A/N: Once again, thanks for your reviews and your patience as I try to fit in fic writing with real life. New year, new demands...you know how it goes! Now that I'm through with traveling for a while, maybe the chapters will come a bit faster. This one is quite a bit longer than the last ones. Enjoy!

Chapter Thirteen

Questions and Answers

Too many hours after being freed from the collapsed mine on Harper Ridge, Gil Grissom was finally, blessedly alone. He exhaled a long sigh as his gaze swept around the room to which he'd been moved after undergoing a brief, uncomplicated surgery to stabilize the broken bones in his leg. For the first time since his arrival at the hospital no doctors, nurses, technicians, or orderlies swarmed around him. He wasn't sure if it was an overwhelming sense of relief or the residual anesthetic circulating through his system making him feel slightly light-headed. The preceding hours had been a nightmare blur of unfamiliar faces and hands, the indignity and humiliation that were inevitable and necessary in emergency medicine. As dispassionate as he had always schooled himself to be at crime scenes, he'd found it impossible to maintain that same level of detachment when he was the victim.

The solitude of this small, nondescript room was a balm to his frayed nerves even though the surroundings themselves offered little to soothe his senses. Almost everywhere he looked he saw white -- white ceiling, white walls, starched white sheets and thin white blanket covering him. The window offered a small hint of color in draperies of muted green and blue sketched in small geometric shapes. The sturdy upholstery on a single visitor's chair angled into the far corner of the room echoed the pattern. The plain circular wall clock showed the time as 6:03, and the reddish cast of the scant light filtering in between the edges of the drapes told him it was P.M. rather than A.M. To the right of the clock, a ceiling-mounted television faced the bed; the blank, black screen stood out against the white wall like some kind of malignant growth.

There were no machines nearby to generate rhythmic background sounds, but from the corridor outside the closed door he heard the faint rattle of a wheeled cart. He surmised it carried dinner trays for the patients on this floor. Voices over a paging system sporadically broke the relative silence, and from the adjoining room a burst of loud laughter sounded like the cackling of a startled hen.

Grissom turned his head when someone tapped lightly on his door, but had no time to call a response before it opened. A pleasant-faced woman wearing blue scrub pants and a flower-patterned scrub shirt entered briskly. She carried an electronic notepad, and her middle-aged features shaped a smile when she saw him watching her approach.

"Good evening, Mr. Grissom," she greeted him. "You probably don't remember me from when they brought you to the room. I'm Angie, one of the floor nurses." She stopped beside the bed and checked the drip from the bag of clear fluid suspended on a metal T-stand. She carefully straightened a slight kink in the plastic tube running from the bag into the port taped in place on the back of his hand. "You're looking a bit more alert than you did then."

"I remember you," he said mildly, but his voice came out rusty. He frowned and tried to clear his throat, feeling the rasping dryness that came of having nothing to drink in far too long.

Angie poured water from a pitcher on the bedside cart into a lidded plastic cup and stuck a flexible straw into its top. "Here you go, hon," she said with another smile, holding the cup in place and guiding the straw toward his mouth. "Just small sips, now, just in case you're still queasy from the anesthesia."

He drank cautiously, but felt only the relief of the cool liquid sliding over his tongue and down his throat. "Thank you."

He watched as Angie replaced the cup and moved to the foot of the bed. She carefully turned the blanket and sheet back to expose his injured leg, encased in a bizarre looking wire cage. "No cast?" he asked curiously.

Angie glanced up at him with another small smile as she pressed her fingers against his swollen ankle. "Not just yet," she replied. "Once the surgical wounds have healed, they'll put a cast on it. Till then, this crazy looking contraption and the pins they put in will keep those bones in place." She patted his foot in a motherly gesture. "Dr. Baines will be glad to know you've got a good, strong pulse in your ankle. He'll be along in a little bit, by the way. How's your foot, hon? Any numbness? Cold?"

Grissom carefully assessed the ghostly sensations registering in his brain. "Numb," he said at last. "But an achy kind of numb."

She nodded and picked up the notepad to record the information. "Let's just check the rest of your vitals, and maybe by then the doctor will be here. I'm sure you've got lots of questions for him."

He did indeed. First and foremost was whether or not he had done irreparable damage to his spine. The fact that he was aware of his extremities, even though they felt leaden and only distantly attached to his body, gave him a measure of hope. He searched his disjointed memories of the tests and examinations that had followed his arrival in the ER and vaguely recalled talk of hairline fractures, swelling, impeded nerve function.

"Until the doctor arrives," he said as Angie recorded his blood pressure and stuck a digital thermometer in his left ear, "perhaps you can answer another kind of question for me." His stomach chose that moment to rumble loudly.

Angie's pink lips twitched into a smile. "If you're going to ask me to smuggle you in a pizza," she said, "the answer is no."

"I don't want a pizza," Grissom assured her. "I'd like to find out about another patient who came in at the same time I did."

The woman's brows drew down into a slight frown. "The only other new arrival on this floor is a sixty-year-old carpenter who fell off a ladder. Your friend must be in a different unit – or wasn't admitted at all."

Grissom started to say more, but the door opened again to admit a tall, athletically built African-American man wearing a hospital coat over his scrubs. The ID tag clipped to his pocket bore the name L. Baines, M.D. Grissom remembered him, too, from earlier.

"Mr. Grissom," the doctor said, "how are you feeling?" He glanced at the information Angie had recorded on the electronic notepad before nodding to the nurse and permitting her to go about her business.

"A little battered," Grissom answered truthfully, "but better than I expected."

That drew a faint smile from the doctor. "Battered is a fairly accurate assessment," he said. "But all things considered, you're very fortunate your injuries weren't more severe. Are you ready for the details?"

"Yes."

"Both bones in your lower right leg were fractured – fortunately those were nice, simple fractures that were fairly easy to repair. You also suffered minor fractures in three of your vertebrae, but with no displacement and no disruption of the spinal cord."

Grissom frowned. "So why can't I move my legs?" he asked.

"Even though your spinal cord is intact," Baines explained, "there is some swelling as a result of the fractures and from soft tissue damage. That swelling is impeding the flow of nerve impulses below the locus of the injury. We'll use corticosteroids and other medications to reduce the swelling. I've consulted a neurologist, and he agrees to wait and see if surgery will be necessary to repair the fractures."

Grissom gestured toward his midsection where a rigid brace encircled his body from hipbones to ribcage. "And in the meantime, I get to wear a metal corset?"

Baines answered with a wry smile. "I know it's not the most comfortable apparel," he said. "I was in one myself after a car accident when I was in college. But it will protect your spine from any further injury while the fractures heal."

"Which will take how long?"

"Several weeks, assuming no complications. With appropriate physical therapy, you should regain full sensation and mobility."

Grissom felt that an enormous weight had been lifted from his chest. As much as he dreaded a prolonged recovery, it was a far better alternative than a lifetime of disability. After several moments he said simply, "Thank you."

"You do have some other minor injuries," Baines continued. "The same impact that caused the spinal fractures also bruised your kidneys, which we'll be monitoring very closely these next several days. And we had to stitch up a laceration on your head. There's a pretty sizable lump underneath it, but no skull fracture. I'd be willing to guess that you've got a headache though."

The doctor was right about that, but Grissom answered only with a small shrug. He suppressed a grimace when the movement caused the back brace to dig uncomfortably into his side.

Baines shifted his stance and glanced toward the door. "Unless you have questions, Mr. Grissom, I need to finish my rounds. And you have some visitors, if you feel up to it." When Grissom didn't respond immediately, he added, "They asked to see you as soon as possible, but if you'd prefer, I can suggest they wait until morning."

"It's fine," Grissom said. He knew his team would be anxious to see for themselves that he was alive and relatively intact. And he trusted that Catherine, at least, would know him well enough to keep the visit short.

The doctor nodded again and left, pausing in the half-open doorway to speak to someone waiting outside. Grissom turned toward the door expecting to see Catherine, Sara, and Warrick. His brows puckered into a frown when a serious looking man came in.

"McNabb?" he said slowly. "This is an unexpected….turn of events. Are you here officially or just to talk over old times?" He remembered McNabb as a competent detective, and had been assigned to several of the man's investigations over the years. He'd been a little surprised when McNabb accepted a transfer to Internal Affairs six months earlier.

Lt. McNabb looked vaguely uncomfortable. He cast a quick glance back at the door before stepping farther into the room. "Captain Garza will be joining us in a minute," he said with a certain grimness. "He got a phone call just before the doc gave us permission to speak with you."

Grissom's eyebrows lifted in mild surprise. "So it's official."

"I'm afraid so." McNabb removed a small tape recorder from his coat pocket and set it on the bedside table. "We need a statement from you about what happened yesterday on Harper Ridge."

"What happened is Dan Stevens tried to kill Nick Stokes and me. His death is the result of his own schemes gone wrong."

McNabb looked pained by the hard edge in Grissom's voice. "So you know Stevens died in that mine collapse?"

"Yes."

"Don't say any more just yet," McNabb cautioned. "I'll need to get it all on tape, but Garza wants to be here for the questioning." He glanced at the door again to make sure his superior wasn't on his way in. "Look, Grissom, just between you and me, I don't think you did anything inappropriate, but Garza's got a burr up his butt, so he's likely to come at you pretty hard."

Grissom regarded the detective. "Any particular reason, or does he not like CSIs either?"

McNabb shrugged. "Stevens slipped the net when he was investigated last year, and Garza wants to make sure he didn't have help hiding what he was up to. Look, he'd have my ass in a sling if he knew I was giving you a heads-up on what to expect…"

The door opened then, and McNabb shut up quickly, his faintly apologetic expression turning to stone.

"Mr. Grissom," Garza said as he strode in. "I am here to inform you that you are being questioned as part of an official investigation into the death of Detective Daniel Stevens and the reappearance of money missing from the SunWays Armored Transport robbery that took place on March 8 of last year."

Grissom fixed a bland stare on the IA captain. "Good evening to you, too, Captain Garza," he said with pointed courtesy.

Garza withdrew a small notebook from his inside jacket pocket and made a curt gesture to McNabb, who pressed the "Record" button on the tape recorder he'd set out earlier. Garza identified himself as the investigator and Grissom as the subject of this interview for the official record. He added a note about the date, time, and location, then went immediately to the point. "Mr. Grissom, how did you come to be on Harper Ridge yesterday?"

"I was attempting to determine if the two million dollars stolen from a SunWays Armored Transport truck last year was hidden in an abandoned silver mine on Harper Ridge."

Garza's subsequent questions and Grissom's concise answers covered the events and decisions that had resulted in Grissom's call to Dan Stevens the previous morning and the presence of the detective and two CSIs on the ridge. They covered in excruciating detail the CSIs' discovery of the body inside the mine, their return to find Stevens loading the bags of stolen money into his car, the confrontation that ultimately led to Stevens' death and Grissom and Nick being trapped and injured. Throughout the questioning, Garza seemed almost annoyed that Grissom responded promptly and in the same level, reasonable tone he used on the witness stand in court.

"What was your role in the original SunWays robbery?" Garza asked abruptly.

Grissom's eyebrows lifted in vague surprise at Garza's choice of phrasing. "I had no role in the robbery," he answered evenly. "In the investigation of the robbery, I was the lead CSI."

"And who assisted you in that investigation?"

"Sara Sidle."

Garza paused a beat before he asked, "No one else?"

Grissom answered with a miniscule shrug. "Initially, Warrick Brown and Nick Stokes also responded."

"And did they also take part in the investigation?"

"No. Another call came in within minutes of their arrival on the scene, and I reassigned them to that case."

The questions went on, sometimes going back to cover issues already addressed, and Grissom's responses became briefer, his tone slightly more clipped. His headache had intensified as his irritation with the IA captain grew. He was ready for the inquisition to end.

When Garza paused for a moment, Grissom thought perhaps the interview was over. He was wrong.

"How well do you know Nick Stokes?" the captain asked. "He's worked for you – what? – six years?"

Grissom regarded him steadily. "You know exactly how long he's been with the department. And I know him well enough to trust his competence as an investigator and to trust his integrity."

"Yes. You recommended him for a promotion last year," Garza noted, almost as if thinking aloud. "From your earlier statements, though, it seems Detective Stevens didn't share your high opinion of him."

Grissom cocked an eyebrow. "Is that a question?"

Garza shrugged. "An observation. Your night shift crew didn't work all that often on Detective Stevens' investigations. Any idea why he was so antagonistic toward your man?"

"You'd have to ask him."

"That's going to be a little difficult since Stevens is dead," Garza said. "We can ask Mr. Stokes when we interview him. Of course, that won't be for a while yet," he added with calculated negligence. "It seems he didn't come through this quite as well as you did. He might be up to answering questions tomorrow, but the doc thinks more likely the day after."

Grissom clenched his teeth to hold back an uncharacteristic display of temper. The hollow sinking in his stomach had nothing to do with going almost thirty-six hours without solid food. He'd been concerned about Nick before, knowing that he was only aggravating his injuries by trying to dig his way out of the mine. Now his worry escalated even more with Garza's comment. He wanted to ask what the IA captain knew, but the expectant look on Garza's face told him that was exactly what he wanted. Grissom decided he'd be damned if he'd give the man that satisfaction.

"Are we done here?" Grissom asked instead.

Garza signaled his partner to shut off the recorder. "For now," he agreed. "But we may have more questions later. I guess it's not necessary to tell you not to go anywhere," he added with a smirk.

Grissom watched as the two men turned to leave. McNabb trailed slightly behind his boss and managed to give Grissom a pained smile that was faintly apologetic. As soon as the door closed behind them, Grissom reached for the master control clipped to the side of the bed that was an all-in-one TV remote, telephone, and call button.

With any luck, his resident Florence Nightingale wouldn't be too busy to help him with a little investigation.

To be continued...