Nick Robey was a Chicago native. He had moved to Las Vegas to take care of his mother. His partner was Chad Wilson from Henderson. The two of them had become fast friends in a short amount of time. Chad invited Nick to barbecues at his house, and Nick took care of Chad's house when he was out of town. Their joined duties were in patrolling the looking for JDLR's or things that "just didn't look right." Sometimes it was an ornery gambler who had imbibed too much liquor or a tourist was caught trying to hustle the casinos. The night was dark, somewhat cloudy without a star to light the night sky. It was also a bit cold out with a wind coming down off the mountains. Nick didn't miss the hard Chicago winters, but he did miss the friends he made back there. Chad did the driving up the Strip, and Nick kept a look out for JDLR's around them. Turning off the Strip and out of the realm of the tourists, Chad drove past the sites that reminded him that people lived in this town… a market, a Laundromat, a drugstore, a bus bench with a box next to it….

"Let's turn round the Laundromat again." Nick looked to Chad with a yawn.

"You see something?"

"A box at the bus stop…" Nick was watching the light. It did not look good for a patrol car to go through a light. "God knows what was in it."

"Probably empty…." Chad sighed a bit as he turned round through the back alley behind the Golden Nugget. "So, you still seeing that redhead in Chicago…" He dispensed in small talk.

"Micki?" Nick looked round as they came back out down from the Laundromat. He looked up to the box up ahead at the bus stop. "Yeah… she's going to come down on a search for antiques. She's never been to Vegas before."

"Can't wait to meet her…." Chad slowed closer to the bus stop. There was light over him casting long shadows over the road and a camera overhead. Nick waited for Chad to come to a complete stop and stepped out the passenger side of the vehicle. He came out on one end of the bench and maneuvered around the end of it wondering what had been abandoned off the curb. He started wondering what it was. Please don't let it be body parts he started thinking. That had happened to him in Chicago. If it was guns or drugs, all he had to do was turn it over to dispatch. Turning off the vehicle, Chad emerged from the patrol car to inspect the abandoned package.

"Careful, Nick…" Chad braced a hand on his revolver. "It could be a snake."

"If it is, it's yours!" Nick looked to him then bumped the box with his foot. It was weighted by something in it. It was the box for an old Panasonic color eighteen-inch screen TV. Almost two feet wide and two feet high, Nick reached down and pulled an overlapping flap open; the other flaps popping open with it. Nick first thought he was looking at a large doll, but as he looked closer, he realized its eyes were closed and it looked much more real than he was comfortable with at the moment. Sitting deep in the box was the form of a tiny five-year-old girl with long brown curly hair covering her head.

"Dispatch…" Nick reacted with offended disgust into his radio as Chad peered into the box. "We have a body. Repeat, a body dumped on Emerson a block off the Strip in front of Brinks Laundromat…"

"Oh god…" Chad was a father of two girls himself. It stirred deep hostility in him to see the ugly side of humanity doing this to defenseless young children. He looked deep into the box and was ashamed by what he saw. A tiny brunette moppet of pure innocence, crammed into a box without any clothing on this the coldest night yet for November. Her body was white and still. He reached to pull a box flap out of the way to get a better a look of her and when he did, he got a reaction. Maybe it was a gust of cold air, or the warmth of his body, but the tragic brunette pixie opened her eyes slowly and slightly looked up to him.

"Nick, ambulance! She's still alive!!!" Ignoring procedure, Chad started quickly pulling off his jacket to wrap around her tiny frail body. He pressed it into the box and started pulling it around her to get her warm. He was possibly destroying evidence, but he was not letting this waif die when he could save her. Nick was screaming details and circumstances into his radio. Another patrol car in the vicinity was racing to the scene. A few scant moments behind it was an ambulance with a huge African-American paramedic and a tall athletic and attractive EMT. By time they arrived, Chad was holding the nearly frozen juvenile in the back seat of his patrol car and Nick had the area secured with police tape.

"You find a girl dumped at the curb in a box and you taint the scene by pulling her out of it?" Captain Jim Brass's breath formed in the cold night air as he confronted Wilson. The once quiet neighborhood was busy with patrol cars, an ambulance and a narrow stream of cars passing through the other lane. Blue and red and white lights flashed over the area.

"I wasn't thinking, sir…" Chad looked to the girl getting attention in the back of the ambulance. "I just… I just started life-saving procedures."

"You wasn't thinking?" Brass turned to Robey. "And what were you doing?"

"Securing the area, sir…" Nick looked to him. "I sent a call to dispatch for the ambulance and the footage for the camera checked…."

"Footage was sent straight to CSI…" Gil Grissom, the head of the Las Vegas CSI division spoke up at that moment. Tall and bearded with obvious stoic overtones, he looked to his people on the site. Dark of hair and dashing enough to be an actor, Nick Stokes was photographing the box and deciding how to handle it. It was a package for a very old make and model of TV; tracing its owner was going to be difficult. A few feet from him, attractive and doe-eyed Sara Sidle was trying to talk to the young girl.

"Hi…" Sara beamed toward her. "Can you tell me your name?"

The girl didn't react. She was wrapped up heavy on the stretcher. All she did was blink and look around. All this fuss… She'd never seen so many people before….

"We haven't got a reaction from her since we got here." EMT Louise Foster answered.

"Her body temp was three degrees below normal when we got here." Paramedic Roger Perry added. "No way to tell how long she's been out here…" Sara could only look at the tiny young lady and palm her hair out of her face. Her little cargo was extremely adorable with wide brown eyes, long curly hair and a lean face shaped by her chin. Nick was perusing the area around the area looking for something to photograph besides the on-lookers in the Laundromat parking lot. The box was placed in the CSI vehicle to take to the lab to be processed for prints other than the two cops on patrol. A father himself, Brass, however, had to realize he might have broken procedure to try and save the girl's life. Grissom was speaking on his cell phone with his left index in his left ear blocking out the ambient noise from the street. Getting the gist of another case in the area, he switched off his phone and turned to his people.

"Sara…" He called to her. "Stick with the ambulance and try to get what you can… Nick, you're with me."

"Another case?" Nick watched as Grissom pulled his case out of their vehicle and gestured him to come along. A police car would watch their vehicle till their return, but right now, down the street and up the block at the light was another job for them. It was a good jaunt for them to cover, and they were both in good shape. From what Grissom understood, two perps had held up a gas station nine miles down the line, but instead of trying to find out who they were, they were going to their assistance. The two hoods had raced from the scene of their crime in a dark blue SUV with lightning streaks painted on it, and the exact same vehicle had been found flipped over at the intersection. Nick saw it as soon as he turned the corner. Flipped over and resting on its top with four wheels sticking straight up, he jogged the final two hundred feet to the scene carrying his gear. Grissom looked to him with interested curiosity. From criminal to victim in one night….

"What is this?" Grissom asked first. Police were guiding the traffic around the scene. Lieutenant Jack Coleman was on the scene as rescue squad workers used jacks to lift the vehicle and get to the idiots pinned underneath out to arrest them.

"We don't know…" Coleman looked to Grissom and tried to talk over the sounds of traffic going by them. "We were heading to the robbery scene when we came upon them, but we have no idea how they ended up like this…"

"I'm going to kill that blonde!!!" Aching, groaning and hostile, Horace Trainer was pulled out from under the flipped vehicle ready to be cuffed. "There ought to be a law against standing in the street!!!"

"You swerved to miss a pedestrian and did this?" Nick mugged in disbelief at the damage.

"What pedestrian?" Trainer was bleeding from his lip as he was handcuffed. "Super-bimbo dropped down out of no where and flipped us over!!! I wanted to run her down!"

"Mr. Trainer…" Grissom smirked a bit as the gusts of cars heading by rushed over him. "Are you using or under any substances right now?"

"I told you. Horse…" The accomplice, Joey Brenner, was pulled out next and arrested. He was a skinny gaunt figure quick for holdups; his taller, more brawny buddy did the driving. "They'd never believe us! We were flipped over by a chick in a red cape!!!"

"Was there a big "S" across her chest?" Nick was kidding. Grissom eyed him with slight annoyance.

"Yeah!!!!" Brenner sneered while clutching his side as two officers rode with him in the ambulance. Coleman was guiding the arrest and expecting the CSIs to come up with the extra evidence to pin them to the gas station. Nick was more intrigued by the damage to the vehicle. It was the passing lane of the southbound side of Sands and Burbank close to the Desert Inn. Constant cars were breezing through the well-lit intersection as officers directed traffic. A few more minutes and the wrecker would be on the scene for the crashed vehicle. Nick started snapping photos on a new roll of film.

"What do you think, Nick?" Grissom grimaced and pondered over the crushed SUV.

"Only thing I can figure out is that they bounced off something." Nick was walking the perimeter of the vehicle as he panned over it with his flashlight. "You'd think that if they hit another vehicle that it'd still be on the site, but…" The stoplight over his head flashed to red, Nick stopped talking as he wandered in front of the ten-ton wreck of crushed steel and shattered glass. He had seen something, but what? He flashed his light back to the crushed in grill.

"Grissom…" He called over his superior and got ready to take a picture. Grissom looked up first, saw the look in Nick's face and ambled over to what he had found. He looked round once, and then noticed it. Warped into the front of the hood was the odd-shaped imprint of something that had hit the vehicle at a hundred and ten miles an hour…

It was shaped like a human hand.