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Chapter Thirty-seven: There But for the Grace (SARA)

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He raped her once with the lights on and again with the lights off, which was worse, because she couldn't see what was happening and didn't know what to expect.

When it was over, he dressed, poured himself a glass of orange juice, and sat at the edge of the bed, stroking her hair and her handcuffs while he talked in a low, soothing voice about the things he had done to her, the things he had done to Lizzie Zimmer, and the things he had done to Greg. He told her about when he had visited Boston on a whim in 1998. He had wanted to see a real winter; to wear a scarf; to see the history embedded in brick; to walk the campus; to eat breakfast in small cafés. What he told her was that he had never really had any intentions of doing anything particularly violent or illegal in Boston.

"It's rare that I plan in advance," Flowers said, trailing one fingertip down the side of her face as if tracing the path of the tears she'd refused to cry. "You might feel special."

Matthew Flowers had liked Boston, and stayed longer than he had originally intended. Even with his extension, he was still scheduled to leave the day after Gil Grissom came to lecture at Harvard. Flowers didn't attend the seminar, but he was on campus when Lizzie came out of the building. She had been wrapped up in a thick blue coat and an unraveling knitted black scarf, and Flowers had left his secondhand paperback on the table and followed her. Their footsteps, he told Sara, had crunched in the snow. She had turned and smiled at him, and Flowers had smiled back - - that nice boy's smile, all polite, with just a hint of confidence and just a hint of sexual eagerness. He had looked only a shade too old for his surroundings - - perhaps a teaching assistant - - and he was attractive.

She had waited for him. Happy with her boyfriend Abraham "Lincoln" Claberson or not, she had waited for Matthew Flowers to catch up with her.

"If she hadn't - - who knows? I might have left her alone. It was cold outside, that day. I'm sure that you remember how cold that winter was. Did Dr. Grissom give you his coat before he walked you to your building? Or did he not walk you at all? Did he stand there, and look at you as if he had a thousand ideas and not a thousandth of the strength it would take to act on even one of them?"

Sara looked at the tiles on the ceiling and tried to pretend as if he were not right. As if Flowers were never right, as if his very immorality guaranteed it would be impossible for him to see into her and Grissom with such unconscious ease.

"I've been wondering about you since I heard that you were at that seminar. What would have happened if you had come out? If I had seen you. . . it wouldn't have mattered how cold it was, or how it snowed. It wouldn't have mattered if you hadn't smiled back at me. I would have followed you to the end of the earth, Sara Sidle. You're so much harder to break."

He drew his hand across her eyes. His skin was warm.

"See, you aren't even crying."

Lizzie had waited for him, and the two of them had walked off-campus. She had accepted his offer of a drink with no hesitation. He had bought her one, then another, and then a third. Her tolerance had been low. When he had slid her hand under her skirt, she had offered only perfunctory resistance. Outside, in the hurtfully cold snow, her slurred voice had grown louder, in protest, but by then it was late, and there was no one left to stop and hear her. So Flowers had hurt her again and again in the snow, his breath warm against her neck and the rape heated enough to thaw the ice around them both until he left her in a bank of blood and melted frost.

"When the - - when Ecklie talked to me, I made all of my contacts through Claberson. She never saw me - - until I came into her room that night. She didn't recognize me. Too many years of blocking the memories, I suppose, and too many years of therapy. Besides, my hair was dark when I was in Boston. Still, I was just a little hurt. But it was our reunion, so we relived what we did the day that we met."

When he raped Sara this time, the lights were on again and she could watch him, so she did.

He was oddly gentle, as if only her lack of consent was stopping him from making love. But still, it hurt. He was taking her. The tenderness was just another way to make her feel used - - it was a parody of what she'd hoped to have with Grissom. She couldn't concentrate on the pain and she couldn't concentrate on his melodrama.

She concentrated on him.

Disconnected, she memorized him. Not with love, the way she had memorized Grissom, but from hate. She would know every flaw on his body, every connection, every habit, every feature. And he had frustratingly few of each. He was attractive; well-spoken; educated; dramatic; cruel; depraved. So were a million others. Aside from what she knew about him and what she learned underneath him, he was almost impossibly opaque, as if he wasn't really a person at all, but something crafted and melded. Unblemished. Pure impurity.

He touched her cheek.

"You can pretend that I'm Grissom."

She turned her head away and bit her lip, but for the first time, she wasn't able to stifle the scream. Her eyes grew wet and she kept them closed. She was not going to cry for him. She was not going to let Grissom's name do for her what the pain had not.

"No? Nick Stokes?"

Nick. She kept her eyes closed and her face turned away from him. His hands were on her hips and then one was in her hair, tangling the strands instead of combing them. I can't, I can't. Nick. Someone come and get me, she thought - - almost prayed. It was the first time she had ever prayed for rescue in her life, and in the end, it was shame that brought the tears down her cheeks. Someone help me.

"Warrick Brown," Flowers said musingly, trying her. "Greg Sanders? Now that was fun," he added. "If you thought he was beautiful before, you should have seen - - did you see?" He hurt her again, purposefully. He didn't look interested in her pain, he looked interested in getting an answer. He repeated his question. "Did you see him? When he was dead? Did you see him on the cross?"

"No," she said, "no."

"It was my best work."

He stood and crossed the room to sit down. From the distance, he looked like a Greek statue - - naked and tense with thought. Sara had heard a theory that rapists never liked to be fully unclothed, even when their position was secure. It had something to do with nakedness making them feel vulnerable. She watched Flowers stretch casually and wondered if either nothing made him vulnerable, or if he were simply beyond neat labels like rapist or murderer. Then she hated herself for listening to him and almost counting him as an artist - - a sadistic one, yes, but an artist all the same. She would label him if she wanted, fit him into a drawer if that was what made her happy. She was naked, too, but if he wasn't going to be vulnerable, neither was she. Her legs were trembling, and she counted to ten until they had relaxed completely. The mathematics in her head didn't vanish the pain, either, but it was numbed.

"Do you know, most people beg for their lives? He didn't. He said my name, and he tried to hit me, but he didn't beg. Does that make you proud of him? Or does it just make you jealous? Are you going to beg for me not to kill you, like I killed him? Or just not to touch you again?"

Sara didn't answer. She was away from him - - not far enough, but away. She mapped in her head the route they had taken from Claberson's hotel room when the gun had been in the small of her back and his arm had been looped around her shoulders like a string of beads. His caresses in the hotel had clung to her skin like bruised promises, fulfilled when she had found herself in this new room - - his room. It was . . . well-decorated. Neat. Artistic and functional at the same time. It was small, though, and on the outskirts of Vegas, as if he had tried to retreat and had only been able to go so far.

"What was the listed cause of death, by the way? For Sanders. I'm curious."

"Exsanguination," she said, relishing the scientific term and hoping to knock him off his footing, even for a moment. It didn't matter in the long run if he were confused by the word or not, but it was some small, insignificant victory, and the only one she had - -

He took it from her. "Bled to death. Interesting. I was wondering if it would be trauma - - I hit him fairly hard, you see, and - - "

"Stop," she said, and started to add please but then bit her lip against the word. She would not beg him. For anything. For anyone. Greg had been crucified without a whisper of a plea, and she would lie in this bed and take him again and again until it killed her, but she wasn't going to beg him. Anything but that. She would bargain before she would beg.

"I'll tell you something," Sara said, and remembered his dramatic nature. "A secret."

He smiled. He really did have a lovely smile.

"A secret. In exchange for me not rubbing in the messy details of killing Sanders?"

She swallowed hard against nausea. "Yes."

"Do I get to pick?"

He sounded like a child. She nodded, and he sank back in the chair in obvious thought. He took his time in consideration and she took hers in studying him again, hoping the distance would add the clarity that the proximity had lacked. He sprawled in the chair, unashamed of who he was, what he had done, and what he looked like, so he was confident. He had a body tone that looked as if it were from regular exercise rather than gym workouts or bodybuilding. It was nothing she hadn't noticed before.

"Tell me what you were doing on the last day of that seminar," Flowers said finally. "Tell me why you weren't out of the building on time."

"I slept with Grissom," she said.

He didn't even hesitate.

"You said you'd tell me a secret, not a lie."

She hated that her lie hadn't even given him pause, so she used the truth. Her last weapon. "It's not much of a secret," she said, "since you've already guessed. You were right - - he looked at me for the longest time. A thousand ideas. Not enough . . . courage." It was the only word she could settle on, in the end. What the hell, anyway, right? Grissom wasn't here. She was here and she was bleeding and she was going to tell the truth because Flowers didn't believe her lies, anyway. "So I asked if he would be my reference, when I applied for a job after graduation, and he said yes."

His eyes were closed. "You aren't finished yet," he murmured. "Not nearly."

Not nearly is right.

"He wrote down his home number and gave it to me."

I'm not often there, he had said, giving her the slip of paper that had been warm when she enclosed it in her hand. But I could always call you back.

"He said that if he wasn't there when I called, he'd call me back."

"It's a line," Flowers said, not opening his eyes.

"No," she said, "not from him, it wasn't."

He considered this and nodded. "All right," he said, agreeably, reasonably, "it wasn't. Keep going. It's a fascinating story. I'd say that I can't wait to see how it ends, but I think it's going to end here, and I'll be around for that. So tell me the end of the first act, at least."

I hope you do, she'd said, gathering all of her nervousness together and pushing it away. She had been young - - pretty enough - - and a few boyfriends through high school and college had given her confidence enough to do this. She had written down her own number in one swift movement of pen across paper. But if I can't reach you, maybe you can reach me. Sometime. For something. Coffee, maybe. You like lattes, right?

"I gave him my number. Asked him out for coffee."

Grissom had been blindsided, and she had been confused. Hadn't she read him right? He had been looking at her - - sideways glances as well as the usual flirtatious ones. He'd been more than civil, he'd been sweet. He'd been more than sweet, he'd been . . . available. For the first time, she had wondered if he were married, and shamed had warmed her face and choked up her vocal chords.

Sara, I'm sorry, but - -

It's fine, she'd said. I was . . . presumptuous. It doesn't matter. Keep my number. She had managed to smile at him, but that time, out of all the times she had smiled at him before, she kept her lips closed, ashamed of the gap between her teeth. And he had never made her feel ashamed before. You're still impressed with my work, right? Maybe if you ever need a hand, you can give me a call.

Flowers seemed to be evaluating her silence. "What did he say?"

"You know what he said." She was too tired to pretend that he actually had to dig this information out of her. She couldn't keep her secrets around him. "He said no."

"And then you blushed. You made an excuse. You apologized for your . . . sexual harassment."

She didn't have to look at him to know that he was smiling.

"And he - - he kept your number."

"He only called me once," she said. "Three years later. He called and he offered me a job. He didn't say anything about three years being gone. He didn't mention me asking him out, and I didn't, either. It was mutual silence. But . . . I was hoping . . . he did call me. Nick says that he didn't call anyone else."

I don't even have to turn around. Sara Sidle.

It's me.

"Secret's done, Sara Sidle," Flowers said quietly, "and everything else about you, I already know. You've sold your bargaining chip so cheaply - - just so I wouldn't talk about your friend? You may be the best criminalist in Las Vegas . . . but you never would have made it in marketing. You gave everything away, and now I can take everything else."

He stood and crossed the room.

Any tenderness that had been there before was gone. And she screamed against him, her hands aching and her wrists and ankles bruising from the cuffs. She screamed and cried and Matthew Flowers buried his head in her neck and laughed before delicately kissing her shoulder. Again and again. It hurt . . . she couldn't seem to catch her breath . . . and there wasn't enough room on the bed or in the cuffs for her to get away from him.

"Stop," she said, and whispered, "please."

And through the haze of tears and pain, she looked over his shoulder and saw the two men come through the door. The light made them nothing more than silhouettes, and she couldn't even place them. She couldn't think clearly enough to call to them, not even to ask for rescue as she had asked them before. They were like dolls, balanced in the doorway. They didn't look a thing like heroes, anymore than Matthew Flowers had looked like a killer.

So she didn't speak, and Flowers didn't look up.

He didn't look up until someone, their voice high-pitched with fear and panic, shouted:

"Jesus, Grissom, put the gun down!"