Wow. It's been a while - - a long while - - and I can't say how sorry I am. I haven't been writing much of anything, lately, so this story wasn't neglected anymore than anything else - - but I had a startling case of writer's block, and I tried to break it by experimenting through different fandoms and different mediums, and, after writing some shockingly bad poetry and rereading the last few chapters - - I think I've picked this up on the right track again. And are we in the last inning now, or what? Bottom of the ninth, and we have - - Nick. Then, I think, Warrick, Flowers, Catherine, Grissom, and . . . the epilogue. It may be a little extended, but that's the basic plan.

Again, I sincerely apologize about the wait, and I only hope that this chapter and the ones that follow it can, at least partially, make up for it.

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Chapter Thirty-five: The Lawyer's Confession (NICK)

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Abraham Claberson had lost weight since Nick had first met him. Far from seeming like one of Those People, Claberson now looked as if he had recently escaped from some Third World country. His expensive suit hung on his body like so much loose skin, and his eyes has lost the glimmer of brilliance, and were instead dull from lack of sleep. All of his shine had rubbed off - - and that, Nick thought, half-asleep himself, was the beauty of Las Vegas: it could destroy what was formerly so beautiful. Robert Frost: nothing gold can stay.

Claberson looked everything but golden now. He was shaking, his hands clamped to his upper arms so tightly that Nick could count the ribbons of flesh through his fingers. The suit puffed around him, enlarged by the pressure and the loss of weight. Claberson was hollow.

Nick said, "Tell me everything."

Claberson licked his lips. "He'll kill me. If I tell you, he'll kill me."

"Who, Flowers? Flowers will kill you anyway."

Claberson jerked his head to both sides, and for a moment, Nick wasn't sure if the man was telling him no, or if he was having a seizure. "No, no, not Flowers. Flowers won't kill me. Flowers won't kill me because I told him, but what I tell you will make him kill me. Dr. Grissom."

"Grissom?"

Grissom was watching them now, from behind the glass. Nick didn't have to be told this to know. It was like someone's cold hand on the back of his neck, Grissom's eyes on him. Grissom had let him be the one to question Claberson when Claberson had stumbled into the station, looking disheveled and generally pathetic, but Nick had no illusions about what Grissom thought of his capabilities. Grissom was watching. Big Brother, right? Behind the glass.

Nick fought the urge to look behind him. "Grissom's not here."

"You'll tell him."

Nick pushed his hands against the table, not hard enough to call it a strike. "Fuck, man, you have to tell me something. You're an accessory to two murders!"

"Three," Claberson said. "There were three."

He hadn't slept for the last two days, and his mind made the only connection it could through the haze. He saw the hanged man swinging back and forth in his vision like a pendulum, and said, dazed, "Hodges? Hodges didn't kill himself?"

"He did," Claberson said. "He got it over with, I suppose." He smiled emptily at Nick, and the expression was eerily unsettling. It was as if there were nothing there, as if the last of Claberson had finally vacated the building. "And your wedding. Your brother - - you were never going to a wedding," he said, slowly. "You were investigating Elizabeth."

"Zimmer, yeah."

"I loved her."

"And Flowers killed her," Nick said, unable or unwilling to summon compassion for Claberson right now. His head was still hurting with too many memories of Greg. "So tell us what you can, so we can catch the bastard and put him where he belongs."

"I was at Harvard with her," Claberson continued, as if Nick had never spoken. "I was there. I was seeing her when it happened - - when she was raped. She broke my heart." Claberson made a lazy crisscrossing gesture over his chest. "And I was there when Dr. Grissom was there, you know. And your - - your Sara Sidle. I went to the seminar, because Elizabeth wanted to go."

"You went to Grissom's seminar?"

"I saw," Claberson said. "Everyone saw, but I knew what it meant."

There were no cigarettes left to shred. His hands dug into his pockets in frustration, unable to find anything to tear. His fingers pushed into soft fabric, and he fought to keep his composure. So damn frustrating, though, not being able to get anything out of him, as if Claberson were not a person but a music box, who could only come to the right notes in the song at the right time. And nothing he could say could make Claberson play faster. Nothing. He had wound him up, and the key was spinning, but the tune needed to be forwarded. He needed to know why Claberson had come into custody.

"Everyone saw what?" he said, his voice low, and painful.

"How he looked at her."

"How - - how Griss looked at Lizzie? You thought that he might have been the one to - -"

"Dr. Grissom didn't even see Elizabeth," Claberson said dismissively. "He couldn't have. He was looking at her. At Sara Sidle."

Of course, Nick thought, too weary to care, everything would come down to that. No wonder Claberson knew that he was doomed and damned either way. How could he walk into Grissom's custody and explain what he had just explained and expect anything else? All of the pieces - - were together now. Everything fit into place. And the thing that revolted him the most was that he couldn't even summon enough energy to be surprised, let alone revolted. He had finally reached the notes in the song that he had been waiting for, and that much-anticipated melody had fallen curiously flat on his ears.

"You told Flowers," Nick said. "You told him that Grissom loved her. Like drawing a target on Achilles's heel, wasn't it? To save your own neck."

"Three murders," Claberson said, "three. Or maybe two - - maybe he hasn't yet. But he will. He wanted to do it, he told me. He wanted to crucify one and burn another . . . he said that was the old way of sacrifice . . ."

The glass behind Nick rattled, and he closed his eyes.

"Grissom," he whispered, and, as if he had called instead of simply known, Grissom came into the room with the suddenness of a hurricane, his eyes gleaming with fury. Grissom would have grabbed Claberson by his shirt, probably, and thrown him against the wall, but Nick inserted himself between the two of them almost effortlessly, almost without thinking at all, and all of Grissom's weight hit him. Grissom swung into him like a pendulum, and bent him back over the table until his elbows struck against the metal and rattled his funny bone all the way up in a hideously shrill pain.

Claberson skittered back to the wall, and Nick thought: Coward.

The sudden intensity of his disgust hurt him all the more because it was the only emotion he had felt in hours, and he pushed into Grissom, hands flat against his boss's chest until Grissom was shoved off him.

Oh, this wasn't the job for him and he should have left a long time ago. Not smart enough or emotionally disconnected enough to impress Grissom, the one person he had wanted so badly to impress. Not skilled enough to rise through the ranks with the speed his family had hoped for. Not even charming enough to have started a family already and had a refuge in the inevitable storm. And now, he was too embittered by all of it, too lost at sea to be anyone else's anchor, and too dead to start hoping that he would live. He had seen countless dead bodies and now, one crucifixion, and in the end, it had torn him to pieces. Too tender-hearted in the beginning, and too disheartened now.

And after all of that, was he finally what Grissom had wanted from him? Was he finally Grissom, too jaded to feel? Standing there with his hands at his sides and nothing but a curled knot of disgust to fill him up inside, he thought that maybe, yes, this had been it.

He had prayed for this severance, this devotion to duty-and-nothing-but-duty. He was one of Those People, glaring at Grissom with Claberson behind him, cowering. The intersection between fury and madness. Everything that they had wanted him to be.

He thought again, that same old thought from the airport, with all the humor removed and the bitterness washed away by emptiness and time:

I want to be Gil Grissom when I grow up.

He said, flatly, "You gonna find her or just stand here?"

Grissom looked at him and Nick couldn't read his expression. Oh, most of it was still caught up in Sara, sure, and there was still that wounded fury and lover's hurt, but there was something else there, too. A sudden fear - - and then a sad, growing awareness. A recognition, as if he were Grissom's mirror instead of himself.

"Where," Grissom said, not a question, and not at him, but at Claberson. He was still staring at Nick, though, and Nick took the brunt of that icy rage.

Claberson said an address that Nick barely caught but Grissom apparently registered it, because Nick could practically see the cogs whirring away as Grissom filed the information in his mind.

Grissom turned on his heel, and Nick said, "I'm coming with you."

He patted the gun at his side, reassuring himself with its weight and its presence. His stomach didn't flip-flop in nervous anticipation or fear, as he had expected it would. Too far removed now, as if he needed more confirmation of that. He thought about Warrick and Catherine for a moment, and then dismissed the idea of calling them to come along. They were probably safer going over Hodges's case, if anyone was safe in this mess anymore. Two cowboys were enough to rescue one damsel in distress from one black hat villain, or at least they were in the movies.

He felt blissfully, terribly calm. No fear, no doubt, no remaining insecurities. Just a growing numbness that seemed to be spreading all the way down through this new identity. Good old Nick Stokes, who simply wasn't That Guy anymore, and couldn't be That Guy ever again. And wouldn't Greg be so ashamed of him, now?

But Greg was dead.