Marlena Reagan kneeled in front of her first dead body and felt her heart jump into her throat and all her blood rush to her feet. The face was familiar…she knew it somehow…but from where?

"Oh God," came the frail whisper of her good friend and fellow CSI, Sara Sidle, who was standing behind Marlena and had arrived late as usual. "It's Gil."

Marlena looked over her shoulder at the thirtysomething CSI2, her sad brown eyes looking sadder than usual. "You know him, Sara?" she asked softly.

Sara's hand went to the base of her throat and she fled the room, totally unlike her. Marlena, focused on her work, didn't go after her, though she heard someone do so.

Before tugging on her rubber gloves, she used a scrunchy to pull back her long dirty-blonde hair. She pulled the vic's face toward hers gently. Curling grayish hair cropped close, a pensive expression even in death, Marlena suddenly knew who this was.

"Doctor Gilbert Thatcher Grissom," said Detective Kenyon Browning, coming to kneel beside Marlena and confirming what she didn't want to know. "Former Las Vegas Criminalist and expert entomologist. Retired from CSI two years ago due to a degenerative hearing disorder called autosclorosis. Taught entomology at Cromwell University of the Deaf. Was found like this, in his living room, apparently asphyxiated. There were no signs of forced entry anywhere."

"There's the blue tinge," Marlena ran her pointer finger around the outline of his pale lips and nodded in agreement. "The blue in the fingers, too. No foaming around the mouth." She tuned to Kenyon. "This man was almost famous at CSI. I've seen his picture in the lobby. Hell, I worked with him for three, four years before he retired." She glanced around the room. "Where did Sara go?"

Kenyon pointed outside the doorway, "She didn't tell you that she'd been working with Grissom since she began here. The man was like a father to her. You know how she always says, 'smiling offsets the gagging reflex'?"

"Yeah."

"Let's just say that she's got nothing to smile about."

Marlena softened, "Poor Sara." Carefully, she put Grissom's hand down and laid it on his chest. "I can't tell time of death, but he's already in rigor mortis. Even so, Doctor Orestes will have the true answer and confirmation." Even through her latex gloves she could feel how cold his hands were. "Such a sweet man. He was pretty nice to me."

"Gil was like everyone's dad." Kenyon stood and ran his fingers through his blue-black hair. He wiped his hands on his sandstone-colored suit as if he'd touched something dirty. "It's a shame."

Marlena stood as well and but her let's-get-down-to-business face on. "There were no witnesses?"

"Nope. Only the woman who found the body. She's talking to Detective Sawandi. Her name is--" Kenyon glanced at his notebook, "--Solange Tanguy."

"Well, you know what they say: whoever finds the body automatically becomes the first suspect."

Kenyon pursed his lips in doubt and read some more from his notebook, "Solange is twenty-three years old, from Trinidad and speaks little English. That's why we got Sawandi; he's fluent in French. She's Gil's cleaning lady, been working for him only a year."

"Does she have a key?"

Kenyon nodded, "She had access to one. Gil had one of those hide-a-keys."

Marlena felt sorry for Solange, who, despite her true age, looked no older than sixteen. Very short and thin with large, black-button eyes, from all the way across the room, she could see how terrified the girl was, hugging herself and tearing slightly. Her beautiful skin was the color of un-ground coffee. She wore a turquoise knee-length dress and the cleanest pair of white tennis shoes she'd ever seen. A beat-up hemp purse with a frayed strap dangled from her shoulder. Her ebony hair was tied back tight in a figure-eight knot at the base of her skull. Not a hair was out of place and Marlena figured she didn't do much cleaning today.

"You don't think the cleaning lady did it?" Kenyon raised an eyebrow--he knew the kind of thought process Marlena had. This woman didn't rule anyone out.

"You know what I think, Ken," Marlena's bittersweet chocolate eyes met with Kenyon's emerald ones with hidden meaning. "Do me a favor? Keep Gil Grissom's former team out of the investigation. Replace Sara with Breeze Hamelin and whoever else has been assigned…Stokes, I think. Instead of Stokes get Sasha Zarek. Have Catherine Willows and Warrick Brown notified of Gil's death."

"Uh, sure," Kenyon said, trying to hide his surprise at Marlena's taking charge of things. This was her first field case but obviously she seemed more in control than Sara Sidle, her superior. "You wanted Hamelin instead of Sidle?"

"Yes," Marlena said, kneeling beside Gil Grissom's body. "She's just as experienced as Sara is. Clearly, Sara can't handle this now…at least she identified the body. We won't have to call anybody in."

"Wouldn't have done any good," Kenyon sighed. "He's got no living relatives. His mother, Evelyn Elizabeth Grissom, passed away several years ago. His father, Broderick Gilbert Grissom, six years before her. Only child. Several distant relatives scattered everywhere, but no one so closely attached as to claim the body."

"There are no lacerations on the neck. Maybe he was smothered," Marlena observed, running her gloved fingers down Grissom's neck, ignoring Kenyon's last statement. "I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't had a mark on him." She opened one of Gil's eyes, a soft and serious hazel, though not much showed, "His pupils are dilated severely."

Soft footsteps came up behind her. Marlena stood and turned. Sara, leaning on the shoulder of a police officer, was red-eyed and pallid.

"Marlena," she whispered.

"Sara, honey," Marlena took her gloves off and then held Sara's frigid hands in hers. It was as if all the rosy life within this woman had flown out the window. "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry. I hear I'm being replaced by Breeze Hamelin?"

"And Nick by Sasha."

"Good," Sara replied firmly. "I'm sorry Marlena, but I'm afraid I wouldn't be much help to anyone."

"Oh, honey, I can understand. Go home to your little girl," Marlena squeezed Sara's hands slightly, referring to her daughter, a sweet little four-year-old with her momma's smile and brown curls. Like Catherine Willows, another colleague, Sara was a single mother, except her husband had walked out. "Get some sleep and I'll talk to you later."

"May I say good-bye?"

Marlena couldn't say no. She nodded and stepped away from the body. Sara got on her knees, took Grissom's hand into her own and kissed him once, softly on the cheek. Then she whispered something in his ear and got up quickly. She didn't look back.

After Sara left, Marlena was on her own. Breeze and Sasha were to report tomorrow for the case. She had Kenyon contact Nick, Warrick and Catherine and the coroner's office had them take the body away.

"Think I can talk to the cleaning lady?" Marlena asked Adrian Sawandi, a tall and well-built black man with what seemed like a permanent five o'clock shadow who liked to joke around, except when he was on a case.

"Sure," he said. "Hang on." Sawandi turned to Solange Tanguy and spoke rapid French. Marlena didn't speak French, not one word. Sawandi and Solange carried a short conversation and finally, Sawandi turned to Marlena and said, "She'll speak to you. She's slow in English so try to stay basic."

"Sure," Marlena nodded. She turned to Solange, "Miss Tanguy, how long have you been working for Mr. Grissom?"

"One year," the young maid replied in clear English.

"Where did he hire you from?"

"Agency…the Quall Agency. For clean ladies, maids. Monsieur Grissom call and I come."

"How often did you come?"

"Twice. In a week."

"Did you move the body when you found him?"

She paused, "Oui. I turn him over. To check."

"For what?"

"To check…to see if, ah, he dead."

"Did you move anything?"

"Some glass…" Solange looked a little lost.

Glass. "Miss Tanguy, I'm going to need to take a sample of your DNA."

"DNA?"

"Um…DNA…um, your saliva," Marlena opened her mouth and pointed to her tongue, "I need to take your DNA and…fingerprints to eliminate you as a suspect. As a cleaning lady I think your epithelia would be all over the place."

Solange gave Marlena a vacant expression and turned to Sawandi for help, who quickly jumped in to translate.

"Ah, oui," Solange finally said empathetically and opened her mouth, nodding.

Marlena swapped the inside of the girl's mouth--which contained the whitest teeth she'd probably ever seen, to match her shoes--and then took her prints with much cooperation and without much trouble. Afterwards Marlena let her go. Solange Tanguy left with a promise to help as much as she could and kissed Marlena once on each cheek and did the same to Sawandi.

"French," Sawandi shrugged in answer to Marlena's quizzical stare. "Well, there's not much else I can do here. Good luck, Reagan."

Marlena blew her bangs out of her face, "Thanks. I have a feeling I'll need it."

After everyone was gone, she began to process the room, dusting powder, luminol, RUVIN and all. She gingerly dusted over Grissom's jars of creepy crawlies--tarantulas, fire ants, scarabs, cockroaches and even a two-headed scorpion that Marlena would see on his desk sometimes. It all made her skin crawl. She did, however, stop to admire the glass-encased butterfly collection. She was familiar with this process of capturing butterflies, drugging them and pinning them up by their wings. Her cousin Del would spend hours examining his own collection of butterflies. Marlena was impressed with Grissom's, which was twice the size of Del's.

After nearly three hours, Marlena came up nearly empty handed. In the kitchen, she'd sprayed all the knives with luminol and found one tiny drop of blood on just the tip of one paring knife. It turned the point a fluorescent blue-green like a glow stick. Feeling victorious, she bagged the knife. While searching the floor she found tiny pieces of porcelain, thick and white. The floor was wood so it couldn't be chipped tile. She picked the pieces up with a tweezer and dropped them into a small, slender manila envelope. It wasn't until after she had opened up a majority of the cabinets that she noticed that the dishware Grissom kept were white porcelain.

Must've dropped a plate, she concluded as she put the envelopes in her field kit, a silver lunch-box-looking thing that Marlena referred to as her Caboodle.

Still in the kitchen she swabbed all the glasses left in the sink and found fingerprints and lip marks. One glass in particular had lipstick the color of burgundy around the rim. She bagged it, feeling excited. Marlena discovered a second drop of blood on the floor, so minute that it was almost easy to miss without the RUVIN. She found it beside the shards of porcelain. Happily, she also lifted several prints, but unfortunately, a lot of them looked like Grissom's himself: sneakers and/or loafers, probably between men's ten to twelve. There was a smaller shoe-print, more narrow than the men's sneakers--perhaps a size eight. Though some prints that intrigued Marlena looked like stilettos and from the looks of it, they were a very small size: between a woman's six and four.

The only other bit of workable blood she found was in a razor next to the sink in the bathroom adjoining to the bedroom and quickly concluded that Grissom had cut himself shaving once but bagged it anyway. She opened the medicine cabinet and was overwhelmed by the amount of pharmaceuticals that Grissom kept. He was obviously a firm believer in herbal remedies. She inspected each bottle carefully, reading the labels, some with very strange names: Pau d'Arco, pycnogenol, bayberry and more. Carefully, she scooped a dozen bottles into separate bags, hoping to lift some prints and maybe get a sample of each pill to be processed.

Scanning the unmade bed in the bedroom, she found several hairs, all long and dark. Grissom's graying but otherwise brownish hair was always snipped short; obviously this was not his. She bagged them and tried to rack he brain to figure out whose hair it was or might be.

Wait a sec, she stopped herself, noticing she was making a rookie mistake. That's not my job. I gotta get these to Greg.

Greg Sanders was the spiky-haired-I-don't-wanna-grow-up resident lab rat at CSI. So devoted to his job was he that while most of his friends were "eye men" or "leg men", he was a self-proclaimed, "DNA man" and insisted on researching the epithelials of the women he dated. Greg was usually eager to the bidding of his superiors, but Marlena knew he was another one close to Grissom and wasn't sure if he'd be up to the task this night, despite his job, or if he'd even heard about the death of Gil Grissom yet.

Some people…she thought bitterly, need to know how to get on with life. Marlena knew she was thinking like a cold-hearted bitch but was sorry that Grissom was dead and knew how much the death of a loved one hurt, especially when they died of unnatural causes.

But then again, this was why she was the only one who hadn't been replaced on the investigation team for this crime.