Still with me? Great. Part three.
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Nick goes home and drops his CSI kit with a bang in the middle of the living room carpet. He pours the contents out in a careless heap and stares at the sum total of his life- finds it unspeakably eerie. Hours spent with print dust in his hand and it occurs to him that the most substantial relationship he has is with fine powder and a bell head brush.
"Been there." Catherine would relate.
Nick takes a glass from the cupboard above the sink and carries it to the living room floor. He prints the handle and swabs the rim. He looks for clues as to who he is by the picture on the side (a cartoon crocodile with a mischievous grin). It's always an epiphany when he realizes how much of a person's life is spare luggage. The way his mother forced him to bring four pairs of socks for an overnight camping trip. The way, in college, Dennis Colby carried seven condoms in his pocket when he went to his cousin's wedding. "Brides maids Stokes! Brides maids!"
He goes back to the fridge. Takes an over ripe peach from the freezer and stabs it with a knife.
The week after Nick joined the Las Vegas Crime Lab, his girlfriend left his house screaming curses and threats. She left him with a shattered lamp and a cut on his arm that should have gotten stitches. Nick cleaned up after the fight meticulously. There was something embarrassing about it- his own mini crime scene. He'd seen pictures of what a candle looks like if it hits the eye socket exactly right. He'd seen a woman convicted of 'assault by toothbrush'. He couldn't even count the felonies he'd learned of where the foreplay was a shattered lamp. He could be a rapist, he could be a murderer- things escalate.
After four days of wearing long sleeved shirts to work and changing his bandages in the bathroom during break, Grissom told him that it took less than a pound of pressure to break human skin.
"We're delicate creatures, Nicky." Said Grissom and never once did he glance at Nick's arm.
Nick admires the knife wound in the flesh of a peach. He wants to believe that death is as freakish as having a piano fall on your head- or at least as heavy. Instead he hears Grissom's calm rational: "We make it heavy Nick. People need a weight for things... so they make their own."
In Nick's kitchen the refrigerator is humming. He wipes his hands on his dress pants where the smell of fresh juice will dry sticky and fragrant. He lobs the peach into the kitchen sink. It splatters, leaving cast off in the metal basin. He leaves it there to rot. One more body he doesn't want to clean up.
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Five days ago:
Nick drives Catherine to the collision scene while she screams at him to speed faster ("Just get there!"). When she sees the body she jumps from the vehicle while it's still moving. "Catherine!" he yells as she hits the pavement and stumbles. She bites her lip on impact and he won't forget the look on her face: "Goodbye Nicky." Her long bangs in her eyes and a broken strap on her expensive shoes.
"Like flesh-" babbles the thirty two year old driver being questioned on the sidewalk. "It sounded like- I- I- I hit flesh." Nick is used to these kinds of testimonies. The moment where articulation fails and is replaced by the acrid smell of rubber heating the air.
Lindsey's arm is broken in six places so that when Catherine kneels over the body and tries to hold her daughter's hand it falls back upon the wrist like putty. The PD officers pull Catherine from the scene like a whirling devil and later when she's sitting on a check up bed with a brace on her ankle, she folds her hands cleanly in her lap and says, "I wonder what noise she made."
He doesn't answer. A dying body should sound like a piano- like the symphony Beethovan would have written if he could hear. Nick knows it doesn't.
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Standing by the front door, Sara takes her limp funeral clothes off. Greg watches her brace herself against the doorframe while she struggles with her sandals. To Greg she looks like liquid: painted shadows and cream and bright eyes. At 6 in the afternoon, the entire world is reduced to one-strap-at-a-time, starting with shoes and ending with her translucent black panty hose- the underwear beneath.
Half a year earlier she, he and Grissom worked a case. The case involved only the landlord but evidence led them to a tenant- a man who horded text. Somewhere amongst the pages would be a receipt for eight hundred pounds of white sand. Newspapers, notes, tax forms, novels- as they loaded fifteen truckloads of pages the man began to keen: "please, don't ruin them- for the love of god, please."
Some of the books had been forced onto the porch and gotten soaked- the pages melted together like wax. The three of them had worked a double, separating paper. It was only Grissom who could work without tearing the pages. "Some people can't love people… so they love something else," said Grissom and, in his own way, he taught them how to spare an innocent man anguish.
Sara lets Greg remove her panty hose. The way he goes about it, so slowly- she remembers a six-foot stack of water stained novels. Finally, one of his bitten fingernails snags a whole in the left thigh. She looks down and he looks up and the house is silent. Carefully, he traces his finger over the snag and when he exhales against her thigh she gasps. She makes the first tear. The spandex rips and stretches in their combined hands and she falls against his kneeling form before they can remove the tattered fabric.
They find the carpet first, rough and dark on a rainy afternoon. Sara digs her fingers into the floor as though she's trying not to slide off the earth. She's on top of him with her hands like claws beside his shoulders so he takes each hand and guides it into his messy hair. "Better grip," he says. When they're finished her fingers will smell sweet like hair gel.
By seven thirty she disappears into the bathroom and Greg finds her on the floor of her shower with soap in her eyes and blood running down her leg from a gash in her knee. "Shaving," she says but Greg thinks it sounds a bit like a faulty alibi. He presses the soap between their bodies and hangs on to her slippery skin. "If you go down the drain I'll have to take your shower apart to find you in the bend."
"I smell like death," says Sara flatly, and he repeats a line from long ago that makes her smile.
"A real man doesn't mind."
She has a habit of dressing in the hallway where the cool air dries her skin. He dresses in the bathroom and they lean in opposite directions against the same door. Sara's thinking, symmetry and applied force- two same objects imploding into one space and, "sometimes, there is pain to be found in numbers."
She moves to the kitchen where she reaches her arms towards the top of the cupboards, straining for a canister of coffee she's been keeping hidden, least she drink it and never sleep again. Greg sees her poised on slender tip toes as though for a dive and her pant leg lifts up, revealing the tattoo on her ankle.
In the kitchen with a can of Foldier's in her hand, sara turns to find greg standing in front of her, hard again and pressing her against the counter. It's only been ten minutes since they licked the bitter soap off of each other's skin in her shower.
600 seconds later she is still disoriented- overheated and slippery and, "he can't possibly-"
"What are you-" she begins but maybe tonight is not the time for finishing questions. He breaths into her jaw, "I'm not going to let you regret this."
Another five seconds and she drops the coffee grounds. With the lid off, they scatter like print powder on the linoleum. She can feel the dark grit sticking to her bare feet. "Caffeine addict," he mumbles against her chest as he lifts her onto the counter- contemplates genetics with heavy lidded eyes. "You're more perfect than I thought."
The room smells bitter and she tilts her head back, locks her eyes on the ceiling.
"Oh God… Oh God…" ("I don't believe in him anyway.")
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From Marty's diner Catherine drives to the coroner's. Al Robbins, who was not Lindsey's coroner, is in the middle of a man who ate two pounds of Mistletoe. That's what he tells Catharine when she shows up in his lab. When he leads her into the autopsy room she realizes he was being literal. The 'middle' of Robert Wallace turns out to be his stomach.
David is, ironically, still back at the funeral- a fact that Al alerts her to with a single raised eyebrow. "I don't see you sitting around the cemetery discussing tombstone etiquette," answers Catharine and Al just flicks his eyes back to his cadaver in the way that he often does. 'Press on' whisper the dead.
"This one went slow," he says of the pale flesh decorating his slab. Catharine pulls on her own chalky latex gloves and traces her fingers lightly over the fingernails.
"Lucky for him."
"The coldest thing in this room," thinks Al, "is not a corpse."
He removes Wallace's liver with a sound like feet in mud. Catherine is playing with the man's wrist, watching it flop in its socket. "You have any female's in tonight, Doc? Any kids?" Despite her attempt to be casual her hands still shake.
It only took ten seconds for Al to notice Catherine's eyes- the pupils like eclipses. She stood before him in his own facility like some sort of post mortem harbinger, smelling of dust on dry grass. She smells like it's going to rain. His leg whispers thunder to him as well. It's the only thing he took away from The Accident.
Now Catherine's hands are all over the body of a dead man. She seems as though she's searching for wounds she can't find. Al revises his previous pronouncement:
"The coldest thing in this room is not a corpse… yet."
Al has three bodies left to go before he takes his lunch break. People wonder how he can eat after doing what he does. Any time he's ever attended lunch with a friend outside the business it's been forty minutes of, "So Al, dig through any bowels today?" and when Al answers, "Yes, actually," his friend gets a 'look' and chews his sandwich like the bread has turned to paste. "Fifteen year old female," Al continues sometimes, "and I have it on authority that fries and gravy was her last supper."
"You're insane. How'd you figure that out?"
Al just calmly chews his low-carb microwave burrito and says, "Hodges." And they don't ask.
Standing beside Robert Wallace, Catherine watches Al pick through the greenish black mass of partially digested leaves and she asks again: "Do you have any females?" This time when he raises one of his white eyebrows at her she sucks in her cheeks and bites, "Jesus Christ, fine! Do you have anyone who looks like my god damn daughter?"
"Catherine-" he begins to say but when he goes to place his gloved hand on hers he finds it is gone. Now she's over admiring his instruments under the glinting overhead lights. She is more dangerous than they are. Al would know- he's seen every laceration a perverted lunch-friend could imagine about a body. In the end it's the living who aren't there while you're speaking to them.
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Once, after a gruesome double shift- (A T-bone collision between a tour bus and a semi), Al took David for drinks at some drab little counter-laminate-and-dart-boards type bar. They sat amidst men whose fingers would never stop smelling of tobacco and drank their malts. Al had let David fumble through ten minutes of conversation-
"I'm not really very good with… I- I mean I don't usually practice my- although there is this one… someone. She's a- a new girl on Investigation. Really… smart and beautif- well I think she's-"
Al eye-browed the waitress for another scotch and decided that work friendships may take as much tolerance as non-work friendships. But then, neuroses were not exclusive; he was 51 and in love with the one body he had never got to autopsy.
"Her name was Isobelle Keats," he began, interrupting David's Ode to Miss Sidle. "Caucasian female, 25 years old, 5'3", slim build, red head; ID on the body suggested Harvard Grad Student, member of a book club, archery club, paper mache club, In case of emergency contact Michael Keats- brother, or Al Robbin's- fiancé."
The waitress set down two more tumblers of scotch. She had one brown eye and one blue. Only .27 percent of the population had multicolor eyes. Al checked once and found that .55 percent of his autopsies have them. Something in the evasion of symmetry has made them more prone to disaster…
"Now you know my motivation. Why do you desire to spend your day with corpses, David?"
David looked as though someone had asked him to slow dance. He picked up his glass, set it down, picked it up again, smelled the amber liquid and grimaced as he drank it. David grimaced for a long time afterwards too, and then he said, "I think it… Well, I think it was the same reason you did."
Al was dabbing the table with a napkin but he glanced up to say, "C.O.P: Cause Of Profession- lets hear your theory."
David was dabbing his forehead with a napkin when he said, "Around the dead we can't be lonely or- or even grieve. We see them when they're… cold. In our profession no one ever dies."
Al just sipped his drink and thought, "I never had a son."
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Sara and Greg lay on her couch in a heap of breath and limbs. After a while he reports it to be 11:38 PM. She finally asks him (not sure that she's joking) if he's been taking any little blue pills lately and he answers, (not sure if he's insulted or flattered), "well, I guess you're little and often kinda blue, but uh- nope."
He makes jokes while she makes coffee. He's wearing nothing but the too-big dress shirt he wore to the funeral and his white cotton socks. Sara is fully dressed accept for her belt which is undone and missing one of it's loops. "Am I going to have to take all those clothes off again? Because you really know how to layer. I'm not sure if I can handle the suspense."
Sara finds a litre of precariously old milk and a can of whip cream on the back of her fridge. She's got raw tofu and bean sprouts that could qualify for a tox screening. Suddenly she isn't sure she can handle another box of Kraft Dinner. She lets the fridge door drift closed and turns to Greg- "I'll be right back."
From the hallway she calls, "Eat whatever you'd like but I think it's mostly olives and tofu." She hears his reply:
"I'll get it figured out."
Maybe what he means is, "I'll get you figured out." Sara closes her eyes and takes a breath. She tries not to feel that Greg is twenty-five years too young to be figuring her out.
Her coffee is still too hot to drink and she burns her hands when she cups the mug. Her palms turn white and then scalded red- she can smell skin and steam when she carefully sets the mug down on the hard wood floor beside her knees. It takes a moment for her to find what she's looking for, buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer. After two years she's almost surprised when it's still there. One small bottle of Xanax. She taps three pills into her palm and admires them a moment.
Red and white red and white redandwhite.
They taste like nothing, like plastic coating and chemical dye. She burns them down with coffee and shuts the drawer. Greg is banging pots in the kitchen. Greg would worry if she told him. So she doesn't.
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After Lindsey's Accident, Catherine walked the fifteen blocks home and sat at her kitchen table. She made coffee- weak because she couldn't find the table spoon so she used a soupspoon and guessed. She did a crossword in pen and finished it- "I guess I'm not in shock," and then she brushed her teeth, put on her high heeled boots and left for work. When she went by Lindsey's bedroom door she had silently pulled it closed.
Grissom put her on a B and E in the suburbs. The neighbor broke in and was setting up his newly acquired plasma screen when PD arrived to arrest him. Catharine went and stood in front of Grissom's desk with her sunglasses on. "Have you been smoking, Catherine?"
"Don't. Do this," said Catherine but it was the way she stood, like the Salvador Dali vision of a ballerina that made Grissom put her on the potential 4:19.
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She breaks the case:
"Dean Rathers committed suicide. There was nothing for me to solve."
"It said in your report his daughter was murdered by a mugger."
It's been 24 hours since Catherine left his office and she hasn't been home yet. Grissom hasn't either.
"Oh so what Grissom? He's dead. We move on."
And very calmly: "The day he jumped was the day before his daughter's funeral Catherine."
Catharine slams down her hand on his desk. She is still gripping her sunglasses. The dark lenses shudder and an arm snaps off. "You wanna stop me from taking a swan dive off the Monaco?" She chucks the ruined frames into the garbage can and leaves. As she goes she spits her threat: "Give me a fucking case. That'll keep me busy."
Three days later she watches while Doc Robbins squeezes toxic black liquid out of Mr. Wallace's liver. He tells her to go home. She lashes; "I bet you'd love to take me home." it's the least professional thing she's ever said. She's got red eyes and no color. She could be an elderly man if it weren't for the eyelashes. He looks at her as though she's ugly and maybe she is. She feels gaunt, the way a starving person must feel, as though their skin is afraid.
Lindsey's coroner left a message on her cell phone- "We need you to come pick the outfit." Catherine was in the middle of the desert with sand in her mouth and her sunglasses lying broken in the trash can in Grissom's office. The coroners dressed Lindsey in a frock with white daisies on it. Catherine stood over the casket at the funeral and counted to ten. Turned away.
When she left the Graveyard the dew on the lawn was cold against her bare toes. Somewhere is St. Gabriel's Cemetery is the tread from the bottom of her stiletto heal. Catherine already threw those shoes away.
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Catherine stands across the autopsy table from Al and grips a scalpel in her hands. She twists her fingers around it until she slips and the blade slices into her palm- right through the glove. Through the slice in the white rubber she can smell clammy skin. Al finally takes the instrument from her and sets it aside from the others with a sigh. "Fuck," says Catherine quietly. He'll throw her out in a minute. She heads for the door.
When she gets to the exit she stops with her back turned to him. She puts her hands on either side of the door and spreads her fingers over the metal. "Why the hell would Robert Wallace eat Mistletoe?"
Al can tell by the way she demands an answer that she needs one. He contemplates his next stitch as well as the lithe redhead spread across his doorway. He's so used to seeing bodies who have destroyed themselves in their search for proof- he remembers Catherine's pupils like oil spills and thinks, "Silly girl, there is no proof here."
"Maybe he wanted to know he could," says Al. She leaves without another sound.
Al is already sewing up the body cavity. Catherine wants to stay. She wants to know what Lindsey's coroner felt when he pushed a needle through her daughter's skin and knew he would never see inside of her again. Catherine thinks it must be like sniffing coke- being inside of someone. More than sex even- being able to hollow a person out and explore, the way a child might explore a snow cave. Like stripping accept with stripping it's more like sonar than sight.
Know thy body. Know thy customer. An autopsy isn't so different. The smell of fine linen suits on wealthy gentlemen; she's never forgotten. Doc Robbins looks at her and thinks, "If I could cut the tendons in her calves, her ankles wouldn't have to suffer through those heels."
Warrick's fingers touched that point between her breasts where the Y of the stitches divides. At the time she'd thought it was an accident. He smelled like leather and root beer and she'd thought, "He would tell me I was beautiful and I would come. He would bring me Popsicles in bed and lick my sticky fingers. The color of his Popsicle and mine would mix and turn orange as though the sunset had stained us."
41 hours later Catharine thinks it is human instinct that brought Warrick's hand to her skin. The same way she stood over Lindsey in a room full of people wearing black and wanted to feel through Lindsey's dress for the stitches she knew were there. Like a valediction forbidding loneliness, forbidding grief. Catharine had counted to ten and turned away.
On occasion there are bugs in a flower's bloom. The mortician had put Lindsey in a daisy dress. Lindsey hated daisies. Sometimes she found spiders hiding beneath the petals.