Disclaimer: I didn't create CSI. I don't own CSI. I have not profited in any way from CSI.

A/N: This is actually the first "CSI" fan fic I've ever written, just not the first I've posted. Before the events of the last few episodes of season 7, I've always thought the rest of the team kinda, sorta suspected the GSR. This is how they might've found out (if they had). I'm hoping to add chapters for each of the main characters.

Suspicious Minds:

GREG

A tiny fragment of night sky was all Greg Sanders could see from his uncomfortable position in the backseat of the SUV. With his back and left shoulder propped against the driver's side door, he had to tilt his head backward and up to see anything at all. What he could see took his breath away. Black as ink and loaded with stars he never noticed living and working so close to the gaudy Las Vegas lights, the strip of starry sky visible out the window only served to remind him that he was but a tiny speck among billions of other tiny specks on this planet he called home.

He was tired. So tired the backs of his eyelids felt like sandpaper. Probably better not to keep opening and closing them, he thought. Open or closed, pick one. Okay, I'll keep 'em closed. There, that was easy. He and Grissom and Sara had spent the better part of the last twelve hours out on Highway 93, piecing together the last moments of a family of three from Phoenix, Arizona. Visiting Las Vegas to celebrate their son's 21st birthday, Rich and Caroline Newmark had made a side-trip to Hoover Dam, misjudged a turn, and ended up plowing through the guardrail and down a steep embankment, taking two other cars with them along the way. Three dead, four injured, and nothing more to blame it on than sleep deprivation and too much coffee.

Damned if life wasn't just randomly stupid sometimes.

His neck and shoulder beginning to ache, Greg shifted his legs restlessly, being careful not to touch the back of the front passenger seat, where Sara was dozing. There had been nothing but silence from the front for the last few minutes or so and Greg was hoping to keep it that way. He was entirely too lanky for the backseat and Sara had begun to whine about what she called the "assault" on her seatback. He had already been told to "knock it off!" twice now. Once more and he was convinced she'd wake up, climb into the backseat and attempt to beat the crap out of him. There was barely enough room for him back there much less her, but he was certain she'd find a way. Sara Sidle was nothing if not determined. For someone who claimed not to need much sleep, she became very cranky when she didn't get any at all. For his part, Grissom (who was driving) had passed the time listening to a country music station and humming occasionally.

Greg hated country music. (He hated Grissom's humming even more.)

The door's hard plastic armrest wasn't any good as a place to rest a weary head and he debated giving up the attempt to sleep. He couldn't sleep in a moving vehicle, anyway. Planes, trains and automobiles, he had never been able to nod off in any of them. His mother claimed he'd slept like... well... like a baby, strapped securely in his seat as an infant. He seriously doubted that. What he remembered were long road trips with his mom and dad and he didn't remember sleeping through a single mile of any of them.

He was good at pretending, though. He had learned early on that other people had little patience for his incessant questions. Road games like I Spy and Spot The License Plate got really old really fast. And, sometimes, his parents just wanted to listen to music or talk quietly, with no interference from the back seat, so he would lie back, close his eyes, and dream the miles away. His fantasy life was rich, even as a young child, and he could go for hours like that. With his eyes closed, young Greg would sometimes pretend he was invisible. (Would anyone notice if he were?) Now, adult Greg considered it a form of meditation. After the day (and a half) the three of them had put in, it would be almost as good as sleep.

If only he could get comfortable.

With Grissom behind the wheel, the drive back had been relatively smooth. They never let Greg drive, even before the . . . incident. After his run-in with Demetrius James, he was happy to be a passenger and let somebody else have the responsibility of guiding the large vehicle safely to and from crime scenes.

They had established a routine: Grissom always drove. (Greg suspected it had something to do with Grissom being a control freak.) Sara rode shotgun. She got carsick and needed to sit in front. Or so she claimed. Greg thought it more likely the fact that he was still The New Kid and needed to be kept in his place.

"Are you all right back there, Greg?" Grissom asked, sounding faintly irritated.

"Fine."

"I'm glad to hear it. Could you stop squirming around and bumping the back of my seat, then? You're beginning to annoy me and we both know what happens when you annoy me, don't we."

"Yes, we do." Grissom was not – often – a petty man but something about Greg brought out the despot in him sometimes. He knew it. Greg knew it. It wasn't something that worried Greg too much, but punishment for getting on Grissom's nerves usually involved disgusting chores best avoided at all costs.

"I don't want you to wake Sara," Grissom continued. "We have a good thirty minutes until we get back to the lab and she needs sleep. So do you," he added, as an afterthought.

"Don't worry. I'm good now."

Grabbing several jackets from the back, Greg bunched them into a vague pillow-like shape, wedged them between his head and the door and closed his eyes. Much better. The intimate dark of the Denali's interior and the steady hum of the tires on asphalt soon had him relaxed again. His breathing slowed, evened out. He was entering what he thought of as his "auto Zen state." Not asleep, but not entirely awake.

It looked like sleep to others, though, and kept him out of trouble and that was all that mattered.

Five minutes later (or it could've been fifteen – he lost track of time in his Zen state) a particularly violent bump in the road forced his eyes open again. He was careful not to move or alter his breathing, in case Sara was now awake and looking around for the cause of the jolt. In the front seat, she mumbled something inaudible and shifted slightly but didn't awaken. From his vantage point in the back, Greg could just make out her lower thigh and bent knee, now resting on the console between the two seats.

It's a really nice thigh, Greg thought. Muscular. Long, long legs. For a brief moment, he allowed himself to imagine those legs - No. Don't even go there, he cautioned himself. He had long ago given up thinking about her in that way. She clearly didn't think of him as anything more than an adorable (if he did say so himself) kid brother/protégé.

And, anyway, he had begun to suspect that she had someone she did think of "in that way."

He couldn't point to anything definitive but she seemed different somehow, ever since what they had all come to think of as "Nick's Ordeal." Maybe it was just a matter of tragedy making her re-align her priorities, but he didn't think so. His personal reevaluation hadn't resulted in the glow that now seemed to precede Sara wherever she went. (At least he hoped not. That would just be freaky.)

No, the changes in Sara were subtle but profound. In the past, she had often seemed to Greg a little bit lost and unsettled. She gave the impression of being all alone, even surrounded by other people. He sometimes wondered if that wasn't a large part of her attraction for him, this need he had to make her smile. Now, the loneliness was gone. She was more relaxed. She went through her days with an air of... he wasn't even sure he could put a name to it. Settled, maybe. Rooted. No, he thought. That wasn't it. It was that she seemed more at peace with herself and it showed in the way she dressed, wore her hair, did her make-up, dealt with the often depressing work they did.

Now that he thought about it, he couldn't remember the last time she had pulled a triple. She had even declined to work the past two Christmases in a row. Added up, the little signs all pointed to a Significant Other she was unwilling to talk about or share with the class.

Sara shifted again, thumping her knee harder this time and Greg watched as a hand reached out from the driver's seat, resting firmly on the inside of her thigh. He watched as Grissom glanced over his shoulder at the backseat and, seemingly reassured by the silence there, glanced over at Sara. Noting her restlessness, he lightly rubbed his fingers up and down her inner thigh. The motion was oddly sensual and Sara began to calm almost immediately.

Hmmm. That's interesting, Greg thought. He kept his breathing deep and even as he watched Grissom's hand, now beginning to stroke Sara's arm where it rested on her thigh. Tenderly he stroked down her arm from elbow to wrist, (gentle tracing of fingers) wrist to palm, (light, ever so delicately so as not to disturb her) along her palm to her fingers. Grissom's big hand seemed to defy gravity as it made its way almost imperceptibly from elbow to fingertips and back again.

Sara sighed and turned more fully onto her left side until she was facing Grissom, arm stretched out between the seats. Grissom gently gripped her hand, lacing his fingers with hers, and rested their linked hands on her knee. Assured that she was calm once again, he returned his full attention to the road and peered into the darkness ahead.

So, thought Greg. It's like that. Suddenly, all of the bits and pieces which had pointed (not unlike neon, if he was honest with himself) toward a more relaxed, contented Sara, and a Grissom more patient with his underlings, clicked silently into place.

He spent about a second feeling foolish for having missed all the signs, another two seconds feeling faintly jealous, and ended with an almost overwhelming feeling of gladness. If being with Gil Grissom was the reason Sara no longer seemed so alone, he was all for it. And if being with Sara was the reason Grissom no longer haunted the halls of the crime lab, took better care of himself, and cut Greg a break now and then, who was he to complain?

The fact that, of all of them, it was anti-social Grissom and misfit Sara who were regularly getting laid gave him a moment's pause, but he quickly decided he was big enough to overlook it. He wasn't without prospects, his own self.

Closing his eyes, Greg imagined he could still see the clasped hands of the couple in the front seat and, like a child watching Mommy and Daddy embrace, felt that same child-like warmth spread outward from his chest. He was definitely big enough to be outrageously happy for them. For her.

Smiling ever so slightly and burrowing his face into his makeshift pillow, Greg, for the first time in his memory, drifted off to sleep in the back seat, determined to closely guard his new secret knowledge. (Unless somebody offered him money. In that case, all bets were off...)

The End