A/N: I knew I couldn't stay away for very long! This story has actually been in the works for a long time – I started writing it during the summer, but postponed publishing it until I could give it my full attention. And now here we are! This is NOT a work in progress, it is very near completion, so chapters will be posted as they are re-read and fine tuned!

This is going to be slightly A/U – but don't run away yet! It's still very much in the CSI world, still very much in character, and it will eventually intertwine with canon CSI. You'll see what I'm talking about over the next few chapters. I'm really excited to see what you think.

And finally, thanks very much to ILoveJorja for agreeing to beta this story for me, even though she is busy, busy!

Enjoy!


Prologue

If I could swear by anything, it is this: the evidence never lies.

Ask anyone I work with – Jim, Catherine, Nick, Warrick, Holly – and they'll all tell you the same thing. I'd swear by it up and down, left and right. Humans lie. The evidence doesn't. To me, throughout my career and up through my first few years in Vegas, that was all that mattered.

I started saying it so much, everyone else began swearing by it too. Could I have asked for a better team?

In all honesty, I couldn't. They were hardworking and skilled. In fact, the only concern I had was about our newest recruit – a daughter of a traffic lieutenant that Jim had been anything but forced to hire. Her name was Holly Gribbs.

Her first day on the job was rough, to say the least. She was yelled at by an irritable Jim, nearly fainted at her first autopsy, then got locked in a room full of bodies and was subsequently held at gunpoint twice in two cases. Luckily for her, Catherine had been able to rescue her from the first gun situation of the night. Warrick was only just in time to save her from a perp who had returned to the scene of his own crime. Holly was checked out in the hospital for a few bumps and bruises and walked away relatively unharmed.

Thanks to Warrick's quick-thinking and good timing, Holly had been lucky. But needless to say, after her rough start, Jim felt she needed a good talking to. And apparently, I was the one to do it. I sat Holly down in my office, and after offering her some fresh chocolate-covered cockroaches for a second time, told her in the nicest way I could that she was going to have to step up her work if she expected to keep her job here. She was respectful and serious, nodded in all the right places, and, over the next couple of weeks, proceeded to do just that. She still wasn't ready for solo cases, and Catherine or I had to read over each of her case reports to scan for error, but she was improving.

So all in all, I was optimistic that the graveyard team would be the preeminent shift in the lab. And on top of that, I had no cases that seemed to challenge my master theory.

The evidence is always the most important.

But then, I hadn't anticipated the Sidle case.