Marlena arrived at Sara's apartment at the same time Breeze and Sasha were digging through Lady Heather's garden.
She came to apartment 17M, knocked sharply—one, twice, three times—and waited patiently for Sara to answer.
She did, finally, pale-faced and ring-eyed, "Marlena?"
"Hi, Sar," Marlena smiled. "How you feelin'?"
"Like shit. I think I'm coming down with a flu bug," Sara said softly. "I've been throwing up…running a bit of a fever."
"I'm sorry to hear that. I'm also sorry to tell you I'm going to have to do a search in your apartment. I have a warrant," Marlena added quickly.
"Oh…oh, yes. Of course," Sara opened up her door and stepped aside to let Marlena and her field kit in.
Sara's apartment was neat, chairs pushed in, throw blankets folded, everything in its proper place except for the laptop open on the dining table and a pile of paperwork. It was quiet.
"Where's Evie?" Marlena asked.
"Daycare," Sara said, closing the door. "I, um, heard about what Breeze found on Sean."
"Yeah. I'm sorry."
"Don't be," Sara reassured her. "He swore he quit, when I was with him. Swore up and down. It's hard to trust people nowadays, isn't it?"
"So he was a user?"
"Yes. I caught him doing lines on more than one occasion. I was so angry I poured his whole stash down the toilet. But he told me stopped because of Evie."
Marlena nodded. "Sara, you're CSI, so you know the drill. I don't have to ask you to—"
"I know," Sara nodded. "I have to go talk to my neighbor, anyway, see if she'll be able to take care of Evie…now that Sean's probably going to wind up in jail." She winked at Marlena and pulled a Harvard sweatshirt over her head.
Marlena gave Sara a sympathetic smile and watched her friend leave. Then she went to work.
She started with the kitchen, in the cabinet under the sink, where the household cleaners were usually located. The door was child-locked and Marlena had to jimmy it a little before it came open all the way. All she found were bottles of C-Thru, Orange Clean, Kaboom, Lysol and a large box of SwifferMitts. She opened and shook all the bottles and no white powder was found anywhere. She looked through packages of sponges and inside paper towel rolls.
She opened every kitchen drawer, emptied each once and shook them out. Nothing. She sprayed all the knifes with the luminol. Nothing. She unfilled cabinets, looked in every bowl, every nook and cranny, behind and in every box of cereal. Nothing.
The living room was neat and clean and Marlena tired to be careful as she sifted through a catalogue of video cassettes, CD's and magazines, opening and shuffling everything. She shook out each blanket and unzipped each pillow cover and looked for re-sewn seams in the pillows. Nothing. So far Sara was looking squeaky-clean, and Marlena began to feel relieved.
The bathroom was just as immaculate, albeit there was a pile of outdated Popular Science and Cosmo magazines beside the sink, as well as a few Disney, J.C. Penny and Home Goods catalogues. A packed wicker basket of children's books were placed by the bathtub, inside which were several bath toys, toy sponges and a plastic box of soap crayons that laid open on one of the ledges. "E-V-I-E-S-I-D-L-E" was spelled out on the tile wall inside the tub in red soap crayon in large childish scribble. So far, those were the only clues that showed someone that a child lived here. Beside Evie's name, in blue crayon, was "S-A-R-A-S-I-D-L-E", written in a much more adult hand. The name was followed by the letters of the alphabet.
The sink cabinet was the same as the kitchen: simple cleaning supplies behind a child-proofed door.
Marlena looked in the medicine cabinet, found the usual: Advil, Aleve, Robitussin, NyQuil, children's Tylenol, Tums, Folic Acid, tampons, pregnancy tests—
Wait, what was that?
Marlena picked up the box. Yes, there was a box of pregnancy tests, real and in her hand. In a package of two, there was one missing. What was this doing in Sara's medicine cabinet?
Marlena replaced the box and closed the medicine cabinet. Then she opened it again, to make sure that wasn't a figment of her imagination.
She opened every bottle of pills, poured it's contents into her hand and inspected them. She picked each pill up, held it in the light, turned it in her hand and replaced it back into the bottle. No white powder. Her neck was beginning to ache but she continued her work.
She dumped out the garbage pail, looking for the missing pregnancy test. She sifted through, afraid it had been disposed of already, until she found it. It was all the way at the bottom, wrapped in toilet paper and a lot of it, at least a three feet.
The test was positive.
Marlena reached into her field kit and bagged the pregnancy test, her heart pounding. Sara was pregnant? Something didn't settle right. This was obviously a recent discovery for Sara herself. The garbage couldn't be very old, despite how much junk was piled on top of the test. Marlena wound up estimating it was about a week or two old, due to the garbage pickup schedule. She bagged the test stick and continued.
Marlena moved to the bedrooms, going to Sara's first. It clearly distinguished who Sara was. The room was painted a soft but bright blue and the furniture was white. The bedspread consisted of large eight-by-eight squares of many shades of blue, green and purple and four overstuffed pillows were placed at the carved headboard. There were a few posters on the western wall beside two windows: one advertising a Robert Palmer concert circa 1984, another for Sarah MacLachlan at 1997 Lilith Faire and a third was Tori Amos Concert Tour 2003. The night tables on either side of the bed held potted plants: a fern on the right and a cactus on the left. Over the headboard of the platform bed was a lamp in the shape of bright red lips. Beside the bed was a large bookcase crammed with hundreds of books, many of them forensic textbooks, plus a row of fantasy novels by Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey and Terry Brooks, another of Anne Rice and Stephen King horrors and James Patterson mysteries and two thick volumes entitled Shakespeare's Comedies and Shakespeare's Tragedies. Curious, Marlena plucked the last two tomes from the shelf. She opened the Comedies. An inscription was written in bold black ballpoint pen:
Sara—
For the laugher we've shared through the years…
Marlena opened the Tragedies and there was another one:
…and the tears we've shared even more
From, Grissom.
Grissom, huh? Typical gift from a man like him. Marlena had known it was his habit to quote Shakespeare and so often that she joked, "This is science, not English lit."
Marlena carefully flipped through the pages of the Tragedies book. Right between Hamlet and MacBeth were a collection of letters. Curious, she opened one after the other and skimmed them. They were more or less the same: love letters, worn and unset, from Sara to Grissom. They all began differently—from To Grissom to My Dearest Beloved Gil—but they all ended the same with, All My Love, Sara. But gradually, the greetings became hard, the sign-offs brusque and the contents callous. The plummeted to Fuck off Grissom and Hoping You Rot In Hell, Sara. The handwriting was less flowery, more scribbled in anger.
You've hurt me for the last time…I spit on you and your decency...you turn my stomach now…I won't allow you to hurt me again, ever…you don't deserve to have me or Evie or anyone in your life…you are lower than the maggots you'd rather study than be with me…one day I will make you regret hat you have done to me…you've hurt me for the last time.
The letters scared Marlena. She gingerly put each unfolded note in a separate evidence bag, as if the notes would jump up and bite her with their venomous words.
The dresser had five drawers a large oval mirror over it and the top was covered with photographs: many of Evie, several childhood pictures of Sara herself, including one of her with Catherine Willows and another of her sitting in the sand on the beach in a skimpy bikini, peering at the camera over her Jackie O sunglasses, her lips pursed in a kiss.
One caught Marlena's interest. The picture, in a purple frame, was of a very young Sara, perhaps she was eleven or twelve years old. She was crammed onto a very small, cushy loveseat between two other girls. They were all laughing, their mouths wide open and eyes squinted, heads thrown back. The girl on Sara's right was blond and a bit chubby, the one on the left was Asian, sporting a pair of wire-framed glasses. Marlena wondered who those girls were. There were no other pictures of Sara with either girl.
Marlena opened every drawer and shifted through the undergarments, socks, pantyhose in the first drawer, t-shirts and turtlenecks in the second, sweaters and sweatshirts in the third, jeans and slacks in the fourth, pajamas in the fifth.
Though she didn't find any strychnine or anything suspicious, she did find some objects she would bet her salary on that Sara had been looking for for a number of weeks: an extra set of keys, a Craig David CD case, tube of Sunburst Coral lipstick, a gold cuff earring missing its mate, a rhinestone-studded bangle and a silver ring with a Celtic knot perched on it. She also found a plain white envelope in the way back of the second drawer, quite buried. It was not sealed, only folded closed, so Marlena opened it. It turned out to contain a group of photographs.
There were two photographs that caught her eye—the dates on both, at the bottom right-hand corner, in red LCD numbers, read 5-12-94. The first one was a faraway shot of a couple smiling into the camera, in front of Dodger Stadium. Marlena couldn't make out who they were until she saw the second photograph. It was closer, showing the couple more than the stadium. It was a man and woman, arms around each other. Both were wearing jeans, Dodgers hats and sunglasses. The man wore a plain white shirt and the woman was wearing a Dodgers baseball jersey: #15, Shawn Green. Marlena recognized the woman immediately: it was Sara, of course. A very young Sara, in her early twenties. The man, Marlena had trouble recognizing. With the hat and the sunglasses, it was hard to tell.
Marlena flipped the picture over and read the handwriting on the back: feminine, round and loopy—this was Sara's script. The paragraph was written lightly with a blue Bic pen, some things were smeared but most was legible:
Dodgers game with G—. They played the Diamondbacks and lost. Afterwards we went for a quick dinner at Mick's and shared a pizza and a few beers. We fed quarters in the ancient jukebox that plays only really bad country/pop songs and danced. I didn't know he could dance. Actually, he can't. He moves funny. I don't think he's ever danced before in his entire life. But he surprised me. He is full of surprises. The fact that he tried to dance touches me so much. I love him.
G—. The initial should have been obvious: Grissom. But Marlena had trouble believing the slim, tanned, muscular man in the baseball cap and sunglasses was Gil Grissom. She felt a tug at her heartstrings. Sara sounded madly in love with him.
Every picture was of Sara and Grissom. At bars, at restaurants, one at a concert, a few more at Dodger Stadium. Holding hands, embracing, heads-on-the-shoulder. They looked very much in love, like two high schoolers.
Sighing heavily, Marlena replaced the pictures and bagged the envelope. She turned the picture over in the bag and stared at the paragraph again.
Moving on, Marlena searched the closet. She shook out each article of clothing that Sara had meticulously arranged by category. Skirts in order of length—shortest to longest; tank tops to long-sleeved peasant blouses; mini-dresses to cocktail dresses. The floor held a row of shoes, tennis slippers to sneakers to sandals to high heels. Marlena checked inside each pair, heel to toe. She picked up a beautiful, silky African-print skirt that had fallen to the floor from it's rightful hanger and held it up. It was heavier than she thought it would be, for a garment with such thin material. She shook it out and heard three things. One was the faint chime of the small copper bells that were sewn to the bottom of the hem of the skirt. The second was the grainy, maraca-like sound of shifting sand along with the crinkling of plastic wrap. Marlena was confused and shook it out again. The bells continued as did the shifting and crinkling. She flipped the skirt inside out and shook it again. This time, the bells were muffled and the crinkling and shifting were louder. Then Marlena looked down and realized why the skirt felt so heavy. Something was sewn inside the hem.
It was a high hem and felt thick as Marlena poked it. There was definitely a plastic bag in there. Marlena went to her field kit, skirt in her left hand, and found an X-acto knife. She put it in her right hand, made a slit in the hem and saw a portion of, as she suspected, a plastic bag. With the knife she speared it open. A fine, white powder spilled out in a thin line. Alarmed, Marlena dropped her knife and used that hand to catch the falling powder and reacted so fast that the powder did not touch the carpet. With a sigh of relief, she turned the skirt so that it would not spill and laid it on the dresser. Marlena took an envelope from her kit and tipped the powder in her hand into it. Her blood was beating in her ears. White powder. In Sara's home. Marlena took some Scotch tape she kept into her kit and patched the tear she'd made in Sara's skirt. Then she put the whole skirt into an evidence bag.
Marlena didn't know what to do. She hoped and prayed it was cocaine and that Sara had gotten it from Sean. She actually prayed that Sara did lines with her ex. Prayed that it was not strychnine and prayed that Sara did not kill the man she loved, the possible father of her child, and, perhaps, the father of her child-to-be.
Biting her lip, she returned to the closet and scoured it with her eyes, gloved hands and Mag-Lite. Her heart sank when she found what she'd hoped she never would: a pair of worn Aquila boots. Sara had hidden them in a new Sketcher's shoebox, inside a garbage bag full of clothes that was marked "Good Will".
"Oh, Sara…" Marlena whispered.
With a heavy heart, as she gathered evidence, Marlena dreaded she had just confirmed her worst fear: having to convict one of her friends as a murderer.