Title: Thinner Than Blood
By: Ashika
Summary: A figure skater from Disney on Ice is dead and, as usual, no one is confessing. The CSI team has a couple of witnesses and a suspect who's nowhere to be found. "There's an underground to figure skating? You've got to be kidding!"
Disclaimer: If I owned any part of CSI, I would hardly be writing fanfiction, now would I? In any case, it belongs to CBS and etc. Disney On Ice is property of Disney and it's affiliates.

Grissom was beginning to regret coming into work tonight. This was unusual for him, but nevertheless, he was tired. And his head hurt.

And now there was a case sitting on his desk that was so ridiculous his headache was getting worse. A Disney on Ice figure skater was dead. Incidents with figure skaters hadn't come to light since the Tonya Harding episode. He didn't even want to think about why someone would want to kill a Disney on Ice figure skater.

He thought about who he was going to send. It should be an easy case. The chief suspect was found holding the murder weapon over the dead girl. Grissom knew he shouldn't jump to conclusions like that, but he really didn't want this.

Making his decision, he called Nick and Sara into his office. "We have a DB at the Las Vegas Ice Center. I want you two on it." He paused, "Please."

Nick grinned. "Who's dead, any idea?"

Grissom glared. "A figure skater."

"A…what?" Sara's eyebrows rose and she stifled a snort. "Okay, let's go."

Grissom wondered if Aleve would help his now burgeoning migraine.

They arrived at the scene and there was lots of blood. Some of it had drained into the hole in the middle of the floor. The body – obviously a girl – lay on her stomach wearing a skating dress.

Sara and Nick looked at each other before stepping into the crime scene. Brass stood to the side waiting for them. "The girl's name was Stephanie Verronna. Jennifer Blanchett was found standing over her with the bloody skate," he nodded to the skate on the bench. "Those two," he looked to a woman and her child, "were the ones who found them. The poor kid's been traumatized – hasn't spoken a word since we got here."

They took a look around the locker room. It was shaped like a regular hockey locker room. The grey walls were marred. The darker grey benches were low to the ground and the hooks jutted out of the wall. There was blood spatter on one of the walls about halfway up.

They stepped lightly, taking pictures of everything and anything that could be considered evidence. The adjoining bathroom door was closed, but Nick dusted it for prints. It was covered in them, overlapping with the multitudes of people going to the bathroom. He found a syringe needle on the floor, and whether it pertained to the investigation, he had no idea. He snapped pictures and put it in a little plastic bag, just in case.

The bathroom smelled disgusting. The aroma of sweat and urine wafted to him and he wrinkled his nose. The toilet stall held nothing that he could see, and checking the toilet itself yielded nothing. The sink was filled with hairs; brown, red, and blonde. He picked up the clumps with tweezers and stuck them into a bag as well.

A bottle of hairspray sat on the sink and he put that into a bag.

As Nick was getting a layer of make-up onto a sticky, Sara walked up behind him. "They're taking the body."

Nick grimaced. "Yeah, you wanna check the shower for anything? There's nothing left on this sink, I'll check the urinal."

"Yeah, sure."

Sarah shined the flashlight everywhere in the shower, finding nothing.

"Sorry, Nick – nothing in the shower."

"Urinal's a no-go."

"Anything else?"

"Not that I could find."

"You check the garbage?"

"Yeah…nada."

"Let's go over this place one more time."

"Sure thing."

Twenty minutes later they had found nothing. No footprints, no hairs, and no more syringes.

Sara's disgust was evident. "For a locker room, that place was disgusting. I can't believe people take showers in that."

Nick quirked a grin. "Yeah, well, us sweaty guys don't really care about that. We just wanna get the major smell off before going home."

"It's disgusting."

"It could've been worse."

"I don't really want to think about how."

Nick only grinned charmingly at her.

Sara stuck her head into Grissom's office. "Hey, Grissom."

He looked up, his migraine still pounding at his head. "Yes?"

"Ah, we're back."

His eyebrow rose. "I see."

"Okay, well. Okay."

She stepped away from the door and walked down the hall. Grissom pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering if he should call her back. The migraine pounded a definite no and he heeded the disappointing demand.

Nick was waiting for her in a lab room. "Glad you could come." He winked. "There's so much hair here – what do these girls do? Pull it out in clumps?"

Sara grinned at him. "Maybe."

"At least it's not mine. I'm giving it to DNA now. I got the powder to Trace. You wanna come with?"

"Sure thing."

Sara walked with Nick down the hall, annoyed with Grissom and hoping that this case would be open and close.

AN: Next up is an interlude, introducing yet more characters. With something like this, there's gonna be tons of people. We learn that the skaters don't have much to do but get wasted. In more ways than one, I suppose. -Edit: I realized that Jacqui doesn't DO DNA…so I had to fix that. I changed some other things too because I'm an idiot. Also, I apologize about Nick and Sara working together. But I haven't seen season 5 so…- Please review!