Author's Note: Man thanks to my betas, you guys don't know how much I truly appreciate you.
Chapter Two
Shall We Dance?
Five silhouettes momentarily stood in the doorway, observing the scene. Setting the stage for them, a man lay dead in the large ballroom. The heaviness of the atmosphere surrounded them, swirling along the floor and around their feet. The room reeked of alcohol and steak dinners. Streamers and confetti littered the floor giving a pseudo-festive appearance. Not even an hour ago, the room had been filled with music, dancing, and laughter. Now, it was deserted of all its patrons save one.
Nick, Warrick, and Sara moved to one side of the doors and donned their gloves. Catherine started to follow suit when she noticed that Grissom seemed transfixed on something. She followed his gaze to a large metallic object that looked like a mutated saltshaker.
"...som! Earth to Grissom!"
Grissom started at the sound of irritation in her voice. There was something that he could not put his finger on, something that sent a flare of warning up in the back of his mind.
Catherine looked at him expectantly. "Well?"
"Right," Grissom mentally shook his head to clear his mind. "Nick, Sara, process the body. Warrick, start processing the room; Catherine-"
"Catherine. Grissom." Detective James Brass approached them. This was the first time the entire team had managed to get past his watchful eye. "The victim's name is Timothy Marks, age 39. No one saw anything. He was alive when the lights went out. Lights came back on and he was on the floor, dead. We've also got reports of theft. Three wallets, a purse, and three necklaces were taken during the blackout."
"Excuse me, Detective Brass? There's a call for you at the front desk." The young bellhop who interrupted the briefing looked past the two investigators into the room, his face turning pale as he observed Nick and Sara photographing the corpse before the coroner's office bagged it.
"Shall we dance?" Grissom asked as he turned to his companion and gestured to the spot where Nick and Sara stood. Catherine smiled at his soft remark. She had missed working with Grissom. Okay, technically, she worked with him everyday, but they rarely worked on the same case anymore. Most of all, she missed his sense of humor.
"Looks like a knife wound to the heart," David said when they approached.
Grissom nodded his head to acknowledge the information. "Sara, go with the body."
Sara nodded and packed up her things and left, leaving the others to process the rest of the room.
"He was poisoned, shot, and stabbed?" Warrick asked after filling his coffee mug and turned to face the other two in the room, disbelief written on his face. Warrick and Nick had just returned momentarily from the hotel and dropped off their evidence. Sara was already waiting for them in the lounge to hear from the rest of the team.
"That's what Doc Robbins told me," Sara answered taking a sip. "So what did you guys find after I left?"
"A knife and a discarded outfit were found in a large metal container. Catherine is waiting for the clothes to dry. Warrick and I found way too many fingerprints."
"Have you guys seen Catherine?" Greg's voice interrupted as he popped his head into the break room in search of the senior female.
Grissom looked at the metal container he had spotted almost immediately at the scene. There were no fingerprints to be found inside or out. He picked up a magnifying glass and looked closely at the edge of the object. Selecting a pair of tweezers, he pulled the threads that caught his attention, put them in an envelope, and tagged it.
"Grissom, have you- Cool!" Greg's voice echoed through the silent lab.
"Have I what, Greg?"
"Oh, have you seen Catherine recently? I have the results from the stains she found on the clothes," Greg explained. "Is this what I think it is?"
"Did you try paging her?" Grissom asked ignoring Greg's obvious interest in the object he was examining.
"Yeah. She's not answering her cell and no one is answering at her house," Greg replied still eyeing the object of Grissom's inspection. Archie had told him what it was a while back when the public broadcast station ran several episodes of the show during a pledge drive.
"Strange. Linds-" Grissom stopped talking as he remembered where Lindsey was. He set down the magnifying glass and sealed envelope on the bench. On his way out, he took the results that Greg still held before walking out, "Thanks, Greg. I'll make sure she gets this."
The gentle breeze stirred her hair, causing several locks to fly into her face. She could feel the warmth from the sun on her skin as she stood by the wooden fence. Daisies, dandelions, and bluebells covered the rolling fields. The songs of birds filled the air, accompanied by the sound of a nearby babbling brook and the rustling of leaves in the wind. It was a perfect day to go riding.
As she stood drinking in the scenery around her, a milk chocolate steed approached her. He nudged her shoulder as a voice on the wind gently whispered her name. Ignoring the oddly familiar voice, she mounted the horse and they took off at a gallop. Her hair floated back and she began to see the ground fall away as she rode up into the clouds.
"Catherine." Grissom finally found his missing co-worker on his office couch. This wasn't an unusual place for him to find her. In the past, she had taken to grabbing short catnaps here, but that was before everything happened. He leaned closer to her ear, his breath stirring a few strands. "Catherine, it's time to wake up."
"Horses can't talk," she mumbled sleepily. Grissom never knew that she talked in her sleep. In fact, he never knew her to be this tired so early in a shift. Glancing at his watch, he realized that it was actually later in the shift than he thought. He moved to try again, this time poking her shoulder.
"Catherine, I got those results from the clothes you wanted." This time his words sunk in, Catherine's eyes opened immediately in shock, and her head just missed connecting with his. Grissom stood up from his squatted position and waited for the initial wave of adrenaline to wear off before handing her the report. "The blood stains came from our victim."
"How long was I out?" she asked after reading through the analysis. The nap and adrenaline in her system had woken her up enough to focus on the case, but part of her just refused to wake up completely. The clock on the wall ticked behind them, never stopping to allow her the wishful thought that she had only just closed her eyes before Grissom's wake up call.
"I don't know, about half an hour. Greg spent twenty minutes looking for you before coming to me."
"I'm sorry; I only meant to lie down for ten minutes. I'll just go-"
"Catherine, go home," Grissom interrupted. His guilt, although not evident on the outside, plagued his mind ever since he found her in his office sleeping. He knew Catherine well enough to see the worry that none of the others could. Although it rarely appeared that she worried about anything, she was a mother- and that meant she worried constantly about Lindsey.
"No, I'm fine now. Just need some caffeine to shake loose a few cobwebs, that's all."
"Go home," Grissom insisted. "You should've taken today off."
"Grissom, really, I'm fine. Lindsey called before I went to sleep. She got there just fine. Everyone was waiting for her when her plane landed." Catherine placed a hand on his arm to assure him of her words. He took her hand in his and helped her stand up. She proceeded to turn and fold up the light fleece blanket that he kept in the office before looking back at him.
Grissom looked at her skeptically then sighed. She would not go home, no matter how much he insisted. "Okay. Go get your coffee, then meet me in the bay."
Catherine nodded, yawning as she left his office heading for the only drink that would wake her up. Grissom watched her leave before looking down at his desk. He had forgotten to turn the page on his calendar. He flipped the page over and kicked himself for not realizing that Lindsey was going to be gone for the rest of the summer. The date stared back at him and underneath, written in capital letters, was a reminder to send Catherine home at the beginning of the shift. Grissom left the office and made his way back to the metal object he had been examining before Greg's interruption.
"But Lindsey didn't like having the flight attendant checking on her every ten minutes," Catherine said smiling for the first time that morning. It was six in the morning, and Grissom declared that it was time for a briefing. Like most plans, it started out smoothly until Sara asked about Lindsey's trip.
Grissom looked down at his notes to figure out the best way to finish the meeting without seeming callous. He did not have a chance to talk with Al yet about the details of the post mortem, but he had over heard Sara and Nick say something about the killer wanting to make sure this person was dead.
"So what killed our victim?" Catherine asked, suddenly deflecting the onslaught of questions that the younger CSIs were asking. Catherine had spied the look of momentary irritation in the eyes of their supervisor. She suppressed the yawn that wanted to escape as she received three separate answers.
"Poison."
"Stabbed in the heart."
"Shot in the heart."
All three answers came at once. Nick, Sara, and Warrick grinned as though they had prepared the simultaneous answer earlier, knowing that Catherine had not heard the cause of death yet.
"Poisoned, stabbed, and shot?" she repeated. "That's a little overkill, don't you think." The three criminalists shrugged their shoulders and waited for Grissom to speak.
"According to the tox screen, arsenic was found in minute levels in the blood stream and a hair analysis confirms that Timothy Marks had been administered arsenic over the last few months," Grissom summarized. He briefly shared the report from Firearms Identification.
The small caliber bullet had still been lodged in the victim's heart at the time of the post mortem. Perpendicular to the body of the bullet, the examiner found a scratch that had been made after it entered the heart. They could safely assume that the gun used was silenced. There was nothing in the database that matched the markings on the recovered bullet. The gun used had been approximately twenty feet from the victim. The stab wound was from a double-edged knife. One thing was certain: the killer knew his victim and anatomy. He or she was also very lucky.
