Title: Journey of the Lonely Whale: Evolution (Month 12)
Author: Lisa (ljkwriting4life)
Rating: M. This story contains strong adult themes including references to violence, sexual references, and coarse language.
Pairing: Gil/Sara
Summary: One year since re-marrying, Gil and Sara return to San Diego to fulfil work commitments. While Sara becomes involved in a case that stirs memories of the past, she is also pushed by those around her to consider her future and her place in the world.
Notes: The JOTLW series aims to fill a gap between Immortality and CSI: Vegas. It does foreshadow CSI: Vegas and refers often to storylines established in the original CSI.
SEVEN
Sara led the way into the interview room, with Sophie behind her. Sitting at the table was Dev, a man in his thirties with alert brown eyes and dark hair. He smiled at them when they sat down, but Sara saw the brief flicker of fear. She had seen it before. Witnesses were brought in to help and came voluntarily, but still worried they might be accused of having done something wrong. Sara was carrying a carefully compiled manila folder and offered Dev a reassuring smile as they sat.
"Hi Dev," she began. "I'm Sara and this is Sophie, we're from the crime lab. Thank you for giving us access to your driving history. Like the police have said, we're trying to find out more about the lives of some people you've driven over the past six months and we thought that route information would be important."
"Was it?" he asked. "I mean, I'm happy to help."
"It was, thank you," Sara said with a kind smile. "Do you mind if we ask you a couple of questions?"
He nodded, granting permission with a more clearly anxious look on his face.
"How long have you been a ride-share driver? I noticed you've been attached to a few different companies."
"I've been doing it for a few years now. It started as a side hustle, but I lost my other job about a year ago and decided to do the gig full-time. I've tried out a few different companies and apps when they come along. It's busy around here, all the tourists coming and going. During the day I'm on the airport route, and trips to Seaworld and the Zoo, and at night it's a lot of locals coming and going from work and restaurants. Nothing's ever gone wrong or seemed criminal to me."
"That's good," Sara said. She opened the folder and removed two photographs, which she laid in front of Dev. "Do you recognise either this home, or any of the people in this picture?"
One of the photographs was the first home where a footprint had been left in the hall, and the other was a photograph of the married couple who lived there.
"Take your time," Sophie said as Dev drew the photographs closer to him and leant in.
"Look, maybe," he said as he gestured to the house. "I've seen a lot of homes like this, but I don't know if I could tell you exactly where that was." He looked to the couple. "And I don't really recognise either of them," he added. He looked into Sara's eyes with his big, brown eyes. "You've seen my records," he said. "You know how many trips I do? Did I…take this couple somewhere?"
"We believe you drove the woman in this photograph home from Su Casa about five months ago. It was a Friday night, and she had gone out to a party with friends after work."
"And that's her house?" he asked as he gestured to the other picture. Sara nodded. "I'm gonna have to take your word for it, because that was a long time ago, and I don't know if you've been on a lot of trips yourself, but the driver and passenger don't always get a good look at one another. Mostly I keep my head down, be respectful, and I find a lot of women are on their phone most of the time, sort of nervous. You'd know that, and I kind of get it? So, I just let them be."
"I see," Sara said. She paused, then laid another three photos over the tops of the others. Another house, and two photos of its occupants, Mrs Rollins and Chloe. She watched Dev's expression change immediately as soon as he saw Chloe's most recent high school photo.
"I know her," he said. He looked at Sara with wide, urgent eyes. "That's the same picture they've been using on the news. That's the girl who was killed last week."
"Yes it is," Sara said seriously. "Do you know this house, or this other woman?"
"Okay, okay I see where you're going with this, just let me think for a second."
Sara nodded and pressed her lips together, and she glanced at Sophie and gave her a subtle nod just to be patient and wait. Dev tapped his fingers anxiously over the table and was jiggling one of his legs up and down beneath the table, as he pushed Chloe's photo aside and focused on Mrs Rollins and the house.
"Okay," he said after a moment. He took a breath and looked up. "Yeah, I remember her."
"Tell me about her," Sara said.
"Um, I don't know exactly when, but it was more recent than when you said I drove that other lady. This was maybe a month ago? I remember because we talked, and I thought she was friendly. She's a teacher, right? Am I thinking of the right lady?"
Sara nodded.
"Yeah, okay so I picked her up from school and took her home. It was late for a school pick-up, but she said she had a staff meeting. She was talking to a couple of other people when I got there. She was really happy, and I said something about her being in a good mood and she laughed and said it was a miracle because her car was having troubles and it was going to cost a fortune to fix. I think she said she'd only just put her app to find a ride on her phone when her car started having problems, she was new to the app. I told her about this mechanic I use, he's good but he's strictly word of mouth, so it's half the cost of those big dealership repairs, and um, I dropped her home. I guess this is her home…I mean, I think I've seen that home on the news too." He bit his bottom lip and looked at Sara. "You don't think I did this, do you? To her daughter? Cos I would never, never hurt a kid like that. They said she was like violently killed and the mother found her?" He sighed and looked back at the photos. "That poor lady. She was really happy when I saw her. I remember her because...she's one of the nicest people I ever met."
"Okay," Sara said. She finished up the interview, and then met with Sophie on the other side of the observation glass while Dev dealt with a police officer who was confirming his contact details. "What do you think?" Sara asked Sophie, who was still thoughtfully watching Dev through the glass.
"I kind of believe him?" Sophie ventured. "I mean, we know he drove two of the women, but that second home invasion with the footprint, whoever did this took time to select that woman too, and she says she's never used a ride-share in her life. It's um, it also just doesn't make sense."
"Why not?" Sara asked.
"Well, whoever is doing this is going to a huge amount of trouble, right? Planting a shoeprint while not leaving any prints of your own, is kind of a clever thing to do. What's not so clever is identifying targets you've driven on an app that records every pick-up and journey on your own phone, and leaves a copy of it on the victim's phones. I mean, I'm sure it happens, but I don't know if that's the sort of person we're really looking for. Plus, his surprise seemed genuine to me."
"And to me as well," Sara confirmed. She smiled when Sophie let out a deep breath in relief. "We've got nothing to tie him to the other break-in, or the property damage of the earlier homes. I think we are looking at something quite rare, Sophie."
"An innocent man?" she guessed.
"No," Sara said with a soft laugh. "A coincidence."
As Sophie rolled her eyes, for a moment Sara felt like Gil, as though there had been some great switch or role reversal along the way, and Sophie was Sara twenty years ago, trying so hard to read Gil's mind and probe with questions, to impress him and to soak up everything she could learn.
Sara pressed her lips together in a smile and felt grateful to be where she was. She was in the position to carry on and to pass on some of her husband's own life's work. She was worthy of that.
Gil's meetings at Berkley had gone well the day before, and he said the team was also eager to meet with her. Something had switched for Gil in the past year too. When they first married and embarked on some research projects in Central and South America, there had been a tendency for them to split their roles when they spoke about what they were doing. Her research, his research. When they moved to Paris and he started doing a series of special lectures and they got some more work in conservation it was all very much led by Gil's research, his teaching, what he wanted.
Now in his head it was all 'we', and 'us', and 'Sara and I'. After she last left Vegas and found Gil in San Diego almost a year ago to the day, over those first few days they made a pact, cemented when they married for the second time a couple of days later. They were a team, they were going to do the rest of life together, Sara was choosing to be with him and he wanted to be with her, more than either of them had ever wanted anything else in their lives. It was beyond just the research.
Sara valued that, and she thought she understood why it had taken Gil until that point to have the courage to commit, not just to her but to sharing his own, very private, special life with her.
"Sara?" Sophie asked. "What do you think?" From the look on Sophie's face, it seemed she had been talking and Sara hadn't heard a word she said.
Oh dear, Sara thought. Yes, that was exactly like Gil.
The following afternoon Sara sat in the chair in Nick's office as she read through one of his funding applications with a pen poised in her hand. He was sitting back in his chair, waiting, as she made a few corrections and suggestions, but all-in-all she thought it was a decent business case.
"This is good, Nick," she assured him.
He sighed with relief.
"We just haven't had much luck with this sort of stuff the last few years."
"Yeah, well it's super competitive, no one has the money to spare and some departments prefer to spend money on boots on the ground, not equipment they don't understand. But this is a busy city and you're busier here at the lab than most probably appreciate, and it's only going to get worse as the years go by, with more and more people coming here to live, more wealth discrepancy, more pressures on food and housing, more drugs, more crime. It always gets worse. Look at Vegas, the way that got over the years, until it was just this never-ending parade of people doing terrible things to each other…most of the time just because they could. Remember, we're not so far away."
"Gee, you're a pocket full of sunshine today, aren't you," Nick said, taunting her with a cheeky grin and a droll tone.
"I try," Sara replied, thoughtfully serious, but she flashed him a playful look as well.
"What's bugging you?" Nick asked. "I mean besides my terrible punctuation."
"Augh," she said on a sigh. "Nothing." She rested the file in her lap and looked into his eyes. "Gil met with some people in Portland today from Oregon State as well as from a couple of the ecological training stations along the coast, and it was meant to be this big, final, in-person meeting to discuss the next steps in our research, people drove in for it, but he sent me a text an hour ago saying he'd been feeling unwell since breakfast so ended up video-dialling in from his hotel room."
"And?" Nick asked, confused. "Are you worried about how it looks, or how he is?"
"Both," she said.
"He's probably just got a bit of a bug," Nick said with a shrug. "It's not surprising. I'm stunned you're still on two feet."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sara asked with a frown. Nick chuckled.
"Oh Sara, really? Come on now, you know how this works. You and Gil have spent a year on a boat together, mostly just the two of you, except when you've hit land and trekked around tropical islands and whatever it is the two of you do. Before you joined him, hadn't Gil been out on that boat for a few years, pretty much on his own? Bottom line is, it's just the two of you most of the time. You obviously don't make each other sick, but you're also not coming into contact with any other bacteria or viruses either, yeah? So, three weeks back in the US, all these people, coughing and sneezing and touching everything, the bugs-"
Sara pulled a face. Nick knew how much she hated to think about that stuff.
"-It's a wonder neither of you have come down with anything so far," Nick concluded.
"We did get bad colds in New Zealand," Sara said, thinking of the week they spent cuddled up in a Queenstown cabin by the little fire in the middle of winter. Sara had gotten sick first; the splintering sore throat, the fuzzy head and deep cough. Gil followed a day or two later with the same symptoms. They extended their stay there until they had the energy to move on and continue their trip around the South Island. Even though they were sick, Sara remembered that week fondly. It snowed, and neither of them complained, they just took care of each other. She remembered blankets by the fire and a lot of cups of tea and soup thanks to the kettle and the kind manager.
"Exactly," Nick said, declaring his point made. "Give him a bit of a break if he wasn't feeling too well, okay? Not the end of the world."
Sara's phone dinged at her hip and she reached for it while nodding along with Nick. She wasn't mad at Gil. In fact, she suspected he had to be feeling seriously unwell not to have gone through with the meeting in-person, and that was worrying her more than anything else. He was just as determined as her to make the best use of their limited time in the US, and he wasn't the sort of person who got sick very often, he was fit and healthy. Even in Vegas, besides the debilitating migraines that he never seemed to get on the boat anyway, she couldn't remember his last flu.
She hoped it wasn't a migraine.
"Oh no," she whispered when she read his message. Not a migraine.
"What is it?" Nick asked.
Sara sighed. She held her phone up and turned it around, and repeated Gil's message aloud.
"Not gonna make it home tomorrow. I have stomach flu. Suspect: norovirus."
Nick snickered and tried to stop himself from laughing, but he sat back in his chair and opened his arms up to say, 'What did I tell you?'
Sara groaned, but another message quickly came through. She softened and shook her head.
"What's he sayin'?"
"Are you okay?" she read aloud, unable to help the small smile that touched her lips. "I'm terrible – all capital letters and typos; good work, Gil – don't call can't talk, never been so sock."
"Poor sucker," Nick said. "I think he meant sick? Probably puking his guts out."
"He'll be fine," Sara insisted as she put her phone away, but her heart was racing and her own stomach churned.
If Nick was right, then Gil hadn't been this sick in years. He was not an old man, she didn't see him that way at all, but the reality was he also wasn't young, and gastro and the subsequent dehydration could strain a body. She couldn't help it that part of her mind thought of losing him.
She wanted to reply to Gil's last text message, to hold onto him virtually somehow, to reassure him that she was fine, but not there in front of Nick.
"He probably got it at the airport yesterday," she mumbled. "Or from someone at his meetings at Berkley on Tuesday."
"He could have gotten it anywhere, Sara," Nick said more gently. "You feel okay, right?"
"Fine," she said with a helpless shrug.
A part of her was glad she wasn't with Gil too, because she probably would have caught it from him while she was trying to help him, and she felt guilty for appreciating the distance they'd keep over the next few days while he recovered, so she didn't get sick. What kind of wife was she?
Not a very natural one, she suspected. She'd had such a stellar role model. Being a selfish bitch was kind of genetic, right?
Stop it, she told herself as she glanced warily at Nick. Gil would never think that about her, and most of the time she would never think it about herself. She was just feeling anxious.
"So," Nick said after they sat in silence for a moment. "I can tell by the look on your face what the answer's gonna be, but I have to ask. I don't suppose you'd be interested in staying on a while longer with us here? Another month, perhaps. Or…longer?"
Sara didn't move, but she slid her eyes from the cabinet she had been staring at, to Nick.
"Until the end of next week, Nick," she finally said.
"Don't you miss it?" he asked, frowning at her curiously. He gestured around the room. "He's not here, Sara, and I want to know what you really think. I see the way you are with the rest of the team here now, you're a natural. I don't know how you cope on that boat all on your own."
"I'm not on my own," she said with a small frown.
"How do you even…wash your sheets and stuff?"
"Oh, buckets," she said. She allowed a small smile to play on her lips. "There's a soap bucket and a rinse bucket, we use the shower to fill them and we've got a wringer. We try and use as little water as possible of course. The sun and fresh air do the rest. It works well, it's good exercise for us, it's therapeutic. I promise, our clothes and sheets are always clean."
"So you don't feel…claustrophobic, ever?" he asked cautiously.
Sara smirked. She knew he was just curious, and keen to look out for her.
"Sometimes," she admitted honestly. "But no more than I would ever feel in a house. We still bicker about stupid stuff, and we have our spots on the boat where we go to be alone. We get annoyed but we never raise our voices in anger. We play our favourite music if it all feels too quiet, and we can pick up radio depending on where we are. I like listening to Gil sing, which I bet you didn't know he could do. We do chores, and we work, document, fish, cook, navigate, sit together and read, go to bed together. It's all very domestic except we're not in a three-bed, two-bath house with a grassy yard and concrete foundation. People can feel trapped in those houses in a way that Gil and I will never feel on the boat." She paused thoughtfully. "I still feel useful," she added. "The days are simple and we're partners, and I feel safe, if that's what you're worried about. The only reason we're here right now and not still on the boat is because I made a commitment to be here."
"So, you guys really have worked through all your stuff from before," Nick said.
Sara pressed her lips together and nodded. She didn't owe Nick any more than that.
"And I can't convince you to stay?" he asked.
"No," she said softly. "Sorry."
"No, don't be sorry," he admitted. "I'm glad it's all working out. Like I said, I had to ask, not just because getting you to stay would be a big win for the lab here, but because I'm your friend."
"I know," Sara assured him. "I appreciate it, thank you." She stood and gestured to the door, and Nick nodded and said he would see her later. Once she left, Sara removed her phone from her pocket and made her way to the locker room. Sophie was there, fussing around with something in her locker, but Sara didn't mind so much. She sat on the bench and typed out a quick reply to Gil.
I'm fine, sweetheart. So sorry to hear you're so sick. A good decision not to go to campus this morning after all! Text me when you can so I know you're all right. Sip water once you can keep it down and try to stay warm and hydrated, just rest. I love you, take care. xoxo
She added the ASL emoji for 'I love you' to the message and then pressed send. She sighed.
"Everything all right?" Sophie asked as she shut her locker and looked down at Sara.
"Mm, my husband is sick," she said. She read the quick reply that popped up her screen.
Hourly report: still alive. xxox
Good to know, she thought with a chuckle. She held her phone and smiled up at Sophie.
"He's fine," she said. "He's just on his own for a few days."
"I saw you wear a ring," Sophie said.
Sara nodded and looked down at her left hand. There was no engagement ring, just the plain but shining yellow gold band that stood out against her fair skin. Sara loved its simplicity, the look of it, even if it was the traditional choice and tradition was something she was often quick to criticise.
In three weeks, no one had asked her about the ring, or Gil. She just assumed no one cared.
"Have you been together long?" Sophie asked.
"Ah," Sara said with a knowing smile. That was a complicated question to answer, but she went with the basic truth. "Yes, we met nineteen years ago now, at a forensics conference."
Sophie's eyes lit up.
"Oh, does he work in forensics too? Is he a coroner or a cop or something?"
"Not quite. Gil's an entomologist. He's-"
Sophie sucked in a breath and her eyes went wide.
"Not Gil Grissom!" she exclaimed. "I watched all his online lectures for a course in college. It's not my thing but I guess it's unavoidable that I'll see the bugs one day. He makes it interesting."
"Gil and I worked with Nick in Las Vegas," Sara said, though she thought Nick had told them all that on her first day already. "Now we do marine research from our boat full-time, but I want to keep my hours up, in case we need this old job as a backup. That's why Nick's letting me help you."
"Wow," Sophie replied. "You live on a boat together? That sounds so cool! You're so cool!"
Sara immediately felt better about her life choices as Sophie's eyes sparkled.
"Can I meet him?" she asked.
"Sure," Sara said, nodding. Gil wouldn't mind, he'd be tickled to meet one of his wife's so-called groupies. "Once he stops throwing up in Portland," she added with an easy-going laugh.