Chapter Five
Disclaimer, header in Chapter One
Notes: Back to reality…
******
"So, how was Nick doing when you left?"
Sara sighed. "Not so good. I mean, he was keeping himself pretty tightly controlled, but both Warrick and I could see that he was definitely still in shock."
"He didn't go back to his house to spend the night there, did he?" Grissom asked doubtfully. "That's the last thing he needs, to try to sleep and recuperate in the same place where his life was invaded. Every time he opened his eyes, he'd have to look up into the same ceiling where that guy was watching him for so long."
"Yeah, I know. I couldn't stand that," she agreed, shaking her head. "But he's actually spending the night at Warrick's. I'm not sure how long he'll stay there, but hopefully we can help him get his place cleaned up quickly." She took a sip of her drink and shifted the phone against her ear. "He might even want to just find a new house entirely." Her eyes flickered. "I know I would."
"You would? Move, I mean?"
"Absolutely. Once someone's violated your life like that, in your home…there's no way to feel safe there again. Every time I turned a corner or heard a strange noise, I'd think the guy was back."
Grissom frowned. "But isn't that letting him win? Letting him chase you out?"
Her voice turned hard. "You don't understand, Grissom. By the time you notice a stalker, he's already won. Most victims don't even realize what's been happening to them until it's too late. They get off on that kind of secret control until you make them angry, and then they just get off on torturing you emotionally, or worse. People usually think of rapists as being the total control freaks, but stalkers are worse. They would rather kill someone they can't have instead of 'just' sexually humiliating them, as if that's not disgusting enough." She forced herself to stop, and took a breath. "It's just so..."
Grissom had listened, but did not respond, which suited Sara just fine. The last thing she wanted was to get him wondering how she knew so much about it.
He narrowed his eyes in concentration as he tried to not to make the mistake he usually did when this issue came up between them. Part of him did not want to know, he could hardly deny that. As long as he didn't know, he could pretend that one day she would do what he asked and simply let things go. But apparently, that was not meant to be. He studied the worn leather spine of the book he had been reading before she called. "Are you speaking from first hand experience?"
She felt a surge of something sharp somewhere in her gut. "No. No, of course not."
Her too-quick response was greeted by silence. He sat back, prepared to wait her out. After nearly two minutes passed with nothing but the sound of slight static on the line, the frustration spoke for her. "What I mean is, no, it's not first hand experience."
"Someone you know?"
She exhaled roughly. "Yeah…Look, I would really rather not…"
His frown deepened, but he held his tongue. "Okay."
She pushed herself back against the sofa, kneading the soft skin of her forehead as if it were dough instead of flesh. Cowardly as it was, she just wasn't ready. It was hard enough living with her own guilt; she didn't want to face his disappointment as well. She squeezed her eyes shut, but to no avail. The problem was not what she could see up ahead, but rather, what she always saw behind her, just over her shoulder.
He would look at her differently, she was sure. He might even blame her, just like Chris's parents had. She could understand their reaction—she shared it. All it would have taken was a simple "yes," and she might have saved her. But she had been too angry, too eager to punish for her friend for having abandoned her to do the generous thing. And by the time she allowed herself to regret what she had failed to do, Chris was dead. Or rather, Sara reminded herself, she might as well have been.
Grissom, caught in the silence she was forcing upon them both, focused on the only sensory input he had; he listened to her breathe. He heard the tight, sharp intakes of air, as if something was constricting her chest. If he was right, that tightness was also a prelude to tears, the very last thing he had hoped to elicit from her. Obviously, she wasn't ready to share this was with him; less obviously, and for the first time since he had known her, he wished that she were. Some of the harshest things she had ever said to him came out when he tried to avoid really listening, or really asking. It was a measure of how much things had shifted between them that he now felt that he could listen to it, or at least that he could try.
"Do you remember the Francis case?"
She dug her fingertips on one hand into her cheeks before dragging them up past her eyes. "Of course. How could I forget?"
"What made it memorable for you?"
Her fingers halted their punishing progress across her face; she almost smiled. Meeting you. It should have been the case or the victim, but if she was honest, it was him. She shook her head, knowing she needed another answer. "The fact that it came down to investigating the coroner's office in San Fran, as much as the suspect himself."
He nodded. "That was unusual, yes. But what I remember most is how straight you were. You listened to the evidence, not the pressure to catch a guy, any guy. Peters was an underhanded liar, but he was still your boss. If you hadn't made the decision to tell me your suspicions and bring me your proof, I would have never gotten to the truth that he and the others were trying so hard to hide. And an innocent man would have ended up on death row."
She frowned slightly. Why was he talking about this now? They had discussed the case that brought them together only rarely over the years. Their friendship was surely forged because of it, as was her transfer to San Fran's CSI division after the retaliation and rumormongering by her "colleagues" in the coroner's office took their toll. Despite its significance, though, the subject of how either of them had chosen to trust the other on such short acquaintance never really came up. It simply was there, and neither of them questioned it. The questions came later, when the case was over and it was time for him to return to Vegas before she could decide what to say to him. The situation was awkward and she had no idea what he felt about her, but she was not a woman used to letting things lie. So she made up her mind to do what she could. He probably rationalized her consistent presence as coincidence or mere professional interest, but she had made it her business to find out where he was scheduled to speak over the years. Admitting to herself why she did so still made her uncomfortable, but if she hadn't acted as she had, would she be here now? Would they be here now? Her head fall back against the cushions and she ran her fingers over her lips, caught up in her memories. Like she used to tell herself back then, it was all about points of contact, and a strange, stubborn sort of faith.
"Well, I'm glad you see it that way," she said finally, when she realized how long she had been silent. "But you would have seen through the lies eventually."
"No," he overruled her firmly, "I don't think I would. It takes a rare person to risk siding with an outsider like me, someone brought in just to consult on a case and who won't have to stay behind to catch the hell for it. You stood against the people you worked with every day because you listened to the evidence and your conscience first. And because you let yourself trust me." He paused. "I really respect that about you, Sara. I always have. And it's why I trust you the way I do."
"Is it?" Her words were faint. His, for all their loveliness, only made her feel worse. He knew that version of who she could be, but it was not the only one.
"Yes." His face softened into a smile. "Yes."
Her shoulders sagged. "Thanks."
"So," he continued smoothly, satisfied that he had distracted her from whatever was bothering her, "any thoughts about what Nick might need from us? You know I'm no good at that sort of thing."
She dug deep and drove the dullness out of her voice. "Oh, yeah, definitely one of your managerial weaknesses, boss."
"At least I can always count on you to point these things out, grasshopper." This echo of their usual banter cheered him unreasonably.
The smile was shaky, but it still counted for something, she figured. "Never say I don't do anything for you, okay?"
"Okay."
******
Grissom's eyes swept the floor, roving distractedly from one precisely cut linoleum square to the next. Little tricks like these often helped; sometimes, they were the only way to deal with the worst of it until he could get away from the lab. Death, violent death, was almost always pointless and petty, but this one…his mouth tightened. A harmless old woman, a ruinous child—one who killed instinctively, proudly even, before crying for her mommy. A child with two of the coldest eyes he had ever seen. Such was the product of a mother's love. Like so many of his colleagues, Grissom could attest to the way parental neglect warped young minds. The frightening thing here, though, was that this child wasn't neglected at all; she had instead been given too much. If anyone had been left to fend for herself, it was that sad old woman.
"This must be some kind of record. I literally haven't seen you all day."
Startled, he looked up to find Sara blocking his path. "How are you?" she asked, her eyes bright.
He looked away quickly. "Fine. Tough case." Hoping to deflect any questions, he settled his features into familiar lines and forced himself to meet her eyes. "I guess the husband is off the hook in your bombing?"
Sara wasn't fooled, but she also knew that he wouldn't talk here. Later, when he was less on his guard, she would try again. In the meantime, she tried to think of an innocuous answer to his question. No doubt she had read far too much into it, but still, the case disturbed her. What could it mean to say 'I love you' when you could end up like the Tobins? Nothing, she suspected. Even those words could equal nothing more than a mutual delusion.
As these thoughts drifted through her mind, she dropped her eyes into the middle distance somewhere over Grissom's shoulder. He watched her, noting each expression as it floated across her face. Her reaction seemed odd--as far as he could knew, her case had been fairly straightforward. It didn't have any of the triggers that tended to set her off. Maybe she was just tired.
"Sara? So, how did it go?"
She looked back at him in surprise. "Oh, it went fine. It was a conspiracy among the wife, her father, and her lover. They were setting up the husband so that he wouldn't be able to claim any of the wife's inheritance when she divorced him." Her eyes drifted away again. "Pretty cold blooded, actually."
"Practically reptilian." He seemed on the verge of continuing, but did not. "I should go wrap up the paperwork before I get out of here."
Hiding her disappointment, she nodded briskly. "Oh, sure, of course. So should I." She clasped her hands behind her back and rose slightly onto her toes. "…I'll talk to you later?"
As if I would refuse. "Yeah."
*******
"She killed her because of a cat?" Sara lowered the spoonful of ice cream she had just raised to her mouth back into the pint she was holding, her voice strained in disbelief.
"Well that, and because she's fundamentally evil," he said dryly.
Her wide mouth tilted upward slightly. Black humor seemed appropriate. "Didn't know you believed in evil. Kind of unscientific, isn't it?"
"Not at all," he said, taking her question seriously. "It fits in with the theory of opposites, yin and yang, Newton's Third. Evil as the equal and opposite reaction to good. I think that's the intended relationship, actually. Sort of a variation on the law of intended consequences."
"I guess I never thought of it quite like that," Sara frowned. Her bare feet were perched on top of her coffee table, and crossed at the ankles. She rubbed the top of one foot against the sole of the other. It was a peculiar skin-on-skin sensation that she had always found satisfying, especially when she was trying to think. "Following your logic, then, the husband in my case offered goodness to his wife, so she returned evil to him…" She shook her head. "Either that poor guy is a modern-day Job, or we're missing something. I mean, she lay beside him every night, plotting to ruin his life. Why? He wasn't cheating on her, or beating her, or anything like that…his only crime was having the bad grace to continue to love her even after she had stopped loving him. Unbelievable."
"Well, they say it's thin line between love and hate, right? Maybe he loved her too much. Sometimes the more you love someone, the more you end up driving them away," he said quietly.
"Except that I don't think she even hated him, really," Sara argued, not liking the implications of what she had just heard. "I think she just decided that he didn't matter anymore. But I still don't see how can that be. How does it happen? Did she wake up one day and just slough him off like dead skin?" She shuddered. "That's what he gets for treating her better than most men treat their wives? It's that totally instrumental view of his place in her life, as something she is free to use up and spit out that amazes me. I understand it coming from a serial killer—that's their psychological hallmark. But this was her husband."
Her brow creased deeply. "Sometimes I can't understand how people ever get together. She couldn't have ever really loved him, right? And yet, she must have, or else why marry him?"
Grissom shrugged. "I guess she thought he was…what was it? Husband material."
Sara bit her lip. "Hmm. Yeah. And yet in both cases, the guy gets shafted. Jane Gallagher was two-timing her husband material, and would have passed off that kid as his even if it wasn't, I'm sure, and Marcie Tobin married her husband material, only to later set him up for attempted murder. So what does that term mean exactly? A license to take advantage of someone?"
"I don't know, Sara," he said slowly. "Things just fall apart sometimes, I guess."
"But that's just it. They don't. People let them fall apart, or they choose to take them apart."
"Because as adults, people are mature enough for their behavior to be a matter of deliberate choice, is that what you mean? That's generally true." He paused. "But what about when someone we generally think is too young to make choices decides to take things apart?"
Sara sighed. "I think it pretty much sucks either way, Gris."
She settled back into her seat. Over the past few weeks, she had begun to learn when to speak, and when to let the silence prompt him instead. He generally knew what she wanted to know, anyway.
"In a way," he said suddenly, "that wife didn't do anything so surprising, really." He looked out toward the view from his bedroom window. "People discard each other all the time."
"I don't think…"
"Sons discard mothers, friends and neighbors discard the crazy old lady next door…The old woman's son wouldn't even have come forward to claim her body if we hadn't dragged him in. He said he was too broke to pay for her funeral, but …is that the reward she gets for caring about him all these years?"
Frowning again, Sara began to tug reflexively on the chunky silver ring on her left hand. She worked back and forth between the middle and bottom joints as she spoke. "She was his mother, it's her job to care about him and love him. It was his job to take care of her when she couldn't take care of herself any longer, and from what you said before, he tried. What's sad is that she seemed to have reached a point when she couldn't even appreciate his importance in her life…he meant less to her than her cats. It's a case study in being too far gone into your own little world."
"So then, what was the point of her life?" He countered, challenging her. "Here's a decent person who did the right things, or at least, the normal things…She got married, had a child, raised him, probably never cheated on her husband, was kind to her friends and neighbors, all of that. She basically tried to live like a regular human being. But she still ended up alone, with feral cats for company, shunned by nearly everyone. If the mailman hadn't noticed the mail piling up in her box, she would have lain there for weeks as nothing more than a piece of meat for her little friends. Things fell apart despite what she tried to do with her life, which begs the question…"
His voice was flat.
"Why bother? Why bother at all?"
Sara stared at her hands. If she had been using an old-fashioned telephone, she surely would have wrapped the corkscrew cord round one of her fingers, tighter and tighter with each loop, until the flesh it had caught turned red. She didn't have that satisfying option, though, so she twisted her ring around and around until her skin protested the abuse.
"But…one thing doesn't necessarily follow from the other, Grissom. The way she lived in the past few years doesn't invalidate the rest of her life. Neither does the nature of her death. None of that means it wasn't worthwhile to do the 'normal' things…As badly off as she was by the end, I'm sure she still thought of that as the best part of her life--the people she had loved and cared for. Even when she couldn't seem to recognize the value of those people anymore, they stood for something."
He said nothing.
"That's the worst of it, at least to me. Losing the ability to see people for who they really are."
Grissom looked back at his window, and blinked several times as if to clear his vision. What was there to say? He was already closer to that old woman than Sara would ever know. She trusted him; she trusted that he was basically a decent person--unusual, yes, but essentially normal. How could he dissuade her? Improbably, he still held out hope that he wouldn't have to. She was too lovely a creature to bear that burden.
He found the words, somehow. "I'm sure that's true."
"Of course it is," she said quickly, with confidence enough for them both. "Beauty is always true, and--"
"And," he continued, "poets never lie."
She was probably the bravest person he knew.
******
"You sure do know how to light up a room."
Her lips twitched, but she kept her eyes focused on the luminescent display in front of them. Grissom had asked for blood, and now they had it. The victim must have been in Weston's car, even if they didn't know quite what happened from the time he was struck until he finally bled out. Sara turned—Grissom's attention had shifted back to the case, and he was theorizing aloud about Weston's actions. She heard the words with only part of her conscious mind, but that was all she needed--she could process evidence in her sleep. On the other hand, opportunities to observe Grissom this closely didn't come nearly as often, even now. So she listened, but really, she studied him. He seemed very relaxed tonight, almost happy. There could be any number of explanations for that but she would be lying if she said she didn't hope it had something to do with her, and whatever was taking shape between them. It wasn't a relationship yet, that was true, but something was crystallizing nonetheless. As she heard herself say something about checking for a DNA match, she watched the way he turned his body towards hers and gently lifted his hands in a gesture of agreement. His face held only the hint of a smile, but his eyes were soft and satisfied. She finished her thought, but he didn't look away. Finally she maneuvered around him on her way to the door. She did not have to look back to know that his eyes followed her out.
"But where did it come from?" she asked a few moments later. She was sure he was right about the blood drops bouncing up from the car floor to splash the underside of the seat; it made sense. Still, she frowned as she considered her own question. She looked up at Grissom, who was standing across from her, also frowning. He reached for the part of the seat carriage she was holding, trying to get a better look. Rather than let him have it, she gripped it tightly, forcing him to step closer. He bent his head and peered intently at the rust-colored specks. She watched the light play off of the rims of his glasses. Truthfully, these were among the moments she treasured most. Being alone with him, nowhere in particular, puzzling over some question. They could have been talking about the weather, or some other nonsense, and she would have been just as content. Some people soothe you just by being themselves, and he was such a person for her. He had been for a very long time, in fact. The difference was that now, she did have to seek out his company; he offered it willingly.
He was the one who approached her now when she walked through the lab, and always, almost always, with a strange light in his eyes. Who knew if she managed to speak coherently; she was too busy memorizing that look. More and more, it was their private time that floated through her mind when he spoke to her at work, bits and pieces of what he had said only to her, in a voice that rose and fell in patterns she had come to recognize. It was like living two parallel lives in her mind, lives that bled into each other so very well. She had no idea if it was the same for him, but the slow softening that she sensed whenever they were together gave her hope. Surely, it wouldn't be too much longer now. He would have to take the next step, wouldn't he? The phone was lovely—she would be too embarrassed to ever tell him, but his voice was one of the things she treasured most—but he had to want to be with her. Just to…actually see her, hold her, touch her…surely. He must, by now. She looked in his eyes again; he couldn't possibly know what she was thinking, she had said nothing except what pertained to the case. But somehow, surely…
"So, Greg said you were processing an S-class?"
******
tbc…