Disclaimer: These characters are the property of CBS, inc

Spoiler: Unbearable.

So I watched tonight, but I am not sure if I feel better or not. Was the dinner all about keeping her as an employee? Who knows? They love to be vague with us. Maybe they want to keep all their options open. Story is getting intense. Still don't know where it's going, but I am happy that you all are along for the ride. As usual, the reviews make this all worthwhile. Thanks!

Sheila

Chapter 5

Afraid of the Light

Warrick drove. Danny sat next to him, leaning against the dashboard as if urging the truck forward, Grissom sat in the back next to Brass who was mumbling under his breath about judges and stupidity. Grissom carefully laid his injured hand on his lap. Brass looked over, and sucked in breath through his teeth. "So what's our plan here, Gil. You gonna ignore that broken wrist or are you just planning to amputate it later in Doc's lab."

Gil's head went up and he blinked. Then his eyes grew wide. He turned to Brass and whispered, "Sara. She went home a few hours ago."

"Shit!" Brass leaned forward. "Turn around! Turn around!"

"We're only about half a mile from the courthouse, Brass." Warrick swiveled his head around.

"Do it, Warrick, now!" Brass began stabbing at his cell phone. "What's her address?"

Danny turned around and caught Grissom's eye. "He probably went straight home. He would want to stalk her before he would grab her. This is not how he operates. Besides, it would too obvious. I'm not sure that Hatfield is ready to be caught."

Grissom nodded. "Better to be safe. I don't have my cell phone with me. Call her please."

Danny was already pulling up her number. He held the phone to his ear. Four rings sounded and then her answering machine. Danny hung up the phone. "I'm going to try again in a few minutes. She was really tired."

Grissom closed his eyes and laid his head back against the seat. A fear was building in his gut, and he could do nothing to curb it. He tried to keep his breathing regulated, and hoped he could keep a clear head. In the background he could hear Danny repeatedly imploring Sara to pick up her phone. Brass had squads rolling on her address.

"Squad says her car is in her parking spot." Brass announced.

"Good sign." Danny nodded.

"Does he ever grab them in their own vehicles?" Warrick's eyes never left the road.

"No, he doesn't." Silence fell over the truck until Warrick pulled into her driveway. Several squads were parked haphazardly about the lot. Warrick pulled the Denali in next to Sara's. Without a word, they were out and climbing the steps to her apartment. An officer met them at the top of the stairs with the apartment manager. He reported that she hadn't responded to repeated knocking.

Brass took the keys from the manager and slid one into her lock. Slowly, he opened the door, his gun and Danny's unholstered. The daytime sun flooded into the apartment. Grissom walked in behind Brass. He had been there before. It was a comfortable, warm space, and he had appreciated her aesthetic sense. Danny moved through the apartment quickly calling Sara's name. He came back into the living room, reporting simply, She's not here."

Grissom turned to Brass and took the keys. "Go! Get the warrant for his arrest. We'll stay and wait for her."

"She could be out on a run right now."

"Possibly." Grissom lived in a frozen place in this moment. He had forgotten the pain in his hand and arm. A low buzzing served as background to his thoughts. His responses were slow but measured. He needed to be in a comfortable place, a place of authority.

"Gil. Hey Gil, are you with me?" Brass was waving an arm in front of him. "What are you going to do?"

Grissom blinked and looked at him. "I'm going to treat this like a crime scene." He turned around and walked back down to the truck for a kit.

"Follow him," growled Jim to Warrick. "He's got a broken wrist that hasn't been tended to. Make sure he doesn't try to carry anything." Warrick nodded and disappeared.

"So Agent Taylor, it's time to bring in your brothers from serial crime, isn't it?"

Danny nodded.

"You think you could ask them to tread carefully around us. I expect we'll be having some jurisdiction tussles over this. This is real personal for us."

"I'm not going anywhere, Brass. They're going to have to let us take the lead. We know the case."

Jim smiled sadly. "Ah, the vagaries of a youthful mind."

"She could have walked down to a café or a drugstore."

He shook his head. "The minute Grissom remembered, I knew. He came straight here. Probably was waiting for her when she came home to sleep. You know how he got her into the car better than I do."

"He chloroforms her, puts duct tape over the rag, and pulls her down to the car before she passes out. He's so smooth about it that previous witnesses merely thought he was escorting a sick friend to her car."

"Where did he grab her? Where was he waiting?" Danny turned to see Grissom and Warrick at the door, Warrick carrying both kits. Danny walked past them into the hot sun. He walked along the sidewalk until he came to some bushes at the corner of her building, bushes she would have had to pass in order to reach her door.

"He likes to come out of the bushes, grabs them, subdues them, and then moves them quickly."

Warrick moved past him, and started to set up a perimeter five feet in every direction around the bushes. Brass and Danny move back. Swiftly, Warrick dons his gloves and begins to carefully work the branches of the bush. He removes cigarette stubs and candy wrappers, handing them to Grissom who bags them with Brass' help. Warrick disappears behind the bushes for a moment. Then he stood up, a roll of duct tape in his hand, his face a mask of fear. They all stood transfixed. Up to this point everything had been speculation, but now they had something that pointed directly at their suspicions. Danny broke away first, wheeling around and shouting expletives to the sky. Grissom stood paralyzed, unable to even bag the tape. Brass and Warrick worked together to do this. Warrick put his hand on Grissom's shoulder waking him gently. "I'm calling in everyone." Grissom nodded and Warrick moved away, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket.

"The warrant?" Grissom said when he found his voice.

"We don't need that stinking judge right now, Gil. Don't worry about it. I don't particularly want to be in the same room with him. I'll send a squad to it. They can tell him what he did. Believe me. He'll sign anything after that."

An EMT climbed the stairs to Sara's apartment. Grissom stiffened. Brass took him by the arm. "Get the damned thing splinted at least. It's a distraction having you walking around this hulking, purple hand hanging off your arm." Grissom glared at him, but followed the EMT down to his truck.

Danny was talking rapidly into his cell pacing back and forth, his free hand pantomiming the importance of his words. Then he snapped it shut and looked at Brass. "The field office will be here in twenty. Quantico is going to monitor the situation by phone. Unless the local guys start waving their dicks around, I think you and I are running it."

Brass nodded. "I'm going to get on the horn with the sheriff. He might not be much, but he'll hate the idea that someone took one of ours. My guess is that I'll have whatever I want at my disposal."

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Danny lost his suit coat sometime in the last two hours. Every few minutes he thought about looking for it, but then got refocused on the kinetic energy around him. Brass was barking at deputies over a radio microphone. He had just discovered that Corcoran's car was still in the parking lot. So they were currently without a car to track. Brass had deputies searching for all cars stolen in the last eight hours.

Grissom stood in the corner with a splint on his arm. He was quiet, but was observing intensely. Danny caught his eye, and Grissom walked over.

"We have to figure out what car he has? Has he stolen a car before?"

Danny shook his head. "We've theorized that he keeps another car that he registers under a false name. He parks it somewhere, and waits until he needs it."

"He must have purchased it recently. He can't leave a car unattended too long. It'll be noticed."

"We had someone here working on this, right?"

"Ronnie was doing a search on all vehicles purchased in the last year in Nevada by persons without a Nevada license. Hoping to find some fake names."

Danny extended his arm. "Why don't we see what Ronnie has?"

Grissom led him through the lab until they found Ronnie. Ronnie looked up with a worried look on his face. "I'm real sorry, Grissom. You can have all the work out of me that you want."

"What happened with the DMV search? We had you matching registrations to licenses."

"Not sure it's going to help. In the last year, there were 5,786 registrations we can't match to licenses. We have determined that 3,903 came from buyers out of state. That still leaves us with 1,883 unaccounted licenses."

"Limit it to cars purchased in the last month."

Ronnie manipulated the screen. "That brings us to 97 cars."

Grissom looked over at Danny.

Danny leaned over Ronnie. "Narrow it to all economy cars. No SUV's, no luxury cars."

Ronnie typed in another screen. "That brings us down to 43 cars with possible owners using false names."

"Hatfield likes to play with us. Thinks he's smarter. Maybe he would tease us with the name he used."

Danny nodded and suggested another combination. "Ronnie, are there names with Hatfield or Corcoran in them? Also, look for the initials HC."

Ronnie shook his head. "Nothing."

"Anything unusual?"

Ronnie narrowed his eyes and looked at names. "There is a Sara."

"There are many Saras, Ronnie. That doesn't help us."

"No Grissom, look at this." Ronnie pointed to his screen. A name was highlighted: Sara Sidlenomore.

A chill ran through Grissom. Danny groaned. "He must have purchased the car from lock-up. How did that happen?"

"A visitor? His lawyer?"

"We'll have Brass check it out. Give me that description, Ronnie." Danny took it and ran from the room.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

Grissom didn't even bother to leave his desk light on. He sat there in the dark. A TV and VCR stood in the corner. The TV screen was on, the image paused. Geneva Austin sat in a thin, white shift staring into the camera, her face contorted in fear.

He was unable to watch more, and equally unable to click away her image. He was exhausted, but fear kept him awake. He couldn't remember the last time he had eaten which was good because the nausea in his stomach was almost as intense as the throbbing pain in his arm. He had resisted an x-ray, and was beginning to suspect that it needed setting. However, he didn't care enough to take the time.

Thoughts of Sara stung his eyes. He couldn't stop imagining her in a white, gauzy shift, frightened, vulnerable; Sara, his fierce, scrappy girl, alone and terrified. The thought of someone breaking her spirit as well as her body was extraordinarily painful to him. He suspected that he would never really survive it. He felt that his spirit was intricately connected to hers.

He sensed a presence and looked up to see Danny Taylor in his doorway. Danny's shirt was untucked and his sleeves rolled up. The unruly thatch of hair on his head looked wild. "Are you sure you should be watching that?"

"I should be doing something."

Danny lingered at the door. Grissom motioned to a chair. Danny came in and sat down.

"I understand she wanted to go to New York with you."

Danny's eyes had shadows and he let his head fall back against the chair. "Yeah, I don't know if it was real, but she said wanted a new job."

"You only knew her for 4 days."

He smiled a little. "We connected. Probably not in the way that you think, but I think we understood each other."

"Corcoran called you Orphan Boy." Grissom rubbed at his eyes as he talked.

"Yeah."

"Is that part of your connection to her?"

"I think so. We understand loneliness and trust differently than others. And I like her energy. She's a fighter."

They both left the last comment unanswered. How her feistiness would serve her now was not something that either man wanted to contemplate.

"Did she talk about me?"

Danny nodded.

"It probably sounds like I want you to betray her confidence, but I don't. I only want the best for her. She means…the world to me."

Danny folded his arms across his chest. "Sometimes we're not very good about telling people that."

"Yeah. The two of you aren't the only ones who…struggle with loneliness and trust."

"I'm not leaving 'til we find her."

"How did this happen, Danny? How was this possible?"

"I encouraged her to interview Hatfield. Thought we could use her to get him. You knew better."

"If I knew so much then this wouldn't be happening."

"Ah, omnipotence, a great fall back position for so many great men."

Grissom raised an eyebrow at the sarcasm.

"Sorry. It's just that you sound like my boss. Smart as hell. Great leader. But he insists on carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Hard to get close to a guy like that, you know."

Grissom had no opportunity to respond. Brass came barreling down the hall calling hs name. He scrambled to his feet, and ran into Danny at the door.

"We found him!" Brass exclaimed.

"What!"

"He's staying at a motel in Reno. We found the car. They arrested him when he came out for something to eat."

"Sara?"

Brass shook his head. "He's alone. But we have a good place to start."

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TBC