"What do you guys think?" Sara said quietly, looking at Jack and Sophie. "Was it really an accident?"

The two less experienced CSIs, both locked in thought, were silent for a few moments as they re-surveyed the scene. "I think . . ." Jack finally ventured, "that it could have been, but based on how the husband is acting, I doubt that it actually was." He nodded toward the man standing a few feet away, surrounded by three policemen who were all asking questions at the same time. "He just looks too suspicious to be innocent."

Before Sara could offer the suggestion of ignoring the emotions at the scene, Sophie answered Jack's idea with one of her own. "There's got to be more to it than that, Jack," Sophie said thoughtfully. "We can't get on the stand and say, 'Well yeah, the suspect looked shifty-eyed, so we bagged him.'"

"Well I didn't say that . . ." Jack began, looking guilty. Running a hand through his short hair, he tried again. "I was just . . ."

"Time out," Sara interrupted, knowing that this discussion was about to degenerate an argument. "Before you two get into it, let's get back to the point. Sophie, you say that there has to be something more. Do you have any idea what that 'more' could be?"

Sophie bit her lip. "Umm . . ."

"Oh!" Jack piped up, winning himself a dark look from Sophie. "I think I thought of something. The angle she fell at – I mean, the ladder, and the floor – and her position . . . well they're just weird. We could work out some regressions to confirm it, but I bet we'll find out that she couldn't have landed how she did without outside interference."

Sara smiled. "Good, Jack. That's exactly what I was thinking."

"If you knew it already," Sophie said, a little put out because she hadn't been the one to come up with a solution, "then why did you stand around asking us?"

"Because, grasshopper, you guys have to be able to do this too. What if I weren't here with you? You'd have to be able to read the scene the same way you just did." A strange look crossed Sara's face when she finished this pronouncement, and she tried to hide her the abashed grin that followed.

Jack looked at her, brows furrowed. "What's so funny, boss?"

"Nothing about the case . . . I was just remembering that I got almost the exact same lecture I just gave you, once upon a time." She shrugged. "Just goes to show, everyone has to start at the same place."

She was about to impart more wisdom to her CSIs when the finale of the William Tell Overture sounded from the vicinity of her hip. Slapping a hand down to the noise, she sighed. "Phone . . . hold those thoughts, guys." She checked the caller ID window on the phone and was immediately worried. Quickly, she hit the send button and said, "Hello? Gris? Is something wrong?"

"Uh, no. No, nothing's wrong; why do you ask?" Grissom sounded puzzled, and she wondered if he didn't realize how strange it was for him to call her to begin with, let alone during work.

"Because you are calling me in the middle of both of our shifts. I also happen to be at a scene right now. So if it's not an emergency, why did you call?"

Grissom sounded unusually hesitant when he answered. "Well, I was just . . . things are slow here tonight, and I thought maybe they were for you too, so I figured I'd just call to chat . . ."

A skeptical look came over Sara's face. "You called me during work 'just to chat'? What are you smoking, Grissom?"

He coughed. "Well, actually . . . that's the problem. I'm trying not to smoke anything, as per your directive, but it's getting a little difficult. I guess I called now because I figured that I'd talk to you instead of smoke. But if you can't talk, I understand . . ."

"Oh fine," Sara said, a small smile on her face, "just keep talking and make me feel a little guiltier. Do you maybe have a puppy I could kick?"

"Er, no. Sorry."

She snorted. "I kinda guessed that. Hold on a sec." Putting a hand over the phone, she motioned to Jack and Sophie, who had moved a discreet distance away. "Guys? Have you finished processing?"

"Well, no," Sophie said, "but we were just waiting for you."

"Go on and finish. Jack," she ordered, "keep an eye on her, you never know what could hurt a case or the CSI working it."

"Yes ma'am," he said and, with a snappy salute, took Sophie's arm and half-dragged her toward the house as Sara put the phone back to her ear.

"Jack!" Sophie said when he finally stopped just outside the door to the house. "Do you mind maybe not dragging me around like a caveman? Or would you rather I lie down so you can drag me around by my hair, because I'm sure we can dig up a club somewhere . . ."

Jack rolled his eyes, but let go of her arm. "Sorry. Didn't realize I was dragging. You ok?"

"Yeah," Sophie said, giving her arm a light rub. "Fine. Let's go on in."

Ten minutes later, they were both in the foyer, dusting for prints. Sophie used her forearm to wipe a smudge of the dust off her cheek, only succeeded in smearing it onto more of her face, and groaned. "Jack, you don't have a clean hand by any chance, do you? I've got this stuff all over my face and I'm still gloved."

"Hold on," he responded, and worked his way down the stairs toward her. "Where on your face? Oh," he said as he caught sight of it. "Yeah, I'll get it."

He was still wiping at a particularly stubborn streak when Sophie said, "So . . . what do you think Sara's on the phone about?"

Jack shrugged. "No idea. It didn't sound like she was talking to anyone from the lab, I know that. Maybe a friend?"

"That's what I thought at first too, but I just don't really think she'd blow us off at a scene to gossip with a friend."

"Yeah, good point." He was quiet for a few seconds. "Maybe someone from her old office needing help? Did you hear her say a name?"

"She said 'Grissom'," Sophie responded immediately. "Do you know of anyone named that, or with that as a nickname?"

"Mm-mm," Jack said, shaking his head, "not that I know of. But I definitely think it's a friend, or something along those lines. She sounded really worried at first."

"But then she said that this Grissom guy . . . or girl? . . . was calling during both their shifts. It must be someone from her old work."

"Would you sound that worried if I called you in the middle of shift?" Jack asked teasingly.

"Depends on if you broke something or not," Sophie shot back. "But really – you know what I think?"

"I bet I'm going to hear it whether I want to or not, so go ahead," he said resignedly.

"I think," Sophie began, then lowered her voice to just above a whisper, "that maybe she has a boyfriend on the Las Vegas team. Maybe she's doing a long-distance thing with this Grissom guy."

"But she hasn't mentioned anything like that to any of us here," he protested, shaking his head, "and she's pretty tight with Mark. Besides, she doesn't talk like she has a boyfriend."

"What would you know about talking like you have a boyfriend?" Sophie said, biting back a laugh. "You definitely don't have one, and you know I don't have one, so you couldn't be basing this theory on me . . ."

"I'm speaking in generalities, ok?" he said gruffly, and gave her shoulder a gentle push. "Silly."

Sophie smiled. "But my point still stands – you wouldn't know 'talking to a boyfriend' if it painted itself purple and danced naked on a piano, singing 'Talking Boyfriends are Here Again'."

Jack blinked. "That was the most nonsensical thing I have ever heard you say, Harrison. So you think she is talking to a boyfriend?"

"Well . . . not necessarily a 'boyfriend,' in the sense of 'smoochie smoochie, I wuv you,' or anything, but it definitely sounded like someone who – well, just think about it. She established that it wasn't an emergency, which usually would result in her saying she'd call them back later, but instead of hanging up, she got rid of us and is, at least presumably, still talking to him." Sophie stopped abruptly and took a deep breath, replacing the air she'd just expended reciting that run-on sentence.

"Hmm," Jack sighed, "good point. But if he's not her boyfriend, what is he?"

"Maybe she has a crush on him."

"On a guy on the team she worked on? Never happen," he scoffed. "That would cause too many problems, and Sara's smarter than that. Besides, she voluntarily moved away from him; why would she move away from someone she liked?"

Sophie blinked. "Are you really that dense?" She reached up and knocked on the side of his head jokingly, then said, "Apparently you've never had a crush on anyone, because if you had, you'd know that you don't get a whole lot of choice in the matter."

"But . . ."

"Besides," Sophie continued, overriding Jack's protest, "when you sleep during the day and work with a team of people who share your interests at night . . . it's really easy to develop a crush on someone you work with, whether it will cause problems or not."

Jack raised his eyebrows. "Well it's not like anyone on our team does that; I don't see why you think other teams would be that different."

Blinking, Sophie stepped back from her previous position almost nose-to-nose with Jack. "You're serious." It wasn't a question.

"Well, yeah. I mean, you don't see any of the guys hitting on you or Sara, do you?"

That startled a laugh out of her. "Jack, dear . . . Sam and Will both would kill to get Sara in bed. I think Mark might even be considering it. You need to start paying more attention to gossip."

"Yeah, but what about you?" he asked.

"I don't know," Sophie said, a slight challenge in her tone, "what *about* me?"

"You don't . . . I mean, there's no one who . . ."

He was narrowly rescued from the fist Sophie was preparing to send into his nose when Sara's voice, which echoed through the marble, rang out from the doorway.

"Hey! You two! What are you up to in here? Because it's obviously not cleaning up after yourselves," Sara said with a slow look at the black-dusted surfaces in the area.

"Oh," Sophie said, recovering quickly, "I got dust all over my face and Jack was trying to get it off before it migrated into my eye."

"Uh-huh," Sara said neutrally, and looked at Jack.

"Yeah," he said with a firm nod, "what she said."

Sara didn't believe a word of it, but she figured she'd give them a break this time. "Okay, then. You got it all, Sophie?" When Sophie nodded, Sara smiled. "Good. Then how about you two get in gear and either finish the dusting, or start cleaning up the dust?"

Both CSIs leapt to attention and began dusting with a vengeance, determined to escape the wrath they would face if Sara inferred that they had been talking about her.

Sophie couldn't resist indefinitely, though, and her patience finally broke on the drive back to the lab. "So," she said in what she hoped was a conversational tone, "who was on the phone before, Sara?"

Sara looked startled. "No one important. Why?"

"We were just curious," Jack piped up, causing Sophie to close her eyes and pray that he wouldn't say something insensitive. "Since you were on the phone for a while."

Sara gave them both suspicious looks. "No one important, like I said. Just someone from home." She paused. "Uh, Las Vegas, I mean." D'oh! How many times did she have to tell herself that Vegas wasn't supposed to be "home" anymore?

"From home," Sophie said cautiously. "That's nice. Did he have anything important to say?"

"How do you know it was a 'he'?" Sara snapped. Her eyes narrowed and she looked hard at Jack and Sophie again. "Never mind. I said it wasn't important, and it wasn't. You ought to worry more about your scene than who your boss is or isn't talking to."

"Right," the chastened pair muttered in unison.