haolehothead | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Danny is only acting as backup when it comes to this exercise. He's grateful to Chris for doing the requested damage, but there's still a part of him that cringes when he sees the way they've trashed the huts. He sighs and closes the door behind him, signalling to Nick and Kate that this is the one that's set-up the best for their exercise. He's the detective and if he's learned anything from his years on the job, it's that he ought to shut up when the lab shows up because he doesn't know half of what they do.

"Today," he advises to Kate as catches up to them, walking the last little distance, "Nick's your guy. You have a question, you ask him. If it's about the procedure of what happens after, that's me, but what I want you to do is take everything you've read and all that we talked about and go into this scene with an open mind. I want you to pick out the important pieces that might lead you to a suspect or give you a lead. Sound good?"

And maybe he can politely request that someone who owes community service hours can help tidy up the clusterfuck that's become of the huts.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Of all the exercises they've done, this is the one Kate's most nervous about. It seems more difficult than everything else they've done, especially since both Danny and Nick are pretty much professionals and she's just a girl from Kansas with only part of an idea what she's even doing here. This is getting more and more real with each passing day and she's still at a loss some of the time.

But she's always been good at faking it.

"Okay, first question," she says. "If we come across a scene like this, is calling the lab guys the first thing? Like, we don't touch anything, do we?"

Nick whistled lowly and shook his head as he stood back and surveyed the damage.

He had to admit, this was a pretty awful trashing of the huts. Awful in the way that meant that if it were a real crime scene, he would really be hating his night right about then. It was a pretty excellent trashing in the technical sense, with the amount of chaos created.

"Yep, look but don't touch. Unless there's a person in immediate need of attention at the scene, don't touch anything. Touching anything could compromise the scene -- crucial evidence could be lost or displaced, and we don't want that."

"So what's my purpose here?" she asks. "I just tiptoe around and look at thing? I mean, that's fine, but if I find something that looks suspicious, I call you guys over?" And she's not entirely sure what she's looking for, but she figures if there's anything that looks like it might have been handled, there will be fingerprints on it. That's a good place to start. Or blood. Although she doesn't know why there would be any blood.

"How do I know what's evidence and what's just stuff from this hut that's been trashed?" she asks, knowing it's a lot of questions. But she needs them answered. "I mean, it'd be great if the person who did it dropped a personal belonging, but how do you know it belongs to a criminal and not the person who lives here?"

Danny's in the corner, but he raises his hand (like he needs permission to speak, though he's not about to mess with Nick during his lecture). "Remember what we talked about during our suspect weeks and profiling? Look for patterns. I mean, primarily, you're going to want fingerprints on anything incriminating, like a weapon, but illegal drugs don't hurt for a place to start."

"Anything you wanted to add?" he asks, throwing a curious glance in Nick's direction.

"You can absolutely call our attention to something, if you see something that should be a priority. I like to think we're a little more laid back on the island than in the real world, and I don't mind someone pointing out something at a scene that deserves a little extra attention." Nick also came from a slightly unorthodox forensics background, where the CSIs were really allowed to take the lead on investigations. Both the island and his experience of the real world, he'd learned, didn't necessarily line up with the way everyone else did things.

"That's the beauty of scenes like this," he said with a slight chuckle at her question. "You might not have any idea what belongs to who, which means a lot of stuff is going to get bagged as evidence, and then things get sorted out later. Once you've been doing this for a while, you start to be able to really visualize the scene -- put the place back together in your head, I mean -- and it might be easier to tell what belongs and what doesn't."

"Okay," Kate answers, then falls quiet for a second, just standing there in the hut, looking at everything that's happened. It's really trashed and she wonders who's going to have to super shitty job of having to clean it up.

"It sort of looks like the window's broken," she says finally, pointing over at it. "I know it's like, not really necessary to break in on the island, but it looks like someone did anyway. The latch isn't latched anymore, see? So there might be fingerprints on that, right?"

"I wouldn't discount that idea," Danny says, trying to remain neutral so that she makes her own confident decision. "That does sound a little like a question, though. What do you think, Nick?" he asks lazily, perching on a table near the door that's fairly clear. "I mean, fingerprints. Broken windows. Sounds pretty reasonable."

"Absolutely," Nick said, stepping over some of the mess to get closer to the window, examining the latch without touching anything, since he hadn't put on a pair of gloves yet. "I would definitely want to dust this for prints. And if we think the window could be the point of entry, we'd also want to go back outside and see if there are any footprints or other evidence leading to or away from the scene that could help point us in the right direction."

Kate hasn't even thought of that and she listens to Nick carefully, then nods, because that makes sense. If that's how they got it, it's probably how they got out, too. "Do you dust windows and doors just in general?" she asks. "Just to make sure? Because they've obviously gotta get in and out somehow and there are only so many windows and doors..." Maybe that's not right, but she thinks it makes sense.

Danny doesn't say anything. He should, but he doesn't. This is her rodeo and he's the helper. Besides, he always learned from doing, which is what he wants to let her do now. "Is there any harm in doing just the first? How about everything? Are you on a time-sensitive case? How much help do you have? I'd start with some of those questions."

"What he said," Nick said, nodding his head towards Danny. "A lot of what you need is going to be driven by the case. So a lot of what I do is driven by what the cops need to get done fast. In an ideal world, we will get through every piece of crap in this place, but those are definitely the right questions to ask to figure out what your priorities are."

It's a lot to remember and Kate's having one of her regularly scheduled moments of panic and doubt, but she pushes it down, refuses to let it get the better of her. "Do I get gloves?" she asks, holding up her hands. "And bags to put things in?"

The idea of going through everything is daunting, but if that's what they do, then that's what she'll do.

Danny makes a sign, one that says 'don't look at me'. It's up to Nick and how much he's willing to sacrifice from his wares. Danny's not going to feel any crunch from giving his stuff away, not the way the guys in the lab will.

"We're going to improvise a little bit today, but normally, yes," Nick said. He picked a clear spot on the floor and set down his field kit, which contained a good deal of supplies but which also wouldn't last forever. He pulled out a few pairs of gloves -- those always seemed to be well in supply, at least -- and handed one pair over to Kate before putting his own on. Next, he reached into the kit and pulled out a few bags. One was an actual evidence bag from the kit, but the others were a bit more makeshift, cobbled together out of paper, but still roughly the same size as the real evidence bags.

"Since I don't know that the island would be so kind to replenish the bags, we're faking it today, but if this were a real crime scene, we'd use the real ones," he said as he held up the substitute bags. "So today, we'll just use our imaginations."

Kate's eyebrows shoot up in amusement, but she's grinning as she takes the gloves and puts them on, then takes one of the makeshift bags from Nick. It's fair that he doesn't want to waste his supplies on this, since she doesn't want to ever waste any of the stuff the island gives her. It would be just like this place to stop supplying him with something as soon as he uses it for a lesson.

"Okay," she says, turning to look at the mess that used to be a hut. "So I just... start sifting through crap?"

"That," Danny says, glancing towards Nick as he barely suppresses his grin, "is possibly the best description I've heard of my job in years," he says, shaking his head. "Years and years, but no one's said it better."

Nick laughed, because it was an accurate description. "That's pretty much the gist of it, yep," he said. "It's not very glamorous, and can sometimes be pretty gross, but sifting through crap is pretty much the essence of the job."

He turned back to the kit, sifting through it before pulling out a digital camera. "Since documentation is important, one other thing we want to make sure to do is take photos of the crime scene as it is, so in the event of some sort of hearing, we'd be able to show people exactly what happened, what was left behind, instead of just relying on your word or my word. People really like pictures, is what it boils down to."

Kate grins at Danny's comment, because a lot of this shit is complicated, but she likes Danny. And she likes that she can make him laugh like that.

"Before we touch anything, we take pictures," she says, nodding. "Gotcha. Do we take pictures of stuff after, too? Like, say I take a picture of that area," she says, pointing to where a drawer is lying upside down. "But then I find something important under the drawer. Do I take a picture of that, too, once it's moved?"

"Think of pictures like the memory you're never going to have, unless you're one of those freakish photographic memory people. I mean, let's be honest, is anyone going to yell at you for wasting time and money? Maybe. Is it better to be safe than sorry? Definitely. I'd err on the side of too much over too little."

"Absolutely," Nick said. "I would definitely recommend being more thorough and maybe taking a little longer to process a scene than to want to cut corners to save time. You might not realize that something would have been important until it's too late, especially if whatever you're investigating happened somewhere that you need to get it all processed and cleaned up ASAP. You don't want to have to try to reconstruct something from memory later, all because we had to clean up the scene so people could have their hut or their rec room back or whatever."

Listening, Kate nodded to the both of them, though she knew that was the type of thing she'd probably have trouble with. She'd never really been the patient type, but there was a lot of stuff that she was going to have to work on if she really wanted to get this sort of job in the long term.

"Okay. Take my time, take lots of pictures, be careful not to touch much until one of you guys get here," she said, reciting everything she thought was important to remember. "Was there anything else?"

"I don't know," Danny says evenly, playing dumb. It's not that hard to do, given that he's not the CSI expert, but Nick is. And really, this is just one additional reason that he's grateful to have met the man. "Tell me what your instincts say," he coaxes.

Nick nodded his head towards Danny, agreeing with his question. "Always hated it when people pulled that on me, but he's right. You're doing real good so far, Kate. You've got this stuff down already, practically. Think there's any steps you missed?"

"I guess don't take anything for granted," she says, lifting one shoulder in a thoughtful shrug. "I mean, even if something looks totally innocuous, that doesn't mean it's not still something important."

She grins and adds, "And don't fuck anything else. Because the lab guys won't like that."

"Look at her, she's all grown up," he dryly comments, wiping away a fake tear as he grins at Kate. "Well, if you two are happy to keep working on this, I'm gonna head to the Compound and find someone who owes about two hundred community hours to clean this up."

"Thanks, Danny," Nick said, surveying the mess one more time. "That reminds me, Kate -- the best part of the job, I almost forgot." It was, sometimes, his favorite part of his work -- aside from solving crimes and helping give closure to grieving families. "You don't have to clean a single part of this up. You come in, you investigate, you collect your evidence, and then you go home. Sure, maybe here on the island we'd probably be a little more helpful about it, I don't know, it doesn't really happen that often. But back where I'm from, at least, traditionally, law enforcement leaves the clean-up to other people."

"Thank god," Kate says, rolling her eyes up toward the ceiling as she laughs. "I'm pretty much the messiest person ever, so asking me to clean this up would've been the worst idea ever."

Which is to say, it wouldn't have gotten clean if that was the idea. Marshall would have been better at it, although he probably wouldn't have liked it very much.

"Well, then, let's hope we do things that way here, too," Nick said, with a smile on his face. He took a few steps back so he was closer to the edges of the mock crime scene.

"I'm gonna stand back and let you get to work, don't want to get in your way. Any questions, just shout them out, hopefully I'll know the answer."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only