Title: Crash and Burn

Disclaimer: Angst, slash, violence, sexual content, language.

POV: Grissom

Chapter Six: Trying to Understand

The next night….

I took my glasses off, placing them on the desk, and rubbed my eyes. The last few days had been nearly too much to comprehend. First Greg disappeared. All the evidence at the crime scene pointed to two people; Nick and Greg. Nick ended up needing stitches for a nasty cut in his side; left by whom? The call that came in last night had interrupted a meeting with the others. We'd been going over what little evidence we had, trying to find a way to link an unknown perp to the crime. Needless to say, we didn't have much luck. The call to my phone shattered the silence and made Sara jump. I knew that rushing out of the room like I did was only going to make them curious but I had somewhere important to be.

There's a soft rap on my door. I look up to find Sara standing there with Warrick and Catherine behind her. I wave them in.

"So, where did you rush off to last night in such a hurry? Someone set fire to your place or something?" Sara asked.

Even though I had been expecting the questions I didn't know quite how to phrase the troubling news. Nick always told me I wasn't good when it came to people. "There was an emergency. I reassure you that everything is okay. He's doing fine. I took him to the hospital myself."

"Who are you talking about?" questioned Catherine.

"Nicky?" guessed Warrick with a small nod of his head.

"Yes, Nicky," I confirmed. "I assure you though, he'll be fine. So don't worry too much. We need to figure out where the hell Greg is before we end up with-"

"Don't say it," Sara interrupted. "Greg will be found alive. Now I want to know just how bad Nick was hurt." She leaned on my desk, making it clear that she wouldn't leave until she got what she'd come for.

I sighed. Might as well tell her. It's the only way I'll get them to work. "He has two black eyes, one of which was caused by a small hairline fracture to the cheekbone. Three of his ribs are broken and one cracked. There were abrasions and cuts and he had a nasty sprained wrist. From the way he described the attack he got off pretty lightly," I explained. "I had to calm him down because he was afraid of internal bleeding. Don't tell him I said this, but I was afraid too. The doctor sent him home this afternoon with a whole load of painkillers."

"What the hell happened to him?" asked Warrick, leaning back against the wall.

"He said he got attacked. He went out for a walk and a man in a ski mask attacked him. A neighbor who had been our doing yard work heard him yell and found him lying in the street. Nick had him call me, why, I have no idea."

"I don't like this," Sara remarked. "Am I the only one who seems to think that someone is out to get Nick and Greg?"

"But why would anyone want to hurt them?" Catherine inquired. "As far as I know Nick's stalker is still in jail and the man that kidnapped him is dead. We did catch his partner, didn't we?"

"Unless he had another one, yes, we did catch the partner," I reassured her. "I'm going to have to go with Sara on this one. The evidence may point to only the two of them being in the house but I refuse to believe that two of my friends would harm each other, and that Greg would skip town."

Warrick folded his arms over his chest. "I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorists, so forgive me for what I'm about to say. But what if the man who attacked Nick last night was Greg? He couldn't see the man's face."

"If he couldn't see a face than there's no definite reason to say it was a guy," Sara countered.

I put my glasses back on, while watching the tempers flare in my team. I knew Sara and Nick had a close friendship. And up until the whole outing of his love for Greg, Nick had had a pretty good friendship with Warrick and Catherine. For some reason they'd been acting different toward him. Not really so much as hate but I honestly believed it was a lack of understanding. They didn't know how to deal with the surprise. They had both known Nick as long as I had and they never expected this. My CSI's were slacking off.

"Will you guys stop bickering?" I almost needed to yell for them to hear me. "If you keep this up no work will get done on this case. Do you want to find Greg or not?" They all looked at me with solemn faces. "We only have a small space of time to figure out what really happened before the sheriff pushes to lock-up Nick."

Sara's eyes got wide in surprise. "He'd lock-up Nick without hard evidence?"

"Ecklie stopped by my office earlier. The conversation we had was unsettling, to say the least. Seems the sheriff paid him a visit. If we can't found evidence to clear Nick, the sheriff will charge him with killing Greg," I told them. I felt the desperation setting in, now they'd focus on the case with their full attention. There would be no more arguing.

"Nick didn't kill Greg," Warrick defended. No one disagreed with him. "The sheriff can't send him to jail."

"Yes, well," I sighed. "He won't be sending him to jail. He'd be sending him to a mental hospital. For some reason he and Ecklie really feel that Nick has lost his mind."

They stared at me with eyes of disbelief. I shooed them away to do their work. If they didn't want Nick to get sent away the best they could do was prove him innocent. And that wasn't going to be an easy task. The sheriff hadn't been able to keep the media quiet for long and the stories would be running soon. Everyone would believe that Nick killed Greg and was walking free. I feared what might happen to him. The only good thing going for Nick right now was that no body had been found. The bad thing, he was a CSI; he'd know the proper ways of disposing of the body. But why do that and leave only his blood in the house? Did he want us to believe that someone had hurt him and taken Greg? Is that what really happened? Then the question would be, why hurt Nick and taken Greg? Why not ask for a ransom? Greg was missing and no one had claimed the kidnapping. None of it made sense to me.

I looked over the photos of their house, tracing the movements by the blood. The blood in the bed had belonged to Nick. That made sense. He'd been sleeping when he got stabbed. However, the blood was on the left side of the bed. The cut on Nick had been on his left side. Was he sleeping on his stomach when the cut was made? And why didn't it wake him up?

Most disturbing was the bloody handprint on the door. The blood kept testing as Nick's but the prints belonged to Greg. Maybe Nick had harmed Greg and in fighting back Greg stabbed him in the side. But in the bed? Nick's blood could have gotten on Greg's hand, which was very likely. But why and how?

There wasn't a lick of evidence to prove that there had been a struggle. The house was cleaned and everything in its place. The windows were locked. The only sign of entry was through the front door. But since the entry wasn't forced, I don't know if someone had gotten in or if someone was just trying to get out.

Then there was the scream that Nick claimed to have heard. No one else had heard it. Not even the neighbors. Nick said he thought Greg was watching a horror movie. I checked the TV guide for that night and no horror movies had been playing on any of the channels. I checked the DVD player for a movie, nothing. Could the scream really have belonged to Greg? If it did, why didn't Nick hear anything else when it woke him up?

Why did Nick have blood on his hands? Why had he passed out before help arrived? Why couldn't he remember calling me? Question after question flooded my mind. None of the evidence could place another person in that house. There had to be something that we missed. A small piece hair or maybe a fingerprint that didn't belong. I closed the folder on my desk in frustration. Never before had I felt so lost in a case. Even when Nick had been kidnapped from the fake crime scene there had been evidence to follow. There was nothing here. Nothing that could free him of charges for murder. At this rate the sheriff was going to get his wish, and so would Ecklie. Nick was going to be locked away in a white room with a matching white jacket.

Deciding that a change of scenery and a short walk might help shift the puzzle in mind I took off for the break room. The cup of coffee I poured myself went untouched as I starred into space, trying to put the piece into place. All the evidence said he did it. My gut told me he did it. But deep in my heart I knew that he was innocent. And I wasn't going to stop until I proved it and found Greg. Hopefully I'd find him alive.