Note: just finish it. If you don't then you won't get it. If you do then you will. It's pretty simple.
P.S: Sorry, I'm pissy when it comes to people reading my work. They tend to ignore blatant instructions. If you don't ignore blatant instructions then... never mind.
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Conflicting evidence:
The offer stands, shimmers in the air- in a room, in a club where things are made to shimmer. And she lays down in front of him. Arches her back with her hair spilling into teased waves and her heels pressing into the glossy stage. To Grissom she looks tired, too thin- almost reminiscent- and when she parts her lips, as though in orgasm, he speaks before she can.
"How about Catharine?"
Her mouth closes. Then opens again falsely plaintive. "But that's already my name."
"No, I believe yours is with a K."
And she says, "so what are you writing, Gil?" To which he rhetorically asks, "Do you know what it costs to keep this glitter falling at an approximate rate of 1.5 lbs per second?"
She does not pause for breath. "Seven and a half G a night- plus custodial staff. It's a luxury buy. The owner runs this place half-into the ground every year or so. Every time his wife has an affair."
Serving a warrant:
Sara, the second time he hears her voice for the first time. A DB at The Monaco and Nick on the roof in dust covered pants. Three limp forms on the ground around him and, "I don't even have to turn around," slipping from Grissom's lips before he knows it.
She will never fall out of love with him now, and maybe that was always his intention.
She is receptive- falls for the appeal of a mind that can strategize, rationalize, impersonalise.
In Vegas, Sara Sidle is too subtle a creature- too self-paranoid and manic. Warrick will hold this against her for three months and Catherine, longer than that. But Grissom sees excitement in her slender hands. He sees the anticipation of a hundred future coffee cups- the styrofoam she will rip apart.
"Like lighter fluid in bulk," grimaces the frenzied brunette he does not yet know- and he can let himself believe she wants to be here- wants the Vegas desert wind, rattling her windows at four PM.
Because in truth, Warrick is not the suspect- is only, really an excuse for a warrant. The permission Grissom will need to draw (her) closer, search the spaces she keeps, creeping through her with insatiable curiosity.
He will spend years trying to avoid thinking of this first endeavor as entrapment.
Indeterminable motivations:
In the strip club Grissom has stalled, pen to paper and the ink runs out in a circular blot. Catharine is adjusting the skinny ankle straps on two hundred dollar heels- the skin beneath is raw and blistered. She is talking business psychology with her leg over her head.
"Catharine…" he tries, almost tentatively, "what do you do?"
Ecklie and his shoes are disappearing out the door, a girl on his arm- not nearly the fantasy he is leaving behind him and Grissom sees his co-worker shoot a single distasteful glance in their direction. Squint his eyes.
Conrad is secretly near sighted.
"You mean what do I do outside?" Catharine says like it's frivolous- some distant vacation. She is smoothing the star over her left breast back into place. Busy fingers, but she stills a moment to glance about the buzzing room. Through the commotion she picks out a man, aging, watching from a distance and it's a shock to see him here. "Forensics," says Catharine. "You wouldn't know it looking at him, but that guy over there? He's good… besides, the books and lessons are free." And a beat before: "Mostly."
With her shoes in place she recedes to the pole, hips swaying, watching him over her shoulder.
As a scientist he has never believed in fate. It will really be difficult if he finds he has to revise his hypothesis now.
Alibi:
They go for pizza across the highway at the place where the waiters used to be strippers before they got out. Guys and girls with icing coated faces and greasy hair.
"Mostly, it's because they got on the wrong side with a whale," says Catharine, dangling cheese into her mouth. "People think they're not any good but mostly it's just politics." and when she leaves, she leaves her phone number and a 200 percent tip. "Our waiter used to be in the big time," she concedes and then, playing from Grissom's stutter-shook glance, "Are you confused or jealous? Because I'm not… well you know- I'm… not really a fan of exclusivity."
He stumbles through with, "Oh, no- I'm just. Well you're not- I never assumed that we might-" Before she pinpoints their conversation.
"Yet."
No longer manslaughter:
And when the conversation comes around to whose house, to destination- she gives him a careful look in the rear view mirror before announcing.
"If we're going back to my place- then just… well don't freak out at me when you see the coke on the coffee table, kay? Because- I don't want to- I mean I'm not-," and swinging the wheel; too tired to even begin, "-I really want you and that's just all."
Drawing parallels:
A girl who was a billionaire, shoving him down on her mattress on the floor- holding him down to whisper in his ear- "We're enough. We're enough. We're enough."
Her breath smells like menthol and she breaks the neck of her shirt to get it off, grasping at him before either of them is ready for anything. "Are you here?" she asks once, twice. She grabs his face in her hands and when they kiss his eyes are open and hers are closed. A girl with a billion dollars and a beer fridge in the corner…
And she whispers in his ear. "Tell me we are."
Most perpetrators plan only up to the event:
In Catharine's house there is a liquor cabinet instead of a beer fridge. A skylight and a Jacuzzi with a jet cycle, that- as they discover- will shut off after two minutes. Appropriately, when she comes back from the kitchen she announces, "It's not like I can afford this shit," and Grissom sees she has a bottle of champagne and a two-kilogram jar of Kraft peanut butter.
She is dressed in satin red pajama bottoms and a spandex t-shirt, which she abruptly strips off. Grissom would like to ask her to put it back on and then remove it again, slower this time, so that he could dissect the motions of her. Instead he accepts a flute and watches her pour. She must have coked up in the kitchen. She's lightning quick and too sincere to be straight.
"If you can't afford a thing, then why buy it?" he wonders, examining a statuette of a naked woman- fingers in her mouth. "You wouldn't have to dance."
That's when she looks him in the eye, leans forward- pressing him into the bed one more time, and he knows: he's asked the wrong question again.
"Well then I guess the real question-," she breaths, rolling her hips against him and stretching her arms above her head, "-the real question, I guess, is why dance?"
"I guess it is," he says.
Once she feels him getting hard she sits back down, Indian style on the bed and passes him a spoon.
"Why do you work doubles? And don't cite money- that's BS." She places the peanut butter between the two of them and tucks her hair behind her ears, anticipating an answer she can combat.
Instead Grissom takes her hand in his with peanut butter fingers and turns it palm up. Examining.
"Definition." He says at last. "I think it's about definition."
He knows she understands.
Cold case:
A ring found at a crime scene. The delicate inscription of, "Always and Forever." Scratched into the shining inside surface of the band and the potential to make a match between font style and boutique.
Grissom begs Catharine to run the search for 18 hours before losing her to a 4:19 on the strip. Left to stare after her as her voice echoes back, "what's the matter Grissom? First time checking out the ice?" she's still in heels- maybe she needs the focus. He likes to believe there was never anything so messy as need between them but maybe that's his focus.
Count on Catharine to understand before he ever could.
Without a trace:
His first case, he supposes, was a kidnapping. A missing girl. Grissom shouldn't consider it his fault then, that he didn't discover the ransom until May twenty third and by that time everyone was studying for finals, too busy for breakfast at Denny's and triple thick milkshakes from the specialty store beside campus.
Years later he will wonder if that set the president.
Sara is standing under a billboard mouthing words over the roar of traffic. He can't hear either. Sara is standing under a picture of perfection; oblivious that it only serves as her halo and he's thinking maybe deprivation is a form of addiction.
Over their five AM breakfast that morning, Grissom never though to ask Maria whether she intended to start eating again, once she was sure she had nothing left to lose.
Re-offender:
A woman in a jewelry boutique collapsing into 500,000 dollars worth of diamonds. Grissom standing stunned, just feet away. He is the first of several gentlemen to recover his senses and kneel to check her vitals.
Weak pulse and her skin is cold. Grasping her wrist, he can feel the bones beneath, the pull of gaunt skin over her knuckles and he laces his fingers through hers for just a moment, sickened to realize he can feel the Proximal Phalanges as small and light as the bones of birds. The bird weight of her sorrow.
She is old, frighteningly so. Maybe only forty-five but her cheeks are dawn and eyes hollow. Lately, he is only used to seeing this in teenagers.
He stands and looking down at his shoes edging beneath her confident blazer there is nothing for him to do. She is familiar so he doesn't want to check her wallet. He doesn't want to do this simple act.
The leather of her purse is fine, wealthy. His fingers on the zipper and he can smell varnish and cigarettes and some careful cinnamon smell. He doesn't want this. He doesn't.
When it's her he puts the wallet calmly back and turns away. "Maria Cristine" he tells no one in particular, a man with a suit and brief case.
People with briefcases remember things as a rule. He has to leave before he is sick on the expensive tile floor. There is no room for hysteria. Not at a scene like this. The way she has fallen, lying still amidst glinting stones.
He never does find a match to the scripture. His experience is humbling, if perhaps equal parts twisted coincidence. After all this time he never saw it coming. Her feminine voice asking for "a closer look at that one, no- on the left." And her nervous hands splayed against the clean glass casing, the way he remembers them, scribbling mysterious numbers. Grissom still wonders…
"I'm not sure I'll ever get this enough."
Experimentation:
"You wanna be different?"
Charlotte in the lab- in his personal space. She's satirical and he has never known how to do this. He wants to be different; of course he wants to be different. He wants to remember that God Damn physics book on his dresser; he wants to know what Robert Frost felt in his winter woods. He wants he wants he wants.
"-Up against a wall and lay one on me like you mean it!" Charlotte is saying. She says, "Lay one on me" and he has to assume she is speaking of a kiss. He cannot be here; he has work to do.
Trouble with Warrick and Holly Gribbs.
He will stay in his office until dawn, drive home listening to Pink Floyd and teach himself the principles of mosquito anatomy.
As he leaves, Catharine will be pulling into the parking lot for a double and wiping peanut butter from her fingers, she will smile- Lindsay's lunch on her hands.
Re-occuring circs:
Two months later, Sara Sidle, new in the crime lab and already exhausted, asks him to hold her ring while she pushes her hands into wet clay. Her hair is messy and she's operating on too little sleep to remember pleasantries.
A B and E with possible hostage situation- the case made difficult because it took place in a pottery shop. Fifty-one hours in and she's approaching desperation.
"The first twenty four hours is golden."
phrases echo inside these walls.
Her finger tips trace his palm when she places down the band and, "it's just Sara," he assures himself but "just Sara" is still "Sara" is still something he can't quite manage to smother with too much Blue Hawaiian and triple shifts created out of him own necessity.
"On the table?" he asks of the ring and hair falls into her mouth when she gestures awkwardly towards an available space not occupied by broken shards.
For a moment they don't speak and he is terrified that she is going to ask him to pull the rogue strand from her mouth. He is not entirely sure if that is something he can do. Instead she smiles her Sara-smile and gnashes her teeth, scrunches her nose, works her tongue, half blushing until the hair slides sticky from her mouth. Ungraceful and his breath is shallow.
The ring gives a thin click on the glass tabletop where he places it and there is something about the sound it makes that causes them both to turn- something about the fact that it's hers that causes Grissom to extend his hand. Investigate a hunch.
New evidence:
He's going deaf and his Vic was going crazy. Then she killed herself.
Just one double shift is all it takes when her face had previously been worth a half a million.
And it's Sara, supporting herself against the evidence table- quite alone. "You must have been so desperate."
"They're lists of intakes." she explains an hour later, too calm and ignoring Grissom who is motionless in the background. If she doesn't look at him, he can't know that she feels this way all the time.
"This is negative intake and this is positive. If the calories in column A don't equal the calories in-" but he isn't paying attention anyways. He's just remembered:
Maria Cristine writing lists on the backs of all her pages.
Summation:
In the end it is Catharine who says it best.
With Warrick hanging his head in a room across the lab, feet locked behind the legs of a chair and he swears he's back in elementary school. He is age reduced and shameful but Catharine can brush her bangs aside and say:
"Listen, Gil- we all need a looking glass to fall through. It's just a distraction from the victim/perpetrator dynamic, that's all."
And when confronted:
"Not on the lab's time, Catharine… not on Holly Gribbs' time."
Can conclude:
"You know last night I burnt Kraft Dinner? I was making it for Lindsay and- I don't know, I… fell asleep."
"Catharine, I understand that you-"
It's fiery Catharine who can persist with a hand in the air- forcing back his words.
"Look. All I mean is I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a B and E. not just last night- all the time- and not just me… we all do it. We all hear sirens, commotion, things get broken and be damned if I can even remember what I might have had that's missing." She pauses, takes Warrick's file from Grissom's hands. Flips to the last page.
Grissom has been looking for evidence hidden there; Catharine finds only suggestion. But she reads the words of a man who has yet to meet her daughter- reads them like she knows the moment he made his first mistake.
"'Crime doesn't stop, so neither do we.'" She quotes. Shrugs her shoulders. "In the words of a gambling addict… And it doesn't get any straighter than that."
It is Catharine who can climb the pole with blistered feet.