Good job (and kudos) to everyone who noticed what I believe to be the last of the religious parallels. Yes, Hodges equals Judas, and yes, Judas hanged himself after the betrayal. This chapter has a little calming-down at the ending of it, but we still have a lot of messes to work through before the end, including (just to tantalize you) a shooting, a kidnapping, a couple revelations, and more bad things happening to good people.

Like I said, I believe in warning people - - as long as the warnings are really, really vague.

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Chapter Thirty: Suicide Novel (CATHERINE)

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"The part that bothers me the most," Catherine said, "is the drama."

"The drama?" Warrick had his back to her, studying Hodges's body, and he didn't turn around. She could tell from the stiffness in his back how upset he was - - every muscle seemed tenser than usual. He had been close-mouthed all night, part of which she chalked up to grief for Greg - - Lord knew she was having her own trouble coping with that - - but the other part was probably the unmistakable burden of having to take command. She'd seen it written in Grissom's stature after he'd been promoted.

"The drama," Catherine said, "of the suicide note. He was trying to do the right thing, I'll give him that, but he played it up, too."

The suicide note that they had found began with, I'd like to make a formal confession. Catherine had studied enough creative writing in school to know an obvious hook when she saw one, as if Hodges had been trying to compel them to read onwards, even though he knew that they wouldn't just toss a suicide note away because it wasn't Pulitzer Prize-winning material.

"He knew that this was going to have an effect on us, so he heightened it," she continued. "The hanging is a riff off Greg's - -" She couldn't say the word. Crucifixion seemed stuck in her teeth, glued there. She swallowed, and the feeling didn't go away. " - -death. Greg's death. Judas hanged himself, ergo the Biblical significance, and Hodges turns out to be just as much a drama queen as whoever did this to Lizzie Zimmer and Greg."

Following the hook, the suicide letter went on and on, almost rambling. Drama or not, Hodges hadn't been in his clearest state of mind when he wrote it. Parts of it were highlighted, as if he'd wanted to draw their attention so that the words jumped out of the page. Conspiracy. Flowers. Mistakes. Nothing was clear or concise, but what they had been able to understand were the identities that he had penned out most lucidly, and clearly, at the beginning of the letter.

I'd like to make a formal confession. I am responsible for the deaths of Elizabeth Zimmer and Greg Sanders, but I am not singularly complicit in them. The other involvement came from Abraham Claberson, who assisted in making the rape allegation, Matthew Flowers, who raped and killed Zimmer and murdered Sanders, and Conrad Ecklie.

Ecklie was the one who came to me first and later asked me to steal the evidence.

Sara and Brass had gone back almost immediately to take Ecklie into custody, and Warrick had Nick looking for Abraham Claberson. Catherine didn't know if that was the best idea - - Nick had a strange, haunted look about him, and instead of seeing through him, as she could have always done before, she saw nothing. It was if someone had closed a series of doors leading to this thoughts, and she was left with nothing but flickers of brief, painful emotion. Since his run to the morgue, Nick had simply shut down entirely. He was acting as if he had killed Greg, but if anyone had the right to be guilty about that - - well, anyone outside Hodges's circle - - it was:

Me. Because Grissom may never have laid a hand on Greg, but I sure did. And the sound was enough to make everyone look up and start paying attention, but not enough. Too little, too late.

He hadn't even tried to hit her back, or cut her again with some sarcastic remark. He'd just sat there, his hand on his cheek against the scarlet marks her fingers had left, and looked like he should have expected it. Like he'd known all along that something like this was bound to happen to him someday.

That was the drama that really bothered her the most.

"You didn't send anyone to look for Flowers," she said, changing the subject.

Warrick still wasn't looking at her, just staring at Hodges, as if he were going to start speaking any second now. Catherine thought that was unlikely. Hodges had said everything he could think of and then he had simply gotten the rope and taken the step.

"That's because looking for Matt Flowers is going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack," Warrick said. "Damn hard to impossible."

"You're not going to just let him walk away?"

The disbelief in her voice startled her. She sounded like a rookie, as if she were still under the impression that all the bad guys got caught at the end of the day and the good guys went home and tucked their daughters into bed and told those same daughters the bedtime stories that would make them believe like rookies, too. She sounded like Greg, and that was what was giving her trouble, she sounded like she still had that damned innocence engraved in her somewhere, that confidence born of the assurance that there were happy endings and real heroes.

Warrick finally turned around. He'd lost weight in the last few days, and looked haggard instead of heroic.

But, then again, Catherine didn't believe in happy endings anyway. She didn't want Warrick to be her knight. She wanted Warrick for something more elementary than that - - not just sex, though. There was more going on there than just a flash of attraction. She wanted to be able to be comforted, wanted to be able to open up, and Warrick had once seemed like the kind of man that would let her do that, that would love her for doing that. Warrick had once seemed like the kind of man she could love, and let herself be loved by. Last week, it would have been a possibility so close to her that she could feel it moving, almost breathing.

This week, it was dissolved and fading. Too much tension, too much stress. And like Greg, she should have known. Love caused more problems than it solved.

"No," Warrick said. "I couldn't do that. But it's going to be a damn sight harder than I'd like to even know where to start. Hodges never even met him." He motioned to the suicide note. "Outside of Ecklie, that's all conjecture. Rumors. He leaves a suicide note full of rumors. How helpful."

"I feel sorry for him," Catherine said. "Drama or not. He didn't know."

According to the note, he hadn't known, and the honest agony that seemed to come through there, even through all the theatrical overtones, seemed to prove it. Ecklie had asked him to steal the evidence in Grissom's case not to implicate Grissom further, but to overturn Flowers's plans. Flowers was the one running the show, in the end, and Ecklie, Claberson, Hodges - - hell, even Lizzie - - were just observers. Not innocent observers, but practically passive ones.

Hodges had been trying to do the right thing, and that burned. He'd taken the evidence and hidden it - - they'd found it all in his closet, still sealed - - because he and Ecklie had been trying to frustrate Flowers enough so that he would leave.

I think that Sanders died because of what I did, Hodges had written, and even if I could live with the rest of this, I can't live with that. We weren't friends, don't make the mistake of believing that. But I KNEW him. I saw him every day and then I heard what happened. We didn't scare Flowers away, we just made Flowers up the ante. Greg was implicated in stealing the evidence, so Greg would have to die, to cast even more suspicion on Grissom.

I gave Grissom motive for murder, and Flowers used it.

"He tried to do the right thing," Warrick admitted, "but it would've helped if he'd known what that was." He struck out, suddenly, and his hand knocked the suicide note out from between her fingers. "Dammit, Catherine. He should have come to us. We could've done something. We all could have stopped this at the very beginning, when Ecklie first asked Hodges to stand by and be ready if he needed something. That's what he says, and whether or not he tried to do the right thing later doesn't matter, because he had his chance back before anyone died, and he didn't take it!"

Hodges said, He told me to be ready in case he needed my help. He told me that he wouldn't forget my assistance. There are more important things than raises, he said, and asked what Grissom had ever really done for me. He asked for me to keep quiet until he asked, and I did.

I did. Because I wanted more than I had.

She picked the note up off the floor. "He left us this, at least. A whole novel of a suicide note."

"Yeah. A novel where he points to Flowers as the kingpin and then gives us nothing on how to find him."

"He gave us Ecklie," Catherine said, "and he said that Ecklie could identify Flowers."

She looked at Hodges, now nothing but a body, a memory, and a suicide novel. He had bite-marks on his tongue and painful ligature around his throat. She didn't need Robbins to point out that this was the genuine article, as far as suicides went. Poor Hodges, she thought, almost absently, didn't he know that no matter what he gave us, it wouldn't be enough to cancel out what he didn't give? He tried - - but it wasn't enough. And no one's grieving for him now.

"You want to talk to Ecklie?" he asked.

"I want to kill Ecklie," she admitted blithely. "No, don't let me in there. It wouldn't be a good idea. I don't know if I could stop myself if he said something about Greg. I hit him, Warrick. You were there. I blamed him and I hit him and now he's dead. And it doesn't matter if I apologized before he died or not, he still died with that bruise on his face."

Warrick's face was impassive, but he touched her shoulder, and even through the latex gloves, his hand was warm.

"He wouldn't have blamed you," Warrick said.

"I know that." She smoothed the wrinkled suicide novel again. It was held together by paper clips and tied together with insanity, scribbles of black ink on white paper as if everything were so simple as to be described in plain words. For all his brilliance, Hodges hadn't understood that. It must have taken him hours to write it. If they had started looking for him earlier, they might have still found him penning it. One more person they hadn't been able to save.

"I know that," she said again, "and that's why it hurts so much."

"You didn't mean to hurt him."

"Hodges didn't mean to hurt anybody, either."

"Don't compare the two things," Warrick said. "They're different. Hodges could have stopped this all if he had wanted to. It only got to be too much when it started involving him - - when it touched him. You read it: he saw Greg every day. They weren't friends, but Greg existed to him in a way that Zimmer didn't. One death wasn't enough. It took a whole other death to convince Hodges that maybe enough was enough. You aren't like him. You couldn't have done anything."

Catherine moved the paper clip across the paper. It made a rustling sound.

Pain and fear and loneliness. Hurt and need and want. She was more like Hodges than Warrick would ever be willing to see.

"Are we friends, Warrick?"

It was a mark of how far the two of them were gone that he had to pause, to think, instead of answering immediately. Then he leaned forward a little and kissed her cheek. She closed her eyes at his touch, and it was all the answer she was going to need, or all that she was going to ask for. If she could still love Warrick, then there was hope. And if Warrick could still love her, then there were miracles. She could doubt and look back all she wanted, now, because she couldn't stop herself anymore. She'd lost her sense of self-preservation.

"We're friends, Catherine," he said, and his voice was so gentle that she had to believe him.

They sat down to read the suicide novel again, and she could almost hear David Hodges's voice as he charted, with such precision, how things had gone wrong.