looking for other people on the list?” he asked Mitchell.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Ramos’ wife told us where to find him, but no one was in the other hotel suites listed.”

Sara checked her watch. “It’s barely midnight. That’s still early for a Friday night in Vegas. They’re probably still out.”

“They have to come back at some point,” Gil said. “Keep people here looking for them.”

“Yes, sir,” Mitchell said.

“What do we think about what Alejandro told us?” Sara asked. “Our victim sounds a little odd.”

“He does. I’m not sure what it means yet.”

“Do we think he was actually there playing that game against his will?” she asked.

“How could someone arrange something like that?” Mitchell asked.

“Blackmail or extortion, maybe,” Gil said, wondering if he had enough time to look into Bursh’s finances. He doubted he could get the subpoena by six pm, but it might be worth trying.

“He has to be good at this, right?” Mitchell asked. “Sounds like he was drinking heavily and still winning.”

“Okay, say he’s being blackmailed or extorted for the money. Isn’t drinking like that during a game risky? Also, if he’s rich enough to play in that game, why does he need the money from the game in order to pay the blackmail?” Sara asked.

“And he won. Why kill him afterward if he doesn’t have the money yet?” Mitchell asked.

“Good questions. I don’t know the answers yet,” Gil said. His phone buzzed again. “Grissom.”

“I have our warrant and I’m on my way back to The Tangiers, but traffic is backed up to hell. What do we know?” Brass asked.

“We talked to a few people. We’ll wait for you here, collect evidence from Bursh’s hotel suite, then figure things out back at the lab. I want surveillance footage to Archie as soon as humanly possible. It’s his top priority tonight.”

“Alright. I’ll meet you there,” Brass said before hanging up.

“Let’s take our evidence out to the car. Brass is on his way with our warrant,” Gil said to Sara before turning to Mitchell. “Call me as soon as you find someone else.”

“Yes, sir,” Mitchell said.

Gil and Sara walked back to the parking lot, Sara seeming deep in thought.

“How much time do you have?” she asked once they’d stowed their evidence and Gil had passed out water bottles.

“The loop seems to reset at six pm on the twentieth.”

“Is the idea that you solve the case and then all of this stops?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I hope so. That would be the simplest solution, but I’m not sure it makes sense. You said last time that we’d have an easier time solving this case if we had more than twenty four hours. I agree with that. As far as I can tell, we didn’t need a time loop to solve this case. It doesn’t seem unsolvable. If anything, this time loop is preventing us from solving it.”

The corner of her mouth quirked up. “It’s really weird to have you tell me about things I said in another timeline.”

“Do you want me to stop?” Gil checked.

“No. It’s just weird.” She finished her bottle of water and wiped at her forehead. “We need more information about Bursh and I’m not sure we’re going to get it from the other players.”

“I’m going to have Brass call his wife today. Maybe she can tell us something we don’t know yet.”

“At the very least she can tell us if he was supposed to be meeting with someone here. Someone who hopefully knows him and can tell us what was going on, because something about this isn’t adding up.”

Gil could agree with that. They were missing something big, but he didn’t know what it was. He was nearly positive it somehow came back to that missing surveillance footage.

“What’s it like?” Sara asked after a moment.

“The time loop thing?” he checked, since their conversation had been jumping around.

She nodded.

He had to stop and think about it. “Disconcerting, a lot of the time. It’s like having a very bad case of deja vu. But I’m discovering the earlier I change things, the less that happens.”

“I think you said you’ve lived today twice?”

“This is the third time. I…if solving the case doesn’t do it, I don’t know what will, but at the same time, I really don’t think this is about the case,” he admitted.

Folding her arms, she leaned against the back of Gil’s car. “I’m tempted to agree. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing special about this case. But that leaves us with so many options that I can’t even begin to list them offhand.”

“We can narrow it down to two categories,” he said, since he had been thinking about this too. “Purposeful or either natural or accidental, however you want to term it.”

“I don’t know which of those options is more terrifying.”

He wholeheartedly agreed. “On one hand, the idea of some cosmic being who could arrange this is…”

“I want to say impossible, but here we are. But nature somehow doing this itself…that also sounds improbable at the very best,” she said, looking at him. “And if it is natural, if this just happened, then I don’t see how we get you out. At least if some entity arranged this, there has to be some purpose in mind, which implies a criteria you can meet.”

Gil slowly exhaled. He’d been trying not to think about that too closely. “Unless this is punishment. Then I’ll be here for however long the entity believes I should be punished.”

She frowned as she met his eyes. “You can’t possibly think you’ve done anything that would deserve this.”

“Who knows what whatever this hypothetical being’s system of morality is.”

Sara shook her head. “No. I don’t believe this is punishment. You haven’t done anything to warrant that.”

He wished he could be as sure.

Their conversation was interrupted by Brass’ SUV pulling into the spot next to them.

“Warrant,” he said, climbing out of his car and joining them.

“Sara and I are going to go check out Bursh’s suite. You supervise them getting the surveillance footage. I’m guessing they’ll have prepared it for us by now,” Gil said. Prepared and without the footage they actually needed. “I’d like us to make a call to the victim’s wife this morning from your office.”

“Do we have her number?” Brass checked.

“I have his cellphone in evidence. I’m hoping his wife’s number is in his cellphone. If not, that raises some interesting questions,” Sara said.

Gil nearly asked her what she’d found on the cellphone before remembering she hadn’t had a chance to look at it this time around. “Let’s grab our evidence and get back to the lab.” He needed to get Archie in that security system and he couldn’t do that until he had evidence and a reason.

“How are we getting into Bursh’s suite?” Sara asked, turning to Gil.

“His room key is in his wallet,” he said, opening the trunk so she could retrieve it.

She pulled out the cellphone as well and then made a small face and shook her head.

“What?” Brass asked.

“No problems finding the wife’s number. She’s in here as ‘Wifey’, which probably says plenty about their relationship,” she said, writing down the number and putting the cellphone back in the evidence bag. Gil locked the trunk and regathered his kit from where he’d set it down.

“Wifey. I’m pretty sure if I’d called Nancy that she would have divorced me a lot sooner than she did,” Brass said, accompanying them to the elevator.

“It does seem a little demeaning, but maybe it had particular connotations to them,” Gil said. He generally tried not to judge relationships by the small things. Not until the small things started adding up, at least.

“I wouldn’t stick around with anyone who wanted to call me wifey,” Sara said.

“Good to know,” Brass said, sharing a knowing look with Gil.

Back inside the casino, they split up, with Brass heading toward security while Gil and Sara went to the resort.

“I take it you already know the room number?” she asked when they boarded the elevator instead of going to the front desk.

“1119. Mostly we’re just there to collect DNA. We’re doing it early enough this time that Wendy can actually process it,” he said, though he still didn’t know what DNA was going to tell him. He was reasonably sure it wouldn’t be the wife’s DNA, but he didn’t have a comparison to know for certain.

“Did you see a laptop or anything that looked like it was business work?” Sara checked.

“No. I didn’t see that it was a business trip, but sometimes people do business on vacation.”

“Or whoever he’s doing business with has all the paperwork. He could have just been here to sign something.”

“Possibly. Just about anything is possible at this point,” he said.

The elevator let them off on the eleventh floor and Gil used the key card to let them into room 1119. It looked exactly as he remembered it.

“Kinky,” Sara said when they peered into the bedroom. “We should be able to get DNA from the handcuffs and the sheets.”

Gil nodded. “Let’s take what we need and go. We have more to do tonight.”

*****

“You two are acting very odd tonight,” Archie said, his focus half on his computer and half on them.

Sara looked at Gil and did a moderately poor attempt at leaning casually against a nearby counter. “We are?”

Archie glanced back at them, his eyebrows raised. “Well, yeah. You’re in here looking like you think this footage is about to explode or something.”

Gil made a mental note to figure out a way to handle this better. He only needed to get Archie in that surveillance room once. Once they had the information, Gil could figure out how to discreetly use it in other loops. Unless he somehow got lucky and it solved the case. After today - all three todays - he wasn’t relying on luck for anything.

Shifting on her feet, Sara shrugged. “Well, if we have a video of our suspect murdering the victim, that should solve our case for us.”

“Assuming you can match a face to a name and a name to the physical location of a person,” Archie said, returning his attention to the computer.

“Even a face would be a good start at this point,” Gil said, knowing they weren’t going to get it.

“Well, cameras are listed by location. You said there were two cameras in the private room. And that was casino room nineteen?”

“That’s right,” Sara said, scooting closer to try and peer over Archie’s shoulder, but he waved her away.

Archie spent about five minutes clicking and typing before he swiveled around in his chair. He looked directly at Gil and folded his arms. “Is this a test or something? A joke?”

“Not a joke or a test. But I can guess. The footage isn’t there, is it?” Gil asked.

His eyebrows went up. “And that’s why you’re watching, because you think the casino fucked around with what they were supposed to give us for the warrant. Sneaky.”

“Can we tell what happened to that footage?” Sara asked.

“Given the packet they sent me, either the footage was deleted before they made the copy of the database, or it never existed in the first place. I’ll have to go through the other casino cameras to see if I can catch you a glimpse from the other side. We might not have the murder on camera, but if they were sloppy, we could have them leaving the room if you know the time of death.”

Gil knew they weren’t sloppy enough for that. “Before you go searching, prepare what you need to for Brass to get a subpoena for us to go inside their system. Disabling those cameras so a murder could take place or deleting the footage are both felonies. I want to know who did it.”

Archie nodded. “With access to their system, I might be able to find out. Might.”

“Well, we have to at least try,” Sara said.

“I’ll let Brass know you’re bringing that information. As soon as possible,” Gil said.

“Time is money,” Archie agreed, turning back to his computer.

“Time is evidence,” he corrected, leaving the room.

“Can we actually get that subpoena and get Archie into the system in the time we have left?” Sara asked, hurrying to keep up with him.

Gil checked his watch. They had fifteen hours until he looped again. “With the right judge, maybe.”

“Do we know who the right judge is?” she asked.

“Not yet. I’d rather not do that trial by error, but I will if I have to.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

He looked at her, uncertain what she was going to ask. There were a lot of possibilities at the moment and he didn’t particularly care to revisit the conversation about why he was trapped in this time loop. Not without more evidence and supporting information, at least. “What’s that?”

“Do you always have me accompany you on this case?”

Coming to a stop in the hallway, he took a good look at her. “You don’t want to be on this case?”

“No, I want to be here. This is great. Talk about having something new to investigate and a theoretical physics problem at the same time,” Sara said, shaking her head. “But it might not be the best thing for you or the case.”

“Why’s that?” he asked, discovering he felt a little odd at the idea of doing this without Sara.

“Well, you’ve said I’m repeating myself,” she began.

“You mostly haven’t been. I changed enough this time that it’s nearly all new now.”

“Even so. One of the reasons that we’re a team is we each bring a different perspective to cases. Don’t you want to know what the rest of the team has to say about this? They might ask a different question or see a different piece of evidence.”

Gil thought about it and realized she had a point. One of the reasons he changed up the way the team was assigned to different cases was because they all had different specialties and strengths and weaknesses. He knew some CSI labs worked in partners rather than having a larger team, but he liked the larger team.

“Though, I understand if you don’t want Catherine involved in this one,” she said when he didn’t answer.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“I’m assuming you don’t want a face off between her and Sam Braun, especially after he helped us out with Nick a few months ago. Accusing the casino is sort of like accusing Braun and that’s a tough position for her to be in considering their…unusual relationship.”

That had been why he hadn’t assigned Catherine to this case in the first place.

“Though, I’ve sort of been thinking of something,” she said, meeting his eyes.

“Oh?” he asked, having no idea what this conversation would have prompted for her.

“You’re sort of consequences free at the moment. You could do pretty much whatever you wanted, just to see what would happen, and it wouldn’t matter. Right?”

“It would matter to me,” Gil told her after thinking about it for a minute.

Sara grinned. “Relax, I’m not suggesting you go on a crime spree. I’m saying that if you wanted to take Catherine with you to see what happened, it wouldn’t have any long term consequences for them. They’re not going to remember. And if it turns out to be a bad idea, then you don’t do it again.”

“I don’t know how I feel about using people like that, even if they don’t remember. I will remember.”

“Okay, but say it gets you into their security system. Don’t you usually tell us that we should do whatever will get us evidence while still being within the bounds of the law?” she asked, eyebrows up. “What if it’s the only way to do it?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when we get there, but we’re not there yet,” he told her, still feeling a little uncomfortable about the idea. He started in the direction of Brass’ office again.

“Look at it this way. You have twenty four hours where you can do whatever you want. Isn’t there something you want to do?” she asked, keeping pace with him.

“I want to solve this case and get out of this time loop.”

She shrugged. “Alright, but you know what they say about second chances.”

There were so many sayings that could potentially be applied there that he didn’t know which one she was talking about, nor did he want to inquire. He wanted to solve this case. He wanted his life back. Before it started affecting his mind.

They arrived at Brass’ office and Gil found him bent over a file instead of on his computer. Then again, they were three hours earlier than they usually did this. Gil knocked on the door frame to catch his attention.

Brass glanced up and nodded at him and Gil pulled the door closed behind them as they entered the office. “That kind of night?” Brass asked.

At least someone around here was reassuringly predictable.

“We have a problem,” Gil said, taking a seat. “We’re missing security footage from inside the private room. Archie says it either was deleted before the database was copied or the cameras were turned off before the murder.”

“It’s a felony either way,” Sara said.

“Sabotaging evidence or collusion,” Brass said after a moment, his hand coming up to rest against his chin.

“We’d like a subpoena to get into the security system onsite to find out who did it and what exactly they did. Archie is preparing what you need for the request right now. This is very time sensitive,” Gil said, putting all of his emphasis on time sensitive.

“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not sure I know a judge who is going to give us that subpoena.”

“Can we think outside of the box? Someone who might be willing to go against Sam Braun even if they aren’t necessarily tech savvy? Archie can explain what we need in a way they’ll understand,” Gil asked, though the more times he did this, the less he felt it was going to work.

Brass seemed to think about it for a moment. “I’ll try. No promises.”

“Are the judges really so corrupt that they won’t go against Sam Braun?” Sara asked.

“Not without solid evidence and a hefty life insurance policy and a good team of lawyers. You’re going to have a hard time getting the DA to go up against him too.”

“I thought the mob days in Vegas were over,” she said, shaking her head.

Gil shugged. “Vegas has deep roots.”

“And long memories,” Brass added. “So what else do we need?”

“To call Bursh’s wife,” he said, though he wasn’t looking forward to it. Hopefully they’d only have to do this once.

Brass looked at the clock. “At three in the morning?”

“It’s six in New York and we either need in The Tangiers’ security system or to know who Bursh was meeting with before we can do anything else,” Gil said.

“The wife is the more approachable of those two,” Sara suggested.

Brass sighed. “Okay, what exactly are we looking for from ‘wifey’?”

Gil had to wonder if Bursh actually called his wife that. “To start with, whether or not he was planning on meeting anyone here in Vegas and the purpose of his trip. I’d also like to know whether he was receiving cancer treatment.”

Sara frowned as she looked at him. “What?”

“Doc Robbins found something?” Brass asked, picking up a pen for notes.

He’d forgotten they hadn’t got autopsy results yet. “Zachary Bursh has stage four colon cancer. It would be good to know if the intent was treating him or if this was a sort of end of life trip.”

“If it’s an end of life trip, why isn’t his family with him?” Sara asked.

“Most men don’t want their wife and kids around when visiting strippers and gambling their life savings,” Brass said with a knowing nod.

“Given what we found in the hotel suite, it might have been more than just strip clubs,” Gil said.

“Dare I ask?”

“Nothing too wild. Handcuffs on the bedposts, DNA in the sheets,” Sara said.

“But if the wife is in New York, it’s not her DNA,” Gil said. “We may want to leave that part of it out. If she wants to see the hotel suite, the handcuffs and dirty sheets have been removed.”

“Probably for the best,” Brass agreed. There were many things they left out of reports to families about the circumstances of a loved one’s death. They didn’t need to know the gory details, especially in the middle of an investigation. The time for more details was later, if the family chose to seek them out. Most of them didn’t. “Okay, so associates in Vegas, purpose of the trip, cancer. Anything else from a first pass?”

Gil thought about it. He didn’t want to do this more than once. He didn’t want to do this at all, but this was the least harmful way he could think of to get this information. If Bursh had been meeting someone here in Vegas, they needed to know as soon as possible. “Gambling habits. I want to know if he was either winning or losing large amounts of money on a regular basis.”

“Alright. We have her number?”

Sara dug through her notebook and then passed it over.

Brass put his desk phone on speaker and then dialed, all of them waiting pensively while it rang.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered on the fourth ring.

“Mrs. Bursh?” Brass asked.

“Yes, who is this?”

“My name is Detective Jim Brass. I’m with the Las Vegas Police Department.”

Gil glanced at Sara and found her with her head bowed and her fingers fidgeting. None of them liked giving death notifications.

“I’m sorry for calling you at such an early hour,” Brass said, looking over at them briefly when she didn’t say anything.

“What happened? Is it Zach? Is he okay?”

“I am calling about your husband. Do you have a moment for us to sit down and talk?” Brass asked.

“Oh my God. Where is he?” she asked, her voice pitching high into fear.

He took a slow quiet breath. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but Zach was killed yesterday evening.”

They waited again, listening to Mrs. Bursh breathing rapidly. Sometimes people hung up on them at this point.

“Mrs. Bursh, we know this is a very bad time and we’re sorry for your loss. We want to help arrange things with you. We were wondering if we could ask you some questions that might help with our investigation.”

“What do you mean by investigation?” she asked, her voice still breathily on the edge of panic.

They’d gotten through the death hurdle. Now for the homicide hurdle.

“Zach was killed yesterday evening. We believe he was killed by someone,” Brass said, couching it in the most neutral terms possible.

“Oh my God,” she said again and there was a loud clunk.

Sara looked alarmed, her gaze moving between Gil and the phone.

“Mrs. Bursh? Are you alright?” Brass asked.

“I’m here. I’m here. I…”

Gil bunched his hand in a fist and released it, trying to release some of the tension in his body. He hated doing this to people, but it needed to be done.

“Mrs. Bursh, are you sitting down?” Brass asked, his expression a cross between concern and frustration.

“I am. I just…I can’t believe this is happening. I spoke with him just last night,” she said.

Gil motioned to Brass. “What did they talk about?” he whispered, seeing a way to perhaps get information.

“Do you recall what you spoke about? About Zach’s plans or what he’s been doing maybe?” Brass prompted.

Her breathing was audible over the phone. “He said that everything was going fine. That he was having a good time.”

“Do you know what his plans were for this trip?” he tried.

They waited, Sara standing up and starting to pace in the space behind Gil.

“He liked to gamble. He went to Vegas four or five times a year. It was never really a problem. Most of the time he comes home with more money than he spends. It’s just his hobby,” Mrs. Bursh said, seeming to collect herself a little.

Gil motioned to Brass again. “Same people every time?” he whispered.

“Did Zach meet with the same people regularly? Or go to a specific place?” Brass asked.

“He liked The Tangiers. That’s where he was staying. They always comp his room and food because he plays so much. He views it as a free trip, because he uses airline miles to pay for his plane tickets. Where did…where was he found?” she asked, her voice wavering at the end.

“He was at The Tangiers,” Brass said.

“But how could something like this happen there? They have all that security.”

Gil met Brass’ eyes and shook his head, though Brass hardly needed to be told.

“We’re still investigating. It’s only been a few hours and we’re in the beginning stages of our investigation. We should know more by tonight,” Brass said.

Gil barely managed not to grimace. At this rate, there was no tonight for him.

“Okay. I will see what I can do about getting a flight. I have to…I have to tell the kids. I don’t know how to do that.”

“You have some time. You don’t need to rush,” Brass said. “Mrs. Bursh, would it be alright if I asked you a few more questions?”

“What sort of questions?” she asked.

“About who your husband was meeting with in Vegas, places he might go, any sort of business he was doing? If you know his itinerary, that would help us as well.”

“This wasn’t a business trip. It was a vacation. He doesn’t do business in Vegas.”

Gil saw Sara shake her head. They’d been hoping for more possible suspects, ones with more motive than the players in the private game.

“And he took this sort of vacation four or five times a year?” Brass checked, his hand resting on a pad of paper with a pen.

“Yes. We don’t vacation together. We’re not very compatible in that way. I go to beach resorts and sunbathe and snorkel. He goes to Vegas. When the kids were younger, I took them with me because I didn’t want them going to Vegas.”

In general, Gil tried not to judge people. It was clear that Mr. and Mrs. Bursh had negotiated about this and found something that worked for them. Still, Gil felt if he was in a long term committed relationship with someone, he wouldn’t want to vacation without them. He’d spend the entire time wishing she was there.

“Do you know how long Zach was intending to stay in Vegas?” Brass asked.

“He left Wednesday morning and was supposed to be back on Sunday evening. I didn’t even see him off. I got up early that morning to go into the office. I didn’t even kiss him goodbye.” It was clear from the sniffling and gasping that she was now crying.

At a minimum, she was still invested in her relationship with her husband. Given the evidence, Gil couldn’t say how invested Zachary Bursh had been. DNA in the sheets suggested he was not as invested as she was.

They waited as Mrs. Bursh calmed down again.

“Mrs. Bursh, do you know if Zach was planning to meet anyone here?” Brass asked.

“Not that I know of. He doesn’t really socialize in that way. He doesn’t have drinking or gambling buddies or anything like that.”

Gil thought back to what he’d been told about Bursh in the private game. They’d said that Bursh hadn’t seemed happy to be there, even though he was winning. How did they reconcile that with the wife saying gambling was one of his hobbies? Hobbies were generally things people did because they enjoyed them. And why hadn’t Bursh been enjoying himself right then?

“Ask if he’s a heavy drinker,” he whispered to Brass.

“Is it typical for your husband to drink heavily?” Brass asked.

“Not typical, no. He has a few drinks every night, but he doesn’t get drunk, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said.

A few drinks every night could mean a lot of things, up to and including alcoholism. A person didn’t need to get drunk to be a functioning alcoholic, and the fact that Bursh had been steady enough to play competitive poker at a BAC of point one three suggested he was accustomed to that level of alcohol in his system.

“Do you know what his plans were for this long weekend?” Brass tried.

“He was just taking it easy. This was a break for him. We’ve had a busy year. As far as I know his plans were to play a few games, rest in the spa, and unwind. I don’t understand how…I don’t…why would someone kill him?”

“We don’t know just yet. Our investigation is just beginning and any information we can get about Zach is helpful. So as far as you’re aware, there wasn’t anyone in town who would have known him?”

“No. He doesn’t know anyone in Vegas. He’s not much of a people person. He doesn’t like to socialize. I just…I worry that someone may have taken offense that he’s not very good with people. Would someone kill him over that?” she asked.

Gil had heard this type of rationalizing from family members before. They wanted a reason - and someone to blame.

“I’m afraid we don’t know right now. We’re looking into every angle to understand what happened to Zach. If you have questions during the investigation, you can ask me,” Brass said.

“What happens from here? Can I see him?”

“From here, we’re going to investigate what happened to Zach. We’ll have more information by tonight. If you’d like to see Zach, you can come by the morgue and we can arrange for you to ID his body,” Brass said, giving Gil a one handed shrug.

Gil nodded. They could do that, but he suspected that she wasn’t going to be here in time for him to see her in person. Flights from New York to Vegas took six hours, but first she’d have to find a seat on a Saturday and it was the busy season. Chances were good she’d have to take a red eye if she wanted to be here in the next twenty four hours, and that was too late for him. “Ask about his health,” he whispered as Sara flopped into the chair next to him.

“May I ask you a question about Zach’s health?” Brass asked.

“His health?” she asked, sounding confused.

“Yes, we’d like to know if Zach had any major illnesses or was receiving treatment for anything. This will help our medical examiner understand what was happening for him.”

That was the excuse they gave, but what they really wanted was the family’s understanding of the victim’s illness.

“Zach is in relatively good health. He’s getting older and slower, but we all are, aren’t we? He’s actually lost some weight recently, which is good for him. He’s been trying various diets to see what works and it seems he’s found something.”

“How long is recently?” Gil whispered.

“Do you know how long he’s been losing weight?” Brass asked, raising his eyebrows at Gil.

“About six months. He’s dropped nearly thirty pounds.”

Gil had thought the victim weighed around two seventy, but he hadn’t checked the weight on the driver’s license. Weight loss was common with end of life cancer and it seemed Bursh had been trending in that direction for a while.

“And Zach hasn’t been diagnosed with anything?” Brass asked when Gil motioned to him again.

“No. As I said, he’s in pretty good shape for his age.”

Sara shook her head and met Gil’s eyes. Either Bursh hadn’t been diagnosed, or he hadn’t told his wife.

“Alright. Is there anything you’d like me to know?” Brass asked.

“Just that Zach is a good man. And if someone killed him, if someone killed the father of our children, then I want that person caught and punished.”

That was a sentiment Gil heard a lot too.

“We understand. We’re going to do everything we can to find who did this to Zach. I’m going to give you my number. If you want to call me and let me know when you’re planning to be in Vegas, we can help with arrangements,” Brass said.

Gil waited until Brass was off the phone. “She doesn’t sound like someone who knows her husband was cheating on her.”

“And she’s okay with her husband going to Vegas on his own. Frequently,” Sara added. “Is it possible to have stage four colon cancer and not know?”

“Let’s ask Al. He might know,” Gil said, because up until now, he had assumed that Bursh had known. He turned to Brass. “Archie is going to bring you what you need for the subpoena. We need in that security system as soon as possible.”

“I will see what I can do,” Brass said.

Gil left the office with Sara, trying to figure out where to go from here.

“Would you tell someone if you had cancer?” she asked as they walked.

“I’m not the right person to answer that question,” he told her. When he’d had surgery on his ears, when he’d been losing his hearing, he hadn’t told anyone, though Catherine had figured it out on her own.

She frowned as she looked at him. “But say you were married.”

“I wouldn’t know what that felt like in order to say. But assuming I loved someone, and was sharing my life with them, I don’t think I would want to keep serious secrets. There’s something else we need to consider.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s possible Bursh knew something was wrong and decided not to go to a doctor. That’s fairly common in men of his age, though denial can and does cross gender boundaries.”

She seemed to think about that for a while. “I suppose it depends on what his symptoms were. Some are more alarming than others. If he was just losing weight, then he might have just thought his diet was working.”

“I’m anticipating that his symptoms would have been more severe by this stage, but let’s ask Al,” Gil said as they approached the autopsy lab.

Al looked over at them as they entered. “I was about to let you know I was ready for a preliminary.” He grabbed his crutch and went to Bursh’s body.

“Cause of death was exsanguination?” Sara checked.

“Correct. Six stab wounds. If your suspect was aiming for the liver, they did a good job. Victim bled out in maybe five to ten minutes as the hepatic artery was severed. Your weapon is a double edged dagger. After clearing the blood away, we have the clear impression of a rectangular hilt around the edges of the wounds. Your suspect was very forceful.”

“Were you able to get a cast of the wounds?” Sara asked.

“I did, your cast is over there,” Al said, nodding to a table.

Sara went to the cast and brought it to Gil. “This looks like a dagger and that’s not something they could get in The Tangiers. They brought it with them from somewhere else. Which means they thought they were going to have a use for it.”

“Only so many uses for a dagger,” Al said.

“Was there anything else wrong with Bursh?” Gil asked after nodding to Sara, not wanting to get into the fact that he already knew.

“Stage four colon cancer. Your victim would have died on his own within one to two years.”

“Do you have any idea what sort of symptoms he was having?” Gil checked.

“At this stage, he would have been experiencing sharp abdominal pains, rectal bleeding, and I can tell he’s suddenly lost weight. He also has a mild jaundice that you can see on his skin,” Al said, motioning to the victim’s face.

“Okay, maybe it’s just me, but if I’m bleeding out my ass, I’m going to a doctor,” Sara said with a small grimace.

“That would be the wise thing to do,” Al agreed with a smile. “Many people avoid colon cancer screenings because they’re invasive and uncomfortable. People need to go to the doctor when they find blood in their stool instead of simply assuming hemorrhoids.”

Gil nodded, recalling Al saying this to him before. “Is it possible he wasn’t diagnosed?”

“Yes, it’s possible. If he’s avoiding going to a doctor, and is ignoring his symptoms, then it’s very possible. That’s not uncommon for men of his generation.”

That’s about what Gil had figured. “Thank you.”

“Anything else we should know?” Sara asked.

“No, this was a straightforward stabbing as far as this sort of thing goes. There were no complications in the death,” Al said, covering the body.

“Thanks,” she said, nodding to him before she and Gil left the autopsy lab. “What’s next?”

“Lunch. Then back to surveillance footage while we wait for information. I want to confirm that Alejandro Ramos was where he says he was, and I want to check out the exits around the time of the murder.”

She nodded. “I could eat. What do you feel like?”

Gil wanted to do something he didn’t ordinarily do and get away from the loop altogether. “Chinese? The one on Spring Mountain is still open.”

“Sure,” she said easily. “Is this something you usually do?”

“No. First time. Wanted to do something different,” he said as they left the lab together. “I don’t actually have many groceries in my house and I’m already sick of fruit and toast.”

“Maybe not the ideal day to get stuck repeating over and over.”

“Perhaps not. But I can think of worse,” he said, able to think of a number of cases that he would not want to repeat over and over again.

“I can too,” she said, looking distant as they settled in Gil’s car. “You know, when I told you that you had the opportunity to do anything, I wasn’t trying to get you to do something outlandish.”

“Oh?” he asked, his attention half on his surroundings as he navigated out of the parking garage.

“Aren’t there books you’ve wanted to read, but never seemed to find the time? Or a movie that’s been on your list for a while. Or a whole list of movies and books?”

“I suppose so.” He figured just about everyone had those lists. There weren’t enough hours in the day. Except now he perhaps had a lot of hours in the same day. “I wasn’t really planning on being in this time loop, if that’s what this is, for long enough to do those things.”

“So you have a plan to get out or break the loop or whatever it is that you need to do?” she asked.

Plan was maybe exaggerating where he currently stood. “I plan on solving this case and seeing if it fixes the problem. If it doesn’t, then I’ll see what other measures can be taken.”

“I still say I don’t think this is about the case. Is there a reason you think solving it will fix this?”

“It seems like the most straightforward solution and I might as well try the straightforward solution before looking into things that maybe are less supported by evidence. And after three days of this, it’s bothering me.”

The right corner of her mouth turned up. “That I can completely understand. The longer a case takes, the more it bothers me. Tell me about the other people you’ve interviewed.”

Gil spent the drive telling her about the dealer, the cocktail waitress, and Mark Halford.

Special Noodle was almost empty by the time they arrived and they took seats and after a moment of examining the menus ordered. Gil ordered spicy lamb with mixed noodles. Sara ordered eggplant with vegan gravy and mixed noodles.

“I don’t understand Zachary Bursh,” she said when they were alone again.

“Which part?” he asked, because by now they had a lot of oddities.

“Well, he’s in this high stakes poker game. As far as we’ve been able to tell, no one is forcing him to be there. His wife says gambling is a hobby and he comes to Vegas several times a year specifically to do so. Yet by all reports he’s winning and he’s miserable and he’s drinking heavily.”

“The question becomes why is he playing if he doesn’t want to. But maybe we’re not considering the situation holistically. Maybe he was in pain at the time. He appears miserable because his gut is aching from the cancer. He’s drinking heavily because he’s trying to block out some of the pain. He stays behind at the end of the game because moving hurts and he’s trying to steel himself for it.”

Sara shook her head. “If he’s in that much pain, he needs to be at a hospital, not a casino.”

“Ideally, but I think we’ve already seen that maybe Bursh doesn’t make the best decisions for himself,” he said, because he did understand that fear of going to a doctor as symptoms progressively got worse. He suspected Bursh knew the diagnosis was going to be something he didn’t want to hear.

“What do you think about what we saw in the suite?” she asked a few minutes later after their food had been brought out.

Gil picked up his chopsticks. “You mean the infidelity?”

“Yeah. The wife says he’s shy and that he doesn’t know anyone in Vegas. But maybe she’s wrong. Maybe the person in Bursh’s suite wasn’t a prostitute. Maybe he’s coming to Vegas to meet with them?”

“How does that relate to the murder?” he asked after considering it for a moment.

“The way it usually does in infidelity murders. They want more of Bursh. They’re jealous of the wife. They want him to end things. And for him, this is just a side fling. He’s using them, and they realize that.”

“They wait until the poker game is finished, accost him alone…why are they carrying the dagger?” Gil asked as he reasoned it through.

She frowned, refocusing on her noodles. “Bursh was a decent sized man and he had some muscles. If I were to go toe-to-toe with him, I would not pick a dagger as my weapon.”

“Gun with silencer,” he suggested. “Most women pick distance weapons when confronting a man because biologically, men are simply going to be physically stronger about ninety five percent of the time.”

“And usually have a longer reach too,” she agreed. “But we didn’t see any signs that Bursh fought back. There wasn’t evidence of a struggle. It’s like he just stood there and let himself be stabbed.”

That was something he hadn’t considered before. “He’s not drunk enough that he can’t count cards. But he just stands there and lets someone stab him.”

“I think we have to consider the difference here between premeditated murder and a situation escalating. The dagger perhaps suggests premeditation. But maybe they were just intending to threaten him and one thing led to another. I wish we could see what happened in that room,” she said, stabbing her chopsticks into her eggplant.

“The missing surveillance footage complicates things. If it’s not premeditated, why do they have an accomplice?” Gil asked.

“And if it is premeditated, why did they choose a dagger?”

They finished their meals, Gil searching for a single explanation that covered all of their evidence.

“I don’t know. We’re missing something,” Sara said. “Do you want me to get that?”

Gil claimed the receipt and tucked his credit card into the folder. “No, I’ve got it.”

Once they had paid, Gil leaving a good tip considering they were the only ones being served, they headed back to the lab.

They bumped into Wendy in the hallway and she smiled at him. “I have something for you.”

“You do?” he asked. He hadn’t bothered with asking her for DNA results after the initial loop because he knew what they’d be. At least, he’d thought he did.

“Yeah, let me show you. I don’t know if it’s important, but it seems like it might be,” Wendy said.

“Is this DNA or BAC?” Sara asked as they walked with her.

“DNA. BAC and tox screening wasn’t too exceptional. Point one three. No other toxins present,” Wendy said.

“But there was something about the DNA?” Gil asked.

They reached the DNA lab and she retrieved a sheaf of papers. “So Sara brought me DNA from drink glasses. You have six individuals who were drinking. None of them popped in CODIS.”

Gil nodded. That was the same as last time. “Sara brought you DNA from condoms and handcuffs, didn’t she?”

“She did. And while that didn’t pop in CODIS, I can tell you that your victim was having sex with a biological woman. The DNA on the handcuffs was hers, as was the vaginal fluid sample on the condom. And she was one of two women who were having drinks in the private room.”

“Whoa,” Sara said, looking at Gil.

“Thank you,” Gil told Wendy, reminding himself that this was why they examined every piece of evidence instead of making assumptions.

“Anything else?” Wendy asked.

“I think that’s everything for now, but you’ve been very helpful,” he said, turning over the new evidence in his mind. So far, everyone he’d talked to said it looked like no one at the table knew each other. Now he had evidence that wasn’t true.

“Are we still doing surveillance footage next, or are we doing something with this?” Sara asked.

“Surveillance footage while we figure out what to do with this,” Gil decided after thinking it over. He wasn’t sure what this meant just yet.

They went down to the AV lab and settled in at computers. Gil knew where to access the footage, since he’d done this the last time, and he decided to rule out Alejandro while it was on his mind.

It took some doing to find the right cameras, but they watched Alejandro enter the casino restaurant at seven seventeen and stay until almost eight. From there he went back to the casino floor to another game.

“Doesn’t necessarily rule him out. Doesn’t take that long to stab someone. We need the cameras outside of room nineteen,” Sara said.

“I had the same problem with Mark Halford. The cocktail waitress and the dealer were walking together to the employee door, so that makes them less likely. Let’s try our exits around the time of death,” Gil said, his mind still hard at work.

They watched the cameras for the exits to the parking garage and the lobby from seven to eight, but didn’t see anything like someone fleeing a murder scene.

His phone rang and Gil checked the time. He knew what this call would be. “Grissom.”

“Alright. My deputies have tracked down one of the people from the game and he’s agreed to talk with us. Mark Halford is going to meet you at the Cabana restaurant in The Tangiers for breakfast at seven,” Brass said.

“What about our subpoena?” Gil asked.

“In the hands of a judge. It’s going to take him a while to look through everything and make a decision. I don’t think we’re going to hear before tonight.”

“Which judge?” he pressed.

“Judge Bastings.”

Next time he was going to tell Brass to try a different judge.

“Are you able to make the meet with Mark Halford?” Brass asked.

“We’ll be there,” Gil said. He now had a new question for Mark Halford.

“Problems?” Sara asked.

“No subpoena yet. Probably not before six o’clock. We’re going to go meet with Mark Halford for breakfast. I want you to lead the questioning again. This time ask him about the two women at the game. Press him to be specific.”

“I can do that. The real question is, where is everyone else? We’ve had deputies looking for them forever now,” she said.

“That’s a good question.” He was going to have to change something if he wanted to talk with the other three players, and he did want to talk with them.

The drive back to The Tangiers was done in silence and Sara seemed particularly pensive.

“Are you alright?” he asked her, though last time she’d asked him that question.

“I’m not going to remember any of this. None of us are.”

Gil wondered again if telling her was the right thing to do. “Do you want me not to tell you in the future?”

“No. I want to know. I just…it’s weird knowing that this day will have happened for you, but not for me,” she said, looking at him while they were stopped at a light. “I don’t want to lose these memories.”

“Are you losing them if you are experiencing the day again?” he asked.

“No matter what you do, this exact day like this will never happen again. We all make small movements, say something, look at each other, in ways we can’t replicate, even if we try. I think that’s losing something, even if I’ll never know. You’ll know.”

He didn’t know what to tell her. And despite what she’d said about wanting to know, he wasn’t sure the ethical thing to do was to keep telling her. He wanted her here with him, but maybe he needed to start making bigger changes. Afterall, she was the one to tell him to try using different people on the investigation.

“I’m alright. I’m just confused, I suppose,” she said a few minutes later.

“That makes two of us,” he said, pulling into The Tangiers’ parking garage.

They went to the Cabana restaurant and met with Mark Halford, Gil taking a back seat and letting Sara direct the questioning. He wasn’t very hungry after having lunch a few hours ago, so he just had coffee.

“Can you tell us about the two women at the table?” Sara asked once they’d had a basic overview and a timeline.

“The women?” Mark asked, blinking at her. “Whatever do you mean?”

“Did anything about them stand out to you?” Gil asked.

“I really don’t know what you’re looking for.”

“You mentioned that Zachary Bursh was drinking pretty heavily. What about the women?” Sara asked.

“Ah. I see. And I can tell you that one of the women, the brunette, she was pretending to drink, but she wasn’t. I was sitting next to her. She was ordering rum and coke, but I could smell that there was no rum in her drink after the first two,” Mark said with the nod. “The other woman, the blonde, was only drinking lightly, but she wasn’t pretending.”

That lined up with what the cocktail waitress had told them. “What else did you notice about the women?” Gil asked.

Mark worked on his breakfast as he seemed to think about it. “The brunette was subdued. A little grim, if you know what I mean. I didn’t catch her name. I didn’t catch anyone’s name, I don’t usually pay attention to that sort of thing. The other was more of a typical woman for Vegas.”

“Typical woman for Vegas?” Sara asked, a slight edge to her tone.

He nodded. “You know how women are. Flirty, showing off their legs, meeting men’s eyes and giving them the look. The blonde was trying it on everyone, trying to get an advantage, but it didn’t seem to be working. No one was paying much attention to her.”

“How did Zachary Bursh respond to that?” Gil asked.

“I don’t think he was aware of anything in the room but the cards and his drink. He barely seemed to be aware that he was playing against other people. People with that attitude should play video poker, if you ask me,” Mark said with a headshake.

“Was he aware of the brunette?” Sara tried. “Maybe met her eyes, or was possibly avoiding looking at her?”

Mark seemed to think again. “Not that I noticed. To be honest, it was an unhappy game. I wouldn’t want to be matched with those people again. I like things to be a little more lively.”

Maybe the game hadn’t been lively, but it had still somehow ended in murder. Gil wasn’t sure how to reconcile all that they’d been told, especially when compared to the evidence.

“Would you mind if we take your fingerprints and DNA to exclude you from what we found in the room?” Sara asked.

“Not without a warrant, and it seems our time is up regardless,” Mark said as a waiter approached with a tray. “Coffee refill, if you would.”

Gil paid for their breakfasts, thanked Mark, and they left.

“What do you want to do?” Sara asked.

“Call it a day until the deputies find another person who was at the game,” Gil said.

She looked at him. “When was the last time you slept?”

“My body thinks it finished sleeping fourteen hours ago, but I haven’t actually had the experience of sleeping in nearly two days,” he said.

“Time for you to get some sleep, if you can. Even if your body is still getting rest, your mind needs it too. I find sometimes if I go to sleep thinking about a problem, I have ideas on how to solve it when I wake up.”

Gil nodded. It worked that way sometimes for him too. He drove them back to the lab and noticed that he was late enough that he’d missed Catherine and Warrick. He didn’t know where Nick and Greg were either.

He made one last phone call.

“Brass.”

“We finished with Mark Halford. I really need to speak with the two women who were in that room,” Gil said.

“My people are looking,” Brass said.

“Call me as soon as you get the subpoena or one of those women. One of the women from the game was having sex with him in his suite. I want to know, no matter what time it is,” Gil said.

“I’ll call. I promise.”

“Thank you,” Gil said before hanging up.

He went home, showered again, and then put himself in bed. The exhaustion in his mind must have outweighed his body because he felt himself falling asleep within twenty minutes.