"Griss?" Sara's voice echoed in the sparsely furnished apartment. "Did you ever find one sixty three last night?"

"Huh?" Grissom poked his head out of the bedroom and eyed Sara disbelievingly. "What are you doing?"

"Is this one of yours?" she prodded, pointing from her perch on the dining room chair.

Grissom allowed himself an amused smile. "No," he replied easily. "Not mine."

"Good." Sara hefted the can of Raid and sprayed liberally, coating the cockroach with a fatal white afghan. "Die, garbage-eater. Die. Die," she chanted.

"Raid?" Grissom clucked his tongue in disapproval. "You know, if any of my boys decide to take a constitutional later, this could kill them."

"I apologize in advance to your 'boys'," Sara tossed back, "but I wasn't about to smack him with the Hanson file. I'm not cleaning roach guts off another manila folder," she concluded. Sara deposited the bug spray on the counter and picked up the file folder as she climbed off the chair, skirting the still-twitching carcass on her way back toward Grissom's couch.

"If you've finished with the carnage for now, Caesar, can we get back to the case?"

The small telltale grin flirted with her eyes only slightly, but was enough to voice their collective amusement. She sat back down on the worn leather couch, taking a sip of the water she'd poured prior to her cockroach conquest. "All right," she said, refocusing, "where were we?"

"Jefferson Marlow's motive in the Hanson murder," Grissom reminded her. "The defense will probably try to object, but the D.A. has a pretty strong argument, so odds are, you'll be testifying about the entire series and the forensic similarities in each case to Hanson."

Sara shook her head. "Killing three strangers to cover up your wife's murder. It never ceases to amaze me." She leaned across his torso to grab the ballistics report. "I keep thinking one of them will be smarter, change weapons or M.O.s. But no." She grinned fully now. "Same old, same old."

"Better for us that they never get smarter," Grissom said, raising one finger in a gesture of rebuke. "We work hard enough as it is."

"True enough," the brunette conceded, settling back against the cushions and resting her feet against the corners of the table. She flipped through the file for a moment before rubbing her eyes, and rolled her neck to pop the obviously tight tendons there. "It's getting late," she murmured, turning her head to see if Grissom had noticed the movement.

Without lifting his eyes from the paper he was scrutinizing, Grissom nodded. "You can head to bed if you're tired."

Sara smiled again and nodded, quickly discarding the file. She rose, kissing the top of his head. "Don't be long."

"Define 'long'," Grissom deadpanned, looking up to catch Sara's reaction.

Sara paused and turned halfway, quirking her mouth in amusement. "Too long is when I wake up for shift and you're still out here, snoring away and disturbing your precious bugs. You should see them, crawling up and down their containers. If they had ears, they'd cover them."

"If they had hands to cover them with," Griss replied, his lips curling in an impression of a smile. "I'll be there in an hour."

FIN