Intervals in Broken Time

A.J. Breton

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See Ch.1 for Disclaimers and Summary.

The fragmentation continues…I have little tags at the beginning of some sequences to help keep the timeline in order, but I've let some just "float" for dramatic effect. Hope it's not confusing.

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Ch. 3: Angel of mercy, don't leave us now…

The Day Before:

"Your father was a man of some means, Dr. Grissom." Gil stayed quiet.

"Uh..well, sir, as per your wishes, your father's assets will be liquidated. As his only named heir I will have the monies transferred…" Gil shifted in his seat, not really listening to the slick haired lawyer, his father's lawyer, rambling on about wills and inherences. His father owned a home, a house Gil had never seen. He owned a small boat and apparently held significant investments.

The lawyer, Bennett, contacted Gil only an hour after he'd gotten to the hospital. Only an hour and ten minutes after Sean Gabriel Grissom died. The young lawyer gave his condolences then gave directions to his office so they could go over the paperwork.

The internment arrangements were spelled out. No service. Cremation. Simple burial in a plot already paid for. No priests. No family.

Gil signed and initialed documents without reading. His dad's property would be auctioned off, his personal effects would be donated to local charities…Gil's attention faded again…he really didn't need to be here. According to his father's living will, he shouldn't be there. Gil was listed as Sean's only next of kin, listed with an outdated phone number and address. Gil had found out from the nurses at the hospital that when his father had been admitted, two days ago, he had requested that no one call his son. It hadn't been until a sudden massive stroke put Sean in a coma that the hospital staff set about trying to find Gil.

Sean Gabriel Grissom died alone in a hospital room at age 76 with no family or friends to say goodbye to. Gilbert Gabriel Grissom sat alone on a bar stool at age 50 with no friends or family to share his frustration with.

The shot burned far too much as he poured it back. The beer he chased it with was cool, if not satisfying, as it washed away the taste of the whiskey. He'd already had a few and was now at a decision making point. He was at the precipice of drunk. If he was smart, he'd leave now, go back to his motel room and get some sleep. If he did that, he could still avoid a hangover.

The bartender, a tall, thin man of probably 25, sidled up to the bar asking with an eyebrow if Gil was good or wanted another. Gil pulled out his wallet, he'd been paying cash up to this point.

He thought about his motel room. It was small. It was empty. Like his dad's hospital room, like his townhouse in Vegas. He pulled out a credit card and slapped it on the bar top.

"Keep setting them up until this runs out or I pass out." He slid the thin piece of plastic to the young man. The bartender nodded and walked away with the card, coming back a few moments later setting down another shot and opening another bottle of beer. The shot was gone in a moment and Gil let his throat burn while he slid his eyes across the bar, they stopped at a tall, thin brunette at a table by the door, she had to be about half Gil's age. She had perfect lips.

For a well-educated man, Gilbert Grissom wasn't always smart.

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Later on…In Vegas…

His whiskers scratched almost uncomfortably hard against her back. Somewhere between passion and pain she cried out harshly but he didn't slow down, keeping her pinned to the countertop in her apartment's kitchen as he moved roughly inside her.

"Griss…" Sara was shaking now, uncontrollably. Grissom said nothing, only holding her down, only thrusting.

She was unsure if she should be fighting him or not, caught as she was between desperately wanting, needing him like this, hard, violent, and desperately needing, wanting him to stop, to cry to caress and kiss her softly. But there was no love from this man. He was cold, a machine, unloving, and she was now his girl. Sara started to cry…

She woke up hours after the call from California, sobbing in her blanket.

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The night after…in the LVPD crime lab.

There were no insipid sympathy cards on his desk. No one put a hand on his shoulder and said they were sorry for his loss. Well, one person did…Conrad Ecklie…and in the same breath sternly ordered that Gil's proficiency reviews be completed by the end of shift.

Five or six years ago there would have been cards and talk and hugs and concern…but now there was a wall of silence that preceded him, cutting off conversations as he approached. There were eyes that flickered to him and then away as he passed his co-workers in the halls. There was hushed speech as he drew away from them, nose down in a folder, as always. Over the past few years he had slowly and not entirely unconsciously alienated himself from his co-workers. He had methodically separated himself from their friendship as a coroner extracts a bullet from a corpse. Was he the bullet or was he the body? Was he the foreign object that caused life to stop? Was he the reminder of things deadly? Or was he the body? Was he a shell that was left when the evidence of passion and pain were removed? Cold, stiff, unloving and unloved. He was Gruesome Grissom. That nickname no longer was an endearment attached to his sometimes macabre idiosyncrasies, but now a title marking his alone-in-a-crowd status.

It was a quarter-past midnight on his first shift back from California and he had absolutely no assignments to hand-out. Sin-city was apparently sleeping. He stepped into the conference room where his crew sat waiting for him. Their conversations also stopped when he entered. He stood at the head of the table, father like, he thought, as all eyes turned to him waiting. Greg and Nick, expectant, obedient. Warrick, weary but sympathetic. Catherine, caring but guarded. Sara…Grissom didn't let himself meet her eyes. Truth was he loved her eyes. They were brown and deep and gorgeous and sometimes when he couldn't sleep the thought about those eyes. He fantasized staring into them, getting lost in them as she writhed and groaned and bucked against him, gasping his name…

All of this was observed by him and flashed through his mind as he held up his hands, displaying his lack of paper slips.

"Good news, there are no gruesome murders or savage acts of incivility being wracked upon the city tonight. Bad news, because of this, it's going to be a long night. All of you, as well as I have paperwork and bureaucratic nonsense to attend to… tonight is an excellent time to complete these tasks." Groans and rolled eyes ascended from the table.

"Don't go too far from the lab, just in case something comes up."

"Gee, next you're going to tell us not to play in the street." Greg's sarcasm was typical, though it was unusual for him cop an attitude directly with Grissom. Griss fixed the young man with a stern glare, but Greg's boyish smile was disarming and the rest of the room was snickering at the comment.

"If you have nothing more important to do, Greg, my tarantula's cage needs cleaning." More snickering, Greg pasted an appropriately chided expression on his face and the team started getting up and leaving the room.

Grissom let them go, watching their interactions as they left. Warrick and Nick started harassing Greg, with Catherine chiming in every so often. Sara didn't participate and was the last one to leave the room. Grissom let his eyes follow her for just a few moments. In some hazy, half-blacked-out memory he could recall a bar and a pretty girl named Sara…but almost as soon as he remembered it…it faded away.

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36 years earlier:

"Father, I need your advice."

"Of course, my son. What is troubling you?"

The priest's private office was small but the desk was large, as was the crucifix Gilbert now stared at over the father's shoulder, it dominated the office. Christ hung, writing in absolute agony. His face contorted as though he was being tortured at the very core of his being. The fourteen year old thought he had an idea what that expression was about. For the past several nights, since coming back from his summer visit to Uncle Danny, Gilbert had been praying for the courage to do this.

"Father, something has happened…has been happening. I-I don't know what to d-do…"

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Around 4:00 am the call came in. A seven year old boy was found dead, brutalized. The graveyard shift came alive.

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"Lying is a sin, my son." The priest's Adam's apple bobbed behind his crisp white collar.

"But father…" He stuttered, he always stuttered around adults…"It's t-true…m-m-my Uncle D-Danny..."

"Gilbert!" The voice was like thunder in the small room; Gilbert could see the crucifix move under the reverberations. The father sat upright in his chair glaring sternly at the now shaken boy, "Daniel Grissom is a good Catholic and a generous benefactor to this church and its congregation. Lying, especially about something so atrocious, is unacceptable behavior, Gilbert. Does your mother know that you're here making such ridiculous claims?" It took the boy a moment to find his voice.

"No, s-sir." Somewhere inside him, in a place Gilbert couldn't describe, a little piece of him went cold, shuddered and died.

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Greg and Nick were on the perimeter, Catherine and Warrick stayed at the station to talk to the parents who were being brought in. Sara and Grissom were in the house processing the body. Sara knelt down before the boy. David had released the corpse officially, but Grissom requested it not be moved yet. She took in the scene.

The boy had been beaten about his body, but his face was more or less untouched. He was a dark-haired, handsome boy, Sara thought. The child's eyes were still open, even in death they seemed too wise for his age. She looked up at Grissom, who had not spent any time directly with the body; instead he examined the rest of the room. Sara swabbed the boy's exposed skin and meticulously scrutinized his clothing for any kind of trace materials. As she passed over the boy's face again she considered his features…God, she thought, he looks like he could be Grissom's kid. She watched Grissom again as his hands hovered over a photo on the wall. Father and son.

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Catherine steeled herself for the interview. The boy was seven, apparently strangled, though the autopsy was needed to confirm that. His name was Gabriel Hovanec and he'd been badly beaten. She now waited with Warrick for the parents to arrive with the police.

She braced herself for the tears and the heartache. How many times had she been moved to tears by devastated parents only later to find mothers who had choked off the very life they created or fathers who had given in to rage shaking or crushing the very best part of living? How many little girls and boys had lain out on autopsy tables, but all Catherine could see was Lindsey? Catherine would kill herself before hurting her child. She took a breath. Parents were always the first suspects, but she couldn't let herself jump to any conclusions. Cases with kids were always tough on everyone. She glanced over at Warrick, who was tapping his finger anxiously.

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Gabriel. Why did his name have to be Gabriel? Grissom went over his crime scene notes for the umpteenth time. He and Sara had come back from the scene a little while ago finding painfully little to bring back. Sara was already hand delivering the evidence to the lab techs. Nick and Greg had found some shoeprints and were still at the house taking casts, but from the looks of them they probably weren't anything that couldn't be explained by normal family activity.

The digital photos from the scene were on his computer. He was a dark-haired boy with an innocent face. Gabriel.

"Evidence is being processed as we speak." Sara walked into his office and took a seat in front of this desk. "Honestly, Griss, I don't think we're going to get much out of what we picked up."

"I don't either." His voice was quiet. Sara followed his gaze to the computer seeing the young victim's face again.

"He's a cute kid."

"Yeah. His name is Gabriel Hovanec."

There was a silence in the room. Sara stared at her supervisor as his eyes seemed to focus somewhere else. Grissom was often withdrawn, but since coming back from California he'd seemed completely cut off from the rest of the world. Sara continued to look at him as unknown emotions played behind his eyes. She wished she could unlock that safe, knock down that wall that he used to either protect or smother himself. With his eyes still not in the here-and-now Griss let out a soft breath.

"If I was ever to have a son, I always wanted to name him Gabriel."

Sara's mouth dropped open. She closed it quickly. Had she heard that right? Had he just confessed an intensely personal fact about himself? The most disturbing thing about it though, was not what he had said but how his voice sounded. It had a defeated edge to it, a timbre Sara had only heard from Grissom once before.

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Months earlier:

Dr. Lurie stopped in mid-stride leaving the interrogation room.

"Sad, isn't it…" Sara had never heard Grissom's voice sound quite so tired, so old. His eyes were haunted, reflecting inner emotions Sara couldn't decipher.

"Two guys like us…" Sara's reflection eclipsed her view of Grissom as he spoke, eyes unfocused.

"…our work consumes our lives…" Our. Us. Why was he speaking like that?

"…realize we've lived 50 years and haven't lived at all…" Had his eyes actually flickered to the mirror, looking where she was hidden, or had she imagined it?

"…all of a sudden we get a second chance, someone young and beautiful comes…she offers us a new life…" Sara tried to look at his eyes. He'd called her beautiful before, it was the first time a man had said that to her in a way that she'd believed him.

"…we'd have to risk everything we've worked for to have her. I couldn't do it." Sara reeled, feeling briefly weak in the knees. This really wasn't an interrogation ploy, this really was Grissom speaking…about her. That broken expression, was for her.

Risk everything.

"Now you have nothing."

Dr. Lurie's face was a slate, stoic, restrained, but fragile, not unlike the expression Grissom usually wore at work.

"I'm still here." His voice was just as hollow sounding as Griss's.

"Are you?"

Sara stood, rooted, speechless. She willed the tumult inside her to recede. Clinching her jaw the way she had thousands of times before in her life until the muscles hurt, a little physical pain to help control the internal tidal wave she was riding. It was an odd combination of disappointment, rage, empathy and desire.

Dr. Lurie left the room. When Grissom sighed it was as though his very soul shook with defeat. Sara shuddered.

Risk everything.

Just to have her. Did he even think about that? Having her? The way she thought about him? Just once she'd longed to hear him say he needed her, wanted her without there being a dead body involved. Risk. There was risk in any relationship. Was she not worth it? Her temper flared. She walked away from the window before he left the room.

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Doc Robbins wasn't always good at deciphering other people's emotions or moods. There was a reason he worked with the dead and not the living. But even he could tell there was something off about his friend when he'd come into the autopsy lab with Sara.

Ahh, Sara Sidle, now she was a lovely creature. Far too young, but certainly a nice sight to behold in his cold, steel world of corpses and cutting instruments.

Gil's mood, Robbins figured, was due to the case at hand, the seven-year-old Hovanec boy. He motioned to the body on his table and brought the discussion right down to business.

"The victim was strangled, manually; I did get some prints off of the throat…"

"Which didn't get any hits off our databases." Sara interjected.

"Other than that, the boy was physically abused, signs of repeated beatings, I'm guessing fists and foreign objects. I had David roll him over and there was what looked like belt marks across his back. X-rays show a few previously broken bones, all of which had healed completely months ago." He paused to take a sip of his coffee. "There is also evidence of sexual molestation, bruising and such…" he waved his hand at this part, indicating that he'd really rather not go into detail, "I have it all documented in my report."

For the first time since entering the room, Grissom spoke.

"Interesting there are no marks or bruises on his face."

"True," Robbins nodded, "you'd think that with the rage dumped on this kid he would have caught one across the face."

"Not if the attacker was careful." Sara offered. "All the bruises are easy to hide with ordinary clothes. Nothing on the face or hands…very little even on the forearms or lower legs…" she pointed out her observations, "this makes it harder for outsiders to figure out what's going on, makes sure no takes your kids away from you." There was a slight darkness in Sara's eyes that Robbins wasn't sure he'd seen before.

"So, you're thinking the parents did this?"

"It's too early to assert that," Grissom warned, watching Sara.

"Still," she met his gaze, "this kind of abuse, killed in their own home, even if the parents didn't do it, they have know something."

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The phone don't ring… and the sun refused to shine

Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly for what was already mine

For such a long, long time…

Mia kept the radio low. She'd gotten comfortable enough to play music in the lab, but she still didn't like to blare it the way Greg did.

We made mad love, shadow love, random love and abandoned love…

Sara had gotten a few hairs from the Hovanec case and Mia just finished the processing. Now it was up to the computer to find a match.

accidentally like a martyr

the hurt gets worse

and the heart gets harder…

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He absently traced the handle of his coffee mug with his finger. She watched his hands. They were big and strong with stocky fingers that matched the frame of his body. Sometimes when she couldn't sleep she thought about those hands. They would be surprisingly rough on her bare skin, they would caress her, maddenly soft, barely touching before grabbing her, fingers digging in, leaving bruises. She didn't care about bruises. Those hands would hold, grab, and hover, moving, gliding everywhere where she longed to be touched, everywhere she never knew she wanted to be touched. Those hands would be meticulous and ravaging and gentle and brutal at her whim…

The movement of Grissom's hand back to the case file snapped Sara out of her trance. She frowned, scolding herself for the lapse. This case was important; she couldn't let herself drift off like that. She stood, needing to put some distance between them.

"I-uh- am going to see if Mia's gotten anything yet."

Grissom only barely looked up. "Hmmm," was his only response. Sara swallowed a sigh. There she was lusting for him only a couple of feet away and he didn't know, and couldn't care less. She strode out of his office, trying not to look like she was hurrying.

Pathetic.

Music met her at the doorway.

The days slide by…should have done, should have done, we all sigh

Never thought I'd be so lonely, after such a long, long time…

Time out of mind…

We made mad love…

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TBC…soon I hope.

Song lyrics in italics are from "Accidentally Like a Martyr" by the late, very great Warren Zevon.

A/N: In the Roman Catholic tradition the patron saint/angel of mercy is Gabriel the Archangel.