A face from the past?
Grissom told the others what Jack had told them, when he and Sara arrived back at the lab. Again the name meant nothing to Warrick or Nick but Cath's eyes widened in disbelief as she visibly trembled "But he died!" she whispered "we all thought he died"
Nick, Sara and Warrick waited impatiently to be told the story from the two older investigators. From their reaction it seemed this wasn't going to be pretty.
"About ten years ago, there was a young lab technician who worked with us called Paul Simmonds" Catherine explained "Something awful happened, Grissom had no option at all but to fire him"
"What happened?" Sara asked not sure she wanted to know.
"A young female employee was raped" Catherine said, her eyes downcast "right here in this lab Paul was the only one here that night, it had to be him but there was no proof, no evidence she washed it away immediately. She refused to name him, wouldn't give evidence against him, she killed herself several days later"
"Whoa" Nick sucked in his breath, struggling to believe something like that had happened.
"We didn't want to believe it" Grissom continued "he had been a good kid, chirpy excitable, much like Greg now" he added somewhat sadly "But something changed he became angry, irrational, he wasn't the Paul we once knew. He would turn up for shifts late, was sometimes drunk and then the rape happened.
"It made me think of something that same girl who was raped had said about Paul some months earlier" Catherine confided "She came to me and told me that she may have been mistaken but saw Paul 'doing something' to a corpse."
"Oh god" Sara breathed, sickened
"I dismissed it off hand I knew Paul he wouldn't do something like that but after that girl was raped I realised just what a sick man he must be." The realisation suddenly hit her like a ton of bricks. "Oh god that bastard has Greg!" Catherine broke down. Nick and Warrick were stunned as Sara did her best to comfort Catherine.
Nick finally spoke "Er Griss you said something about thinking he was dead?"
"We all did" Grissom replied "obviously because there was no evidence he was never prosecuted, he moved on but five years ago, to cut a long story short, there was an accident, Paul's car ended up in a fireball after hitting a tanker. Both he and his female passenger, who we later found out to be kidnapped, were engulfed, they died instantly, nobody could possibly have survived. By the time the emergency services arrived they could find nothing. The fire brigade reckoned they could simply have been burnt to nothing; such was the ferocity of the fire. He was dead but no body was ever recovered. His house was searched, we found two missing people, locked in a basement. A guy and girl both dead, both sexually assaulted"
Nick was not at all liking the sound of this guy who was holding Greg captive. "What does he want with Greg?" Nick asked almost too afraid to hear the answer.
"To get at me" was Gil Grissom's saddened reply.
"Griss" Sara called sometime later, do you have a picture of this guy from 10 years ago? I want to run a match file on him, you know see what he would look like if he was naturally aged"
"There should be one in his case file" Grissom replied, going to retrieve it. He returned with a glossy photo which he handed to Sara.
"Oh my god" she breathed, showing the photo to Nick and Warrick. At first they saw nothing, the young smiling man in the picture didn't seem at all familiar but then in his eyes, they saw exactly what Sara had seen.
"No need to run the age thing" Warrick stated turning to a surprised Grissom. "Cos this is our friendly neighbourhood mailman" Catherine gaped at him.