Part Eight - Admission

(Got Murder?)

Cyrus walked into the diner and looked around for Nick, pretty sure before he did so that it was going to be a waste of time, and not being in the least bit surprised when it proved to be so. After all, Nick had managed to be on time or, shock of all shocks, early the last few times that they'd met up; he'd been bound to revert to his past habits sooner or later. Cyrus himself was a little earlier than usual today, based mostly on the fact that he was starving, so he sat down in one of the booths, reaching for a menu, resolving to order the second the waitress came over to him. Nick had done it to him often enough, he was bound to understand.

As it happened, Cyrus was just placing his order when Nick came in, sliding into the booth across from him and turning a smile up to the waitress. "Whatever he's having, make it two," he said, in a slightly deeper accent than Cyrus was used to hearing from him, but the waitress didn't know that, and she bestowed a beaming smile on Nick as she walked away. "Sorry I'm late man," Nick told him, holding his hands up. "One of those cases."

"Yeah. I heard you were on the eyeball case," Cyrus said with a smirk, recalling the shudder that had coursed through Brass's body as he'd detailed the particulars of the case. Cyrus had been waiting a long time to find something that would crack Brass's cool facade, and he was deeply appreciative that he'd been around to see it.

His phraseology seemed to have a similar affect on Nick, whose head twisted sharply to the side as if he was remembering something unpleasant. "You know things are bad when that's the best part of the case," he said, words that had Cyrus looking at him in amazement. This part of the tale he hadn't heard from Brass.

"Seriously?"

Nick nodded, opening his mouth to speak but stopping when the waitress came back over to them, all charm and batting eyelashes, filling their coffee cups. Nick grinned up at her again, but didn't speak until she was gone, and only then after a fortifying gulp of coffee. His words however, came out of left field. "Did you know that average Nevadan generates more waste more than three times waste than the average American? Thirteen million pounds per day."

Not sure how to respond, Cyrus opened his mouth, then closed it again, raising his coffee cup to his lips. "No."

Nick chuckled. "Neither did I, until I spent hours searching a landfill for a dead body with Sara and Catherine. Sara went to some recycling forum in March, and she's got a head for numbers that you would not believe."

The twinkle in Nick's eyes though, had nothing to do with Sara's affinity for numbers and everything to do with his habit of dropping Sara's name into random conversation in the hopes of eliciting a reaction from Cyrus. Cyrus knew that, and kept his face carefully blank, concentrating on the case. "So the body that the eyeball belonged to was in a landfill?"

Again, Nick gave a slight shudder. "I swear, I can still smell that place. But yeah. Long story short, that, and other evidence, helped us to find that her name was Kelly Easton. She ran out on her husband and kids five years ago. Came back to town wanting to start over. Except that her daughter, Nora is now a high school senior with a serious Electra complex."

About to take another sip of coffee, Cyrus's cup froze halfway to his mouth. Running Nick's words through his head to make sure he'd heard what he thought he'd heard, he laid the cup back down on the table, staring at the other man. "You're telling me… "

Nick nodded when his voice trailed off. "She killed her mother because she didn't want her father belonging to anyone but her." Silence fell between the two men, broken finally by Nick's quiet words. "There are days… "

"Hear hear."

There was another silence then, each man lost in his thoughts, before Nick visibly shook himself, eyes opening wide as if to clear them. "In other news… " he drawled, a slightly singsong quality in his voice, and Cyrus felt his guard go up automatically. "It seems you have a bit of a fan in the CSI lab."

"That a fact?" Cyrus leaned back in the booth, crossing his arms against his chest, lifting an eyebrow. He had a pretty good idea what this was all about, but he wanted Nick to do all the digging. With any luck, he'd bury himself, and certainly showed a willingness to do so.

"Come on man, you know who I'm talking about."

Cyrus shook his head, affecting his most innocent demeanour. "I have no idea."

"Right." Nick shook his head, chuckling softly. "Lea is all over you like a rash at Christmas, and you walk out of the party without as much as her phone number?" His voice rose at the end in pure disbelief. "You know how many men in that room would have given their right arms to be you?"

Cyrus shrugged, hiding his smile with difficulty. He'd caught the looks that Nick was giving him out of the corner of his eye at the party as they'd talked with Lea. Ostensibly, she'd been talking to the two of them, but her attention had been devoted to Cyrus only, and she hadn't been at all subtle as to her intentions. "I had a flight to catch," he told Nick again now, the same excuse he'd given at the time for leaving so soon.

"Yeah, yeah, family Christmas," Nick said dismissively, waving his hand. "That's no excuse for not getting her number." He paused, looking down at his coffee cup, stirring it mock-thoughtfully. "She's been asking about you … "

"No." The word was uttered with force, completely on instinct, and Cyrus had never meant anything more. There was only one place that Nick could be going with this, and he didn't want to entertain it.

"It'd be no trouble." Nick continued unabated. "Neither of you are seeing anyone, and she's a nice girl … I mean, I know she looks wild, and yeah, that's because she is but … "

"You sound like my sister," Cyrus interrupted, rolling his eyes. "She's always trying to set me up too." Except that she wasn't as upfront about it as Nick had just been. Kim's latest attempts at marrying him off had involved dinner invitations where he thought he was just going to spend some time with his sister and her family. Once there though, there would invariably be some friend of hers, dressed to impress, and he'd have to make small talk with her while Kim and Rick hovered in the kitchen "preparing dinner". Repeated pleas on his behalf to cease and desist all such activities had resulted in Kim haranguing him for hours about how it was time for him to find a nice girl and settle down, and he wondered when she'd begun channelling the spirit of their grandmother, a dragon of a woman who had drilled that message into him and his two sisters the second they'd turned eighteen. "Plenty of introductions," he told Nick. "The odd first date, the even fewer second date. Not many people can understand the hours a homicide cop works."

Nick rolled his eyes, obviously agreeing with that assessment. "Ain't that the truth." Cyrus thought he might leave it at that, but Nick was just beginning. "Which if you think about it, Lea would. I mean, she got transferred back from dayshift because she preferred working nights." He stopped then, something just occurring to him. "Though that might also have had something to do with Ecklie … "

"Stokes, you're not fixing me up with Lea." Cyrus tried again, this with a different tactic. "She just didn't seem like my type."

Which, if flimsy, was certainly the truth, though nowhere near the whole truth. The whole truth centred somewhere around the fact that when he thought of the Christmas party, when he pictured a brunette that he'd spent time with, had chatted with, laughed with, had a great time with, it wasn't Lea who came to mind.

Instead he pictured Sara's ready smile, her gap-toothed grin flashing as they'd watched Greg and Catherine leading the Time Warp, had watched Greg and Warrick almost coming to not-so-good-natured fisticuffs over the music that Greg was playing. He hadn't stayed for long at the party, but what little time he had, he'd spent with her, only leaving her when Nick had called him over. A few minutes later, Lea had joined them, and after a while of feeling like the spider to her fly, he'd made his excuses and left, citing family obligations, waving to Sara as he'd left.

Not, he told himself once again, that it mattered, because nothing was going to happen between them. He'd known that she was dating someone, Nick had told him as much months ago, and he'd had a pretty good notion that it was still going on, not least because he was sure that Nick would have told him if Sara was a free agent. Going on this conversation, he'd probably be offering to fix them up. But it hadn't been Nick who had told him that, it had been Sulik, who'd been working a case with Sara and Warrick the previous week. Cyrus hadn't heard many of the details, had only come in part of the way through the conversation but from what he could gather, Sulik was having great fun recounting how Sara Sidle, the ultimate professional, the iron woman herself, had been working a scene with her paramedic boyfriend, and had forgotten herself and called him "Baby" in front of everyone.

By this time, Cyrus thought that he had a pretty good handle on Sara Sidle. She wouldn't have done something like that were she not pretty serious about the guy.

But that was fine he told himself, not for the first time. She was entitled to her life, she was entitled to date anyone she liked. They were just friends, and he could live with that.

"And what is your type?" Nick asked him, bringing him back to reality. "Sara?"

Cyrus blinked, because his tone was serious, almost confrontational, and Nick had never taken that tone of voice with him when talking about Sara before. "Sara and I are friends," he said flatly. "That's all."

"Uh-huh." Nick didn't sound like he believed him, and his next words confirmed that. "You know … if you were to be interested in Sara … you could always just ask her out." He wouldn't meet Cyrus's eyes when he suggested it though, so he didn't see Cyrus shake his head.

"She's already dating someone," he said quietly, speaking to himself as much as Nick. "I'm not getting in the middle of that."

It was more than he'd ever said to Nick on the subject, and as close to an admission of his feelings for Sara as he'd ever come to giving. It also had the undeniable ring of truth to it, and maybe that was why Nick didn't push it further, just changed the subject to the latest round of NBA games, a subject which could, and did, keep them occupied for hours.