On his drive into work the next day Horatio ran the events from the previous evening through his head. Grace had asked if he would help her to start unpacking some of her things, which were still stored in crates and containers since she's just had them dumped in her new apartment and gone to find what had happened to her wayward sister. Anxious to gloss over his casual gaffe, Horatio had wholeheartedly agreed. He had called and cancelled the dinner reservations he'd made for them, and instead they'd sat next to each other on a sturdy cardboard packing box eating takeout Chinese food straight from the cartons. It was a somewhat subdued evening at first, neither really knowing what to say, but gradually they fell into companionable chatter and eventually easy laughter as they allowed the events of the day to drift to the back of their minds. Thinking back; Horatio remembered one conversation vividly.
"So you're still going to move down here then?" He'd questioned, Grace couldn't quite separate the emotions crossing his face, a changing expression that seemed to convey hope and worry all at the same time, edged with curiosity and just a hint of embarrassment.
"What do you mean?"
He stopped for a second, not really sure if he should bring up the subject of Sarah, for fear of lapsing back into the awkwardness of earlier.
"Well, I figured that maybe if Sarah wasn't here anymore you might reconsider your moving plans and decide to go back to New York."
"Well, even if…" it was going to take some effort for her to voice the worst-case scenario, and Grace changed the phrase from 'even if she's dead' at the last minute, not wanting to tempt fate, "even if Sarah did skip town, well I still have a really good reason for moving down here."
"Yeah, I guess working as the top photographer for a fashion house will be a great addition to your cv." He nodded his head, understandingly.
Grace's face flushed a little, and she looked at Horatio, wondering if she should really push her coy personality to one side for just a moment and voice her next comment. What the heck, she thought, might as well go all in.
"You remember when I phoned to say I'd decided to take the job offer, I told you why I'd made the decision to move down to Miami? The three reasons?"
"Yeah, you wanted to get to know your sister again, the chance to develop your career, and…" he could feel the tingling on his skin that was a sure sign that he was turning red. He couldn't bring himself to say 'me'.
"Well it's the 'and…' part of the sentence that's kinda my main reason for moving here now." She kept her head down, looking at the floor, afraid to look at him, nervous about how he'd react to this very forthright admission.
Horatio thought that, from the part of her face that he could actually see, he'd never seen someone turn that vibrantly red, that quickly before. He chuckled, and she looked up at him, surprised that her admission had elicited that kind of reaction. He explained the reason for his amusement, and she swatted him playfully on the arm, turning, if it was possible, an even more violent shade of red. He continued to observe her until she eventually raised her eyes to meet his once more.
"Come on Horatio, I'm out on a limb here, you gotta say…" She was silenced when Horatio leaned forward and did something he'd wanted desperately to do ever since he'd first met her, he placed his lips firmly on hers, "…something." She muttered into the kiss.
Her lips tasted of sweet and sour sauce, and there was a tingle on his own lips that Horatio debated was part of the passion of the moment or a trace of chilli oil from the takeout food. In his head he opted for the passion of the moment, a much more romantic notion than a condiment induced sensation.
Their task of unpacking boxes all but forgotten they had sat there side by side on their makeshift seat watching as the rain continued its fearsome onslaught, lashing at the palm trees that lined the beach outside the apartment block. Grace had fallen naturally into Horatio's arms, her head snuggled underneath his chin, his arms stretched around her; holding her close. In each others' presence, he realised, all the troubles in the world could be pressing in on them and they wouldn't notice a thing.
The memory provided Horatio with a warm glow as he parked the Hummer in one of the spaces outside the MDPD building. He found a skip in his step and a happy whistle on his lips as he walked up the steps that led into the main entrance.
Officer Paula Muro looked around the entrance hall to the MDPD from her position behind the desk. Who the hell was whistling? It was way too early in the morning for someone to be that happy. She shook her head when she realised that the noise that was currently assaulting her eardrums was coming from the normally solemn Lieutenant Caine, wondering if she was mistaken and the sound was actually some warped kind of tinnitus she shook her head. Nope, Caine was definitely walking through the lobby whistling, she could see his lips were pursed. That, she thought, is not normal.
"Morning, Paula."
"Um, morning Lieutenant."
"Any messages for me?"
Paula handed Horatio the pile of messages and he thanked her as he wandered off, quickly flicking through the notes. Paula decided that today would be a good day to catch up with some of the office gossip from Calleigh Duquesne.
Horatio glanced at his watch as he walked into his office and sat down at his desk. He was early, as usual, and the rest of the team wouldn't be in for at least another hour. He tossed the pile of messages down onto the table, just requests from journalists each wanting a sound bite for their stories on cases that were going to trial this month. His early start to the working day served a purpose, Horatio used this time to catch up on the mountain of paperwork that appeared on his desk on a daily basis in an attempt to clear the decks before another frantic day had the chance to put him behind on his reports. This morning though, Horatio stared at the pile of paperwork sitting idly in his in-box and groaned, what he really wanted to do was to lean back in his chair and continue reliving the enjoyable events of the evening before. Unfortunately it wasn't to be and Horatio forced himself to pick up his pen and flip open the cover on the crime scene report that was sitting on the top of the pile.
That's where Calleigh found him when she got into the lab an hour later, scanning a page of typed text, initialling and annotating the occasional phrase.
"Mornin'" Calleigh's greeting was as jovial as usual. She placed a steaming mug of coffee on the desk in front of him. Horatio leaned back and blinked his eyes trying to refocus on something that wasn't text.
"Hey." He yawned and picked up the mug, taking a sip and sighing, "Ah, that's better."
"You ready for a powwow in the layout room to go over yesterday's scene?"
"And leave the paperwork? I don't know, I'll have to think about it." He had stood up and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair before he'd even finished the sarcastic comment.
"Ok guys, so what did we get?" Horatio asked his first question as he was walking through the door, taking Eric and Ryan by surprise so that they stopped bickering with each other and both started relaying their results at the same time. Horatio stopped them with a chuckle and prompted Eric to go first.
"I took casts from the tool mark impressions in the door, there are no unique markings on the weapon used to break in, no identifying features. I also lifted a boot print from the bottom panel of the door." Eric rolled his chair over to the table and sifted through a stack of photographs that sat neatly on the light table. He pulled out one image that showed the impression of a boot print and handed it to Horatio.
"Ran the impression through the computer and got a match to a brand." Eric picked up another sheet of paper and handed it over.
"Harley Davidson motorcycle boot?"
"Yep. The unfortunate thing is that they're about as common as a cold, so it's not going to marrow down our search field a whole lot. It does have a pretty unique wear pattern, but that's not going to help us unless we've got something to compare it to."
"Hmm. Didn't any of the neighbours hear anything from the break-in? The damage to that door wasn't done quietly."
"Strangely, all the neighbours seem to have become deaf all of a sudden according to the officers that went door to door, no-one heard anything."
"Ah," Horatio understood perfectly, "it's a neighbourhood affliction. Live in that part of town and you soon learn that when it comes to the authorities you need to be deaf, dumb and blind, or someone'll put a bullet through your window, or worse, your skull. Ok, so there's no eye-witness testimony. Mr Wolfe how did you do with prints?"
"Not much better I'm afraid H. Lifted loads of prints from surfaces in the apartment. They all come back to the prints from Sarah Turner's criminal record, every single damn one of them."
"Isn't that a bit strange? I mean surely there should be at least one foreign print present." Calleigh commented from where she was perched on a table at the edge of the room.
"Well, the scene wasn't wiped down, if that's what you're getting at, if it was they would've wiped away Sarah's prints too, and I found examples on pretty much every surface I dusted."
"PD questioned some of Sarah's colleagues from the strip club, see if she told anyone she was leaving town. She hadn't told them anything about moving away or any particular trouble she was in, but they did say that she was pretty private. Never let any boyfriends know where she lived…"
"So she'd always have a safe place to come home to if things got rough." Horatio finished Delko's point. "Grace said something about Sarah being cautious with who she allowed to know where she lived. She hadn't even taken Grace back to see her place yet. Yesterday was the first time she'd been up there."
"That explains why we didn't find Grace's prints at the scene, I'd been wondering about that." Ryan looked sheepishly towards Horatio.
Horatio realised that they'd been stepping carefully in their run-throughs, wondering how far they could push the analytical process in his presence. He had already noticed a slight difference in the language they'd been using to address the case. Where they would normally use the term 'victim' or 'subject' he realised his team had carefully substituted in her name, calling her Sarah was their way of saying 'if she means something to you, then she's important to us too.' He appreciated it, but he wanted to let them know that no matter what his involvement in the case they should treat the scene like any other.
"Guys, no matter whether I have a personal interest in this case or not, we treat it like any other scene. There's no need to dumb down the evidence, I'm a big boy now. Ok?" A round of relieved sighs signalled that the message had been received loud and clear. "So we got a bust on tool marks and prints, did trace give us anything Calleigh?"
"Sorry Horatio, but it's zero for three. Trace came up empty, blood spatter on the walls and clothes is the subject's, no foreign DNA was identified."
"But at least the blood spray tells us something."
"What?"
"Someone knew where she lived."
"Yeah I guess, but there's no definite evidence from that apartment to prove that she was taken against her will. Doors could have been forced in a bungled burglary, blood spray on the wall could've been there for days or even weeks. My gut's telling me there's more to it, but we just don't have any proof that anything more sinister occurred here than she skipped town." Horatio knew he could always rely on Calleigh not to mince her words and come straight to the point.
"Yep, I agree. I still think there's something more here, but at the moment we've just got no evidence to back it up. But I'm gonna get a uniform team to watch the club, just in case she turns up there, and put out a missing person bolo. Thanks for your work on this guys, I appreciate it."
This was taken as a signal that the briefing, like the case, was over, and each investigator slid off their stools, or in Calleigh's case the worktop, and headed back to their respective stations to continue processing evidence from other open cases.
Horatio sat there in the empty room for a few minutes longer, the light from the table casting strange shadows on the walls. He flicked through the copies of reports that his team had left for him, he agreed with Calleigh, his gut too was telling him that something happened here, but with no physical evidence to follow he had no justifiable reason to open an investigation at the taxpayers expense. He glared intensely at the photographs of the scene as if willing them to produce some as yet unnoticed clue, but nothing stood out. Horatio felt slighted, the evidence had never let him down before.
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The next few days passed in a blur of contentment for Horatio. He had explained the results of their investigation to Grace, and she had taken the news a lot better than he had expected her to. When he'd related the verdict to her she'd simply shrugged her shoulders in a manner that suggested that she'd been expecting something like that. She seemed to accept the possibility that Sarah had simply skipped town and had not deemed Grace an important enough part of her life to explain where or why she'd gone. She had been a little reserved in her manner for a few hours, and then the Grace that he knew, full of life, seemed to have returned.
To be continued…