Gil Grissom sat at his desk studiously avoiding the neat piles of paperwork on either side of it and reading the Journal of Forensic Sciences. The supervisor of the night shift was leaning slightly over his desk to read, resting on his elbows and keeping a good posture. His index and trigger fingers occasionally rubbed against the thumb of his right hand, as if there should be a pen there. His brow was slightly furrowed behind his glasses and his lips were pursed. It had been quiet lately. His team was tying up loose ends and going over cold cases. If he were superstitious, like most of his team and many of the officers they worked with, he would be concerned with the current lack of criminal activity. Most of them thought it portended some large scale crime wave once all of that stored up crime reached critical mass.
Grissom was not superstitious.
He was a scientist and for all the world out there, he would rather be immersed in knowledge, finding new ways to catch the bad guy. That left little room for many things others felt very necessary to live a full life, superstitions among them.
"You know, you could be taking this eerie break in cases to do some of your desk work." Catherine's wry tone broke Grissom's concentration and he looked over his glasses at her. She was leaning against the door frame of his office, arms crossed in front of her chest, wearing a black suit and her usual bright smile.
Here was woman who embodied many of the finest qualities of humanity, in Grissom's mind. She was tenacious, hard working and loyal. She had taken the ball of being a woman in this man's world and run with it, never apologising for it. Yet she was still caring, one of the most caring people Grissom knew and he knew it first hand. He was not an easy person to get close to yet she had managed to. She knew when he was loosing his hearing and all she insisted on doing for him was being there. That compassion made her the Watson to his Holmes, he had asked her perspective on the human element of their cases time and again.
"Staying on top of research is desk work." He stated matter of factly, with a small shake of his head.
The blonde raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to the side, "funny, it's not the type of work I usually get saddled with when you're out of town."
Grissom gave her a sharp smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and shifted the hairs of his well trimmed beard, "I'll start on it after this article, promise."
"Yeah yeah, come have some dinner with me and Jim in the break room." Catherine dropped her arms and turned to leave.
Grissom watched her leave with a small smile playing across his face and a feeling akin to contentment. It felt good to have time to actually sit and have a meal with his colleagues, two people he respected and cared for. While everyone else was worrying about what they might next need to worry about, Grissom flipped his journal closed, stood and walked towards the break room still smiling.
Jim and Catherine already had their respective meals in front of them and coffee in their hands when Grissom walked in. Jim smiled up at him.
"What? No murders no love? I haven't seen you in two weeks."
Grissom grinned as he bent down to the fridge to retrieve his dinner, "It's been a week at most, Jim, and I for one am excited to just talk with you about baseball."
Jim smiled with a mouth full of sandwich. His phone rang just as Grissom sat down next to Catherine.
After a few hurried chews and painful looking swallow, Jim flipped open his phone. "Brass."
"How's Lindsay doing?" Gil asked, moving his food around with a fork.
"Good. She's turning into quite the little artist. You should see the drawing she brought home the other day," Catherine beamed.
Grissom smiled with his own mouth full of food. They both looked up as Jim closed his phone. He immediately took out his notebook and started to scribble in it.
"Looks like quiet time is over. Gil, sounds like I'm gonna need CSI on this one." Jim sighed as he put his hands on his knees to push himself up. "Should I grab Nicky?"
Wiping a grain of rice from the corner of his mouth and setting his food down, Grissom slowly shook his head. "No," he said after he finished chewing, "you haven't seen me in a week. Maybe it's time for me to get out and stretch my legs a little."
Jim shrugged as he started towards the door. Catherine caught Grissom's eye as he stood to follow.
"Stretch your legs, huh?" She looked away from him and gave a small laugh.
"Hey, Jim needs a CSI, I'm just doing my job." Grissom said as he followed the detective out the door. "If something comes up, you can reach me on my cell."
"Mmmhmm." Catherine intoned after him, shaking her head and taking a harder than necessary bight of her food. The piles of paperwork on his desk loomed in her mind.
####
Grissom put the vehicle into park as he looked around the semi-deserted stretch of road. It was dark and the only light nearby came from flares around the crime scene, headlights and the blue and red strobes of the police cruisers. The two lanes of road were surrounded by scrub and desert, a power line running down the south side. Las Vegas proper glowed in the distance. Slinging his camera around his neck, Grissom grabbed his kit from the passenger seat, opened the door and slowly stepped down.
Jim had informed him that patrol had found the van on the side of the road an hour ago. The generic black vehicle had been empty and unlocked, allowing the officers to see the smears of blood inside. This precipitated the call out to CSI.
Grissom held up his Maglite and flicked it on, walking a slow circle around the perimeter of the van, his brow furrowed in concentration. As he carefully avoided the foot prints surrounding it, he could make out the marks of the officers boots, plain soled and easily recognisable, approaching the vehicle, circling it, standing at the back doors, then leaving. Apart from that, another set of adult sized prints were vaguely distinguishable alongside some scuffs and smaller shoe prints.
Setting down his kit outside of the ring of shoe prints, he stepped into the officers prints by the back of the van and ran his flash light over the interior. There was certainly blood in the back.
Grissom fished inside his pants pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He skimmed his list of contacts while glancing back at the van.
"Warrick, I'm gonna have this van towed back to the lab, I need you to go over it. I'm going to stay here and process the scene." Grissom closed his phone. His brow was again furrowed and the muscles of his jaw could be scene working beneath his beard. He wasn't one to jump to conclusions, especially with so little evidence actually before him. But this van, something about it was bothering him.
"License Plate comes up as a stolen Honda Civic," Jim said, walking up to Grissom.
Grissom nodded and walked around the front of the van, running his light over the dashboard until he found the small, 17 characters of print he was looking for. He grabbed the notebook from inside his CSI field vest and jotted the number down, then went about photographing everything of note.
As the tow truck was backing up, Grissom stood to the side of the scene, scanning over it all one last time. His face was still full of concern. He forced himself to turn away and trust that he had found and photographed everything important. Quickly raising a hand in goodbye to Jim, Grissom climbed into the Denali and backed away from the now truly empty stretch of back road.
####
Back in his office, Grissom again sat at his desk though there was none of the quiet calm about him that there had been earlier. A bomb could have gone off in the lab and he might not have noticed. His attention was focused on his laptop and the DMV records web page currently pulled up on it. Grissom gripped the mug sitting to his left about it's rim and raised it to his lips. Having tried vehicles registered within Nevada and come up empty, he had now broadened his search and the site was crunching through an enormous amount of data.
When it focused in on a vehicle description, Grissom set down his mug and pulled up the information. "Stolen fleet vehicle...landscaping company...Dade County, Florida, hmm." Pulling up the incident information, Grissom smirked as he saw the attending officers listed. Lieutenant Horatio Caine, Miami-Dade CSI.
Catherine had had some interesting tales of the Miami lab from the Rittle case she and Warrick had worked on with them. 'A little scientist, a little cop...kinda sexy...' was what she had said, in private, to Grissom of Caine. She hadn't said he'd been difficult to work with and that was now, in retrospect, a relief.
Grissom checked his watch and did a quick calculation of time zone as he was dialling the Lieutenant's number, concluding he would probably get Caine's voice mail. He was surprised when the deep voice answered swiftly after two rings.
"Horatio."
Grissom's eye brows went up as he leaned back in his chair, "uh, sorry, I was expecting to get your voice-mail Lieutenant Caine. This is Gil Grissom calling from th-"
"Doctor Grissom, head of the Las Vegas crime lab. What can I do for you?"
Grissom blinked. Twice.
"I...I have a, uh, case...in Vegas that, um, that I think you might be able to shed some light on."
"Go on."
Normally a very careful speaker and not easily distracted, Grissom was at a loss as to why exactly this man was throwing him off so much. He chalked is up to the time of night, after all, he wasn't used to people being alert this time of night. Especially not at the time of night he knew it to be in Florida.
"You have listed an Andrew Callum as a person of interest in a vehicle theft." Grissom waited for a response. "Lieutenant?" He said after a moment of silence from the line.
"I'm here. What exactly have you got up there?" Grissom noted the change in the other man's tone. Difficult to catch through the deep gravel, but he thought he could hear a tenseness enter into Caine's voice.
"Just a van, a black Ford. It doesn't quite match the description in the file but-"
Horatio cut him off. "Doctor Grissom, I'm booking myself on the first plane out there."
"I don't...don't think that's necessarily-" he was doing it again. Why the sudden change in voice, why the urgency?
"What was it you found in the van that made you call me at three in the morning?" Horatio's voice was coming across exactly as that, urgent. As though this was life and death. As though this was exactly the type of case Grissom had been afraid it might be, standing at the side of a deserted road looking at an empty van.
"Blood."
Horatio didn't waste a second responding before the line went dead, "read the details in my report, Doctor. It wasn't just a vehicle theft and that is why I need to be out there now."
Grissom moved the cell from his ear and looked at it a moment before gently closing it and turning his attention back to his laptop. Navigating through a couple of government pages, he finally made it to the detailed case information.
Grissom removed his glasses and stared straight ahead, digesting everything he had just read before standing and tossing his glasses on the desk. He made his way quickly to the garage.
Warrick was in a white lab coat with orange safety goggles on, leaning over the driver's seat in the van when Grissom walked in.
"Warrick? What have you found?"
Grunting slightly as he extracted himself, Warrick turned to face Grissom and found himself suddenly worried when he saw the frown on his supervisors face. "A lot. I mean, enough to keep DNA and trace backed up to Christmas. This vans worse than a cheap motel room in the back and on the outside? It's been on the road for a while."
Grissom's frown deepened somewhat. "Keep at it, I'm going to have Nick come down and give you a hand." Without really looking at Warrick, he turned to leave.
"Griss?"
Turning at the doorway, Grissom looked at Warrick.
"What's goin' on with this case?" The younger man asked.
"I think we've got a child molester in Vegas who was using that van to conceal two children he abducted in Miami. I think that van is all we've got to go on." He didn't offer any more information than that, simply turned and left.
Warrick looked at the empty doorway for a moment before turning back to the van. He ran his eyes over vehicle with a new sense of distaste and, rolling his shoulders, went back to swabbing.