Fandom:
CSI
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: GSR
Summary: Another
serial killer strikes Las Vegas--but this one has a twist.
Disclaimer: Most of the characters and situations in this story belong
to Alliance Atlantis, CBS, Anthony Zuicker and other entities, and I do
not have permission to borrow them. No infringement is intended in any
way, and this story is not for profit. All others belong to me, and if
you want to borrow them, you have to ask me first. Any
errors are mine, all mine,
no you can't have any.
Spoilers: through "Bull"
Note: this story includes the non-graphic deaths of children.
Believe it or not, I wrote the "home" line before it came up on the
show.
Many, many thanks to Cincoflex and Laura27md, betas extraordinare!
*********
When Sara woke that
afternoon, the revelation of the night seemed silly in the
extreme. She showered, made the bed with Grissom’s
pillow back in its proper place, and got ready for work, eager to go
back in and get Warrick’s report and the AFIS results.
It wasn’t until she was parking in the lab garage that the
logic of her thought came clear as well.
A pillow would make a perfect
weapon. It looks like our killer is using one.
Of course, the
fact that he’s sleeping on it makes this whole thing even
sicker...
She didn’t mention the similarity to Dr. Reyes, however; that
level of personal data wasn’t appropriate.
“I smelled an odor that reminded me of hair care
products,” she explained to her boss.
“Our killer may be using a pillow to smother his
victims.”
Reyes opened her mouth to answer, and her phone rang.
“Go check on your results,” she said, waving a hand
in dismissal as she picked up the receiver. “The
chaplet cases are now on the top of your priority list.”
Finally,
Sara thought, but the triumph was ironic. They still had so
little to go on that Sara suspected she would have plenty of time left
in her current shift for other cases.
“Anything?” she asked Jacquie as she swung into
Fingerprints.
The tech didn’t even look up from her work.
“About two thousand matches,” she said
absently. “Find me a better print and I can narrow
that down.”
That
many--there’s no point in spending time on those until we
have more data. Sara thanked her, getting a
vague grunt in return, and went to find a free terminal to check her
e-mail.
Sure enough, Warrick had sent her an informal report. Joseph Sanchez’s mom
was about to remarry, he had written. His dad’s out of the
picture, and while I wasn’t able to find out much first-hand,
Brass says that Mom’s boyfriend is bad news.
According to him, word is Mom kept trying to farm Joseph out to family
and friends.
Sara winced. They’d all seen it before;
less-than-stellar parents who decided that their new lives
shouldn’t include their own children. The lucky
ones ended up with a competent relative, but there were many who
weren’t so fortunate.
Memory intruded: a small body soaked with stale water, one arm twisted
until it snapped--a mother pretending to grieve--
She shook the old case away, and went to talk to Nat.
“The usual,” the coroner reported with disgust,
nursing a cup of coffee at her desk. “Traces of
diphenhydramine in his stomach as well as his bloodstream, and the same
light bruising around the nose and mouth. Any luck on your
end?”
Sara shook her head, resting a hip on Nat’s desk and stealing
a lemon drop from the jar Nat kept next to her in-box.
“Nope. The chaplet is just like all the others, and
the print isn’t enough for a real match.”
Nat scowled over her mug. “The press is going to
get a hold of this any day now, and boom--circus.”
“I know.” Sara sucked on the candy, which
abruptly reminded her of the last time she’d helped Grissom
wash off the reek of decomp. “We’re lucky
they haven’t already.”
“Get ready for it,” Nat advised darkly.
“Ms. Sanchez was in here last night to I.D. her son, and
while I hate to malign someone who’s just lost a kid, she was
looking to aim her hysterics in whatever direction would get her the
most attention.” She wrinkled her nose.
“Said something about calling all the TV stations, for
starters.”
Sara blew out a breath. “That fits with what
Warrick told me about the family. Damn
it!” She ran an angry hand through her
hair. “Why can’t we catch this
guy?”
“You will,” Nat said with serene
confidence. “Sooner or later he’ll screw
up, and you guys will fall on him like a ton of bricks.”
“I’d settle for one brick if it would give me a
lead,” Sara sighed, her burst of anger fading.
Nat reached out and nudged her arm. “Go talk to
Lake. She might have something for you.”
“I hope so.” Sara rose, taking another
lemon drop. “See you later.”
“I hope not!” Nat called cheerfully after her, and
Sara made a rude gesture as she left, closing the door on
Nat’s snicker.
Ronnie was eating lunch in the breakroom, looking a little bleary-eyed,
but she also wore a faint air of catlike satisfaction that Sara thought
she recognized.
“Date went well, huh?” she asked as she headed for
the coffeepot.
“Yemph.” The rookie swallowed her
mouthful. “Very well, thanks.”
Sara grinned, and refrained from teasing her. Greg she is not.
“Find anything last night?”
Ronnie grimaced. “Nothing but lots and lots of
cardboard. I’m going to have nightmares about box
attacks.”
“The boxer rebellion?” Sara asked, then mentally
smacked herself. Gil
is such a bad influence.
Ronnie, her mouth full again, didn’t get a chance to reply
before their phones beeped. The text message ordered them to
a hit-and-run on the other side of town, and she took the rest of her
sandwich along as they left.
Calculating vectors and impacts kept them occupied for the rest of the
shift, and Reyes appeared at the end of it to chivvy them both out of
the lab, hearing no protests. Sara didn’t make much
of one; after last night’s double, she was tired.
The house was still echoingly empty; Grissom wasn’t due back
until at least the next day. Sara slept badly, but since she
had the next shift off, it didn’t really matter.
She went for a run, did some grocery shopping, and vacuumed, filling
the afternoon with mundane chores and something very close to
contentment.
She’d loved her apartment, in part because it was her very
own space that she could arrange and decorate at will; after years of
living in other people’s houses and in dorm rooms or shared
apartments, it was a blessing to possess a space that belonged to her
alone. Cleaning and organizing it had filled many restless
hours when she couldn’t sleep or settle down, and while it
had been slightly cramped, every inch of it was hers.
She’d expected to have trouble sharing again. But
much to her surprise, it hadn’t been a problem; mainly, she
supposed, because they had moved into a new space that had belonged to
neither of them previously, and partly because it had plenty of room
for all their things.
What she also hadn’t expected was the quiet pleasure she took
in maintaining that space, their mutual household. Shopping
and cooking was more fun for two; she still hated scrubbing the tub,
which Grissom handled anyway, but washing dishes and windows and
dusting shelves brought her a warmth that even her apartment had never
provided. It wasn’t just her space; it was theirs.
Theirs alone.
She kept expecting the phone to ring and announce that a new victim of
the chaplet killer had been found, but it remained silent.
It was dark by the time she got around to eating supper.
After the dishes were in the washer, Sara picked up the receiver and
sat down on the couch, hitting the number-two speed dial.
After a ring and a half, a familiar voice answered.
“Sara.”
She smiled. “Hi Gil. How’s the
case going?”
Grissom snorted softly. “Not too badly, though it
would have been better if they’d managed to take proper
samples before I got here.”
“Ouch. Not up on entomological procedure,
huh?”
She could all but see his half-shrug and the quirk of his
mouth. “It’s a specialized
field. How was your day, sweetheart?”
Sara leaned back. “Quiet. I miss
you.”
Grissom sighed. “I miss you too. Next
time I’m going to insist on a police helicopter to travel to
the far corner of the state; I’m getting too old for these
long drives.”
“Nobody who could keep me this, ah, satisfied, is old,
Gilbert.” Sara smirked. She knew he
wasn’t entirely serious, but it was still fun to yank his
chain a little.
Grissom huffed, pretending outrage.
“That’s cruel, honey. How am I supposed
to sleep now?”
They teased each other for a few minutes, bridging the loneliness with
light words, and Sara marveled again at the difference Grissom made in
her life. I
was lonely before; but I didn’t know how good it felt to be not lonely.
When she hung up, Sara was content and even a bit sleepy.
Grissom’s analysis was well on the way to
completion and he would be heading home in the morning, which meant she
would see him soon.
But sleep was not so cooperative. She slept for about five
hours, fighting nightmares of small children trapped in tiny rooms,
before giving up and going back downstairs to shove a packet of popcorn
in the microwave. When it was done, she took it into their
living room. Grissom had invested in a plasma-screen
television the year before; Sara had teased him about it, but he had
declared it necessary for the proper viewing of the World Series.
As Sara set her DVD of Real
Genius into the player, she admitted privately that it was
pretty cool.
Something warm and soft was moving over her eyelids. Sara
held still, enjoying the sensation as it drifted across her temple and
down her cheekbone, but by the time it reached her lips she was smiling
widely.
Grissom kissed her anyway, a messy sweet kiss that ended with her
pulling him down into the bed with her. He went willingly,
and Sara finally pried her eyes open to see that he was still
dressed. She gave him another kiss and then looked at the
clock, which told her it was 1:13 p.m.
“You’re late,” she said severely.
“I was expecting you by eleven.”
Grissom shifted so that he was looming over her.
“Sorry,” he said cheerfully.
“There was a construction detour on 93, I had to go through
Moapa.”
Sara let her hands wander down and yank his shirt from his
pants. “Excuses, excuses.”
His own hands weren’t idle either, and Sara sucked in a
breath as one found its way under the sheets to her bare
breast. “I’m here now,” he
breathed into her ear.
“Mmm,” she purred, her hands going lower
still. “Yes you are.”
“Indubitably,” Grissom agreed, and yanked the sheet
away.
The resultant wrestling match had them both laughing, and was
eventually declared a draw.
“Missed you,” Grissom said softly, much
later. He was playing pillow for her, with the weight of his
arm a heavy comfort across her shoulders, and Sara rubbed her cheek
against his chest.
“It was lonely with you gone,” she confessed, and
heard his heart speed up a bit under her ear. His arm
tightened.
“I don’t ever want to come home to an empty house
again,” he said. “You don’t
know how good it made me feel, Sara, to know that someone was waiting
for me at the end of my drive.”
Sara smiled, knowing he could feel it. “Does that
mean you’re never going to let me out of the house
again?” she teased, and Grissom snorted.
“As if I’d dare.”
But his grip didn’t loosen, and Sara damned her habit of so
often making light of intimate things. She lifted her head to
meet his eyes, and repeated what she’d told him months
before. “Gil...you are the only home I’ve
ever known.”
His mouth twitched, his eyes glittered for an instant; then he was
kissing her again, sweet and passionate and so loving that her heart
ached.
“Marry me,” he muttered against her lips.
Sara laughed, drawing back just enough to hold up her left hand, where
his grandmother’s ring sat. “This
isn’t evidence enough for you?”
Grissom shrugged, and caught her hand to kiss it too, right across the
band, and again where the beesting had pierced her skin.
“We should set a date.”
“True.” Sara pulled her hand away and
leaned forward to his lips again, more interested in continuing what
his body had begun below the rumpled sheet.
“Later.”
Before he could argue, she slid all the way on top of him, and whatever
he’d been about to say was lost as she kissed him most
thoroughly.
“Later,” he agreed against her mouth, and then it
was past time for such discussions.
Sara was very nearly late for work that evening, but her good mood was
again ruined as soon as she got in by the news that a sixth chaplet
murder had taken place.
The body, a seven-year-old boy, had been found out off Highway 51 on a
stretch of waste ground--not far, in fact, from the spot where
Catherine and Mike Keppler had processed a naked young woman.
Dayshift had actually caught this latest one, but so late in the day
that they had merely passed it on to Swing, since Sara would have been
primary anyway.
Sam Oguntayo was already with the body by the time Sara
arrived. He pulled his thermometer from the corpse and looked
up at Sara. “Ten hours.”
She’d been asleep then, and Grissom driving home.
Sara dropped to her knees and reached out to pull the chaplet free of
the small hand. “Damn it.”
Oguntayo didn’t comment, but the flash of his eyes agreed
with her.
Ronnie, who had photographed the scene, came back from a perimeter
search. “Nothing,” she reported tiredly.
Sara held back further swearing and bagged the chaplet.
“Did you get a chance to search the medals yet?”
“Nope.” Ronnie dropped into a crouch on
the other side of the boy, watching Sara’s hands as she
sealed the bindle.
“Go back to the lab and run it now. Be
thorough.” Her voice was calm and cold, and Ronnie
straightened hastily, almost overbalancing.
“Yes ma’am.” She strode off,
and Sara ignored Oguntayo’s interrogative glance.
Ronnie knew Sara wasn’t angry at her.
“I want this guy,” Sara said softly, brushing the
corpse’s curly hair with the lightest touch possible.
Oguntayo grunted agreement.
It didn’t help Sara’s temper when the press arrived
halfway through her processing of the scene. Fortunately for
the coroner, he had already bagged and loaded the corpse and was able
to slip away, but she had to stay and finish while the cops tried to
keep the reporters behind the tape.
She’d had years of practice ignoring their shouted questions
and the cameras were too far away for their flashes to interfere with
her vision, but eventually she had to gather up her pitifully few
evidence envelopes and run the gauntlet to her SUV. The cops
couldn’t help her; they had to keep the more impudent
photographers from slipping past them.
Sara ducked under the tape and shouldered through the crowd, keeping
her eyes facing front and letting their battering waves of words wash
over and past her.
“CSI Sidle, is it true there are more than two such
victims?”
“Ms. Sidle, do you have any suspects?”
“How did this victim die?”
“Ms. Sidle, what do you think of the allegations of
incompetence being made against the Las Vegas lab?”
None of the questions were new, and Sara managed to get past them
all. Fortunately for their microphones and the last shreds of
her temper, all the reporters observed the tacit two-foot neutral zone
around her vehicle and let her close the door and pull away without
incident. She knew her face would be on the eleven
o’clock news that night, but at least it would lack her
voice.
Sara took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she reached the
highway, trying to calm herself. She would have to do the
same thing over again when she reached the lab, and once more when she
left it, unless the Sheriff or the lab’s director put forth
some kind of press release and called them off.
She swore softly, bitterly, into the emptiness of the SUV. The pressure’s on,
now. And all it will do is make him harder to catch.
The drive gave her time to calm a little, however, and she shouldered
her way past the small crowd of reporters into the lab in hopes that
Harris or Nat could come up with something at last.
Dr. Reyes met her almost as soon as she got through the
doors. “We have an I.D. on the latest
victim,” she said in a low voice, her eyes serious, and Sara
stiffened slightly. “Gavin George.”
She started down the hall towards the Trace rooms, and Sara followed,
keeping pace. “This is a good thing,
right?” Sara asked, wondering dismally what had gone wrong in
Gavin’s life to make him a target of the killer.
“Yes, but it throws another variable in the
pattern. Gavin is from Moapa. He disappeared from
there early this morning.”
Reyes kept talking, but Sara simply couldn’t understand the
words. She stared at her boss, dimly realizing that her feet
had stopped moving, but most of her brain was too awash in a cold
shocked disbelief to pay attention.
Moapa.
Detour on 93.
Early this morning.
Grissom smiling down at her in bed, eyes brilliant with love and
delight.
Moapa.
Reyes stopped and turned back, and Sara saw the frown forming on her
face as the world came back into focus.
“Sara? Are you all right?”
The frown was concern. Sara sucked in a breath, struggling to
get her emotions under control, and Reyes slipped a hand under
Sara’s near elbow. “Sara?”
“Sorry,” Sara managed. “I, uh,
I got dizzy for a second there.”
“Did you get any sleep at all while you were off?”
Reyes scolded gently, tugging Sara back towards the lobby.
“Don’t answer that, it’s
rhetorical.”
Sara let herself be tugged, and allowed Reyes to push her down onto one
of the padded benches that were placed for the convenience of waiting
visitors, but she balked at having her head pressed down between her
knees. “Julia, I’m fine. It was
just a second or two.”
Reyes set aside the evidence box she’d pulled from
Sara’s grip. “Any chance you could be
pregnant?” she asked calmly.
“Not really,” Sara answered, trying to keep her
tone light while her mind spun over the bombshell that Reyes had
unknowingly dropped. “Isn’t that an
invasion of privacy?”
Reyes snorted delicately. “Trust me, I’d
rather invade your privacy than let HR find out you’d spent
three months of pregnancy inhaling fingerprint powder.
Stephen,” she said over her shoulder to the receptionist at
his desk, “do me a favor and run get Sara a drink of water,
would you?”
The tall man nodded and rose, vanishing around the corner.
Sara took a deep breath and let it out slowly, squeezing her eyes shut
and reaching for calm. She needed to think about this right
now--
Reyes’ phone chimed, and she pulled it from her hip and swore
mildly. “I have to take this. You
sit--“ she pointed at Sara, “--for at least five
minutes. I’ll find you later.”
With an absent pat to Sara’s shoulder, she hurried off,
opening her phone as she went.
Sara looked around, automatically making sure that the evidence box was
still right next to her ankle. At this time of night the
lobby was fairly quiet, with the reporters who had plagued her barred
from the lab by policy and the rather large patrolman standing guard
outside the main doors. People were passing to and fro in the
corridors, but the only person entering the lobby was Stephen, who had
returned with a paper cone of water from the cooler around the corner.
He gave it to her with a sympathetic smile, and Sara thanked him,
sipping at its coldness as he returned to his desk and donned his
headset. Sara braced her elbows on her knees and looked down
into the cup, one finger idly tracing its seam.
Moapa.
Everything within her rebelled violently at the thought of Grissom as a
killer, let alone a serial kidnapper and murderer of
children. This was a man who usually couldn’t even
remember to wear his gun, for pity’s sake, the most gentle
lover she’d ever had, someone who abhorred violence--who
loathed those who hurt children--
Her fingers tightened on the paper as Sara realized bleakly that that
last qualification was not exactly in Grissom’s favor just
now.
She stopped short of crumpling the cone, instead tossing back the rest
of the water to get it out of the way so she could put the cup down and
clasp her hands together, hard.
Gil.
He had trained her to follow the evidence, his own most unswerving
guide. The evidence never lied, he would say again and
again. His entire career--until recently, his life--was dedicated
to finding out the truth, no matter how terrible or bizarre.
The truth might condemn or set free or just repulse, but it was always
the ultimate goal.
Oh, God.
It might have been a prayer. Sara pressed the heels of her
hands into her eyes, as if the pressure would wake her from this
overwhelming sensation of a bad dream. The evidence...that
errant silver hair, the boy from Moapa, the ghost of cotton and of a
male who used neither cologne nor aftershave...Sara repressed a sudden
desire to race home and count the pillowcases.
Moapa.
Shit, Yakima.
The first case, at least the first one she’d processed--Roger
had been taken from Yakima.
Which just happened to be on Grissom’s route back from
Seattle.
This
isn’t possible.
It can’t be.
But the evidence stared her in the face, as if it were all laid out on
the shiny floor in front of her. All the points
they’d so painstakingly gathered concerning their
suspect--Catholic, a forensics expert, concerned about children--it all
fit.
And while Sara could swear that she’d seen no signs of this
kind of insanity in Grissom, she had heard the same protestations a
thousand times from shocked and disbelieving spouses, parents,
friends. She knew quite well--and from older, darker personal
experience--that violence and insanity could be hidden under a normal
façade, sometimes for years on end.
Her stomach flipped, and for a few seconds Sara was afraid she was
going to vomit, right there onto the lobby floor. She gritted
her teeth and swallowed repeatedly, forcing herself to breathe deeply,
absolutely refusing to lose control so thoroughly. Eventually
the feeling ebbed, leaving her only slightly queasy.
All
right. Think about this logically. None of the
evidence indicts Gil directly. The hair could
still be, arguably, cross-contamination; the chaplets would seem to
indicate a strong faith, while Grissom claimed he was hardly Catholic
at all any longer. The scent she’d caught could
have been a trick of memory, and wasn’t even official
evidence anyway.
The two kidnapped boys, though…that was damning.
The timing was just too precise. It could be coincidence, but
Sara had testified at far too many trials to believe that a prosecutor
wouldn’t make hash of those odds.
But
it’s Gil.
Why would he suddenly start murdering children?
Grissom claimed to be happier than ever before now that he was sharing
his life with her, and certainly his actions seemed to support that--he
was more relaxed, more open, more serene than he had been in
years. People didn’t tend to suddenly start killing
out of the blue; there was often a trigger of some kind.
Sara grimaced, a twinge running down her arm. Yeah. A trigger.
Having your lover kidnapped, tortured, and found nearly dead of
exposure could certainly affect a man, at that.
She closed her eyes, deliberately forcing down the fury and fear,
reaching for a chill calm. Ethics told her she should
immediately recuse herself from the case, pass it to Reyes herself or
over to Dayshift, even if she couldn’t bear to mention to
anyone the fact that Grissom had swung through Moapa just about when
Gavin disappeared.
But she knew damn well that she would do no such thing.
Grissom has to
have an alibi for at least a couple of these murders. If I
hand over the case, it’ll lose momentum; I’m the
primary on most of the murders, I have all the data. I have
the best chance of finding the killer.
Sara knew her logic was skewed, but she didn’t
care. Some things were more important than rules and
regulations.
And if you stay
on the case, whispered the voice she was pretending not
to hear, you can prove
Gil innocent before someone railroads him.
She didn’t think Ecklie would actively lead a vendetta
against Grissom, but she wasn’t too sure he would look for
other suspects, either.
Lifting her chin, Sara rubbed her hands on her thighs and stood,
scooping up the paper cup and her box of evidence. That works. I find out
what alibis he has, and I catch this sonofabitch.
She tossed the cup into the nearest trash can, gave Stephen a nod, and
headed for Trace Three.
As usual, the chaplet and the other scraps of evidence from the scene
yielded no clues. Sara packed the items away and went in
search of Ronnie, finding her frowning at a monitor in A/V.
It didn’t surprise Sara that she’d ended up there;
the audiovisual techs did tend to have the best equipment, and Ronnie
was certainly geek enough to appreciate it.
“Hey Sara,” she said as Sara entered, the glow of
the screen making Ronnie’s face appear older in the darkened
room. “I’ve got news.”
“Good news, or bad news?” Sara asked, leaning
against the computer table.
Ronnie’s nose twitched comically.
“Depends on your point of view.” She did
something with the computer mouse, and an array of images sprang up on
the screen--rank after rank of metal crosses.
“First off, the crucifix is pretty generic. You can
buy them in bulk wholesale from religious supply houses and crafting
sites. Unfortunately they’re pretty crudely cast,
and it’s a common pattern. They could have come
from any one of five or six companies, most of which are
foreign.”
“Mm.” Sara tapped her fingers on the
table. “Hard to track a purchase, I take
it.”
Ronnie nodded. “Yeah. I mean, we could
try, but...” She let the sentence trail off, and
Sara knew what she meant. There were times when brute-force
bludgeoning of the data could produce results, but eventually one
reached a tipping point of time and resources. The crime lab
had infinite reserves of neither.
“Okay. What about the medals?”
Ronnie brightened. “There is where it gets
interesting. Remember how I said there was no such thing as a
Saint Nicholas chaplet?”
She moved the mouse again, and new pictures took the place of the old;
this time they were medals, round and oval, all stamped with the image
of a man. “Every example I could find of a Saint
Nicholas medal has only one loop, at the top. But to form the
middle part of a chaplet, a medal has to have at least two.”
The medals disappeared, replaced by a large shot of a
crucifix. Ronnie made the pointer circle the medal securing
the center. “See how there are two loops at the top
and one on the bottom?”
Sara nodded slowly, bringing the victims’ chaplets to her
mind’s eye. Sure enough, the chains were fastened
through a loop at the top of the medal--and one at the
bottom. “So you’re
saying...” She already knew, but she let Ronnie
finish.
“The killer is most likely making his own medals, same as
he’s making the chaplets,” the rookie said with a
slight air of triumph. “It wouldn’t be
that hard with the right equipment.”
“You’re right,” Sara said, smiling down
at Ronnie. “He could also have someone making them
for him, though, a custom job.”
Ronnie deflated a little. “Yeah, that’s
true. Should I start looking at custom designers?”
“Local ones. Call around, see if anyone’s
had an odd order come in lately. Someone had to design the
die for this, if nothing else.” She narrowed her
eyes, thinking. “See if anyone’s
purchased this kind of equipment, too.”
Ronnie nodded, beginning to call up a business directory on the
screen. “And when you’re done with
that,” Sara added wryly, “you can start on the
pawnshops.”
Ronnie looked up at her, startled.
“Pawnshops? What for?”
“Silver purchases.” Sara’s
smile widened. “Think about it, Ron. If
he’s making the medals himself, he has to get the silver from
somewhere.”
Ronnie rolled her eyes in self-disgust, and Sara left her to her
research.
Grissom was just as obsessive as Sara could be, but generally about
different things, and Sara blessed the tendency as she went through his
desk. He kept every receipt until it cleared, recorded his
gas mileage, even made himself lists of chores and errands.
Not that he always stuck to the latter, but it was one way to track his
behavior.
Except, Sara had to admit after two hours of search, she
couldn’t find anything that gave him an alibi for any of the
murders. In fact, there were receipts for gas that placed him
in both Yakima and Moapa at roughly the times the boys disappeared.
Sara stared down at the scraps of paper, fighting an odd panic and
struck with the insane desire to utterly destroy both
receipts. Which was stupid, because the same proof lay in
Grissom’s credit card records, but the impulse was still
there.
Biting her lip, Sara put everything back the way she’d found
it and left Grissom’s home office, closing the door behind
her and trying to figure out how she was going to conceal her turmoil
from him.
It’s
not exactly something I can just mention over breakfast.
“By the way, Gil, it turns out you’re the primary
suspect in the chaplet murders. Care to come down and give us
a statement?”
She threw herself down on the living room couch and stared at the
ceiling, images of those wretched chaplets floating in front of her
eyes. I know
him; he’ll go all noble or something and insist on turning
himself in, and I’m afraid that if they have him they
won’t look any further--
Sara closed her eyes, absolutely refusing to look at the cold doubt
that lurked at the back of her conviction.
What if the evidence was right?
She slept on the couch for a few uneasy, dream-ridden hours before
stumbling upright to brush her teeth and shower. As she did
so, she discovered that Nature had provided her with the perfect excuse
to offer Grissom concerning her mood; her period had begun.
I’m
always bitchy the first day or two. Combine that with the
latest murder, and he won’t think anything else is wrong.
Sara stood for a long time under the pounding hot water, vaguely sick
at the necessity of hiding the facts from Grissom. He
wasn’t the only one who had promised to be more open.
Sara’s growing years had taught her to guard her feelings and
her tongue, to hide vulnerabilities from those who could use them
against her. Grissom had often been the one chink in her
armor when it came to emotion, but it had still taken her a long time
to form the habit of verbally expressing her deeper feelings.
Deliberate effort on both their parts had been necessary to counteract
decades of learned caution.
It was bitter to be keeping secrets again.
Grissom was in the kitchen when Sara came downstairs in her robe;
savory scents met her on the stairs, and she detected artichokes with
bay leaves and what was probably a soufflé. He
greeted her with a smile, and Sara gave him a kiss as though that
morning were like any other, but when she sat down at the kitchen table
and he started asking casual questions about her day she found herself
just short of snapping at him.
Wincing, Sara was about to apologize, but Grissom forestalled her with
a steaming mug and a kiss on the forehead. Sara stared down
at the tea. “What?”
“Need some Motrin?” Grissom asked. When
she switched her stare to him, he grinned.
“You’re not the only one who keeps track of your
pills, sweetheart.”
Her smile wavered into tears, and then he was holding her, stroking her
hair and teasing her gently about hormones, and Sara sniffed them back
and hugged him tight, wishing she never had to let go. He can’t be the
killer. It’s impossible.
But after they’d eaten and read together and Grissom was
sound asleep, Sara found her reluctant feet taking her to the linen
closet. She counted the pillowcases carefully, and frowned.
Nine?
Seven here, two on the bed--I thought we only had eight total--
Pillowcases come
in packs of two.
Oh God.
This time it was definitely a prayer.
She left for work early, before Grissom woke.
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