On their way back to the whole "evidence processing" thing, they somehow ended up in one of the break rooms. She was not exactly sure how... And Nick's every movement seemed to be annoying her more. But she had felt shaky on the inside, when he'd suggested rather shortly that they split up, and go in different directions to cover more ground.

"How about some coffee, instead?" she'd been quick enough to recommend.

Of course, he hadn't been opposed to that. And so they were there, each in their own little world, perched on stools around the uncomfortable table of the particular break room they had gone to. Nick was on his phone, tapping letters on the touch screen keyboard furiously with one thumb. Sara was watching him go, and managing to catch little words based on which letters she could see highlighting with every tap. She squinted when one of them was "grandpa..."

"Trying to read me?" he finally asked in his low, husky voice.

She looked up suddenly, as if she'd been caught with a hand in a cookie jar. "What? Oh... No, I just–"

He chuckled, and waved the hand that had just replaced his phone in a pocket dismissively. "It's okay, Sara. It's just a family issue, is all."

She leaned forward on one hand, and affixed him with a stony expression. "Family matters, huh? On the job?"

"A pressing one," he qualified, and took a short sip of his coffee. "They happen, at times."

She narrowed her eyes down at her coffee, but somehow could not bring herself to direct such a look right at him. "They do. But, as I recall, it's a supervisor's job, more than usual, to put such things on hold."

"I'll try to remember that the next time you get a text from Grissom, or your mother, and you're covering shift," he shot back. A timed shrug matched perfectly with an expression of confusion. Almost as if he wasn't totally serious...

About a thousand different responses flew through her white hot head. She squeezed her cup of coffee between her fingers, and wriggled her toes within her shoes as furiously as his thumb had been texting. If she answered with anything even close to that level of honesty, there would definitely be war.

She set her cup down after a sip, that she hoped would be calming, of coffee. "I've never covered shift," she muttered, in a dangerous tone of voice.

"Oh?" He had folded his arms, and leaned back against the very edge of the table behind him.

"Oh," she repeated. "Never, not once. Nobody slipped me a supervisor's card under the table."

"Mm. And nobody's ever come to you under the table to clean up their messes before, either?"

She sighed, and rubbed one eye. "That's not a common occurrence, Nick. There aren't too many people who even know you have it."

"Yeah, but my point is–"

It all seemed to reach critical mass, all at once. Being with him felt like giving up. Being against him was making her nervous. His hard gaze and body position set her on edge. And she crumbled underneath the feeling.

"I'm sorry I brought it up," she interrupted him. And it took some work, but she was able to soften her speech. "I'm sorry. I am. You can deal with your family matters. It's safe with me. I swear."

Whatever likely-cutting thing he'd been about to say, he let it die. He nodded, and averted his eyes. His exhale was deflating. "But you're right: it can wait. I'll tell them I'm at work. It's not like they don't understand that."

She had looked away from him, too. Until she heard this... There was such a downcast in the way he spoke that she looked back. There were times when a person could look at another, and see things that were always there, but not usually apparent. Like how tired they could be, or how heavy the unseen weights on their shoulders could get. Nick was full flush with both. Dark circles the size of carry-on luggage pieces under his eyes were not from a lack of sleep, she knew that. And the sudden sag to his shoulders was not from being professionally over-burdened. He had covered shifts before, many times, that were a lot harder than their current one.

"Nick...?" she started to say.

He sighed, and lifted his eyes to hers.

"Hey!"

It was Morgan. She came in looking much more enthusiastic than Sara thought she probably should. At least, from the short glance she shot in her direction...

"What's up, Morgan?" he greeted her with. "Did you find something exciting, 'cause you're having way too much fun."

"We found a buried treasure. And then a literal one..." she teased at him.

Sara's sense of irritation switched. Or rather, its target... "What was it? We have enough riddles outside of the lab."

Morgan was not dampened by the obvious underlying impatience. "Check this out."

They followed her back to the materials lab they had left her in with their trainee, dragging along their own evidence from David's autopsy. The trainee in question seemed to have acquired another buddy.

"Hey, Pip!" exclaimed Nick, with an excitement in his tone that Sara could tell was forced. "Thanks for your work on the lab! We're back up and going."

The young maintenance man that she had been talking to earlier was bent over the evidence, along with their rookie. At Nick's blatant show of acknowledgment, he blushed a bit of a strange, purple-ish color. Sara inclined her head to the side, and darted her eyes from the wary Pip to the weary Nick. Whose phone had vibrated in his chest pocket, lighting the screen up...

"Oh," answered Pip. "Hi. Yeah, it's all good, sir."

"I see that," said Nick. And he eyed the rest of the situation in the room before him. "Are we all having a party?"

"No, sir," Morgan reassured. "We're just wrapping up what we've got."

"I see that, too. And what have we got, then, ma'am?"

Sara rolled her eyes, and stepped up to stand beside him. Pip and the rookie split ways to give her room. She nodded at them with a smile that she hopped was friendly. Morgan started with the evidence she was clearly the most ecstatic about.

"Alright, Sara, this is the deal with the jewelry: there are fingerprints all over some – just some – of these pieces. We dusted every single one of them from top to bottom, sometimes twice. We got everything off of them. And guess what we found..."

She turned, and rotated the laptop that Nick had cleaned up for Hodges earlier to show them the results on the screen.

"There were two sets of prints on them. One set? Matches our unknown female from the house."

Sara leaned in... And there it was: the fingerprints from the jewelry box read under the same category on the electronic evidence log's filing system. She regarded it with a bit of suspicion, and then reached out to touch the highlighted words, "Additional Evidence", on the screen. Up popped the secondary findings.

"Clara?" she said, amazement flooding her. "Clara Jaffel?"

"Yeah," replied Morgan. "That's our crazy jewelry store lady, Nick."

He leaned forward, palms pressed on the table, eyes squinted at the computer screen... "Wait a second... I know her."

Sara's head all but turned itself to him. "What?"

He nodded. "Yeah, I do... I know her."

"How?" she pressed, incredulously.

"Back when..." –he cleared his throat– "...when Kristi Hopkins was still alive, I bought a necklace from that girl, during a crazy, and brief, period of time that I thought about asking her to, you know... leave the whole 'prostitution' thing behind, and–"

"–be with you."

Sara blinked at him, a couple of times. She wasn't sure if she was angry about that or not; he had tried to help Kristi... And that was unrelated to their current situation, anyway. But still... What a time to drop such a bomb to someone who had watched him go through all that... All the whining he'd done afterwards suddenly felt obnoxious, rather than sympathetic.

"Yeah," he confirmed. "Something like that..." Then he waved at Morgan with a couple of loose fingers. "Was there anything else in the box?"

Morgan tried to erase what seemed like curiosity from her expression. None too completely, Sara thought. But she remembered letting the name "Kristi Hopkins" slip earlier. She grimaced at the side of Nick's shoulder, and silently prayed that Morgan would not press him – or Sara, herself, for that matter – about it later.

"Uhm... No. It's an old box. We know that the diamonds traced back to the store. And those that didn't, didn't even trace anywhere in the country. The box is covered, pretty thoroughly. But, we did find more of Clara in the crime scene. Have a look at this: she was sleeping with somebody there."

The next virtual results folder to flash across the screen caused a flash of sickness through Sara's stomach, as well.

"Nick, you did find female DNA contribution in the kitchen? On the table?" asked Morgan, for clarification.

"That's right..." he said, warily.

"Well, it was her's. She slept with somebody on that kitchen table. Vigorously..."

And so she had. Because, mixed in with her natural vaginal lubrication, there was a little blood. Nick looked a little green. Much like Pip had suddenly turned...

Morgan shook her head a little, and swiped across the screen to remove the details. "That's whose blood was on the floor trim, also. She spent a lot of time there, I'm guessing. But she wasn't the only one. This next sample is a bit of saliva. It was by the kitchen sink, right?"

Nick nodded, but seemed unwilling to risk prompting further details by speaking, in light of the last revelation.

"Well, there's no sperm in it. But it is from a male, and we do have a name, this time."

She pressed on a small square in the lower left corner of the screen, and it brought up one of the most unattractive-looking young men Sara had ever seen. He was blond, but his hair was disheveled and greasy-looking.

"'Martin Trem'?" she read.

"That's right," the rookie chimed in. "And I do know him, actually. He's the younger brother of an old college buddy of mine."

Sara felt Nick's eyes move to her, but she didn't look back. "Was he gay?" she asked of their student.

"He always said not, but we never believed him," the student answered. "He seemed too into the football team in the locker room..."

"Well, where can we find him?" demanded Nick. "Or do you know?"

"I don't, but I can make a few calls. Probably track him down."

"You do that, then. Go. Right now."

Sara jumped internally a little at the harshness with which Nick spoke. The rookie jumped externally. But he did as he was told, and jogged off down the hallway. From her own memories of learning when she was younger, Sara imagined he was feeling moderately relieved to be out of the spotlight, for a moment or two...

Nick, however, immediately returned to Morgan. "Okay, Morgan, lay off the bombshells, for a moment or two, huh? Give me something to really go on."

She looked to her right in thought. "No bombshells? Okay. How about this...?"


Sara was still hearing Morgan's voice in her mind as they were literally following her instructions. "Go back to the house, and pass it by about three blocks. You'll find an alley there. Drive down it, and you'll find a specific kind of door..."

"And we're supposed to be looking for what?" Nick was saying, as she came back to the reality she was presently in with him.

"The door that the wood splinters came from," she explained. "The splinters came from an old door that was sold to a plastic vendor back in 1996."

In spite of himself, he was still smiling. "Serial check."

"No. The only company to use doors with that type of wood in the last decade..."

He was not deterred. "Whatever. It was still a great find, on her part."

He leaned back a little against the driver's seat, and let his head rest on it. At the red light they were waiting for, the headlights of the cars following the street they wanted to cross cast a light on the windshield. And in the windshield, she could see their reflections. She started with herself, perhaps a bit selfishly...

In the fading light of the afternoon, she could see that she looked worn out. Her hair had let its slight curl go in the stress from the discovery of the numerous and disgusting things that Nick's evidence had turned up. She shuddered to think what else they would find, once Morgan finished with the rest of his things. But, both oddly and childishly enough, the first thing she wondered was if it would make her look anymore haggard... Her eyes glazed over, as she trailed her vision from unkempt hair and pale cheeks to dirty shirt and ruffled jacket collar.

"Don't stress, Sara. You look as sharp as always," came the voice of Nick beside her.

She whipped her head over, and saw that he was watching her with the windshield, too.

"I saw you checking yourself out," he followed, in response to her quizzical look. "No worries, there."

And then his phone buzzed again. Several times... But he ignored it.

"Are you gonna get that?" she asked in a cracked voice. "It's been going off for about a half-hour, now."

"I'll get it after shift." He shrugged. "I know it's not Jim, or anything like that..."

She felt a weird weakness fall into her. Not an emotional one, so much as a physical one. The last echos of his voice seemed to haunt the interior of the car. That was not the last thing she wanted to hear him say.

"What if it was your family?" she tried.

But he answered with another shrug.

"What if it was an old friend, like Catherine?"

He looked over, perhaps at some of the bitterness she hadn't meant to let out, but still didn't speak with more than a shake of his head.

The weakness was replaced by a desperation. "What if it's Russell? Or Finn? Or Greg...? Or–"

But his answer – although verbal, and enough to relieve the frustration – brought back the weak sensation through its quieter and calming tone. "I'll look at it when we get there."

She exhaled sharply, and tried to mimic him by leaning back on her own seat. The leather was surprisingly cool on her back, as it met up with her again. Rather through her side vision, or the continued reflection on the windshield, she was not sure. But she saw him staring at her with a concern that she normally would have been annoyed further by.

But in the midst of that moment, it caused her the much-preferable sensation of relief. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he forgave without a beat. "But you're starting to worry me a little, Sara. What's going on?"

She grinned, and looked at him with raised eyebrows. "You didn't tell me what's going on with you. Why should I tell you?"

He shrugged again, this time with a reckless lack of care. "That's a very good question. But I bet whatever it is, it's not a family issue. And I mean that in the best possible way!" he hastened to add.

She tried to push the uprising of discomfort away; that had kind of stung. But she found, when she nodded, and watched him in the windshield, that it was easy. The look of him was aided by the sudden movement of the car, as the light turned green, and his foot pressed the pedal.

She took another deep breath, and let it out. "Nick... You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to, alright? I was just pissed, I guess."

"Yeah, I noticed that. But I'd like not to be fighting with you. You're... well, you. You're the only one left from the team we both had. Care to tell me what I did so wrong?"

She rolled her head from side to side a couple of times. Eyes closed... taking in the cooling feeling of the seat... "Nothing serious. Really..."

Shadows rose up over the car. The interior's lighting suddenly seemed brighter in the surrounding darkness. She couldn't see him in the glass anymore when she opened her eyes. She had to turn and look right at him. But his eyes were on the road.

"Something, though, right?" he inquired.

She threw a hand up, and felt herself lightening a little. "You sound like your old self."

He applied the brakes. And she realized, suddenly, that they were in the alley way. She un-clicked her seat belt.

"Is that a bad thing?" he tried asking, beginning to get out, himself.

"Not by itself, no," she said in the act of sliding out her door.

She didn't see him, but she guessed that he exited the vehicle much more quickly than she had, because the sound of the other door opening and closing came to her ears a few moments before those of her own echoed in the dimly lit alley. But she would have no more questions; they were beginning to make her squirm.

So it was fortunate that he didn't ask anymore. He brought her a flashlight. Instructed a gun check... Made sure he had the car's keys before locking the doors... Edged up to the side of the alley... and set off along the wall.

Close behind him, she could hear the sounds of the city beyond them much more clearly than she normally wanted to. It was usually something she noticed; just not something she was fond of concentrating on during a case. The rest of the time, it was more of a comfort than anything...

Their breathing was quiet. Their footsteps, not much less so... The sidling – and she thought of that as no pun – along the dirty, old brick wall took them right to their intended target. But it sounded like they might not have been alone.

Nick looked back at her before going on. He leaned right up next to her; she could smell some kind of fancy, probably expensive cologne rolling off of him, like he'd been wearing that morning. His lips right by her ears tickled her cheek a bit, with his beard.

"Stay behind me," he whispered.

As he backed away, she turned her eyes up and nodded once, lightly. He seemed satisfied, at least enough to turn and press into the door. It came open with little resistance; Sara could see why as she followed him through it: there were splinters similar to their evidence, indicating some heavy damage already on it.

As she stepped into the room, she ground her teeth at the extra noise their feet made on the floors inside the old place. Lying around all over were the signs of the previous business conducted in the building; plastic bits in indiscernible chunks were piled randomly across the floor, and an endless onslaught of old paper work was visible in the still-shining sun of the day's winding down. Nick didn't seem to have taken much of this in, though, through his one-focus goal. He approached the corner at the doorway to the room steadily, and without looking away.

The shock that they had wanted to avoid came before they'd turned that corner, though. Just as she had noticed that she had gone close enough to all but walk into the back of him, he had thrown back an arm, and taken her with as he'd flung himself against the wall, weapon poised up.

"Good God!" shouted the voice of the other person in the room. "What are you doing coming in through the back!?"

Sara sighed, half in relief, and half in irritation. "Brass..." she breathed.

"Oh, my God, Jim!" shouted Nick. "Why didn't you tell me you were here!?"

"I didn't think you'd be able to miss the cop car outside. You never told me you were going to come in the back way."

Nick stood up straight from where he had leaned against the wall. "That's how we found our way here. Morgan traced the splinters from the wood to this place."

Brass shook his head. "I'm not even going to ask how that one happened. Forensics has just come so far since I came back to detective-hood..."

"Timing of the business, nature of the doors kind of thing," offered Sara, in spite of the captain's assertions for unawareness about it.

"Sure," he accepted. "That part, we still know works well."

"Oh, yeah," said Nick. "Can't beat the classics." He exchanged a grin with Sara, and sent a wink to her before addressing Brass again. "Find anything while you were waiting for us?"

"Well, actually, I did. Didn't you get my text message?"

Sara's grin widened. She felt better, she knew, because it had just been Brass in the room, instead of a rabid homeless person, or a murderer in the middle of the crime. But knowing that Nick hadn't checked his phone like he'd claimed to have done was just as sweet.

And he knew it, too. "I, uh... Er... No. I didn't."

Brass closed his eyes, and sighed. "You're falling down on the job, Stokes. I found something you'll be very interested in. Something for your department."

Nick's lingering smile disappeared entirely. Rather for the grim anticipation, or the shot taken at his supervisory skills, Sara was not sure. She gripped his arm, hands wrapped around his upper arm in the hope that it would come off as a supportive move. He did not brush her off or shake her away, or make any sign that he didn't like it, as he hadn't done when he'd walked her all over the streets the night before. It was in that united position that Brass laid it out for them.

"We've got another dead body. An older lady... I saw her lying on the stairs as soon as I could get the front door open."

Nick glanced thoughtfully over at Sara. "Wait a second... That means somebody else forced open the back door."

He turned to look back at it, and she with him. The wind blowing through it gave off an ominous effect. She inhaled some of the fresh air coming through it to kill the negative association, and embraced the cold feeling that followed. That shiver could be her excuse for tightening her grip.