It had been years since Sara had vomited during an autopsy - the liquid decomp in Vegas had been the last time, now that she recalled - but Gregory Itzin's small body brought out her gag reflex for entirely different reasons. The same nausea from the crime scene clawed its way up her throat and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth so hard she thought she must be bruising her lips.
"You okay?" Rachel looked up at her, studying the CSI's face carefully.
"Yeah. Yeah, it's just..." Sara gestured with the hand not holding her mouth closed.
The coroner nodded in understanding. "I can count on one hand the number of infant autopsies I've done." She pressed the back of one gloved finger against Gregory's blue cheek. Someone, probably Rachel before Sara had arrived, had closed his eyes. "Every one is one too many."
Sara nodded, but didn't trust herself to speak - or, for that matter, to open her mouth. Rachel turned back to the body and began speaking aloud for both the tape recorder and Sara's benefit.
An hour and a half later, Rachel peeled off her gloves and shook her head. "This is a perfectly healthy baby."
"No cause of death."
It wasn't really a question, but Rachel shrugged anyway. "None apparent. No evidence of any sort of foul play. My best ruling is SIDS."
"SIDS," Sara breathed, and her vision went gray at the edges.
"Sudden Infant De - "
"I know what it means," Sara snapped back, and was instantly remorseful. "I'm sorry, Rachel, you didn't deserve that, it's just..." She shook herself. "The blanket?"
The coroner looked at her oddly for a few seconds, and Sara wondered if Maggie had been to the morgue yet to spread her new gossip. Probably. "It's right here. I bagged it first thing."
"Thanks." She plucked the paper bag from the counter and nearly slammed into Alec when she turned to exit.
"Sara!" His brow wrinkled in confusion. "What are you doing here?"
"Attending an autopsy," she returned, as if it weren't obvious.
"I hope it wasn't the Itzin case," he informed her, and then pushed past her to where Rachel was stitching up the tiny Y incision. "You haven't seen Thomas tonight, have you."
"What are you talking about?" She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms as best she could while holding an evidence bag in her right hand. "Look, I'm sorry I didn't page you, I was running with the case and you were out with Fiorelli serving a warrant on your penthouse burglar."
"It's not your case to run with anymore," he told her testily, and reached for the evidence bag. She swirled on her heels to keep it away from him; a childish game, she knew, but sometime since the crime scene their temporary truce seemed to have been obliterated.
"What do you mean, it's not my case?" She knew exactly what he meant. She just wanted the satisfaction of forcing him to admit that he'd gone behind her back. Rage was burning inside of her - how dare he, how dare Thomas, and - Grissom. Grissom must have known.
Alec Tremain was many things, but not a coward. "You were too involved. Thomas agreed. I'm handling it solo. We've got a search warrant on the missing nurse's apartment coming, and fingerprints and DNA to match. It's a slam dunk, and there's no reason to have two CSIs on it anymore, especially when one of them is..." He trailed off.
"When one of them is what, Alec?" She jabbed her left index finger hard into his chest, jamming the bones together and grinding the joints, so hard she thought she might have sprained it. "When one of them is what?"
"When one of them is obviously suffering from impaired judgement because of an emotional attachment to a case," he replied coolly, and wrested the paper bag from her hand.
"I have never jeopardized a case in my life," Sara said shakily, but knew she'd lost.
"It's out of my hands now," and there was just a hint of apology in his voice.
She ignored it and took petty pleasure in knocking his arm with her shoulder as she passed him on her way out.
~*~
Unlike her locker in Vegas had been, Sara's locker at Boston CSI was bare, containing only the essentials: two changes of clothes, a bottle of aspirin, a light jacket she'd left there that fall and never brought home, a small bag of toiletries, and a crumpled bag of Hershey's Kisses. No pictures, nothing personal.
"Hey," Jonas said softly beside her, and jumped when she slammed the locker door shut, two aspirins in her hand. The headache had started on the walk over from the morgue, and while she normally didn't like to take drugs unless it was an emergency, she wanted to face Thomas with a clear mind, and in eight hours she had to be at Harvard, smiling and presenting the wonders of forensic science.
"Jonas, I am really not in the mood for chitchat." She seemed to be saying entirely too many things she regretted these days. "And don't take anything I say for the next week or so personally, okay?"
"Sure." He smiled crookedly, like he'd had his jaw knocked out of alignment at some point. It wasn't at all attractive, but it was endearing. "You want to talk about it?"
He'd never offered that before, and he couldn't have offered it at a worse time. "Not really." She swallowed the aspirin dry, wincing slightly as one of them caught in her throat, working the muscles frantically to get it down before the gag reflex kicked in.
"Okay," he replied amiably, and sprawled in one of the hard plastic seats that lined the locker room, knees splayed apart and hands resting palm up on his thighs. It was a welcoming posture, and it probably served him well in interrogations. Some people went their whole lives never quite able to pull off that combination of guilessness and open trust. Jonas came by it naturally.
Sara leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the locker, watching Jonas out of the corner of her eye. "If you're ever in Vegas, Jonas, head to CSI and look up a guy named Nick Stokes. You'd get along great. He's from Texas." She didn't know why she'd added that detail, only knew that it had somehow become tied up in her fast-fading memories of Nick: Texas drawl and gentle smile and the taste of ice cream on a hot August night.
"Texas, huh?" There was that lopsided grin again. "I don't know about that. He's not one of those Southerners who's still bitter about the Civil War, is he? I had a great-times-something grandfather who wore blue. Fought at Gettysburg with Colonel Chamberlain in the Twentieth Maine."
"Jonas?" She shifted to lean her shoulder against the locker and cross her arms, looking at him with one eyebrow raised.
"Yeah?"
"You're babbling."
His tone was suddenly serious again, and he leaned forward on his elbows. "Is it working?"
Sara offered him a smile with just a hint of teeth. "Little bit, yeah. Thanks."
There was a comfortable lapse in conversation for a few seconds, interrupted by the sound of Jonas's pager. "That's Thomas. Uhm...should I let him know that you're going to be bearding him in his lair, or..."
In spite of herself, Sara laughed. "No. I'm just...going to go home."
"Good." He paused at the door, looked back over his shoulder for a brief moment, and then left the room.
~*~
She didn't go home, though she did get off at Park Street to change to the right line. She had every intention of getting on the Red Line, but somehow she kept walking and found herself exiting the station into a chill, clear night.
Boston Common was very nearly deserted at this time of night - or, more correctly, morning - and Sara kept her hands firmly in her pockets against the icy cold. The snow of a few days ago had crusted over, the top layer melting in the warmth of the day and then freezing solid again with the night. Light from the street lamps reflected off the layer of ice, sometimes refracting into color. At the other end of the Common, she could hear the honks and complaints of car horns - a show letting out at the Wang, probably.
Her boots scuffed at the concrete of the path aimlessly, tracing patterns in the sand laid down so no one would slip on the ice on the paths. Soon, she couldn't feel her toes, or any other extremeties, but she walked on.
The next park bench she came across proved to be her salvation as her legs gave out just as it came into view. Sara sat down heavily, shivering hard. The measure of peace that the silent snow had wrought in her disappeared as her far-too-good memory confronted her with the images of Gregory's body lying on the autopsy table, tiny and perfect and cut open. Tiny and perfect and covered in a plastic bag and thrown in a dumpster.
Tiny and perfect and swathed in a soft pink blanket, not moving, not breathing...
Sara leaned over and vomited violently, the granola bar she had eaten on her way into work burning its way back up her throat. Her gag reflex continued long after the contents of her stomach were emptied, and her abdominal muscles clenched weakly as she sobbed and retched.
"Ma'am? Ma'am, are you okay?" The beat cop shined his flashlight directly in her face and she winced, holding up her hand to deflect the glare. "Do you need me to call an ambulance?"
"I'm fine, Chris," she croaked out, the acid burn in her throat making her voice hoarse. She swallowed convulsively. "I just - I haven't been feeling well."
"Mrs. Grissom?" Chris Landry moved the last few steps forward, recognizing her. "Are you sure you're okay?"
She nodded and wiped away the iced tears from her face with the back of her glove, wishing she had a tissue or something to wipe her mouth. Her wet lips were chapping rapidly. "Yeah. I'm all right."
"If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing here? This isn't really a safe place to be at this time of the night." He was still young, so young she half-expected his voice to break in the middle of his sentence. "Is there a crime scene near here? No one told me anything."
"I just wanted to take a walk," was her childishly simple response, and she found that she didn't really have a better explanation for him than that. Oh, God, she really was finally cracking. How long had she slept that afternoon? Two, three hours? And all of them tense and dream-filled, which didn't give the body anywhere near the amount of rest it really needed.
"I don't think you're okay," Chris said to himself slowly, and unhooked his radio from his belt. "Dispatch, this is Officer Landry. I need you to patch me through to CSI Thomas Roman."
"Copy. CSI Roman is in the field right now..."
"This is important," Chris cut them off, and Sara flushed angrily. She wanted to tell him that she was fine, that she could just get up and walk back to Park Street - and then she realized that the T had stopped running probably twenty minutes ago. So she remained mute, shaking violently from the cold, the taste in her mouth growing more and more sour by the second, trying desperately to push the images out of her mind.
And then she realized that she hadn't heard a word of the conversation that had just taken place between Thomas and Chris.
"I'm going to take you back to headquarters, ma'am," Chris said, and reached forward to take her arm just below the elbow. Obviously, she was supposed to brace herself against him and stand. Her mind understood the concept.
Her body refused to cooperate. He tugged, and she pushed off feebly with her feet. He was a strong man, and could probably have pulled her up even with the minimal help she was offering him, but sparks exploded in front of her vision and she felt her muscles go lax just before she slipped into unconsciousness.