Part 3
Grissom never managed to touch base with Sara again that night. He got pulled into other cases that the rest of the team was working on. It was good to have some distance, to clear his head. He did look for her before he went home in the morning to get some sleep, but she was nowhere to be found. He assumed she had gone home. But as he entered the break room the next night, he saw that couldn't have been the case. The table was littered with coffee cups, candy wrappers, and the packaging from a veggie burrito, a sure sign that Sara had been working on the case all day long. He should have seen that coming. He left the break room in search of Sara.
He found her sitting on the floor with papers scattered all around every table, chair, and bare spot on the floor. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the chaos, with her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees. He entered the room cautiously, careful not to disturb any of the piles of papers.
"Sara?" he said softly. He couldn't tell if she was awake or asleep.
"Do you have any Advil?" came Sara's muffled reply.
"Pardon?"
Sara looked up. "Advil, Aspirin, something. I've been staring at computer screens, printouts, and phone records for over 16 hours; I have one hell of a headache." She reached up and tried in vain to massage some of the tension out of her shoulders with one hand.
"What have you found?"
"Our Vic was quite the actress. She carried on whole on-line relationships with dozens of different people using several different aliases. Each one seems like a totally different person. She is a member of 42 different e-mail list serves under 12 e-mail addresses. I have everything here from S&M lists to cooking clubs and horseback riders groups. It's as though she made up a whole slew of personalities and went and made friends for each of them."
"Any of these personalities have a propensity for men with swords who climb balconies?"
"Two lists," said Sara, reaching for a pile of papers. "Damsels in Distress and Looking for a Knight in Shinning Armor. The Knight in Shinning Armor list is some kind of role playing where everyone pretends to live in medieval times. She had two apparent boyfriends on that list. Damsels in Distress isn't really medieval, but the name is. By subject it is a support group of sorts for women in abusive relationships that want to be saved. She held several conversations with people from that list. It's the only list she was a part of that she used her real name. I'm still trying to figure out who some of the people are, they are mostly set up as anonymous e-mail accounts, we are tracing to find the locations of the computers that the e-mails were written from."
"Have you eaten anything?"
Sara looked confused, what did that have to do with the case? "Uh, I had a burrito at noon."
Grissom looked down at his watch; it was almost 8:30pm. "That was eight hours ago, you should take a break and get something to eat, the papers aren't going anywhere."
"I'm fine, I just need to get some Advil and get back to reading. I'm sure there is something here to point at a suspect." He was really worried about her. He had learned long ago that he couldn't keep her from working herself to death when a case really struck her, but he could try to insist that she took at least minimal care of herself in the process.
"Sara, you really n-"
"Hey guys," said Catherine, peeking in the room. "Tell me this isn't all paperwork to be done."
"No, just evidence to read. Hey Catherine, do you have any Advil?"
"Wouldn't leave home without it, its in my locker, I'll go grab it."
"I'll come with you; I need to stretch for a bit."
Sara followed Catherine out of the room. Grissom was left standing in the middle of the sea of paper, wondering how he was going to make it through this case with her, without losing his mind.