Following Grissom's orders, Nick reluctantly dropped him off at his house. As he let himself in, thoughts he couldn't stop swirled in his head. The Untouchable had struck a nerve, and broke down his defenses. Now he was thinking of victims he couldn't save.
He remembered his mother, Angela Grissom. Her dark brown hair, flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes. She had been prelingually deaf, or had been born deaf. Her marriage to her husband, Paul, had been a unhappy one. He had refused to learn sign language, so they could hardly communicate. But she had stayed because of Grissom. He had been so different that his father, he had learned sign language, learned it well. He knew it almost better than his mother did. But some people, people like his father, were afraid of the Deaf community. That using their silent language, they could tell secrets, plot against them. His father hated it when Grissom talked to his mother. He would get terribly angry. First, he started with mental, emotional, and verbal abuse. Threats and name-calling. But by the time Grissom was seven, it had escalated into physical violence against both him and his mother. And Grissom had been powerless to stop it. Finally, it all came to a terrible end when he was twelve. Paul came home from work, drunk, and spoiling for a fight. He found Grissom and Angela discussing a project that he was doing in school. Paul became enraged, and gave Grissom the beating of his life. Angela tried to intervene, and Paul grabbed her by her long dark hair, and drug her out of the room. Grissom, broken and bleeding, crawled after them. And made it into their bedroom just in time to see Paul shoot Angela in the head. Then turn the gun on himself.
Grissom closed his eyes, trying to banish the memory of watching his mother's brains splatter all over her bedroom. And then his father, turning the gun on himself. Grissom had called 911, but of course, there was nothing they could do for his parents. Grissom had received a broken arm, ribs, nose, and severe bruising that day. He vaguely remembered the hospital stay that followed, but he always remembered his mother, watching her die…
And of course, there was also the death of Candice McIntyre on his head.
When he had just began as a CSI, they had a murder of a pimp. A bloody, grotesque murder. Which sixteen-year-old , Candice McIntyre, had witnessed. Grissom had everything he needed to put the killer away, except they couldn't locate him. And during the intense manhunt, the killer managed to slip into the safe house where Candice was staying, and brutally slaughter her. Because Grissom couldn't find him fast enough.
Grissom held his head in his hands, those memories flashing in his head, spinning like a morbid merry-go-round. He decided that he was not going to have any more deaths occur because of him. He was going to stop the Untouchable… even if it killed him.