IN HARMS WAY
Nick Steeply lived in a large house in an upper-class subdivision in Las Vegas. Nick whistled under his breath as they pulled into the driveway, loathing on sight the perfect landscaping, the green grass and the lonely Volvo sitting in one-third of the open garage. The outdoor lights were blazing, as were a myriad of lights inside the house. Someone was up.
Grissom had made him change into a blue forensics jumpsuit, citing the stains on his jeans and t-shirt as the main reason. Nick knew the suggestion had held merit - his jeans had been stiff with blood; his t- shirt ruined - Nick would have changed eventually on his own anyways. However, after crawling around after Officer Dickwad in the crawl space to examine the area where the knapsack had been found, the last thing Nick had needed was Grissom telling him to change.
"I don't want the victims' parents seeing all that blood on you. They'll think it belongs to their son."
Nick had flashed his teeth at Grissom in some semblance of a smile, biting back the harsh words that had risen - hot and thick - in his throat. When would Grissom realize that he wasn't a complete fucking idiot? That he understood about human suffering - more so than Grissom did or could ever hope to? Nick wasn't the insensitive one on the team; the one who never noticed anyone else. He was the PEOPLE PERSON. Which meant, he UNDERSTOOD people. Unlike Grissom. Standing behind the open doors of the coroner's van as he changed, Nick had imagined telling Grissom this. As he slid out of his stiff jeans, he had smiled grimly as rolled the words around in his mouth. How sweet would it be to tell Grissom to just Fuck Off, already, and give him some damned CREDIT? If Nick hadn't been so pissed off, imagining the look on Grissom's face would have made him smile.
And now, here he sat. Grissom was beside him, driving the Tahoe, and they were pulling to a stop in front of a house that easily cost more than Nick would ever earn in his entire life. The forensics jumpsuit was itchy against his bare skin, burning like the acid eating a hole through Nick's stomach. While he had been crawling around through the tubing, Detective Lockwood had called in to dispatch to see if there had been any calls regarding the kid - regarding Nick Steeply. Had anyone reported him missing? Surprisingly - or not - no one had. So Grissom had sent David back with the body to the morgue, and he and Nick had climbed into the Tahoe and followed Lockwood to the vic's house.
Nick had looked at his watch when the pulled into the driveway. 1:30 in the fucking am. Do you know where your children are?
Standing uncomfortably on the front doorstep, he wished idly that he smoked. It would give him something to do with his hands. Right now, they were clenching and unclenching into fists. He had somehow managed to force the anger he had been feeling since before shift began down into the pit of his belly, but he could feel it gibbering - like some irrational beast - deep in the very marrow of his bones. Grissom rang the doorbell.
"Nicky - you little shit - I swear to God, if that's you, you better have a good reason for not coming home at 10:00, like I told you -" Nick cocked an eyebrow at Grissom, frowning at the strident tones coming from behind the front door before it was flung open. A young girl stood there - she couldn't have been much more than sixteen - the flashing anger in her eyes quickly replaced by shock and then a strange sick look of dread as she took in the three men standing in the entrance.
Lockwood stepped forward slightly. "Hello. I'm Detective Lockwood. These are my colleagues, Mr. Grissom and Mr. Stokes, with the Las Vegas Forensics lab. Are your parents' home?"
The girl stood mutely, eyes darting from Lockwood to Grissom to Nick, and back again. Breathing in shakily, she shook her head. "I don't live here. I'm the babysitter. Mr. and Mrs. Steeply are away for three days on business. Why - what - what do you want?"
"How old are you?" Nick growled. His eyes were obsidian, shining darkly in the shadows of the front entrance. His jaw was clenched so tightly it actually hurt. Grissom reached out a hand and lightly touched Nick's arm. *Down, boy.* Nick glared at him.
"May we come in?" Grissom asked, although it wasn't really a question. Stepping into the large foyer, Nick kept his eyes glued to the girl. She was a skinny little thing. At this very moment, she looked like she wanted to vomit all over the Italian marble tile.
"Do you have a number we could reach Mr. and Mrs. Steeply at?" Grissom's voice was calm; which only served to put Nick more on edge. To the left of Grissom, Lockwood surreptitiously scanned the interior of the foyer.
"I - I - yes, of course I do. They're in Washington, D.C. Is this about Nicky? Do you know where he is?"
"We're not sure yet," Grissom responded gently. "Do you know if there's a picture of him we could look at?"
The girl looked at Grissom in horror for a minute, before nodding dumbly and turning towards the kitchen, the three men following her. Walking over to the large fridge, she retrieved a magnet and handed it silently to Grissom. The older man studied it intently for a moment before passing it to Nick. The little boy on the magnet looked so alive, it was almost obscene. Standing proudly in a little league uniform, an oversized catcher's mitt on his hand, Nick Steeply smiled up at him. Nick rubbed his thumb gently over the finish and closed his eyes briefly for a second, before handing the magnet to Lockwood.
The babysitter remained silent, shifting anxiously from foot to foot, re- distributing her slight weight over and over again. The silence - though it lasted mere seconds - was unbearable and fraught with agony. "Where's Nicky?" she finally blurted. Her voice was squeaky with fear, her skin suddenly so pale it was almost translucent.
Grissom's voice was unbearably gentle when he responded, "I'm sorry, but he's dead."
* * * * * *
Lockwood was on his cell-phone, talking to Brass. Nick was barely aware of the conversation, knowing only that they were making arrangements to get the Washington PD to locate and inform Nick Steeply's parents of their son's murder. The babysitter - whose name - they had finally learned - was Jenny, sat dumbly in a chair at the kitchen table. Her face was shattered.
"When was the last time you saw Nick?" Grissom was asking her. Every time Grissom or Lockwood mentioned the victims' name, Nick himself would start. He could almost believe it was him they were talking about, and it made him feel inexplicably sad. Nick didn't know where the sadness began and the anger ended, but both emotions were there now, roiling around inside him.
"I saw him at 8:00. He went out." Jenny's voice was expressionless.
"What's a what - nine year old boy doing going out at 8:00 in the evening?" Nick managed to ask.
Jenny shrugged, "He just - went out. I told him to be back by 10:00; no later."
"Did he go out with anyone? Was he meeting anyone?" Grissom interrupted. The girl shook her head.
"I don't know. I don't know." Suddenly, she was crying again, "Can I call my dad, please?"
Lockwood had stepped back to the table. "Brass told me to tell you he's headed back with everyone else to the lab. He's going to arrange for the Steeply's to be notified." He looked at Jenny, "What's your number. I'll call your dad."
Jenny rattled it off shakily, before turning to look at Nick. "I didn't want this to happen," she offered brokenly, "I didn't know this would happen."
Nick kept his expression blank as he studied her, "Why did Nicky leave the house at 8:00?"
"I asked him to. I told him to go sit in the back yard, or go to the park or something. My boyfriend was here, and -"
"And." Nick sighed in disgust. "You kicked a little kid out of his own house so you and your boyfriend could fuck each other."
Jenny flinched backwards and, if possible, turned whiter at Nick's blunt statement. Grissom looked like he was about to say something, but Nick just ignored him. "It was your responsibility to keep him safe, and you sent him out. If you'd been doing your job, he'd still be alive."
Jenny started crying, and Nick smiled at her viciously, "It's your fault he died."
"That's enough." Grissom's voice was steely, his eyes icy, as he glared at Nick. Nick glared right back at him. "Don't say another word."
Nick slouched back into his seat, "Whatever you say, Grissom."
* * * * *
Robbins had just dictated his preliminary report on Nick Steeply when Grissom and Nick arrived at the morgue. Jenny and her father had come back to the station with Lockwood. Nick Steeply's parents had been notified of their son's death and were frantically trying to get a flight home.
Nick had hardly spoken two words to Grissom since their exchange back at the Steeply's kitchen. The air between the two men practically crackled with tension and anger, winding Nick tighter and tighter with each passing second. *Grissom better say something to me soon,* Nick thought, *or else I'm going to snap.*
Robbins looked up from his dictation when the two men entered the morgue, expression grim. "I'm just finishing up dictating my preliminary report."
"And?" Grissom demanded.
Robbins shrugged. "He choked to death on his own vomit." Sighing, he approached the still form of the little boy and lifted the sheet. "He probably would have bled out from the cuts, but that's not what killed him."
Nick stepped forward and looked at the boy's face, trying not to picture the happy grin from the picture on the magnet. "What else happened to him?"
"He was sexually assaulted. Doesn't look like he suffered from recurring assaults - there is no old scarring. He was whipped with - something - which stripped large swatches of skin off him. Genitals were mutilated."
Robbins paused, clearing his throat, before continuing. "I found several trace amounts of bark in the whip marks, so I'm thinking he was switched with a branch. Also, I found - bark and unknown fibers within the anal cavity. Hairs on the body that aren't his. I've got it all here, ready to go to trace for analysis."
Nick hadn't moved from the head of the autopsy table. The room was spinning around him, his heart pounding as he listened to Robbins detail the injuries done to the boy. His breath tasted sour, and his eyes were burning from the pressure of unshed tears. He realized that Robbins had stopped talking, and he looked up to see the two other men looking at him.
"You alright, Nick?" Robbins asked. Nick blinked at him, before turning his gaze to Grissom, who was standing at the foot of the table and looking at him with something akin to concern.
"Nick?"
Nick felt like he was in a wind-tunnel. The bright fluorescent lighting seared his eyes and he shut them against the stabbing pain, feeling a weird sense of vertigo overtake him.
"Nick?" Grissom's voice again, coming at him mutely, barely discernable as a voice behind the rolling thunder of his blood pounding through his veins. Risking a second brief glance at his boss and mentor, Nick managed to gasp out an angry "Fuck!" before rushing over to the large stainless steel sink at the side of the autopsy room, and vomiting the contents of his stomach.
* * * * *
Of course, Grissom had made him go home. At first, Nick had refused, but Grissom had been insistent. Handing Nick a wet paper towel to wipe his mouth with, he had taken Nick by the arm and gently led him down to his office.
"Are you alright, Nick?" His voice had been calm. Any of the anger he had been feeling towards his young colleague from earlier had disappeared when he had watched Nick heave the entire contents of his stomach in the morgue.
Nick had refused to look at him. Instead he had replied thickly, "I think I'm getting the flu." He had slid into an empty seat in Grissom's office as he said this, smiling weakly when Grissom handed him a bottle of water that had been sitting - unopened - on his desk.
The anger that had fueled him for the majority of the day was no longer there. Instead, Nick just felt empty. A husk, or a shell. He couldn't decide which. He just wanted to curl up into a little ball and go to sleep and never wake up. His lungs hurt.
Grissom sat in the chair across from him, reaching out and tentatively touching Nick's knee. Nick flinched backwards at the contact, pushing the chair backwards about five inches across the floor.
"Nick, what's going on?"
"Nothing. Nothing. I just - I'm getting sick. I thought I was getting sick earlier this evening, and I was right." The answer sounded weak, even to his own ears, so he pasted on a patently false grin and tried to reassure Grissom that way. "I haven't thrown up like that since - I don't know when."
"Are you sure that's all it is? You're not acting like yourself. You've been angry all night."
Nick sighed at Grissom's words, "I'm just tired, Grissom. I can't be happy all the time."
"No one expects you to be," Grissom responded, "but no one expects you to accuse a young girl of causing a death, either."
Nick winced, and felt the anger he thought was gone flicker to life once again. "Don't start," he warned. "It IS her fault the boy is dead. She was supposed to watch over him; keep him safe from harm - and she failed. She placed him in harms way. And what about his parents? What type of people leave a nine year old in the care of a 16 year old girl for three days while they go away on business?' Nick felt his voice rising, but he didn't care. "When did parents abdicate all common sense when it comes to protecting their children? Who's supposed to protect kids from stuff like this?"
Grissom just shook his head, "I don't know, Nick. I just don't know. But I do know this - you're going home. You need to get out of here and clear your head, get some sleep. So go home."
"What about the case?"
"As of right now, you're off the case," Grissom responded. "You're too involved."
Nick pushed himself out of the chair, expression grim and eyes broken and shuttered. "Off the case. That's just great. Why is it that Catherine gets to work on cases she gets emotionally involved in all the time? Sara as well? Is it because they're women and can get away with it?"
Before Grissom could phrase a response, Nick growled, "Forget it. Just forget it. You want me to go home? Fine. I'm going. Maybe I'll be in for shift tomorrow. But then again, maybe not."
______________________
Author's Notes: thanks for the review for the first chapter - I really appreciate all of them! I hope you all continue to enjoy this story - next part: Nick is confronted by Catherine. More angst.
Nick Steeply lived in a large house in an upper-class subdivision in Las Vegas. Nick whistled under his breath as they pulled into the driveway, loathing on sight the perfect landscaping, the green grass and the lonely Volvo sitting in one-third of the open garage. The outdoor lights were blazing, as were a myriad of lights inside the house. Someone was up.
Grissom had made him change into a blue forensics jumpsuit, citing the stains on his jeans and t-shirt as the main reason. Nick knew the suggestion had held merit - his jeans had been stiff with blood; his t- shirt ruined - Nick would have changed eventually on his own anyways. However, after crawling around after Officer Dickwad in the crawl space to examine the area where the knapsack had been found, the last thing Nick had needed was Grissom telling him to change.
"I don't want the victims' parents seeing all that blood on you. They'll think it belongs to their son."
Nick had flashed his teeth at Grissom in some semblance of a smile, biting back the harsh words that had risen - hot and thick - in his throat. When would Grissom realize that he wasn't a complete fucking idiot? That he understood about human suffering - more so than Grissom did or could ever hope to? Nick wasn't the insensitive one on the team; the one who never noticed anyone else. He was the PEOPLE PERSON. Which meant, he UNDERSTOOD people. Unlike Grissom. Standing behind the open doors of the coroner's van as he changed, Nick had imagined telling Grissom this. As he slid out of his stiff jeans, he had smiled grimly as rolled the words around in his mouth. How sweet would it be to tell Grissom to just Fuck Off, already, and give him some damned CREDIT? If Nick hadn't been so pissed off, imagining the look on Grissom's face would have made him smile.
And now, here he sat. Grissom was beside him, driving the Tahoe, and they were pulling to a stop in front of a house that easily cost more than Nick would ever earn in his entire life. The forensics jumpsuit was itchy against his bare skin, burning like the acid eating a hole through Nick's stomach. While he had been crawling around through the tubing, Detective Lockwood had called in to dispatch to see if there had been any calls regarding the kid - regarding Nick Steeply. Had anyone reported him missing? Surprisingly - or not - no one had. So Grissom had sent David back with the body to the morgue, and he and Nick had climbed into the Tahoe and followed Lockwood to the vic's house.
Nick had looked at his watch when the pulled into the driveway. 1:30 in the fucking am. Do you know where your children are?
Standing uncomfortably on the front doorstep, he wished idly that he smoked. It would give him something to do with his hands. Right now, they were clenching and unclenching into fists. He had somehow managed to force the anger he had been feeling since before shift began down into the pit of his belly, but he could feel it gibbering - like some irrational beast - deep in the very marrow of his bones. Grissom rang the doorbell.
"Nicky - you little shit - I swear to God, if that's you, you better have a good reason for not coming home at 10:00, like I told you -" Nick cocked an eyebrow at Grissom, frowning at the strident tones coming from behind the front door before it was flung open. A young girl stood there - she couldn't have been much more than sixteen - the flashing anger in her eyes quickly replaced by shock and then a strange sick look of dread as she took in the three men standing in the entrance.
Lockwood stepped forward slightly. "Hello. I'm Detective Lockwood. These are my colleagues, Mr. Grissom and Mr. Stokes, with the Las Vegas Forensics lab. Are your parents' home?"
The girl stood mutely, eyes darting from Lockwood to Grissom to Nick, and back again. Breathing in shakily, she shook her head. "I don't live here. I'm the babysitter. Mr. and Mrs. Steeply are away for three days on business. Why - what - what do you want?"
"How old are you?" Nick growled. His eyes were obsidian, shining darkly in the shadows of the front entrance. His jaw was clenched so tightly it actually hurt. Grissom reached out a hand and lightly touched Nick's arm. *Down, boy.* Nick glared at him.
"May we come in?" Grissom asked, although it wasn't really a question. Stepping into the large foyer, Nick kept his eyes glued to the girl. She was a skinny little thing. At this very moment, she looked like she wanted to vomit all over the Italian marble tile.
"Do you have a number we could reach Mr. and Mrs. Steeply at?" Grissom's voice was calm; which only served to put Nick more on edge. To the left of Grissom, Lockwood surreptitiously scanned the interior of the foyer.
"I - I - yes, of course I do. They're in Washington, D.C. Is this about Nicky? Do you know where he is?"
"We're not sure yet," Grissom responded gently. "Do you know if there's a picture of him we could look at?"
The girl looked at Grissom in horror for a minute, before nodding dumbly and turning towards the kitchen, the three men following her. Walking over to the large fridge, she retrieved a magnet and handed it silently to Grissom. The older man studied it intently for a moment before passing it to Nick. The little boy on the magnet looked so alive, it was almost obscene. Standing proudly in a little league uniform, an oversized catcher's mitt on his hand, Nick Steeply smiled up at him. Nick rubbed his thumb gently over the finish and closed his eyes briefly for a second, before handing the magnet to Lockwood.
The babysitter remained silent, shifting anxiously from foot to foot, re- distributing her slight weight over and over again. The silence - though it lasted mere seconds - was unbearable and fraught with agony. "Where's Nicky?" she finally blurted. Her voice was squeaky with fear, her skin suddenly so pale it was almost translucent.
Grissom's voice was unbearably gentle when he responded, "I'm sorry, but he's dead."
* * * * * *
Lockwood was on his cell-phone, talking to Brass. Nick was barely aware of the conversation, knowing only that they were making arrangements to get the Washington PD to locate and inform Nick Steeply's parents of their son's murder. The babysitter - whose name - they had finally learned - was Jenny, sat dumbly in a chair at the kitchen table. Her face was shattered.
"When was the last time you saw Nick?" Grissom was asking her. Every time Grissom or Lockwood mentioned the victims' name, Nick himself would start. He could almost believe it was him they were talking about, and it made him feel inexplicably sad. Nick didn't know where the sadness began and the anger ended, but both emotions were there now, roiling around inside him.
"I saw him at 8:00. He went out." Jenny's voice was expressionless.
"What's a what - nine year old boy doing going out at 8:00 in the evening?" Nick managed to ask.
Jenny shrugged, "He just - went out. I told him to be back by 10:00; no later."
"Did he go out with anyone? Was he meeting anyone?" Grissom interrupted. The girl shook her head.
"I don't know. I don't know." Suddenly, she was crying again, "Can I call my dad, please?"
Lockwood had stepped back to the table. "Brass told me to tell you he's headed back with everyone else to the lab. He's going to arrange for the Steeply's to be notified." He looked at Jenny, "What's your number. I'll call your dad."
Jenny rattled it off shakily, before turning to look at Nick. "I didn't want this to happen," she offered brokenly, "I didn't know this would happen."
Nick kept his expression blank as he studied her, "Why did Nicky leave the house at 8:00?"
"I asked him to. I told him to go sit in the back yard, or go to the park or something. My boyfriend was here, and -"
"And." Nick sighed in disgust. "You kicked a little kid out of his own house so you and your boyfriend could fuck each other."
Jenny flinched backwards and, if possible, turned whiter at Nick's blunt statement. Grissom looked like he was about to say something, but Nick just ignored him. "It was your responsibility to keep him safe, and you sent him out. If you'd been doing your job, he'd still be alive."
Jenny started crying, and Nick smiled at her viciously, "It's your fault he died."
"That's enough." Grissom's voice was steely, his eyes icy, as he glared at Nick. Nick glared right back at him. "Don't say another word."
Nick slouched back into his seat, "Whatever you say, Grissom."
* * * * *
Robbins had just dictated his preliminary report on Nick Steeply when Grissom and Nick arrived at the morgue. Jenny and her father had come back to the station with Lockwood. Nick Steeply's parents had been notified of their son's death and were frantically trying to get a flight home.
Nick had hardly spoken two words to Grissom since their exchange back at the Steeply's kitchen. The air between the two men practically crackled with tension and anger, winding Nick tighter and tighter with each passing second. *Grissom better say something to me soon,* Nick thought, *or else I'm going to snap.*
Robbins looked up from his dictation when the two men entered the morgue, expression grim. "I'm just finishing up dictating my preliminary report."
"And?" Grissom demanded.
Robbins shrugged. "He choked to death on his own vomit." Sighing, he approached the still form of the little boy and lifted the sheet. "He probably would have bled out from the cuts, but that's not what killed him."
Nick stepped forward and looked at the boy's face, trying not to picture the happy grin from the picture on the magnet. "What else happened to him?"
"He was sexually assaulted. Doesn't look like he suffered from recurring assaults - there is no old scarring. He was whipped with - something - which stripped large swatches of skin off him. Genitals were mutilated."
Robbins paused, clearing his throat, before continuing. "I found several trace amounts of bark in the whip marks, so I'm thinking he was switched with a branch. Also, I found - bark and unknown fibers within the anal cavity. Hairs on the body that aren't his. I've got it all here, ready to go to trace for analysis."
Nick hadn't moved from the head of the autopsy table. The room was spinning around him, his heart pounding as he listened to Robbins detail the injuries done to the boy. His breath tasted sour, and his eyes were burning from the pressure of unshed tears. He realized that Robbins had stopped talking, and he looked up to see the two other men looking at him.
"You alright, Nick?" Robbins asked. Nick blinked at him, before turning his gaze to Grissom, who was standing at the foot of the table and looking at him with something akin to concern.
"Nick?"
Nick felt like he was in a wind-tunnel. The bright fluorescent lighting seared his eyes and he shut them against the stabbing pain, feeling a weird sense of vertigo overtake him.
"Nick?" Grissom's voice again, coming at him mutely, barely discernable as a voice behind the rolling thunder of his blood pounding through his veins. Risking a second brief glance at his boss and mentor, Nick managed to gasp out an angry "Fuck!" before rushing over to the large stainless steel sink at the side of the autopsy room, and vomiting the contents of his stomach.
* * * * *
Of course, Grissom had made him go home. At first, Nick had refused, but Grissom had been insistent. Handing Nick a wet paper towel to wipe his mouth with, he had taken Nick by the arm and gently led him down to his office.
"Are you alright, Nick?" His voice had been calm. Any of the anger he had been feeling towards his young colleague from earlier had disappeared when he had watched Nick heave the entire contents of his stomach in the morgue.
Nick had refused to look at him. Instead he had replied thickly, "I think I'm getting the flu." He had slid into an empty seat in Grissom's office as he said this, smiling weakly when Grissom handed him a bottle of water that had been sitting - unopened - on his desk.
The anger that had fueled him for the majority of the day was no longer there. Instead, Nick just felt empty. A husk, or a shell. He couldn't decide which. He just wanted to curl up into a little ball and go to sleep and never wake up. His lungs hurt.
Grissom sat in the chair across from him, reaching out and tentatively touching Nick's knee. Nick flinched backwards at the contact, pushing the chair backwards about five inches across the floor.
"Nick, what's going on?"
"Nothing. Nothing. I just - I'm getting sick. I thought I was getting sick earlier this evening, and I was right." The answer sounded weak, even to his own ears, so he pasted on a patently false grin and tried to reassure Grissom that way. "I haven't thrown up like that since - I don't know when."
"Are you sure that's all it is? You're not acting like yourself. You've been angry all night."
Nick sighed at Grissom's words, "I'm just tired, Grissom. I can't be happy all the time."
"No one expects you to be," Grissom responded, "but no one expects you to accuse a young girl of causing a death, either."
Nick winced, and felt the anger he thought was gone flicker to life once again. "Don't start," he warned. "It IS her fault the boy is dead. She was supposed to watch over him; keep him safe from harm - and she failed. She placed him in harms way. And what about his parents? What type of people leave a nine year old in the care of a 16 year old girl for three days while they go away on business?' Nick felt his voice rising, but he didn't care. "When did parents abdicate all common sense when it comes to protecting their children? Who's supposed to protect kids from stuff like this?"
Grissom just shook his head, "I don't know, Nick. I just don't know. But I do know this - you're going home. You need to get out of here and clear your head, get some sleep. So go home."
"What about the case?"
"As of right now, you're off the case," Grissom responded. "You're too involved."
Nick pushed himself out of the chair, expression grim and eyes broken and shuttered. "Off the case. That's just great. Why is it that Catherine gets to work on cases she gets emotionally involved in all the time? Sara as well? Is it because they're women and can get away with it?"
Before Grissom could phrase a response, Nick growled, "Forget it. Just forget it. You want me to go home? Fine. I'm going. Maybe I'll be in for shift tomorrow. But then again, maybe not."
______________________
Author's Notes: thanks for the review for the first chapter - I really appreciate all of them! I hope you all continue to enjoy this story - next part: Nick is confronted by Catherine. More angst.