Chapter 7
Expression
"If you go out there and give it your all no matter if you win or lose, you're still a hero."
-- unknown
Catherine had been working for hours and pulled up nothing. Not only were Jack Banning's records completely clear, she had gotten a call from Greg that said the dart that she and Grissom had found did not match the darts that had been found in the basement.
"Mommy?" Lindsey's small voice sounded from the door. Catherine, without looking up, acknowledged her presence.
"Yes, honey?"
"Come have lunch with us?" Catherine sighed, putting down the two darts she was holding on the large table in the middle of the room.
"I'm a little busy, Linds…"
"You haven't eaten anything for… a long time. Even Uncle Grissom is worried about you."
"Cath, come on," Grissom's soft voice urged. She finally turned to face them and shook her head.
"I'm not hungry, Griss. I don't want to eat."
"And if you don't, you'll starve yourself."
"No." She turned back and picked up the darts again. Grissom sighed and directed Lindsey out of the room for a moment.
"What is wrong? And don't tell me it's nothing, Catherine. You haven't been eating, you're not talking to any one… Lindsey's terrified. Her own mother is ignoring her." Catherine turned to face him, intent on giving him a piece of her mind. She hadn't, however, taken into account his possible movements in the last couple of minutes. He was standing right in front of her, his eyes angered and betrayed. Catherine moved to the side, he moved with her. She placed her hands on his chest and shoved him away slightly. His eyes flashed with hurt at Catherine's obvious withdrawal and watched as she made her way to the other side of the table.
"Don't run away from us, Catherine. We want to help."
"You want to help? Catch the culprits who killed those girls! Put Jack Banning in jail for assaulting a government official! I'm not the victim here, Grissom, I'm trying my best to figure out the perp!" Her voice rose in volume with each sentence and Grissom tried his best to keep his own voice calm. It wouldn't help for him to yell at her now too.
"Damnit Catherine, we're doing everything we can! But we as human beings need to sleep and eat! You can't have all work and you, of all people, should know that. How many times have you gotten on my case because I work too much? Don't you dare tell me this is different," Grissom's voice matched Catherine's in tone and volume. Neither was about to back down. He quickly moved to the other side of the table, grabbing her arm as she tried to run and swinging her back into his body.
"You can't pull away from me Catherine. I won't let you. Maybe the others, but not me." His voice had quieted substantially since the couple of seconds before. Catherine could feel some of the ice she had built up around her heart melting and she couldn't seem to get it to stop.
"I love you, Catherine, and that's why I won't let you pull away." Even if she had wanted to tell him that she didn't love him – of course, contradicting herself – she couldn't lie to him. She'd never been able to. She looked up into his eyes and let down the guards around her heart, letting him see all of the emotions running rampant underneath: the pain, the anger, the helplessness, uselessness, and the pain of her memories. Yet, under all of that he could see her love for him and her concern for Sara. He pulled her close to him as tears welled in her eyes and overflowed onto his shirt.
"It will be okay Cath," he said dropping little kisses onto her hair. "Everything will all work out in the end."
He felt her breathing even out and lifted her carefully into his arms. He turned to the door to find Lindsey, whom he had guessed watched the whole thing. With a reassuring smile in the little girl's direction, he carried Catherine down to her room.
"Lindsey, can you pull down the covers for your mom, please?" Grissom whispered. Lindsey quietly did as she was asked and Grissom laid Catherine in amongst the sheets. Turning to leave, Catherine's arm reached out and attached to his wrist.
"Stay?" The words were so quiet, Grissom thought he hadn't heard right. Looking down to Lindsey, he found her carefully climbing in with her mother. He followed suit, kicking off his shoes and climbing cautiously in behind Catherine. His arms wound around her waist, not surprised to find it slightly thinner than earlier. Catherine snuggled back into him resting her arm on top of his, subconsciously and wrapping her other one around her daughter.
The shrill ringing of a phone woke him hours later. He quickly but carefully, and reluctantly, pulled himself away from the sleeping women and searched for the source of the ringing. He found it in his cell phone.
"Grissom," he said curtly, holding back a yawn.
"Finally some one who will answer the phone!" Warrick's voice came through.
"No one's answering?"
"Catherine's cell and pager… no answer. I didn't try Sara, the hospital and all, and Nick's not answering his either. I even tried Catherine's house…" Grissom looked up to find Catherine's kitchen phone off the hook.
Lindsey must have thought of that while Cath and I were arguing, Grissom thought to himself.
"Problem?"
"Another woman found. This one's brutal, Griss. It wasn't just a dose of drug that killed her."
"What makes you think it was the same guy?"
"I don't. Look, just come, will ya?"
"Yeah, I'll see if I can get a hold of Catherine too." He hated to bring Catherine into all of this, but she would kill him if he didn't. Maybe he could convince her to pick up a bagel or something on the way.
"Great," Warrick replied, quickly giving him the address and hanging up. He turned around to find Catherine, he arms wrapped around herself, leaning against the door frame.
"What was that?"
"Warrick. We've got another dead girl." Catherine nodded solemnly moving to the closet to pick up her coat. Grissom stopped her, gripping both wrists lightly. She looked up at him, confused.
"Listen to me, Cath. You can go, on one condition." She looked at him expectantly.
"You have to eat something. I don't care if it's on the way or when we get back, but you have to eat something." Catherine glanced at him wearily. He wasn't going to give this up.
"Fine. We'll get a bagel on the way. What about Lindsey?"
"We'll drop her off at the crime lab on the way. I'm sure Greg would love to see her." Catherine moved back into the bedroom to wake Lindsey up and the two emerged moments later, unwrinkled. Grissom looked down at his own clothes, never more thankful for jeans in his life.
Greg was more than happy to see Lindsey when she walked through the lab doors. He had immediately agreed to 'baby-sit' her while Catherine and Grissom checked out the crime scene. She sat silently in the Tahoe, watching the scenery pass by until he pulled into a small shop. She knew what was coming and had hoped he would forget. Unfortunately for her – in her mind but of course fortunate for her body – he remembered. He hopped out of the Tahoe and was back in moments, carrying with him a small bag. He handed one of the bagels to Catherine and pulled back out of the parking lot. The Vegas streets were rather quiet for this time of day as the Tahoe manoeuvred through the transportation grid. The small townhouse that Grissom and Catherine pulled up to looked well kept, organized, but as Catherine and Grissom located Warrick in the bedroom, they realized the interior was anything but.
"Theories?" Grissom asked wearily. Warrick shrugged slightly as another flash from the camera in his hands illuminated the room.
"You take a look and tell me," Warrick replied waving at the bed sheets, stained a bloody red.
"Brutal was an understatement," Grissom quipped, taking in the gaping wounds. Setting down his kit and extracting a pair of rubber gloves, he reached out towards the victim's face. Out of the woman's mouth, he withdrew a piece of white cloth.
"She was a screamer," Catherine said, voice void of emotions as she too moved to inspect the victim.
"Here's the weirdest thing: there are fingerprints this time," Warrick said, pointing to the bloody marks on the windowsill. Grissom glanced at Catherine, moving towards the prints.
"You photographed?"
"Yeah, they haven't been lifted yet," Warrick replied, another flash illuminating the disaster that had been a bedroom.
"Who is she?" Catherine asked, thinking out loud.
"Lauren Bray," Brass' voice came from the doorway. "Haven't had a chance to ask Sara about her involvement with this one."
"Don't," Catherine shot, much harsher than she had meant. Her emotions were strained with each new case and each wrong turn. Even with sleep, Catherine was still on edge. Silence continued to reign in the small bedroom, the only sound being Catherine's movements as she continued to inspect the victim. Then it registered in her brain – the silence. She looked up into Warrick's stunned face before quickly darting her eyes to Grissom and Brass. She rolled her eyes at their looks of shock.
"I want to talk to her anyway," she clarified carefully, a vague and yet completely descriptive statement.
"Some one's getting sloppy," she murmured to herself, picking up a stray piece of hair that she had noticed on the pearl white sheet and dropping it in an evidence envelope. The rest of the room still hadn't moved, slightly stunned from Catherine's earlier lash.
"I have two incredible CSIs in the same room as me, a police captain and yet all they can do is stare. As much feminine pride as it really does give me – to even consider you're looking at me as a female – I really can't process this scene all on my own." Her words jolted Grissom out of his shock as he moved once again to the window to lift the prints that Warrick had pointed out. Warrick quickly resumed taking pictures of the crime scene, periodically stopping to take a closer look at this or that. Brass left the room, content to go harass the potential witnesses. Catherine glanced around the room again.
"What do we know?" she asked, half rhetorically, half wanting to know what her colleagues thought.
"She was raped," Warrick offered, taking a picture of yet another ripped pile of satin.
"Our perp came through the window," Grissom supplied. Catherine moved beside him and shrugged.
"Or left through the window, all bloodied up," she theorized. Grissom had noticed that she hadn't spoken directly to Warrick or Brass since she had arrived, and was only talking work. Even on a crime scene, Catherine and Warrick tended to have their own little banter sessions. Not this time.
"Find the wound?" Catherine asked, turning back to the body. There it was again, asking – talking – only when necessary, and nothing more.
"Bloody leg, but we haven't turned her over yet," Warrick replied. Catherine pulled down the bed sheet that was covering the victim. There was a slash wound in her thigh, the blood, however, had stopped flowing, but didn't stop the pool from beneath her to show. To say she had died in a pool of her own blood would be an understatement.
"Get her to Doc Robbins. We'll process further then." Warrick nodded, leaving the room to find Brass. Grissom moved closer to Catherine. Gently pinning her arms to her sides, he pulled her upright and turned her to face him.
"They won't be happy."
Catherine knew exactly what he had meant by that statement. When the team realized she was pulling away, they would not be happy with her at all. She was, after all, like the 'mother' to their CSI family.
"Grissom, I'm here to do a job, and do my job I will," she replied, trying to avoid what she knew to be the underlying words. Don't pull away. Well, in truth, it was too late now, wasn't it? She'd already started pulling away, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to be let back into the folds.
Then, she reasoned to herself, she had never, in her how many years of doing these cases, been this involved, this attached to any of her work. Not even during the Strip Strangler. They didn't need to be burdened, and she, in a way, wanted to do this case anyway. It had the potential to give her some closure on her past. Dealing with Sara had the potential to give her closure.
Speaking of Sara…
"I'll go see if Sara knows Lauren. If she does, we've got a connection, though probably not with Jack Banning. I'll meet you back at the lab in an hour, no more," Catherine said quietly to Grissom, pulling herself out of him embrace. He caught her just before she exited the door, pulling her to the wall beside. There he kissed her, quickly but full of hunger and a promise. She found some sense inside her to file that promise away for a time when she would need the comfort. Right now, her mind was focused on Sara and her latent connection to the woman lying dead on her bed.
The talk with Sara had been quick, Catherine being smart enough to file her more personal questions away for another time.
If I wasn't a CSI, Catherine mused to herself on her way back to the lab, I would make a bundle off of abuse counselling.
She hadn't known a Lauren Bray. That put Lauren in a completely different category than Ellen and Emily. She stopped right in the middle of the hallway and turned back, towards evidence. Lauren could wait. She pulled down the box with the sparse evidence collected at the scene of Ellen Bizet's death. Even saying sparse about the couple of bags would have been an understatement, but Catherine was determined to find something useful. Something that would make of break this case…
If it was the last thing she did.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
There we go. I have never realized how hard it could be to write a mystery-like story in my life. I'm sorry if it's getting confusing – I kinda lost track of where I was going – but hopefully things will turn around.
I also realize I'm slightly behind in Blossoming but I want to get this done first before working on the Sara/Nick side, just to get everything ironed out. Hopefully I will still have another chapter up in a day or two, though.
Coming soon:
Catherine builds her shellLindsey tries again to help her mother
Lauren Bray's murder leads to new inspections of the murders of Ellen Bizet and Emily Turner
Grissom opens up to some one unexpectedEnjoy!
~Kavi Leighanna