DISCLAIMER: Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS and various others own CSI, not me. I just played in their sandpit for a while.
SPOILERS: Set during and after the season 6 episode "Pirates of the Third Reich" Thanks to http://www.kilohoku.com/ for the transcript. Mention of other `Lady Heather' episodes.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
Human Nature
By Celievamp
That's the thing about this job. However bad your day has been you just know that it's been worse for someone else. When that someone is someone you know…
It was a horrific crime scene, even to our jaded senses for such things. A beautiful, intelligent young woman who had obviously been starved and brutalized, her head shaven, her body branded and mutilated, her identity removed. Her body left in the desert for nature in all its forms to take its course, to finish the job of removing this young woman from life, erasing her.
The way she looked, the way she died made Brass suspect some kind of cult activity. Only a few months earlier we had had to deal with a suicide cult in a bunker just a few miles the other side of the city. Perhaps this was evidence of similar cult activity. The Nevada desert seemed to attract such things. Jesus might have fasted in the desert but as Grissom said – it was his choice to do so. All this woman's choices had been taken away from her. The swirling wind blown sand threatened to remove any evidence that remained and we acted quickly collecting what we could before it became just dust in the wind.
She had been reduced to a number – 19 in her case. Her right hand was missing, possibly due to animal depredation by the ragged nature of the wound and her right eye had been replaced with someone else's – so we knew right away that we were looking for a second victim. At least. We didn't really want to contemplate what the number 19 could indicate as to the potential scope of this case.
The autopsy threw out more questions than answers. The young woman had died of necrotizing faciitis – a flesh eating bacteriological infection which had consumed most of her liver and attacked all of her other organs before she died. There were traces of oxycodone and chlorpromaxine in her system – drugs commonly given to mental patients to keep them calm. Although our Jane Doe had been dead around 24 hours, the donor right eye had been implanted up to a week earlier. DNA on that came back with the name `Jack Landers', a registered sex offender.
Brass and Sarah picked up Landers – or Captain Jack as he now preferred to be known – and found that apart from his missing eye, he'd also lost a portion of his frontal lobe in a crude lobotomy but had gained the number `13' branded into his shoulder. Our theory of multiple victims just got a lot more concrete.
The whole building went silent when we heard that our Jane Doe had a name – and that it was known to us. Brass had promised Lady Heather that her connection to the dead woman, that it was her daughter Zoe Kessler would be handled discreetly but you couldn't keep something that huge hidden for long in a place like ours. We're all trained investigators after all.
One thing we did find out about our victim was that Zoe Kessler had heterochromia – one blue eye and one brown eye. It was a twisted explanation for one of the procedures that had been done on her if nothing else.
It seemed that Zoe Kessler hadn't been home for a while. There was a pile of mail on the floor behind her apartment door and her landlord informed us he'd been on the point of evicting her. I sorted through the envelopes, looking for anything that might give me a clue as to how this bright, beautiful young woman had ended up in the clutches of a monster. The oldest item of post was dated ten weeks before. Zoe had been dead for no more than a day when she was found. Where had she been the intervening weeks?
On the same day that she apparently disappeared, Zoe had an appointment at the Betz Clinic. There were several messages on her answering machine from the receptionist at the clinic asking her to get in touch about some test results.
She identified the body herself. I can only imagine how hard that must have been for her. She kept that calm, controlled façade throughout but she must have been so broken inside. I watched from the door of my office as Lady Heather was escorted down to the morgue to view her daughter's body. I remembered my conversation with Lady Heather, the first time we met, how proud she was of her daughter, of how she had got into Harvard. I could only think how I would have coped if it had been Lyndsey. I could only imagine what was going through her head. I wondered if she would touch Zoe's body at all – some relatives did, others were horrified by the idea as if death was some kind of contagion. I could imagine her touching her daughter's cheek. She would also be one to ask questions – which of the injuries and indignities she could see were part of her daughter's death and which were as a result of the autopsy. How badly would the revelation that her daughter suffered possibly for weeks before her death affect her? This was a woman who inflicted pain in the cause of pleasure, something willfully misunderstood by a hell of a lot of people. Would they think she was just reaping what she had sowed?
I didn't believe that crap for a second. I remembered our first encounter, how immediately at ease I felt with her despite her reputation, despite her presence and persona. `You would have made a good dominatrix' she told me and I took it as a compliment. I still do. I remembered the pride in her voice when she talked about her daughter, then a freshman at Harvard. So many hopes and dreams embodied in that girl.
I wanted very much to approach her, to tell her how sorry I was, but Grissom beat me to it. He more or less waylaid her outside the morgue. I shouldn't have been listening but their relationship had always intrigued me.
"I'm so sorry about your loss," he began.
Her expression was closed, watchful. "But you need to ask me some questions."
"I'd like to know some things about your daughter. When was the last time you saw her?"
"She dropped out of school about a year ago. I didn't even know she was in town," Lady Heather said.
I could only imagine how much that admission cost her. "So you weren't in contact with her," Grissom continued. Lady Heather indicated that she was not. "Can you tell me why?"
"What difference does it make now?" she asked.
"Did she have any medical conditions?" Grissom asked.
"Not that I know of…" Lady Heather stared at him.
"Because in November, she participated in a medical study at the Betz Clinic. Right after that she went missing."
Lady Heather just nodded, but I could tell she would have carefully filed that particular snippet of knowledge away. "Where was she found?" she asked.
"In the desert," Grissom said.
"Just out in the middle of nowhere?" I caught a trace of anguish in her voice, the first sign of how deeply this had affected her. She was close to losing control.
"Off Highway 55, near Sparks," Grissom told her. I was beginning to wonder – Grissom wasn't usually so forthcoming with the victim's relatives, certainly not if the case was still running. What was he thinking?
"I have to go," she said, brushing past Grissom and passing where I stood without a glance in my direction. There was a grim determination to her expression that boded ill for anyone who got in her way.
The Betz Clinic turned out to be an offshoot of Betz Pharmaceuticals who were running a sleep study. Zoe Kessler suffered from chronic insomnia and was part of their study. As was Jack Landers. Greg and I talked to Dr Jacob Wolfowitz – one of the last people to see Zoe Kessler alive on the night of 12th November – the day she went missing.
"She came in for an overnight sleep study but left early," Wolfowitz told us. "Some people just get freaked out spending a night in a strange place. Happens all the time. But as you can see, we try to make the facility as normal as possible."
The patients were monitored at all times and our search warrant enabled us to get the tapes for the night Zoe and Landers had disappeared. Greg spent the next few hours contacting the rest of the participants in the study and ascertaining that they were all intact and none of them had acquired any brands or unexplained injuries recently.
Our investigation continued. Wendy Simms, our DNA technician had identified the traces of `meat' found in Zoe's teeth – and matched them to Zoe's own DNA. Her missing hand took on greater significance still. Could Zoe have literally chewed it off in order to escape from where she was being held captive?
I remembered Lady Heather's mantra – `there are a lot of things you can give a man, your body, your time, even your heart, but the one thing you can never ever let go of is your power.' I doubted very much that Zoe Kessler had willingly given up her power: she had been rendered powerless, subdued by a cocktail of drugs, abused and traumatized. And yet she had found it within herself to gnaw through her own wrist in a desperate attempt to escape. The strength of will that must have taken… she was her mother's daughter however much she fought against it.
Nick and Warrick were sent back out to Highway 55 with a group of police cadets to see if they could find Zoe's missing hand – or any evidence as to where Zoe might have been held for the missing ten weeks of her life. Whilst the cadets searched the roadside and surrounding desert, Nick and Warrick canvassed the area for buildings. As they approached the first building they came to they could hear flies buzzing and could detect the unmistakable stench of decomposition. There was a large pile of dirt at the side of the house which they investigated first, taking samples. A few minutes later they discovered the apparent source of the stink – a bed of Titan Arum or `corpse flowers'. In a garage there were tables with more flowers on them, some of them hybrid species and at the back of the room a large storage freezer. All of their instincts thoroughly aroused by now – especially since they discovered that the house and land belonged to no other than Jacob Wolfowitz of Betz Pharmaceuticals, they couldn't search any further as they didn't have a search warrant. Nick and Warrick had both been CSIs long enough to have a healthy disregard for coincidence. But if they opened up the freezer without a warrant and found something probative they wouldn't be able to use it. But without finding something probative they wouldn't be able to get a warrant.
The house appeared deserted at first but then they heard a noise from inside. When they investigated, they found it was Lady Heather.
"He's not home," she said.
Of course she was brought in for questioning. She admitted to breaking and entering and stealing an etching from his house. She also admitted that she'd done it to flush Wolfowitz out. The police would investigate his house if she burgled it. But Wolfowitz wouldn't bite. He refused to press charges.
"She's clearly disturbed. She just lost her daughter and I was one of the last people to see Zoe Kessler alive. I'm sure she was just looking for a connection."
Both Grissom and I agreed with Lady Heather's assessment. Wolfowitz had something to hide.
The print turned out to be rare. An early illustration of the Romulus and Remus myth, worth thousands. It had also been removed from a book.
"I find that people who don't respect books have a general disregard for keeping things whole." Grissom had once commented that with her accurate perception of the human condition, Lady Heather should have been an anthropologist. And whilst I wasn't too happy with the way that she was guiding Grissom and therefore the whole investigation, the likelihood that Wolfowitz had stolen the print gave us reason to look at him further. There were too many coincidences.
Give him his due, Grissom did warn her to stay away from the case. I wondered if I should try to talk to her as well. There had always been an attraction between us and there was a time, after Eddie's murder when we had got close. The timing was probably all kinds of wrong. But I thought...
And so instead of going home to my own little girl at the end of the shift I found myself ringing the bell at the side door of Lady Heather's mansion, her private entrance. The double entendre of that did not escape me either.
As always, she opened her own front door. "Ms Willows," she said, a polite smile on her face that went no where near her eyes. Her head tilted slightly. "Or is it Catherine?"
"It's Catherine," I said.
The smile grew a little more welcoming. "Catherine, a pleasure as always."
"I'm sorry, I probably should have called first, but…"
"It's always good to see an old friend, Catherine, whatever the circumstances. Come in. I was just about to make some tea. Join me."
There was a picture of Lady Heather and Zoe on a side table mother and daughter standing shoulder to shoulder, Zoe's arm around her mother's waist, their expressions very similar, those of strong, empowered women who didn't take crap from anyone. Except… Rose petals of a red so dark they were almost black scattered in front of it. We paused in front of it for a moment. "There are so many things I wish I could say to her right now. I will always regret that she saw my… concern as interference, that she resented my attempt to protect her." She took a second porcelain cup and saucer from a cabinet, set it on the coffee table in front of the fireplace. "I suppose that you hear that a lot from the relatives… things unsaid things they would rather undone."
"Quite often, yes," I said. The thing about this job, the nature of the crimes we so often investigate is that we usually look hard at the family before we look at any external suspects. I see people at their worst moment. Sometimes it's also their finest hour.
"This clinic she was visiting. The doctor… Wolfowitz. You've spoken to him, I understand."
"Lady Heather I…" Grissom had already told her too many details about the case. And she had already taken the law into her own hands once, breaking into Wolfowitz's house and stealing the print. I wanted to talk to her, to divert her from making her own investigation and possibly compromising our own as a result. If she did… if we lost any leverage we might have over Wolfowitz because of her interference I knew that she'd never forgive herself.
She held up a slim, well manicured hand. "It's all right. I remember. You came to see me as Catherine." She poured the tea, we sat in silence for a moment or two.
"It's strange," she said at last. "I don't know what's hit me hardest. The fact that my Zoe is dead or the fact that I might be a grandmother. When we last talked, Zoe told me that she was pregnant. The father was her therapist of all people. Zoe could be curiously trusting of male authority figures sometimes. I… tried to interfere. Zoe cut off all contact with me. I don't know whether she went through with the pregnancy or had an abortion. I don't know what happened to the child or even if there was a child. Your Doctor Robbins was unable to tell me whether Zoe had ever given birth or not. The damage to her internal organs was too severe…" She swallowed hard, gazed into the firelight for a moment. "I always hoped that we'd be reconciled. Zoe is… was… a very fair person, logical, pragmatic. I know she would have come to understand that I had only her best interests at heart."
"There may be a record of a birth somewhere in the system. I can do a check for you," I heard myself say. "If there's anything I can do…"
Lady Heather set her tea cup back onto the table and regarded me in silence for a long moment, her emerald eyes enigmatic. In one flowing move she slipped from her chair and knelt in front of me, her hand resting on my knee. "I wish…" she sighed, looked to the firelight again for a moment before staring up at me. "I wish very much that we had pursued our relationship, Catherine. I think that you would have been very good for me. Your nature… it is so effortless for you to command, your beauty, your natural presence, your force of character. And it would have been such a pleasure to serve you." Her fingers began to move across my knee, stroking up the inside of my thigh. Her touch was electric. "To play with you, to shape the roles we play…"
"You are Lady Heather," I reminded her. "I don't see…"
She leant towards me, her face very close to mine. "Submission is its own reward, sometimes." She kissed me, taking her time. Any resistance I might have wanted to put up melted away after about five seconds.
"Help me, Catherine," Lady Heather reached out, her long fingers smoothing my hair back from my cheek. "Help me to find this man, this monster. Help me avenge my daughter and all those other people he maimed and killed. Please, you know how much I think of you, care for you. I always thought we could have something… beautiful between us, you know. I don't willingly… give myself to just anyone. But I would to you."
I had always found the touching of lips to be the most intimate contact of all. I'm a pretty good judge of character under normal circumstances, but what I get from a kiss – well, I can tell in that instant whether the other person is fully with me, in the moment, or whether this is just a way of passing the time, the opening gambit in a play or a paucity of imagination. It's nothing to do with whether the person is a `good' kisser or not. Eddie was a great kisser but his mind was always a million miles away. The human body can do almost anything without heart, but the lips and the eyes, they do not lie.
And so I wasn't taken in for a moment when she kissed me. And it was a really really great kiss. Such sweetworded desires weren't her stock in trade. Lady Heather was using me.
But something inside me wanted to let her. To be knowingly used by this fantastic creature to submit to her will even if that will was for me to dominate her. The heady rush stopped my breath for a long moment.
It would be so easy… It would be so wrong.
"My Lady Heather," I said, formally. "I'm sorry. I can only do what is within the bounds of my job. I will gather and process the evidence. I will make the case. I will do whatever is in my power to catch this man and bring him to justice as the law decrees. I am so sorry…"
I was. I really was. I burned for her.
She withdrew. Those remarkable eyes were shuttered. Suddenly she was back sitting in her chair across from me, her cup of tea in her hand as if the last ten minutes had never been. "You are right, of course," she said at last. "We must each do our part to the best of our abilities."
I stayed a little longer but the moment for confidences was gone. I made my excuses and left her to her grief. She was planning something, it was obvious, but I did not want to know what it was. I only hoped that it would not jeopardize the case.
Our expert Professor Rambar examined the print Lady Heather had taken from Wolfowitz's house and got very excited about it. He confirmed that it was indeed the real thing, very old and therefore extremely valuable. There were traces of saliva on the edge of the page where it had been dampened to aid its removal from the book. Rambar traced the missing plate to a volume in UNLV library. It was enough to get a warrant to search Wolfowitz's house.
Greg and I reviewed the video tapes from the Betz Clinic of Zoe Kessler's sleep sessions. Four hours into her session, Zoe Kessler had got out of bed and left the room. They could see a shadow thrown by someone else in the room, someone who had woken Zoe up and persuaded her to leave her room. The same thing happened to Jack Landers. He got up out of his bed, left his room and never returned.
Grissom had gone out to Betz Pharmaceuticals to talk to Wolfowitz about the print. He got there about the same time as the police did. The receptionist had called them after finding Dr Wolfowitz dead in his car in the underground garage. David Phillips was already assessing the body when Grissom got to the car where Brass was also waiting for him. There were no signs of trauma or blood on the body but both the car seat and the body were wet. The body was in rigor which meant he had been dead for at least six hours. It seemed incredible that Wolfowitz had been in his car in a busy parking lot all that time and no one had noticed.
Things were about to get a lot weirder. The autopsy revealed that Wolfowitz had potentially been dead for a lot longer than six hours. His body had been frozen – something that took quite a while to accomplish of itself – Doc Robbins estimated at least two days to freeze a body to the core. The body showed evidence of puncture wounds similar to those found on Zoe's body and on the upper left arm there was a brand: the number `1'.
So how had we seen and spoken to Wolfowitz only the previous day? Grissom and I kicked round a couple of theories including dunking the body in liquid nitrogen in a form of cryogenic freezing but the most obvious conclusion was that either our frozen corpse – test subject 1 - wasn't Wolfowitz at all – or the man I had talked to the previous day wasn't Wolfowitz but someone pretending to be him. In which case, just how long had the masquerade been going on.
And I was the one tasked to find out the truth.
Meanwhile, Grissom had another encounter with Lady Heather. She was waiting for him in the garage. She offered her assistance. "I assumed you might need a DNA sample from Mr Wolfowitz." She produced a ziplock baggie containing what appeared to be a used condom.
"How did you get this?" Grissom asked.
"The rage was stronger than the repulsion. People have used sex for much less worthy causes," she replied.
"When did you…" Grissom asked.
"Last night," Lady Heather said. "You may not approve, Grissom, but you cannot arrest me for sleeping with him. He was consenting. I am playing by your rules. But if I had it my way this man would die the same way my daughter died."
"He's already dead," Grissom told her. There was no mistaking Lady Heather's reaction as anything other than shock and surprise. No one was that good an actress. "He's been dead for two days."
"That's not possible," Lady Heather whispered.
When I found out what she had done I wanted to cry for her. And I understood. Totally. Because if anyone touched a hair of Lyndsey's head in a way that I did not like or approve of then I would move heaven and earth to bring a swift and terrible justice down on that person. Whatever it took, whatever the cost.
I dusted Wolfowitz's car for prints. The steering wheel was an obvious contact point and indeed there was a print. Taking even more care than usual I lifted it, securing the tape in an evidence bag and marking it up. A second print was lifted from the rear view mirror. Then, I was searching around the seats I found a pill stuck in the passenger seat folds.
The condom had been given to Wendy Simms for processing along with other samples from the dirt outside the barn at Wolfowitz's house. She reported her findings to Grissom:
"The dirt from outside the barn tested positive for human DNA. And I mean a lot of it, over a dozen profiles. And one of them matched Zoe Kessler… and although chain of custody is a bit problematic `cause a plastic lunch bag isn't department issue bindle, the DNA from the condom, it matches both the saliva from the book page and the dead guy, Jacob Wolfowitz."
"Thanks," Grissom looked over the results.
"I have a question," Wendy said. "How do you have sex with a guy who killed your daughter?"
"Revenge is an act of passion," Grissom replied. Lady Heather's motivation had polarized opinion in the lab. Wendy's question was typical. But we were all very careful not to lose sight of the ultimate objective here: we had a serial killer on the loose who had potentially 16 other victims for us to find. Grissom took it very hard: he was disappointed in her, I think.
Meanwhile I had discovered that none of the fingerprints I had lifted from the car's interior belonged to Jacob Wolfowitz but were a match to a Leon Sneller. It wasn't a name we had come across before in the course of the investigation but we had come across the face before. The physical resemblance to Jacob Wolfowitz was startling.
"Which explains how I saw and how Lady Heather… did a dead guy."
"Identical twins," Grissom nodded. "Same DNA, different prints. So all the DNA that we attributed to Wolfowitz could be Sneller's." Sneller had enlisted in the army in 1985 and had been stationed at a field hospital in Berlin for the last twenty years. He had no criminal history on file.
"I thought that she killed him too," I said suddenly. "I would've. I mean, I wouldn't have slept with him first, but…" I recovered myself. "Makes you wonder who's on the autopsy table. Sneller was stationed in Berlin until about a year ago… at which point I think he came to Vegas…" My mind supplied the rest of the details. Wolfowitz opening his door to his brother, some time later one brother stuffing the dead body of the other into a chest freezer, perhaps the same one Warrick and Nick had seen in the garage at Wolfowitz's house. "If Sneller's our killer, he puts his brother on ice, starts impersonating him… I mean, I know this theory's a little out there, but given the evidence… it's the only conclusion that makes any sense."
"Occam's razor, principle of parsimony. If you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebra's," Grissom said. I think that meant he agreed with me.
"Given twins… go with twins," I nodded.
A further search of Wolfowitz's house revealed the eccentricities of the man's life. It was more like a museum. He had inherited the place from his parents and didn't appear to have changed a thing. I picked up a prescription bottle from the table. The tox report on the pill I had found in Wolfowitz's car had come back with no match to any known pharmaceutical. Our boy was making his own. We checked the rooms finding a curious mix of artifacts, including a silver menorah. Then Grissom uncovered a trap door. And we found the real chamber of horrors.
Nature or nurture. Evidence of a Jewish background upstairs. Downstairs, a laboratory and evidence of experiments that would have made Dr Mengele proud. A Nazi swastika and eagle on the wall with the motto `Arbeit macht frei' left us in no doubt as to his model and motivation. Whoever was the `scientist' had kept meticulous notes documenting his experiments, complete with intricate sketches.
On another wall was a clock. The face of the clock was blank. As we examined it our silence was disturbed by the faint sound of groaning. It seemed there was another room beyond, even more secret than the one in which we stood.
We found the survivor of his last experiment – number 21 - unfortunately not in time to save his life. He died in hospital, but at least he didn't die alone in that terrible place. I'll never forget… never… the horrors of that place.
She will never forget either.
Romulus and Remus. Sneller was their birth name, but the boys were adopted by a Jewish couple named Wolfowitz. Jacob went nurture and Leon went nature. It did make you wonder what the hell he got up to during his time in Germany and how such a squirrel mind managed to go undetected for so long. A further search of the Wolfowitz house revealed reams of notes and other records commemorating the experimentation done by the Nazi's during World War Two in sickening fashion. We finally discovered exactly what Zoe Kessler had endured during the weeks she was Sneller's captive. It was horror beyond imagining.
We also discovered that Lady Heather had been in the Wolfowitz house. Grissom found her jeweled black and silver crucifix under the couch in the living room. Had she lost it in a struggle with Sneller? Who had won? No one was taking any bets on that one.
We found them together, at more or less the same spot where Zoe's body had been discovered. It was a scene straight from the Marquis de Sade. Lady Heather had Sneller strung up in front of her SUV. Her whip coiled and curled around her as if it had a will of its own. Blood was already streaming down Sneller's chest and shoulders.
Grissom had to interfere, of course. I would have let her get on with it, translate her pain and frustration into a punishment that this man would understand. If he had degraded and tortured my daughter I would have got down on my hands and knees to thank her for what she was doing. As would most of the family and loved ones of Sneller's other victims, I was sure. And maybe the spirits of his victims would rest a little easier as well.
Sneller screamed with every crack of the whip.
Grissom's a brave man, I have to admit. To come between Lady Heather and the object of her elemental rage. He actually caught hold of her, almost lifting her off her feet. For a moment I thought she would use the whip on him as well. She was well beyond reason, her iron self control had deserted her. I seriously wondered whether she would ever get it back or whether this was the end of the Lady Heather persona. It had been a long time since she was plain Heather Keller.
Not that she would ever be plain anyone. Not to me. He calls her Heather. No honorific. After all she's been through, that annoys me. One more indignity. She worked hard for that title.
There will be consequences from this for everyone. Grissom… he's not the kind of man I think who will let this go. Whenever he sees her, whenever he thinks of her, this will be what he sees, the whip coiling through the air, the blood, Lady Vengeance herself. He knows he crossed a line with her, almost including her in the investigation, telling her more than we ever tell the relatives in an investigation that is still current. I don't know what their physical relationship is any more – or even if there ever was one. I used to think their attraction was based on the fact he thought he could somehow save her from herself and she just saw it as a role to play for him. Now he sees the truth. She actually begs him to let her go. She will never forgive him for this.
She's still struggling in his arms and then her gaze falls on me. Her eyes flash fire again. I slowly shake my head. It's over. She sees the truth of it and slumps. Grissom follows her to the ground. I join them.
"Please…!" she begs again.
"I'm saying stop," Grissom said. To my surprise, she submits. The whip drops from her hand and she turns, buries her head in my chest. Her hot tears scald my skin. Grissom's hand strokes her hair, his expression troubled, distant. He has run out of things to say. This is beyond him now. So I guess it's up to me to pick up the pieces.
The EMT's and two of Brass's people move past us to take care of Sneller. Grissom goes to join them. Brass and Sofia Curtis are waiting to question Lady Heather. I glance at Brass and he reads my intent, motions Sofia forward to help me with the distraught woman. Sofia helps me get her to her feet and then with a quiet apology cuffs her hands behind her back.
I sit next to her in the squad car all the way back to HQ. She does not speak. A deep shudder wracks her every now and then as she fights to regain her self control. As we re-enter Las Vegas I feel her begin to relax and by the time we get her out of the car and into booking she is my Lady Heather again, diamond bright.
Maybe she will survive this after all.
The End