This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 13/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 08:23 AM

Jim Brass turned the knob to his office door and pushed the door open with his foot. He reached his desk chair and dropped rather than sat into it. He was beat. It had been over fourteen hours since he had left his home and gone to work. He had no idea how long it would be before he saw his bed again. One thing was certain - it wouldn't be today.

Leaning his elbow on his desk, he ran a hand over his face. Jim grimaced as his hand moved over the rough stubble of his beard. He didn't want to know what he looked like. He took out the electric razor that he kept in the second drawer for those all too frequent occasions when he was away from home for far too long. There was still a great deal of work to be done.

Damn Grissom. The list of potential suspects in this case was too long, and it would take too much time to check on every name. Time Grissom didn't have. The man had proven himself too good at his job.

Calling what Grissom did a job was probably an injustice, Jim mused. Gil didn't have a job as much as he was the job. This was something Jim understood. He had known police officers who did the job and he had known police officers who just were cops – at the core of who and what they were was the need to be a cop, not just do the job. The same was true for Gil Grissom. Somewhere there had to be a special dictionary with descriptions of all the professions there had ever been. If there were such a volume, he was sure that Grissom's picture illustrated the entry for a crime scene investigator.

Being a criminalist fueled Grissom. His list of completed cases was impressive. Since Gil had joined the Las Vegas Crime Lab, it had moved from fourteenth to second among forensic labs across the nation. That was no coincidence. Grissom's passion for forensics made it happen. Jim had seen it with his own eyes. Although most of the time he had given the credit to the expansion of the metropolitan Las Vegas area, the infusion of funding into the police force, the effort he himself had put into the running of the unit, and the general advancements in the science of forensics itself. All of those things had helped, no doubt about it. But none of it would have elevated the lab so significantly without a scientific mind with a passion for justice, quirky though it may be. Wrap it all up in a bow and you get Grissom with a capital G.

Jim turned on the razor and set about the task of shaving off his eight AM shadow. He did it mechanically while his mind returned to the impossible task of deciphering the enigma that was Gil Grissom.

Quirky probably wasn't the best way to describe him. A living study in paradox was better. Jim knew that Grissom was what women considered handsome. Their experience in the Sports Bar on Friday night was proof enough of that. With the two young studs, Brown and Stokes, sitting at the same table, the guy the waitress went for was the middle-aged geek with a penchant for bugs and dead bodies. Man, life was bizarre.

When Grissom opened his mouth, you never knew what he would say – he could share the oddest piece of trivial minutia that popped into his head, or he might admit that he had just made a mistake. How many people in the world are willing to tell you about what they didn't do right? Not a hell of a lot.

The Kaye Shelton case was the most vivid reminder of Grissom's integrity that Jim could think of. When his bugs had said that the victim was dead three days instead of five, everyone thought a murderer would go free. Then Gil figured out he had made a mistake. The crazy guy sat up with a dead pig wrapped in a blanket for nearly a week to prove his own mistake and nab the husband. When the lunatic Sheriff shot down the evidence, Grissom and his team went back to square one and proved the husband was guilty anyway, without the bugs. Damnedest thing Jim had ever seen. Months later, Jim had overheard Eckley grumble about Grissom getting the case published in some nerd rag. The scientist in Grissom couldn't leave the case alone any more than the investigator would.

Grissom was the go-to guy for information concerning just about anything you'd care to name. Ask him a question he didn't know the answer to and he'd gladly tell you he didn't have a clue. Ask him the same question twenty-four hours later and you'd probably get more detailed information than you really wanted on the matter. That was Grissom.

He was also a natural leader with a hatred for advancement. Why be the boss if it means letting someone else have all the fun doing the drudge work? But then, Gruesome Grissom never met a corpse or a crime scene he didn't like. It was the drudge work, the investigation that made the man stand out from among his peers. Grissom loved the puzzles. Solving them was the reward. It didn't matter to Grissom who noticed how good he was at his job. Hell, he'd probably do the job for free if the county would offer to feed and house him.

And that was the single most annoying aspect of the man's character. Grissom didn't care who was involved. He had no political savvy, no fear of reprisal, no need to impress, no desire to placate. If there was a crime committed, no matter by whom or for what reason, Grissom was determined to solve the mystery and see that justice was done. Gil stepped on toes often. Important toes. Powerful toes. Goddamned Grissom had stepped on the Sheriff's toes so often that the poor man would probably have started to wear steel-toed shoes around the criminalist if he thought it would make Grissom go easier. That was a pipe dream.

The mental image of the Sheriff in steel-toed shoes made Jim smile. It annoyed the hell out of Jim when Grissom had a burr under his saddle about something, but it usually made for good theater. And, as with all really good theater, when Grissom was involved, the good guys usually won the war. John Wayne would be proud.

Yeah, Jim thought, but even the Duke bought it in the end of The Sands of Iwo Jima. An enemy sniper took the hero out despite the success of the allied forces. What did it matter if the result of all the work Grissom had done was that there were so many potential suspects to wade through that there was no way they were going to find the right guy with the right motive, the right opportunity, and the right handprint in time to do a damn bit of good? Jim had a detail of eleven guys out helping. Even with that kind of manpower, they were looking at another full day before exhausting what possibilities they had. And there was no guarantee that the person or persons they were looking for was on the list in the first place.

Just finish with the razor and get back at it, he told himself. Before he was able to quite finish shaving, his cellphone began to ring.

"Now what?" he muttered.

Turning off the razor, Jim pulled his phone out of his inside coat pocket and answered it. "Brass."

"Brass, Sidle. AFIS gave us something."

Monday Morning 08:38 AM

Catherine had just gotten back to the conference room after telling Grissom's mother about the official case when Greg Sanders had shown up at the door. He had hand carried the reports to her - unheard of for the young lab tech who loved beeper tag as much as he did loud rock. Now she was staring at the results from the blood samples Greg had processed. She was glad she hadn't had this information when she was conversing with Mrs. Grissom. The story she had to tell Gil's mother was hard enough without having to tell her this.

"How's it going?"

Catherine looked up to find Doc Robbins standing near the end of the glass conference table. The Chief Medical Examiner for Clark County worked the night shift by choice, just as Grissom did. Both men preferred the autonomy that the graveyard shift provided. They may be administrators, but they were both men of science first. "Hey, Doc. Are you through for the night?" she asked the ME.

"I am, but I get the feeling you're not," Robbins told her, nodding at the open folder on the table. "Good news or bad news?"

She thought about that question for a second and then pushed the folder across the table toward him. "You tell me."

Robbins took a seat across from Catherine and slid his metal crutch under the table before pulling the file the rest of the way toward him and putting on his glasses. The folder contained several DNA reports that all identified the blood donor as Gil Grissom. Blood samples had come from the floor of his home, walls and railings from the building he lived in, and from a Toyota vehicle. The samples from the rear seat of the Toyota also contained nasal mucus and saliva. Grissom had been bleeding from a head wound that was most likely accompanied by some kind of facial trauma.

When he looked from the report and met Catherine's eyes he knew she understood completely how bad the implications from the report could be. There were other less horrific possibilities as well. "It could be a simple nose bleed," he offered.

"Yeah, it could be," she replied leaning back in her chair. "But it's probably not." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"How do you know that?" Robbins challenged, not willing to jump to the worst possible conclusion immediately.

Catherine shook her head slightly and spread her arms. "If you had a beef with Grissom would you stop at giving him a bloody nose? I wouldn't."

He couldn't stop the grin that spread across his face. Grissom could have that effect on people. The man was not a people person. His compassion, real enough and seated deep in his character, found an outlet in becoming the voice of the victims he encountered. Watching Grissom piece together what had happened to a murder victim was a thing to behold. He could talk to the dead much more meaningfully than most people talked to the living.

Catherine wasn't dealing with this case as well as she'd like, that was obvious. Robbins could see the frustration and anger that lay just below the surface of her professional mask. "It must be difficult for you," Robbins told her.

That brought a hollow laugh from her. "It's nothing compared to what his mother must be going through," she said.

"You've contacted her then?"

"Yeah," she shook her head. "Before we knew how bad it was. I updated her this morning."

"How's she taking everything?" he wanted to know.

She looked back down at the file on the table. "Like Grissom would. She thanked me for all the hard work we're doing to find him." The burden of the situation was showing in her face. "God, Doc. I'm a mother and I didn't know what to tell her."

He looked her in the eye. "The truth."

She thought about that for a moment. "The truth is, things are going from bad to worse. Not exactly a message of hope."