DISCLAIMER: I do not own, produce, or have any incorporation with CSI. To all those people who have read my previous chapters, I know its been a LONG time since I've last written! I sincerely apologize to all those folks who were waiting for next chapter, and I most sincerely apologize to the friend who I promised to write this story for. But please, everyone, enjoy this! Thanks!
Has it really been three days? The man thought to himself. He scratched his chin absentmindedly; he could feel the growth of his beard prickly and coarse like a porcupine. His body ached and not because of old age, no not that, he constantly reminded to himself. He seldom thought of himself as an old man. Pretty ironic considering when he was younger he always felt like a 30 year-old trapped in a ten year-old's body. Oh but now he was older—that was the inescapable truth.
The man got up from his bed. He lived in a small one-roomed apartment. It was spartanly furnished, the absence of a dining table indicated his martial status (washing dishes had never been so easy), and the number of books that graced the living room's shelves amassed to rival the population of a small Pacific island. However underneath the seemingly sparse but tome endowed apartment lay the fine dusting of loneliness.
He splashed cold water on his face. The briskness of the water woke him up like a jolt of caffeine to the cerebrum. Ignoring his reflection in the mirror (he wasn't a vain man), he brushed his teeth and slathered on shaving cream. Slowly he began to shave away the last three days. It was all so confusing, the haziness and the clarity of the past events. He drew the razor along his jaw, rinsed it, and then drew it again. The monotony of the motion lulled him into a false sense of comfort.
"Oh no…" he grunted as he put down the razor and hurriedly calmed the cut with cold water. He had nicked himself and the warm red blood trickled down his neck, staining his white t-shirt. He grimaced at the sight of the blood against the white. Looking up at his reflection, he saw the terror of his nightmares come to life.
Sara woke up the next morning surprisingly refreshed. She felt a few kinks in her body from the accident, but overall she felt better physically than she had in months. She showered, changed her clothes and explored her near-empty refrigerator for breakfast. Finally settling for a glass of orange juice and a two-day old apple Danish, she sat down and opened the newspaper. Reading the Las Vegas Sun was always a novelty for Sara. Reading the Sun was like reading the achievement's column and finding your star athlete kid listed there, if you considered solved crimes your children. Man Found Lynched on Paradise Road read one headline. The unfortunate man found lynched, 22-year-old Walter Prufrock, true to his surname, was a maniac depressive with one twist: the Mafia had a hit out on him. Sara and Warrick had been at the scene and it was not as the Sun described, "a quasi-Soprano act of mediated violence featured in a picturesque backdrop of the Wynn Golf Club, which by the way is an excellent…" Poor skinny, miserable Prufrock (even more pathetic after death) made a life of double-crossing the wrong people, and this time the wrong people got to him.
Today, however, no Walter Prufrocks, dead hookers, or murdered rich tycoons for that matter, the news was clean as a whistle.
"The crime lab must be quiet today," she said to herself as she took a bite from her Danish. Putting down the newspaper and finishing the rest of her breakfast, Sara was interrupted by a knock at the door.
"Hello-oooo, Sara! Rise and shine!" greeted Noel as Sara opened the door.
"Hi Noel, how's your morning?" Sara inquired politely. Noel sometimes went door to door in the mornings to catch the building's sleepy occupants off guard in an effort to get people to join his "causes". The last cause of Noel's was GPATS, aptly abbreviated to mean Gay Persons Against Tacky Suits. Apparently, some rich (eligible) men had bad fashion sense, and Noel decided to "help" them out of the abundant goodness of his bottomless heart.
"So what's the campaign today?" Sara asked while leading Noel to the couch. As she sat down, she saw that Noel was holding a glass vase that contained artfully arranged purple and lavender flowers. He set the purple flowered vase right in front of Sara on the coffee table. He sat down and reached out to grasp Sara's hands with his in a conspiring embrace. Noel then began to stare at Sara, a strange mark of bemusement etched in his smile and a twinkle in his eye—he looked moronically prophetic, as if he had a great and terrible revelation to reveal. Sara began to inch away near the wall where she had a baseball bat hidden.
"Noel," she started hesitantly, "please tell me you've become straight and that you've brought me flowers to show your budding affection?"
Making a face, Noel pulled his hands away. "Honey, I wouldn't become hetero for all the purple scarves in the world! Unless it was a really nice scarf by Versace or Gucci…"
"Okay than what are you doing bringing me the flowers?"
"Oh well you see, little old me was organizing the mail shelf with my back turned. And when I turned around, these flowers were on my desk," his eyes then became wide as saucers, "I thought the flowers were from Andrew, you remember him right? No? Oh well Andrew was my last squeeze. He's British… oh that Earl Grey Tea accent…but I digress, so there was a note attached to the flowers," he gestured to the note tied with a ribbon to one of the purple flower's stalk.
Reaching out for the note, she realized that it was made of the same paper quality as the envelope from her secret admirer. But this note was not written in calligraphy, it was just regular neat print. The handwriting was so neat she wasn't sure it was from a man or a woman.
It must be from my mysterious admirer who left me the scarab, Sara thought to herself.
"Noel," she asked meditatively, "are you sure you didn't see anyone? I mean, I doubt anyone could just pop in and out without you noticing. Even when your back was turned," she added.
Puffing his chest up like a hubristic rooster, Noel leaned in conspiratorially, "Well, I didn't want to seem paranoid, but I did go straight outside once I saw the flowers on my desk. You know with all these banana cuckoo people dropping things here and there on other innocent," Noel interrupted his narration to point to her, "people, I decided to go Dick Tracy."
"And what did you see?" Sara asked.
"Well that's the unfortunate bit. Just as I went outside, a flashy red Volvo zoomed by. It was driving out so fast, I couldn't even catch its license plate number, although I'm sure it was a vanity plate. So blasé." Noel furrowed his Botoxed brow with an afterthought. "You know I should really ask the county to put up a speed limit sign or something."
Sitting back into the soft contours of the couch, Sara wondered to herself who in the world could this person be. First, the admirer sent her a poem with a jeweled scarab, and now he was leaving flowers and taking off in a flashy European car. If this didn't sound like a prelude to any of the romantic novels she would put down halfway, she didn't know what this was. She had to hand it to her mysterious admirer, he most certainly got her attention.
Noel finally left her after ten minutes of gossiping about the new couple who had moved down in the recently vacated apartment on the first floor. Promising him that she would do lunch sometime to talk more in detail about the conspicuous couple and then shooing him out the door, Sara sat back down on the couch. She was still holding the note in her hand. No use putting this off, I'd better read it, she thought resignedly to herself.
"The view may be heavenly, but the love is divine," read the note, "Come to the observation deck of the Stratosphere Tower at 9 PM tomorrow."
"A date, huh?" she said at loud, "You sure move fast, mystery man."
Chuckling softly and placing the card gently upon the coffee table, Sara got up to rearrange the flowers in vase. They were quite beautiful. These flowers were rather exotic considering her expertise in flowers, which was nil—she only knew the names of common flowers sold in floral shops, like rose, petunias, daffodils, or lilies. The glass vase contained dark purple flowers with large petals that were sharp and triangle, each petal had a velvety parfum texture richer than any silk. These smaller ones could have been any ordinary wildflower, but next to their darker and larger sisters, the purples, were magnificent in their unfurled glory. Each tight little lavender bud had a slight twist, as if one peeled back the leaves, you'd almost expect a pixie or a fairy queen to pop out and wag its finger at you for disturbing it. Sara liked these flowers and they appealed to her style: beautifully simple.
Sara shook her herself to relieve her head of the profuse emotion swirling inside—it was near exploding with the thought of a love that she wasn't sure of, a man she did not know, and the confusion of it all. Stroking the softness of the flowers, she wondered why she didn't feel apprehensive. Quite strange actually, in this day and age, an unknown admirer could be a stalker or some newly released serial killer looking for a pen-pal. Yet, Sara did not doubt the veracity of the admirer's emotions—he seemed honest and eager to have his feelings reciprocated, but knew not to border on the edge of creepiness.
"Tomorrow," she promised herself, "tomorrow we will see." So with that, Sara started her day with a smile on her face. The hopes of tomorrow were only a day away.