Chapter 9

Devils In The Details.

"OK, so let me see if I understand this. A serial killer today is, for whatever reason, choosing serial killer's from the past and is recreating their crime scenes across Vegas?" Russell said, quietly,

"In a nutshell..." Greg murmured,

"And you're all sure they're the same?" he asked,

"Their kind of hard to forget." Nick pointed out.

"So that means that our three cases are one in the same?" Finn suggested, cautiously,

"Yeah, I guess so..." Morgan said, softly, glancing around the group,

"Alright, so, for the benefits of those who don't know, can we go back over these cases, leading up to the ones we have now, try and tie it all together. It'll be easy enough to get to know the MO from your case but I want to know the killer. I want to get inside their heads and find out what they all have in common that may be driving our killer now. There must be something and unusually for a copycat, we're not looking for something that's caught his interest in the method but in the killer. We still need to know what. Devil's in the details so give me some..."

Nick, Greg and Sara glanced at one another briefly. None of them were delighted by the prospects of revisiting the cases that had caused them and the people they cared about so much anguish. Nevertheless, they knew Russell was right and so Nick said,

"Alright, who do you want first?" he asked,

"Let's do it chronologically. Which of our ghosts of killers past came first?"

"Ours, Paul Millander." Nick said, flatly.

It was probably a better one to start on. Millander may have been a thorn in their side, and a persistent one at that, and he may have started playing games with them, but none of his games had had as much of an effect on them as the other two.

"Millander was the first big serial case I worked in Vegas, though I missed his first." Sara began, getting the ball rolling when comments from the other two did not seem forthcoming. "He was a slippery bastard and he enjoyed playing games almost more than he enjoyed killing."

"Sounds like a wonderful individual. Why did he start killing?"

Again it was Sara who answered. While Nick and Greg were both aware of the case, she had been more directly involved, particularly because of the Grissom connection, "When he was a child he watched several men break into his house and murder his father. They shot him in the chest in the bathtub and left him there to die. When it came to court, Millander testified against them but it was ruled a suicide and he watched his father's killers go free."

"So he decided that in order to get even with the world, he had to abduct and kill men in the same way his father died?" Finn clarified,

"Yep, crazy world..." Greg muttered in reply,

"The world's not crazy; the people in it are..." Sara murmured,

"Well Millander was definitely a few teacups shy of the full set by the sounds of it." Russell broke in, "How did he choose his victims?"

"All middle-aged father figures whose birthdays fell on the seventeenth of August, the anniversary of his father's death." Nick answered, not mentioning that their old supervisor had also shared this birthday.

"Alright, how did you know that the case you were working was based on Millander's, the sleeping bag in the bathtub suicide isn't exactly copyrighted."

"No, but it would have been pretty damned impossible not to see Millander all over that scene. The attention to detail was ridiculous." Nick said

"What did you find?" Sara asked, curious despite herself.

"You're right, devil's in the details and there were plenty of them. I found a basement downstairs filled with Halloween memorabilia, including one of those rubber hands used, we matched prints, it was one of the Millander hands. We also found an old gramophone down there with the suicide message recorded on it. A calendar in the kitchen with the years Millander's victims were killed, their names marked in one the seventeenth. A letter posted through the door addressed to me, while we were in the house with a blank piece of paper inside...And we found a tape-recorder."

"That's a bit of an anti-climax." Greg said with a light chuckle,

"Not when you know what we found on it." Nick said, grimly,

"What?" Sara asked, noticing as his eyes flicked towards her before at the sheets as he refused to maintain eye contact, "Nick..."

"We found prints, thumb prints, one on top of the other. One belonged to Millander, the other one-"

"Belonged to Grissom..." Sara breathed, horrified by this revelation though she tried to keep a neutral expression.

"What?" Russell, Finn and Morgan chorused, not knowing the history of the print and thinking this was a direct attack on Sara.

In a way it was. It may not have been intended that way but it was certainly having that effect on her. After all the time she had spent in the last few weeks forgetting him, forgetting what he had done, forgetting what they had been, forgetting the last fourteen years of her life, burying herself in her work again, as she had always done, in an attempt to escape from her past and it turned out that she wasn't even safe there.

"Millander developed an obsession with Grissom." Sara said, calmly, fighting to keep her tone neutral, "He started playing with him, sending him messages at crime scenes, the envelope with the blank paper meant that we had nothing. He turned up at the lab, deliberately being caught on camera, waving as he disappeared to God knows where, on the tape recorder, we found two thumb prints, Millander's on top of Grissom's meaning that he had him under his thumb. He even invited him into his house to have dinner with his family."

Despite herself she was getting worked up. Something she had promised herself that she would not allow. Shockingly, it hadn't worked.

"Regular psychopath."

"Vegas is full of them apparently. Did you find anything at the scene that tied it to the present day, to our killer?"

"No. The only things we found there were what he wanted us to find."

"Alright, OK, so let's leave Millander for a second. Vegas is indeed full of psychopaths it would appear, who was next?"

"Us." Sara said, delicately,

They were now straying into uncharted waters. Millander they had been able to deal with. He had remained a part of the world they could control him in, Walter Gordon and Natalie Davis had started crossing personal boundaries and none of them wanted to cross them again.

Despite what he told himself and everyone around him, despite however well he pretended otherwise, Nick could not pretend that his burial had not affected him. It would be enough to get to anyone. There wasn't a sane human being alive who could endure that and not have something inside them snap. It was not a place he wanted to go soul searching again.

But he had to. Someone was making sure of that. He would have to go there, as Sara would have to in a moment. The least he could do, for her sake if nothing else, was to do this first and get it over with.

"Walter Gordon had a grudge against the crime lab because of his daughter's imprisonment as an accessory to murder." He began in clipped tones, "He lured a CSI out to the scene where his daughter had been convicted three years before. Once there, they were abducted and buried alive with a gun, some glow sticks and a message telling them that they either waited it out or killed themselves but one way or another, they were going to die in there."

"And who was it?"Morgan asked, The CSIs who knew groaned inwardly at this.

Curiously, Nick didn't mind. He did not like keeping secrets from his co-workers. He considered them to be his team, his family; he did not want to keep things from them. He could have done what Sara did, argued that it was for their own protection, to keep them safe, that they didn't need to know, but he knew that the longer he kept it quiet, the worse it would get.

While, like Sara, he objected generally to talking about his feelings, he would never deliberately hide anything from them. If they asked him, he would tell them, whatever the consequences. He would not lie to them and he would not choose to keep things from them either.

"Me." He said, calmly

"What?" Morgan breathed, horrified,

"Gordon had a grudge against the lab. It could have been any of us really. Still, they found me, I dealt with it. It's ancient history now."

"History someone is apparently keen to remind us of."

"Hear, hear." Sara said. The reason they were here in the first place was because someone had been keen to start flipping through closed cases deciding that old wounds needed reopened, something she for one did not thank them for.

There had been an aspect of Nick's case that had shaped her life in a way that her colleagues would never know about. Something they had kept quiet until her own brush with one of Vegas' notorious psychopaths.

Once everyone had been sure that Nick was going to make it and be alright, another member of the team had suddenly become sure about something in his life, something that had, and continued, to change her own. Given the circumstances, she for one was not enjoying this charming stroll down memory lane.

"What was it about your case that reminded you of that one?" Nick asked, directing this more towards Sara who would have known what to look for.

"The signatures weren't really there with this one." She said, "But I couldn't really fail to start making connections, even if initially they were in my head. There are some details that I was still considering to be a product of my imagination up until what you said about the Millander scene. This killer is terrifying, the detail is ridiculous. For a start it was in a plant nursery, odd location for a random burial, particularly considering it was owned, additional risk when the thousands of square miles of flat, barren, uninhabited desert would have made a much better choice. The coffin, the little we saw of it before it kindly exploded, for another thing, looked to be of an identical set-up. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that along with the Semtex, I could guess what else was in the coffin. Gun, glow sticks, recorded message. I'm sure I noticed bug bites on our victim, probably fire ants. And I swear there was a trail of bubblegum wrappers leading up to the body."

She glanced at Nick, watching him closely. She had a little more experience than most when it came to hiding scars you didn't want or think anyone else could see. She could tell that he had been affected by what had happened to him but she had also been able to see that pushing him in to facing that wouldn't have done either of them any favours. But just as she had been able to tell back then that he had been bothered by it, she could tell now.

His eyes had glazed over and she could see his muscles twitching as he was no doubt forced to relive what had happened. Somehow, she had always found that flashbacks were worse than the reality they were forcing her to go through again. His hands were locked tightly together, the veins standing out on them like ropes against the tanned skin as he fought to control them and to control himself. She gently slipped one of her hands over his; he squeezed it softly in thanks, the simple action saying more than anything they could have done with words.

"Unfortunately, someone created a slight distraction at our scene. We didn't get much processing done." Russell said, pointedly, smirking lightly at Sara and making her think that he suspected Nick was not as comfortable with this as he was making out, something she was both grateful for and regretted because of what it now meant for her. "We didn't manage to get through much evidence, something to go back for...Since we're just touching on this, who was next?"

"Natalie Davis, the Miniature Killer." Greg said, quietly.

"The Miniature Killer?" Morgan repeated, tone caught between curiosity and incredulity,

"Yep. The wonderfully nutty Natalie Davis. At every one of her crime scenes a perfect, half-inch scale model of the crime was left with insane detail." He said, pulling out the tablet he had stowed in his pocket, the pictures he had already downloaded to show Finn saved on it.

He brought up the first two side-by-side shots of the murder in Izzy Delancey's kitchen and then the miniature that their 'fruitcake' killer as Greg so delicately put it, had left behind.

"You have got to be kidding me." Morgan breathed, staring at it in horror.

"That is a different level of obsession..." Russell murmured, staring, transfixed at the images, his eyes picking out the replicated detail in each one.

As Greg began to flick through the shots, the all began to re-examine them, even the ones who had seen them before,

"Have you seen all of these?" Russell asked, as they reached the carbon monoxide miniature that Natalie had hand delivered to Grissom's office. Nick and Greg both answered "Yes" but Sara murmured, almost inaudibly,

"No..." Causing them all to pause and look at her.

She shifted, uncomfortably, on the bed before shrugging self-consciously and replying, "At the time I was a little too engaged with being the miniature to have a chance to look at it...Afterwards, all of the evidence had been put into storage, it was never something that anyone ever wanted me to see and I didn't go looking..."

"Hang on, she took you?" Morgan demanded, looking shocked,

Sara nodded quietly, glancing at Greg with an almost imperceptible nod, allowing him to move onto the next slide.

As she did so, she stared at it, unsure of how she felt about it. It was strange, to see herself replicated in that way, to see herself the way that Natalie had seen her. No wonder I couldn't talk her out of it...This was all I ever was to her, a dead doll, just another piece in her puzzle...She remembered being trapped under the car, screaming, begging with her to let her go. She remembered her calmly walking away. She had never had any intention other than the one she had set out there with.

"Which one did they choose?" she asked, knowing the answer, "Which miniature did this killer choose to copy?"

"The last one." Greg replied, delicately, as opposed to saying, bluntly, 'Yours!'.

He flipped the screen again and showed them the picture taken from their scene earlier that day. The flipped red car on its back in the baking desert sun, the cracked windows, the sand that had drowned the victim, the desperate, pleading arm reaching out. Pinned. Trapped. Praying for someone or something that had not helped.

She could not pull her eyes away from that image. If sheer, desperate, animalistic, survival instinct could be bottled and put down on paper, that picture was what it would be. It was haunting whichever way you looked at it but with her eyes...Her eyes that knew what that poor soul would have gone through, knew exactly how they would have felt, their terror, their fear, their pain, her eyes that held on to the image and couldn't let go, her eyes that wanted to reach out to them and help them, her eyes that knew she couldn't, her eyes that knew it could just as easily have been hers. With those eyes, it was nothing short of terrifying.

"We found this in the glove compartment." Greg's voice drifted gently onto her ears, reminding her that she was in a hospital, not trapped, drowning, alone and terrified, in the middle of the desert. In a hospitable, surrounded by her friends, by her family, safe, comfortable...Perhaps that last one was debateable...

Shaking herself she forced reality to come back into stronger focus as she allowed her eyes to fall on the second image, the miniature.

She had to hand it to whomever this deranged new killer was, they knew what they were doing. They had always thought that Natalie was one of a kind, that no-one could reproduce a scene with this much accuracy, this much detail, this much talent for want of a better word. The detail and skill was still terrifyingly realistic. She had expected a false, empty carbon copy that would not could not have the same impact as Natalie's miniatures. She had been wrong. That horrified her.

"So, ladies and gentlemen, I think we can say that our observant Miss Sidle is right, we have a serial killer on our hands." Russell said, with an air of finality,

"How do you propose we deal with it?" Finn asked,

"The same way we always deal with it." He replied, "Like any other case. We follow the evidence and we see where it takes us." He paused, before clapping his hands together and saying, "In the morning. I say we stick to what we have now, in pairs, we investigate our own scenes then we pool our knowledge at the end of the day?"

Everyone agreed with this and began to gather themselves together, saying their goodbyes and well-wishes to Sara as one-by-one, they trickled from the room, some needing more pushing and almost literal shoving than others.

Somehow, the last to leave, or not, was Russell.

"You don't look too delighted by this..." he murmured,

"I wouldn't enjoy being in this place at the best of times but recently..." she trailed off, sighing before taking a deep breath, forcing a brave face and saying, "Hospitals never inspire the best memories or the best night's sleep in me normally, tonight. I think there will be a lot of 'observation' going on and it will all be being done by me..."

He looked at her sympathetically and said, softly, "You know, if it's just for someone to keep an eye on you, I'm sure I could manage that. I'll ask the doctor if you can come home with me tonight."

"Oh, no, Russell, I can't ask you to do that-"

"You didn't, I believe I offered."

"You shouldn't have." She told him. While she was desperate not to spend the night here, she equally did not want to be a burden or to put him out of his way,

"Well I have, you try and get me to take it back now." He told her, smiling and squeezing her shoulder. She smiled at this as he added, "Besides, you won't be intruding, Barbara's up visiting in Seattle, neither of us particularly like empty houses, remember. Besides, I need my partner in fighting crime to be fully alert and awake for tomorrow." He said, finishing lightly with a wink and a smile and being rewarded by a faint laugh as he headed for the door saying, "I'll go and talk to your doctor, get you out of here."

"Thanks." She said, meaning it.

She thought it was a bit strange that Barbara was in Seattle, she seemed to be spending more and more time up there recently. However she was not about to start arguing with her ticket out of here. She would talk to him about it later, when they were several miles from Desert Palms.

"Right, I have the papers of your freedom." He said, smiling as he returned with her discharge forms, "I'm afraid you're stuck with me."

A/N: Thanks for reading and reviewing. I might to a little more CSI soul searching as to how they feel about these cases if you don't mind. I'm enjoying this little trip down memory lane a bit more than I thought to be honest. Anyway, please review if you can, always keen to hear your thoughts :) Thank you!