Chapter Seven
Disclaimer, header in Chapter One
Notes: Well…
********
Needles, neatly arranged, but no insulin. Water and botox, but no food. Enemas, plastic bags, and a dirty, ugly coat, which Catherine was currently holding out with one hand from across the room. And, perhaps strangest of all, large glossy prints of herself papering the walls under art lighting. She even had a Warhol look-alike hung near the front door that reproduced her image into four bright blocks of color, instead of Marilyn Monroe's. The irony of choosing to immortalize herself in the style of a man who would surely have glanced at his elegant watch every time he saw her, noting the slow ticking of her precious minutes of fame. Grissom's eyes moved over these items again without really seeing them. What was he missing here? Catherine had said something, he saw her lips move, but it did not penetrate. If this apartment stood as one bookend to the victim's life, surely the dumpsite was the other. Things were bound to seem clearer there.
Though it was a cool evening, Grissom barely noticed the chill as he stepped away from the building and into the street. Head down, he concentrated on thinking through the static. Static that was more like a dull roar that ebbed and flowed capriciously, so quiet at times that he had to press a finger to one ear to hear it clearly, but more often, loud enough to drown out more than he would have thought possible. This was one of the loud times. The harsh sound would diminish eventually, maybe even within a few minutes if he was lucky. A temporary reprieve, of course, the prospect of which should have frightened him. Instead, it merely left him numb. He had too much to do in the real world to focus on what was going on inside his head.
He walked rapidly through the mostly deserted alley, hands in his pockets, looking from his shoes to the dirty ground and then back up to the space around him. Soon enough, he caught sight of the first of Ashleigh James' unlikely neighbors. Lost souls, all of them, but not always lonely…A white dog trotted towards him, smiling in the odd way that canines do, and watched him for a moment. Grissom turned his head to follow the dirty string attached to its neck back to a man in a blue cap, with long curly hair growing wild down to his shoulders. Their eyes met; the man pulled his dog away. Grissom frowned, preoccupied by questions. It was hard to reconcile the face on the walls with the needles and bags, but no doubt it all made sense to the victim, somehow. Did it make sense to her killer, who left her out in the open with only the trappings of her model's life—her planner and her bag, but not her face? The face that was so perfect on a wall, but imperfect on her. Imperfect because someone made it so, someone who took the time to wheel her to that specific place once she was dead. He shook his head. He was definitely missing something.
Small groups of people, strung out in pairs or threesomes, talking quietly near barrel fires and makeshift beds. There was a flash of dark hair on a woman who stood off by herself; he stared at her absently, but kept moving. A few more steps brought him into bright fluorescence and colored neon, a typical Vegas sidewalk with more affluent nocturnal activity. He could pick up some things now, muffled echoes of laughter and conversation, even heels clicking against pavement, but they did not capture him. Instead he probed his assumptions. Was this the path the killer had taken to move the victim to the underpass? Would he have risked it? The body had been covered in papers and old clothes, but still, it would be taking a chance. He looked up; his destination loomed not very far ahead. He left the sidewalk and crossed the street. The concrete supports of the bridge, massive and almost white in the glow of the full moon, stood as rough-hewn beacons. From this angle, their stark profiles both framed and obscured his view of the clearing where the body had been found. He kept moving closer, craning his neck unconsciously to see beyond the concrete edges. Someone was there, he was sure, but he caught only a glimpse of black at first. Then he moved again and saw her.
She stood in place, with her back to him, hands buried in her jacket. When she turned at the sound of his voice, her hair spilled out into the night and he could see the light above them through its long strands. He remembered her sleepy voice from the night before, laughing and dreamy, before it softly faded away. She was here for context, she said. He watched her, a skeptical twist to his lips. Somehow, she always turned up in the places he least expected. The roaring quieted for the moment, he faced her and spoke of the victim's journey from where he had just been to where they now stood. She listened and then she thought aloud, sorting through the possibilities. He turned to look at the scene, head and eyes moving to the right; she mirrored him, but to the left. When she turned right to see what he had seen, he turned left to see what she had. From either direction, her hair rose and fell in the wind at the edge of his vision. Finally, they both turned toward the billboard, a mile-high extension of one woman's public beauty. A little piece of the puzzle clicked into place in his mind and hers as they traded thoughts on the spectacle of it. Then she left, destined to return to her labors, and he to his.
*******
He saw her eyes drift downward, her energy finally spent. She had been front and center for the past half hour as she led them all through the victim's mind, but her overall immersion in the young woman's world had lasted much longer. She seemed a bit worn, and instead of rising from the tall stool on which she sat, she rolled the video remote back and forth between her hands. Grissom watched that movement, the restlessness of which was echoed in the waves of some stifled emotion washing over her face.
"You were great, Sara."
Her hands stopped their tossing, but her smile was subdued.
"Breaking the code was the key. Without that, none of this makes any sense." He raised his brows, amending that thought. "Not that any of it truly makes sense anyway. It's hard to conceive of any living thing willfully mutilating itself, destroying its own evenness the way she did. The pursuit of symmetry is…a biological script, too hardwired and powerful for any creature to ignore. Insects and humans included." He could feel her watching him. "Functionally, humans are coded the same way," he added. "It's just that our neuroses and addictions can complicate what nature demands."
She nodded slightly. "And those problems make us act unnaturally…literally and metaphorically. I can't imagine what Ashleigh's life was like—to feel so completely out of sync with your own body." Her mouth turned downward as she looked past him. "Every time she looked in the mirror, it must have been a kind of torture…''
"It really isn't a cliché, you know," he said softly, trying to bring her back.
"What isn't?"
"That 'beauty is truth, and truth beauty'. We've all heard that quote in every English lit class we've every taken, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Beauty, real beauty based on symmetry and alignment, is a kind of truth. No one can be symmetrical only on the outside and truly be beautiful; it has to reflect the alignment of outside and in. Surface and depth, commenting on each other." He had succeeded too well in drawing her eyes back to his; now he found it difficult to hold his tongue. But he managed to stop himself; it was too soon to say more.
"But that's a rare thing…perfect symmetry," she mused, her mind still full of Ashleigh, rather than herself. "I guess she finally gave up the quest." She looked down at her hands again. "Who can blame her?"
He opened his mouth to speak of quests, both natural and inevitable, when his watch beeped. The appointment. He covered the watch face with the fingers of his other hand instinctively, as if the timepiece could broadcast his secret to her from across the room.
Sara, startled by the sudden noise, took in his altered expression. She could almost see him turning away from whatever he had been about to say and looking inward, as if something there that she could not see had suddenly demanded his attention. She caught him touching his watch protectively. His unease was palpable.
"I have to go." Hurried. Abrupt.
"Oh. But…you can't have a meeting at this hour, can you? We're way past the end of shift."
He evaded her eyes. "No…I told Cassie I would drive her back to her part of the Strip, and then…I have to be somewhere." He kept his tone vague. "But I should go get her now if I don't want to be late."
She laced and unlaced her fingers in her lap, trying to hear what he was not saying. "Okay." When he did not elaborate further and she had watched her hands do their tangled dance for the third time, she looked up. "So I'll talk to you later…maybe in a couple of hours?" She tried to smile.
He blinked, shifting his eyes somewhere below hers. "Of course."
The moment that followed lasted just long enough to fix the image in his mind. Sara, posed on the stool, back straight, legs uncrossed, hands in her lap…gazing back at him with hopeful eyes. He ran his eyes over her, his lips tightening imperceptibly. Sensing danger, he turned and left swiftly before she could complete her silent appeal.
******
Grissom turned to the left, feeling the still warm air of the late afternoon ruffle his hair. Leaving the Tahoe behind, he began to walk up the street towards the plaza just ahead. At this hour, he melted easily into the milling crowd. Shopping bags and spouses, children and friends, all commingled in noisy clamor. Chattering lips exclaimed, carelessly held possessions slipped to the ground, heads fell back in laughter, but he heard nothing. As he steered carefully around those in his path, trying not to approach anyone too closely, he was drawn to the fountain in the middle of the square. He walked right up to its edge, and found himself staring fixedly as if he had never seen such a thing before. He had certainly heard it before—the brash tumbling of water forced out in rhythmic pulses, which normally blots out everything in a decent-sized radius. The idea of blanketing extraneous noise in this way had always appealed to him; it was a kind of enforced privacy, even in the midst of a crowd. But now that he carried his own roaring with him wherever he went, he could only watch the bold water silently, his lips parted in disbelief.
His weary feet pushed him onward. Where now? He had no real idea; his only coherent plan was to postpone the inevitable return home. It was normally his surest refuge, but he could not be there like this. Not now, when he truly could not hear a sound. The doctor's voice drifted through his mind. "A year, maybe." An endless span of time to the young, perhaps, but a blink of the eye to someone already halfway through life. Two years had passed since Sara had joined him here, and even that seemed like no time at all.
Nearly too late, he caught a glimpse of something bearing down upon him. The driver stared angrily from behind tinted glass; Grissom had wandered into the crosswalk like a blind man. After a stunned, lurching moment, he raised his hands, palms up, in apology. He then moved out of the way unsteadily, closing his still outstretched hands into fists. His balance was getting worse, too. The doctor claimed there was a chance it might not blossom into full-blown vertigo, but the odds were fifty-fifty, at best. As he lowered his hands, he wondered how it would happen. Would he just fall down one day from the spinning inside his head, or would he have to ask the others to repeat themselves so many times that they would simply guess? Who knew, or cared? His life was already ending, right before his eyes.
He made it to the railing that marked the border of the plaza and separated pedestrians from the swift-moving traffic that bound the space on three sides. Unclenching his hands for a moment, he grabbed hold of the top railing, squeezing it as hard as he could. He turned his face to the horizon, away from the oncoming cars, trying to see the desert. Wind artificially roughened by the rush of vehicles unsettled his hair again, dragging it this way and that. Grissom searched the skyline for something, anything, his mouth open. Feeling the traffic unnerved him; he needed to be somewhere without any peculiar vibrations that substituted for the real thing, the things that he ought to be able to hear. Somewhere blank, empty. His lips came together in a hard line as he detached himself from the metal rod. It was a few minutes' walk to his car, and with luck, only a few minutes more to the desert. He lacked the added cover of darkness this time, but he would have to do without. The privacy was far more important.
*******
Sara clicked off her television with one sharp punch of her thumb. It usually distracted her quite well, but not tonight. She needed to talk to him. But she had already called his house three times; either he really was not home, or he was avoiding her. Both possibilities made her cringe. Not too long ago, when she talked about wanting to get a caller id box, he had admitted that he had one. She smiled bitterly as she remembered teasing him about never using it to screen her out. He had laughed, saying only that the thought had never crossed his mind…Of course, he could still be out somewhere, away from home. So what's worse, Sara, she asked herself cruelly. The idea that he is home and just ignoring you, or that he isn't home and is just ignoring the fact that you are home, waiting? The delicate skin of her forehead crinkled into a web of fine lines. What thing could he be doing that would take four hours from the time he had left the lab? And when he knew she was waiting to talk to him? He hadn't contradicted her when she guessed at the delay being "a couple of hours," so he knew she would be home by that time, waiting. She kneaded the knuckles of one hand roughly into the other, a nervous habit. Somehow, she was always waiting.
She had just started to make her way to her bedroom to lie down when the phone rang. She stopped short, and then rushed to pick it up.
"Hello?"
"Hi. It's me."
"Hank?"
He laughed, a deep, lazy sound that helped her recognize his voice. "Uh, yeah, Sara. Glad to know I'm so forgettable. How could you forget the guy who sat through The Panic Room with you, huh?"
Her heart sank despite his banter. She had hoped, naturally, to hear… Swallowing, she forced some cheer into her voice. "Hey, that was a great movie—Jodie Foster kicked ass. And at least it wasn't a chick flick." Why did she feel so uncomfortable just talking to him? "So…what's up?"
"What are you doing tonight? Are you busy? It's been a few weeks; I could use a diversion. How about you?"
He might still call. Maybe he got paged to come in for a case unexpectedly. But if he had, he would have called her in, too. He did that often enough, so why not tonight? Their conversation had been interrupted earlier, so why not call her in so they could work together? They could keep each other company; they could talk some more; that would have been entertainment enough tonight. At least for me, she corrected herself. Who the hell knew what entertained him?
"Hey, you still there?"
She shook herself. "Yeah, I'm here. Sorry, I was just…thinking."
"What's there to think about, Sara? Unless you have plans, let's go. You haven't seen Spider-Man yet, have you?" When she did not reply, he lowered his voice into a teasing wheedle. "I've already paid for the tickets, so if you don't go, I'll be forced to ask some homeless woman outside the theater. Come on. Besides, you don't want to be the only one at the lab who hasn't seen it, right?"
Not the only one, she thought, biting her lip. "Okay."
"Great," he breathed, sounding pleased. "So I'll see you at the Century on Tropicana at 7?"
"Yeah. Seven," she said, more firmly. "I'll see you there."
She hung up and slowly closed her eyes. It was probably unfair to inflict her mood on Hank, but the good thing about going to movies is that you don't have to talk, really. He usually wanted to grab coffee afterward, but she would pass tonight. She was too tired anyway, she told herself. It wasn't that she hoped Grissom would be back from wherever he was by then and that if she stayed out for coffee, she might miss his call. At least that was the story her mind insisted that her heart believe. And when she returned and he still didn't call, what then? She felt her shoulders droop as she pulled on her jacket and picked up her purse. Well, he had to call, didn't he? He had to know she was waiting. He had to.
******
Grissom leaned against his car, shivering unreasonably. The sun had begun to set, but the temperature had not yet dropped significantly. He had tried to stop the tremors trickling through his body, but he couldn't. Maybe I'm just afraid. It's about time I was. His hearing had actually improved somewhat during the drive out to this favorite spot in the desert, about thirty minutes outside of the city. It wasn't back to normal, but he could at least make out some sounds again. That improvement, and his presence in this place where everything could be relied upon, the level sand under his feet, the reddish cast of the mountains, even the dull green cacti scattered amid brown brush, had eased some of the panic he felt earlier. He could breathe out here; apparently he could hear out here, as well. It had to be the purest coincidence, of course, but a man in his position could not afford to question even random chance. His private place brought some relief. More specifically, his privacy brought some relief. That much he knew. But still, he thought of her.
If he was honest, before things fell apart in that cold room filled with diagrams of ears, noses, and throats, the visuals of his doctor's trade, some part of him had begun to imagine bringing her here. It had become a favorite fantasy, a scenario to which he added new details as he saw fit. Her sleepy voice had supplied the latest version…they would drive out here, and he would pull off the gray road to this very spot. The breeze would move her hair, and the way his hands would graze her skin as he tucked the stray strands behind her ears would make her smile. He would ask if this way of leaving Vegas was do justice to that song. She had said it was a song to leave to--if she left with him like this, would that qualify? Was it enough to believe that they had left? She would laugh and tilt her head back for a moment, wondering aloud if he memorized everything she said now, asleep or awake. He would say nothing, merely smiling his reply as he searched her face for a hint of her answer. And if life and fate were perfect, when it came, he would finally bend his head to hers.
He started violently. The sound had vanished again. He felt himself grow frantic, willing it to return. But it did not. It would do as it pleased, fading in and out, regardless of his demands, and no amount of daydreaming about her would change that. Drawing one deep breath after another, he struggled for calm. There was nothing to be done about the sound right now. But there was something to be done about Sara. Something damaging and raw, but necessary. It would not be enough to simply stop calling. He had to refuse to engage with her when she called him, as she surely would for a while yet, before his coolness put an end to it all. God only knew what would befall him then, without her, but it was clear that he would be forced to find out. If it was painful to envision bearing the beauty of the world without her, it would be far worse to rob her of it with the silent future that was all he had to offer now. She deserved so much more that that.
The sky had darkened and the first stars had braved the night before he could bring himself to get behind the wheel. As he placed his hands on the dashboard, he looked up through the windshield with searching eyes. When he did not find the omen he sought, he leaned back. After a few moments, he started the car and returned to the road. He drove in silence, trying to find solace in his familiar solitude. And in between the plans he sketched to rebuild the walls between them, he dreamed while awake, his eyes flickering with reckless hope.