Disclaimer: I don't own it, I don't pretend to own it, and I don't mean to offend anyone's sensibilities.
Thank You: Stelmarta for being there! Mom because I love her!
Special Thank You: Duchess of Hell and Saryn for the wonderful reviews
Chapter Seven
Catherine was more than a little disturbed as Sara rushed off to God-knew-where to satisfy some psudo-subliminal messaging she may or may not have received from Grissom while he was locked up in the fishbowl with a suspect. She seemed to know what it was all about, though, and that was a little disturbing as well. There were telepathic CSI floating around Vegas, well hell, never a dull moment in this office.
"Oh, hey Gil, sorry about bumping in to your interview, but I need to borrow your manager for a second." Aha, Catherine thought to herself, Sara never calls him Gil; she calls him Mr. Grissom, Professor Grissom, just plain Grissom, and Griss, but never Gil. The game is now afoot.
"We're in the middle of something Sara" He looked vaguely annoyed, and sharply dismissive, in other words: Classic Grissom.
"It'll only be a sec, OK? I'm working prints with Nick, we need to ID some unknowns off of the main vault and want to eliminate some of the people we know had access." Sara, wearing an oversize man's dress shirt, not hers, stained with fingerprint powder and ink, slammed her kit down on the table "I'm assuming you've never been arrested before, printed, or what have you -- right?"
"Um, yeah" the suspect, a lean man, early forties, jet black hair, strong cheekbones but a rather weak chin, sent a puzzled look to his lawyer.
"Excuse me, Miss…"
"Sidle, Sara Sidle" she continued getting the papers and ink rollers ready.
"Miss Sidle, my client's fingerprints are listed in his employee file with the bank. Is this examination really necessary?"
"No, not really, it's just that the FBI has the personnel files from the bank. It'll be about ten times quicker if I can get him taken care of now, then wait 'till tomorrow night or the next day for the info. We can get him out of the way and on with life today, instead of a week from now." Sara poured out the ink expertly and slicked a roller with it.
"Hands"
Mr. Angel Gutierrez, manager of the Wells Fargo, shrugged at his lawyer and stuck them out for inspection.
It was Catherine's opinion that the hands, not the eyes were the windows to the soul. You could tell a lot about a person from his hands. Were they rough or smooth? Left or right handed? Calloused, scraped, bruised or fine, delicate and graceful? What people did with those hands was reflected on the appendages themselves. There was always something sinister about a slick-fingered, two bit hustler, it was the same as a murderer although not nearly as refined. His were manicured, worked, but not quite rough, and marred with an ugly mark on the right front knuckle.
"Ouch, that looks bad" Sara flipped the hand over to examine the 'fight-bite'. "Here, I'm always getting myself cut up, one way or another" Before anyone could say anything about it, Sara dropped some clear liquid on the cut and swabbed the liquid, blood, and some excess fluid from the knuckle before wrapping it in light gauze and a sterile pad. "You really ought to get that looked at," she commented, throwing the dirty cotton ball and sterile wrapper into the trashcan in the corner. "Infections can be a bitch"
"Are you done?" Grissom said, sounding as annoyed as ever.
"Yup," Sara grinned cheerfully, "Thanks for the time"
She left and the questioning continued as though it had never been interrupted. Sara jumped back into the observation room, still carrying the kit and wearing the stained dress shirt.
"What was that all about?"
"Shhh" she said, as if they could hear her, "You'll see in a minute." The interview concluded with as little fanfare as possible, handshakes all around, and a self-satisfied bank manager with protestations of goodwill and support. He and his lawyer left the room, closed the door behind them, Grissom stood up, stretched out his neck and grinned widely and gave a thumbs up to the invisible audience.
Catherine and Sara both rushed into the fishbowl, "Sara, remind me to give you a raise. That was a perfect idea." Gil shook his head in admiration, "Positively perfect."
"What the hell was that all about?" Catherine was dying to know what was so important about Sara fingerprinting a man whose fingerprint would be on file and accessible anyhow.
"This," Gil took of the cover of the trash can in the fishbowl, and delicately removed the dirty cotton ball, stained with the residue of the fight bite. "Sara…."
"I know, I'll run it down to Greg and see if we get something out of it." Sara sealed the cotton ball in a little baggie and raced off to the lab, grinning like a madwoman.
"You obtained a DNA sample" understanding began to dawn in Catherine's mind, "You want to know who he was fighting; you think it has something to do with this."
"I find it curious that a manager of a well respected and successful bank finds it within himself to physically assault an individual just hours before or directly after his bank is bombed in a most, ah, demonstrative manner." Grissom left the fishbowl, followed by Catherine and Brass. "It speaks to me of a rather heated and very private disagreement. One heated enough to detonate an explosive in the lobby of his bank."
"Wild," Brass remarked, seeing the sense in Grissom's reasoning, "We'll get in on his acquaintances right away." He angled himself down a corridor, heading for the main precinct building of Las Vegas PD.
"Well, you're lucky Sara understood what you were trying to do. You had me running for a loop." Catherine remarked.
"I was trying to do something?"
"You mean you weren't waving your hands around like that on purpose?"
"No," he stopped, "Why?"
"Then how did you know what she was planning on doing?'
"It made sense to obtain a sample; I assumed she saw the mark through the observation window, I was going to do something myself, but then Sara walked in wearing a different shirt. Then she called me 'Gil' and she never does that. Therefore, she was putting on a pretense of some kind and I played along."
"You know," Catherine said, exasperated, "the two of you drive me nuts. If you're not reading her mind, then she's reading yours. It's like some bad episode of Star Trek. What the hell is going on between you two?"
"Nothing, we just work well together." Grissom sounded almost puzzled at her outburst. "She's an excellent CSI"
"Yeah, well you and I work well together, and I don't finish your sentences."
"Then perhaps we need to work on our telepathy. What am I thinking right now?"
"I don't want to know." Catherine walked back over to the break room, turning at the door "You scare me sometimes, you know that?"
Grissom smiled, and turned back into his office.
"Hey, pssst, hey!" Nick snuck up on Sara in the lab, Greg had gone on some bizarre errand for Warrick and she was left with the processing until he got back.
"Huh?" Sara turned around startled, and came face to face with him, wearing his undershirt, which also had ink stains down the front. "What do you want?"
"My shirt, for starters, but that can wait." He tucked his hands up on her shoulders and read the printout the spectrograph machine spit up. "What are you up to?"
"Mmmm," she shrugged his hands off her shoulders, but undaunted he kept them near. "I'm trying to ID the explosive. Not having much luck."
"What's wrong?" His hands found a niche on her neck, cupping the stiff muscle and beginning to gently knead.
"The scene got so contaminated between the explosion and our arrival that isolating a single compound out of the debris is almost impossible. There's everything in here: dust, dirt, blood, other bodily fluids, rocks, floor polish, hell there's even some Clorox. The explosive had to be a petroleum based substance, because there's no trace of plastic explosive, but isolating it out of the mess is damn near impossible." She reached up again, this time removing his grasp manually.
"So you're trying to differentiate between cleaning products and explosive devices?" His fingertips slipped out of hers and slid back under the collar of his shirt that she was still wearing.
"Yup, and it's harder than it looks. They must have just had the floor done; there are extremely high concentrations of cleaning solvents in this crap." She now leaned back, unthinkingly, into his grasp, relaxing into the gentle massage.
"Hmm, I'll check it out; maybe if we can get a fix on the exact product they use we can filter out the extraneous crud and really get down to the explosive." She tilted back her head to look him gratefully in the eyes.
"Thanks." The hundred watt grin that never failed to make him grin back appeared.
"One condition" he warned, looking to capitalize on her momentary lapse in active resistance to his attentions.
"Name it" she wasn't really paying too much attention to anything but her shoulders and the rapidly approaching buttery status.
"Let me buy you breakfast after the shift."
"Done. I hope you brought your wallet, I'm starved."
"Yeah I bet. You're as skinny as a rail. I need to fatten you up a bit." That elicited the response he was expecting, she sat up and swiveled in the chair she was seated in to face him.
"And what's that supposed to mean?" She said tartly.
"I like my women…curvy." His eyes twinkled, teasing her gently.
"I'm not your woman" she said archly, turning her back to him.
"Now" He put both of his hands on her waist and felt her go tense and taught under them. She squirmed out of the gentle embrace and swiveled her chair back to face him, a little unsettled at his gentle, but persistent attention.
"Are you always this arrogant?" she said the words in a challenging manner, but took his hands in her own and played with the ink stained fingers, much larger than her own slender hands.
"You're wearing my shirt for the second day in three." He tugged on the tail of the clothing in question. "Isn't that enough?"
"Hey, I needed a convincing disguise. You want it back?" She reached for the buttons, but he stopped her with his hands over hers.
"No, keep it. I can't wear it back to work anyhow; the fingerprint ink is all over the front. Besides, you look good in my clothes." He grinned, teasing her again.
"Thanks," she flushed but then regained equilibrium, "Now get out of here. I got work to do."
"Remember…breakfast."
"Shoo" Sara turned back to the job at hand, trying to not replay Nick's words in a circle over and over again in her mind.
"Hey, where's Greggo?" Catherine slid into the lab; unbeknownst to Sara and Nick she'd seen their encounter reflected in the glass back to the computer lab, although she hadn't heard their conversation. The urge to ask warred with the knowledge that Sara was such a private person, and tact won, although it was a hard fought fight. Not to mention she'd have to explain her little bit of espionage.
"Out," Sara explained, "he's wrapping up something for the Northside 405 with Warrick. I'm taking care of the samples," Sara sighed, "Not that I'm having much luck."
"Contaminated?"
"Yeah," she stood up to pace around the length of the lab, "I don't get it. There was no gunpowder, no C-4 or C-7, no fertilizer or ammonia/methanol based explosive. And event the petroleum residue doesn't fit the profile, it's just floor wax and some other oil based distillate. I mean its oil wax, it's a lot of oil wax, but how complicated can it get? They gotta clean the floor on a regular basis."
"Ok, how do you make a bomb?"
"What?"
"Let's think I'm the suspect, and I want to make a bomb. How do you do it?" Catherine sat in the chair that Sara just vacated. "Remember, lower class, high school level education, bare minimum of chemistry and physics, and no plastic or ammonia/methane or gunpowder"
"And it's gotta be small enough to strap to the waist." Sara leaned against the wall, and sighed "Enclosed container, maybe an aerosol can or compressed something or other. But that doesn't have enough kick to spread intestine quite as far as it did. Um, damn, no gunpowder makes it rough, let's see…electrical maybe? No, we'd have more physical remains off the bomb." Sara leaned on the evidence counter, absently fiddling with one of the machines, as if to coax the answers she was looking for.
"MOMMY!!!" a screaming bundle of joy raced into the lab and upended Catherine in a furious hug. Behind her a middle age ex-husband, well known and loathed by all the CSI, waved his goodbye and exited quickly. There was no need to court trouble. "Hey guess what mommy? Guess what, guess what?"
"What, sweetheart?" Catherine fielded the invasion gracefully, pulling Lindsay up on her lap and tucking her into the crook of one arm. Sara squirmed a little on the inside, kids always made her a little nervous. It wasn't that she didn't like them, but she wasn't quite sure what they expected her to do with them.
"Mommy look at my safety poster" Lindsay dragged a huge poster board out of her backpack, "The contest is today for the best one."
"Oh that's lovely, I'm sure it'll do very well Lindsay." The energetic child slipped off of her mother's lap and raced to the doorway.
"Where are Mr.Gwissom and Uncle Wawick and Nicky-pie? I wanna show them my poster too!" she was all but leaping in her excitement.
"That's Mr. Gr-iss-om, Mr. Brown and Mr. Stokes to you little lady." Catherine moved to intercept her progeny at the point of escape and turned her around at the door, "And aren't you forgetting someone?"
"Oh!" Undaunted by the admonishment, she turned around and for the first time realized that her Mother wasn't the only one in the room. "Good Morning Miss Sidle." She said in her best 'company manners' tone.
"Morning" Sara grunted. There was no need to correct her 'nickname', Sara thought cynically, I don't have one.
"Do you wanna see my poster?" Lindsay said carefully, as if Sara would bite if offended or approached.
"Sure," Lindsay gingerly walked over and unfurled the large poster board in front of Sara's face. "See, look, there's soap an' bathroom stuff an' spray cans an' stuff an' I put them way up so's little kids don't get to them. And look I put the 'Don't Throw in Fire' an' 'Don't Mix Up' signs on there too."
Sara examined the crude artwork carefully. "Don't mix up, huh?"
"Yup, my teacher, Miss Jenny, said that if you mix up the wrong ones bad stuff happens. You could get sick from the smell or they could even go boom."
"Boom" Sara repeated, suddenly her mind flew light years ahead of the second grade safety poster. "That's it! Boom! " Sara unthinkingly wrapped both of her rather long arms around Lindsay's middle and straight lifted her up into the air and shook her like a rag doll. "That's perfect, it's inexpensive, it's powerful, and it's easily accessible. Jesus, how did I miss that! "
"Sara, put her down. She's turning purple" the mother, always concerned, saw that her daughter was beginning gasp from the combination of the squeeze and the shake. "What did you miss?"
"Cleaning products!" Sara pried Lindsay's' arms form their protective grasp around her neck and put her down. "Remember the 'contents under pressure' and 'highly flammable keep away from flame' labels? Mix the wrong things with some aerosol cans, shake them, and strap them to your waist. All you got to do is wait for the pressure to build enough and" she made a popping sound with her mouth "bye, bye, birdie"
"That's insane"
"Yeah, but it works," Sara, now energized re-read the printouts. "How much you willing to bet they didn't clean the floor just before the attack? This stuff was the explosive." She shook the papers. "Any two bit website will give you instructions on how to make an aerosol bomb. Add some oil based polish or wax and you've got a flame ball big enough to scatter guts from here to Reno."
"Well little lady," Catherine gave her gasping daughter a hug, "Looks like you've helped in your first case. Congratulations"
"You mean I got it right?"
"Yup"
"Woohoo!" she shouted, "wait 'till I tell Gwissom!" and she sped down the hall to his office with her Mom in close pursuit.
