1Chapter One: In Which There is no Murder and Everyone Learns a Lesson About Prejudice.
A steaming Vegas blacktop. The iron of the basketball hoop radiates waves of heat. The CSI's are out among the cops, sweaty though determined and concentrated on their jobs. The smell of burnt rubber overwhelms the smell of acrid sweat and body. Then the body; her body. On her inside forearm-the word "temporary" is inked into her skin in a type-writer font. Grissom snaps a few pictures of it. There are other tattoos. One on her chest- some kind of symbol, asymmetrical, no one on the scene knows immediately what it means. And there, on her left shoulder blade another one...this one is a tri-spiral, interconnected spirals contained in a circle.
"COD?" Grissom asks David
"Not so sure yet, but most likely it had something to do with her elevated body temperature, the heat of the day, the fact that she's not perspiring, though there's an obvious smell of sweat from her"
"We are on a semi-enclosed basketball court-the lockers wreak, maybe she's worn the same shirt a few times"
"Yeah." David offered halfheartedly, "feel here shirt, right her at the small of her back"
"Dry" remarked Grissom, putting the glove back on his hand.
"Right, no sweat, but that stench is overwhelming"
"Gee, and I showered and all this morning" came Catherine's wry remark from over Gil's shoulder. She'd just arrived.
"I'm taking the body back to the lab" was Gil's flat response to her quip.
He'd undressed her and now was moving the av light slowly up and down her body. Her fingernails were short and bitten, her hands, her whole body was strong. An athletic ability is easy to spot in the musculature of a young woman. Basketball was obviously one of the sports she played. But the tattoos, more than her muscles were what drew his attention, especially the one on her left forearm...temporary?
Sara came in quietly and slipped on her own pair of glasses. Barely acknowledging each other, the two CSI's continued to work. Moving around to the other side of the slab, Sara took the young woman's hand in her own and slowly made her way up the arm massaging the muscles, feeling the bones then suddenly stopping at the right shoulder.
"Grissom, feel this" taking his hand she put it on the woman's shoulder joint, "grab it hard" she instructed. Then holding his wrist she pushed slightly against his hand and the woman's body. The snap was sickening.
"Her shoulder popped right out" Gil remarked pulling his hand back from what was now an ugly shoulder dislocation.
"Yeah, weird eh? I'm no expert but shoulders should be more resilient than this" she jiggled the offending joint as she looked up at her supervisor.
Putting his hands around her chest, then bracing her shoulder he pulled out and down on the arm and the joint popped right back into place, with little coercion.
"This is obviously an injury she has sustained a number of times, I can't see that it's relevant. It doesn't relate to the COD"
"Which is"
"That's a job for the good Doctor"
"The autopsy results" Grissom slapped the file down on the table and sat down heavily in his chair. "Too much cocaine, too much basketball, too little water and the heart popped. Literally exploded in her chest. Not to mention her septum was mush on account of all the coke. We're talking a long term habit. The levels in her system were ridiculously high at the time of her death"
The rest of the team looked at Grissom waiting for his next move.
"It's just that it's a weird cause of death for this woman" Catherine muttered just walking into the room, nose in a file.
"Why's it so weird Cath", Nick asked.
"According to this, our vic, Nicola Webb, was a PhD student at UNLV. She was almost finished her thesis; Reversing the Gaze; female spectatorship and the morality play'. She was a Renaissance scholar, had a thirty-five thousand dollar a year grant from the University, a sparkling reputation within the department..."
"And she was a cokehead?" Nick increduled, "weird, it just doesn't match up. Was there any signs of struggle? Did we do a rape kit?"
"Nick, there was no foul play. Unless anyone else has anything else to offer, I'm thinking this is an accidental overdose".
Gill looked at his team for possible theories.
"Right" offered Nick, always willing to be the sacrificial lamb when it came to expositing theories, "she's smart, athletic, healthy, attractive...what's she doing coked up to her eyeballs on a basketball court in an iffy part of town"
"So I need to know where she got the coke...if she did indeed take it herself and why she was where she was" Grissom offered to Nick, even though he was sure what they were investigating was not a crime.
"Well Gris, if this girl could play, and we've all established that she is athletic, she had on some expensive kicks, this is one of the best courts in the city. There's always a game happening, somebody must have been playing with her" offered Warrick.
"She was foolhardy then, a white woman heading on her own for a nighttime ball game in South LV?" Nick questioned.
"At 25 and about to get a PhD, she had sense in bucket loads. Sometimes intelligence makes a person feel invincible." Gil reasoned. Willing to placate his incredulous team on a quiet night, Grissom pushed the investigation further than he knew it had to go. "Look, Warrick, see if you can track down who she was playing with, I'll see if I can source her dealer. Catherine, can you go back to the courts see what you can find. Nick; the body, check it for struggle again, and Sara, read her thesis."
"What?" came the unanimous question, as four sets of eyes locked onto Grissom at his odd final order.
"Sarah, you've written a thesis, you know how much blood, sweat and tears goes into it. If you read it sensitively enough, it might as well be a diary", Grissom explained passing her the floppy disk that Catherine had brought in from Nicola's apartment.
"Have fun with that Sarah" grinned Nick pulling his hat on and patting her on the shoulder on his way out of the room.
Grissom pulled into the crime scene. It had quieted down some since earlier in the day. A cop stood guard, but the yellow tape was gone. He could make out the figure of Catherine bent over a backpack. "It's hers" she called out to him as he approached. "I found it in the men's bathroom." "Hmmm, I found her source for the coke. He's a bartender at the Sands, the vic worked there on Friday nights"
"She was a waitress too?"
"Yup, cash tips to supplement her University fellowship"
"Yeah, I know how that is. The cash pays for your disposables but isn't counted against your grant", Catherine smiled at the familiar scenario.
"Apparently the vic and the bartender used to get pretty loaded after their shifts on Fridays, they'd do a few lines, smoke a few joints, but from what he suggest they never did the kind of coke that we found in her system. Actually, he said that more often than not, she egged him on when he was ready to call it a night."
"So maybe she kept snorting when he wasn't around; there has to be evidence of more coke here" she said turning her attention back to the backpack.
"I'll check the stands" Grissom offered, walking away,
"No need" called Catherine, holding up a small jar half filled with white powder. "There has to be at least three ounces of coke here".
"Brass, I just need your pawprint and then we can put this away" Grissom offered Brass the file. The cop looked over the report his eyebrows lifting when he saw the ruling of accidental overdose. "You sure about this Gil?"
"Absolutely, you know we assume a certain behavior out of people because of what we appreciate of their professional choices, a young Renaissance scholar does not always an angel make"
Sara overheard the comment and smirked wondering who Gill imagined when he made that astute observation.
Brass took his pen out of his jacket and scribbled his name at the bottom. Handing the file back to Grissom he smiled "enjoy breakfast".
Sitting around the booth at the Diner the talk was quickly centered on the case they'd just closed.
"Her tattoos said everything to me about the dual nature of her projected identity" Grissom remarked smugly, his mouth full of toast.
"Okay, yeah the tri-spiral, it's a neolithic symbol found on Celtic monuments indicating fertility, rejuvenation, the course of the seasons" offered Nick.
"And the one on her chest-the arabic symbol for "truth". She obviously had a sense of the symbolic, of faith in the truth of some kind of cyclical energy, but where does the word "temporary" fit into the rest of it?"
"Think about it Warrick, what is temporary?",
"Not the ink in the tattoo obviously", Warrick offered his supervisor.
"Aha, no but that indicates a well developed sense of irony, n'est pas? To write the words in permanent ink? But think about it symbolically"
"This woman", Sara began, "used her body to express a sort of philosophy. It's her body she thought of as temporary. And if that's the way you think about your body, you're not necessarily going to be frightened of losing it. Hence the coke, the obvious repeated injuries, even to some extent the tattoos". Gill looked appreciatively at Sara who'd for the most part taken the words right out of his mouth.
"I couldn't have said it better myself"
"Wait a second here" commented Catherine shaking her head and looking generally disgusted at what was being suggested. "Do you mean to tell me that because a person is willing, free, irreverent, shall we say, with their bodies that they care less for life?"
"On the contrary Catherine, it evidences the deepest care for living life. She found a way to be an intellectual and spend 40 hours a week in a library, studying five hundred year old texts in isolation, in deep concentration ..sound familiar to anyone here...and yet she didn't have to project THAT image to the world. On that court, with a few lines in her, she was tough and modern, and hot and alive, and short of breath, and one of the guys, and physical, intensely physical; all the things that her professional choice deemed her NOT to be."
They all took to heart what Grissom had inadvertently revealed about himself, but more importantly the way in which what he said was directed at all of them.
"Hold up though, Gris. You're basically suggesting that drug use is a good way to escape the boredom of a person's career"
"Are you bored Warrick?"
"No. I love what I do"
"Well so did our vic. It's not a matter of escaping boredom it's about escaping the generalizations that people make about you based on the limited information they might have about you"
"It's about prejudice?" asked Nick incredulously
"Yeah, that makes sense" intoned Sara, "why do we expect certain types of behavior from certain types of people, this woman made it obvious that her goal was to make decisions that would disturb the judgements people made about her. In fact her whole thesis", they all smiled as Sarah smirked at them, she had actually gotten through the 250 pages of dense theory and analysis of sixteenth century theater, "was about the power that women got in being audience members during the Renaissance. Seeing as all the actors were male, for once they were not the objects of the male gaze, they were the one's doing the seeing, they were the ones with the power to deem the gazed upon, the actors, worthy of her attention. Actually she made a really interesting point about Queen Elizabeth I being the ultimate female spectator at the time. Nicola deeply understood the power of being seen and being judged on that first impression."
"Exactly," confirmed Grissom, asking "how many white girls with tattoos playing street ball are PhDs? How many Renaissance scholars play basketball, do coke, smoke pot, drink, have tattoos?"
The bill arrived and Nick picked it up, heading over to the cash register.
"Just a second there Nicky," called out Catherine "I'm all for disrupting people's views of me and living my life more unpredictably, so I'm gonna have another beer before bedtime."
"Alright, I'll join you then Cath" smiled Nick.
"Yeah, me too" said Warrick, "like my grandma used to say, a bird never flew on one wing"
Sara smirked at the expression and stood to get up, "I'm sorry to count myself out but I'm just getting off a triple and I need sleep"
"C'mon Sar," goaded Nick, "this is about changing your patterns, living differently"
"I'm too tired to change right now Nick, another time"
"I'll walk you to your car" offered Grissom
"Aww Gris, you're out too?"whined Catherine
"I'm too old to change Catherine". With that he turned and headed toward the door of the Diner ushering Sara ahead of him.
They got to her car and Sara, looking for her keys in her purse mumbled, "you're never to old"
"What was that Sara?"
"I saiiid," drawing out the middle of the word, "you're never to old...to change, to be free to think differently"
"Maybe"
"And I'm not interested in effecting change in how people perceive me by ordering another drink" Sara said pointedly.
"I think I know what you're getting at and..." before he could finish what he was saying, Sara had stepped into his personal space and was watching his lips intently.
"Sara?"
"Grissom, if this" she placed a hand on his chest, purposefully over his heart "is all temporary, why are we wasting so much time?"
"Because Sara," he said placing his own hand over hers "this life is the only one we have"
"Exactly my point" Sara countered closing the few inches between them and taking his lower lip between her lips. She felt his chest fill up with air, and her own chest ached with the rush of adrenaline that made her heart race. She pulled away, looking at him...
"you didn't let me finish my thought Sara" he said softly but now holding her hand on his chest "the only one we have has to be lived with balance and care".
"So what Gil, you have a balanced life, you live your life with care?" She was annoyed at him now, feeling the condescension in his tone.
"Not by any means Sara, I'm no great model. But I do know that I don't want to make compromises, or compromise anyone else because of my judgements"
"So you'd rather be dishonest to yourself and to others than listen to your judgements" she questioned withdrawing her hand from his and turning towards her car.
"Sadly, yes Sara, if it means being safe and secure"
"I'm fed up with safe and secure Gill" she spat at him yanking open the car door,
"Sara!"
"What?"
"I'm, It's just, I... sorry"
She chuckled softly and shaking her head and screeched away leaving Grissom to pull his hand slowly down over his face, tugging at his beard and sighing deeply.
Chapter 2: In Which Sara Explains an Important Difference to Catherine
"Bang bang, my baby shot me down"
"Ahh, Nancy Sinatra", Sarah thought, "Nancy always got it right". The melancholy aspect of this song always got to her, the echoing reverb on the guitar, Sinatra's honey breathed voice, so sorrowful, not angry at being shot down, just disappointed and sad.
Sarah had listened to that tune over and over after Grissom had turned her down. Now, a few months later she listened to the song on a long forgotten CD (entitled "hide all sharp objects and sleeping pills". The mix was, shall we say, mellow) with a bit of remove, a twinge of embarrassment, but mostly with relief that nothing had ever happened between them. She increasingly found Gill's neuroses irritating, but was nonetheless proud of herself for managing to take the higher ground with him, most of the time anyway.
If only she could say the same of her relationship with Catherine. Sarah constantly found herself feeling scornful and dismissive of Catherine. She just couldn't find reason to respect her older co-worker. Her PEAP counselor had a few things to say about Sarah's scorn for Catherine. Their exchanges about Catherine (and there had been many in the last couple of weeks) usually went something like this:
Counselor: Probing question about Sarah's suspension
Sara: Bitchy judgment lobbied at Catherine's overt sexuality
Counselor: Measured question about Sarah's harsh resentment
Sarah: Defensive pointing out of specific incidences where Catherine used sex to get her way. Reasoned explanation of the inappropriateness of this behavior.
Counselor: Calming assurances of agreement. Sneaky question about Sarah feeling jealous that Catherine's attention was never directed at her.
Sarah: Disgusted dismissal (thinly veiled)
Counselor: (seeing through the veil) Delicate inquiry into Sara's sexua-
Sarah: Abrupt halting of discussion followed by childish stomping out of the office.
Sarah gripped the steering wheel, thinking that the meeting she was just leaving would be the last with Sheila, her counselor. She was over the Grissom stuff, but now that she had been suspended over her mouthing off to both Catherine and Ecklie, she reasoned that finishing up with Sheila would be, for the time being, a fantasy.
Sighing, she switched off the car cutting Nancy Sinatra off mid sentence. Heading into the lab, she knew she'd have to be the one to offer up the olive branch. Sheila would be so proud.
"Catherine?" Sarah knocked at her office door.
"Mmmhmm?" Catherine offered, looking at Sarah over the tops of her glasses. Taking in a fidgety Sarah leaning against the doorframe.
"I, well, it's just that, you know, I wanted..."
"Sarah, come in, sit down, close the door" Catherine suggested softly, taking off her glasses and closing the file she was reading.
"No, that's okay, I'll just stay he..." Sarah could anticipate Sheila's question for her next week if she refused Catherine's polite request... "so you didn't sit down when she offered. Were you afraid of something she might say?". Sarah decided at that moment that she'd prefer to sit down with Catherine now, than have to listen to Sheila analyze her refusal next week. "Well, okay".
She pushed her body off the door frame and took two long strides into the office, settling her long frame in the chair across from Catherine. Catherine leaned back in her own chair, folding her arms over her chest and looking at Sarah, who was suddenly very interested in her fingers. They sat like that, in silence for a good minute, before Catherine sighed deeply and leaned forward onto her desk. At the abrupt break in the quiet, Sarah looked up and met Catherine's quizzical face. She'd have to say something.
"Catherine. Look. I'm sorry. I just wanted to say that. I shouldn't have, in fact we, shouldn't have had that conversation in the hall like we did, and I apologize."
"Okay. So you're apologizing for where we had that awful conversation as you put it?" Catherine was incredulous. "What about what you said Sarah?"
Sarah breathed in deeply and closed her eyes, "what would Sheila say" she thought to herself in that moment of pause.
"Catherine, you're right. What I accused you of was, well, I guess...wrong, certainly it was hurtful and disrespectful. You didn't need to hear that from me."
"From you...Sarah, this is...I admit I know this is hard for you, but you are apologizing in the most backhanded way. You don't regret what you said to me, in fact I think you'd say it again, given the right moment. Say it again Sarah, do you think I use my sexuality to get what I want from people?" Catherine glared accusingly at Sarah.
"Take the high road Sarah" she pleaded with herself. "Catherine, don't ask me that" not exactly the highest road, but it was better than screaming at Catherine to go fuck herself, or rather the closest warm body. "Wait, that would be me" Sarah smirked to herself.
"Why are you smiling? Sarah, this is not funny, answer the damn question".
"Catherine, its just that, and even with me, but not really with me... you have this way of smiling, or touching your ear, or crossing your legs, oh, and sometimes, if you're asking a really big favor, you lick your lips first and pull on the back of your neck, and its just, well, how can I put...it's very hard to refuse you".
Catherine was speechless.
So was Sarah. She couldn't believe she'd said all that, and not accusingly, just trying to explain to Catherine what she observed.
"Catherine, I'm sorry. I should leave." Sarah got up to leave.
"Sarah," Catherine called out, "do you think I'm the only one who knows how to manipulate people?"
"What are you accusing me of" Sarah's tone had lost all neutrality and traces of apology. She wasn't asking the question, rather she was daring Catherine to respond.
"You, Sarah my dear, flirt incessantly with Greg, with David, you tried to pocket Gill, Nicky would jump into your bed so fast...
"Catherine!" Sarah just wanted her to stop, she was flushed with embarrassment, surprisingly she wasn't angry. She knew Catherine was right, but there was a difference between flirty and sexy. She proceeded to try to explain the discrepancy to Catherine.
"Bullshit." was Catherine's reply. After a thoughtful moment of silence between the two. Sara refused to rise to Catherine, but she also didn't want to leave this conversation.
Catherine broke the silence. "Sara, show me flirty."
"What?
"Go ahead, be flirty with me, then sexy and we'll see if there's a difference". Catherine was serious, she swept her hair back from her face and put her glasses back on. Sarah just stared open mouthed, while Catherine got right back to her file. "This is such bullshit" Sarah thought as she figured out her next move, "she's trying to play me, using my own sexuality against me, rather than using her own. She thinks she can manipulate me using sex, but do it in a way where her sexuality is not on display. She knows I'd call her on that, prove that what I observed about her was true, and win our little debate." Sarah turned and walked out of the office, leaving Catherine, who never looked up from the file, alone in her office.
But not for long.
Sarah took a deep breath outside Catherine's door and knocked.
"Yeah?" Catherine called.
"Hey Catherine," Sarah moved into the office and sat down, leaving the door open behind her. "Umm", she began with her head down. Looking up with her eyes only, and smiling coyly at Catherine she continued, "Cath could you give me a hand with something?" Sara broadened her smile, and lightly rubbing the skin her v-neck exposed, went on "I've got about a million potential instruments to compare to a splatter pattern, I don't suppose you could lend me half an hour? It would mean so much to me".
"Yeah sure, I"..." Catherine was utterly confused. She thought her little exchange with Sarah was over, and now her was her colleague asking her for help, like butter wouldn't melt, and she was so sweet!
Sarah cut her off and stood, putting her hand over Catherine's and meet, and held, her eyes. In a low voice, and still smiling, only now more of a sexy curl played over her lips, she leaned in to tell Catherine how much she appreciated the help.
"No problem" Catherine said looking at her co-worker, equal parts entranced and perplexed. Catherine was just about to get move closer to Sarah, inexplicably, she felt drawn to get nearer.
Sara slid her hand slowly off Catherine's and walked towards the door as over her shoulder she tossed, "that was flirty... do you want to see sexy now?"
"Sure Sarah" Catherine challenged, a smirk playing on her features, knowing Sarah would just keep walking out into the hall. Convinced as she was that she knew what Sarah would do, she certainly wasn't prepared for Sarah to close the door with a kick, to close the blinds with a twist of her fingers, and to lock Catherine in the most intense of looks.
"Catherine, I flirt at work, it's innocent enough right? Just enough coercion to get what I want without being overt. You on the other hand, use sex." Catherine tried to protest, leaning forward abruptly in her chair, but Sara held up her hand. "Wait, just wait, I'll show you what you do". With that Sarah turned away from Catherine and flipped her head down running her fingers through her hair. She put her hand inside her bra pulling first the left, then the right breast, closer together. Pulling her v-neck down to expose her newly discovered cleavage, she flipped her head up and licked her lips before turning around to a slightly pissed off, but mostly curious Catherine.
"You see Catherine, right now yoooou, are looking at my tits." Sarah said through a smirk. Catherine tried again to protest. "Hey I don't blame you Cath, when they're out there like this," she cupped her breasts looking down at her cleavage, "you can't help but pay attention to them. So there's your cleavage, then there's the way you move". Sarah thrust her hips out, stuck her chest out, shoulders back and strutted over to Catherine's desk, "Then," Sarah continued to explain, "you'd probably perch yourself on the side of the desk of the person you were trying to manipulate, like this". Sarah sat up on Catherine's desk, tossing her hair over her shoulder, and watched as Catherine leaned back once again in her chair. Both women were determined to see the other one back down, but the way they held each others' gaze, there was no telling how far their stubbornness was likely to take them.
Sarah couldn't believe Catherine hadn't kicked her out of her office, or slapped her, or at least blushed during this whole time. She wasn't sure how much more "explaining"she could do for Catherine. "If you still aren't satisfied with what you've gotten out of the poor unsuspecting dope, mesmerized by your overt sexual display, you might lean forward like this", Sarah bent her torso over Catherine's seated figure, placing a hand on each armrest, "that way you can look at my tits bett...I mean, the guy, the the, you know the... he could see your ti...cleavage better." Sarah was starting to get a little flushed and was losing her thread. Up until this point she'd been imagining herself as Catherine, imagining Catherine as the drooling lab rat. But she was starting to feel her own sexual self sneaking into her role, and could no longer imagine Catherine as an oogling sap. Instead Sarah could only take in an obviously aroused Catherine, a Catherine sitting there looking from Sarah's eyes to her chest, and back again, and running her finger over her own lower lip. "She's not going to stop me," Sarah thought, slightly panicked, but nonetheless determined to maintain control. If she ran away now Catherine would always have the upper hand, and Sarah would always feel subdued and ashamed. Sarah desperately grasped once more at the roles she had been imagining when this all began.
"Then, once you've given them a good look, and I've seen you do this Catherine so don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll lean closer and whisper what you want," Sarah's lips moved to within a hairsbreath of Catherine's ear, "you move so close and demand so seductively that they can feel your hot breath on their neck, and you can smell their resistance slipping away". Sarah could tell that Catherine had stopped breathing, and now she heard the quietest of moans escape from Catherine's lips, along with a long low release of breath. That was all Sarah needed to know that she had won. She had shaken Catherine with her own brand of overt sexuality. She moved abruptly away from Catherine, and put her hands purposefully on her hips, with raised eyebrows she smirked triumphantly down at the seated figure. "See, I told you, it's impossible to resist. With that kind of strategy Catherine, you never give anyone the chance to refuse you." With a shrug of her shoulders she turned and left the office.
Catherine stared after her, unbelieving, not necessarily about Sarah's behaviour, but about the fact that Sarah might be right. Catherine was at that moment, reduced to a bundle of sexual nervousness and energy. She had been putty in Sarah's hands and probably would have assented to any request Sarah could have dreamed up. "Is this how the guys feel when I ask them for things?" Catherine asked herself out loud.