Last chapter of part three - - all that remains now is the two-chapter epilogue, which I'll post together. It should be up tomorrow, with any luck.
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Chapter Forty: The Normal Goes On (CATHERINE)
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She spent a lot of time wishing on the way to the Tangiers. If there had been a well in Grissom's Tahoe, Catherine would have dropped every spare penny into the shining depths.
Every wish tunneled her a little farther back into her past. It was eerily like unearthing her own bones. She peeled away layers of years, dust, and regrets, and exposed the bareness within. Every wish was like a prayer, offered up for divine approval, and whispered into the pink skin of her palm, her mouth so tight against her hand that she could feel the movements of her lips in small kisses and even the bite of her teeth as they came together to spit out another wish. She unraveled time.
She wished that she had accepted Grissom's apology when he had given it to her. For Grissom to think to apologize at all was rare, for him to do it was even rarer, something that Nostradamus might have predicted as a global event. She wished that she would have said something else, instead of rubbing salt into his wounds.
She wished that she had seen what Nick was going to do and stopped him. She had convinced herself that she knew Nick better than anyone else. She had been the only person he had told about his babysitter, the only person to offer comfort after Nigel Crane, and the only person he had called in the middle of the night just before Greg had died. She had deluded herself into thinking that love was a substitute for understanding, and she hadn't been able to stop him. She hadn't even been able to see it coming, such a waste.
She wished that she could have stopped anything from happening to Sara. She even wished that they could have been on better terms before. They had never been friends. An occasional drink after work, maybe, an occasional consolation, but never anything closer.
She wished that Hodges hadn't hanged himself. She hadn't liked Hodges, either, but he had been real. He had been flesh and blood and someone that she saw more often than she saw her daughter, and all he had wanted was to be a hero. Maybe he hadn't deserved to be mocked when he was still cooling on a board - - mocked for his suicide novel and his delusions of grandeur. After all, she'd had those delusions herself, hadn't she?
She wished that Greg wasn't dead. She wished that she hadn't hit him.
She wished Lizzie Zimmer hadn't died alone and scared and hated.
She even made a wish for Flowers, who might have been human once, a long time ago. Certainly, he had never had anything but death to fill up his empty spaces.
She wished that when she was twenty and stripping, she had given Eddie a second glance and seen that all the slick in the world he carried around with him was nothing more than a sheen of grease. She wished that, after Lindsey was born, she'd pulled up stakes in Vegas and gone to Montana. She wished that she'd sat in the car with her daughter and watched the lightning ripple over the surface of the sky. She could have taught Lindsey to ride a horse. She could have stayed in the country and Eddie never would have found them because Eddie had never asked questions about who Catherine was or where she had come from.
She wished that at seventeen, she hadn't lost her best friend Cassidy over something so trivial as a guy whose name she couldn't remember. Catherine and Cassidy. They had looked like twins, with the same eyes and the same hair cut the same way, and almost the same name. And, unfortunately, the same taste in boys - - the bad taste.
She wished that when her cousins had helped her hunt Easter eggs, she hadn't gotten into a fight with Billy, two years older than her, over the biggest chocolate egg. She had split Billy's lip with one of her mother's rings. What a spanking she had gotten that night.
She wished that her mother had never met Sam Braun.
She wished that she believed in wishes.
Even after she had just negated her own birth by removing her father, she didn't feel better. None of it was fixable. Her life had been broken into pieces like a tea set dropped by a child as careless as she had been, and no one could put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I'm mixing metaphors, she thought wryly. China tea sets and fictional talking eggs. The point is that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put my life back together again.
Only the smallest mistakes were ever fixable. She touched Grissom's hand. "I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe it's all going to work out. We know who he is, and what he's done, and we're going to put him behind bars. The science didn't save us, but something did."
He said nothing.
Last time pays for all, she thought, and went on.
"Gil, I can't tell you why he did this anymore than I could tell you why he's done any of the other things he's done. I can't even tell you that I'm not to blame for half of it. I didn't let him in, and maybe he thought that this would change things. And maybe it even would have, if Flowers hadn't slipped up. Maybe when it was over, I would have come to him and said that I'd finally realized that love was important, no matter how screwed-up, and maybe I would have let him in. Maybe I even would have trusted him alone with his granddaughter. I can't tell you anything except that you're not to blame."
"It's a good speech, Catherine," he said, without looking at her. "Maybe we won't have to bail out Nick to say a eulogy. Tell you what, you can say mine if I don't make it through this."
Roger Dawson looked up briefly from the wheel. "Two of you ought to stop this before we get there. United front, and all that." He sounded terribly disinterested in everything that was going on in the backseat of the Tahoe. "Don't want to leave any chinks in your armor."
Were we ever wearing armor? She thought of Nick's warmhearted friendliness, Sara's strength, Warrick's cool, and Greg's unflappable buoyancy. Sure. Armor. But the chinks had been broken wide open now - - they hadn't even been left with a breastplate.
"Truce?"
It surprised her that it came from Grissom, but she nodded anyway and held out her hand to be encircled in his. "Truce," she said.
We can't be friends anymore. She'd been stalling the realization too long. We can be coworkers, yeah, but we're not going to be friends again. I wouldn't be surprised if he never had another friend again. It costs too much for him to make them that it leaves him broke when they're gone.
And who wanted to look up one day and realize that the people you loved were lost along the way? Maybe Grissom had the safer idea. Maybe it would just be easier to box herself up into a series of compartments - - separate her head from her heart and her soul from her memories. Maybe she could forget the way Greg had touched a hand to his cheek after she had slapped him, let the memory of Nick's arms straight and quivering as he held that gun fade out of her mind, and block out entirely the way Sara had looked, naked and hurt on the bed.
The Tangiers wasn't busy. It was the wrong hour of the day, for one thing. All the lights seemed to bright, as if they were liable to scorch her corneas. She wanted sunglasses and didn't have any - - and there had been a time when Grissom would have sensed her frustration with the glare or at least noticed the sheer number of times she blinked, but that was over with. He looked like Sherlock Holmes - - a bloodhound trained and pointed in Sam Braun's direction.
God protect us, Catherine thought, from the sins of the fathers.
It was seeing him that made her angry, and abruptly, her fingernails were biting into the skin of her palms as she made tight fists. There were too many memories associated with Sam, anyway - - he had been the one to teach her some of her hand-to-hand combat when she had turned fifteen - - she still remembered breath on her neck that smelled like alcohol mixed with something sweet as he guided her hands into place: Okay, Mugs, hands like this, and you kick his ass like this, if he's trying to take something you don't want. She had been old enough to understand that he was teaching her to guard against someone trying to steal more than her purse, and she had thanked him with a kiss on the cheek before he went back in to talk to her mother. And at night, when she had heard the bedsprings start to creak, she had closed her eyes in the next room and recited stance directions in her head.
Keep your punches clean, Mugs, she had whispered to the insides of her eyelids.
It had been Sam Braun to take her out for drinks when she turned twenty-one, even though she hadn't wanted him around then. She'd wanted to go with some girls from the club, but Sam had just said that if she went around with some irresponsible people, she'd end up using her car to gift-wrap a tree before the end of the night.
It's your birthday, he'd said, and you're entitled to get as drunk as you want, sweetheart, but don't think that I'm going to let someone else take you home.
He hadn't been a bad father for someone who hadn't been sure, all things considered. A little unorthodox, but she had loved him. She had loved him even after she knew that he was a killer, because it was hard to stop loving someone you'd loved your whole life. She had cried into her pillow - - but only once - - and finally decided that she wasn't going to let loving Sam make her vulnerable or make her hard. It just was the way it was, and she'd deal with it. Love didn't mean special favors. Love didn't mean he was one of the good guys. She'd handle whatever curveballs he threw with a stiff upper lip, like he'd taught her.
What repulsed her when he came into view was that she still loved him, and that he hadn't changed.
Grissom had aged a thousand years. Gray hairs had been tangling in her own hairbrush of late, too. But Sam looked the same - - well-dressed, impeccably groomed, straightened, and polished. His expression at the sight of the two of them and a cop standing nestled into his casino was one of polite resignation.
Grissom said, "Flowers is dead."
"I liked Flowers," Sam said, lighting a cigarette. "I really did. An absolute sociopath, of course, but one of those genuinely polite young men you run into every once in a while. And he was very, very good at what he did. Obviously."
Dawson said, "We're going to have to bring you in."
"Suit yourself." Sam held out his hands. "I know when I've been beat. Call it a virtue, if you like - - it's not one I think you share, Grissom."
Catherine couldn't keep Grissom from hitting Sam except by sliding between the two of them and preventing him from even raising his hand to start with. "Why? God, why? I never thought you were even capable of something like this. I chalked you off as a crime-of-passion type of man, Sam, never thought you had it in you to commit cold-blooded murder."
She was trying to do to him what she'd done to Warrick, once - - rub in the words and hope they stung. Hope they made that look of composure turn sour. But Sam, for better or for worse, was tougher than Warrick, and she couldn't even dent him. She wondered why their own armor had been so easy to tear apart when his seemed impregnable.
"I taught you never to trust people," Sam said quietly, "and God knows I never taught you to trust me. You never think you know anyone, Mugs. Never think you understand. Do you honestly think that I could have had all this without a few skeletons in my closet?" He swept an arm out to indicate the casino, with all its plush carpeting and jingling slots, but Catherine had a feeling that he was talking about more than the Tangiers. Sam's smile said he was talking about Vegas itself - - and wasn't that true? Old Vegas - - hadn't Sam been there almost from the beginning, turning the stones to look for gold?
"You build things up the best you can, and then you keep someone else from knocking them down. You used to understand that. Your mother and I took you to the beach and you kicked anyone in the shins if they came near your sandcastle. I was protecting my investments when I hired Flowers - - but I'll admit to a little bit of passion." He turned to Grissom. "You tried to screw with me just one too many times, Grissom," he said flatly. "Revenge is best served cold - - and with a great deal of planning."
Grissom said nothing. He was looking at a chandelier in the distance, and Catherine could see crystals reflected in his eyes.
"You wanted to ruin everything I created," Sam said, and smiled. "But this is a laissez-faire world. You couldn't hit me hard enough - - yet - - so I hit first."
"Did you even think about me?"
Catherine hated the way he voice sounded, like she was a little girl again. And maybe she was. Maybe she was just Lindsey's age, and Sam was letting her play with him at work. Maybe she was going to get to climb on top of one of the slick vinyl chairs near the slots and spin until she got dizzy and fell down on the carpet, pressing her nose against the pattern and smelling sweat, cleaner, and spilled cologne. But she was his daughter, and she loved him, and she deserved to know.
"When you were planning your laissez-faire pre-empt action, did you think about me at all? Did you think about how you'd put me through hell?"
"No one was going to hurt you." He looked petulant suddenly, like a very old, childish man who had been slighted and didn't appreciate it. "I told Flowers that he wasn't supposed to touch you, and he didn't. For all his flaws, he knew how to follow an order, and he loved following them, from the right person. No one hurt you, Mugs."
"You didn't think that this would hurt me?"
"You were another reason." His eyes were almost soft enough to be human. "If he was gone, you would have come to me, wouldn't you? You would have loved me again. I don't have any children left, Mugs - - I had Cain and Abel, and once Walt finishes his stretch on death row, I'll never see him again at all. But I had you . . . until he took you away. If he was gone, you would have loved me. You wouldn't have had a choice. That's just what you're like."
"I loved you anyway," Catherine said fiercely. "You just didn't see it - - and that's just what you're like."
Dawson, like Grissom, hadn't spoken, but now he said, "If everybody's done, I'd like to take him in. I've got a family to get home to, you know, and all this soap opera crap is going to be bad for my digestion tonight. You mind just putting your hands out and letting me get some cuffs on? It's been a real long day, see, and I'm tired."
Sam didn't even grant him a glance. "You loved me?"
"I love you," she said, making fists again, feeling battered and bruised. "But you were the one who taught me that love didn't matter - - and it certainly doesn't stop you from hurting anyone."
Dawson coughed.
She turned on him, feeling tears glittering in her eyes, "We've kind of got a situation here, if you know what I mean, and I'm sorry that you aren't going to get home to your family on time tonight, but the rest of us don't even have a family to go back to anymore, so - - "
"What you have here," Dawson said kindly, "is a man who needs some steel bracelets. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm sorry for your losses, Ms. Willows, but I'm going to have to cuff him now."
Catherine, startled more by his nonchalance than by his earlier vitriol, stepped aside and almost collided with Grissom, who still hadn't moved. Watching Dawson quickly and efficiently cuff Sam and just as efficiently reel off his rights jarred her in some way she couldn't really identify. It wasn't seeing Sam led away that drilled down deep into her mind, it was - - the way the normal rolled on inexorably, despite everything that had been thrown in its path. Here was a man named Roger Dawson who had glided in briefly to make an arrest - - just another day on the job - - and just wanted to get home to his family, eat leftovers, and fall asleep next to his wife after checking his kid's homework. He'd heard of what was happening to them - - like she had told Grissom, everyone with a TV set knew by now - - but it didn't touch him. Not really. He was just a guy doing his job the best he could - - treating Sam like a killer and treating them like victims.
And he is a killer, and we are victims. And I guess the normal does go on.
"I think it's going to be okay," she said to Grissom, leaning against him and finally trusting him to not move away. "We got the bad guys, right? We won."
She looked at him, and hoped that he could see everything she was thinking - - from Roger Dawson tucking his kid into bed to a quiet funeral for Greg; from Sam getting locked up to Nick being acquitted; from Sara kissing Grissom when they left Flowers's apartment to Warrick putting away the weight he'd had to shoulder - - the weight of being Grissom, of being a leader. She hoped that he could see everything there, from the ending of life to life going on. And she hoped that he trusted her enough to know that it was true - - that they would be okay, that there would be plenty of time for the open wounds to heal into less painful scars - - that what she had said was true - - and that they were still worthy of being saved, by something, if not science.
She wished that he would believe her, and for just a second, she believed in wishes enough to be absolutely certain that this one was going to come true. She knew that Grissom was going to look at her and say, You know what, Catherine? I think we did, and it was making her warm, as if the wish itself and the surety that it would be granted was enough to make her glow.
But when Grissom spoke, he sounded disinterested, not peaceful, and all he said was:
"Do you really think so?"
And whatever was left of the wishing well inside her exploded in a burst of copper and silver spare change.
All around her, people played their slots. They won; they lost. Most of them didn't even realize that the man who owned the casino was being quietly led away by a beleaguered cop. They were just focused on themselves - - their own wins, their own losses, and their own lives. They never even saw what was happening in the center of the room. The people around them, with all their mix of insecurities, hopes, wants, and battles, were normal. The normal went on.
But we won't.