"Is the butcher selling dinosaur now?" Grissom asked as he entered the
room. The bone Sara had in front of her was huge, bigger than any beef
bone he'd ever seen.
"It's bison, actually," Sara said, not looking up. "I'm waiting for the lye to do its thing so I can start sanding."
"Bison?"
"Uh, yeah, it's a specialty store. They sell venison, bison, ostrich. All farm-raised. The guy who runs it went to college with me, makes the best jerky in the country. I miss that stuff. . ." Sara sighed. "Anyway, I wanted something big enough to work with, but still like a beef bone, Justin gave me two. One's in the lye bath," she gestured to the one in front of her, "and one's in the fridge. . .I'm going to clean it with a knife, see if that makes a difference in the sanding patterns. Where's Teri?"
"Oh, she's on lunch break."
"The two of you find anything?"
"Yeah, fish."
"Really?" she asked, looking up at him. "What kind?"
"Take your pick." He handed her Polaroids of the carvings. "Angelfish, goldfish, I think there might be a jellyfish in there, too."
Sara looked at the pictures with interest. "I'm retracting my 'Barnes isn't original' statement. . . wow."
"You might to figure out what carving tool was used to do those," he suggested. Sara, completely engrossed in the images, nodded.
"Does Teri know what this is all about?"
"I explained to her that the fish are a message between us and the killer, but not much more. She didn't quite get it."
"Yeah, I don't really get it either. Oh, Greggo has your trace results. . ." she said absently.
His forehead furrowed. "Why did Greg tell you?" Grissom asked, his budding anger spilling over into a cautious tone.
She grinned at him. "No need to get all Alpha Male on him, Gris. I asked him if the results were back."
"Don't care. They're my results, I want to know first."
"Control freak," she teased.
"Protocol. Not something you have a lot of use for. . ." he taunted.
Sara's eyebrows narrowed, her face growing stony. "That's a low blow, Grissom."
Oh, God. She thought this was about the pills. . . "Sara, I was talking about us." This didn't appease her. "I mean, it's not exactly like we're obeying protocol here. . ." She tilted her head, crossed her arms, her expression saying, You're just digging yourself deeper, buddy.
"Before we were married," he rushed. "Supervisor-subordinate relationships are frowned on, anywhere."
"Grissom, I think maybe you should go before you get buried in that pit you've dug yourself." She smiled, winking at him.
"Fine, I know when I'm not wanted. . ." he sighed.
"Oh, I want you, just not right now. . ." His eyebrows raised at that. "Go," she encouraged. "Let me sand."
"Hell is that?"
Sara and Warrick looked up from the white bone, plastic safety glasses and coveralls making them look like insects, a sharp contrast from Nick's impeccable suit. "Still in court, Nick?" Warrick asked.
The Texan shrugged. "Man, I don't testify for months, and now it's like all my cases are being called in. We're on a lunch break." Nick looked at the bone with curiosity. "What'd you kill to get that?"
"Buffalo," Sara said, picking up the sander. "Just have to sand it. . ."
Nick sent Warrick a 'What the hell is she talking about?' look, which was answered with a 'I'll tell you later' shrug. "Sanding a bone's making you work a double?"
"Well, yeah," Sara said, nodding. "I couldn't leave it until next shift because I didn't want the lye to eat away too much of it."
"Lye, right." Nick looked perplexed.
The sander made a noise similar to a dentist's drill as Sara hit the power switch. She looked at Nick and his perfect suit and said, "Crimestopper, you and your suit might wanna take a few steps back. . .this is going to be messy, and I don't know how far it'll splatter."
"You mean you haven't researched it?" he teased as he stepped back a few feet.
"Yeah, I take power tools to animal bones on my days off," she scoffed. "Of course I haven't researched it."
She turned back to the bone, a gleeful look coming over her as she put the tool to the bone and started working. Powdery bits of bone rushed off as she ran the machine from left to right. "Oh, this is fun," she crowed over the high pitched whine.
Warrick mouthed 'Serial killer' and pointed at Sara. Nick nodded in agreement. Sara, catching the exchange, grumbled, "Science nerd, not serial killer."
A few minutes later, the bone was shaped identically to the bones they had found. Taking a magnifying glass, Sara examined the marks made by the sanding.identical. "Nice," she said. "Bones were sanded. I'll tell Grissom." She raised a cautionary finger at the two men. "Throw that away and I'll hurt you."
"I was just about to ask how it was going," Grissom said. "They were sanded?"
She gave him a smile. "The buffalo bone is just as smooth as the others. I don't know if our bones were sanded by hand or by machine, but I'm hoping it was by machine. . .Dust everywhere. If our killer did it in a room with wooden floors, we can probably get evidence."
"No DNA," he reminded.
"You never know," she disagreed. "Sometimes."
"This guy's pretty smart. Chances are that he hasn't left anything behind."
"You're such a pessimist," she drawled. "People make mistakes. No one's intelligent enough to think of everything."
"What about me?" Grissom leaned back in his chair, taking off his glasses. "If I committed a crime, would anyone who works in this building be able to solve it?"
Sara pondered this for a moment, then a smile quirked on her face and she answered, "Well, Day Shift probably couldn't. . .but our shift? We'd have you in no time."
"Why?" Sara wasn't sure was he was getting at, what exactly the riddle was, but it wasn't hurting her any to play along.
"Because you trained us, and Graveyard has me," she shrugged. "Catherine may be your best friend, and Warrick and Nicky are practically family, but I live with you. It would be beyond easy to solve a case where the killer has trained the investigator. . .especially when the investigator is running on the same wavelength as the killer."
"But wouldn't knowing the way I work be a hindrance? How does my training you make it easy?"
Her forehead wrinkled, she was confused. "Why wouldn't it make it easier?"
"If I trained you, I'd know exactly what you were looking for, making it easier for me to alter the evidence. If you're not looking for it. . ."
"You aren't going to see it," she realized. "What do you know that I don't?"
"Nothing more, I just think we've been focusing too much on Barnes. What if he has nothing to do with it?"
She looked at him, astonished. "Are you serious? He was on the tape, the Gregory murder was identical to his others. He knows what 'This is the fish' means."
"We think he knows. He wouldn't ever tell us, remember?"
"Grissom! He's a son of a bitch who gets off on mind games. Of course he wasn't going to tell us."
"What if he doesn't know? We can't find any way that he's communicating with anyone on the outside. No letters, no phone calls."
"He could've slipped a note into another inmate's mail," she suggested, and he could see she wasn't going to let this go any easier than an animal with a death-grip on prey's neck. "He was on the tape. Why would anyone put him on the tape if he wasn't supposed to know that something happened? It was a conformation."
"Exactly! His name was on the tape, but I don't think he has anything to do with it."
"But it was the girl he killed before he attacked me!" Sara's frustration was growing.
"I was wrong about the tape, Sara." Her eyes grew wide at the admission.
"You were wrong?"
"Yeah. The woman wasn't the one he killed, it was probably recorded more recently than we thought."
"Are you firing Archie?" Some criminalists fired employees who made mistakes, especially of this magnitude.
"Archie didn't run the tape, I did, so no. I wouldn't fire him anyway."
"So what are you doing about the woman on the tape?
"Nothing. I don't think she's important." He put his glasses back on. "Sara, why would anyone want Barnes involved in the first place?"
"Revenge," she replied automatically. Grissom shot her a look that suggested that she take the time to think about it. "I don't know," she sighed, frustrated. "Somebody knew that I was involved, or wanted to make sure I was involved. . .so. . .they plant a tape that has nothing to do with the case except for the 'Fish' thing, but mentions Barnes, knowing that that would get me on the case if I wasn't already."
"Good. More," he requested.
"We have a skeleton, which would make us call in Teri Miller, although I have no idea what her role is, and the other three vics are set up as players in some macabre episode of 'The Grissoms'. . .you, me, and a son we don't even have. Someone trying to break me by killing a hypothetical Grissom family and bringing in your ex-girlfriend?"
"We never went out more than once, so technically. . ."
"Whatever. Or maybe. . ." Her face curled in concentration. "Maybe it's not me, it's you."
"Me?" Grissom looked surprised. He hadn't thought of that. "Why me?"
"Okay, hear me out before you say anything," she said, sitting down. "The first vic was a woman. . .me. So, what would upset you more than losing me, right? And the next vic's the husband, looks like a suicide. A course of action, perhaps? You watch me die, then take your own life. And bringing Barnes into the picture again. . .designed to make you furious. Here's the guy who nearly killed your wife, back again, threatening her." Sara got progressively more excited as she figured it out. "Our killer isn't after me at all, he's after you and Barnes. Maybe Barnes would get a harsher sentence, or be killed or something. And you, the killer's torturing you. . .the crime scene suit makes it impossible to get any evidence, a kid is killed, someone you had intentions for comes back to remind you of what you could've had-"
"I'm more than happy without Teri, thank you," he interrupted.
"But he also wants you to be appropriately challenged," Sara jumped in, ignoring his interruption. "Giving you tough cases, making you work at whatever this fish thing means. . .he wants you to suffer but he wants you to have a good time while you're doing it."
"That's crazy!" Why hadn't he thought of that? The student had just about made the transformation to teacher, he remembered.
"Who isn't?" She gave him a small smile. "I mean, there's crazy-sane and crazy-insane, and our guy's definitely the latter." Sara's brown eyes wandered around the room, finally landing on 'The Entomological Handbook.' "Pretty smart guy actually."
"Why?"
"Well, I probably wouldn't go this far if I was scheming. This guy's thought of everything."
"Enemies?" Gary Barnes asked with a chuckle, his voice distorted through the speaker. "Of course I have enemies. I'm in prison."
Sara shifted the plastic telephone from her left ear to her right. This is way too much like those phones I made out of cans when I was a kid, she thought as she stared down Barnes through the Plexiglas screen. "Come on, Gary. You know of anyone on the outside who would do this?" she asked, pressing a photograph of Sean Gregory's body against the glass. "Maybe to get back at you?"
Barnes stared at the photo for a long time, licked his lips. "No," he said, distracted by the grisly image. "That's incredible," he added huskily, reaching out a hand to trace the boy's outline. Sara pulled the picture away, shaking her head, and Barnes frowned, licked his lips again. "I was just looking," he grumbled.
"You weren't looking, you were salivating," Sara snapped. "And I didn't ask for a DNA sample."
"Self-righteous little-" Barnes wisely cut himself off at the sight of her rising eyebrow. "I'm done. I don't know anything." He gave her a final glare before he hung up the phone.
"It's bison, actually," Sara said, not looking up. "I'm waiting for the lye to do its thing so I can start sanding."
"Bison?"
"Uh, yeah, it's a specialty store. They sell venison, bison, ostrich. All farm-raised. The guy who runs it went to college with me, makes the best jerky in the country. I miss that stuff. . ." Sara sighed. "Anyway, I wanted something big enough to work with, but still like a beef bone, Justin gave me two. One's in the lye bath," she gestured to the one in front of her, "and one's in the fridge. . .I'm going to clean it with a knife, see if that makes a difference in the sanding patterns. Where's Teri?"
"Oh, she's on lunch break."
"The two of you find anything?"
"Yeah, fish."
"Really?" she asked, looking up at him. "What kind?"
"Take your pick." He handed her Polaroids of the carvings. "Angelfish, goldfish, I think there might be a jellyfish in there, too."
Sara looked at the pictures with interest. "I'm retracting my 'Barnes isn't original' statement. . . wow."
"You might to figure out what carving tool was used to do those," he suggested. Sara, completely engrossed in the images, nodded.
"Does Teri know what this is all about?"
"I explained to her that the fish are a message between us and the killer, but not much more. She didn't quite get it."
"Yeah, I don't really get it either. Oh, Greggo has your trace results. . ." she said absently.
His forehead furrowed. "Why did Greg tell you?" Grissom asked, his budding anger spilling over into a cautious tone.
She grinned at him. "No need to get all Alpha Male on him, Gris. I asked him if the results were back."
"Don't care. They're my results, I want to know first."
"Control freak," she teased.
"Protocol. Not something you have a lot of use for. . ." he taunted.
Sara's eyebrows narrowed, her face growing stony. "That's a low blow, Grissom."
Oh, God. She thought this was about the pills. . . "Sara, I was talking about us." This didn't appease her. "I mean, it's not exactly like we're obeying protocol here. . ." She tilted her head, crossed her arms, her expression saying, You're just digging yourself deeper, buddy.
"Before we were married," he rushed. "Supervisor-subordinate relationships are frowned on, anywhere."
"Grissom, I think maybe you should go before you get buried in that pit you've dug yourself." She smiled, winking at him.
"Fine, I know when I'm not wanted. . ." he sighed.
"Oh, I want you, just not right now. . ." His eyebrows raised at that. "Go," she encouraged. "Let me sand."
"Hell is that?"
Sara and Warrick looked up from the white bone, plastic safety glasses and coveralls making them look like insects, a sharp contrast from Nick's impeccable suit. "Still in court, Nick?" Warrick asked.
The Texan shrugged. "Man, I don't testify for months, and now it's like all my cases are being called in. We're on a lunch break." Nick looked at the bone with curiosity. "What'd you kill to get that?"
"Buffalo," Sara said, picking up the sander. "Just have to sand it. . ."
Nick sent Warrick a 'What the hell is she talking about?' look, which was answered with a 'I'll tell you later' shrug. "Sanding a bone's making you work a double?"
"Well, yeah," Sara said, nodding. "I couldn't leave it until next shift because I didn't want the lye to eat away too much of it."
"Lye, right." Nick looked perplexed.
The sander made a noise similar to a dentist's drill as Sara hit the power switch. She looked at Nick and his perfect suit and said, "Crimestopper, you and your suit might wanna take a few steps back. . .this is going to be messy, and I don't know how far it'll splatter."
"You mean you haven't researched it?" he teased as he stepped back a few feet.
"Yeah, I take power tools to animal bones on my days off," she scoffed. "Of course I haven't researched it."
She turned back to the bone, a gleeful look coming over her as she put the tool to the bone and started working. Powdery bits of bone rushed off as she ran the machine from left to right. "Oh, this is fun," she crowed over the high pitched whine.
Warrick mouthed 'Serial killer' and pointed at Sara. Nick nodded in agreement. Sara, catching the exchange, grumbled, "Science nerd, not serial killer."
A few minutes later, the bone was shaped identically to the bones they had found. Taking a magnifying glass, Sara examined the marks made by the sanding.identical. "Nice," she said. "Bones were sanded. I'll tell Grissom." She raised a cautionary finger at the two men. "Throw that away and I'll hurt you."
"I was just about to ask how it was going," Grissom said. "They were sanded?"
She gave him a smile. "The buffalo bone is just as smooth as the others. I don't know if our bones were sanded by hand or by machine, but I'm hoping it was by machine. . .Dust everywhere. If our killer did it in a room with wooden floors, we can probably get evidence."
"No DNA," he reminded.
"You never know," she disagreed. "Sometimes."
"This guy's pretty smart. Chances are that he hasn't left anything behind."
"You're such a pessimist," she drawled. "People make mistakes. No one's intelligent enough to think of everything."
"What about me?" Grissom leaned back in his chair, taking off his glasses. "If I committed a crime, would anyone who works in this building be able to solve it?"
Sara pondered this for a moment, then a smile quirked on her face and she answered, "Well, Day Shift probably couldn't. . .but our shift? We'd have you in no time."
"Why?" Sara wasn't sure was he was getting at, what exactly the riddle was, but it wasn't hurting her any to play along.
"Because you trained us, and Graveyard has me," she shrugged. "Catherine may be your best friend, and Warrick and Nicky are practically family, but I live with you. It would be beyond easy to solve a case where the killer has trained the investigator. . .especially when the investigator is running on the same wavelength as the killer."
"But wouldn't knowing the way I work be a hindrance? How does my training you make it easy?"
Her forehead wrinkled, she was confused. "Why wouldn't it make it easier?"
"If I trained you, I'd know exactly what you were looking for, making it easier for me to alter the evidence. If you're not looking for it. . ."
"You aren't going to see it," she realized. "What do you know that I don't?"
"Nothing more, I just think we've been focusing too much on Barnes. What if he has nothing to do with it?"
She looked at him, astonished. "Are you serious? He was on the tape, the Gregory murder was identical to his others. He knows what 'This is the fish' means."
"We think he knows. He wouldn't ever tell us, remember?"
"Grissom! He's a son of a bitch who gets off on mind games. Of course he wasn't going to tell us."
"What if he doesn't know? We can't find any way that he's communicating with anyone on the outside. No letters, no phone calls."
"He could've slipped a note into another inmate's mail," she suggested, and he could see she wasn't going to let this go any easier than an animal with a death-grip on prey's neck. "He was on the tape. Why would anyone put him on the tape if he wasn't supposed to know that something happened? It was a conformation."
"Exactly! His name was on the tape, but I don't think he has anything to do with it."
"But it was the girl he killed before he attacked me!" Sara's frustration was growing.
"I was wrong about the tape, Sara." Her eyes grew wide at the admission.
"You were wrong?"
"Yeah. The woman wasn't the one he killed, it was probably recorded more recently than we thought."
"Are you firing Archie?" Some criminalists fired employees who made mistakes, especially of this magnitude.
"Archie didn't run the tape, I did, so no. I wouldn't fire him anyway."
"So what are you doing about the woman on the tape?
"Nothing. I don't think she's important." He put his glasses back on. "Sara, why would anyone want Barnes involved in the first place?"
"Revenge," she replied automatically. Grissom shot her a look that suggested that she take the time to think about it. "I don't know," she sighed, frustrated. "Somebody knew that I was involved, or wanted to make sure I was involved. . .so. . .they plant a tape that has nothing to do with the case except for the 'Fish' thing, but mentions Barnes, knowing that that would get me on the case if I wasn't already."
"Good. More," he requested.
"We have a skeleton, which would make us call in Teri Miller, although I have no idea what her role is, and the other three vics are set up as players in some macabre episode of 'The Grissoms'. . .you, me, and a son we don't even have. Someone trying to break me by killing a hypothetical Grissom family and bringing in your ex-girlfriend?"
"We never went out more than once, so technically. . ."
"Whatever. Or maybe. . ." Her face curled in concentration. "Maybe it's not me, it's you."
"Me?" Grissom looked surprised. He hadn't thought of that. "Why me?"
"Okay, hear me out before you say anything," she said, sitting down. "The first vic was a woman. . .me. So, what would upset you more than losing me, right? And the next vic's the husband, looks like a suicide. A course of action, perhaps? You watch me die, then take your own life. And bringing Barnes into the picture again. . .designed to make you furious. Here's the guy who nearly killed your wife, back again, threatening her." Sara got progressively more excited as she figured it out. "Our killer isn't after me at all, he's after you and Barnes. Maybe Barnes would get a harsher sentence, or be killed or something. And you, the killer's torturing you. . .the crime scene suit makes it impossible to get any evidence, a kid is killed, someone you had intentions for comes back to remind you of what you could've had-"
"I'm more than happy without Teri, thank you," he interrupted.
"But he also wants you to be appropriately challenged," Sara jumped in, ignoring his interruption. "Giving you tough cases, making you work at whatever this fish thing means. . .he wants you to suffer but he wants you to have a good time while you're doing it."
"That's crazy!" Why hadn't he thought of that? The student had just about made the transformation to teacher, he remembered.
"Who isn't?" She gave him a small smile. "I mean, there's crazy-sane and crazy-insane, and our guy's definitely the latter." Sara's brown eyes wandered around the room, finally landing on 'The Entomological Handbook.' "Pretty smart guy actually."
"Why?"
"Well, I probably wouldn't go this far if I was scheming. This guy's thought of everything."
"Enemies?" Gary Barnes asked with a chuckle, his voice distorted through the speaker. "Of course I have enemies. I'm in prison."
Sara shifted the plastic telephone from her left ear to her right. This is way too much like those phones I made out of cans when I was a kid, she thought as she stared down Barnes through the Plexiglas screen. "Come on, Gary. You know of anyone on the outside who would do this?" she asked, pressing a photograph of Sean Gregory's body against the glass. "Maybe to get back at you?"
Barnes stared at the photo for a long time, licked his lips. "No," he said, distracted by the grisly image. "That's incredible," he added huskily, reaching out a hand to trace the boy's outline. Sara pulled the picture away, shaking her head, and Barnes frowned, licked his lips again. "I was just looking," he grumbled.
"You weren't looking, you were salivating," Sara snapped. "And I didn't ask for a DNA sample."
"Self-righteous little-" Barnes wisely cut himself off at the sight of her rising eyebrow. "I'm done. I don't know anything." He gave her a final glare before he hung up the phone.