Chapter Three: Just Saying
It had started raining early in the morning and it hadn't let up even the slightest by nightfall, and Sara and Nick were soaked to the bone by the time they reached the WLVU campus. They walked through the wooded campus in silence; the only audible sounds the cascade of harsh pats of raindrops hitting Sara's umbrella and the splash of their shoes landing in numerous puddles. Sara had offered to share her umbrella several times but Nick declined each time with a slight shake of his head, showering her with more droplets. The umbrella didn't seem to be doing her much good anyways, not with the added force of a strong wind. The ends of her short brown hair were wet and curling and she'd given up trying to wipe the rainwater from her face. Nick was fine with his ball cap pulled low on his head. It suited his mood. Kind of like the metaphorical rain cloud following him wherever he went. It didn't take long for their usually swift pace to slow considerably as the hems of their jeans weighed down with rainwater.
They weren't in a huge hurry. Rain was hell on a crime scene, and Nick doubted they would find anything useful. That was probably why Grissom sent two CSIs to the scene. Two sets of eyes would be better for finding any evidence that might have survived. So he couldn't really be mad…could he?
He could. Nick heard Sara sigh but didn't look over at her, concentrating instead on keeping a close eye on the sidewalk stretching before him.
"Are you going to talk at all?" she finally asked.
Nick looked up and fought the urge to shrug. "Didn't know there was anything to say."
"Be pissed at Grissom all you want, but don't take it out on me," she said firmly and increased her pace, with difficulty, to pull a few steps ahead of Nick.
She's right, he thought, but kept any apology to himself. He matched her stride and the two continued to trudge slowly across the campus.
The call had come in at about the same time the CSIs were arriving at the lab that evening. 419 at Western Las Vegas University; a call more common than any of them would have liked. And the cases coming from the university were never simple, never cut and dry, and what was worse, the victims were kids. College kids, but still kids. Too young to end up as 419 calls.
Though he would never have admitted it to anyone, because they wouldn't understand, Nick had actually been excited about coming into work. It was a feeling he hadn't felt in, well, months. Work had ceased being exciting and had started to feel like something he was obligated to do. He still went in every night because he wanted to help people, that hadn't changed; he just didn't enjoy the work as much as he used to. What had once been challenging and stimulating was now…nerve wracking. Nick was never quite sure when something was going to jump out at him and throw him off. Something like a bug, or a small space he hadn't been warned about, or a maniac planning to use him as a pawn in some sick vengeance game.
But the work was still enjoyable, to some extent, as morbid as that was. He liked the people he worked with and the forensics had never ceased to interest him. The job was still challenging, and he was good at it. He just didn't look forward to it as much as he used to.
He'd looked forward to it that night. Sure, he was a little nervous about walking into the break room, and for a good reason. He was almost positive Catherine had said something to Grissom, even if she'd told him she would drop it. But even if she had spoken with him…Grissom had already told him he was getting a DB tonight. It was a strange, nearly sociopathic thing to be excited about, but that excitement hadn't lasted long. Not at all.
When Nick entered the break room everyone else was already assembled, minus Warrick. Half of the room was working hard to avoid eye contact with Nick. Catherine was chewing on a fingernail, a little too casually. Grissom was in the middle of handing a slip of paper to Greg, who seemed nervously eager, and the older man's eyes darted to the door and back as Nick entered. Greg didn't notice, and instead hurriedly grabbed up his jacket from a chair.
"Thanks, Grissom," he said. "I mean, this is really, really – "
"Sure, Greg," Grissom interrupted, quietly accepting the thanks.
Greg pulled on his jacket and grinned at Nick as he went to pass him in the doorway. "I got my first solo, man," he said, jabbing Nick excitedly in the arm.
Grissom looked away at the comment.
Nick was slightly taken aback. Greg was still a level one, and Nick had been a level three for almost a year before he'd gotten his first solo from Grissom. Despite his confusion, he managed a smile for his friend. "Great, man. That's great."
After Greg left the room, Nick turned to his supervisor with a questioning look. He jerked a thumb at the door. "What's that about?"
It was with obvious hesitancy, a recurring theme with Grissom's recent actions, that he raised his eyes to meet Nick's. "Ecklie," he said.
Nick wasn't quite sure he understood the implication, but he shrugged it off. "What do you have for me?" he asked.
Grissom once again looked away.
And here he was, walking with Sara in the rain because of Ecklie's desire to make the lab look good and, for some unfounded reason, Grissom's desire to make Ecklie look good. And he was not too happy about it. Grissom had tried to explain, but it had sounded like nothing but excuses, and bad ones.
The rain was doing nothing for his already sour mood, and Sara's continuous sighs weren't helping, either. She was right, and he knew it. She hadn't done anything except come into work. He felt ashamed of himself for getting so worked up over something so stupid. "How far is this body, anyway?"
Sara glanced at him irritably, flinching as another barrage of raindrops assaulted her face.
"You guys CSI?"
The two turned in the direction of the voice. Barely illuminated by the harsh glow of a single street lamp, a large blue tarp was heaped under a cluster of trees off to their left, about thirty feet from the sidewalk. Standing next to the tarp, looking thoroughly drenched and miserable, was an LVPD officer waving them over.
Nick frowned and made his way through the mud and matted leaves. His boots sunk into the ground and almost tripped him up. "Kinda off the beaten path, aren't ya?"
The officer shrugged and turned up the collar of his jacket. "I don't pick where people dump bodies."
Sara stepped forward and cocked her head at the tarp. "It was a body dump?"
"I'm just guessing. Couldn't tell how long it'd been here. We got the body covered as quickly as we could. Already soaked," he added, off of Sara's questioning look.
Nick squinted and looked up at the sky, dark and blank through the leaves of the trees. If it would just stop raining, then maybe they could get some work done. But even without the rain, their chances of finding any worthwhile evidence was pretty much shot to hell.
"Well, until the rain stops, we can't risk moving anything and losing any evidence under the body," Sara said. She pulled her hair over her shoulder and wrung it out.
The officer's face fell. "So we wait."
Nick and Sara exchanged a look. Nick sighed, not exactly thrilled at the prospect. "We wait."
Catherine's attention was drawn to the store's front window as another slew of raindrops assaulted the glass. The dark convenience store was illuminated with flashes of blue and red, giving it an eerie quality accentuated by the fact there was a dead body lying mere feet from her.
It's really coming down at there. She flinched, grateful she was working a scene indoors. Her thoughts went to Nick and Sara, working the case at the university.
Catherine turned to her partner at the scene, none other than the great Gil Grissom, himself. He had been uncharacteristically quiet since they'd arrived. "Do you think they'll find anything in this?"
"No." He didn't even look up, eyes instead trained on the beam of his flashlight as it swept through the cramped store.
It was obvious Gil didn't want to talk, but if there was one thing Catherine had no control over, it was her brain, which just never seemed to stop thinking. Once the wheels started turning, there was no stopping it. "You know what I've noticed?"
Grissom still refused to look up at her. "That we're at a crime scene and should be focusing all of our attention on collecting evidence?"
Catherine rolled her eyes. To pacify him, she grabbed the mini-flashlight out of her kit and started walking the perimeter of the space. "I've noticed you haven't been working a whole lot of scenes with Nick lately." Grissom shot an irritated look her way and she raised her hands defensively. "I'm just saying."
Grissom turned back to his light, this time moving back to the center of the store, to the body. "You've been saying a lot lately."
Catherine shrugged. "I observe people. It's my job."
"Your job is to collect evidence."
"And part of that evidence comes from what I observe," Catherine responded smartly, stepping over shards of a broken bottle.
Grissom raised his eyes enough to give her another annoyed glance and started to remove a few fibers from the body. "What's your point?"
Catherine started to walk back to the body as well. "No point," she said innocently, handing Grissom a small evidence bag.
"You're just saying?"
"I'm just saying."
"I'm just saying," Nick said loudly as he and Sara and sloshed their way into the crime lab. He wasn't normally one to provoke an argument, but he was wet, cold, and had the headache to end all headaches. Their little outing to the university hadn't exactly gone smoothly.
"You're just saying what?" Sara asked just as loudly, throwing her arms out in frustration. Her right side was caked in congealing mud, and it didn't help Nick's mood that now also was the passenger seat of the truck.
The two had been arguing since they left the university campus to return to the lab. Nick was still in a bad mood, and Sara had been a bit touchy lately, and the two had progressively regressed into bickering teenagers over the past couple of hours. The fact they were both soaked and freezing didn't help matters any.
Nick shrugged and continued to make his way through the halls of the lab. "If you hadn't moved the tarp, then maybe we would have more evidence to work with." For emphasis, he held up their singe evidence bag, containing a swath of cloth they'd collected from underneath the body.
"And if you'd helped me instead of letting me slip and fall, I wouldn't have landed on the tarp and pulled it off of the body," Sara replied angrily.
"I wasn't anywhere near you," Nick argued, though they both knew he'd been close enough to stop her fall had he been a little more motivated. "And you probably ruined the little bit evidence we had left to actually collect."
"The rain would have ruined it anyway," Sara said, her voice rising.
"Won't know now, will we?"
"You know what?" Sara stopped in her tracks, disregarding the fact they were still in the middle of a crowded hallway and were attracting an audience. She fixed Nick with a fierce glare. "Knock it off with the attitude, Nick. I know you wanted to work solo tonight, but there are more important things going on than satisfying your ego."
Nick heard a snigger from somewhere to his right. So help me, God, that better not be Hodges. He wasn't given a chance to find out, as he was subjected to a continued tongue-lashing from Sara.
"You have really turned into a piece of work lately," she said, peeling off her wet, muddy jacket with disgust.
Usually, Nick would have responded to such a comment with a wide-eyed 'who me?' look, but now, he crossed his arms and returned Sara's glare. "What are you talking about?"
"You're confrontational, unreasonable, irrational," she said, ticking the items off on her fingers with an annoyed air. "You're not thinking things through…come to think of it, you're not thinking at all – " She was no longer talking about his attitude regarding their present case, and he knew it. She was talking about the McBride case.
"I made one bad call, Sara," Nick said, defending himself, his temper rising. "It's not like you've never done something stupid while dealing with a difficult case."
Sara was angry, and on a roll, and the implication seemed to spur her on even more. The things she was saying were starting to be a little less work-related. "You don't talk to anyone. You mope around here like – "
"Like, what, Sara?" Nick interrupted, sick of being analyzed and yelled at in front of his coworkers. He found himself taking a step forward. "Like I almost died?"
Maybe he wasn't aware of just how loud the two had gotten, or of the crowd of people that had assembled to see this unnatural and unprecedented argument between two people closer than most of them could ever hope to be with a coworker.
The silence that fell onto everyone in the hallway was unlike anything they'd ever experienced. It went beyond the silence of the middle of the night, beyond the silence of death; those were tense but familiar quiets. If it had in fact been David Hodges who'd let the chuckle slip, he was now rendered as silent as the rest of them. No one moved, and it felt as though no one even breathed. The observers watched in embarrassed silence, ashamed they were so enthralled in the fight and wishing they hadn't just witnessed this moment. No one wanted to be the first to move and attract the attention of everyone else.
Sara stood still and silent, her lips parted slightly, her eyes slowly welling. Whether from anger, guilt, regret, or indignation, it wasn't quite clear. Her eyes were dark and sharp and boring holes straight into Nick's heart. Her lips moved slowly, as though she was trying to speak, maybe yell…maybe apologize…but no words came out of her mouth.
Nick felt a familiar sting behind his own eyes but he fought it, not wanting to offer any validity to Sara's words. All he needed now was to be seen crying in the middle of the crime lab. He'd acknowledged something out loud he hadn't even let himself think about, let alone verbalize. He always had a tendency to let things slip out when he was irritated, and he and Sara had been butting heads all night. It wasn't right for him to be taking his anger out on her, but it was too late now; he couldn't take it back. And strange as the outburst itself was, even stranger was the fact it didn't make Nick feel anything. For a brief moment, he wasn't sorry, and he didn't feel any better after getting some of the tension out. And even stranger than that was the tickling feeling in the back of his throat of even more words clawing their way out.
"I'm sorry," Nick continued in a low tone, "if I'm not getting over this quickly enough to fit into your schedule. We all know how busy it is."
Sara's eyes narrowed, and glistened even more, and she silently watched him turn and walk out of the lab.
To be continued...
