DISCLAIMER: If you recognise them, they aren't mine. Yeah.
A/N: Sorry about the delay with this chapter. I'm on holidays now, so hopefully I'll be able to get the rest of it up in the next two weeks. As always, thanks to everyone who's reviewed, and all reviews, constructive or otherwise, are always appreciated.
All of Caroline Flynn's friends seemed to be possessed of large amounts of black clothing and absolutely no information that was relevant to the investigation. Apparently they'd all been too drunk that night in the warehouse to remember who was there. Some seemed almost not to care, and no about of tact, charm, or demanding could get anything out of them. The others were genuinely upset, both about Caroline's death and about the fact that they couldn't help. Those were the girls Greg felt sorry for.
After three hours, he and Warrick were no closer to discovering who had raped and murdered Caroline.
With everything else that was going on in the lab - the sporadic media appearances, Nick and Sara's absence, Grissom closeted in his office and Internal Affairs snooping around - it would have been good to have put an end to the Flynn case. The case had been the start of all the problems, and with the case still open it seemed like the problems, too, would be ongoing.
Greg knew that closing the case wouldn't get IA off everyone's backs, or solve anything else, but at least it would feel like they'd accomplished something. Besides, he wanted to get this guy for Sara's sake.
To Greg, the guns that they all carried had always seemed somewhat unreal. Oh, he knew all about guns - and he knew damn well what they could do - but despite it all, despite what he really knew about the dangers of working in the field, he'd never really thought that any of them would have to fire their guns in defence. It felt like the invisible barrier between them and the crimes they investigated every night had melted away into nothingness.
He could tell that the case, and everything else, was bugging Warrick, too. He hadn't said much for a while, except to question those girls.
Those girls. The all-too-human reminders of what had happened to Caroline Flynn. What had happened to Caroline could have happened to any of those girls in their black clothes. Did some of their mourning for their friend come from a guilty relief?
Greg shook his head and stood up. The last of the girls had gone, and he and Warrick had been sitting in silence in the interrogation room. It was time to go home and try to sleep, try to find some normality in life. "Come on," he said to Warrick, who was gazing somewhere in the distance. "I guess we're finished for now."
Grissom should have been at home. Catherine knew this, and she also knew he was blaming himself for far too many things, and that arguing with him wasn't going to help. She entered his office without knocking first, the weight of her self-assumed responsibility for him heavy about her body. "You hungry?"
Grissom shrugged. "No."
"When did you last eat?"
"Yesterday, I suppose."
Catherine watched him. He had all the grace of a sullen child when he got like this. She seemed to use much of the same skills in dealing with Grissom that she used to deal with Lindsey in one of her teenage moods. If it wasn't for all that she owed him, and for respect of their long friendship, Catherine suspected she would have resented the time she spent coping with him. He was the boss. He should have been holding them all together, not cooped up in his office staring at papers and dwelling on things. Catherine remembered what had happened with Holly Gribbs, and how he'd kept them all going then, and what he had done for them on so many other occasions. But now, because of Sara and Nick, and this IA investigation, he had retreated into his shell.
He was probably blaming himself for IA's interest in the team. It was his "failures", as IA would see it, in discipline that had caused the investigation and thus the uncertain atmosphere in the department. Even the lab techs were subdued, and this unusual thing bothered Catherine probably more than it should have done. All they wanted, all they needed, was normality, and Grissom seemed unwillingly or unable to provide it.
"Well, come and get some breakfast with me," was all she said. Reproaches, reprimands - they were pointless when he got like this. "Now."
Grissom took a last look at some papers and stood up. He looked tired. "I'm not really hungry, Catherine."
"Well, I am. You need to get out of here. Move."
Grissom moved, slowly, and rather reluctantly. As they left, Catherine spotted Warrick and Greg returning from PD, neither of them looking happy.
There was no dealing with all three of them now. She couldn't fix them all. The solution had to start at the top, and it was probably going to involve pancakes. She gave Warrick and Greg a wave, and kept going.
The cafe around the corner from the lab remained a sign that some things, at least, never changed. Catherine decided on a table in the back corner: had it been her alone she would've sat in the window, to watch the world go by, but Grissom was in hibernating mode. "I guess you don't want to talk about it," she said, watching the waitress head for the kitchen with their orders. Grissom was fiddling with a napkin.
"I just feel very responsible for everything that's happened."
"Gil, you didn't make that man walk into that warehouse, brandishing a gun."
"We identified him, you know," said Grissom, dully.
"Yeah?" This was the first Catherine had heard of it, but then she'd been flat out all night, and Grissom hadn't exactly been communicative. Lab gossip had faded to a mere whisper.
"Raymond Ortega. Just arrived in Las Vegas. Unemployed. He was full up with methamphetamines."
"Do we know what he was doing in the warehouse, then?" Catherine asked once she'd absorbed this information.
"No. As he's just arrived it's unlikely he had any connection to anyone who was there the night Caroline Flynn was killed. He was staying with a friend nearby." There was still a distinct lack of animation in Grissom's voice, but at least he was conversing. This was a great improvement, in Catherine's mind.
"Well, what happened isn't your fault."
"I'm responsible for the team."
"You didn't make Sara fire that gun."
"Sara did what she had to do."
Catherine was watching Grissom's face, or as much as she could see as he kept his face down. Sara was a weak spot, as she'd suspected. For a second, pausing to gather her thoughts, Catherine wondered how Grissom would have reacted if that initial shot, that catalyst, had been fired by anyone else. Had it been her he wouldn't have been nearly so concerned; had it been Nick, Warrick or Greg he'd have been much more able to show how he felt. Everyone knew Grissom watched over his younger colleagues with a paternalistic air, but he was all too aware - as was Catherine, as were them all - of the ambiguity that had swirled around his relationship with Sara since the younger woman had arrived in Las Vegas. Because it was Sara, because of how he felt or didn't feel about her, this was harder for Grissom to cope with. It was probably just as big a problem as the IA investigation into the team as a whole.
"I'm worried about Sara," Grissom said, before Catherine came up with a response to his previous comment. A little startled, Catherine eyed him. "Why?"
"Well, she wasn't all right when you saw her, was she?"
"No," said Catherine, remembering.
"Kim Bolton and David Elliott aren't prepared to allow her back into the field yet. They'll let Nick back on Monday. Of course, neither of them can really tell me about Sara, but I gather they're both quite concerned."
"She's tough, Grissom. She'll get through whatever's going on," Catherine said with more belief than she felt. She'd been watching Sara for years, wanting to help but never quite knowing how, and all too often making things worse out of sheer thoughtlessness.
"I hope so."
"You still care about her, don't you?"
"Of course I care," Grissom replied, a little too defensively.
"That's not what I mean," Catherine said softly as the waitress brought their coffee and pancakes over.
"I don't want to talk about it, Catherine."
"Don't you think that's what got you into this mess with Sara?"
Grissom winced. "She's with Nick now. He can look after her."
As she ate her maple syrup covered pancakes in silence, Catherine thought about this statement. Grissom had said what she'd thought - that Nick could look after Sara. As she considered it though, she wondered if he could. With the probable exception of Sara, she was the only one who knew what burdens he carried with him. She'd done amateur psychoanalysis of Nick, and had come to the conclusion that he liked to make other people feel better because he couldn't make himself feel better. Between Nick's need to fix other people's problems and the demons which seemed to haunt Sara, they had the potential for a very unhealthy relationship. Even in a normal relationship, surely everyone shouldn't write it off as one partner looking after the other. Catherine kept these musings to herself, but couldn't prevent herself, like Grissom, from worrying, and wanting to worry, about them both.
Neither of them said anything for the duration of the meal. Grissom too had his own thoughts. As they paid up and left the cafe, Grissom spoke up. "If I've ruined all your careers by not punishing you when I should've done - I really am sorry, Catherine."
Focused as she had been on the problem of Nick and Sara's relationship, it took Catherine several seconds to drag her mind back to the other problem at hand, the one that had exacerbated the simple shooting. "Grissom," she said, "It's not going to come to that." And this time she really believed in her own reassurance. There was no way it was going to come to that - for any of them.
Kim Bolton looked up from her paperwork at the face peering round the edge of her partly-open door. Time for her first client of the evening, and it was bound to be a difficult start to the night. "Sara," she said, smiling, feeling the twinge of nerves she always felt when she knew she would have to push through the boundaries of a particular client. "Come in."
TBC...