DISCLAIMER:Don't own it... No money made... Just for fun and enjoyment.
SUMMARY: Sequel to Displacement. The CSI team and their recently hired coroner Stephanie are back to work solving cases, sharing companionship and generally making their way through the dire world of criminal investigation with humor and friendship... This one will show the development of the relationship between Grissom and Sara and there should be some other surprises down the road as well. Romance/Drama/Angst/Mature Situations
RATING: M for Mature - I'm starting this one out at "M", since we won't be waiting quite so long for the smut this time out ;) Also, there is a sprinkling of language throughout the story.
A/N: Is everyone still recovering from the finale? I'll post the new chapter now, since I've got a busy afternoon and who knows what I'll walk into at work tonight :p
REVIEWS: I am always looking for ways to improve my writing, and your reviews let me know if I am hitting my mark. Thank you in advance for the time you take to review this story.
Chapter 22
The blinds to her office were shut tight, the music was gone and to the unknown observer there was no one in the office at all. However, behind the closed door serious work was being done. On every surface in the small room sat a pile of notes, a stack of journals, a folder of shipping manifests, a printout of documentation, or a binder of raw data. Seated at her desk, with a journal under her nose, Stephanie poured over every single item, which had been sent over from the university, with a careful eye and a trained mind. She was determined to unearth the cause of the death for Professor Adler, even if it took her all night.
With Dr. Robbins away for the weekend, and the morgue being short staffed again, the County Coroner had diverted all new cases to another lab until Sunday night. Stephanie was determined to use the time to her advantage, and she planned to work backwards through the journals and notes until she found something that made sense. She was on-call in the event a big case came through, but otherwise she was on her own for the weekend.
Stephanie had stopped by the house to shower, change, and grab some more food. Warrick had been asleep, so she would have to wait to ask him about his most recent meeting with her friend Stephan regarding his divorce. Warrick had been frustrated by the steps that his soon-to-be ex-wife had already taken on her path to bleed him dry of any financial resources.
Stephanie had gone with him, after his first meeting, to change the signature card for his bank account and cancel the old cards, only to discover that Tina had been there the day before trying to close out his savings account. Fortunately, he had remained the primary on the account, and his bank had informed Tina that Warrick would have to come in before the account could be closed, or withdrawn from, because she was only listed as someone able to write checks on his account. Thankfully, the bank had received a notice from Stephan the day before that the Brown's had filed for divorce and any transaction made by Mrs. Brown should be considered unauthorized, and they were not willing to take any risks after receiving the letter. Mr. Brown was in a particularly dark mood following that experience, and Stephanie was concerned about the man. And his run in at the Body Farm had only solidified that murky disposition.
In her concern for him, she left him a note, letting him know that she was covering the morgue over the weekend, and that he was welcome to reign free in the house, complete with leftovers, and beer in the fridge.
Thinking about Warrick's situation made her neck tighten just a bit, and she sat up straight to stretch it out. As she inhaled deeply she glanced at her watch and realized that it was already making its way back to the evening again. She had been sitting at her desk, going through journals for just over six hours straight. She stood and stretched her arms up over her head and twisted her back from one side to the other as she stomped her feet, hoping to get the blood circulating through her buttocks once again.
She yawned with a burst of sound that reverberated throughout the room and out into the vacant morgue. When her stomach reminded her it had also been about ten hours since she last ate anything, she carefully stepped over the stack of journals on the floor beside her desk that she had already gone through, and made her way over to the mini-fridge on the other side of the room. She took out a Gatorade and a baggie filled with carrots and stringless sugarsnap beans to nibble on, because although her stomach was begging for something to fill it, she was really not hungry at all. Stephanie grabbed one of the sanitary wipes from the top of the cabinet and cleaned her hands before she sat back down with her snack.
Rolling her neck around her shoulders as she unscrewed the cap of the Gatorade, Stephanie started putting together everything she had read so far in her head. She knew that somewhere in all those papers, she would find the cause of the Professor's death. She also recalled that Gil had cautioned her about her closeness to the case, but despite the truth in his statement, she also knew that no one else would be able to get through all of the research material as well as she could.
There were a few reasons for her ability to discern that information, but the first and foremost reason was that she had had worked under the man as an undergraduate student. Professor Adler had been her first year advisor at UC-Berkeley, and she worked as a research assistant for him, because of her intimate knowledge of botany. Stephanie had found botany to be a successful diversion during her childhood, and that success led to her being the only undergraduate on his research team. They had remained associates in the years following that experience, and she always admired him throughout her dealings with him over the years. But the one thing that she had not admitted to anyone in all that time was that Professor Adler had also been her first real crush.
Professor Adler shared a common background with her, as he had also been considered a child prodigy, had gotten through school in the same amount of time she had, and he was still a young man despite his success in his field. Stephanie was barely sixteen when she met the man for the first time, at the insistence of the Dean at the School of Science. Dean Bishop thought that it would prove beneficial for Professor Adler to act as her advisor, because of his having already gotten through the system under the same circumstances. At the time, all Stephanie knew was that when she was watching Adler it was the first time she thought about something other than education and athletics in her life. That thought brought a slight blush to her cheeks as she remembered her first schoolgirl crush.
He had been a kind man, and never made her affection for him an issue. In fact, even after they became colleagues of a sort, he had never even mentioned the nature of their early interactions. After he left the school on a research trip to the Amazon, she had recognized her feelings for the man for what they were and felt a bit silly about it. However, he never made her feel self-conscious about it, and she respected him all the more for that fact.
Stephanie exhaled sharply, started munching on her snack and got back to business on the musty and grimy journals. She determined that Adler had been continuing his research in a remote location of Central America. He used latitude and longitude notations to denote the location, but when she had input the data into a mapping program, it showed a location along the African coast, so she knew he was using a system to hide the actual location from prying eyes. It was one of his traits that she was most familiar with from her time on his research team. Adler trusted no one with his research.
When she came across a new specimen entry, she would look it up in detail to determine the properties of the item and evaluate its potential for the causal agent. The process continued like that over the course of the day, and Stephanie intended to keep going until she found a logical specimen for the culprit. She turned the next gritty page and then grabbed a tissue to blow her nose as she continued to read. All this dust is wreaking havoc on my sinuses.
