Title: Sympathy for the Devil
Author: Burked
Disclaimers: CSI is a registered trademark of CBS, Inc.
A/N: Thanks for the reviews!
"Is this some kind of trick?" Hodges confronted Sara. "You keep bringing me evidence that is pristine. Are you trying to make me look incompetent?" he accused her.
"David," she answered heavily, "I'm bringing it to you because I've already gone over it and found nada. I keep hoping that you will be able to prove me wrong. I wouldn't bother if I thought you were incompetent."
"I didn't say you thought I was incompetent," he spat out. "I asked if you were trying to make me look incompetent."
"You don't look any more incompetent than the rest of us do. She's good, really good. But just think how impressed everyone would be if you could find anything," she said, hoping to mollify him for the next piece of evidence she would bring in, most likely one week from today.
* * * * *
"What have you got for me?" Grissom asked Archie.
"Not much. As she told us, the number belongs to a disposable cellular – the kind you can buy at the kiosks in the mall. You can buy prepaid minutes anywhere, so it can't be tracked. They're a criminal's wet dream. The background noise is traffic, so she was apparently driving while she was talking. Even if we had the equipment to triangulate to find the source of the signal, which we don't, it would be impossible with her being on the move."
"Can you tell where she was driving?" Grissom asked.
"Down the Strip, if I had to guess," Archie answered.
"Along with thousands of other people," Grissom noted.
"Yep," Archie agreed.
* * * * *
"She's not giving us much to work with," Catherine sighed over her turkey club sandwich.
Sara nodded and speared some of her salad with more fervor than it deserved, her frustration starting to mount.
Grissom seemed lost in thought, his chicken salad sandwich sitting untouched in front of him.
"What are you thinking?" Sara asked.
"I'm thinking that there must be a way to figure this out. She knows she's not leaving physical evidence. She's planned the execution and the clean-up meticulously. Yet she believes that it's possible to catch her. So there must be a way," he said, drifting back into his thoughts.
Maternally, Catherine picked up one of the triangles of sandwich off of his plate and shoved it into his hand. "Eat," she commanded.
He dutifully took a bite, distractedly, slowly mulling it around in his mouth, unhurried. "I have an idea," he said, putting down the rest of the sandwich. "It will take time, but it may give us a chance to identify her."
"Spill it!" Catherine exclaimed excitedly.
"She said she's been here six months. Archie said she was driving, so presumably she has a driver's license. How many people who have moved here in the last six months came from Boston? And how many of them lived the prior year in Chicago?"
Turning to Sara with renewed enthusiasm, Grissom asked, "Sara, if we get driver's license data from Chicago and Boston for the period she was at each city, can you correlate it to the people who have gotten a license here in the past six months?"
"Oh, yeah. That's simple database manipulation. I'll just import them in and let it spit out the matches."
"Even if we find her, what then? We still don't have any evidence tying her to the murders," Catherine challenged him.
"Maybe there's evidence at her house. She had to have gotten blood spatter on her during the castrations. There may be some in her car, or she may have it on her shoes or traces on some clothes."
"As exacting as she's been on clean-up, what makes you think she'll keep any of that stuff?"
"It's worth a try," Sara agreed with Grissom. "She may think we'll never get that far. Or she may not know about the persistence of blood evidence, even when it can't be seen."
"Let's get to it then," Catherine said, pushing back her unfinished meal. They stood and Grissom tossed down enough money to cover the meals and the tip so that they wouldn't have to wait one more minute.
* * * * *
Lilith looked at her list and allowed her eyes to trail over the names. To be fair, she decided to concentrate on African-American men this week. The first to die was Caucasian; the second Hispanic. She was nothing if not an equal-opportunity executioner.
She found one who struck her fancy, Robert Harris, Jr. He had molested his six-year-old stepdaughter.
Lilith's only regret is that she couldn't tell who was an pedophile before they ruined a life. Retribution wasn't as effective as prevention would be, but it was all she had.
"Well, Junior, Sunday's your big day," she said, looking up his address on the online map. She would begin observing Robert Harris, Jr. tonight.
* * * * *
The radio was playing some ambient urban contemporary jazz in the background at Sara's workstation. The volume was low enough that it could barely be heard at her chair. It was only on to dispel the stress of soundlessness in the room.
Other than a lamp on the desk, no light was on in the room. For some reason, turning on the overhead light made the emptiness of the room all the more real to Sara, feeding a seed of loneliness that strove to germinate in her heart. The darkness seemed to wrap itself around her, cocooning her, and hid from her the fact that she was alone.
She heard quiet footsteps and felt someone enter the room as she was peering down a microscope, only surfacing to make notes in her laboratory notebook.
"What are you working on?" Grissom asked, peeking over her shoulder.
Sara sighed heavily and swiveled her bench stool around, her shoulder lightly knocking into Grissom's chest. He took a defensive step back.
"That would qualify as 'over the line,' Grissom," she said seriously.
"What are you talking about?" he asked, not making the connection.
"You're so concerned about where to draw the line, that it's a major ordeal to decide whether to eat together in the breakroom sitting six feet apart. But then you come in here and invade my personal space, hanging over my shoulder. That's over the line," she explained.
"I'm sorry," Grissom said, a touch defensively. "If it bothers you, then you should have said something about it before."
"It didn't bother me before," she retorted.
"But it bothers you now?" he inquired.
"Under the circumstances, yes. It's cruel to tease when you have no intention of following through."
"I didn't intend to tease," he contended. "I apologize."
Sara turned back around to her scope. "I'm working on the trace from the Hawkins assault and battery case. Came in two days ago," she reminded him. The castration murders might be foremost in their consciousness, but it was hardly the only crime they were investigating.
"I thought you were working on the database thing," he said stiffly, still stinging from her rebuff.
"I've requested that they push the files out to an FTP site. They'll call me when it's done and I'll go out and snag them. Until then, I've got other pending cases," she explained.
"Oh. Okay," Grissom said uncomfortably, wanting to leave but not knowing how to exit gracefully. Sara continued to pass back and forth between the microscope and her notes, all but ignoring him. After a moment, he turned and left without a word.
He wished he could have thought of something to say that would somehow restore his dignity, or at the very least piss her off. But for some reason he was preverbal, experiencing only feelings that he couldn't express.
* * * * *
"May I please speak to Sara Sidle?" she asked the receptionist.
"May I tell her who's calling?" Rose countered.
"Yes," Lilith said, a bit sarcastically.
Rose sighed. "Who's calling please?" she rephrased, her annoyance bleeding through her words.
"Lilith," the caller replied.
"Just a moment. I'll connect you," Rose said, quickly putting the call on hold and paging Sara over the intercom.
"Sidle," Sara answered into the telephone.
"Ms. Sidle, this is Lilith. Do you mind if I call you 'Sara'?" she requested.
"Yes, I do mind. I don't know you. I prefer that only my friends call me by my first name," Sara said.
"Plucky. I like that. Under other circumstances, maybe we could have been friends," Lilith postulated.
"You never know," Sara answered. "Why are you calling me?"
"Just checking in to see how you are doing," Lilith answered.
"Doing fine, thanks. We're still processing the evidence from the last murder," Sara answered.
"Execution," Lilith corrected.
"Whatever," Sara countered.
"That couldn't take too long. There shouldn't be that much evidence there," Lilith claimed.
"Well, it was a less controlled crime scene than the last one. We've got to go through everything, whether you left it there or someone else. We don't have any way to know yet," Sara explained.
"Of course. I apologize for that, but he didn't get out much. I had to take him where I found him," Lilith told her.
"May I ask a question about the first mur ... uh, execution?" Sara queried.
"Shoot," Lilith said brightly.
"How did you move the body? He's bound to have been bigger and heavier than you are."
"Leverage," Lilith answered. "The same way you move a refrigerator or a washing machine."
"You used a dolly?"
"If you are referring to a hand-truck, yes," she answered.
"Where's the primary crime scene?" Sara asked, pressing her luck.
"I'd prefer not to say," Lilith evaded.
"Why not? You told us where to find Hernandez, and he was at the primary scene."
"I had a little accident at the first scene. It might have left trace evidence. So I had to move him," she elucidated.
"I thought you didn't make mistakes," Sara laughed.
"It wasn't a mistake, per se. It was an accident. A purely random incident, but it could have had consequences. I like to control consequences," she said firmly.
"Cut yourself with the knife?" Sara tossed out hopefully.
"Nothing that drastic," Lilith laughed.
"Come on, you can tell me," Sara said, joining in her laughter.
"Oh, so we're friends now!" Lilith quipped.
"I'll let you call me 'Sara' if you tell me what happened," Sara offered, chuckling.
"You drive a hard bargain, Sara. Okay, I'll tell you. I snagged my arm on an exposed nail. It only bled a little, but even a drop is too much."
"Hope you are current on your tetanus shots!" Sara snorted.
"I am now," Lilith answered, unthinkingly.
Sara didn't want to pause long enough for Lilith to think. "What can I offer you to tell me where the primary scene is? I'll be your best friend," she proffered playfully.
"Would you visit me in prison?" Lilith retorted.
"I promise I'll come to your trial," Sara said laughing.
"Not if I can help it!" Lilith rejoined. "Well, it's been nice talking to you, Sara, but I've got to run. Thinks to do, people to see, and all that. It's a lot of work, doing what I do," she exhaled tiredly.
"I can only imagine," Sara said. "So, are we on for next Sunday?"
"See you then," Lilith said, hanging up.
* * * * *
Sara literally ran through the halls to Grissom's office, glad he was there. He looked up at her in shocked surprise as she stood propping her hands on his desk, catching her breath.
"I've got to stop smoking," she mumbled to herself.
"What is it?" Grissom asked, his face gathered in a mixture of curiosity and concern.
"She's fucked up, Grissom!" Sara breathlessly said.
"She who? What are you talking about?" Grissom said, almost shouting.
"Lilith. She just called me," Sara said, taking deep breaths to calm down.
"Sit down, tell me. Were you able to record it?"
"No. I didn't know it was her before I took it, and I didn't have a recorder anyway. But I took notes," she said, waving a few sheets of paper torn from her laboratory notebook. The pages are numbered to ensure that all the data are there. She was going to have to write an explanation now for the missing pages, but that was a minor irritation.
Sara began recounting the conversation as close to verbatim as possible, making an occasional correction or addition to her notes to help her remember later.
"That was a dangerous ploy, Sara, being difficult with her," he interrupted. She had not gotten far past the beginning of the conversation. "You might have made her angry. She might not have called back," he chided her.
"Look, she's already established a rapport with you. When she called me, I wanted her to have to work for the rapport, so that she would trust it. If I was all gushy sweet, she'd know I was patronizing her. Why are you bitching? It worked," she huffed out.
"You were lucky," he said dismissively.
"You know, I'm not some 22-year-old cadet. Give me some freaking credit. I reviewed my options and chose the one that I thought had the best chance of getting me what I wanted. I was right. Why can't you just admit that and let it go? Why do you have to treat me like I'm incompetent?" she demanded.
He had no immediate answer. He didn't feel like he was doing anything but pointing out the recklessness of her actions.
"If you don't have any more faith in my abilities than that, then ... then ..." she thought for a moment "... then, I quit," she said finally, tossing the notes at him and turning abruptly to leave. The pages fluttered, some landing on the desk, some on the floor.
"Sara!" he barked with condescending annoyance. "Stop behaving like a child!" he shouted at her receding back.
She didn't speak and didn't slow down. Her only reply was a gesture.
TBC
