Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, events, and locales are property of CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer. No copyright infringement is intended, nor is any profit being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders belongs to me. ©La Guera, 2005.
The Scripture Grissom bastardizes in this chapter is John 15:13 and was taken from the King James translation.
Wang Chung was a popular 80's pop band. Their hit was-oddly enough-"Everybody Wang Chung Tonight."
There were, Grissom thought as he stood behind his desk with the phone clutched in his hand and the voice of Jim Brass in his ear, two types of deafness. The first he had known all his life. It was the creeping silence that had stopped his mother's ears when he was a child and threatened his own when he became a man, and it had made conversation an art of the hands rather than the lips. He had never liked this deafness, but it was familiar, and he had grown accustomed to it with time.
The second kind was a deafness of the mind, an inability of the brain to process the information passed to it by the ear, and from that he had never suffered. His mind was as acute as his ears had been dull, and he had made a career-a life, if he was to be completely honest-of understanding and deciphering the meanings and unspoken truths hidden within each word, even the ones left unspoken. He understood the secret language of bugs. He also knew the tongue of Luminol and ANT. His ears were trained to hear their voices.
But try as he might, he couldn't grasp what Brass was telling him. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose as if the thin, wire frames were the source of interference and said, "I'm sorry, Jim. Can you repeat that?"
Brass' voice on the other end of the line, mournful and ineffably weary, repeated its message as clearly as it had the first time, and still the words made no sense. He blinked, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and switched the receiver to the opposite ear. Maybe if he kept moving, they would come into focus. He reached for a ballpoint pen on his desk, hesitated. Picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up again and turned it in his palm, end over end. Put it down.
Feng shui for criminalists. Everybody feng shui tonight, he thought dumbly.
Wang chung tonight, corrected a helpful voice inside his head.
His mind tried to pursue that ridiculous line of thought, but Brass was obviously waiting for a response, and so he pressed his palm to the desktop to stay its frenetic, mindless groping. "I see," he answered at length, and then, because that brusque declarative seemed woefully inadequate in the face of overwhelming silence, "How bad is it?"
"There's no body, if that's what you're asking, but there are signs of struggle, and there is blood on the floor."
The momentary relief he had felt upon hearing that Grace Sanders was not sprawled and stiffening at Brass' feet curdled in his veins and settled in his stomach in a hot, greasy ball of apprehension. He tightened his grip on the phone to anchor himself to the reassuring confines of his office.
"Enough to be fatal?" His voice was flat, clinical.
The line crackled as Brass considered the question. "No, but that doesn't mean much."
Grissom said nothing. There was nothing to say. Brass was right. Even a small wound could be lethal if not treated promptly, and for all they knew, she could be bleeding internally or bleeding out by degrees in the trunk of a car while her abductor sped across the cracked desert hardpan, listening to Led Zeppelin on the radio and tapping his palms on the steering wheel.. Death by septicemia or gangrene or death by exsanguination were the most likely threats, and both were prolonged and excruciating ways to die. He stared mutely at a fetal pig as it bobbed serenely in its womb of glass and formaldehyde; it seemed to smile jauntily at him, a Delphic oracle and its goggling supplicant, and he dropped his gaze to his desk and the small dune of papers scattered over it.
Imagine the fun you'll have breaking the news to Sanders, jeered a voice inside his head. You can sweep into the break room or the DNA lab or the evidence room like a crazed Monty Hall and offer him the choice between Door Number One and Door Number Two, each its own hellish showcase of possibility. Hello, Greg. By the way, Brass went to check on your wife. He didn't find her, but don't worry. He did find this ominous bloodstain at the scene for you to analyze. Oh, and Greg? Put a rush on it.
"No, he can't," he murmured softly. "Conflict of interest."
Unless she turns up in a few hours with a bag of takeout and a wound that required stitches, this entire lab is about to be embroiled in a conflict of interest, not to mention a media circus. You and Ecklie will be staving off the barbarians at the gate with forceps and Bunsen burners before the end.
He stifled a groan at the thought of Ecklie. He would have to be told, of course. As the Director of Forensics Laboratories, he oversaw all media relations, and much as he loathed the man's shameless gladhanding of politicians and craven indifference to the onus his machinations placed on the lab, he needed his constant mugging and bizarre moxie in front of the cameras so that he-Grissom-and the rest of the shift could do the grunt work of finding Greg's wife before the blowflies did.
You're going to handle it, are you? After all your talk of conflict of interest? Why not let the day-shifters or the swing-shifters take the case? They've the same training and the same tools. They can dig and sift and label baggies as well as you can, and none of them have a vested personal interest. He is one of them, but he is not of them, and they will feel no connection with him apart from the ID on his coat. They won't be plagued by the thought of hair coaxed into angles and points that would make Euclides scream, nor will their nostrils be haunted by the scent of hair gel and Right Guard. No emotional baggage. Clean and by the books. Just the way you like it.
All sensible, and it was the advice he would have given himself before the phone had rung with the shrillness of a scream and wakened him from his comfortable, clinical drowse and thrust him rudely from the realm of the theoretical into the harsh, unforgiving light of the practical. But he knew even before the thought had faded that he would not heed it.
Greg was his, had been his since the day he had joined the night shift team with his blue lab coat and his gregarious smile and his music that made ears ring at forty paces and bleed at twenty. So were Catherine and Warrick and Sara, and Nick, who had forgotten how to relax. Archie and Hodges were his, too, though he would not don sackcloth and ashes if the latter someday found greener pastures under Ecklie's baleful eye. They had entrusted him with their lives when they joined his team, and they were his responsibility. He had already lost one on his watch, and last year, Nick had nearly joined Holly Gribbs in the pantheon of CSIs lost. Calamity would not strike thrice. Not his people.
And if worse comes to worst, and we find Grace's remains in a shallow grave in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, picked clean by the birds and the grubworms and covered in leaf litter, I don't want that bastard Ecklie to be the one to hand Greg her underwear, wedding ring, and personal effects in a bag marked EVIDENCE. It would be…indecent.
Well, if she is dead, whispered a tenebrous voice at the base of his skull, you won't have to harangue Greg about his wedding ring anymore.
He gaped, appalled by the cold pragmatism of the sentiment, but before his conscience could remonstrate, Brass spoke.
"I'm waiting on your call, Gil." Then, softly, "Jesus." It was despairing and incredulous, and Grissom knew exactly how he felt.
He exhaled through his nose and gathered his scattered thoughts. "Secure the scene, Jim. I'll get there as soon as I can. Ecklie needs to be informed."
Brass gave a sympathetic grunt. "I'm on it." A pause. "Hey, Gil?"
"Yeah?" He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"You gonna tell Sanders the bad news before or after you examine the scene?"
"I-," He replaced his glasses. "I'm not sure yet."
I don't want to tell him at all. I am a scientist, a creature of sterility and fact and empirical data that does not blanch when presented with a brutal truth. I am not accustomed to empathy or tact. Let Catherine be the one to tell him, with her mother's gentle compassion, or Warrick, or Sara, who can rightfully call themselves his friends. If I break the news, it will inevitably sound like I'm reading from a forensics casebook.
You're his supervisor, his conscience said with implacable finality. He's your responsibility.
Yes, he was, and never had that fact rested so heavily upon his shoulders or over his heart. He quashed the impulse to remove his glasses.
"I think it would be best if I told him before. Otherwise, he might try and go with us. Having night-shift work the case could be construed as a matter of necessity, but any lawyer with his degree could contest evidence collected by a victim's spouse."
The line was silent save for the hum of a live connection, and Grissom knew the detective was struggling for the right words, or indeed, any words at all. There was a crackling rush of spent breath, paper grazing plastic. "This one's not going to be easy, is it?" Brass asked at last.
"No, it isn't," Grissom answered, and hung up.
"Shit." The expletive was a harsh plosive in the sepulchral quiet of the office. It was a word seldom passed from his lips-he considered profanity the last refuge of the desperate and the ill-spoken-but he could find none more apt to the situation in which he now found himself, and in truth, it was oddly comforting to know that the power of speech had not deserted him entirely.
He wanted to sit down and think, to take a moment to catch his breath and order his disarrayed mind, but his legs felt heavy and wooden beneath him, and he was afraid that if he sat, he would never get up again. He would simply sit in his chair like a broken doll until the day shift arrived and found him there, Grissom turned to a pillar of salt for his hubris.
He plucked a manila folder from his desk without really seeing it, tucked it beneath his arm, and headed for the door. He would tell Ecklie first. It was the lesser of the two evils set before him, and once the inevitable histrionics and desk-pounding hysterics over the chaos into which Grace Sanders had so thoughtlessly plunged the lab by disappearing were out of the way, he could concentrate on the task of telling Greg without bungling the affair too badly.
Not much chance of that, is there? sneered a laconic voice inside his head. Let's face it, old friend-you've lived with your bugs and your pigs and the solitude of floors that have only known the tread of your feet for so long that the connections that bind you to your fellow man are threadbare and fragile as dust and old lace. The few occasions on which you have tried to set aside the mantle of your self-imposed exile from the human race have ended in disaster. There was Terry, whom you drove away with the incessant demands of the beeper, that jealous mistress who gives you neither rest nor leave, and Lady Heather, who was a casualty of your congenital suspicion.
And Sara, whom you know loves you with every fiber of her being, but for whose love you would have to forsake all that you have worked so hard and so tirelessly to achieve. She is everything that you need and all that you dare not allow yourself to have, lest it all be lost in an instant. Rather than make peace with the consequences of your choice, you tell yourself that you have not chosen at all and barricade yourself behind your spotless, white walls and your bookshelves full of science and rational prose. It has been so long since you have experienced vulnerability that its presence in others unsettles you.
If you are an island unto yourself, then Greg is youthful exuberance made flesh. He has dreams and chases them with abandon because it has never occurred to him that he might not attain them. The statistics tell him that he will live 78.4 years, and with less than a third of that behind him, he does not see the end, even though the job he has chosen makes it clear that the end is but a breath away. He revels in every taste and touch and whisper in the dark. He loves whom he will without thought to what may come, and when he saw the one in whom he could find a clean, well-lighted place, he pursued her without hesitation and won her hand, and you envy him his fearlessness and absolute surety that it will be all right.
How ironic it is, then, that your worst fears have come to pass, but it is not you who will suffer the consequences. You could have survived it-probably would. The stoicism you developed as a boy, biting your tongue until it bled to keep your silence while children and people who should have known better hurled insults into your mother's face because she could not hear them, has served you in good stead. It would shield you from the gall and the wormwood bitterness until the worst had subsided and there remained only a diffuse melancholy and a smug sense of justification.
No, the cup has passed from you and on to Greg's lips. You're just the harbinger, and when you deliver your message, the last of his innocence will wither.
He did not want to ponder Greg or Sara, and so he strode from his office, intent on getting to Ecklie's office before the full reality of the situation struck and rendered him either inert or agog with rage that his lab, his people, were being targeted for the second time in a year by the cruel whims of fate. His lips thinned, and he set his chin as he walked.
He was half a dozen paces from his office when Sara appeared, brow furrowed and lips pursed in an expression of grim determination. His countenance remained impassive, but behind the cool façade, he suppressed a twinge of irritation. A harangue on the inadequacy of her latest assignment was the last subject he wanted to discuss. He quickened his pace and pretended to check his watch.
Sara was undeterred. "Grissom, we need to talk," she declared.
"Sara, not now."
A disgusted huff. "Yes, now. Greg is acting really strange, and it's freaking me out."
That caught his attention, and he stopped in mid-stride and turned to peer at her over the rims of his glasses. "Strange? How?"
"Well, for starters, he offered to help me process evidence from my triple and then wandered out to use the phone in the middle of examining the bloody shirts recovered from the scene. It was mildly amusing the first time, but now I'm ready to strangle him. He's gone out five times in twenty minutes, and every time he comes back, he's more agitated. He's practically breakdancing around the lab table. Grissom, he's totally spaced on me; he's examined the same bullet hole three times. If he keeps it up, there's a serious risk of cross-contamination."
Grissom eyed her in silence for a moment. "Then why did you leave him alone with the evidence?"
She opened her mouth to reply, and then shut it with a snap. "You know what?" Her lips twitched in a wry, humorless smile. "I'm going to go back there and make sure Tweak doesn't investigate us into a lawsuit." She turned to go.
"Sara?" It was little more than a whisper, but it carried effortlessly in the hallway.
She paused. "Yeah?" Carefully neutral, but traces of self-deprecation lingered in the downturned corners of her mouth.
"Go tell Greg to take a break. Then, I want you to get Nick and Warrick and Catherine and meet me in Ecklie's office in ten minutes. Be discreet. Come up one at a time or in pairs, not in a herd. I don't want to attract attention. It might be best if you didn't all use the same means to get there."
Curiosity and confusion supplanted irritation on Sara's face. "What? Why? What's going on?"
He held up his hand to stifle the torrent of questions. "Sara, please. Just do as I ask."
She opened her mouth to launch another volley of queries, and then closed it again and threw up her hands. "Okay. If this is another one of your experiments, I don't get it. What about Greg?"
"No." It was sharp, much sharper than he had intended, and he blinked in surprise. "No. Not yet."
Sara stared at him in mystified silence from behind half-lidded eyes, cheeks hollowed and lips puckered in mute speculation. Adrenaline and worry had sharpened his senses to almost painful acuity, and the fuschia of her lipstick was a vivid slash on her pale face. He could smell the faint tang of her soap, crisp and piquant in his nostrils, and his eyes were drawn to the flutter of her pulse in her neck. She radiated vitality, and it danced over his skin, the needling quicksilver of static electricity.
Too close, he thought wildly. She's too close. His musings in his office had clearly unmanned him, and he was sure that if she touched him now, he would recoil. He was not ready for this, for any of this, and he was feverish and ungainly in his own skin.
"Hurry, Sara," he said, and was surprised at how calm he sounded. He had never felt less in control in his life.
She regarded him for a moment longer, and then she turned and strode in the direction of the break room, shoulders squared and brown eyes crackling with purpose. When she had rounded the corner, he took a deep breath and continued his grim trek to the elevators and Conrad Ecklie's office.
At quarter to two in the morning, the elevators were the last bastion of solitude in the bustling offices and facilities of the lab, and when the doors slid closed behind him, he was not surprised to find he was the sole occupant. He pressed the button for the third floor and sagged against the cool, steel wall. There was a vertiginous lurch in his stomach as the elevator glided upwards and he closed his eyes to regain his equilibrium.
Now, Gil, pull yourself together, said a voice inside his head, a voice he had always associated with his mother, though he could not say why. His mother had never uttered a word that he could remember. Her hands had been her voice, and she had no need for bilabial fricatives or glissades and sibilants. Inflection was carried in the speed and fluid grace of her hands, in the pop of a knuckle or the smack of fingers on meaty palm. When he was a boy, she had the power to reduce him to shamefaced tears with a look and a few furious arcs of her gesticulating hands.
It was the voice you secretly wished she'd had, whispered the stark, insouciant voice of honesty. She was an excellent mother, and her hands were always tender when you had a scraped knee or a bruised elbow, but the silence as she held you close and stroked your hair always left a hollow place that her fingers couldn't fill. Just once, you wanted to hear her call your name, even in anger. Or better yet, to hear her laugh. But such longing was treacherous to such a good mother, and so you never said a world, your lips as sealed as her ears. You said nothing, and you invented a voice in the one place it could exist.
All this pontificating will get you nowhere, Gil, my boy, the mother-voice was saying now, and in his mind's eye, he saw the white blur of her hands as they danced upon the air in front of her and spelled out the words her mouth formed.
Only fools fret at what hasn't happened yet and what might never come to pass. It's a waste of time and energy, and you know better. You always have. You were always questioning, always so practical. You drove the priests mad with your solemn skepticism. Frankly, I'm surprised you weren't excommunicated. You were a scientist by the time you were eight, and the only faith you had was in what you could see with your own two eyes. Do what you've always done. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. It has never steered you wrong.
The evidence. The invocation of that holy grail of forensic science loosened the burning knot of tension in his chest and between his shoulder blades. Of course, the evidence. The evidence was reliable and unassailable, and once he and his team had processed the scene, the truth would out in a scrap of fabric or a swab of biological fluid.
By the time he stepped out of the elevator, he had regained his aplomb. His racing mind had settled, and he had retreated to that quiet place where emotions and attachments fell away and left only hard science and a case to be solved. His stride was buoyant as he opened the glass door to Conrad Ecklie's ivory tower. The game was afoot, and he would not be thwarted.
Warrick was waiting for him in the vestibule outside Ecklie's inner sanctum, picking aimlessly through the magazines fanned on a squat glass table. From her desk in the opposite corner of the room, the dour, hawk-faced secretary was surveying him with baleful suspicion, as if she expected the lanky CSI to abscond with the July 1987 issue of Modern Toxicology Review.
Warrick looked up at the sound of the door. "Yo, Gris," he said, and tossed the magazine aside. "Sara told me to meet you here. What's up?"
"I'd rather not say until we're all here," he said quietly.
Warrick's amiable grin faded. "Something tells me we're not here to discuss a fat pay raise."
"No."
"Damn."
The secretary glowered from behind her Formica-and-particleboard battlement, but said nothing. The glass door opened and Catherine entered, followed by Nick, who was inexplicably clutching his field kit in white-knuckled fingers. He nodded at Grissom over her shoulder and tugged compulsively at the bill of his hat.
Catherine sauntered over, hands in the pockets of her slacks. "Hey. Where's the fire?"
Grissom shook his head. "Not yet. We're waiting on Sara."
Catherine blinked in surprise and pulled a hand from her pocket and swept a stray wisp of hair from her forehead. "No Greg?"
His lips thinned at the mention of Greg's name, and Warrick and Catherine exchanged blank looks.
"Mr. Grissom, can I help you?" The secretary scratched her narrow nose with one lacquered nail and jabbed a pencil into the electric sharpener just out of sight.
"No, I don't believe you can," he said mildly, and she tutted in indignation.
Sara arrived a few moments later, breathless and flustered as she darted through the door. "Sorry I'm late. Had to dodge Greg. Grissom, he is seriously on the edge of a breakdown. A few more laps around the lab, and there'll be a groove in the linoleum."
Grissom made no answer. He was already stalking toward Ecklie's door, the manila folder now held in front of his chest in a lunatic impression of a medieval breastplate.
Tally ho, he thought grimly, and opened the door without knocking.
"Conrad, we need to talk." The door struck the office wall with an unceremonious crash, and behind him, the secretary scrambled from her desk with a shrill oath.
"Mr. Grissom! You can't just barge into-," she chided him, and jostled through the throng of CSIs congregated in the doorway. Her glasses were askew, and she righted them with a defiant jab of her index finger.
Grissom ignored her and focused on Conrad Ecklie, who was gazing at him in mute stupefaction.
"Gil, what the hell are you doing?" Ecklie asked at last. "Last I checked, the rules of decorum still applied to you, and you don't barge into someone's office without knocking." He rose from his chair, and his eyes drifted over the other CSIs huddled in the threshold. "And why are they here?" he demanded.
"Conrad, I don't have time for decorum. I have a problem."
"A problem?" He ran a hand over his bald pate. "Well, so do I, Gil, and it's called a 'budget,' and before you stormed my office with a forensic raiding party, I was preparing a proposal to the budget committee to explain why we need an additional million dollars a year. If I don't get that million dollars, you don't get your toys. So, why don't you and your merry band get back to the lab before another section blows up under your watch?"
There was a furious huff from Catherine, but Grissom stayed her rebuttal with an imperceptible shake of his head. Not now.
"I tried to keep them out, sir, but he ignored me," the secretary offered, and favored Grissom with a gelid glance.
"Greg Sanders' wife was abducted from their apartment," he said flatly.
"It's not your fault, Helen. He does this all the ti-what?" Ecklie's irritation dissolved into dull-eyed incomprehension.
"Greg Sanders' wife was abducted from their apartment."
"Helen," Ecklie said slowly. "Close the door."
Helen retreated with a murmur of assent, and the door snicked closed behind her. Ecklie looked helplessly around the room, threaded his fingers behind his head, and wandered back to his desk, where he sat with dreamy slowness.
There was a thunderstruck silence. Warrick leaned against the wall with a shuddery intake of breath, and Nick swallowed with an audible click. "Oh, man. Oh, oh, man." His fingers tightened around the handle of his field kit with an ominous creak.
"Oh, Jesus, Gil." Catherine, who had moved further into the room with the departure of the secretary and the closing of the door, sank wearily onto the arm of a chair, hand pressed to her mouth.
"Shit," Ecklie said with dismal finality, and scrubbed his face with his hands.
There seems to be a lot of that going around, Grissom thought nonsensically.
"Wha-" Catherine had found her voice again. "When?" She ran her fingers through her hair and let her hand fall to her lap with a disconsolate thump.
"We don't know. Right now, we think it was shortly after he left for work." From the corner of his eye, Grissom saw Sara reach absently into the pocket of her blouse for a cough drop.
"Anything probative at the scene?" Ecklie was slumped at his desk, and his fingers kneaded his temples as though they pained him.
"The door was ajar when Brass arrived to check on her, and there was blood at the scene."
Sara closed her eyes, and from his corner, Warrick gave a low moan. Ecklie said nothing. He simply opened the topmost drawer of his desk, reached inside, and withdrew a bottle of Tums.
"Enough to suggest lethality?" he asked in a flat, distracted tone. He shook a Tums into his palm and popped it into his mouth with a quick flick of his wrist. In the silence of the room, the crunching of the tablet between his teeth was as the treading of bones underfoot, and Catherine, hunched and oddly vulnerable on the arm of the chair, shuddered.
"Again, I don't know. For all we know, the blood could belong to the perpetrator. Brass secured the scene, and he's waiting for us to move on this."
Warrick straightened. "Then let's roll, man. Time's wasting, and standing around here with our jaws on the floor isn't gonna help anybody."
"Damn right," agreed Nick, and jaw set and eyes flashing, he started for the door.
"Whoa, whoa," Ecklie called from behind the desk. "There is no way I am letting you guys handle this."
Warrick rounded on him. "Why the hell not?" he demanded. "We're the best CSIs you've got."
"Do you have any idea how big a conflict of interest it is for a team to work a case involving one of its own members?"
"That's B.S.," Nick snapped. "We've worked cases involving each other before, or don't you remember Krissy? I was a suspect in that case, and I was still on the job. Or how about when-,"
Nick's mouth worked as he struggled with his reluctant tongue, and Catherine placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Grissom was sure he wouldn't be able to say it, sure that the wounds from his premature burial were too deep and too fresh, and then he did.
"-when I was buried in a Plexiglass coffin under six feet of dirt in some plant nursery? Where was the conflict then?" He glared defiantly at Ecklie, who returned the look with stony equanimity. "This whole lab galvanized, from the first-year techs to Grissom, and if they hadn't, I'd be a headshot on the Wall of Heroes in the hallway. This team and these people saved my life, and Greg deserves the same chance. Let's stop screwin' around and get out there and find her."
God bless you, Nick, Grissom thought, but his face remained impassive.
Ecklie's only response was a derisive snort.
"Unless you want to call in an outside forensics team and the FBI, we don't have much choice," Grissom pointed out before Nick could retort.
Ah, Confucius, what perilous waters he doth tread.
"The Feds are a given anyway if this is an abduction. You know that." Ecklie groaned, no doubt overcome with nightmare visions of the federal agents who would descend upon his stronghold of bureaucratic influence like locusts and strip away his autonomy until he and his underlings were little more than disgruntled, impotent onlookers with laminated name tags.
"Technically, we don't know that it's an abduction," Grissom murmured.
"What?" Ecklie, Warrick, and Nick chorused. Warrick was surveying him in squint-eyed amazement, head cocked, as though he-Grissom-had suddenly announced an aversion to bugs and logic.
"Gil, what-?" Catherine began, but he overrode her with an upraised palm.
"It is entirely possible that she just fell inside the apartment, was injured, crawled outside, and was taken to a hospital by a passerby."
Horseshit was writ large on Ecklie's face, and Warrick's expression of utter befuddlement only deepened.
"You don't believe that," Ecklie said baldly.
"No, I don't," he admitted. "But neither do I have evidence to the contrary, and until I do, it's a theory I have to consider."
"We don't have any evidence because we're playing political pattycake," Sara muttered bitterly.
Grissom ignored her. "Since we have no conclusive proof of abduction, I see no need to involve federal authorities yet," he went on. "If it does turn out to be a kidnapping, it's going to be a very delicate situation for everybody involved, and if something goes wrong, it'll be the lead investigator who goes down. The last thing the lab needs is to lose its director with all eyes on us. You do what you do best, Conrad, and I'll do what I do best-collect the evidence."
"It certainly isn't brown-nosing," Ecklie sneered, but there was no venom in it, and his eyes sparkled with reptilian cunning. Ah, Grissom. Could it be that after all these careful years and all these meticulous jousts, you have misstepped at last and offered your neck to the hangman's noose?
Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his career for his friends, Grissom mused.
I don't think that's quite how it goes, whispered the pedant inside his head, and his lips twitched in a humorless grimace.
Yes. It is.
Ecklie dropped his gaze with a sigh and shook another Tums into his hand. "You're on the case for now," he told the desk. "But the minute we find out it's a kidnapping and not a body recovery, the Feds are to be notified, and for God's sake, keep the media the hell away from this for as long as you can."
On that count, he and Ecklie were in perfect accord. "Understood. Thank you, Conrad."
Ecklie snorted and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. "Don't thank me until it's over. If you drop the ball on this…"
Grissom thought of Greg, who bounced on the balls of his feet when he was nervous, and who for seven months had possessed a quiet surety of the rightness of his world that he could only envy. He thought of the spiked hair and the jaunty step each morning when he clocked out and the wedding band he refused to remove in the face of possible sanctions.
"If I drop the ball, Conrad, everybody loses."
He left without awaiting a reply, but as Ecklie's door closed behind him, he heard the plaintive, maracas rattle of another Tums being shaken from the bottle.
When they had left the office and the flat-eyed glower of the secretary behind, Warrick spoke. "Well, there isn't going to be any ball-dropping if I can help it. Where do we start?" He clapped his hands together and shifted his weight from foot to foot with barely bridled impatience, a runner chafing at the invisible bonds of the starting block.
"I want everybody to get to Greg's right away. We've wasted enough time already. Catherine, Warrick, you're on point until I get there. Document everything-furniture, trace, footprints, tire treads. Nothing is too insignificant. Bag it and tag it and get it back to the lab. I'll be there as soon as I can."
Catherine blinked at him. "Where are you going?"
"To tell Greg," he murmured.
"Ah." A single, choked syllable. Her mouth worked furiously, and when her eyes met his, he saw the sheen of unshed tears. "Gil-I-do you want me to do it?"
Oh, yes, I do, Catherine. Would that I could let this cup pass from me. "No. I'll do it. I'm his supervisor." It fell from his lips like a confession.
She furrowed her fingers through her hair and mustered a wan, sad smile. "Just-be…careful. Be gentle."
He offered her a smile in return, a wistful cramping in the corners of his mouth. Is there a gentle way to shatter someone's world?
She tossed her head in an obdurate attempt to maintain her tenuous composure. "Yeah," she breathed. "Yeah."
She and the team went one way, and he went the other on the longest walk of his life, manila folder clutched in fingers he could no longer feel. Greg was sixty feet and two floors below him. It was a simple matter of stepping into the elevator, pressing the button, and letting it bear him unto Greg Sanders' pinched, expectant face, the bearer of bad tidings borne on the sleekest and quietest of wings.
He took the stairs.