Jealousie Chapter 3

By Evie

Note & Disclaimer: CSI is still not mine just like my long-time crush. BIG, HUGE hands to Hope and Dev for their help & support. For all the people who have liked the story, I deeply appreciate your encouraging words and I will not let you down! I wrote (the fic), I researched (the poison), and I experimented (the powder). Nick is not the Joey Tribbiani of CSI although I still put him in the plot-basement, and Warrick is still hosting "All Warrick, All The Time" while Catherine goes on tour with Slim Shady (ref see TWoP One Sentence Story). They cancelled Dark Angel. Arrgh.

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(Unknown journal entry)

... Darkness eats us all, slowly and corruptly. There is no use of remembering the glory days. Uncertainty is where we stand, where we are not even entitled to anger, hatred, and the ability to love. Nothing is left here. Nothing is justified. How could one not seeing the downside of things only because wanting to believe a better outcome, only to fall in a deeper hell and never see the light? ....

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HOSPITAL

Violet and Neil stood in the emergency room. Doctors and nurses had left the room after they pronounced the time of death. Quietly Gracie's body lay on the bed. The chattering and screaming from adjacent rooms blurred in the cold, empty space; the silence between two friends made the world around them surreal. Emotions were hardly expressive when they faced death. For a long time Violet and Neil stood side-by-side, staring at the deadly, bluish-white skin of Gracie's body, silently, without a word, without a sound, and without a tear. Finally, Neil whispered to Violet.

"You need a moment alone with her."

He turned around, pushed the door open and walked out the emergency room. Waiting by the door, he gave Violet an understanding glance through the glass window. Violet nodded at him, and then slowly moved to Gracie's bedside; she carefully picked up Gracie's porcelain-like wrist. The coldness of death seemed to shock her, but Violet proceeded to hold Gracie's hand. Death had not taken away beauty from Gracie; Violet felt the charming smoothness of the skin. Slowly, Violet let her own warmth flew onto Gracie's skin, knowing the body would remain cold forever. She leaned over to Gracie's head; she could almost taste the fragrance, mixed coffee smell, from Gracie's hair.

"I am sorry, honey," Violet whispered into Gracie's senseless ear. "but it's the only way."

Violet retrieved her head and turned around to meet her eyes with Neil's outside the door. Solemn and motionless, her eyes were like solid black glass, instead of a lake full of grief. Violet slowly pushed the door open. The noise of reality suddenly flooded over her. She clung onto Neil, who held her tightly, as if he would lose her. She let his warmth overwhelmed her, feeling the life of a human. She had earned this moment.

"Don't cry," he said softly to her ear.

"Never"

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THE NEXT AFTERNOON

"Greg, what did you get?" Sara rushed in the trace lab. "Depending on what you are looking for." Greg handed her a thick folder of lab results.

"Toxins," Sara said while she was reading through the results. "Water, sugar, other complex carbohydrates ... C8H8O3, that's vanilla ... and caffeine, the safe amount."

Greg looked at Sara. He tried to act confident in front of her, but he was not sure what Sara was up to. He tried to hold up his head.

"Nothing more than a normal cup of cappuccino, with vanilla."

"No way," Sara flipped through other pages. There were no traces of poisons in the bottles and food samples from the crime scene. The grains on the counter were what they were supposed to be: sugar, vanilla, chocolate, and cinnamon.

"How about the powders Nick found in the washroom?" Sara asked, anticipating a conclusive result.

"That was a hard one, but, " Greg said with a smug smile, leaned over his desk, and looked straight at Sara. "Sara, remember to powder your nose."

Confused, Sara touched her nose. Realizing this was one of Greg's jokes, she quickly put down her hand and asked accusingly. "Excuse me?"

Afraid that Sara might be mad at him, Greg quickly switched to a more serious persona. "What Nick found was cosmetics. Face powder. Very fine and light stuffs. I ran the formula through the national data base and was able to identify the manufacturer and the brand."

"And I assume it's not poisonous," Sara asked, with frustration. Greg nodded when Nick walked in the lab.

"Some lady dropped her powder on the floor," said Nick. He explained to Sara and Greg with crime scene photos he took. "See the pattern here? The compact powder, with the case, hit the floor here, leaving a more intense distribution in this area, and then the loose powder grains radiated out in this shape. A tiny chunk of the compact powder was chipped out here."

This was impossible; all the evidences appeared to be too normal to be true, Sara thought. "How about the cashier you and Brass interviewed last night?"

Nick shook his head. "That little nerd had nothing to do with it as far as I know. He had no prior knowledge of Gracie's appearance in the coffee house. We didn't find anything on him either." Patience --- Grissom once told her that it was the most important component in poisoning. It seemed to her that Gracie had died of poisoning. Most poisons took some time to finally kill a victim. What if...

"Wait," Sara's eyes brightened by her thoughts. Off searching for Grissom, she said to herself while walking out the lab quickly, and ignoring the presence of her colleagues unknowingly. "Maybe Gracie didn't die from anything in the coffee house..."

Making no effort to stop her, Nick and Greg watched her disappeared at the end of the hallway and let her mutter faded with noises in the office.

Nick and Greg exchanged a glance. Nick shook his head.

"That Grissom look,"

"and that Grissom walk." said Greg, with wonder in his eyes.

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AUTOPSY ROOM

Grissom, Sara and Dr. Robbins stood around the autopsy table. Gracie's lifeless body peacefully lay on the cold metal platform; once vibrant with life, her hair now reflected the cold light of the sterile room. Her skin already turned blue.

"No external bruising or injuries; multiple organs failure, internal bleeding, circulatory vessels collapses...The victim probably experienced nausea, muscle aches, weakness, and difficulties in breathing ..." While Dr. Robbins explained the cause of death, Sara imagined the cells exploded, veins flattened, blood stopped flowing, and then the entire body stopped functioning. Trying to divert her attention from those horrible images, she looked up at Grissom, whose wrinkles knotted tightly on his forehead, behind his elegant glasses. How could she smooth these wrinkles? Sara thought for a nano-second, and then quickly put her thoughts back together.

"She was young and relatively healthy, according to her medical record." said Sara. "Do you know what caused these conditions?"

"Most likely... poison." said Grissom. Dr. Robbins nodded with approval. Grissom continued. "We had a case like this before. The victim accidentally poisoned herself with ricin."

"Well, if there is still any poison left in her stomach, we will know when the tox report come back tomorrow afternoon. I sent a sample of her stomach content earlier this morning." said Dr. Robbins.

"Tomorrow afternoon..." Sara was slightly frustrated. "Even Greg worked faster than that."

Trying very hard not to laugh, Dr. Robbins was definitely amused by the "Greg" notion. On the other side of the table, Grissom thought, of course our "Greggo" worked faster than that. Greg had been extra-committed to his work recently. Amazingly, he was able to put together the whole analysis for all the evidences Sara and Nick got from the crime scene in less than 24 hours. From all the evidences he gathered from Greg's recent behaviors towards Sara, Grissom suspected that Greg must have put in a lot of overtime for Sara --- no, for this case. Sensing Sara's impatience, he tilted his head and smiled at her.

"Sara," Grissom reminded her, "Remember what's the most important component in poisoning?"

"Patience, I know," Sara was anxious. If there were another crime scene, she knew the evidences might have been compromised. She hated when the situation was too late for her to save. "Grissom, nothing we found in the coffee house was pointing at poisoning. It took time for the poison to actually kill a person. Gracie did not die from anything in the coffee house. She was poisoned somewhere first."

"We just got ourselves another crime scene, then." Grissom sank deeply into his thoughts. "The question is: Where and how was she drugged?"

TBC (3/?)