Chapter XXV

Ancient History

Nick was pouring coffee and Warrick was arguing with Greg about the Clippers. Catherine was on the phone and Conner Tipps was engrossed in a file, playing catch up. Sofia had a toothpick in her mouth and Gillian was checking her makeup. The meeting wasn't set to begin for a few minutes and they were waiting for a couple of stranglers. Said stranglers arrived in a big and loud way. Stephen led the way, a file in hand. He grinned, "We have found the mother load." The somewhat over-enthusiastic CSI pushed his hair out of his eyes and snickered at some joke that only he seemed to understand. Behind him, traveling at a slower pace with a more professional attitude was Fawn. She put down her own file and moved past Stephen, Catherine and Greg, in search of the coffee pot.
After she poured a cup and took one deep gulp, she shrugged, "We found something, but I don't know-" Stephen, though, was like a class five hurricane, unstoppable. "We ran the case through VICAP; solved, and unsolved cases with like M.O.s. There were hundreds of hits, of course, but this one is definitely the mother of all hits." Without pausing for air or even drama, he plunged on. "Modesto, California versus Laura Sidle, 1984. Sidle's mother killed her father in the exact same way Grissom was murdered."

The Conference room went quiet, it was as though they had all suddenly entered a graveyard. Stephen looked around, somewhat deflated. "Why don't they look surprised?" He shot a baffled look at Fawn. She looked at each of the faces: Catherine, Nick, Greg, Warrick and Sofia, and she understood. "They already knew, Scooter; they already knew.

February 26, 2007

It was viscous. The Prosecutor attacked the defendant the same way a shark would chum. Sara Sidle held up to it, though. She held steady, sticking to her story, never altering it, no matter what Jenkins threw at her. That was of course, until he introduced People's Exhibit R into evidence and the record.

Karl tugged at the lapels of his suit jacket and stood. "Ms. Sidle I would like you to identify the document I've just handed to you. Then I'd like you to read the highlighted passages." The courtroom was silent. In the gallery, the light scrape of colored pencil on sketchpad and the chronic cough of a smoker were the only sounds. Lexine Verona quickly stood, "Objection, Your Honor. Said exhibit was not previously mentioned or logged into evidence for defense to investigate and or prepare for. He's blindsiding us, Your Honor." Jenkins sharply interrupted her request for a motion. "This evidence is within reasonable access to the defense and is a matter of public record." The judge nodded, "Objection overruled."


Judge, jury, counsel and the many faces of the gallery turned to Sara. She sat almost motionless in the chair on the stand. Her hands limply held the papers, but she wasn't looking at them. Her eyes were locked on the back of the room, staring at the space of wall just above the doors of the courtroom. Her big brown eyes were wide and unfocused and the blood was rapidly draining from her face. The woman had held steady as a rock through the whole trial and whatever was on the paper had shaken her. The jury looked on expectantly, almost leaning forward in their chairs. Sara disappointed them. She opened her mouth, as if to speak, but quickly closed it again, because words had failed her.

Karl Jenkins kept his gaze locked on Sara; it was a cold and calculating look that had won many, many cases for him over the years. "Let me help you out here, Ms. Sidle. The document I just handed her is a transcript from a trial. The People versus Laura Sidle. Modesto, California, 1984. I am asking Ms. Sidle to read her own testimony from that trial."
Lexi Verona rocketed to her feet. "OBJECTION!" Her voice rang through the court room, hot licks of anger evident in the words. "Irrelevant." Jenkins coolly looked at the judge, "It goes to show premeditation, and precedent." The judge nodded, though he did so somewhat reluctantly this time, "I'll allow it." The judge, the lawyers, the jury, everyone looked at Sara. Pale, obviously shaken to the core, she didn't utter a word. Jenkins looked, once more, to the judge. "Permission to treat witness as hostile." Verona stood again. "Badgering the witness, Your Honor." Before the judge got the full 'overruled' out of his mouth, Verona was speaking again. The hard bite of her New York accent and the anger coloring her words echoed in the room. "Prosecution is using an underhanded tactic to cause undue drama and upset my client." Judge Herbert Shaney banged his gavel in warning. "Your objection is noted counsel; however, Ms Sidle will have to answer the question." Verona shook her head, "There is no question. The Prosecution is dragging up twenty-three year old testimony with the soul purpose of bringing back up old pain." The judge, unimpressed, frowned at her, "Counselor." It was to no avail. "Defense requests a recess." Past annoyed now, the judge shook his head, "Request denied." Verona was nothing if not determined, "Defense requests a continuance." The Honorable Judge Shaney banged his gavel three times in rapid succession. "Request denied and if you open your mouth one more time on this matter, Counselor, I will hold you in contempt." The look on the attorney's face said that she didn't care about contempt charges.

The sigh that came from the stand seemed to deflate the woman it came from. Sara licked her lips and looked from her own lawyer to the one cross-examining her. "I was thirteen years old when my mother..." She trailed off and her eyes scanned the gallery. She swallowed convulsively and the sudden burst of courage had apparently run out. She looked at Jenkins. "Please don't make me do this, Karl." The recognition, the acknowledgment that she knew the man who was arguing against her revealed just how desperately she didn't want to share whatever information he was demanding. That, however, was no more revealing than the use of the word 'please'. Those who knew her recognized that telltale sign and more than one blinked. Jenkins, however, didn't. "Please answer the question, Ms. Sidle."

She took a shaky breath and picked up from where she'd left off. "I was thirteen when my mother, Laura Sidle, killed my father. I was the Prosecution's star witness." Paper forgotten, Sara stared out into the distance. "They had been fighting that night. They were always fighting. My father was mean spirited and very physical. He beat us, my mother and I. She was no innocent, though, she gave just as good as she got. The fighting, the yelling, and the trips to hospital emergency rooms, I thought that was how everyone lived. One night, August the first, 1984, things got out of hand. There was screaming and hitting; then my mother pulled a knife out of the bedside table drawer. It was a hunting knife, serrated and razor sharp." She closed her eyes and paused for a moment, pulling herself together for the final push. Her hands gripped the railing in front of her so tightly that her knuckles were white. When she opened her eyes again, there was no trace of tears, but the haunted look in them had just as deep an impact. "She launched herself at him and started stabbing. He was a big man, but he went down after the first hit. Eighteen times she stabbed him. Cast off went everywhere, the walls, the bed." She shook her head. "He was dead long before the cops arrived."

Sara blinked a few times and then sat still. Karl Jenkins nodded, "And you saw all of this?" She nodded and took a deep, shuddering breathe, "The crime scene was my bedroom." Jenkins nodded again and went to his table. He picked up a photograph, "I'd like to present this photograph as People's Exhibit S. It is a picture of the Sidle Crime Scene, as taken, labeled and presented for the Laura Sidle Trial." He turned it towards Sara, then the jury, "Ms Sidle that is your bed and that is you father Frank Sidle, is it not?" The picture was of a twin sized bed and the dead man that had fallen on it. The white spread and the brown teddy bear sitting neatly on the bed was awash with red blood and the man's chest was a mess of punctures and still-dripping blood. The fading photograph was evidence of the murder that had happened years before. "The whole thing looks rather familiar, Ms. Sidle." The jury looked from the crime scene photos that had been tacked to a board to the picture in ADA Jenkins' hands. The scenes were, save for the difference between a girl child's and a grown man's bed, identical.

"Now you said that this was your room, correct, and according to your statement, the murder weapon was taken out of the bed side table's drawer. If that is correct, Ms. Sidle, then please explain something to me. What was a thirteen year old girl doing with a hunting knife?" A murmur went through the jury and the gallery. Disregarding the earlier warning, Lexine Verona shot to her feet, "Objection your honor!" Jenkins turned his back on the witness, "Withdrawn, your honor." The comment was struck from record, but the intent was still there. Jenkins had made his point and the jury looked at Sara just a little bit differently.

Some things you never forgot, no matter how much you wanted to. The look on Sara's face when she had been on the stand, speaking in a flat, almost monotone voice about the night her mother had killed her father was something that had haunted Catherine.

"You know ... every time we get a case with a hint of domestic violence or abuse, you go off the deep end. What is your problem?"

Her own words, thrown in Sara's face during the Svetlana Melton case so many years before. She had gotten her answer and had seen just exactly how much giving it had hurt Sara. She had gotten a copy of Sara's juvenile record after that because she had needed to know more. After years of periodically scanning over it, she knew it by heart. Sara's parents, Laura and Frank, had run a Bed and Breakfast just outside of San Francisco. The eyesore of Tamales Bay, it had been a haven for drugs, prostitution and booze binges. Sara had lived there for thirteen long years, suffering at the hands of her parents. Sporadic trips to the ER for "accidental" injuries and a hit-and-miss attendance record at school should have tipped someone off. There hadn't been any marks on the girl, the social worker had noted, so no one had lifted a finger to help her.

"Sara, I was there -- there wasn't a mark on her." Her words again, quickly answered by Sara's emphatic "Not that we could see, Catherine."

The wise words of someone who had been there and done that. She had been right, not that Catherine had ever acknowledged that. She had been too angry, too proud, too caught up in her own ambition and the twisted little power trip she'd been on, to say she was sorry.

Looking at Sara that day, despite her anger, had been an eye-opener. The woman had been washed out, pale, and there hadn't been an ounce of color in her oval face. Her dark eyes, wide and dark with pain, had stood out against her bloodless face, like two black pools of infinite sorrow. In that moment, CSI Sara Sidle had disappeared, to be replaced by a thirteen year old victim that no one had ever tried to help. Not that the jury had seen that. No, Jenkins' little remark had turned the story into something else, something more sinister. It had cast more doubt and guilt onto Sara's character and story. Out of context, it did seem strange, a thirteen year old having a knife all but under her pillow. When you knew the whole story, the strange part was that Sara had never used it.

Rehashing it now, Catherine winced. Sara had never breathed a word of her past to anyone. Jenkins had spun it around to be incriminating. She had something to hide. Sara hadn't been hiding anything; she had been surviving, trying to be something more then the girl whose mother had killed her father. The jury had only seen two identical scenes and the one woman with a connection to them both. Catherine had seen one of the missing pieces of Sara's complicated, still incomplete puzzle.

His Grandmother had loved him. That wasn't to say she hadn't smacked him when he'd deserved it, because she had. She'd also worked to make sure he'd had a good life, a healthy and happy childhood. If Markus, Quentin and Ava had that, he would be happy. He tried to wrap his mind around it and still couldn't. By the end, a few months after Ava had been born, he and Tina had been holding their marriage together with no more than few half-kept promises and hope. It hadn't been enough, but never had he raised a hand to his wife. They didn't get along now, the pretenses of getting along had long ago fallen away. He would still never badmouth her in front of their children. He tried to imagine Ava, his baby girl, or either of his boys, in a position of seeing their mother abused. It sickened him to no end. What kind of father, what kind of man, had Frank Sidle been? He didn't know. He knew that if anyone ever tried to hurt any of his children he would stop at nothing to protect them. That was something Sara never had. Had it turned her into a killer? Somehow, he had never bought that. There was no murder gene, period.
Had Grissom known about Sara's past? Somehow, Nick thought he probably did. The memory of Sara's story soured his stomach. He came from a large, rowdy Texas family. He and his brothers had always been pounding on each other; his sisters had been forever arguing over makeup and clothes. His mother had lost her temper, more than once, but the closest she had ever come to hitting them was throwing a shoe at them. The Magic Shoe, he and his siblings had called it. When their mother had thrown it, the thing would fly around corners and inch under closed doors. His father had threatened with a belt, but to his knowledge, the leather had never left the Judge's belt loops. His childhood had been the polar opposite of Sara's and yet they had ended up in the same profession.

He had been accused of murder once. What had made the difference there? Between him and Sara? He had moved on with his life, she had been sentenced to death.

His family, both back home and in Vegas, had been behind him. Sara had been betrayed and abused by her second family.

He looked from face to face, saw nothing but guilt, and knew that he was not the only one who felt the weight of his actions pressing down on him.

"I didn't see anything." Sara grinned as they were rounding the corner around the lab's reception desk, "Really? Because I saw everything."

He hadn't exactly been lying to her. He had averted his eyes away from Sara when it had been prudent. Not that they'd had much time to think about privacy and propriety when they'd been shoved into the emergency Haz-Mat shower together. The fact was, though, he'd kept his eyes on her face and her back. The former because it was lovely, and the cold water flowing over it had only made it more so. The latter because it would have been a betrayal of their friendship to check out her bare ass. The image of her back, though, had stuck with him for a long time. He had never asked about it, though after he'd heard about what had happened at trial, he wished he had. Her back had been covered in scars. They had been old, faded and had crisscrossed each other, connecting, over lapping and circling each other: the physical reminders of her childhood, the ones that she would always have with her. He hadn't been there that day and he was glad. He didn't want that image, the one of Sara on the stand, going through her past, in his head. He had enough bad memories without that one.

"Yeah, it came out at trial. It doesn't come into play here." Uncomfortable, he shifted on his feet and looked around the room, restlessly until his gaze fell back on Fawn. The young woman opened up a file. "I think it might, actually. According to the California Corrections Database, Laura Sidle was paroled in October of 2006." For a moment, no one spoke and then Gillian, one raven brow arched and arms crossed over her chest, summed up the room's thoughts. "You've got to be frickin' kidding me."

Sofia nodded, "I'm with Junior, I checked her status back in 2007. There was no record of release." She looked at Fawn, brows furrowed, "Do we have a current address?" Fawn shook her head and shrugged, "I guess California Corrections is even more backlogged than Nevada's."

Catherine opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off.

"You see, that's the problem with CSIs. They're geniuses when it comes to finding an out of place fiber, but give them leg-work and they're completely lost."

Author's Note: Can you tell I watch just a little more Law and Order than is probably healthy? Yeah, thought so. Send the reviews on in, people, positive if you like it and negative if I despratly need to improve.