Disclaimer: I don't own. I merely play with them.

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Sheila

"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." Nick sat back in his chair and let out a sigh. Then he shoved a black book across the table to Warrick.

"Come on, Man. You just gotta give it some time." Warrick pushed the book back.

"Uh-huh, you do it. You're Mr. Frickin' IQ."

"Okay, Nicky, first of all, I don't know how I got to be Mr. Frickin' anything. Second, you know I am hip deep trying to get evidence off the victim's sweater."

"Warrick, puzzles are not my thing."

"Nick, it's a planner not a rubik's cube." Warrick was quickly losing his cool.

"Sara is better at this. She's good at unraveling codes and abbreviations and such."

"Sara's not here."

"She's getting out of the hospital today."

"Yeah, and she still has to do 4 weeks rehab."

"I'm just sayin'."

"That's great, Nick. Let's put her on a case where a woman has had her head bashed in so hard that Doc Robins is still pulling pieces of the glass paperweight out of her head. I got the crime scene photos here. Let me grab the close-ups on the victim's face, and then you run them over to her apartment." Warrick pushed a folder of photos at Nick.

Nick opened his mouth and closed it. The best he could manage was a slow shake of his head before getting up and walking out.

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"MMmmmm!" Sara fussed as Catherine pulled her snarled hair back in a ponytail. Sara grimaced as Catherine skillfully pulled the tangles out.

"Yes, Sara, I know, but you can't do your hair that well with one hand, and you can't go walking out of this room looking like the birds have gone to nest." Catherine finished the ponytail and stood back to admire.

"You look good."

Sara threw her a dark look, and Catherine returned it with a smile.

"So like I was telling you earlier, a few of the guys back at the lab were more than a little skeptical when I told them I was taking you home and that I was going to stay on for a couple of days. Well, me and Lindsay, of course." Catherine busied herself stuffing cards and gifts into a duffle bag.

"They said that you were probably not going to be too happy to have someone take over like that for a few days; especially without consulting with you first. Well, I told them that some of the most vicious criminals in Nevada have tried to intimidate me, and so there's nothing that a Sara funk is going to do to bother me in the least."

Sara's eyes followed her as Catherine reduced her life at the hospital to a duffle and a backpack.

"So there is really nothing more to say because we are going to have such fun." Catherine crooned. Sara couldn't tell if Catherine was trying to be nice or just getting a kick out of the discomfort Sara was feeling about having her life co-opted.

"And you know, Lindsay is nuts for you. She has been a very worried girl. I told her that we were going to rent about a million movies, eat popcorn, and order in pizza every meal for the next 48 hours. Aw shit! I forgot that you can't eat regular stuff. Do you want me to blend it?"

Sara made a face at her.

"Okay, well then plenty of milkshakes for you and pizza for us. So my mom will be bringing her over to your place in the next hour or so. I thought we should give you some time to lose the angry face."

Sara signed at Catherine.

"Oh no, girl, don't try that sign language business with me. I know Grissom has been after you with his 'our world is a classroom' crap, but I have enough to do without becoming an expert in every little thing that interests him. Hell, he'd have us all chasing beetles around the desert on our days off if he had his way." said Catherine as she dug the dry erase board out of the duffle.

Sara scribbled out, "this is too much for Lindsay!!!!"

Catherine shook her head. "No, it's not. She cares about you. Acts like you're her teen-age best friend. You have to remember that this is a girl who almost drowned in a viaduct after her father was killed. I want her to know the facts about life, and I want her to see you getting better."

"I might disappoint her." Sara wrote.

"Not unless they kicked all of the stubbornness out of you, girl. Now, unless you plan to get back into that bed, I suggest you let me help get your shoes on so we can go."

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"So, we got a problem here, don't we guys?" Brass said to his assembled colleagues. "Kind of hard to keep things together when the girls are gone, huh?."

Warrick let out a breath and shook his head. Greg turned his spiky head to check on Nick who was intently staring at the floor, arms folded tightly.

"Got your attention yet?" Brass stood his ground. Silence ruled the moment.

Grissom peered his head around the corner. "You wanted to talked to me?"

"Yeah, Gil, come on in. I was busy provoking your guys."

Grissom sat down slowly, pulling his glasses from his face. "Got a reason for that, Jim?"

"Well, I think so. We got a case here, a real rough one. And I'm getting nothing from these guys."

"Vivian Wilson? Blunt force trauma to the head, right?"

"Yeah, that's the one. You know, the case where you are no where to be found." Brass faced Grissom, his short stature belying his strong presence.

"Okay, Jim, make your point."

"We know who did it. It's the boyfriend or should I say ex. He's so good for this. Second ex-girlfriend in four years to end up dead. Hell, Vivian Wilson was his alibi on the first dead girl. Now he's got girlfriend number 3 giving him an alibi for Vivian. It stinks."

Grissom turned his attention to Warrick. Warrick shrugged his shoulders. "She's clean. No foreign DNA on her. As far as we can tell, she was in the room all by herself."

"Oh, great. So the paperweight just fell off the mantel and wedged itself into her skull."

"Look, Brass, I get it. We're all tired. Stressed. We're short-handed because one of our friends, one of our own, was almost killed. But be careful of what you're saying, Man, 'cause Warrick and I have been doing doubles on this case all week." Nick's voice was low.

"We got nothing?" Grissom surveyed the three criminalists in front of him.

"Ah, there's a planner. Weird markings inside. Nicky asked me to work on it for him. I can't figure it out." Greg waded in cautiously.

"What, Greg. It's an ancient text?" Grissom's impatience often found its way to the top around the younger man.

"Nope. It's in English. Markings. Sort of like the…anorexic girl last year, but sort of not."

"And why do we like this book?"

"It was hidden in the cushions of the couch in the room where she was killed. Vivian Wilson was…potentially hiding this book from the ex-boyfriend. What's his name?" Nick made eye contact with Brass for the first time.

"Larry Madison, you should meet this cocky son of a …"

"Okay! We got it, Jim. You like him."

"I may not be some science nerd running around peering at life through a microscope, but I got instincts, and, on this one, boy, you could take them to the bank."

"All right, guys. You start over."

"What do you mean?" Warrick shifted forward in his seat.

"I mean from the beginning. Go over the crime scene again. And if you can't find one piece of forensic evidence, then you need to sit down and figure out how a guy like Larry Madison can kill a woman and yet leave nothing of himself at the scene. So, who's looking at the old case?"

"It's out of Bairstow, we're still waiting for the file." said Greg with a suspicious look on his face.

"Okay, Greggo. Time for you to get in some fieldwork. I'd say Bairstow is only about a 7 hour drive. Why don't you get up there and get your hands on that file. When you get back, come find me. We'll go over the case together."

Greg swallowed hard.

Grissom turned to leave and stopped. He looked at Jim. "I'm not that hard to find, you know. Just right here in my office. If you got something you want to say to me, you can come find me there."

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Sara found herself enjoying a movie called Clueless. Lindsay had picked it out. In fact, Lindsay had picked them all out because Sara wouldn't get out of the car, and Catherine was not that interested in any form of entertainment that wasn't right there, breathing in front of her. The kid had some good taste Sara had to admit. But there was a limit to the amount of teen-age angst one person could take. Sara wondered if Lindsay was really telling her the truth when she said the store was out of PBS Nova documentaries.

Catherine had busied herself around Sara's condo for the first hour, ordered pizza, made some phone calls, and asked her and Lindsay if they needed anything at least 14 times at last count. Now she was sitting at the dining room table drumming her fingers on the table. Sara was beginning to realize that Catherine had almost no domestic bone in her body which , in some ways explained the long hours at work. The finger drumming was beginning to sound like a big brass band to Sara. Before she could say anything, Lindsay jumped in, telling her mother that the finger thing had to stop as it was ruining everything. Comments like that burst from Lindsay approximately every fifteen minutes.

Lindsay liked to roll her eyes at Sara when she did this as if Sara was complicit in the whole 'my mom is a complete idiot' campaign. She made it look like she and Sara shared 'Catherine is so stupid' stories in the bathroom between movies. Sara kept her face as blank as possible during these exchanges. She wasn't up to being on the bad side of either of these two strong females.

Sara wanted to communicate to Catherine that she could go, drive around, do whatever, but she got the sense that Catherine was doing a penance of some kind. She stayed stubbornly cheerful with every verbal hardball from Lindsay, and was on her feet every time Sara tried to move.

Sara knew that, like it or not, she was going to be the subject of the Willow's brand of hospitality for the next two days.

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