MAGIC BULLET - Biting the Bullet

If a stranger offers you the chance to get away with murder...

would you take it?

Grissom did not immediately open the attache case upon his return home. He felt the nagging in the back of his mind to just tear that damned thing open and spill the contents out onto his coffee table to examine whatever it was that Graves had left him in the seemingly innocent brief case.

Yet, Grissom had always been a man of near infinite self control. He needed to be if he could ever hope to properly analyze any evidence the stranger had left him. The investigator set the attache case upon the table alongside his kit and strode away from it purposely to go through the motions of making a small meal and eating it in peace. He sat calmly at the kitchen table, staring for some time across the open floor plan of his apartment to the attache case where it rested upon the table, almost begging to be examined, ripped apart, and scoured for evidence. He made himself a cup of tea and stood in the kitchen, frowning at the thing as though it could actually say something or argue back.

Finally, Grissom stood, walked across the apartment, sat, and opened his kit. The forensic scientist in him took over as he pulled on latex gloves from his kit and studied the case. Slowly, methodically, the man took haddonite white power and began to apply it over any of the surfaces that could potentially bear a usable print. The entomologist took his time, leaving no surface unscoured. The locks. The handle. The edges. Graves had been quite careful indeed not to leave any fingerprints upon the case at all on the exterior. The only prints Grissom lifted where likely his own judging by the characteristic break in a whorl pattern identifying his own index fingerprint where he had a small scar from accidentally slicing the tip of his finger at a crime scene. Grissom conceded a point to Graves.

Then, there was the matter at hand. Grissom took a moment to steel himself, uncertain of what exactly might be in the case as the purported irrefutable evidence as Graves had claimed. The investigator considered once more whether he truly wanted to take the word of a potential mad man in this matter. It could have been a trap after all, a bomb waiting to blow up right in Grissom's face, whether an actual incendiary or a metaphorical one.

Curiosity got the better of him, and Grissom unclasped the latches. There was no turning back now. He held his breath as he opened the case. Sure enough, nestled inside the plush interior, rested a gleaming pistol. A Colt Double Eagle to be precise. Beside that, to the right sunken into little slots, was the one hundred bullets. They all looked perfectly normal and utterly mundane. He studied both the handgun and the rounds before looking to what had been placed to the left of the attache's interior. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary with the ammunition and the pistol, nothing that should or would yield an untraceable round. He tried to lift prints from the handgun and a few of the bullets bound found not a single fingerprint.

Then, did Grissom turn his attention to what had been placed to the left in a neat bundle. There was a fabric parcel of some form. Grissom tested it with his gloved fingers and found the cloth to give but only ever so slightly. The man lifted the strange bundle from the attache and set it down upon the table, frowning at it. Then, with great caution, Grissom unwrapped the white, thin, cotton cloth to reveal the interior contents. On the inside of the bundle, was a dvd-r and a cellular phone; the phone had seen some damage and had a mild, foul odor of vegetable rot, as though it had been in garbage once. If Grissom knew he could trust in Archie's safety, he would have taken both directly to the AV tech, but the man could not take that chance.

He set the phone aside to unfold the cloth and found it to be a button down dress shirt, mens. Grissom draped the shirt across his table and turned the entire thing over a few times, studying it carefully. The shirt size was a few sizes larger than his own and any reasonable guesses he would have made at Graves's size, suggesting that the article belonged to someone else. More than that. It looked familiar, like he had seen it once before. There was a subtle twist to the fibers at regular intervals from when the fabric had been loomed, leaving a fine, implied pattern of pin stripes on the white in tiny downward diamonds. A unique weave. One Grissom most certainly thought he should have known judging by the size and the pattern, like he had seen it before but never truly noticed.

Something caught his attention at the hem of the sleeve. There was but the faintest blush of color peppering the cuff of the right sleeve. Grissom picked up the shirt to lift it closer to his eyes to studying it intently. There were two distinct shades of stain. A dark, garnet red, almost brown along with the slightest of grey black hazes like cordite. Grissom recognized the arterial spray without luminol but swabbed and tested for both the presence of blood before checking to ensure that it was human blood. Judging by the patterning and the gsr, the shirt had been stained while shooting someone at close range. Someone like perhaps Warrick Brown in a tiny, cramped car in the parking lot by the Peppermill?

Grissom shook his head to shuffle loose the thought as his phone rang; the man glanced at the number and spotted Catherine's name. He pursed his lips together, knowing she was likely only calling to make sure he was working on a fitting eulogy for Warrick. The woman probably feared a repeat of being left to give an unwritten speech in Grissom's place if he were called away. The man silenced the offending phone to set it down on the table and continue perusing the evidence Graves had left him.

There was only one thing left. The dvd-r. Grissom turned it over in his hands. He made sure to hold it under the light and survey both sides for any prints, partial or full, knowing Graves hadn't left him any to find even before he checked.

Grissom stared at the dvd-r for a second, noting the burn pattern. There wasn't much information to the disc judging by the short breadth of the burn. However, the investigator now had doubt of what could potentially be in whatever short timeframe left marked upon the disc. Worse. Upon closer inspection, he noted that this was no ordinary Maxwell disc purchased at a local Staples or BestBuy. At least, they might have been available at retail stores, but people weren't likely to purchase or use them in their home granted the nature of the disc. This was a dvd-d, a disposable dvd. There seemed a faint discoloration that distorted and bent in the light, but, upon closer inspection, it turned out to be more than that. It was an oxide film, spreading across the back of the dvd and ruining any content before Grissom's eyes.

The investigator lunged for his laptop, ripped it open, and shoved the disc into the drive roughly before it could destroy its self any further. It took a moment to load, and, unsurprisingly, there was a blank title for the disc. Grissom sat back, wringing his hands in anxiety before hitting 'play' and sitting back to view the contents. The missing surveillance footage of the parking lot. Mere moments later, after the disc had finished and become completely unreadable, thus destroying the most irrefutable evidence he had ever been handed in his life, Grissom launched the laptop into the wall in rage. The entomologist sat there, trembling in anger for a few moments, just staring at the handgun and the 100 bullets.

Much as he hated to admit it, Graves was right; McKeen had shot Warrick in cold blood.

xxxx

Gilbert Grissom strove to never be an emotional person by nature. In fact, the entomologist found a smug satisfaction at the thought of his own stoic facade. The man rather enjoyed watching his colleagues try to make some sense of his thoughts and feelings at any given time, especially when they were completely off.

Emotions were a weakness, at least for a crime scene investigator. The occupation left little room for sentiment or error committed as a result. Investigators that allowed their emotional attachments get the better of them often made critical errors in judgment or missed glaring clues left at the scene. Grissom could ill afford either, especially now. Emotions got in the way of rational thinking, dulling the mental edge the CSI had over the criminals of Las Vegas, the only real weapon Grissom bore, in his humble opinion. It was the only weapon he could bear in whatever game unfolded around him between McKeen and Agent Graves.

His palms were sweaty and hot, but Grissom didn't feel it. Instead, he still felt the sickening sensation of blood on his hands. Not his own blood, mind you, but Warrick's. Grissom had been through hundreds and maybe thousands of autopsies and crime scenes in his career, and blood had never once bothered him. He'd seen far worse. Yet this blood had utterly horrified the unusually cool and composed man. It turned his stomach even then, after washing so many times with just about every disinfectant and every soap Grissom could get a hold of, even after scrubbing down until his skin felt as raw as his own heart. A part of Grissom felt his hands would never be clean of the blood, no matter how often he washed, as though he would forever be stained and sullied by the death of his co-worker, his colleague, and his friend.

"Out, damn'd spot! Out, I say!- One; two, why then

'tis time to do't.- Hell is murky.- Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and

afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our

pow'r to accompt? - Yet who would have thought the old man to

have had so much blood in him?"

Gilbert Grissom, while not a great lover of his own emotion, always appreciated literature, particularly the classics and anything related directly to the psychology of murder, whether of the victim, the perpetrator, the police, or the investigators. Macbeth and Hamlet were among his favorites, nestled snugly right alongside such great modern works as Jane Goldman's Dreamworld. Only Sara Sidle had seen his personal library of fiction, tucked away in his back closet and away from the prying eyes of anyone who might enter his apartment, along with a few personal items, and even she had been taken back by the intensity of some of the novels and plays hidden there. Grissom had shared the better parts of his collection with Sara when she had asked, delighting in her little reactions as she read in the living room or in bed before they went to sleep for the night, especially the way she cocked her eyebrow at the more shocking of clues. The man had adored the way she would sometimes sort out the killer long before even he had figured it out.

He'd thought more and more of that collection anymore, especially Lady Macbeth and her "out damn'd spot" scene. Any time he looked at his hands and saw the scarlet of the blood there, forever burned into his memory, or anytime he felt the warm stickiness of that terrible night, Grissom heard the mad Lady Macbeth echoing in his mind. Anytime he caught sight of McKeen, he heard the Lady Macbeth crying out in his mind, pointing out the murderer that he just couldn't seem to find anyway to bring to justice. Even as he stumbled uneasily through his greetings, Grissom could hear Lady Macbeth cackling away and taunting in the back of his mind. Grissom made a mental note to immediately destroy his copy of Macbeth. Without Sara in his life, no one would ever know the book had ever been in his possession.

Grissom drew a deep breath and almost immediately tripped over his carefully practiced opening remarks, feeling the eyes of the crowd upon him. He felt hot and uncomfortable there, before everyone, his tie suddenly too tight and choking. Were Grissom any other man, he might have fidgeted, reached up and loosened it or awkwardly cleared his throat, yet that was not in Gil Grissom. Even if it were in Grissom, the occasional flashbulb from the back of the massive hall was more than enough to curtail such nervous ticks.

It bothered Grissom, the flashbulbs and the distant hiss of both scribbling pens on slender notebooks and recorders from the back of the hall. Originally, the family had intended for there to be a small service, limited to immediate relations and close friends. They had planned to hold the wake in a quaint funeral parlor owned and operated by an old family acquaintance before an intimate church service in a tiny chapel, really intended only for the same, limited guest list. They had felt it an act of respect to a man who, while he wasn't a hermit like Grissom, enjoy a sort of privacy to his life. However, as word hit the media over what had happened during a light news week, the "intimate" mass and interment turned into a media circus. Every newspaper, magazine, and news crew had immediately come calling, demanding and begging for entrance. In the end, the family had relented. Now, a sea of strangers were packed into the back half of a massive church, all waiting with bated breath for Grissom to finally settle and speak.

Grissom glanced down to the second row. As always, there was Catherine Willows, ever an emotional pillar to him. She had he had worked together for years, much longer than anyone else in the Crime Lab. She had always been there for him, and vice versa. The decision had come down to the two of them regarding who would actually speak that day. Grissom volunteered, but he now found himself strangely wishing he could take it back. The woman smiled serenely in commiseration and encouragement.

Catherine sat at the end of the aisle and of their team. Beside her, sat Greg Sanders, his head bowed. It was the first time Grissom had ever seen the young CSI look so still. Greg's hair and clothes honestly subdued and neat. Black suit, ebony tie, white shirt, and slicked back hair in an utterly normal style. Nick Stokes must have helped him. Stokes stared ahead solemnly at Grissom, just waiting. Beside him sat Jim Brass and, beside the detective, Sophia Curtis, her blonde hair swept up in an almost matronly bun. She had been wedged between Brass and a rather uncomfortable looking Conrad Ecklie. Archie. Dave and Doc Robbins representing the medical examiner's office. A few others Grissom couldn't name at the moment.

"I have met..." Grissom started flatly, but, in an instant, the words felt contrived and foolishly naive as soon as they spilt from his lips.

There came a creak at the door in the back. All of the heads of the audience snapped to the back of the massive church, but only Grissom felt both a sense of sweet relief and intense dread as she slipped in between the massive, wooden doors. Sara Sidle. She wore a plain, dark dress suit, her hair hanging limply about her pale face. Her eyes were red and puffy, as thought she'd been crying hard and long, but, to Grissom, there could be no lovelier of a sight. It was just utterly depressing to see her under such circumstances. She glided down the aisle and took her seat beside Catherine, pausing only to give her former boss a warm and comforting hug. Then, she lifted those dark, brown doe eyes of hers to the man at the pulpit.

Grissom swallowed and shuffled at his cards for a moment, mindful of the task at hand. He stared at the words he'd poured over the night before until late in the office, but the carefully scored notations blurred. The neat cursive now looked like nothing more than chicken scratch. The man frowned, pursing his lips together in an almost petulant expression. Then, Grissom slipped the now completely meaningless cards into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

Grissom took a moment to compose himself before beginning in earnest. "I had spent several hours last night trying to pen the perfect thing to say, the right things to talk about. Writing. Editing. Rewriting." He paused, making sure to rein in any lingering inappropriate emotion. "Yet, what honestly is the right thing to say?" Grissom's gaze swept across the crowd, now unhampered without cards to focus on. "What can you say?"

He had been there that night. Grissom's hands had been upon his chest, applying as steady and even of pressure as possible in a failed attempt at staunching the blood loss. He had watched as his friend breathed his last. Those last breathes had first been labored and obviously torment, before growing steadily shallower, despite his best efforts to drag the man back from the dead. He'd spoken at first to the bleeding man beneath him, then yelled, then pleaded. Grissom had begged, for the first time in a long time, prayed to a God he still wasn't entirely certain existed if things like... like that could still happen to good people in this world.

Grissom looked to Catherine, almost desperate for help. She just gave a small bow of her head, as if imploring him to go on to just continue through his speech.

The man sighed and looked down, catching sight of McKeen. The undersheriff just... sat there, all innocent and in grief, it seemed, but Grissom knew the truth. He had seen the undersheriff for what he was; a murdering sonovabitch, and nothing more. McKeen was Grissom's damned spot that would not be washed clear. The entomologist clenched his fists to keep his calm.

"A good man is dead."

The words were barely a whisper. Grissom's sight drifted to the closed coffin before him and the sprays of white lilies set atop it, and he felt himself trailing off again. Catherine moved out of the corner of his eye, and Grissom was swallow once more. He cleared his throat and brought his gaze back up. Catherine slowly sat once more and gave a small nod.

Grissom shook his head. "No. A friend is dead. What can you say at a time like that?"

There was an uncomfortable moment as Grissom seemed to be asking for a response, his eyes demanding an answer from the crowd as equally as interrogating his prime suspects. It had been a mournful lament, but something about Grissom's tone made it an intense accusation. Several members of the mourners, the media, and even the Crime Lab employees shifted awkwardly in their chairs, looking rather guilty. Only two men seemed unperturbed by the question. One wore a black suit and dark glasses towards the middle of the crowd, his lips taut in a wolfish smirk. Graves. The other sat towards the front row, his sharp and knowing gaze fixated upon Grissom almost pressingly despite the cool composure on the rest of the features. McKeen.

"I had been asked to speak today about the life and times of a friend and colleague pertaining to the work that had become his life, especially in this last, trying year. I had even written in what would have certainly been a boring and trite eulogy about that aspect to his life." Grissom gave his head a toss once more, a terse and nervous gesture now more than anything. "It never fails that I get asked what our task really is. We collect evidence, yes. We prove beyond shadow of a doubt who is the guilty party in a crime, yes. But that is not our task. That is merely our job."

Sara seemed to be smiling, but only slightly. Her pale, pink lips curled at the edges in her own, private reverie. Her hands were clasped in her lap. She kept herself reserved as much as possible, but her eyes spoke volumes. She knew the answer to his unasked question.

"Our task is to speak for the dead, for those who can only speak through us and though the evidence left behind." Grissom smiled. "Warrick Brown tells me that he lived his life to the fullest everyday, no matter how much we the authorities of the Crime Lab bogged him down with meaningless paperwork and red tape. He tells me this through the history of his life and the evidence left behind in the people he held dear, in the faces of all of you."

All eyes were upon him. It felt pervasive almost, to be attempting to share something so bittersweet, so tender, with so many strangers. Grissom didn't like it, feeling like he'd been thrown out in front of the firing squad, but he reminded himself that it had been his choice, his voluntary sacrifice in the last act of kindness and friendship he could grant Warrick Brown. When Grissom surveyed the crowd, however, it was the man in the black suit, emotionless and stolid that took him off guard once more. Grissom had often told investigators, particularly rookie CSIs to look for what didn't belong, and this man most certainly didn't belong with his haunting, predatory smirk and those darkly tinted glasses. Graves. Both he and McKeen had the look of lean, fierce wolves amid a sea of fat, lazy sheep. It disturbed Grissom worse than the feeling of any other eyes upon him, as though the eyes bore straight through him even through the glasses. Both Graves's and McKeen's presences tainted the church, spoiled it somehow.

Grissom coughed and rather quickly blurted out, "I had a far longer speech, but there is nothing I can say that could sum up the life of my colleague and friend more than what is written in the hearts and minds of the people who's lives he touched. No words, no single bit of evidence, no matter how crucial, that can encompass the whole of a person's life and their impact on even the smallest of scales."

He looked to the casket sadly, still feeling the unnerving gaze of Graves upon him even when he looked down. Grissom felt the weight of the attache case in his hands, the heft of the handgun and the one hundred bullets. He felt Warrick's blood upon his hands. The entire world seemed to condense down to a series of disjointed sensations all pressing down upon Gilbert Grissom all at once even as his gaze drifted to McKeen and settled there accusingly. He gave a curt nod, knowing now what he had to do with that one hundred bullets.

"Warrick, you will be missed, more than you could ever know."

And, with that terse, jolted statement, it was over; close one door and open the next.

And, unknown to Grissom, Graves was nodding slowly in approval.

xxxx

Burials held no less social anxieties for Grissom than the mass. The only fortunate thing about moving from the church to the cemetery would be the lonely drive over there. He'd taken one of the Crime Lab SUVs as soon as he learned that the media would be welcome to Warrick's funeral services, hoping that the vehicle would garner some additional recognition and assistance in keeping the procession to the cemetery orderly and without undue interruption. He had also taken it to avoid riding with the rest of the lab staff in any of the livery cars provided to them, especially the crowded limo that would escort the night shift to the cemetery. Grissom wanted time to be alone with his thoughts after such an awkward eulogy.

His original plan had included slipping out of the church before the end of the mass to give himself a little extra moment head start on both the other mourners and the mysterious Graves, but even that seemed out of the question when a pair of high heel shoes sounded on the stone steps behind him at the front of the church. Grissom sighed, half-expecting it to be Catherine come to check on him, but, when he turned to face her and chide the woman for it, it wasn't Catherine.

"Sara," he breathed.

The woman smiled awkwardly, like a school girl almost, as though uncertain what exactly to say or do. "That was... unusual."

Grissom shrugged. "I'm not good at speeches. You know that."

"Yeah. Catherine told me about you ditching her for the prom murder/kidnapping case." Even after all that time, Grissom mildly winced at the jest of leaving Willows to deliver a keynote speech in Ecklie's honor, but the joke was a welcome one that helped to dispel some of the tension between them as Sara went on. "I'm sorry, you know?" Grissom didn't reply but did slightly raise an eyebrow; the woman toyed with her hands. "I'm sorry I wasn't here. I should have been here. For Warrick." Sara looked down at the toes of what even Gil had to admit were daring heels even for her. "For you."

Anything else she could have said would have been better than that. Sara's leaving was a whole other angry welt upon his soul that Grissom didn't feel he could handle at the moment. Perhaps not ever. He held up a hand in protest, stopping anything else she could say and letting a heavy, almost palpable silence yawn between them.

Then, Sara spoke again. "Grissom, if you..." She shook her head. "If you want to talk... you can call me."

"I know..." He paused, thinking over the words carefully as the door creaked open and McKeen slipped out, his cellphone open and in hand to take a call. Grissom gave a quick toss of his head. "I can't."

Sara nodded her head curly, clearly upset by his cold distant and indifference to her. "Well... okay then."

The woman turned to return to the church, but Grissom called out to her, stopping her dead in her tracks. "Sara... wait." She turned to face him, but Grissom looked away. "Sara, I..." The day was getting to be too much for Grissom, far too much, and the words were hard to form. "I want to talk. About Warrick. About... us." Sara nodded imploringly, but the man just sighed as a sinking feeling settled over him like the weight of a certain Colt in his right hand. "I just... I can't. Not right now."

"Alright," Sara said slowly. "Whenever you're ready."

With that, she strode back inside and left Grissom out on the steps by himself, more alone than he'd ever been in his life as his gaze shifted back and forth between the door Sara had just gone through and the murderer no more than ten or twelve feet away just chattering away on his phone.

xxxx

The burial had been more of the same pomp and circumstance, all unnecessary and suddenly, brutally devoid of meaning in Grissom's opinion. He'd kept to the fringe of the group, preferring to remain just outside the scope of the ceremony and the prayers. This wasn't his place amid family and mourners. He didn't belong. Not when his mind churned over Sara's words, over the thought of finding Warrick's killer and putting them away for the rest of their natural life. He slid away from the crowd just before the end of the rites as easily as he had slipped from the church, keeping a wary eye out for Graves, but the mysterious man seemed to have vanished into the ether. Grissom stuffed his hands in his pockets and crossed the cemetery quickly, darting between the headstones and statuary like a distant dream.

Grissom climbed into the driver's seat of the SUV shortly before the emotions of the day took hold of him. He felt a tear stream down the side of his cheek even then as he thought of it. Grissom roughly scrubbed it away, choking back the lump in his throat and forcing down whatever it was that turned in him, twisting his heart. He trembled from the effort but settled in a moment.

The entomologist turned the key in the ignition and glanced up long enough to notice the rear view mirror had been knocked out of alignment pretty badly and now reflected just a scrap of center console. Grissom furrowed his eyebrow. He could not accurately recall, but Grissom felt certain the rear view mirror hadn't been that way when he was driving nor when he got out of the SUV at the cemetery. Grissom reached up to adjust it and found a pair of dark, hungry eyes staring back at him through the mirror from the back seat, the same, predatory eyes he had felt upon him in the church. Graves.

There came a dry click of a firearm being cocked in the backseat before the man ever spoke.

XXXX

Author's Notes: Sorry it took so long, but I has been a bit busy with Dumpshock.