Chapter Six: Silence and Even More Initiative
Greg walked down the intensely lit hallway towards his lab he was sharing with Sara holding a hot coffee in his left hand and his black crime kit on his right shoulder. The events that happened last night were still channeling through his mind. Greg didn't ever like to see Sara hurt or vulnerable, but he knew that he was holding her best interests in mind when he told her Rogers's terrible intentions. Her soft brown eyes were painful to look at; they didn't hide their remorse or sorrow like they usually did.
"Greg!" Someone called behind him and Greg turned around to see his boss, Grissom standing outside Nick's lab.
Greg headed back to him, "Hey Grissom, what's up?"
"The ceiling, but that's besides the fact," Grissom said seriously as he scribbled quickly on his clipboard. "I heard from Sara that you guys finally have a lead and that you're going to make an arrest and search his room so I wanted to know if you already had the warrants made out."
Greg paused in thought and readjusted his strap out of discomfort and nervousness. He was never confident or at ease around Grissom probably because his boss wasn't goofy or easygoing and that radiated off of him. "Ugh, yeah. Sara said she'd take care of that last night."
"Okay, great! Just thought I'd check in with you see if you concurred." Grissom said as he stopped writing finally and looked Greg in the eye, which in turn, caused Greg to become even jitterier.
"Yes, I concur." Greg said idiotically before even thinking about what he was saying. To cover up his embarrassment he quickly took a drink of his coffee completely forgetting it was searing hot.
Grissom nodded and patted Greg on the back, "Maybe you should cut back on caffeine, Greg." After he said that, Grissom walked off towards his office.
"Nice going, Sanders," Greg whispered to himself as he started to stalk off towards his lab again. "Just make yourself look like a jackass in front of Grissom!"
"You are a jackass so you can't help yourself," Sara said smiling as she walked right towards him.
Greg merely laughed sarcastically, "Thanks for the boost of confidence, I really needed that."
Laughing now, Sara waved, "C'mon, we're going to meet your buddy Walts and search his very protected dorm."
"He's not my buddy," Greg pointed out quickly and decided that he wanted to talk about what happened the night before, "and about last night."
Sara cut him off, "Shut up, Sanders. Let's just close this case."
Feeling a little abashed, Greg just somberly nodded and turned around and followed Sara as she brushed passed him holding the blue warrant protectively in her hands.
They didn't speak too much on the drive up there, but the tension was so thick as if it were like fog in the early morning where you can barely see your hand in front of your face. As they drove into the parking lot, Greg saw Rogers standing there with his partner Hudson leaning against their patrol car laughing. Immediately, Greg stole a quick glance to see how Sara was holding up. Apparently already spotting the two haughty officers, Sara's usually sternly beautiful face now had a look of anxiety.
"We'll get the search done quickly and then we'll be out of here in no time," Greg said hoping to reassure as best he could.
Sara parked a few spaces down from where Rogers's and Hudson's patrol car was parked. Greg leisurely got out of the car with his crime kit sitting snuggly on his shoulder and rounded the car in wait of Sara. She was still sitting in the driver's seat just staring into space. Greg guessed what she was thinking, feeling, and going through. After all, in the tenth grade, the prettiest girl in his grade came up to him one day and asked him out, to his surprise. He got ready as soon as he got home; to say he was elated was an understatement. Well, he went to meet her at the burger joint and she never showed. The next day at school, Greg felt exactly what Sara was feeling at this moment, used and hurt.
"Sara," he whispered softly trying not to sound overbearing, "are you okay?"
She snapped out of her chain of thought and nodded, "Yeah." Sara hastily grabbed her kit and the warrant and quickly got out of the SUV.
Greg led the way over to the two officers and merely smirked at the two. "Well, we're going to make an arrest and search suspect's room so we're going to need both of you today."
They both stood up and nodded; Rogers winked at Sara when he reached his full height. Sara just forced a smile in return and said nothing to him. Rogers sensed her standoffish attitude right off the bat and his flirty expression turned to stone almost immediately.
Greg turned and started to walk into the dorm and into the open elevator, holding it for Sara, Rogers, and Hudson. None of them spoke to each other on their way up to the designated floor and as soon as the steel sliding door opened college life hit their ears.
Like the hall had been before on their many trips to the dorm, it was busy and crowded. College students entered and exited many open dorm rooms as the group passed by and soon students stopped and stared at the very formal and serious group.
Greg knew what they were probably thinking and whispering to their friends as they watched on. His guess was correct when he heard someone say to another person, "They must've made a break through." The statement seemed to have relayed through the hall quicker than a track star around the track. Excitement in many people's eyes was evident and others just solemnly nodded when they agreed with the assumption.
Finally they made it to Steven Walts's dorm room and unlike all of the other doors, his was closed.
Sara brushed by Greg and knocked on the door; she wanted to be the leader of this case, after all it was hers to begin with and Greg wasn't insulted by that.
A couple of seconds later, Steven opened the door slowly and stood in his doorframe looking agitated. "What d'you guys want?"
Sara merely smirked and then raised the blue warrant. "We want you in handcuffs and down at the police station and the keys to your room to be exact."
Shock and fear evaded Steven's features when she said this. "What?" He asked rather shakily as Hudson grabbed Steven's wrist and pulled him out in the hall and started to read him his rights as he started to handcuff him.
"What am I being arrested for?" Steven asked as the color from his face lighted considerably.
"For the murder of Chris Johnson," Greg called over his shoulder as he pulled his gloves on and entered Steven's now very unprotected room.
Instinctively, Greg headed over to his desk and started look through his drawers. But as he looked on his desk's face, he found Steven's English paper lying out. The handwriting looked exactly like the handwriting in the journal, which contained the discriminating motive plainly.
He raised the paper and said, "I've got a match on the handwriting in the journal."
Sara handed him an evidence bag, but said nothing in return to his find. Instead, she went back to his small locked trunk at the foot of his bed.
"Hey Rogers," Sara yelled as she knelt down and looked at the lock.
Rogers came in obediently with a smug smile on his face; he must've thought she was calling him to apologize. "Yeah?"
"Go get some shears that would cut this lock off for us?" She said without even looking at him as she rose and looked through Steven's closet.
Rogers looked taken aback by this favor, but a second later nodded, "All right."
"Thanks," responded flatly as she looked on the shelf above where the clothes were hanging.
When Rogers made his way out of the room, Greg smirked to himself as he happily searched through Steven's desk some more.
Silence, except for the noises of moved possessions, ensued the dorm room. It was awkward and tense, but Greg tried to push it aside in hopes of closing this case by nightfall if he kept the pace he was going now.
A few minutes later, Rogers returned to the dorm with the shears in his hand. He was red in the face probably because of searching for the shears and also because of his confused and upset attitude. He handed the shears over to Sara who didn't show any kind of emotion when she took them and headed back over to the trunk.
"Ah, do you need me to cut the lock?" Greg asked seeing as the lock was pretty thick and he didn't know how strong Sara was.
"Stop being sexist and keep looking for some more evidence." Sara responded as she gripped the shears better and placed the steel blades up against one side of the lock and cut the lock efficiently enough to pull it off.
She turned and smiled at Greg. "So Greggo, did you think I was going to break a nail?"
"Ugh, no. I just thought…" Greg started but stopped when he heard how prejudice he was being to Sara. "Sorry, I'm a jackass."
"At least you admitted it," Sara said as she placed the shears on the ground and then pulled the trunk's top up.
From the look on her face, Sara seemed to have found the hidden treasure. Greg came over and looked into the trunk and saw wigs, women's clothing, and make-up.
His eyebrows rose and a smile slid onto his face, "I guess I could say that he was a transvestite after all!"
Sara looked perplexed and amused at the same time. Then she looked up at Greg with a small smile plastered on to her face, "No, he's a crossdresser, not a transvestite. But that's beside the point, do you know what this does to our case?"
Feeling as though some of his thunder had been stolen, Greg said in a less jovial voice, "Not particularly, we have everything we need."
Sara stood up and started to bag each article in the trunk into evidence bags. "It helps the motive a little bit more. If he was both secretly gay and a cross dresser, then he wasn't ready for his little secret to get out and Chris was threatening to do that when he highlighted one of Steven's secrets in Steven's journal."
"Oh, yeah— right," Greg said wanting to kick himself.
After he finished a thorough search through Steven's desk, Greg moved on to his bed.
"Hey Sara," he began, "but if Chris took Steven's journal, doesn't that mean that he was a friend or something?"
She stopped bagging when he asked this. "Well, yeah. If he didn't then he might've saw how Steven looked at him and sneaked into his room when Steven wasn't here and searched for something to see if he was really gay." When she said this, Sara started to bag again, "But really that shouldn't matter how he came upon it because either way he did, it gave Steven a motive to shut him up and he did."
Greg nodded in agreement, "Good point."
He started to lift the mattress up and see if Steven was hiding anything under it, but nothing was there. Greg then proceeded and got on the floor and grabbed his flashlight and looked under his bed and just like the top was clean the bottom was as well.
Sweating a little as he pushed himself up off the floor and turned and headed back towards his kit, this was sitting on top of the desk, and placed his flashlight and gloves in it. Right when he was doing so, Sara was sealing the last evidence bag and practically mimicking what Greg just done with an exception of the flashlight which she hadn't used.
When she finished cleaning up she looked over at Greg. "Hey Greg, can you give me a hand with some of the evidence bags? I can't fit them all in my kit."
Greg nodded and she smiled appreciatively, "Thanks."
He grabbed the remainder of the evidence bags and placed them safely into his kit and closed it again.
"All right, all set," he said as he swung the kit onto his shoulder to find that Sara wasn't in the room.
Greg went outside in the hall to see if she was out there but neither was she or Rogers out there. Concerned, Greg went up to a student who had been standing against the opposite wall talking to a friend.
"Hey," Greg greeted as the lanky student looked at him. "I was wondering if you saw where the officer who was standing on that wall," Greg pointed to it, "had gone to."
The lanky student smiled and nodded, "Yeah," he pointed to the staircase that was the next door down, "he went in there with your partner."
Greg smiled at the student, "Thanks man."
"No problem, just doing my civic duty." He said as he turned back to the other student who he was talking to before Greg came up.
Worried and curious, Greg walked over to the stairwell, where Chris had been hung, and as soon as he was about to shove the door open, he heard voices.
"What do you mean that you can't make the date tomorrow? I set the reservations and everything!" Rogers's muffled voice asked exasperatedly.
"Exactly how it sounds, I'm canceling." Sara's testy voice returned. Greg smirked when he heard this.
After a few seconds of silence, Rogers began to speak again. "At least tell me why."
Sara's laughter started to echo, "Let's just leave it at this, how about that?"
Then the door swung open immediately after and Sara ran into Greg, who hadn't expected the conversation to have ended that hurriedly, didn't move out of the way quick enough.
"Ouch," Greg said as he rose from the ground to see a fuming Sara standing over him.
"What the hell are you doing, Sanders?" Sara barked loudly.
Greg smiled meekly; he was afraid of this enraged Sara so he took a step away from her. "I was looking for you and I, ugh, was just about to open the door when you came pelting out and clumsily ran into me."
"More like you were eavesdropping," Sara whispered dangerously, which freaked Greg out even.
He laughed uncomfortably, "It's not my fault you ran into me!"
"Whatever." Sara spat and she picked up her kit off the floor which had flown off her when she ran into Greg. "Let's just head over to the police station and see Walts and get this case over with."
Greg swallowed the lump in his throat that had risen when he berated him. But he tamely followed Sara out of the dorm and into the parking lot. The sun was already sending an orangey-red glow into the sky. Greg huffed inwardly when he fastened his seat belt; he knew it was going to be a long, bumpy road back.
Author's Notes:
Well, I just want to say thanks to everyone who's been reading and everyone who has been reviewing as well. I appreciate all of your comments so much! I hope this chapter was up to par for all of you and if it wasn't just holler. I'm expecting in the next chapter or two that the story will be finished. I haven't decided really; it depends upon the length of the next one if I will end it or not. Thanks for sticking around this long and I hope you'll stay to see the conclusion!