Okay - - here's a case chapter, then there's a father chapter, then a
musing chapter, then a few case chapters in a row.
A nice long one - - hope you enjoy!
**
Chapter Eight: Pretty Maids All in a Row
**
"Martin matched the blood to - - surprise - - Greg."
Sara buried her head in her hands, fingers pushing up strands of dark hair. "Please tell me that there's more to it than that." She had popped two aspirin on the way back from West Palms, and fallen asleep with her head on Nick's shoulder. Nathan had claimed a previous engagement and sauntered off with a bounce in his step, convinced he'd had the final word and the final victory over them. Grissom had never met a man more prone to creating homicidal feelings in those he left behind.
"There is," he assured her. "There were traces of XX blood mixed in, and he isolated those and came back with not just a profile . . . but a match."
"CODIS?"
"Not CODIS. Our database." He handed her the glossy print-out, with its sleek picture of a young woman. He watched her smile grow. He had smiled himself the second he had seen the image with the accompanying statistics - - the age was twenty-six, the hair was the cheap artificial blonde, and the listed hometown was New York.
"Melissa Sharpe. Tech?"
"Cadet. On her way to a Level One position, according to her supervisor."
"You talked to her supervisor. Did you get her brought in for questioning?"
He pulled the sheet of paper gently away from her. "Brass has her right now." The rage and repulsed feeling of being near Nathan Sanders had vanished, and so had the dismal fear of the threat coming true - - he had received the single bit of news that could perk him up, and it had. Fresh evidence was even better than Blue Hawaiian for new bursts of energy, and he'd needed it. He still hadn't clocked out once since the beginning of yesterday's shift, and he was feeling old and overripe. A hot shower was what he needed, but Melissa Sharpe was what he wanted, and what, fortunately, he had.
Sara looked like it was having the same revitalizing effect on her. "By now, I should know better than to doubt you, right?"
He tapped Melissa's photograph. "You should."
With the pace they set from the break room, they should have made it to Brass and Melissa in record time, but Catherine, Warrick, and Nick had other plans. They practically ambushed the pair around the corner and demanded why they couldn't be part of the interrogation. All hardened eyes and flashing tempers, and Grissom was suddenly aware that they looked less like a team and more like a mob. They were thirsting for blood - - although that was not the easiest thing to tell them.
He pointed at Catherine. "I need you to heckle Bobby into finish identifying that gun for us. If we can trace it to Melissa, we'll have an even stronger case."
"That explains Catherine," Nick said. "Not me and Warrick."
"I need Warrick - -" Grissom hesitated to fabricate some response, and was saved again when his pager went off. With a click, he freed it and handed it to Warrick. "- - to answer this page from Martin in DNA."
Warrick took it with a sigh. "This thing just saved your ass, you know that?"
"I can guess," he said dryly, and as Warrick left, he turned to Nick.
"Why not me?"
Grissom was blunt. "Greg's your best friend. You're emotionally involved in the case."
"That's the pot calling the kettle black, man. You didn't take this case just because it interested you." Nick scowled and tapped his watch. "We've been clocked in for hours. You haven't gone home either. We're ALL emotionally involved in the case."
Grissom closed his eyes. "You can't touch her in there, Nick. Whatever she says - - whatever she does - - we can't give her grounds to even SUSPECT that this case means more than any other."
"I won't."
"Good, because you can't."
"I'm not going to snap, Griss." Nick's eyes were, in truth, weirdly calm. "You can trust me."
He took Nick's elbow then, as they walked, and laid out ground rules. "If you lose it in there, then I want you to get out before you can do something you'll regret later. If you can't take it, then just leave - - I won't hold it against you. But try to stay calm, because one wrong word, one lost temper, and she'll have something to tell her lawyer. Remember, she's a cadet. She knows how this all works."
"Who's going to calm you down, if you lose your temper?" Nick asked, voice even. "Or Sara? We're all on the same side here, Griss."
"If I lose my temper," Grissom said, "I'm going to leave the room. Are you satisfied with that?"
Nick nodded. They met up with Sara, who very studiously avoided reacting to Nick's presence. In a whisper of steel, all three of them entered the interrogation room, seeing Brass, and then having their first impression of Melissa Sharpe.
She was small-boned and looked delicate. Her long blonde hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the nape of her neck, and before he saw her face, Grissom's immediate thought was that she looked fragile, almost breakable. But her expression was smug, small nose upturned, and smirking at Brass as if he were a show put on for her amusement.
Grissom saw nothing in her eyes. It was like looking at twin blue buttons. Light winked and reflected off the surfaces, but behind that, there was nothing else. It was disquieting.
He didn't offer her his hand, but leaned instead against the table. "Melissa, I'm Gil Grissom, and these are my colleagues, Sara Sidle and Nick Stokes." Respective nods completed, he fetched Greg's photograph from his folder with a tiny pang. The young man was smiling at the camera, doe- brown eyes lit up with laughter. A particularly bad hair day in that image - - though he was sure Greg would have liked it. It looked like how Warrick had gelled it in the hospital room.
"Do you recognize this man?"
She barely glanced at the photo. "Sure. Greg Sanders."
"Did you two know each other?"
"Yes, Dr. Grissom," she said, her voice still irritatingly sure. "As I'm sure you've realized by now, I was with him last night at Body Shots. I met him when he was working on dayshift's spillover and we arranged to meet after work."
"And so you did."
"Yes. We did."
"Who picked the location?"
"I did. I'm sure that excites you."
"It interests us," Sara said, stepping in. "Can you explain to us why your blood ended up at the crime scene where Greg was found?"
"Easily. We got into a fight before we left the bar. I took out on him and he chased after me. I told him to leave me alone, but he wouldn't go away." Her smile was reflective but, again, as empty as her eyes. "He became forceful. There was a beer bottle on top of the dumpster and I hit him with it, just once, on the head."
"And somehow, he ended up lying unconscious in an alleyway, shot through the head," Grissom said. "Can you explain that?"
"No. He was dazed. I left."
Nick leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Do you really expect us to believe that Greg tried to force you into doing anything?"
"I could sign a statement, if you like, Mr. Stokes."
"We'll back up for a moment," Grissom continued, with a warning glance at Nick. "You said that you and Greg fought at the bar before you stormed out. May I ask the subject of the argument?"
"I was interested in another date; he wasn't. He kept making excuses."
Nick snorted. "So, tell us, how exactly do we make the elaborate jump from Greg not wanting to be with you again to Greg trying to assault you in an alleyway not ten minutes later?"
Melissa shrugged. "People are inexplicable, Mr. Stokes. I'm sure you know that."
"You wouldn't mind having a clock examination, would you?" Sara's voice was light, but her expression was forcedly cheerful, trying to project the we're-all-on-your-side image. "So we can verify your account, prove that there was some kind of sexual assault?"
For the first time, Melissa seemed rattled. "Things didn't progress that far."
"So you agree that you might have been acting prematurely in hitting him."
"No. I don't agree to that," she said. "He was trying to get to that point, luckily, he didn't, because I didn't let him."
All the fake-warmth drained out of her voice, Sara said, "No, you didn't let him do anything, did you? You drugged his drink, you hit him on the head, and then you tried to kill him, but you screwed it up, and now - - we have you."
"No, we don't." Warrick had entered without them noticing and stood, arms crossed, frowning. "I talked to Martin. He checked the samples from under Greg's fingernails. Epithelial cells and blood are all a perfect match to each other, and they're XY. Male. Ran it through CODIS, but no hits."
"That just proves that he didn't scratch her," Nick pointed out. "That could have been from an earlier struggle - - or she could have had help."
Warrick had apparently taken notice of Melissa, who had turned on her charm again, and was smiling at him. "It gets better. Trace analyzed Greg's beer from Body Shots. It came back positive for dipthalamine."
"I've heard of that."
"It's a depressant with some hypnotic side-effects. Pretty trippy stuff, and illegal as hell. Hard to find, these days, that's why it took so long to identify. Dipthalamine isn't one of the first things we check for in a toxic-screening."
"We can't hold her," Brass said grimly. "Not on blood at a crime scene. Her story stands for now."
Melissa nodded at him and sauntered out of the room with a pleasant goodbye to each of them. She offered her hand to Grissom, who turned from her to face the rest of his team, ignoring the outstretched appendage. Once she was gone, he struck the table with the side of his hand, scattering papers and almost smashing against Brass's mug of coffee.
"She's lying to us." His voice was thick with anger.
"We know that Greg wouldn't have tried to force her," Nick said. "That's obvious. Could it be a hit, do you think? Maybe she paid someone to kill Greg, and the plan backfired?"
Sara sighed. "We'd need a motive. Right now, we don't have one."
Warrick settled against the table. "Dipthalamine has some side-effects that you don't want to know about. It never was a fun recreational drug. Asylums used it, back in the day, for patients that were out of control. It causes severe REM malfunctioning, gives the user the feeling that they're trapped in a dream-world. And with a coma on top of the effects - -"
"Greg's going through hell," Nick said bitterly. "Are you . . . are you saying that while he's sleeping in that room, he's hallucinating?"
"It's possible," Grissom said. "It's never been entirely determined whether or not coma victims dream or have any mental activity. The usual opinion is that they don't, but several have claimed, once awakened, that they dreamed."
He had to try and stay on the facts to keep his voice calm. After all the worry about Nick losing his temper, he had been the one to nearly lose his. Melissa's carefully blank expression and obvious lies were driving him to the brink, and the evidence that had sent her back out had done little for him. He had wanted to resolve it, tie it up. Feel the closure he was always supposed to feel. And now this - - now knowing that Greg wasn't sleeping peacefully, knowing that he might be screaming in some nightmarish hallucination behind those closed eyes . . .
"Has anyone heard anything about Nathan?" he asked, rubbing his temples.
"I did." Brass was gathering up the last of the files off the clean steel table. "He called my office not an hour ago, wanting to see how the investigation was going. Said that you quarreled earlier."
"That's putting it mildly."
"It's not usually a good idea to wrestle it out with a grieving father, Grissom," Brass said dryly. "Not to mention that it's not in good taste."
"You didn't meet him," Sara said. "He threatened to pull the plug on Greg's support systems. I was hoping that he'd go home."
"He's here. Room at the Siesta Inn."
"Did he say why he's staying?"
Brass nodded. His mouth was a straight line, lips pressed tight. "Said he might as well stick around and see if he had to go to a funeral."
A nice long one - - hope you enjoy!
**
Chapter Eight: Pretty Maids All in a Row
**
"Martin matched the blood to - - surprise - - Greg."
Sara buried her head in her hands, fingers pushing up strands of dark hair. "Please tell me that there's more to it than that." She had popped two aspirin on the way back from West Palms, and fallen asleep with her head on Nick's shoulder. Nathan had claimed a previous engagement and sauntered off with a bounce in his step, convinced he'd had the final word and the final victory over them. Grissom had never met a man more prone to creating homicidal feelings in those he left behind.
"There is," he assured her. "There were traces of XX blood mixed in, and he isolated those and came back with not just a profile . . . but a match."
"CODIS?"
"Not CODIS. Our database." He handed her the glossy print-out, with its sleek picture of a young woman. He watched her smile grow. He had smiled himself the second he had seen the image with the accompanying statistics - - the age was twenty-six, the hair was the cheap artificial blonde, and the listed hometown was New York.
"Melissa Sharpe. Tech?"
"Cadet. On her way to a Level One position, according to her supervisor."
"You talked to her supervisor. Did you get her brought in for questioning?"
He pulled the sheet of paper gently away from her. "Brass has her right now." The rage and repulsed feeling of being near Nathan Sanders had vanished, and so had the dismal fear of the threat coming true - - he had received the single bit of news that could perk him up, and it had. Fresh evidence was even better than Blue Hawaiian for new bursts of energy, and he'd needed it. He still hadn't clocked out once since the beginning of yesterday's shift, and he was feeling old and overripe. A hot shower was what he needed, but Melissa Sharpe was what he wanted, and what, fortunately, he had.
Sara looked like it was having the same revitalizing effect on her. "By now, I should know better than to doubt you, right?"
He tapped Melissa's photograph. "You should."
With the pace they set from the break room, they should have made it to Brass and Melissa in record time, but Catherine, Warrick, and Nick had other plans. They practically ambushed the pair around the corner and demanded why they couldn't be part of the interrogation. All hardened eyes and flashing tempers, and Grissom was suddenly aware that they looked less like a team and more like a mob. They were thirsting for blood - - although that was not the easiest thing to tell them.
He pointed at Catherine. "I need you to heckle Bobby into finish identifying that gun for us. If we can trace it to Melissa, we'll have an even stronger case."
"That explains Catherine," Nick said. "Not me and Warrick."
"I need Warrick - -" Grissom hesitated to fabricate some response, and was saved again when his pager went off. With a click, he freed it and handed it to Warrick. "- - to answer this page from Martin in DNA."
Warrick took it with a sigh. "This thing just saved your ass, you know that?"
"I can guess," he said dryly, and as Warrick left, he turned to Nick.
"Why not me?"
Grissom was blunt. "Greg's your best friend. You're emotionally involved in the case."
"That's the pot calling the kettle black, man. You didn't take this case just because it interested you." Nick scowled and tapped his watch. "We've been clocked in for hours. You haven't gone home either. We're ALL emotionally involved in the case."
Grissom closed his eyes. "You can't touch her in there, Nick. Whatever she says - - whatever she does - - we can't give her grounds to even SUSPECT that this case means more than any other."
"I won't."
"Good, because you can't."
"I'm not going to snap, Griss." Nick's eyes were, in truth, weirdly calm. "You can trust me."
He took Nick's elbow then, as they walked, and laid out ground rules. "If you lose it in there, then I want you to get out before you can do something you'll regret later. If you can't take it, then just leave - - I won't hold it against you. But try to stay calm, because one wrong word, one lost temper, and she'll have something to tell her lawyer. Remember, she's a cadet. She knows how this all works."
"Who's going to calm you down, if you lose your temper?" Nick asked, voice even. "Or Sara? We're all on the same side here, Griss."
"If I lose my temper," Grissom said, "I'm going to leave the room. Are you satisfied with that?"
Nick nodded. They met up with Sara, who very studiously avoided reacting to Nick's presence. In a whisper of steel, all three of them entered the interrogation room, seeing Brass, and then having their first impression of Melissa Sharpe.
She was small-boned and looked delicate. Her long blonde hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the nape of her neck, and before he saw her face, Grissom's immediate thought was that she looked fragile, almost breakable. But her expression was smug, small nose upturned, and smirking at Brass as if he were a show put on for her amusement.
Grissom saw nothing in her eyes. It was like looking at twin blue buttons. Light winked and reflected off the surfaces, but behind that, there was nothing else. It was disquieting.
He didn't offer her his hand, but leaned instead against the table. "Melissa, I'm Gil Grissom, and these are my colleagues, Sara Sidle and Nick Stokes." Respective nods completed, he fetched Greg's photograph from his folder with a tiny pang. The young man was smiling at the camera, doe- brown eyes lit up with laughter. A particularly bad hair day in that image - - though he was sure Greg would have liked it. It looked like how Warrick had gelled it in the hospital room.
"Do you recognize this man?"
She barely glanced at the photo. "Sure. Greg Sanders."
"Did you two know each other?"
"Yes, Dr. Grissom," she said, her voice still irritatingly sure. "As I'm sure you've realized by now, I was with him last night at Body Shots. I met him when he was working on dayshift's spillover and we arranged to meet after work."
"And so you did."
"Yes. We did."
"Who picked the location?"
"I did. I'm sure that excites you."
"It interests us," Sara said, stepping in. "Can you explain to us why your blood ended up at the crime scene where Greg was found?"
"Easily. We got into a fight before we left the bar. I took out on him and he chased after me. I told him to leave me alone, but he wouldn't go away." Her smile was reflective but, again, as empty as her eyes. "He became forceful. There was a beer bottle on top of the dumpster and I hit him with it, just once, on the head."
"And somehow, he ended up lying unconscious in an alleyway, shot through the head," Grissom said. "Can you explain that?"
"No. He was dazed. I left."
Nick leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Do you really expect us to believe that Greg tried to force you into doing anything?"
"I could sign a statement, if you like, Mr. Stokes."
"We'll back up for a moment," Grissom continued, with a warning glance at Nick. "You said that you and Greg fought at the bar before you stormed out. May I ask the subject of the argument?"
"I was interested in another date; he wasn't. He kept making excuses."
Nick snorted. "So, tell us, how exactly do we make the elaborate jump from Greg not wanting to be with you again to Greg trying to assault you in an alleyway not ten minutes later?"
Melissa shrugged. "People are inexplicable, Mr. Stokes. I'm sure you know that."
"You wouldn't mind having a clock examination, would you?" Sara's voice was light, but her expression was forcedly cheerful, trying to project the we're-all-on-your-side image. "So we can verify your account, prove that there was some kind of sexual assault?"
For the first time, Melissa seemed rattled. "Things didn't progress that far."
"So you agree that you might have been acting prematurely in hitting him."
"No. I don't agree to that," she said. "He was trying to get to that point, luckily, he didn't, because I didn't let him."
All the fake-warmth drained out of her voice, Sara said, "No, you didn't let him do anything, did you? You drugged his drink, you hit him on the head, and then you tried to kill him, but you screwed it up, and now - - we have you."
"No, we don't." Warrick had entered without them noticing and stood, arms crossed, frowning. "I talked to Martin. He checked the samples from under Greg's fingernails. Epithelial cells and blood are all a perfect match to each other, and they're XY. Male. Ran it through CODIS, but no hits."
"That just proves that he didn't scratch her," Nick pointed out. "That could have been from an earlier struggle - - or she could have had help."
Warrick had apparently taken notice of Melissa, who had turned on her charm again, and was smiling at him. "It gets better. Trace analyzed Greg's beer from Body Shots. It came back positive for dipthalamine."
"I've heard of that."
"It's a depressant with some hypnotic side-effects. Pretty trippy stuff, and illegal as hell. Hard to find, these days, that's why it took so long to identify. Dipthalamine isn't one of the first things we check for in a toxic-screening."
"We can't hold her," Brass said grimly. "Not on blood at a crime scene. Her story stands for now."
Melissa nodded at him and sauntered out of the room with a pleasant goodbye to each of them. She offered her hand to Grissom, who turned from her to face the rest of his team, ignoring the outstretched appendage. Once she was gone, he struck the table with the side of his hand, scattering papers and almost smashing against Brass's mug of coffee.
"She's lying to us." His voice was thick with anger.
"We know that Greg wouldn't have tried to force her," Nick said. "That's obvious. Could it be a hit, do you think? Maybe she paid someone to kill Greg, and the plan backfired?"
Sara sighed. "We'd need a motive. Right now, we don't have one."
Warrick settled against the table. "Dipthalamine has some side-effects that you don't want to know about. It never was a fun recreational drug. Asylums used it, back in the day, for patients that were out of control. It causes severe REM malfunctioning, gives the user the feeling that they're trapped in a dream-world. And with a coma on top of the effects - -"
"Greg's going through hell," Nick said bitterly. "Are you . . . are you saying that while he's sleeping in that room, he's hallucinating?"
"It's possible," Grissom said. "It's never been entirely determined whether or not coma victims dream or have any mental activity. The usual opinion is that they don't, but several have claimed, once awakened, that they dreamed."
He had to try and stay on the facts to keep his voice calm. After all the worry about Nick losing his temper, he had been the one to nearly lose his. Melissa's carefully blank expression and obvious lies were driving him to the brink, and the evidence that had sent her back out had done little for him. He had wanted to resolve it, tie it up. Feel the closure he was always supposed to feel. And now this - - now knowing that Greg wasn't sleeping peacefully, knowing that he might be screaming in some nightmarish hallucination behind those closed eyes . . .
"Has anyone heard anything about Nathan?" he asked, rubbing his temples.
"I did." Brass was gathering up the last of the files off the clean steel table. "He called my office not an hour ago, wanting to see how the investigation was going. Said that you quarreled earlier."
"That's putting it mildly."
"It's not usually a good idea to wrestle it out with a grieving father, Grissom," Brass said dryly. "Not to mention that it's not in good taste."
"You didn't meet him," Sara said. "He threatened to pull the plug on Greg's support systems. I was hoping that he'd go home."
"He's here. Room at the Siesta Inn."
"Did he say why he's staying?"
Brass nodded. His mouth was a straight line, lips pressed tight. "Said he might as well stick around and see if he had to go to a funeral."
