Couldn't sleep, so new chapter for y'all x
x x x x
Chapter 8
After a difficult night's sleep, Ecklie sat up and stretched. His face had spent all night inches away from Grissom's bare feet, and his back felt stiff as a board.
The girls, on the other hand, had had a relatively good sleep. Sara had made a couple of hushed noises in the night, but a few comforting caresses from Catherine and she quietened down pretty quickly.
They all awoke and shuffled into the bathrooms again, nearly giving Ecklie a stroke when it dawned on him that he was expected to shower here too. And one at a time they appeared in the kitchen, until Ecklie and Grissom, the last two, traipsed in.
A meagre breakfast of egg and toast, with the few supplies he had brought back from the town, was prepared and eaten as the findings from yesterday were shared.
Grissom held up his tin of peaches proudly, still profoundly intrigued to know what they looked like.
"Yeah, well just don't open them here." Catherine ordered. "There's enough weird smells in this place as it is. We can do without fermented fruit."
"Okay Catherine, what did you and Sara find?" Ecklie asked, changing the subject.
"Dust mites." The blonde answered bluntly.
"I found a door handle on the dining room floor." Greg piped up. They all sent him a look. Hey smiled and held up his camera. "Look, I took a picture..."
"Well, we found a load of invoices and receipts." Nick said, changing the subject. "But, check this out." He slid the photograph across the table. "It was in a box on the bookshelf." They all peered across the table at it.
"I put a call in to the coroner; he's going to get a reconstruction done of the little boy's face, see if we can't match it to a child on here." Warrick added.
"Did you find a list of residents, or children that lived here?" Grissom asked.
"Not yet, but there's a tonne of paperwork in that office."
"Okay, in that case you and Nicky stay in there, see if you can find anything useful." He instructed. "The rest of us are heading upstairs. Greg, you're with me. We're going to check the other bedrooms and the classroom. Sara and Sofia, I want you two on the landing and stairwell. Catherine, you get the children's games room."
"And I," Ecklie interrupted, "am going back into the town to see what results the lab has got on the victim. So, good luck guys."
X x x
"Man, it is going to take forever to find anything useful in here." Warrick groaned, surveying the mess of papers they had abandoned yesterday.
"I'll start with the filing cabinet." Nick asserted.
After an hour or so, they had developed a system of piles: receipts, invoices, cheques from what they assumed to be a local charity and letters. Anything else went in the miscellaneous pile.
"Hey, I think I got something." Nick said, beckoning Rick over.
"Yeah?"
"Looks like a medical file ... hey; do you think we're allowed to see these without a warrant?"
"I don't know, we'll ask Griss later." Warrick answered absently, flicking through the manila folder. It was indeed a medical file, but included was a portfolio of the child – a little boy, eight years old on arrival, who was grinning wildly at the camera. According to his notes he was HIV positive and died at the age of eleven.
"Man, can you imagine living here?" Nick asked, shaking his head slowly. "No family, no stability, other kids coming and going. Must be so ... lonely."
"Yeah." Warrick agreed. "No matter what trouble I got into, at least I always knew my grandmother had my back."
From the back of the house somewhere, there was a faint knock.
X x x
"You want the top or bottom?" Sara asked. Sofia raised an eyebrow.
"I'll take the top."
They had opted to start on the stairs and work their way onto the landing. So Sofia began at the top and worked her way down, while Sara started at the bottom and worked upwards. There wasn't really much to find and they covered the area quickly, meeting on the platform in the middle.
Though they had put their differences aside – sort of – there were no words spoken between the two as they worked. It was true that there had been a great deal of tension between the women at one time, but this silence was not surly or cold. It was ... calm, almost.
Eventually, however, Sofia decided to voice a thought that had been playing on her mind since her conversation with Greg yesterday.
"So, what's going on with you and Catherine?" Nothing like getting straight to the point. Sara looked up with a baffled expression. "You guys just seem very close at the moment. I just wondered..." she let the sentence hang, not wanted to presume something way off mark.
"She's just helping me out with something." Sara answered evasively. Sofia quirked an eyebrow.
"Oh, alright. I just wondered." She shrugged. "You guys just never seemed all that close. And now..."
"We are." Sara interrupted bluntly. "We just don't flaunt it."
It was true, on Sara's part anyway, that Catherine was the best female friend she had. Pretty much the only proper female friend in fact.
Sofia was trying to formulate a reply, when all thoughts were broken by a series of muffled, intermittent thuds directly above them.
X x x
"Do you reckon the kid was killed here?" Greg asked, as him and Grissom surveyed one of the nun's bedrooms. The bed had been dismantled and lay in pieces against a wall. He contemplated telling Ecklie about it, but the fleeting thought soon disappeared.
"I don't speculate until there's evidence to support it." Grissom answered in that empty, calm voice of his.
"I know, but, you must have a hunch?" He persisted, scanning the empty, bleak room with his camera. The look Grissom sent him was enough of an answer.
"Evidence Greg." He snapped.
"What evidence? We don't even know what we're looking for." The younger man asked.
"We don't know that until we find something. Let's check the classroom." Grissom pointed out, ambling back into the hall.
The classroom was pretty much as you'd expect: wooden tables with years of doodles scratched into the surface, wooden chairs that scraped against the tiled floor. Books, paper, pens. A dusty old globe sat by the murky window.
"I'm never gonna find anything useful in this dump." Greg grumbled miserably.
A random thud above his head made him jump. "Sorry, I didn't mean it." He whispered nervously.
X x x
"Man, what kind of life is this?" Catherine asked to the empty room, surveying the broken, torn and battered toys scattered around her. She picked up a teddy bear with one eye and sighed. Somewhere in the back of her mind appeared the image of a little Sara Sidle curled up in the window seat, hugging this bear tightly to her tiny chest, waiting for the day someone would come for her. Waiting for the day someone would care.
Pushing the sad thought aside, Cath placed the toy back down carefully on a wooden chest and set to work. She checked the drawers, searched under the couch. Inside the wooden chest she found a row of old dolls, lined up in once-pink dresses. Everywhere she looked there were more battered old toys and a few dilapidated books. Another image flashed to mind; Sara curled up on one of the second-hand chairs with a book, teaching herself everything she needed to know. All of a sudden the story of 'Matilda' came to mind – an abused, neglected little girl with a brilliant mind cast into a loveless world and forced to fend for herself. Except Catherine knew that there was no happy ending here; no Miss Honey to whisk little Sara away from this life.
These tragic images in her mind shattered when a loud bang threatened to bring the ceiling down.
