DISCLAIMER: Don't Own It, No Money Made... Just for fun & enjoyment.

RATING: M for Mature. For language and mature situations in later chapters.

A/N: Spent most of the weekend trying to catch up on sleep and getting errands run. But I did get final edits done on Chapters 11-14. Hope to make some headway tomorrow evening on the juicier parts of the story, but here is another chapter to keep you going.

REVIEWS: Thanks to all who have response has been wonderful and I am having a great time reading them and writing the story.


Chapter 10

For a week that had started out so well, it was not ending up that way. Stephanie had just posted her seventh body of the night, plus she had changed into her third set of scrubs and it was not over yet. She was just about to sit down at her desk to finally eat her salad when she leaned forward and reached over the desk for the notes from the last case to read over while she ate. And before she knew it, there was a loud clang on the tile floor. She closed her eyes tightly and winced, because she just knew that had to have been her salad hitting the floor and flying all over the place.

"Dammit!" She let out a huge sigh, dropping the report back on her desk and planting her elbow down so that she could properly grip her brow while she tried to fight back the urge to throw something: something heavy and loud.

"It can't possibly be that bad." Catherine said as she entered the young woman's office, and then she looked down at the mess, "Or I could be wrong… Need a little help?" Catherine bent down to retrieve the bowl from her side of the desk.

Stephanie reached over for the trash can and brought it to the other side as she kneeled down on the floor to clean up the spillage, "Sorry, it's just been one of those days, and-." She gestured at her clothes, "I'll be changing into yet ANOTHER set of scrubs… Lovely."

Catherine could not help but laugh at the young woman's predicament. "Well, I hate to add to the fun, but… You wouldn't happen to have the prelim on my DB from earlier?"

She sat back on her haunches, let out another huge sigh and thought about her answer a moment before she spoke, "Cassen, twenty year old female, suspected OD?"

Catherine shot her a dumbfounded expression, "Yes, and how the hell did you do that?"

"Tsk… It's a gift… And a curse. Once it goes it in, it never comes out." She reached out to balance herself on the edge of her desk and peeked over the top of it until she found what she was looking for, wiped her hand on her top and grabbed the folder to hand to Catherine. "First off, you can forget about the OD… She didn't have time." She scooped up the last of the mess on the floor and deposited it in the waste can. "The seven cc's of hemorrhaged blood I took out of the base of her skull is probably related to her COD."

"You're kidding me!" Catherine started flipping through the preliminary report to look over the findings. She soon found herself alone in the office, as Stephanie had already walked out into the autopsy room.

She called back from the autopsy room, "Yeah, I was pretty shocked, too. But David noticed an aberration in the skull when he was cleaning the body." She noticed that Catherine had emerged from the office with the report in her hands and was listening intently, so she stopped speaking with quite so much volume, "It wasn't soft, or showing any contusions or lacerations." She was looking through the index of the drawers she was standing next to, "However, the occipital bone was avulsed, which was probably the result of some kind of childhood trauma. Since that's the only time the skull could have been soft enough to produce an avulsion." She found the one she was looking for, dropped the book and opened the drawer containing the body in question, "Might have even happened during childbirth, but without causing any obvious brain injury, it would never have been noticed. And I found no evidence of Cerebral Palsy, so that's not going to help you at all." She pulled the sheet back and found that Catherine was right next to her when she looked up, "I'm still waiting for tox to come back, but those pills in her stomach appeared to be nothing more than aspirins, and mostly undigested ones at that. I'm going to say, that judging from the rounding of her face, and the amount of fluid I found throughout her system, that she was high on high doses of a steroid. And it probably raised her blood pressure and caused the bleed."

That was too much for Catherine, she just had to know how she came to that conclusion without a tox screen, "Okay, now how can you say that without a tox screen?"

"Cushing's."

"Cushing's? What the hell kind of answer is that?" Catherine's face was contorted with incredulity and she had subconsciously thrown her hand to her cocked hip in defiance of this conclusion.

"Yeah, Cushing's Syndrome? They also call it 'Moon Face.' Comes from high doses of steroids, typically seen in people with some kinds of kidney disease. Usually at the point of kidney failure, though I have seen it in cases of chronic acute asthmatics, as well." Her matter of fact diagnosis simply blew Catherine away.

She stood there shaking her head at the look on the young woman's face. As though her conclusion was nothing special at all, "Well damn girl! Now I can see why Al was so hot to scoop you up."

Stephanie was confused now, "What? I don't get it."

Catherine was laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole thing, "Oh yeah, you're definitely related to Grissom. Blood or not, you are just like him." Even though Stephanie did not understand why Catherine had made that connection, she still laughed, because she knew it was true. She and Gil had had whole conversations where no one else in the room had a clue what they were talking about, and more times than not, someone would make a joke that neither of them understood. They truly were birds of a feather in many ways.

"What can I say? I had my first bug collection at four years old." Stephanie chose to join in on the joke.

"This is going to be soooo much fun having both of you working cases." Catherine patted her on the shoulder as she shut the drawer and they started walking back through the Autopsy Room. "So, I take it that was your lunch all over the floor in there?"

"Busted."

"Well, then why don't you take a break and come get something to eat with me before the tox comes back?" Catherine had decided during that exchange that this young woman was someone she could easily warm to, and she also noticed that she had not really left the morgue all week. Her maternal instincts told her that Stephanie needed a little push to get her out and about.

"You know what? That sounds like a gr-." She was interrupted by the entrance of David, pushing yet another body into the morgue.

"Catherine, Dr. MacInnerney…" David shuffled past the two women and continued about his business.

She saw Stephanie visibly slump her broad shoulders, "Like a great idea for another night. Sorry, but it looks like I have some more work to get to." She gave a faint smile, "Thanks for the offer, though."

She patted Stephanie on the back and tilted her head to the side, "Don't sweat it… I'll pick you up something and bring it down… You can pick it up next time." She added that last part with a wink and this time Stephanie had a genuine smile.

"That's sweet… Thanks for everything, Catherine… It means a lot."

As Catherine was walking out of the morgue she amended her earlier statement. Stephanie was not just like Grissom, she was better. Grissom would have never been able to admit something like that to a perfect stranger.