"Grissom, now is really not a good time." Sara scrolled down another screen in the listing of Helen McGeary's bank records. If she had sold the baby, there should be some sort of indication in her deposits that she'd received money for the act.
"I wanted to see you." There he was, leaning against the doorjamb, looking in on her like he had dozens of times before.
She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear the blurriness from staring at the computer screen for too long, and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Okay, you've seen me. I'm really in deep with this case, Griss. I don't have time to talk."
"The kidnapping," he said, and moved into the room, effectively destroying her concentration.
She shoved backward from the computer. "Yes. The kidnapping. And if I don't get back to this, very soon there may be another baby in another plastic bag in another dumpster. A tiny little girl named Andrea, who should be with her mother right now, not some stranger."
"You want to talk about it?" he offered, now with his hip up on the table next to the computer.
Sara stared at him in disbelief. "This is really neither the time nor the place to discuss personal issues."
"I meant the case," he huffed, and she blinked at him, wondering how on earth she could have misinterpreted his initial statement to be personal. "We always...worked well together."
"Yeah. We did." She returned to the computer and scrolled down some more, then glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, almost shyly. "I miss that."
"Me too," he said. "Talk me through it."
She did so, keeping an eye on the bank screen. She'd almost gotten to telling him about the security cameras at Boston General when something jumped out at her from the bank records. "Whoa. He-llo. Transfer of Fifty thousand dollars to her account...that timestamp puts it as less than twenty four hours before the first kidnapping." Her fingers danced across the keyboard, totally engrossed in the hunt and oblivious of Grissom's presence. "Damn. It came in from a dummy account, somewhere in Switzerland. Impossible to track past that. But...here, she transfers it out again, from an ATM right outside of Boston City Hospital. Timestamp puts that transaction at eleven fourteen the night of the kidnapping. She did it right after she took Gregory." Impossibly, her fingers were moving even faster on the keys. "And she didn't bother to hide it this time."
Sara sat back in the chair with a satisfied smirk. "Jeremiah Catten."
"Sara!" Alec sounded out-of-breath as he stopped at the computer lab door. "PD just picked up Helen McGeary; she tried to buy a ticket out of town on her own credit card. They grabbed her at Logan - flight was delayed with all these new security measures, thank God - and they're bringing her in now. You coming?"
Both of their pagers took that opportunity to shrill loudly, and they looked down simultaneously; Sara was the one to read the message out loud. "Tim, 911. He must have gotten somewhere with the plastic bag."
They communicated silently across the gap, and Alec nodded. "I'll be in the interrogation room."
"And I'll be there as soon as I've seen Tim." Sara jumped up and grabbed the bank records from the printer. "Oh - Grissom - sorry, uhm..." He was just staring at her, so intently she fidgeted slightly and blushed. "What?"
He shook his head mutely, a slow, lazy smile teasing the edge of his lips. "I'll see you at the colloquium."
She blinked. "O-kay." With a small shake, she bolted from the room, papers in hand.
~*~
"Tim, if you've been able to get me something off that plastic bag, I'm going to nominate you for sainthood," Sara told him, breezing into the room.
"I'd rather you didn't," the thin lab tech said, pushing his rolling chair across to another table. "You have to be dead to be canonized. Here, take a look."
The plastic bag that Gregory Itzin had been wrapped in was under a fume hood. "I don't see anything."
"I didn't either, at first," Tim confessed, and with a laser pointer, brought her attention to a corner of the bag, near the opening.
"Thumbprint?" Sara asked, delighted. It was slightly smudged, but Tim was one of the best fingerprint techs in the country, even better than Jacqui in Vegas had been. He would be able to restore it enough to search from.
The tech held up an admonishing finger with a grin. "Male index finger. Right, to be exact."
"Right? Don't tell me you got a match," Sara breathed.
"I haven't gotten a match this fast out of AFIS in months," he informed her, his tone almost jubilant. "Three minutes, if that." He pushed his chair across to the database computer. "Jeremiah Catten, served time for fraud in '95."
"Anything you want, Tim," she promised him as he handed over the official documentation of the fingerprint match. "Anything."
"Just nail the bastard," he told her, and she was unable to hold back the huge grin as she bolted out of the lab and toward the interrogation rooms.
~*~
"I don't know what you're talking about," Helen McGeary was saying sullenly when Sara entered the observation room. She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair, staring at Alec and Nevins across the table. "You'd better pay me back for my plane ticket."
"You can apply to the city for reimbursement," Alec said smoothly, shooting her a dazzling smile. Out of all the Boston night shift CSIs, he was the best at interrogation, and when he had as much weight of evidence as he currently did, he was like a force of nature. "And you're a smart woman, Ms. McGeary, so let's not play games here. Your fingerprints were found on Gregory Itzin and Andrea Whitten's bassinets. Your DNA was found in the pairs of scrubs left with both bassinets. We have two eyewitness mothers who can identify you as the nurse who took their babies."
McGeary remained silent, and Sara fought down an almost violent hatred of the uncooperative woman. She was responsible for the death of one baby, and the kidnapping of another, and she wasn't showing the slightest hint of remorse.
"You've got nothing," she spat back. "How am I supposed to know you didn't plant that evidence?"
Nevins seemed barely able to control her anger, and Alec leaned forward across the table, speaking in a low, dangerous voice. "Boston CSI doesn't plant evidence, Ms. McGeary. And quite frankly, at this point, I'm not worried about being able to put you away for a very, very long time. All I care about is what you did with Andrea Whitten. Where is she?"
Sara couldn't take it any longer; she exited the observation room and came around to enter the interrogation room.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Alec was asking when she entered.
"I mean I don't know," McGeary repeated defiantly.
Sara sat down next to Alec and in front of Nevins, who was leaning against the wall. She slid the file folder containing both the fingerprint match and the bank record printout over to Alec to warn him where she was going next. "Does the name Jeremiah Catten mean anything to you, Ms. McGeary?"
"Who the hell are you?"
"That doesn't matter," Sara replied, allowing herself the slightest smirk of satisfaction. There had been a definite reaction to the name. "Answer the question."
"So what if it did?"
"Well, you transferred fifty thousand dollars to his bank account," Alec jumped in, holding the bank record up for the older woman to see. "And his fingerprint was found on the bag Gregory Itzin was wrapped in."
"You can tell it any way you want," Sara continued. "We know he was involved, and we're going to find him. But if you help us, it might get you a reduced sentence." As much as she hated the thought of this woman serving any less than the maximum penalty for her crime, they couldn't afford to be righteous when Andrea Whitten's life might be on the line.
McGeary's pale blue eyes darted from CSI to police officer and then back again. "I was telling the truth. I don't know where she is. Jerry has her, but I don't know where he is." She looked ready to spit. "Bastard took the money and ran off."
Sara felt all the energy she'd built up over the successive breaks in the case evaporate. "And you have no idea how to find him."
"If I did, you think I'd be leaving town?" McGeary snapped back. "Fifty thousand split two ways is still a hell of a lot of money. I'd be after him, getting my share."
"So instead, you chose to run," Nevins said, disgusted.
"Damn right I did."
The back and forth continued for several minutes, but Sara was convinced that McGeary had no idea of her ex-lover's whereabouts. Nevins stayed in the interrogation room when Sara and Alec left, quizzing the woman relentlessly about Catten's acquaintances, haunts, and other activities, and then the old-fashioned paper trail would start.
Sara looked at her watch as she and Alec walked down the hall together, silently simmering. Five o'clock. Two hours left in shift, and then two more hours before the day's panels and conferences started. Despite the sleep deprivation of the past few days, she was buzzed, desperate to find another lead in the case. If they were too late in finding Catten, and he had already passed on the baby to another link in the child extortion ring, they might never be able to recover Andrea. And Sara had made a promise.
They both sat down in the break room, still silent, and Alec passed a mug of coffee to her. She stirred sugar in absentmindedly.
"Let's walk it through," Alec said suddenly, setting his own mug back on the table after taking a sip. "Helen McGeary is an underpaid, underappreciated nurse with a bitter streak. She meets Jerry Catten."
"Two possibilities," Sara continued, blowing on the liquid to cool it off. "Either he's been involved in the business for a while, and he targeted McGeary specifically, or he came up with the idea."
"A combination of the two," Alec opted, and twisted the top off an individual pack of creamer. "He's got some experience in it, by the way he was able to get the money transferred from a Swiss account. He had contacts that put him in touch with buyers in the first place."
"But he didn't know enough to warn McGeary not to cover her tracks when she was transferring the money," Sara realized. "Either way, he was using her. The initial payment went to her account to deflect suspicion. He could always say that she was paying back a debt when she transferred the money to her. If it hadn't been for the fingerprint, we would never have gotten her to finger him."
"Makes you wonder why she didn't roll on him right away," Alec mused, ripping the creamer packet into shreds with manicured fingernails.
"She's in love with him," Sara said quietly, and he looked up at her abruptly.
"The question becomes, how do we find him?"
She shrugged. "Paper trail. Bank account, public records, old contact info from his prison time."
"Except I have the feeling that's all going to go cold, quick," Alec said, frustrated, and stood to throw the pieces of the creamer packet into the trash. He sat back down heavily. "He's not stupid. McGeary would have checked his apartment - he won't be there."
"We'll get a warrant anyway," Sara pointed out.
"Agreed." He stood to pour the dregs of his coffee into the sink. "You want bank records or the warrant application?"
"I'll continue with the bank records," was her choice, and she followed him to the sink to wash out her own mug. "I've already started with them anyway."
Alec nodded and began to leave the room.
"Hey, Alec?"
He stopped at the door and looked back in at her, an eyebrow raised.
"We work pretty well together, when we're not at each other's throats."
His smile was softly bemused. "Yeah. We do."
That was about as much emotional exposure as either of them could handle for the moment, and he left quickly. Sara hung her mug up and dried her hands, leaving to head back to the computer lab.