It's funny how, when something eludes you and you spend hours searching for it, you come back the next day – or night – and find it almost instantly. That was what happened to me.
"Yes!" I yelled, so loud that Greg Sanders came scurrying in from DNA.
"What happened?" he asked, looking concerned. I grinned over at him.
"Kimberson Kosmetics," I told him. "Manufacturer of an elite line of nail polishes – and nail polish remover!" I punched the air triumphantly, barely noticing Greg looking at me as if I was more insane than he was. "I am the man!" I said.
"No, you're the WOman," Greg corrected. He peered over my shoulder. "What's this about makeup?"
I laughed. "Not makeup. Nail stuff. With Vitamin E! You see, polish remover with Vitamin E in it was found on one of the letters sent to Nick. Catherine gave me a swab and I ran it yesterday."
Greg nodded and looked at me. "Was wondering where you'd got to. DNA is a lonely place without you, Turner." He gave me a puppy-dog-eyes look and backed towards the door, arms extended towards me melodramatically. "Come back, Sadie! Come back to me!"I just laughed and shook my head as Greg left. I grabbed a printout of Kimberson Kosmetics' nail polish remover ingredients and paged Catherine. After five minutes I received a reply. OutCS. Results2Gris. I shrugged, taking this to mean Catherine was out on the field and I should give the results to Grissom.
Uh-oh. This meant going to Grissom's office and actually talking to him. Nervously I got up and sidled out of the lab, only to run into none other than Sara Sidle, my saviour.
"Hey." She grinned at me. "I hear you're helping Catherine and Nick with those letters. How's it going?"
"Well, it's more helping Catherine with it, really," I said. "Nick doesn't seem to want anything to do with it. Hey, do you think you could get this to Grissom, or Catherine when she gets back?" I handed the paper to Sara and she looked at it.
"Kimberson Kosmetics? I've bought from them before," she said. "They have some nice hand and nail cream. Is this a recommendation for Catherine?" She quirked a brow at me.
"No, it's to do with the case," I said. I explained about the nail polish remover and Vitamin E. "So far Kimberson's the only company whose ingredients matched."
"Cool." Sara grinned her cute gap-tooth grin. "Hey, I hear Nick took you for a ride last week," she added, raising her brows.
"Oh," I said, trying not to blush. Why should I? Those had been purely innocent circumstances. Plus I wasn't interested in Nick. Was I? "Yeah, my car broke down. It was raining."
"Well, be careful next time you get into the Stokesmobile," said Sara with a wicked glint in her eye. "All you might see of it is the backseat."
"Do you know that from experience?" I asked carefully. Sara laughed.
"No, but I've known a couple of girls who have," she said. "I'll let you in on a little secret: our Nick's a bit of a woman-eater. You should be careful, he might just snap you up." Little brother, woman-eater, jock, nice guy…I was getting a lot of conflicting messages about Nick Stokes. I wasn't really sure what to think.
And I wasn't sure if I would mind so much if he snapped me up.
"I'll get this to Cath when she gets back," Sara said, waving the paper. "I'll see ya."
"Bye," I murmured, shaking my head. Who are you, Nick? Who are you really?
I wandered back into Trace to see another lab tech, Hodges, had arrived in my absence. I didn't like Hodges. He was one nasty dude, as Greg put it.
"Hello, Hodges," I said politely. He looked over at me and scowled.
"What are you doing here? I thought you were working in DNA with Sanders."
"I was, but I needed to use the spectrometer," I said. "Excuse me." I made my way past him to the computer and got another copy of the Kimberson printout before shutting down the browser. I retrieved the samples from the spectrometer and hot-footed it towards the door.
"You're working on the letters sent to Stokes, aren't you," said Hodges from behind me. I'd hoped to escape without having to talk to him, but I was obligated to reply out of politeness. Sighing, I turned around.
"Yes."
Hodges smiled nastily. "Probably just a disgruntled ex-girlfriend. I wouldn't put much stock in it – Stokes has a lot of those." He turned away from me dismissively. I wanted to smack him even more than I'd ever wanted to smack Nick. Instead I left Trace and crossed to DNA.
"Back so soon?" Greg asked cheerfully.
"I wish Grissom would assign me a permanent lab to work at," I said miserably, flopping into a spare chair. "It's so hard drifting between departments like this."
"Well, technically you're still in training with yours truly," said Greg. "It's obvious you don't need it, though, since you're already working on a case on your own without any help and you haven't blown anything up yet." He grinned. "Us lab techs typically do drift a lot, except me of course. I'm always here. But I'll talk to Grissom. for ya."
"Thanks," I said appreciatively. "I don't think my help was very helpful, still. I mean, how far can you go with a particular brand of lacquer removal stuff?"
Greg shrugged, fiddling with a microscope. "You'd be surprised. Cases have been made on as little as a microscopic fiber. Evidence doesn't have to be big to be important."
"Wise words," I laughed.
Greg just grinned at me. "Stick this in the thermocycler for me, will ya?" he said, handing me a bottle of clear liquid, presumably containing DNA. I did as asked, watching the little machine whirr away.
I wondered who invented all these little gadgets. Someone with a lot of time on their hands, obviously, I thought, smiling absently to myself. I yawned and glanced at my watch; I'd barely slept at all once getting home yesterday morning. I had dreams of monstrous red-nailed women kidnapping Nick Stokes or, worse, me. Why, I don't know; the subconscious is a funny thing.
Greg pottered around with his microscope, humming to himself and occasionally glancing longingly at the CD player on one of the desks. I'd heard he had a reputation for playing punk music extremely loudly, but luckily for him, he had not demonstrated this in front of me.
"Yo, Greggo," said a deep voice. Both Greg and I turned to face the newcomer, Warrick Brown. "And Sadie Turner. I hear you're the bomb, rookie – working the letters case like that, pitching in overtime." For once I didn't mind being called 'rookie'.
"Yeah, well," I said, blushing a little. "I obsess a little."
"A little? I heard you were here 'til 6am."
"Six? Are you nuts, Sadie?" Greg looked at me, wide-eyed. "That's...daytime! You could have run into Ecklie!"
"Ecklie?" I asked muzzily, aware of how slowly my brain seemed to be moving at the moment. Need coffee, I thought. Wait. I hate coffee. Tea maybe.
"Conrad Ecklie, Day Shift Supervisor," Warrick chimed in. "Nobody in this entire lab likes him."
"Is he the bald one?"
Warrick laughed his deep, rumbling laugh. "Yeah, he's the bald one. Mean as anything, too. Tried to get half the Night Shift fired at one time or another. He had it in for Nick real bad when Kristy Hopkins died."
"Who?" I found myself interested. Kristy Hopkins...ex-girlfriend maybe? "What happened?" I pressed. Warrick had probably come to DNA to submit evidence for analysis but seemed to have forgotten about it. I decided not to steer him back onto the subject.
"Oh, she was...a friend...of Nick's. He was real cut up about it after." Warrick suddenly looked uncomfortable, as if he had breached the barrier between casual conversation and personal details about another CSI. He cleared his throat and turned to Greg. "Hey, I need you to take a look at this." He extended a pair of panties in a plastic bag.
"My pleasure," purred Greg. "Where'd you find them? Ecklie's office?"
"Yeah, these are his spares," said Warrick dryly.
I smiled and turned back to the thermocycler, wondering idly about Nick's seemingly unfortunate love life.
Not that it was particularly important to me, oh no. I wasn't romantically interested in Nick Stokes in the least.
Nope.
Not me.
Really.
Oh, damn.