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: My insomnia has kicked in full blast... Couldn't even manage a few extra hours on my day off :( So, if the writing frenzy continues, you may see a flurry of chapters over the weekend :D

And special thanks to jacey05 and brandie.d for some preview feedback on some chapters I was a little worried about. Your assistance helped me get a little bit of sleep anyway. :)

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 read & review this story.


Chapter 29

She woke up sputtering again. The Benadryl had kicked in and she was feeling some relief from the tightness in her chest. Slowly, she stood up from the couch and walked over to the counter where her purse was sitting and pulled out the inhaler. She forced one calming breath and then coughed violently. She waited for her heart to slow down again and then drew in another breath, but that time she triggered the inhaler and sucked up the medication with it. She held the breath in her chest as long as she was able and then slowly released it. When she reached over to grab the bottle of water, she sighed and took a drink, sloshing it around in her mouth before she finally swallowed it.

Stephanie blew out another breath and coughed again, but with much less furor. She rubbed at her eyes to clear away the remaining effects of the Benadryl and made her way back behind her desk again. She thought she was getting really close to isolating the cause of Professor Adler's pulmonary edema, so she got back to work. When she opened the next journal, she realized that it had gotten out of order, and she was staring at details of the professor's last trip to El Salvador. Realizing that she would also need the manifest of specimens brought back from that trip, she sifted through the stack of folders to her right to locate it. With both pieces of data she started scanning through the pages and making a few notes here and there.

The rest of her time was spent searching through the pages of the journal and the manifests' correlating data, eliminating possibilities as she went along. She had managed to crack his global positioning code by applying a formula used in proving Fick's Diffusion Law to the coordinates he had recorded. From what she could tell, he had started out his trip in San Miguel, El Salvador, but then he made his way into Honduras through the mountains. That was not tracking right with Stephanie, since he could have easily gone straight to Honduras through the Gulf of Fonseca, but instead he seemed to have been purposely trying to subvert his actual goal. She found receipts for hotels in San Miguel and Santa Rosa de Lima, but nothing that indicated he had ever been in Honduras. From the coordinates she had deciphered, it looked like he had come into Honduras through the gulf and up the Choluteca River until he reached Yuscarán. After that, he had gone on a trek through the rough region of southern Honduras to Danli. From there, she traced his steps in the meandering patterns across the high mountains to the west of the Patuca River.

Stephanie had always known that Professor Adler bordered on paranoid, but after reading through his journals and the other supporting documents, she realized that he had gone well over the borderline since her time as his research assistant. Benjamin Adler was well beyond paranoid as he traipsed through the mountainous jungles of Honduras. She held her hand up to her mouth and stared off into the wall for a while, contemplating what might have happened to the man she had once known. She sat like that for an endless moment and then inhaled sharply to shake herself from the reverie of her thoughts. As the breath entered her lungs through her throat she felt as though there was some kind of grit in the air and she began to cough again as her airway became strangely tight. She looked down at her hands and found a discolored dust there and her eyes opened wide with astonishment. She flipped to the next page in the journal and found a pressed fern between the pages with a notation stating that Adler had discovered a specimen that had been considered lost to that continent and how anxious he was to get it back to the states to begin analyzing its chemical properties.

Stephanie looked up from the book, grabbed a hand wipe and removed the remaining dust from her hands before rising to cross to room again. She felt the tell-tale signs of airway constriction that always accompanied an allergy induced asthma attack.

She reached her purse and fumbled through the contents to find her medication. The inhaler was the first thing she laid a hand on and she quickly brought it to her lips to take a double hit off of it, but her symptoms would not be relieved from the normally powerful drug so quickly. Her hands plunged back into the bag desperately searching for something else. Her face showed immense satisfaction in finding a slender plastic tube at the bottom of her bag. She pulled the two halves apart, and revealed an epinephrine cartridge injector pen.

Coughing from her compromised breathing, and from the layer of mucus which had started to form throughout her respiratory system, in response to the allergen introduced into her body, she struggled to remove the cap from the pen. She then raised it in the air, all the while coughing and sputtering, but as she brought the pen down to inject it into her leg another volley of violent coughing came over her and on the downward motion her whole body followed, she struck her head on the corner of the cabinet and fell to the floor.

The clock on the wall showed that it was five in the morning and on the floor, Stephanie laid sprawled, unconscious, bleeding from the head, with an inhaler in one hand and a broken injector pen in the other. The morgue was completely silent.