Chapter Twenty-Eight

II

Sara dreamt vaguely of the sea, its waves falling against the land, shaping the land, but never conquering it, always retracting again. The water hummed a lullaby to her, wordless and ancient and familiar and left the feel of it inside her even as she woke up to darkness and a pounding head.

She glanced at the watch, vaguely making out the time. She'd slept over twelve hours, she calculated and her body still demanded more.

"Yay, jetlag," she muttered to herself, fighting herself free from the covers and feeling her body shiver for a moment, adjusting to the air conditioning. Her head felt like a brick and she padded to the bathroom, extracting a bottle of painkillers. Hopefully, it would chase away some of the strain, enough to make her function as a human being for a while. Sleeping too long would most likely make it worse, Grissom had warned her.

Grissom...

She padded into her living room, checking the machine. No messages. No messages on her page. No calls missed. She felt strangely hurt at that. Granted, he had sent her home to sleep, with strict orders not to do anything but, and the boss wouldn't have called, but he wasn't just her boss anymore. She didn't know what he was, but...

This was Grissom, she sternly reminded herself. He did live in a slightly different world to everyone else's and the same things would not occur to him. He didn't mean to hurt her, even in the million little ways he had and probably would.

Perhaps all humans lived in a different world to those around them. Her world was not Grissom's world, was not Alan's world.

Grissom would have called them if there was something new about Alan, she was sure. They had to still be waiting. In some ways, it was the part of the job she hated the most. Sometimes, they had to wait for the killer to make a move. Reacting, not acting. A part of her wanted to act, to run out of there and drive until she'd come across Alan or died from old age, even knowing the police was probably doing all the searching they could and she would not make much of a difference.

Perhaps this case laid to rest would be the one bringing sleep to her own case finally. A little hope. It was all they lived on, all she had lived on when Grissom had pushed her away and all had seemed dust. And when hope had left nothing but the fantasy, then he had come to her.

And hope lived renewed, hope that he would stay.

A part of her wanted the case to never end, as if it would make the light of Norway linger around forever and keep her with Grissom in the bubble of this undefined between them. And when they'd nailed Alan Keyes, what then? She could not go back to what had been, not when she'd felt Grissom's teeth scrape her flesh and his body sleep next to hers. Fantasies could be ignored, but when they'd been made flesh and bone, they couldn't just be dreamed about now and then and all be as before.

Ever forward, then, and solve the murders she could and let those she couldn't haunt her. Even the solved murders would sometimes still haunt. As Anna would, who now almost felt to live on inside her, as if unable to rest yet.

She wondered why she let Anna haunt her still. The unfairness of her death, the betrayal of her grandmother, the darkness of her father killing for her? Perhaps that was why. Perhaps Anna could not rest in her mind until her father killed no more.

Anna... There had been something troubling her about Anna and Alan's victims ever since she came back, but it seemed encased in the brick that was her mind and she couldn't quite make out the shape of it. She only knew it was there, the knowledge of knowledge of something slightly amiss.

She sighed and headed for the shower. Perhaps it would reveal itself to her as jet lag cleared and she felt more herself and less as if she was carrying Anna and Caroline and her own mother inside her, all bleeding in their own way. Perhaps it was easier to carry theirs than her own.

The hot water was a blessing against her skin, almost scolding her clean. She let it burn away the traces of sleep and dream from her body, if not from her mind. She tried not to think, tried not to rehearse speeches for when she saw Grissom again. It had been a strange, wonderful last day in Norway, out of time and place, just her and him, laughing at the falls of a roller coaster, eating ice cream under the sun. It was almost the sort of thing normal couples would do and therein lay the terrible, terrible lure.

She had not grown up normal. The fighting, the violence, the blood... You could never be normal again. She had fought her way to something like a life, an existance, but she still felt the temptation of creating a normality she'd never experienced.

Normal was an illusion. Normal was what you made it. Normal could be her and Grissom, life with the trenches of human cruelty all around. Their job to walk there, gathering the evidence from what people could do to each other. Murder, torture, scams, violence. Killing other daughters for the loss of his own.

Alan...

The sense of something amiss came back now and she frowned, trying to claw it down.

"She wanted to know him."

Caroline's words echoed in her, triggering a lurch in her brain. How had Alan known Anna, or more specifically Anna's murder to recreate? He could have gotten some details from the media, but she remembered the sense she'd had when looking at the pictures. They weren't detailed copies of Anna's death, which would have made all of them suspicious, but there was something...

It slipped away from her again and she groaned in frustration, feeling the water turn cold on her as well. She hurried out, wrapping herself in a towel almost automatically. Almost... She could almost feel the shape of it, if she just pushed on that thought for a moment... Caroline speaking of Anna... Anna's fairytale...

Fairytales.

Cinderella.

Anna had looked almost like Cinderella, she remembered having thought. And so had these murders. Fairytales, sleeping beauties, princesses, princes, fairy godmothers, dreams came true. Almost as if... He was still waiting for Anna to awake? But could he have known she had looked to be so soundly asleep that the CSIs had referred to her as Cinderella and have attempt to recreate the image?

Could he have an inside source?

The thought was cold and chilling and she let it breathe inside her, the implications spreading out before her. Not someone very close to them, or he would have known Anna's murder was being investigated in Norway and thus wouldn't have gone after Catherine and Warrick for who the killer was. Perhaps someone with access to the coroner's findings or the crime scene photos. Or a friend of a friend of a lab tech. Or a friend of a friend of a CSI of a different shift even. So many possibilities and the chilling thought that remained. He could know they were looking for him. Perhaps inside information was how he had known to find Lindsey, too.

She dressed hurriedly, not much thinking of what she put on, her mind now racing when finally clear. If Alan had a source in law enforcement, he could hide more easily. Perhaps even get some help. Just one guy transporting both Catherine and Warrick would have been hard. Two... Two would be easier. A reluctant helper, maybe, who hadn't wanted to help out more than superficially.

A spectrum of possibilities, all speculation, no evidence. She needed evidence. Nick (and probably Warrick and Catherine too, even if they hadn't been officially there) had already looked over the Keyes' family home, but maybe if she went back there, she could find something. Evidence often only made sense when in context. Grissom had taught her that.

She considered calling him for a moment, then thought against it. She could talk to him if she found something, making sure she didn't lead him on some wild goosechase, perhaps making him suspect she was even doing it to spend time with him. No. Better to have something more than a random theory mostly triggered by word association. He wouldn't scoff at her, not Grissom, but still...

The evening sky was dark as she stepped out, the night chilly against her skin. It felt strange for a moment to have dark evenings again, her mind used to the Norwegian sun. The desert was cold nights, even in summer. No sound of the sea either.

It suddenly hit her that a part of her missed San Francisco still. It had been a younger time and sometimes, she felt as old as the hills above the city, washed by winds and rains and centuries. Time added years to her mind, but blood and death and victims' eyes added decades. She wasn't growing old, she was growing ancient.

The car roared to life as she started it, almost like an angry beast charging. Perhaps that was what she was now, the beast of justice, of victims, of Anna. The beast on Alan's trail, until he was chained, until her own demons were chained, until all killers were chained away and there was nothing but sleep and silence and Grissom's gentle touch.

'Normality,' she thought and knew it was a fantasy. But all life was living fantasies in their own ways, and it was time to bring Alan's fantasy to an end. For Anna, for victims past and victims future. For her, for her own fantasy.

And the beast charged into the Nevada night, darkness softly swallowing her.