Chapter One
I watch the clouds go sailing;
I watch the clock and sun.
Oh, I watch myself depending on
September when it comes.-"September When It Comes"-Roseanne Cash
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer and CBS. No money is being made and no infringement is intended. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders belongs to me.
"September WhenIt Comes" is the property of Roseanne Cash and RCA, and is available on her record, Rules For Travel(2003).
A/N: After four years in HP fandom, I started this fic on a whim. I needed fresh characters and a new playground. Those of you following my magnum opus need not fear; I'm still plugging away. I just had a plot bunny and a burning desire to try my hand at CSI.
As in my other WIP, a character has a disability. If this offends you or sets off your badfic sensor, leave now. I can do no more than write what I know.
This was begun prior to Season 6, so Greg's sudden marriage was happy serendipity.
Fifteen minutes into his shift at the Las Vegas crime lab, Greg Sanders had no idea that the fabric of his life was about to unravel. He would not be aware of the fact for another three hours, and in that time, he would make small talk with Archie Johnson, the AV and computer tech, engage in idle banter with Nick Stokes and Warrick Brown, and use the restroom. He would also catch the glint of the plain, golden wedding band on the third finger of his left hand and allow himself a smile. When the message of calamity came down, writ large in the lines of Detective Jim Brass' face and the haggard, haunted eyes of Gil Grissom, it would be to the glimmer of gold and the fleeting flush of happiness that he would anchor himself.
For now, though, the earth was still solid and reassuring beneath his feet, and the twinkling band was hidden beneath two layers of latex gloves as he sorted through the evidence from his latest case, a suspicious circs case involving a fifty-seven-year-old widower, a vast fortune, and a buxom bride thirty years the deceased groom's junior. To hear Brass tell it, there was also an obnoxious only son and his shady Vegas lawyer soon to enter the picture, and he could only imagine the fireworks that would erupt then.
He hummed as he worked, and his head bobbed to the rhythm of a song only he could hear. If he'd had his druthers, he'd have his radio blasting, but Grissom, an avowed lover of classical music and all things orderly, loathed the strident discord of punk and the sweet aria of three chords and an attitude problem. What had he called it again? His brow furrowed as he searched his memory for the conversation in question. Ah, yes. "A cacophony of the pathological mind."
"Philistine," Greg sniffed as he carefully unsealed an evidence bag containing the hotel bed linens upon which the dearly departed Mr. Proulx had spent his last evening.
"Hey, now, I ain't that bad," came the sardonic reply from the doorway, and he looked up to see Warrick Brown ambling into the room, one hand shoved into the pocket of his black jeans.
"Hey, Warrick." He jerked his head in casual acknowledgement. "No hot case for you?"
Warrick snorted. "Not yet, but I've only been here five minutes. Looks like you're busy, though." He came inside the room for a better look at the bagged objects scattered over the table.
"Indeed I do," Greg agreed. "What you see here are the silent witnesses to the sad demise of one Mr. Gerard Proulx, a fifty-seven-year-old industrial magnate found dead in his hotel suite at the Tangiers." He gestured grandiloquently at the various evidence bags.
"Homicide?"
"Not sure yet. However, I can tell you that he was found toes-up in bed, nude, with no obvious signs of foul play. Gave the poor maid who came in for the evening turn-down service quite the show, I'm told."
"No doubt. Sounds like you might have another member of the DFO club on your hands."
Greg blinked, nonplussed. "DFO club?"
"The Done Fell Over club. We get a couple new members every year. People who are fine one minute and wearing a toetag the next. Doc opens them up, and lo and behold, he can't find anything wrong with them except for the fact that that they're stone cold dead. Maybe Mr. Proulx just had the big one."
"That may be, but since he left behind a vast fortune, a hotly contested will, and a new bride who was still cutting her teeth when her husband made his first million, a little caution never hurt." He smoothed the bed linens on the sterilized table top and pulled the magnifying light to himself.
"Ah, one of those," said Warrick sagely. "A guaranteed three-ring circus."
"Is this the voice of experience?" He peered into the magnifying glass.
"You better believe it." Warrick shook his head in wry recollection. "Back when I was a CSI Level One, one of my first cases involved an eccentric billionaire who had the bad form to pop off in the hot tub after a night of carousing and romance with his nubile young bride."
Greg paused in his examination of the bed linens, intrigued. "He didn't…you know…ride off into the eternal sunset-,"
"In the saddle?" Warrick finished for him. "The widow admitted that she and her geriatric Cassanova had played X-rated Lewis and Clark several times over the course of the evening, but we never found any evidence of little swimmers in the water or caught in the filter. All we found was a dead floater in the hot tub and an empty champagne carafe on the side of the tub. Doc opened him up and figured out he'd had a massive heart attack."
"Case closed?" Greg returned his attention to the magnifying glass.
"You'd think, and if I'd been in charge, it would've been, but I wasn't. Gris was, and he insisted on doing a full tox screen and analysis of the carafe contents. You know how obsessive he can get."
"Not obsessive, Warrick. Thorough. And it turned out my prudence was justified, was it not?" Gil Grissom strode into the room, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a sheaf of assignment slips in the other.
Warrick nodded. "Yeah. Turns out the old man had ingested a massive dose of digitalis just before his death, but when we checked his medical records, they showed he'd never had so much as had indigestion. There was no reason for him to have digitalis in his system, and when we checked his medicine cabinet, we didn't find any. We did find a bottle of Viagra, though."
"Go, Gramps," Greg muttered. His eyes narrowed as he spotted a speck of black particulate matter caught in the dense threads of the eight-hundred thread count sheets.
He reached for the tweezers, eyes still fixed on the speck. The twin layers of latex made his movements cumbersome, and as his fingers closed around the small, metal tool, his wedding band stood out in sharp relief.
Mrs. Greg Sanders is at home, waiting for me, he thought with private relish, and his lips twitched in a fleeting smile.
"Find something, Greg?" Grissom asked. His eyes were sharp and alert behind his glasses despite the bruised pouches of perpetual weariness beneath them.
"Maybe." He tweezed the particle between the tines and plucked it from the nest of Egyptian cotton. "Could be dirt, or it could liquid latex. I'll get it down to Hodges in Trace as soon as I finish up here." He opened a drawer beneath the table top and fumbled for the manila evidence envelopes he knew were kept there.
"Good." High praise coming from Grissom.
"So," he prompted as he dropped the substance into the envelope, "what happened to the floater in the hot tub? Digitalis in the wine carafe?" He sealed the envelope and set it aside.
Surprisingly, it was Grissom who picked up the thread of the tale. He took a sip of coffee from the Styrofoam cup before he spoke. "Yes. And in the Viagra. A more than lethal dose."
Greg whistled appreciatively. "The ole double whammy. Let me guess-Princess was the main beneficiary of Sugar Daddy's will, and she couldn't wait for him to die decently, so she decided to help things along."
"Digitalis, Mother Nature's helping hand," Warrick said drily.
"That's right, Greg," Grissom answered, and took another sip of coffee.
"There's one will that'll never be contested."
Grissom offered an enigmatic smile over the rim of his cup. "Especially not since the son went to jail, too." At Greg's obvious confusion, he continued. "The victim's son was a physician, and he and his stepmother were having an affair. Apparently, the victim discovered what was happening and had threatened to disinherit them both and divorce the wife. Rather than let that happen, the son filled his father's Viagra prescription with pills laced with digitalis and gave the wife some to slip into the champagne in case the tainted pills failed."
"Ouch."
"The lovebirds received life sentences."
"More like jailbirds," Warrick pointed out, and the corner of his mouth twitched in amusement.
"What happened to the money?" Greg slid another section of bed linen under the magnifying glass.
Grissom considered the question for a moment. "I'm not certain. Estate law was never my strong suit."
Greg quirked an eyebrow in surprise. "What's this? Could it be that the legendary Gil Grissom's vast pool of knowledge isn't bottomless after all?"
Another sip of coffee. Another secretive curving of thin lips. "Only a fool believes he has no limitations."
"Confucius?" Warrick ventured.
"Gil Grissom." He straightened his shoulders. "So, you see, Greg, one must not rush to judgment." He drained his cup and tossed it into the wastebasket just inside the laboratory door.
"I was a rookie," Warrick said, and though his tone was light, Greg did not miss the note of exasperated defensiveness in his reply.
Grissom was unfazed. "But you know better now, don't you?" he asked sedately.
Warrick nodded. "Thank God for that."
Grissom adjusted his glasses with a resettling of the earpiece against the curve of his ear. "Fascinating as this trip down memory lane has been, circumstances dictate a return to the present." He riffled through the assignment slips he held and slipped one from the sheaf. "There's been a probable robbery/homicide at 4234 Chesterton Avenue. Take Catherine."
Warrick took the proffered slip, scanned it, and tucked it into the pocket of his CSI-issue vest. "I'm on it." He tapped Greg on one thin shoulder. "Good luck with the DFO."
"See ya," Greg called, but Warrick was already out the door and disappearing down the hallway.
Grissom, too, headed for the door, shuffling the remaining assignment slips as he went, and then he paused at the threshold. "Greg?"
Greg did not look up from his work, but his shoulders tensed, and his fingers tightened involuntarily around the length of bedsheet. He thought he knew what was coming, and after seven months, it was a battle he was weary of fighting.
"I noticed you're wearing your wedding band under your gloves."
What don't you notice? he thought irritably, but he kept his voice neutral as he replied, "Yes."
"We've discussed this before, Greg." Grissom spoke as though he were addressing a recalcitrant and not-very bright child.
Yes, we have. Far too many times for my liking. It's none of your business. "Yes, we have, but there is nothing in the Clark County lab protocol that says I can't wear it. I've checked. Since the ring is a smooth band and possesses nothing that would cause perforation of the latex, the risk of cross contamination is miniscule, if not altogether impossible. Therefore, I am well within my rights to wear it."
"Miniscule is not-,"
Greg looked up from the bed sheet and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, dimly registering as he did so that he would have to sanitize and re-glove. The argument was giving him a headache.
"I understand your concern, Grissom, seeing as how you've expressed it roughly a thousand times since I got married. Really, I do. But until Ecklie issues a memo, the ring stays put."
At the mention of the assistant director's name, Grissom's lips puckered in an unconscious moue of disdain, and Greg was torn between the urge to snicker and the compulsion to apologize. The long-simmering feud between the two men was the stuff of legend among the CSIs and assorted lab techs, and for a while, there had even been a clandestine betting pool as to which of them would put the other on Doc Robbins' slab. Before it had dissolved last winter, Greg had placed a tenner on Grissom in the parking lot with a tire iron. No doubt the prospect of broaching the subject with his nemesis had soured the spittle in Grissom's mouth.
"We'll talk later." Pained, as though he had been stricken with a sudden malaise. Then he was gone, and the clip of his soles on the staid, grey linoleum faded as he retreated to the cocoon of his office, with its books and bugs pinned on cork boards and encased in tombs of glass and fetal pigs floating dreamily in clouds of formaldehyde.
Just like Nick, he thought for no reason at all, and shuddered.
He pushed the thought away and turned his mind to Grissom's parting comment. That he and Grissom would return to the matter of his wedding band and the Creeping Menace of Cross-Contamination was a certainty. While all of the other CSIs had patted him on the back, raised a toast to a long and happy union, and taken turns admiring his wedding band and making ancient but good-natured cracks about the old ball and chain, Grissom had merely raised his eyebrows speculatively over the rims of his glasses and eyed the ring in stone-faced silence. The first rumbling of discontent had come a week later, and they had been at surreptitious loggerheads ever since.
He was not particularly surprised by Grissom's reaction, nor was he offended. It was simply Grissom, pragmatism and logic, and in his world, there was no room for such trivialities as instinct or emotion or frivolity. Life existed to be studied and dissected and carefully classed, not lived and experienced and savored in all its colors and textures and subtle hues. Love and marriage and human connection were human constructs, and he had no need of them beyond passing clinical interest. He was a Vulcan in pressed chinos, and in his more whimsical moments, Greg suspected he slept with his eyes open. After all, what need did the dead have for slumber?
If Grissom had been aloof, the rest of the team had been pleased, if not a little hurt that they had been kept in the dark. He still winced to think of Catherine's exclamation of surprise when she had caught sight of the golden band during a coffee break in the staff lounge, breathless and fumbling and disbelieving.
Greg, is that what I think it is? she had said blankly as he stirred cream into his cup of Blue Hawaiian. She had crossed the distance between them in three brisk strides and bent to look at his hand.
Eighteen carats of gold and holy matrimony, he had replied breezily, and she had gaped at him as though he'd informed her of his election to the Papacy, mouth working as she struggled to gather her scattered thoughts.
What? How? When? Where? A rapid-fire litany, and she had shaken her head in a pendulous arc and switched sides in rhythm to her queries, and her hands had tugged fruitlessly at the air in front of her, a twainer gathering coils of rope. And then had come the question of questions, with a bewildered, beseeching wail and a petulant stamp of one flat-soled foot. For God's sake, who
A gentleman never marries and tells. He had waggled his eyebrows and hoped that would be the end of it, but her outburst had drawn the others to the room, and within moments, he had been besieged with outthrust hands and pats on the back and jovial inquiries. Even Hodges had ventured out of the Trace lab, test results clutched in one gloved hand. Ecklie had not been far behind, but his only contribution to the merry hubbub had been a terse "Get back to work."
And thus, his secret was out. Greg Sanders, former lab rat and spunky hedonist, was a bachelor no longer.
In retrospect, he supposed it would have done no harm to let them in on his secret, to flaunt his joy and his courtship as he flaunted his spiked hair, abominable fashion sense, and love of all things punk. Catherine had never been secretive about her failed romances or her daughter, and Nick and Warrick had often shared idle chatter about girlfriends come and long gone. It was the stuff of friendship and camaraderie, and he counted the team among his closest friends.
But for all of that, he hadn't told a soul. Not his father, with whom he rarely spoke, and not his Papa Olaf, who still puttered about his farm in Wisconsin, and who still called him every Christmas to ask if he'd gotten the cheese log he'd sent and regale him with tried-and-true secrets of Homje virility, and not his co-workers.
He could not say when the secrecy had started, or why. It was not born of malice or of shame, and now that the truth was out, he had no compunction about answering questions about his wife. It had simply happened, one second of omission into another, until it had become unbreakable habit. The silence had grown comfortable, and when the rare opportunity to confess had presented itself, he had let it pass.
That's a lie on both counts, said the amiable, gruff voice of Papa Olaf inside his head, and in his mind's eye, he saw him beside the barn in Wisconsin, dressed in his biballs and flannel shirt and beaten straw hat, gnarled, work-roughened hand wrapped around the shaft of a pitchfork embedded in a rick of sweet hay. A piece of hay protruded from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes narrowed in a perpetual squint.
You made the decision to keep her a secret the moment you fell. She was your treasure, your quiet pleasure. The first time you met her, she made you laugh until you had to make a mad dash to the restaurant bathroom with tears streaming down your face, and on the second date, you didn't make it at all. You sat on the lakeshore and howled, and when you could see, you waded into the lake to wash. The third date came, and the fourth, and every time she made you laugh, you rediscovered the joy uncovering the sins of your fellow men had stripped away.
By the tenth date, you had made up your mind, and you put away any thought of introducing her to the others. As good as they were, as steadfast as they are, they are tainted with the cloying reek of putrefying flesh and the echoes of untold depravity. They carry the stink of Luminol and Ninhydrin in their clothes and in the follicles of their hair, and despair and jaded cynicism has marked them with lines in the corners of their eyes and grooves in the downturned corners of their mouths.
She was clean and she was pure, and when you buried your nose in the hollow of her throat, she smelled of soap and sun and juniper. You were afraid that if you brought her to the lab or introduced her to Nick or Sara or Warrick, the smell of corruption and too much knowledge of the evil that men do would be passed to her, and the thought of rolling over in the night to find the piquant odor of disinfectant nestled in her hair made your stomach heave. She was yours, and you were damned if you'd see your private oasis polluted.
So you requested two weeks' personal leave, and since it was the first leave you'd ever requested in six years, Grissom approved it without asking why you needed it. You flew her to Palo Alto that Friday, and by Monday morning, you were standing before a justice of the peace in your rented suit and telling a wizened Mr. Magoo that you did and you would. Friday night, you took your husbandly privileges in a Westin on the beach, and Saturday afternoon, you took her surfing for the first time and watched the fire dance in her hair.
You took two weeks in the sun and sand and learned how to breathe again, and when the wheels of the plane touched down in Vegas, the twinkling lights of the Strip felt, for a moment anyway, like home. The next day, you went to work, and the only evidence of what you had done was the ring on your finger and the three-by-five photograph wedged into the door of your locker. There would be no fodder for Sara Sidle's perniciously wagging tongue. You were gregarious, not stupid, and you learned your lessons well.
He didn't need to ask what Papa Olaf meant by that. His cheeks still burned with mortification every time he remembered how casually Mina had tossed off the comment about his virginity, the glibness with which she had told him of Sara's treachery, as though the discussion of such private subjects was as common as breath. He had slunk away, face crimson beneath his blonde-tipped spikes, and resolved never to discuss his personal life again.
"More fool, me, as Papa Olaf would have said," he sighed, and peeled off his gloves.
He threw them into the bin marked Biohazard and kneaded his nape with one hand. The argument with Grissom and the subsequent soliloquy by Papa Olaf had given him a headache. It coiled at the base of his skull in a hot, throbbing knot and jabbed its sizzling tines into his temples in time to his heartbeat. He closed his eyes and inhaled the cool, inorganic, sterilized air of the lab. It tasted of alcohol and formica and the flat ozone tang of fluorescent lighting, and he scoured the tip of his tongue over the backs of his teeth to rid them of the taste.
He went to the counter on the other side of the room to get another pair of gloves and sanitize his hands. He had lost the thread of the song he'd been humming earlier, but he started another as he reached up and opened the cabinet that housed fresh gloves and the various kits a CSI in the throes of evidence-gathering might need. His fingers danced over the neatly stacked boxes of swabs and lancets and pipettes and SART kits and glided over the smooth domes of Luminol and canisters of Ninhydrin.
The gloves were in the furthest corner, and as he pulled them forward, his wrist jostled an unfamiliar bottle, and his brow furrowed at the muffled rattle of the contents, maracas in cotton batting. He set the box of gloves on the counter and groped among the shadowy confines of the cabinet until his fingers curled around what was unmistakably a pill bottle. He pulled it out and read the label.
"Excedrin," he muttered. "Must be my lucky day." He eyed the bottle in contemplative silence for a moment, and then unscrewed the cap and shook two of the innocuous white tablets into his palm.
Could be poison, you know, said the voice of prudence inside his head.
He stared at the pills in his palm. "Guess we'll find out." He shrugged and popped them into his mouth.
His tongue recoiled from the anise and lemongrass bitterness, and he swallowed with a grimace. "I sure could use a spoonful of sugar to help that medicine go down," he told the empty room, and replaced the cap on the bottle with a careless twist of his wrist.
He set the bottle down on the counter and made a mental note to remove it from the lab when he left. The cabinets in the laboratories were strictly for the storage of testing supplies and kits, and using them for storage of non-essential or personal items was strictly forbidden. Grissom would sprout an ulcer if he caught wind of it.
Greg smirked as he turned to the sink embedded in the center of the countertop, and opened the tap. They had circled neatly around to the topic of Grissom again, and he was not surprised. Grissom was the nexus from whence the rest of the lab had sprung, and he permeated every aspect of it. He was in the obsessively stacked boxes of swabs and the perfectly aligned manila envelopes. He was in the mandatory updating of personal information every thirty days, and in the nauseating specimens that often turned up in the staff refrigerator.
And in the astronomical success rate of the lab, though Conrad Ecklie would vigorously dispute that.
In his rare fanciful moments, he imagined that Grissom had made the lab, simply willed it into existence with the indomitable power of his will. It had sprouted from his head in a miraculous conception, whole and flawless and fully stocked with all the provisions and nostrums the arcane magic of forensics required. It was his castle, his plaything, his child of plaster and linoleum and glass, and it thrived or languished as he did, linked by an umbilicus time could not sever.
It was a lovely, poetic sentiment, but it was all bunk. The institution that he now ran with an inscrutable gaze and a whisper like a velvet hammer had existed long before he had, and it would exist long after Grissom had become a repast for the bugs he so admired. It was an institution built upon regulations and forms and unceasing bureaucracy, and it was a changeling that reflected the face of its caretaker. It held no loyalty, and it did not mourn, and when Grissom was dust and bones and fading memories beneath the scorching Nevada sun, it would embrace another without shame.
Waxing poetic tonight, murmured Papa Olaf, and he snorted in wry acknowledgement of the truth as he soaped his hands from fingertip to wrist. He took special care to soap his wedding band and the pale circle of flesh beneath.
There, Grissom, he thought smugly. Can't complain now. He turned off the tap with his elbows and pulled a fresh pair of gloves from the box.
He just might, and what will you do if the memo comes down?
He would cross that bridge if and when he came to it, but until then, the ring stayed. It was not religious conviction that cemented the ring to his finger-as a boy, he had been ambivalent on the matter of God, and after a year as a CSI, he was convinced that if God had ever trod the paths of heaven, he had abandoned them long ago-but a moral principle he could not shirk. He had invested three hundred dollars and his heart in it, and to so casually divest himself of an object he had sworn before a dozy California magistrate and two witnesses to cherish as Grace had slid it home with trembling fingers smacked of faithlessness, and of all the epithets that had ever been hurled at him, faithlessness had never been counted among them.
Speaking of Grace, he should call her soon. When he had left her, she had been seated at the computer, crutches propped against the side of the desk, splayed fingers flying over the keyboard in a mad dash to finish a copyediting job before the deadline. It had been all he could do to steal a kiss as he was bounding out the door, and odds were that she was sitting there still, hunched over the keyboard, cramping fingers slower but no less determined as she corrected mistakes with a stroke of the keys. It was likely she was also steadfastly ignoring the need for a shower or a bathroom break.
There was no need to call her. She was more than capable of puttering around the apartment without help, and even if she had stumbled or fallen, her personal attendant would be there with her until he-Greg-got off shift at eight in the morning. He would make sure she didn't slip in the shower or faceplant into the pot of boiling water on the stove, and when he came home just after sunrise, bleary-eyed and exhausted, he would find her at the kitchen table, clutching a mug of Blue Hawaiian and surveying him from behind her glasses.
But he fretted. As fiercely independent as she was, the instability caused by her ataxic Cerebral Palsy made her vulnerable, and fatigue and stress redoubled the effects. Sometimes, he came home to find her swaying drunkenly on her aluminum crutches, lurching and stumbling as her sleep-deprived brain tried desperately to decipher signals passed through damaged circuits. One leg would swing stiffly out, locked at knee and hip, and the crutch would follow suit, planted on the ground by arms trembling with exertion. The other foot would drag dispiritedly in pursuit of its fellow, and red-rimmed eyes would narrow with white-knuckled determination. It was a Herculean struggle between God's blunder and her unquenchable will, and more often than not, he watched it in silence. It had only taken once to learn that Grace would brook no pity.
But sometimes, he could not stop himself, and on those nights, he scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom over her slurred protests. She had her pride, and he loved her for it, but he had his limits, and he would not watch her struggle against her body and her vanity when he could prevent it with half a dozen strides and the crooks of his arms.
He would tuck her into bed, and in the quiet of their room, he would slip off his clothes and climb in beside her, and even as he mouth produced a litany of reasons why he had no right to coddle her, her body would tuck into his and her face would nestle in the curve of his neck. Ever the dutiful husband, he would grunt noncommittally at her drowsy tirade and let his fingers drift over the delicate crown of her head until her voice tapered into the soft sussurating sighs of deep sleep and her taxed muscles twitched and contracted to dreams of running without fetters. Only then would he bury his nose in the soft fire of her red hair and let the scents of woodsmoke and autumn leaves and determination deep as the marrow lull him to sleep.
It was fear, not pity, that lead him to call her every night during his shift, and it was fear that loosed demons of every stripe upon his imagination and made him see her splayed and helpless in the shower, one leg bent at an impossible angle and her crutches just beyond the reach of her wet, grasping fingers. It was sweet and sharp as addiction, and no matter how often he told himself that it was all nonsense, that the aide was there to protect against such an eventuality, the doomsday scenarios grew more gruesome in the spinning. The compulsion always won, and it gave him no peace until he heard her voice on the line, pleased and more than a little perplexed.
It was already there, nestled at the base of his spine like the promise of a cramp and tingling in the pads of his fingers. He flexed them to quell the persistent prickling itch of anticipation and thrust his hand into the glove pinched between thumb and forefinger. Anxious as he was to make certain that his wife's brains were not currently trickling down the shower drain in lazy, sinuous whorls of blood and tissue, he had a job to do. He snapped the latex tightly around his wrists and went back to the sheet that had become Mr. Proulx's shroud.
He was still at it ninety minutes later when Nick sauntered into the room, case folder tucked jauntily under one arm. "Hey, Greggo. Still at it?"
Greg straightened with a sigh and winced as several vertebrae crackled in protest at the sudden change in position. His eyes were hot and raw inside their sockets from endless staring, and he resisted the desire to rub them with the backs of his fingers.
"Yeah. The great scavenger hunt continues, but I'm almost finished. Just gotta swab a few suspicious stains and run ALS over the sheets to be sure I didn't miss anything."
Nick gave a derisive snort. "Hotel sheets like that, they'll light up like the Strip, man. Even swanky turns to spanky."
"The wit and witticism of Nick Stokes."
"It's true. Get anything interesting?" Nick drew nearer for a better look.
Greg shrugged. "Nothing that jumps out at me, if that's what you're asking. A few short and curlies, what looks like a nasal contribution, and a fingernail. As soon as I finish up, I'll take the whole kit and caboodle over to Hodges."
Nick's lips puckered in disgust at the mention of nasal mucus. "Nice."
"Who's taking a star turn in your armpit?" Greg nodded at the file folder peeking from beneath Nick's underarm.
"Nobody. Details on a B and E I'm working. No DB, just lots of broken glass, a missing stereo, and no viable suspects."
"Thrilling."
"Trust me. I've had more thrills on this job than I ever wanted. I'll take a nice, calm B and E any night of the week."
An awkward silence ensued. Nick's trials and tribulations were the stuff of CSI lore, and though the younger techs and dayshift employees discussed his travails with avid glee, they were anathema to those who knew and worked with him. None of them wanted to be the one who tipped his emotional fulcrum past the breaking point. Sixteen months after his entombment in a Plexiglass casket, he swore he was fine, and he smiled too much and laughed too loudly and too long, and though they knew it for a lie, they all smiled and nodded and told him they believed him, and when his back was turned, they shared conspiratorial glances and watched him from the corners of their eyes.
The silence spun out between them, and Greg suddenly found himself fascinated by the sheets that, five minutes before, he had sworn he never wanted to see again. He shuffled his feet and cleared his throat and fought the compulsion to drum his fingers on the table.
"Well, I'd better-," he began diffidently, and gestured feebly to the sheets.
"Yeah, I need to file this report." A quick smile stretched too wide and a voice too eager for the drudgery of the records room and its chronicles of lives cut painfully short.
The dead have no eyes to see and no tongues with which to speak, said a cold, brittle voice that brought hard knots of gooseflesh to the nape of his neck, and he fiddled restlessly with the adjustable neck of the magnifying glass, fingers throttling the narrow stem.
"Be my guest," he said, and was surprised at how shrill he sounded.
The disturbing, fragile grin remained firmly in place, but Nick's eyes flickered briefly to his coiled, crushing fingers, and for an instant, Greg saw a memory dancing in them, a rippling of shadows in the brightness of the room. Then it was gone, smothered by the forced jollity that was now as much a part of him as the Texas twang that occasionally reared its head when he was angry.
"Later," Nick said, and touched two fingers to his forehead in mock salute as he spun on his heel and departed.
When he had disappeared around the corner, Greg released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and groped for the protective goggles and the slender wand of the ALS light. Work would distract him, lull him into the numbing stupor of routine. Not for the first time, he wished for the blare of the radio and the pop and crackle of static from speakers pushed just beyond endurance. Sound and fury soothed him and made the time pass more quickly.
As soon as I get all trace to Hodges, I can call Grace. Buoyed by the prospect of her quiet voice, he donned the protective goggles, turned out the lights, and went to work.
Forty minutes later, he was burdened with dozens of trace envelopes and the nauseating knowledge that Nick had been right in his crude assessment of the hotel sheets. Under the eerie glow of the ALS light, he had discovered thirty-seven biological secretions invisible to the naked eye. Either Mr. Proulx had the sexual stamina of a crazed wildebeest, or the swanky did equal spanky. Neither possibility was pleasant to consider, and he made a mental note to bring his own sheets the next time he traveled.
Imagine the mattress, Papa Olaf mused genially.
There was a train of thought he had no intention of pursuing, please and thank you, and he pushed it away as he swung into the murky lair of David Hodges, Trace tech and mealy-mouthed sycophant extraordinaire.
"Sanders. To what do I owe the pleasure?" Hodges spared him a cursory glance over the top of his microscope, a wet mount slide balanced delicately between his fingers.
"Trace from a suspicious circs case."
Hodges gave a melodramatic sigh. "My work is never done. Put it over there, and I'll get to it when I can." He flapped a dismissive hand at the teetering mound of evidence bags and trace envelopes on the edge of his workspace. "Did you ever notice that people in this town never have the decency to die during daylight hours or in manageable numbers? Why can't Aunt Mabel go into that good night at four in the afternoon, when somebody else is on shift?"
Greg stared at him, torn between revulsion and dumb incredulity. He's a black hole of egotism, he thought numbly, and turned to go.
"By the way, Sanders, how is that hot little redhead of yours?" Sly, and possessed of a subtle derision that grated his flesh like sand.
Hodges was the last person with whom he wanted to discuss his Grace. Get bent, Hodges, he started to say, and then an image arose in his mind of the delightful conference that would take place in Grissom's office if he and Hodges went to sword point, and ground his teeth against the invective. He had no desire to explain himself to his boss under the cloudy gaze of dead fetal pigs and squirm while Grissom surveyed him with that unsettling, doleful expression that never failed to cut him to the quick. Besides, obnoxious as the question was, he could prove no insult.
"She's just fine," he answered stiffly, and left before Hodges could pursue the subject.
He hurried to the locker room, which was quiet and mercifully deserted, and ensconced himself at the furthest end of the furthest bench. He pulled his cell phone from the breast pocket of his shirt, flipped it open, and dialed home. Now that the moment of furtive contentment was at hand, his heart was lightened, and he began to hum again, a tuneless, meandering lilt of his own invention. The muffled burr of a phone ringing sounded in his ear, and he smiled in anticipation of the click that signaled a successful connection.
Time to put the bogey to bed for the night, he thought, amused. The ritual habitual. We'll play our roles and invoke the sacred, protective magic of same old, same old. As long as we stick to the routine, everything will be all right. The monsters can only get you if you stray from the path. That's why most people die in the dark.
As a criminalist, he knew the folly of such a notion, but it was a comfortable humbuggery, and so he did not banish it. He shifted on the bench and tucked the phone between his chin and shoulder. The phone rang a third time and then a fourth, and experience told him that Grace would not be long in coming.
She'll be fine. She'll answer the phone and snort her disapproval of my coddling into the receiver, and after a few minutes of idle chatter and lovers' teasing, she'll hang up, and I'll go back to the grind, secure in the knowledge that when I get home, she'll be waiting for me with a cup of Blue Hawaiian, Chinese takeout, and a smile. I'll eat, and she'll filch my eggroll, and then we'll go to bed, not necessarily to sleep. So it has always been, and so it will always be, world without end, amen.
He was still telling himself that as the phone rang for the fifth time and the sixth. He lifted his foot and inspected the sole of his shoe, and in his ear, the insectile buzz of the phone continued. Seven, eight, nine. He switched the phone to the opposite ear and lifted his other foot for inspection. Ten, eleven…
"C'mon, Grace," he murmured, and fought the urge to squirm.
She's probably in the shower. You did say she had contracted a serious case of body funk. If she's in the bathroom with the shower going, she'd never hear the phone. Relax. It's all good, soothed the voice of reason inside his head.
Twelve, thirteen…
Where is the attendant? prodded the insidious, brittle purr of doubt. Why doesn't he answer?
In the bathroom, making sure she doesn't slip in the shower and win the Grand Quadriplegia Sweepstakes, retorted reason irascibly. Which is precisely where he should be.
The voice was right, of course; everything was copacetic at Casa Sanders, and there was no use jumping at shadows. Grace was fine, a grown woman, and if anything catastrophic had happened, her attendant would have called him immediately. He knew the man had the numbers of both his personal cell and the lab's front desk because he had programmed them to speed dial himself.
He broke the connection and slipped his phone into his pocket again. He would try later. He had evidence logs to file and crime scene photos to look over, and he was sure Sara could use an extra hand sorting the evidence from her case, a triple homicide in the back alley of Amici's, a high-end watering hole for celebrities, politicians, and new-money high-rollers.
And it will keep your mind occupied.
He lasted twenty minutes in the company of Sara Sidle and a pile of bloody clothes before he was in the hallway, pacing impatiently to and fro with the phone pressed to his ear. The headache, beaten back by the Excedrin hours earlier, returned, a hot, crushing hammerstrike at his temples, and each shrill keen of the phone was a dental-drill whine at its center.
His mind attempted to revive the ancient invocation of routine, but the reassuring lullaby cadence of the thought was drowned out by the frantic yammering of his instincts.
She's not all right, they gabbled, a high, reedy wheeze that made his teeth ache. She's not all right, and you know it. That's why you're pacing the halls like an insomniac on a sugar high and paying more mammon to the great god, Verizon, than you can well afford. That's why the dread has settled over your stomach in a greasy pall and the hackles are stiff quills on the back of your neck. It's that same sense of foreboding that strikes just before you push open the door to a crime scene. The realization of death starts from the ankles up. It creeps over the toes of your shoes and curls its greedy fingers over your calves and scrotum. By the time the door has swung in its wide arc and shown you the twisted bodies on the floor, the air is heavy in your lungs and settles around your heart in a rancid caul. You've got that feeling now, heavy as iron in your bones, and soon you're going to have the pork-fat tang of rot in your mouth.
"Get a grip," he told himself, and was alarmed to find that his voice was not quite steady. He cleared his throat to banish the tremor in his voice. "Too many horror movies and too much caffeine." He took a deep breath. "She's fine. She's just in the shower, or maybe she fell asleep." There. Calm. Sensible.
Oh? That's an awfully long shower, especially for her. She likes the terra firma beneath her wobbling feet, and the shower, with its puddles and steam and promise of traction, is a place visited cautiously and quickly. And where is the attendant, the erstwhile soul in whose charge you placed her? Maybe he skipped shift. Or maybe there are darker deeds afoot.
Greg snorted at the crude insinuation and dismissed it as quickly as it formed. Rufus Goodman had been Grace's aide since the day she'd been brought home from the hospital in a pink receiving blanket, and he would sooner chew off his own arm than raise a hand to her. He was her companion and her confidant, and Greg suspected that he knew more of her secrets than anyone else. Wherever Grace went, Rufus followed.
Then where is he? insisted the voice.
He could find no answer, and the phone continued its strident bleating. He shuffled from foot and foot and wished he had a stick of gum to chew or a swatch of fabric to knead and squeeze, an outlet for the nervous energy that vibrated in his nerve endings, the sizzling thrum of a tuning fork. A passing ballistics tech spared him a curious glance as she swept by, lab coat flapping. He offered her a lopsided grin that felt like a grimace, and he turned away before it could become a rictus.
If her trusted aide hasn't seen fit to rape and murder her, the option it leaves is no less unpleasant. The voice was dispassionate and absolutely pitiless. It means that she's lying in the shower, leg twisted beneath her, while the water beads on her forehead and rills around her motionless body. If you're lucky, she's only fractured her skull, but if you're not, her eyes are open and unseeing, heedless of the blood that's mixing with the water and sluicing down the drain in a merry gurgle. You'll come home and find her weeping from eyes that can no longer cry.
The imagination that was so handy when he was curled on the couch in his socked feet with a bowl of buttered popcorn, watching horror movies and stealing glimpses of Grace's hair by the dim, grey glow of the television, was now a torment, and it showed him the doomsday scenario with hellish, unflinching clarity. He saw her eyes, wide and opaque as whitewashed windows, and her face, pale as porcelain and just as lifeless beneath the water's onslaught. His fingers were curled so tightly around his cellphone that the casing gave an ominous creak.
How many rings is that now? Twenty? Thirty? How many more until the connection is broken by the phone company?
"Greg? Earth to Greg." Sara's voice from the laboratory, ten feet away and impossibly distant.
He jumped, startled by the intrusion into his reverie, and closed his cell phone with a snap.
"Are you going to help me or not?" Waspish and exasperated.
He blinked at her in momentary befuddlement and shook his head in an effort to dislodge the haunting images. They went but grudgingly, and he could feel them on the periphery of his consciousness, biding their time and groping among the recesses of his mind with slender, tenebrous fingers.
Christ, he thought stupidly. Was that Excedrin in that bottle or LSD?
He realized Sara was staring at him through the glass wall of the laboratory, eyebrows raised in mute inquiry and lips parted to reveal the gap in her front teeth that was quintessential Sidle.
"Yeah, I'm coming," he muttered, and went inside the lab. His cell phone was still clutched in his right hand.
"She must have you on a tight leash, Greg," she said as he returned to his place at the table.
"Sara, do I look like the kind of man to be at the beck and call of a woman?" He offered her a cocksure grin, but it felt alien and too heavy on his face, and he stopped.
Sara let out a huff of amusement. "Do you really want me to answer that? The male ego is a fragile thing, and I wouldn't want to shatter it." She bent to examine the tattered edges of a bullet hole in the bloody shirt she was holding.
He fashioned his expression into one of wounded indignation. "Please. I am a free spirit, beholden to no one. And, I'll have you know, I am a fabulous catch."
Sara flashed him an impish grin. "I take that back. She's not shattering it; she's inflating it."
"Amen." He had meant it to sound fervent, a holy roller preacher in the throes of revival, but am image arose in his mind of Grace in the shower, a twisted, broken doll from which all life had fled, and the shout emerged as a weary, distracted murmur.
Sara paused in her inspection of the bullet hole and peered shrewdly at him. "Hey, Greg…are you all right? You seem a little spacey."
"Yeah, I'm good. I'm just tired, that's all. Married life's giving me quite the workout, if you know what I mean."
She rolled her eyes. "That is a visual I so did not need. Thank you, Greg." She bent to her work again.
Join the club, Sara. I've got a veritable parade of fun-filled visuals to ponder, he thought grimly, and reached for an evidence bag.
His feigned equilibrium lasted three minutes. He left the lab in the middle of combing a pair of socks for stray fibers, all but deaf to Sara's squawk of confusion. This time when he called, he let the phone ring until the operator disconnected him, and with every unanswered ring, the blood that swirled down the shower drain of his grim imaginings grew brighter, and the gurgling of the water in the drain became mocking laughter. His heart was triphammering in his chest, and his tongue was small and hot inside his mouth.
Get a grip, he told himself for the second time that night, but there was no force behind it. The phone he held to his ear was silent save for the uneasy, sibilant hiss of static, but to close it would be to bow to the inevitable, and so he let it stay where it was.
You've got a decision to make, said Papa Olaf. Standing in the hallway, clutching a cellphone isn't doing anyone any good, and if Grissom happens around the corner and sees you busily engaged in the Devil's idleness, you'll never hear the end to it. And if Grace really has fractured her skull in the shower, each second you delay carries her one step closer to Charon's ferry. Pick a path, Greg, my boy, and travel it well.
He was tempted to leave the lab without a backwards glance and race home to check on her himself, but prudence rooted him to the spot. If he left the lab and nothing was amiss, he could expect a furious reprimand from both Grissom and Ecklie and ran the risk of termination for gross dereliction of duty. He was also painfully aware that he was in no condition to drive. If he got behind the wheel now, his fellow CSIs would be scraping him off the pavement with wooden spoons.
Salvation came in the guise of Detective Jim Brass, who wore the care of years like a well-worn suit. Time and trial and too many crime scenes had etched deep grooves around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, but his eyes still danced with grim humor, bright and alert despite the hangdog expression that rarely left his face. He was marching stolidly in the direction of Grissom's office, leather notepad in hand. He was no doubt on his way to fill in Grissom on whys and wherefores of the corpses on Doc Robbins' slabs.
Grace will kill you for this, whimpered a dolorous voice inside his head, and in his mind's eye, he saw her answering the door in her pink, terrycloth bathrobe, swaying drunkenly on one crutch while she struggled to keep from subjecting the bemused Captain to an unintended display of her still-damp cleavage. Beneath the wet mat of red hair, those green eyes would be polite and inquisitive, but when he returned home, the stumping of her crutch on the kitchen floor would be the tolling of the doomsday bell.
Water gone from white to the pale rose of blooming dawn to the scarlet of irrevocable end. That's what you'll find when you open the door tonight. How many heartbeats will it take, and how many have you wasted in your indecision?
That decided him, and he fell into step beside Brass. "Hey, Brass."
Brass spared him a sidelong glance as he trudged along, and his lips twitched. "Hey, Greg. Slow night?"
"Not really." It dawned on him that his cell phone was still attached to his ear, and he closed it with a conscious effort of will. "Listen, uh, can I ask you a favor?" He quashed the urge to fidget.
Brass quirked one bushy eyebrow, but he did not break stride. "Sure. Shoot."
"I was wondering if you could drive by my apartment. Grace-that's Mrs. Sanders, in case you were wondering-usually takes a shower after I leave for shift, and I always call to be sure everything's all right. It's probably nothing, but she's not answering. I mean, she's probably just out with an old college friend or cleaning out the vast Sanders fortune and heading to the Tangiers, but she's not all that stable on her feet on account of her…well, you know, and I'd just feel better knowing it was a telephone line that went down and not my wife." He was gabbling, and he knew it, but it was safer than silent contemplation of the grinning horrors capering across the canvas of his tortured imagination.
Brass stared at him with a mixture of wry amusement and bewilderment. "All right, Greg. Take it easy. Just let me poke my head into Gil's office for a minute, and I'll get right on it."
How many heartbeats?
He rested his hand on the crook of the detective's elbow, the fabric of his cheap, wool suit rough and dry beneath his hands. "Actually, I was hoping you'd go now."
There was a protracted silence, and he could feel the weight of Brass' gaze as it took in his pinched face and the untidy spikes of his harrowed hair.
"I'll go now. The folks on this who's-who list have a standing reservation with Doc Robbins." He held up the notepad he carried. "I'll let you know what I find. Chances are, your better half is safe and sound." He slipped the notepad into the breast pocket of his suit, offered him a weary, two-fingered salute, and spun on his heel.
"God, I hope so," Greg said when he was out of earshot, but when he turned to rejoin Sara in the lab, his bones were iron inside his flesh, and in the back of his mind, he wondered what it would say on Grace's toetag.
Jim Brass was as good as his word. Twenty minutes after he had left Greg Sanders standing in the hall at the CSI offices, he was in his Tahoe, driving over the mist-slicked asphalt toward the Blooming Cactus Apartments, where Greg made his home. The lateness of the hour and the uncharacteristic mist that fell in a fine, blanketing drizzle ensured that the roads were as deserted as the desert through which they so rudely intruded, and the winding expanse of black ribbon illuminated by his headlights was unbroken by man or beast or gas-guzzling automobile.
The solitude and silence were soporific, and he turned on the radio to combat the seductive caress of Morpheus' treacherous fingers against his eyelids. The shift was fresh, but he was not, and the three hours since he had clocked in had passed in an eternity of bookings and arrests and investigating the outraged accusations lodged against the fine citizens of Las Vegas by tourists and those unfortunate enough to call it home.
For the former, it was a glittering wonderland of possibility, an oasis that summoned them with the lure of instant wealth. It was illicit passion and the smell of sex and cigars. It was limousines and showgirls and high-profile mobsters in Armani and suede shoes. It was the shrill wail of the jackpot and the exultant chuckle of the roulette wheel, red and black and blackjack paradise, a bacchanalian grotto to be taken or left as they pleased. It kept their secrets and its counsel, and in return, they sang its praises on the shuffleboard courts of Miami.
But it held secrets of its own, possessed a face that was not so inviting or sweet. Beyond the gaudy splendor of the Strip, the shadows were darker and thicker. They swept over the red rocks and the lifeless hardpan of the desert in abetting river and smothered the plaintive cries of the discarded. Showgirls ten years past their prime slept in the alleys behind the clubs they once headlined, everything sagging except the breasts five years of tips had paid for, and strippers who had never tasted the bright lights turned tricks in the parking lot beneath the glare of sodium lights that revealed every line and blemish. If they were lucky, there was no light at all. Only the shadows, pitiless and watchful.
And when the city of one hundred thousand lights did slip and offer up one of her unsavory truths, it fell to him to pick of the pieces and set the alluring façade to rights. He had been doing so for twenty-three years, and if high blood pressure or a bullet didn't put paid to his well-laid plans, he would be at it for another ten. After that, he intended to pull up stakes and retire to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where the only flashing lights came from the fireflies hovering over the lake.
Until then, however, he was the watcher in the dark, and tonight, as happened on far too many nights, he had seen too much. The night was young by Vegas standards, and he had already been called to a homicide and a suspicious circs. He had jotted down names and interviewed sobbing relatives and potential suspects, and behind the impassive gaze, his mind was a whirl of names and dates, vague details delivered in quavering voices, and the jolly stipple of blood spatter on stucco walls.
And Greg Sanders' pinched face.
Experience told him that Mrs. Sanders would be just fine, woozy and puffy-eyed from sleep and peering myopically at him from the doorway. He would introduce himself, and her lips would whiten and thin with apprehension until she heard the reason for his visit, and then she would laugh, roll her eyes, and assure him that all was well in the Kingdom of Sanders. They would shake hands, and he would go back to the car and phone Greg with the good news. Jim Brass, knight-errant and his sister's keeper.
If you believe that, why are you driving to his apartment in the middle of the night?
Because it's Greg, and because he's never asked a favor of me in the seven years I've known him. Not so much as a bring me a cruller, and if he feels the need to have me call on a wife none of us have ever seen save in the photo on the inside of his locker, then it matters. And because after Nick, we all sleep lightly.
Maybe Mrs. Sanders is being swabbed for DNA by the guy across the breezeway, sneered a cynical voice inside his head, and an unwilling chuckle escaped him.
It wouldn't be the first time that had happened. The grind and long hours of the job gobbled up marriages and spat them out again. Husbands spent more time in the embrace of the dead than of the living, and wives, tired of staring at the emptiness on the other side of the bed and the stink that never washed out of the sheets, found solace where they could.
You know all about that, don't you, Jimbo? You came home one grey dawn to find your better half busily accepting a special delivery from the U.S. Postal Service with sweat on her thighs and another man's name on her lips. You stood in the doorway and watched the bed rock to a rhythm that was not yours. She was so absorbed in who she was doing that it was almost over by the time she saw you, and what stings all these years later is the expression on her face.
It wasn't shame or horror or even frozen incomprehension, but annoyance that you should be intruding on her liaison, as though you were an interloper who had no right to be there. Even after, when the man had gone with stammered apologies and a bundle of rumpled uniform shirt in his hands, and you were alone with her and the sour tang of foreign sweat, there was no regret on her face, only bitter truculence and dull fury that she should have been so rudely interrupted. You opened your mouth to speak, but there was nothing to say, and so you closed it again and studied the phone, which was off the hook and lying beside the bed like a throttled red snake. Then, you closed the door behind you and went to stay at the nearest motel. Nine months later, there was another special delivery at Desert Palm Hospital, and neither of you mentioned it again.
His chest ached at the mention of Ellie, his prodigal daughter. The thought of her brought no thrill of paternal joy. The years had been too unkind and the secrets too bitter. There was only sadness, deep and throbbing in his bones, and he wondered where she was now. The last he had heard, she was adrift in New York, bartering her body for a bed and an ounce of crack.
It hurt to think of her, and he was grateful when his headlights swept over the sign heralding the entrance to Greg's apartment complex. He turned into the lot and parked between a Cadillac Escalade and a Ford Pinto that had seen far better days. He killed the ignition, and then he sat in the dark and silence for a moment, willing the images of Ellie and her weariness-bruised face from his mind. Unlike the Ellie of flesh and blood, who fled from him as quickly as she could, the specter did not go willingly, and it was five minutes before he was composed enough to get out of the car and cross the dark, wet parking lot.
It was seventeen minutes past one in the morning, and most of the windows in the building were blind and slumbering, though a few emitted the faint blue glow of late-night television. He straightened his coat, patted his breast pocket to be sure his badge was there, and walked to Building Thirteen, the clack of his shoes preternaturally loud in the stillness.
As he made his way to Unit A, he pondered what the elusive Mrs. Sanders would be like. Greg had never discussed her beyond bland mundanities, not even what she did for a living, and his uncharacteristic reluctance to speak on the subject had inspired no end of idle speculation. Archie Johnson was convinced she was a club-hopping, punk royalty diva, and Grissom had once jokingly ventured the idea that she didn't exist at all, that she was a creature entirely of Greg's creation.
We'll find out in a minute.
He raised his hand to knock on the door of the apartment, pleasantry already on his tongue, and then stopped. The door was ajar. Not much. Just a hair. The greeting died on his lips, and his loosely fisted hand dropped to his side and reached for his gun. The hairs on his nape prickled with a sudden surge of adrenaline.
I don't think Mrs. Sanders just fell asleep on the couch, whispered the soft, fatalistic voice of instinct inside his head. Oh, no. Something wicked this way came.
"Shit." It was almost a moan. "Mrs. Sanders?" he called. "This is Jim Brass, Las Vegas P.D. Can you hear me?"
He strained his ears for the furtive sounds of movement-the stealthy scrape of footsteps, the click of a hammer being pulled back, the gurgling, wet rasp of bloody breathing-but there was nothing, and his stomach rolled uneasily in its moorings. He raised his gun and took a deep, steadying breath.
Please, God, he thought as he prepared to open the door, don't let me find her dead on the floor with her brains gluing the back of her head to the carpet or her panties bunched around her ankles and a kitchen knife in her gut. If something wicked did happen here, don't make me be the one to tell Sanders. There isn't enough booze in the world for that.
He pressed the tips of his fingers against the door and pushed it gingerly open.
No nightmare scenario greeted him, nor did a killer leap from the shadows. The room was lifeless as a crypt and just as lightless. The sway of darkness was absolute and cloying, unbroken even by the glow of a television set. Vague shapes loomed in tiny dunes and hillocks, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw a coffee mug on a small worktable in the near corner of the room and the square outline of a laptop.
"Mrs. Sanders?" He stepped over the threshold, and his foot trod upon something soft and springy.
He looked down, and for a lunatic instant, he thought he had stepped into a pool of blood. Then he realized that it was a bouquet of long-stemmed, red roses. They had been heavily trampled, and the petals were scattered over the floor in a delicate blanket of bleeding red and green stems.
He stepped over them and groped for the light switch, his mind screaming all the while that he was contaminating the crime scene. It was true, but he had to see, had to know the worst. The switch tripped with a sharp click, and light flooded the room.
It was empty, but not undisturbed. An office chair was overturned, and papers were strewn over the floor. The phone squatted on the table, one edge hanging off the end in defiance of gravity.
A red phone, thought with idiotic fascination. It's always a red phone.
He shook himself and continued his assessment of the scene. There were shards of broken glass under the table and a damp spot on the carpet. There was a red smear nearby, and there was no hope that it was rose petals. It was too wet. He swore under his breath.
There was something else, too. Two of them, actually, and he stared at them for a very long time. A pair of aluminum, cuff-lace crutches sprawled in the middle of the room, ends akimbo, the untidy legs of a drunk who has temporarily forgotten how to walk.
Comprehension dawned. "Oh, Greg," he said. He was seized with the sudden urge to sit and put his head between his knees, but instead he walked from room to room in the small apartment, praying to find Mrs. Sanders huddled in the bedroom or in the hall closet, but the bedroom was as empty as the living room, and the only things he found in the hall closet were bed linens, towels, and a lightweight, titanium wheelchair painted canary yellow. He stared at the latter in sloe-eyed bewilderment.
"Shit." The single syllable fell like a pebble from his numb lips.
He reached for his cell phone and dialed a number. "Gil," he said quietly into the receiver. "We have a problem."