Chapter XXXV

Poisoned Hearts

Why had Gillian done this? Why had she killed Gil? Why frame her for it? The questions were achingly familiar to Sara. She had asked them a thousand times. What could she or Gil have done to deserve the fate that had befallen them? Standing, woman to woman, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with Gillian Rayne, she still didn't know.

"What did I ever do to you?" Her question was quiet, almost carried away by the wind.

Gillian was close enough, though, to hear her. A slow smile spread across the other woman's face. It was cruel, and triumphant; it was dangerous. "Who said it was about us?"

That had never been the answer she imagined hearing. "What?"

Gillian stared at her, gun still in hand. "You, him, that whole fucking wonder team killed and walked for it. Probably a hundred times over. It was time you felt what it's like to lose someone you cared about."

Sara blinked, "What the hell are you talking about? I've never killed anyone and neither did Grissom. We were scientists not vigilantes"

Gillian's hand twitched. "Never killed anyone?" She laughed, "As far as I'm concerned every cop and every CSI is just a murderer with a badge."

Sara stared down the other woman. "If you're going for the insanity plea, I've got to admit, you've got a good shot."

The breeze made strands of Gillian's dark hair dance around her face. "Jesse Overton."

The five syllables carried a tone of reverence and just a touch of sadness; they echoed through the desert night.

Names, names, names. Sara had spent years with names and faces, too many to recall. There were those she remembered, those that stood out. This wasn't one of them.

"That supposed to mean something to me?"

Gillian's lips curled into a sneer. "You don't remember him? You should; you played a role in his murder."

Mentally, Sara ran through names. Years' worth of names, cases, victims, criminals… nothing. It was very obvious that her life was riding on the line here. She was so close to getting her life back, she was not about to let a bitch like Gillian Rayne take it, again.

"I might. So, what's it to you?"

How had no one noticed this before now? Catherine was a CSI and even K Mart gave 'Are You a Psychotic Killer' tests with their applications.

Unsteady, Gillian stared her down, gun in hand. "They killed him, you know. Beaten and stabbed, he suffered because of that bitch. Because of you and your fucking friends. Your wonderful Gil Grissom and his fucking team. You killed Jesse. He was innocent."

January 2002

Nevada State Correctional Facility

The doors clanged behind her as she went in. The air was warm and dry, but mostly stale. The entire complex reeked of desperation and the barely controlled violence of thousands of caged animals. Jesse didn't belong here. They were twins; they belonged together.
Jill pushed her sandy brown hair out of her face as the guard sat her in front of a glass and wire window. There was a plastic black phone to talk to and an empty seat across from her. She twisted her fingers together and looked around at the other men in orange talking to their visitors. She looked around nervously and out of the corner of her eye, saw when the door opened on the other side of the glass. Another guard led Jesse down to his seat.

He was thin, pale, and the hair he had once lovingly gelled into place each day was limp, stringy and it hung down in his eyes.

"Jilly." His voice cracked just a little but he smiled.

She smiled at him and was dismayed to see that one of his two front teeth was missing.

"I've missed you, Jill. How are Mom and Dad? How's Danny?" Their parents and their little brother, all of whom had turned their backs on Jesse when he'd needed them the most.

"I don't know, I've moved out. I don't talk to them, Jesse. Not with the way they're treating you."

He smiled a little. "We've always been a team, huh. You and me."

They had been. They had taken their first puffs of cigarette together, "borrowed" cars together. Hadn't they taken their licks together? Watched snuff films and laughed at the way the women had always jerked and twitched in death? Hadn't they spent long hours talking about destruction? Fed the Jurgin's golden retriever rat posion and anti-freeze just to see what would happen, watch it wheeze and shudder into a painful death together? They had covered for each other. She lied when he'd been out scoring with a girl, and he'd done the same for her. They were brother and sister, twins. They went through this every third Thursday of every month and constantly in their letters.

She knew he was innocent. The fucking Collins girl had tricked him. The DA, Melissa Winters had lied to him, the shit lawyer, Sal Portins, the state had provided for him had fucked him. The cops, Detective Brass, Investigators Grissom, Willows, Stokes, Brown and Sidle had set him up. He had told her everything, everything her parents had lied about. How he had been confused and tricked. He'd also told her about how the blood had splashed on his jeans, on his face. She envied him.

"It's bad in here, Jilly, really bad."

She nodded, and wished fervently she could get him out, but his so-called deal didn't even offer parole.

"If I die, Jill, can you do something for me?"

She nodded and leaned forward, "Anything, Jess." He put his fist, with H-A-T-E tattooed on the knuckles, to the glass. "Get them for me."

Sara was frantically sorting through the pieces, trying to run it through her memories.

"They said he'd be safe. His fucking lawyer cut a deal. The real killer, that fucking blonde slut is still walking around, alive and healthy as can be, but my twin brother is dead. My twin, do you even fucking understand that? We shared everything and now he's gone. You and your team framed him. You and that wheel-chair-bound freak put him away, and let the fucking perverts, druggies and murderers have him. Some fucking bastard strung him up with a towel and no one was ever punished, no one even cared. All everyone cared about, all you cared about was that fucking kid. Jesse died and no one cared. No one but me."

Information spun around in her head. Melissa had tried to warn her. Melissa spent more time with the victims, and the killer's families, than she ever had. She had recognized Gillian. That narrowed the field, as did the kid the woman was rambling about. Sara had rarely dealt with children. That had always been Catherine's niche. Give her evidence; give her science. Everyone had acted like she was completely incompetent, had believed her when she'd jokingly said she'd left Brenda Collins in her car.

Jesse Overton - Brenda Collins, the Collins Case. It was like an explosion in her brain. Jesse Overton, at the request of Tina Collins had killed four people, slaughtered the entire Collins family in one horrific night. It had been right after she'd moved to Vegas. It had been high profile and gut wrenching. She had become involved, had made it a little too personal. She had let herself become attached - to the case, to the circumstances, to Little Brenda Collins who had lost so much.

"Something horrible happened in that house, didn't it, Tina? Long before the night of the murders."

"Her soul's still in the room."

"It's okay, Brenda, I'm not leaving you."

"We got them both. I don't much care why they did it."

"The Buffalo."

"Every time I go back and think about it, I know I could have done things differently, could have made things better for Brenda and me...but I'm still not sorry. I'm not sorry they're dead, Sara. They stopped being my family when they didn't protect me from him. He stopped being my father the first time he came into my room and lifted up my nightgown. My only regret is hurting my daughter...and dragging Jesse into it when I should have taken care of it myself. You saw what he did to my Brenda, would you have done any less?"

"He killed four people, two of them just boys, in cold blood. Just for fun, just because he could."

The change was visible on the other woman's face, "IT WASN'T HIS FAULT!"

The gunshot almost drowned her out. The bullet went high and wide, but the explosion of sound made Sara's heart jackhammer all the harder.

"That bitch tricked him into it. We- I thought about suing, but the lawyers said you had an airtight case against him."

The scene flashed in Sara's mind, blurry, a little grainy from age, like a photograph that had faded in the sun.

The father in the hallway in a pool of blood. The mother lying in bed, eyes wide open and terrified, un-clotted blood dripping from her fingers to the floor. Two boys, one hiding, trying to escape, bloody handprints smeared on the wall.

"I got the idea when Nick Stokes was buried alive."

Sara jerked her attention back to Gillian. Scenes of the Collins house melted away, only to be replaced by those nightmare images of Nick in the coffin.

"You guys pulled off this miracle rescue, just in time. It made me fucking sick. I realized then, that to beat you, I had to be just as smart, just as powerful, I had to be one of you."

She was on a roll now; had the situation not been so grave, so dangerous, Sara would have made a joke about melodramatic monologuing.

"I changed my name, went to school. Fucked Conrad Ecklie for my first job, almost right out of the Academy."

Old habit had Sara sneering at the mention of Ecklie's name. Somehow, she just wasn't surprised that he was so easy to manipulate.

"You were this big, happy family. Not even Catherine Willows putting the screws to you all shook that. You were so easy to pick out; they all turned against you almost without prompting. The outsider, the boss's pet. The fact that you were sleeping with the old bastard was icing on the cake."

Sara closed her eyes, just for a moment, and forced the bile back down her throat. Blood, Gil, the knife. She had always thought it had been about her mother and father. It had not; it was a play on the Collins scene, right down to the blood drops that had been on the floor. Murdered in his bed, stabbed, in retribution of a loved one.

"Why didn't you just die?" The question was filled with an undercurrent of rage. "You had to stay alive, convince everyone you've been a good girl. Won't it be a tragic epilogue to the Story of Sara Sidle, though? Killed two more police officers and wounded one of the CSIs that were only trying to help her. Too bad Catherine couldn't be here too, but a detective and a uni, that'll have them more than ready to pump you full of poison. Fingerprints on the gun, my eyewitness account."

Sara shook her head, "It won't work, they're on to you now."

Gillian laughed and pushed her free hand through her hair. "Funny thing about that, everything will show that Conrad Ecklie was the one who planted all the evidence, tampered with files, made all the phone calls. His passwords, his orders, his signatures. You can never imagine how useful pictures of that troll and a transvestite hooker can be. I've got him by the short hairs and he knows it. Though he was more than happy to frame you, you know. He wasn't there to see it, but he knew it was me, especially when I waltzed right into Wendy Simm's DNA lab and denatured the hair specimens she'd been testing. In hindsight, I must have missed some. Of course, he and I were the only ones in the lab during that coroner's wedding so even an idiot could have worked out who set up the phone call. He didn't even try to stop me. Blackmailed me a bit, but mostly he was busy covering the lab's ass." She chuckled and pushed her hair out of her eyes again. "If that fails, well, I have an airtight alibi. I spent all yesterday, when vital things were happening, files uploaded, downloaded, deals made, with another CSI. Fawn will attest to how attentive I was." The woman's dark eyes went distant just for a second and Sara wondered if Fawn Drex was still alive at all.

"Just between you and me, though Sara?" A cold, frightening, smile spread across the woman's face as she spoke. "Killing your lover was the greatest thrill of my life. Better than sex and the after glow has lingered on for years. Give me one reason not to kill you now. Watch the life drain out of you, like it did him, and get away with it, again."

Sara couldn't believe her ears. It was so incredibly detailed, borderline genius, and the most sadistic, heartless speech she had ever heard. Goosebumps had risen and her blood had chilled at the other woman's words. Tears burned at the back of her eyes. She knew that her life was riding on the next few moments. She literally had the world to gain and nothing to lose. Beyond the fear, and the horror there was something more powerful, anger. It was boiling in the pit of her stomach. Every instinct in her, every basic animalistic part of her, and every cell of her scared body screamed out, frothed at the mouth for, and demanded revenge. "You're cocky."

Gillian shrugged, "I'm just that good."

Sara felt her adrenaline pumping, her heart pounding, she hadn't felt this way in years. "I figured you out; you don't think Sofia, Catherine and the rest would?"

Gillian moved the gun up and down, following the line of Sara's body and followed the gun with her eyes. Eyes, almost as black as the night now, flickered and Sara felt filthy from their touch. "Oh, that's right you're still a crack CSI after all these years?"

A little glimmer of pride had Sara jutting her chin out, "Better than you could ever be."

Gillian laughed, "And yet I'm still the one with the gun."

They both looked up as the echoing blast of a siren became audible, growing closer to them every second. Sara smiled even as Gillian raised the gun to chest level again. "And I'm the one wearing the wire that sent your entire rant back to CSI."

Author's Note: There you have it. Some scenes and quotes, are taken directly from Season One's Blood Drops. Yes, Gillian Rayne, or more properly Jill Overton, is a sick, twisted person.