Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of CBS and Jerry Bruckheimer. No profit is being made, and no infringement is intended. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders belongs to me. (c)2005

A/N: Thank you for all the kind reviews, and thank you, Waywardangel, for pointing out that the DNA tech's name is Mia, not Mina, as I had thought.

Catherine Willows was on intimate terms with the nature of voyeurism. As a child, she had often gazed wistfully toward the glowing horizon and the beckoning lure of the Strip and told herself that when she grew up, she would be a showgirl, with a dancer's lithe legs and perfect teeth and shimmering costumes fit for a princess. To her naïve, little-girl's eyes, they had been living Barbie dolls, flawless and ageless and destined for a Prince Charming to come and sweep them away to live in a castle in the clouds.

She should have known that the dreams she harbored and nurtured in the quiet cool of a bedroom decorated with too much pink were not to be. Life's harsh lessons had been all around her, etched in the lines of her mother's face as she waited for a phone call that seldom came and in the red, accusatory ink of the final notices that often came in the mail and signaled another week of macaroni and cheese and cold butter sandwiches. She should have trusted the evidence, as Gil always said, but she had been a child, and hope died hardest in the hearts of the young. So she had clung to her dream with the tenacity that would one day become her trademark, and the occasional visits by Sam Braun had only stoked the fires.

If she had known then what she knew now, she would have shunned him with forked fingers, but swaddled in her blissful cocoon of childish ignorance, she had welcomed him with open arms, entranced by his smiling eyes and spicy, paternal smell, leather and expensive wool and the cold, metallic tang of Rolex watches. When Sam Braun came, it was Father Christmas and Peter Pan. He brought toys and patient smiles, and for a while, her mother, so often lost in her own melancholy world, would brighten into the vivacious woman Catherine had only glimpsed in dog-eared, yellowing photographs.

And he had brought with him the shining promise of Vegas lights. When Sam Braun had played Father Christmas in an Armani suit of charcoal grey, his sleigh had always been a stretch limousine as black as pitch. He had been glitz and glamour and the crisp, green scent of better than here, a prophet from the fabled land of milk and honey. She had idolized him, and she still remembered how wonderful it had felt to climb onto his lap and show him all her gilded ambitions.

When I grow up, Uncle Sam, lisped the Catherine Willows of a childhood long gone, I want to be a showgirl. Can I work for you? All wide-eyed innocence and tremulous awe.

Sure you can, Mugs. Sure you can.

His eyes had seemed so loving then, so warm, and she had reveled in the attention and the warmth of his hand on the crown of her small head. It was only in hindsight that she had understood the ugly truth, and by then, it had been far too late. The road she had traveled had been too long and too winding, and there had been no turning back. He had been a wolf in sheep's clothing; he had, in fact, spent the vast majority of his time clad in their sad sacrifices to the loom.

My, what big teeth you have, Uncle Sam, whispered Little Red Riding Catherine.

The better to eat you with, my dear.

Well, he hadn't devoured her, but neither had he steered her away from her road to perdition. He could have told her what lay ahead, disabused her of the sugarplum fantasies. Behind the jolly façade, his wise, ruthless eyes had tended secrets and truths dangerous and deep, and he had lived in Vegas' underbelly and unsavory corners long enough to see past the polished veneer. He had known about the long, hot nights of swollen ankles that had awaited her, about the saltwater burn of cocaine residue in her nostrils and the low throb of fatigue in her hips and calves from the endless hours of bump and grind. He had known about the glare of the stage lights on bare shoulders and even barer breasts and the periodic catfights between dancers brought on by too many dances and too few customers. He had known all of this, and he had said nothing.

He never forced you onto that stage. You went of your own volition, and for six years, it was a good living. Sometimes, it was a great living. Who knows how long you would have gone shaking the gifts your mother and Gregor Mendel gave you if you hadn't met Gil Grissom, that unlikely knight in shining armor? The truth was, you liked the attention. Not the ogling of men wearing beer goggles so thick that Jabba the Hutt would have garnered a twenty in his G-string on his turn around the pole, but the thoughtful, simmering gaze of men with just enough bourbon and scotch in their veins to send sultry, oak-aged heat into their bellies and twitching pricks.

The sway and serpentine slither of your hips was entrancing, a conduit to power about which you had always dreamed. You could make men pant like Pavlov's hounds, and you reveled in it because it was a skill not even Eddie, with his snide comments, casual dismissal of your aspirations, and constant reminders of the debt you owed him, could deny or take away.

Of course she had loved the attention and the heady thrill of knowing her marks were putty in her hands. Being pretty and sexy was the one thing at which she had excelled. She had never been Sara Sidle, with Harvard intellect and impish charm. She had done well in school, but her good grades had never merited any notice from her mother or her classmates. It had been her figure they had noticed, the seductive curve of hip and the haughty swell of breast. It hadn't taken her taken her long to figure out the lay of the land, and by her senior year in high school, she had developed a slinking strut that had turned heads.

For a few months after graduating high school, she had toyed with the idea of being a model and had even sent out a few head shots and hastily assembled picture portfolios, but nothing had ever come of it, and shortly after her nineteenth birthday, she had gone to Uncle Sam in the hope that he would make good on his promise to let her work for him. Uncle Sam-who would later prove to be Suspected Murderer Father Sam, oh my-had been as good as his word, and that same night, she had shimmied and shook to "Cat Scratch Fever".

Those hips had paid her way through college, and though girlhood fancy had curdled to hard reality after a week in a fleabag apartment with no air conditioning and leprous dry rot in the walls, she had kept on shaking until the day she found out that Lindsey was nestling in her belly. Why shouldn't she? Shaking her ass had made the world go round and paid the mortgage when Eddie was too high or drunk or busy screwing around to bother. It wasn't until she crossed paths with Gil Grissom that she'd realized she had a choice.

So, yes, she and voyeurism had been close companions for a long time, but now, standing in the threshold of Greg Sanders' small apartment with her silver field kit in her gloved hand, she felt shamed unease. The roles had been reversed, and the observed suddenly found herself in the role of observer, a voyeur goggling shamelessly at the private life of her coworker and friend. She hesitated for a moment in the doorway, sidled from foot to foot, took a deep breath to steady her jangling nerves, and went inside.

Just keep your cool and gather the evidence, said Gil Grissom inside her head. You know how it's done because you've done it all before. It's just another case, Catherine. Don't let your emotions blind you.

She suppressed a snort. It was easy for him to say, he who seldom left the ascetic cloister of his apartment and preferred the company of cockroaches and corpses to other human beings. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him outside the lab, and even when he was working a case, he left the dirty business of interacting with victims' families or potential suspects to the rest of the team while he hid in his cluttered office and worked on forms and memos that he never seemed to finish. Fraternizing with members of the same species was a squalid task best left to others.

That's why I never go out, he had told her once, after she had nearly gone on a date with a man who turned out to be a murder suspect, and the smug superiority of it still stung. Tact was an art for which neither Grissom nor the science he worshipped had patience.

Can you blame him after everything his eyes have seen over the years? After everything yours have seen? Every day, he's confronted with depravity and rage and the sickening consequences of vulnerability. He's scraped the brains of a young wife off the baking asphalt, only to find that a philandering husband in dire need of the insurance money put them there, and he's seen otherwise rational parents leave their infant son in the backseat of the car in the Vegas summer heat because they were certain he suffered from the same fatal, genetic defect that had claimed his older brother. Life is a cruel teacher, and it has taught him that to invite his fellow man into hearth and home is to invite tragedy.

We all know that, she thought fiercely as she took in the scene before her. It's a lesson most of us learn in kindergarten when the girl we thought was our best friend forever steals our sacred graham cracker. We live and we learn, and when we get knocked down, we dust off our knees and get up again. A little warier, maybe, and hopefully a little wiser. Hell, I was with him on that baby case. I saw what those parents did, but I didn't stick my head in the sand. Nick got back in the game after being buried alive by a nut with an axe to grind.

So Gil could cram his Zen wisdom as far as she was concerned.

Because it's not just another case, is it, Mugs? Sam Braun, quiet and musing and perversely paternal, and in her mind's eye, she saw him watching her from a table at the Monaco, chin propped on his upturned palm and a sardonic smile twitching on his lips. Just like Nick wasn't. It's personal, and the cut runs deep.

Shut up, Sam, she thought savagely, but he was right.

For all her claims to empathy for the victims and the families left behind, she could recall a sorry few of the faces she had seen and served in her capacity as CSI. Most were indistinct blurs, snatches of voice or hair color, one-dimensional cardboard cutouts defined by the tragedy that had befallen them. Those were the lucky ones. The rest were reduced to names and case numbers, consigned to irrelevancy the moment the lids were placed on their case files.

But this was Greg, and he was anything but one-dimensional. He was ebullient and precocious. He flirted-or had-with any woman with a pretty face and a nice pair of legs, and more than once during his DNA tech days, she had stumbled into the DNA lab to find him coyly purring sweet nothings into the phone and charming the girlfriend of the moment out of her socks.

And probably her panties, too, leered a glottal, gravelly voice that reminded her of Eddie, her late ex-husband. She rolled her eyes and pushed the unsettling notion of Greg the Panty Charmer away.

Greg was libidinous and often cheerfully ribald, but he was also as dependable and dogged as the rising and setting of the sun. He had never missed a shift, and on the many occasions Grissom or Ecklie had called him in to cover a shift or work extra hours, he had come without a murmur of protest, bouncing jauntily through the halls with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his lab coat and a grin on his face beneath the untidy profusion of spiked hair.

When Lindsey was small, Catherine had let Greg babysit once. Lindsey had been seven, and Catherine had been called to testify in a murder trial. Normally, Lindsey would have been in school, but the school had oh-so-thoughtfully scheduled a planning day, and so she had dropped off Lindsey at nine o'clock in the morning at Greg's apartment.

It had been his day off and probably his first chance in weeks to get a decent night's sleep, but Greg had met her at the door, wearing cutoff shorts and a Motorhead t-shirt and beaming as if he could think of no better way to spend his morning than playing Old Maid and Candyland and Chutes 'N" Ladders. And according to Lindsey, that was precisely what they had done, Greg sitting cross-legged on the floor and gleefully rolling the dice as he moved his piece around the candy-cane paradise.

Remember when you came to pick her up that afternoon? Greg answered the door in an apron, carton of Chinese take-out in one hand. The mother in you cringed at the thought of all the MSG and salt coursing through your daughter's veins, but when you saw Lindsey with a pair of chopsticks and her face slathered with sweet and sour sauce, you couldn't find it in your heart to scold him. Dirty or not, she was happy, freed from the drudgery of school and the draconian restrictions of her usual diet, and Greg hid the bruised bags of exhaustion beneath his eyes with a brilliant, carefree grin.

He was even decent enough to hide his skin mags, the late, great Eddie commented wryly, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to smother a sudden desire to weep.

"Hey," said a voice at her shoulder, and she jumped.

"Oh! Christ, Jim, you-" She took a deep breath and blinked to ease the burning sensation in her eyes. "-No, I'm good. It's just…" She gestured helplessly at the shambles in the living room. "Dammit."

Brass grimaced and rubbed the nape of his neck with one dry-skinned palm. "Yeah, I know. Sorry I startled you." He was silent for a moment, studying the carpet. Then, "Where's Grissom?"

"He's coming," she said. "He wanted to be the one to tell Greg."

Brass' thin eyebrows shot toward his even thinner hairline. "Bet that's going well." Dour, and some would have said grossly inappropriate, but she knew that he was just doing his best to maintain his composure.

Her own composure was hardly assured. Each time she thought she had her emotions in check, her eyes would happen upon the blood pool over which Nick was crouching, and they would slip perilously in her grasping fingers, unwieldy and treacherous as wet glass. She was angry and sickened and filled with an iron-fingered, maternal instinct that surprised and unnerved her. She exhaled through her nose and crouched in the doorway to assess the scene.

You've felt the protective, maternal instinct before, the Eddie-voice mused, and there was no lascivious leer now, only quiet, gin-soaked sincerity and weary tenderness. When they took Nick, your heart bled, and the idea of finding the person responsible and peeling the flesh from his bones was fire in your bones. If I didn't know better, Cath, I'd say it turned you on. When you found that feed wire sticking out of the ground at the plant nursery, I've never seen you dig so furiously in my life. You'd have dug him up all by yourself if it had come to it.

Of course I would've. He was mine. And so is Greg. She set her kit down on the concrete just outside the door, careful not to disturb the flower petals strewn over the threshold.

They're family. More than I ever was. Your pal, Grissom, has gone to the wall and buried more bodies for you than you had any right to hope, and when I was too drunk and too stoned and you were too broke, he and your lab cronies always found a way to throw a birthday party for Lindsey, even if all they ever gave her were those stupid science kits and ant farms that she never opened and that gather dust in the back of her closet.

A wistful smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. "What's the story with these?" She nodded at the rose petals at her feet.

Brass, who had been watching Nick photograph the blood pool in woebegone silence, trudged over. "Not sure. They were here when I arrived. You should know I stepped in them on my initial entry."

"You've got to be kidding me."

"Hey, I had no idea it was a crime scene," he snapped. "Greg asked me to check on his better half, so I did. I wasn't case-hunting. At worst, I thought she'd be dead asleep with the phone off the hook or playing Show Me Your DNA with the neighbor across the breezeway."

She might be plain dead, retorted a cynical, savage voice inside her head, and she pressed her lips together against a scream of frustration. For a veteran cop like Jim Brass to make such a rookie mistake…

"Is there anything else I should know?" The question was harsher than she had intended, and she grimaced. Emotions were running hot on all sides, and the last thing they needed-the last thing Greg needed-was for the team to get bogged down in pointless, internecine squabbling while the seconds ticked by and hope and opportunity slipped out of reach.

Not exactly one to cast stones, are you, Mugs? Sam Braun said, and she saw Gil's face, somnolent and pinched as she confessed the sin of the cashed check that had transformed Lindsey from public school latch-key kid to private prep school snot.

What else should I know, Catherine?

"Are we pointing fingers now?" Brass was snarling. "Because I seem to remember a few spectacular mishaps from your storied career. Like blowing up the DNA lab with Sanders in it. Rumor has it that he still has souvenirs from that little gift that keeps on giving."

The conciliatory attitude vanished in a white-hot flare of indignation and hurt. Ecklie had never forgiven her for her accidental incineration of several million dollars' worth of equipment, and she had never forgiven herself for the injuries her moment of carelessness had caused Greg. Greg assured her that there were neither hard feelings nor sleepless nights on his part, but sometimes, she would catch his gaze in the break room, there and gone before emotion could register, and she would wonder.

"I just thought that as an experienced cop and a former head of CSI, you'd know better than to blunder through my evidence like a nervous rookie," she retorted. "Forgive me for giving you a little credit."

"Hey!" Sharp and quick as the report of a pistol.

Nick was still crouching over the pool of blood with the camera in his gloved hand, but he was no longer studying it. He was staring at her and Brass in incredulous irritation. His jaw twitched ominously, and beneath the bill of his cap, his face was colorless.

"If you guys want to play the blame game, that's fine by me, but could you wait until we've finished processing the scene?" He set the camera beside his kit and reached for the packet of swabs in the foremost slot. "I'm sure Greg would appreciate it." He shook his head and turned to the blood pool again.

She opened her mouth to reply, but there was nothing she could say. As the senior CSI on the scene, she should have known better than to engage in a sparring contest with a colleague. Grissom certainly wouldn't have gotten so easily sidetracked, and her intended defense of bad memories and a nauseating sense of déjà vu wouldn't carry much weight with a man who'd spent the better part of ten hours in a Plexiglass coffin wired with explosives.

She offered Brass a bleak smile. "Truce?"

Brass ran a hand through his close-cropped, thinning hair. "Yeah. Yeah," he murmured vaguely, and sighed.

"This is going to be an explosive any way you slice it, so is there anything else you touched? When we get this son of a bitch, I want to make sure it sticks."

Brass blinked at her in logy incomprehension for a moment, and then his face cleared. "I turned on the light when I made entry. It was dark, and after I stepped in the flowers, I decided to play it safe." He shrugged apologetically. "Not one of my finer professional moments, I guess. Oh, and I opened the closet door while I was clearing the apartment and hoping against hope that Mrs. Sanders was present and accounted for. Anyway, I'm gonna head outside and make sure the lookie-lous aren't getting too close."

"We have lookie-lous?" she said, surprised. The only people at the scene when she'd arrived had been uniforms from LVPD.

"Not yet," he answered grimly, "but we will. The lights always attract them." He turned to go. "I'll start knocking on doors, see if anyone saw or heard anything. They were probably all in the shower." With that, he trudged out, notebook clutched in stubby fingers.

When he was gone, she examined the petals at her feet. Most of them were clustered at the threshold in red, bruised clumps. Here and there was a green flash of stem or a brown sliver of thorn. A few petals had strayed from the nucleus of the carnage and lay on the carpet in small, red smears, each a body unto itself. They led to the table where Nick crouched, shining his Maglite over the carpet in search of stray fibers, particulate matter, or blood spatter. A single petal lay beside the table leg, and another was caught beneath the rubber-stopped tip of a crutch that listed dangerously against the table's edge.

"Hey, Nick?"

"Mm?" Nick had dropped to all fours and was scouring the carpet beneath the table.

"Did you see a vase in here?"

Nick spoke without looking up. "Nope. I did find shards of glass, but they were unglazed and transparent, and there was a wet spot consistent with water or spilled liquid of some sort. I collected it and a swab of the carpet for Trace, but I'm guessing a drinking glass got broken in the struggle."

"So, the flowers were delivered, then?"

Nick swept the beam of his flashlight over a pencil beneath the table." Could be," he conceded, but isn't it a bit late to be delivering flowers? Are there florists open at this time of night?"

"Honey, this is Vegas. Everything is open all night. Besides, the twenty-four-hour wedding chapels have to get their flowers from somewhere."

"True." Nick's beam paused on the pencil, and he reached for an evidence bag. "Hm."

"You found something?" she asked, instantly alert.

"Maybe." He pinched the eraser end of the pencil between his thumb and forefinger and rotated it in the brilliant beam of his flashlight. "There are pencils and pens all over the place. Another casualty of the struggle, most likely. Every one of them is still intact. But not this one. It's broken nearly in half, and the tip is missing. Blood on the splintered head, too."

"Good find, Nicky."

He grunted. "We won't know that until we get it back to the lab." He slipped the pencil into a plastic evidence baggie, sealed it, and put it into his kit. "You're thinking whoever did this used the flowers as a ploy to get inside the apartment?"

"It's certainly possible. It's cheap and has a surprisingly high success rate. Otherwise intelligent women who wouldn't let the President through the front door will throw wide the gates at the barest whiff of romance."

"If the flowers came from a flower shop, where's the box? The plastic wrapper to keep the thorns from tearing up your hands?" Nick was on his knees, hands pressed to his thighs as he surveyed the room.

"Good question."

She shone the beam of her Maglite around the room in a slow, sweeping arc until it alit on a thin strip of transparent sheeting that lay on the carpet behind the overturned chair, sides curled and dappled with beads of moisture. She gingerly stepped over the pile of flower petals she had been examining and pinched the find between her thumb and forefinger with practiced care.

"I think I found the wrapping," she announced, and held it up.

Nick nodded. "Okay. That means the card should be here someplace unless our guy's not that thorough." His own beam joined the search.

Silence fell as they lost themselves to the work, soothing and familiar in spite of the personal nature of the case. Even as she sought the neat, white square that heralded proclamations of undying love or at least a coy invitation to get horizontal, Catherine found herself taking in the broader details of Greg's apartment. She had never visited again after Greg's adventures in babysitting, and had duty not compelled her to do so, she probably never would have. Greg was sharp and funny and sweetly shy beneath his eccentric façade, but he was young, and while she might once have shaken her ass to the grinding, raunchy chords of "Girls, Girls, Girls while coke burned in her nose with the promise of seeing the dawn, she was never going to develop a taste for The Dead Kennedys or Gran Turismo 3.

The apartment was cramped and untidy, and despite the incontrovertible proof of matrimony, there was precious little sign of female habitation. The living room blinds were coated in a thin layer of dust, as was the squat, black bulk of the PS2 perched atop the flat-screen television on the far wall. There were no curios or knick-knacks scattered on window ledges or teetering precariously from the topmost bookshelf. There was, however, a pile of Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions stacked haphazardly on the coffee table, and a wrinkled t-shirt lay over the back of the couch like shed skin.

"Mrs. Sanders has no love for Martha Stewart," she murmured to no one in particular.

Voyeur, hissed the voice of accusation again. You're prying into the life of a man who calls you friend even after your lab mishap. You have no right to stand in his living room and inventory the mundane secrets of his life and critique his wife's housekeeping skills as if you were some kind of domestic diva. It wasn't so long ago that you were living from hand to mouth and sleeping on your mother's couch with Lindsey tucked into the crook of your arm because Eddie was froggy and loud and too ready with his fists.

She thought of Lindsey then, three years old and playing on the threadbare floor of the apartment she paid for, chattering in her tiny, singsong voice and oblivious to the tatty dress and the dull, matted hair of her dolls, unaware that her mother had found them in the Goodwill donation box and wheedled the asking price to a dollar because the dollar-fifty was fifty cents beyond her reach. If anyone had seen Lindsey then, in her too-small dresses and with wide blue eyes that saw too much and often bore the telltale dark smudges of a sleepless night spent in a cheap motel, they would have taken her for a neglected child and shaken their heads and clucked in disapproval.

Those people can all go to hell, she thought savagely. I love Lindsey, and she might not've played with designer toys, but I made sure she knew she was the best little girl in the world every damn night, and I'd kill any son of a bitch that threatened her. She was rich where it counted.

And Greg loves Grace, sloppy housekeeping or not.

Touche, she mouthed soundlessly, ashamed.

"Yeah, the place hasn't changed much since the last time I was here," Nick conceded with a thin-lipped smile and a faint bob of his head.

"You've been here before?" she asked, pulled from her reverie.

"Me and Warrick, both." His voice was tinged with amusement. "We'd come to watch a ballgame every couple of months. It wasn't like we were having candlelit dinners."

She considered that. "So, what can you tell me about those?" She gestured to the crutches with the beam of her flashlight.

Nick's smile faded, and he shook his head.

I don't know, or I'm not telling? she wondered.

"Forearm crutches," said a voice from the doorway, and Grissom swept into the room with field kit in hand. He stepped nimbly over evidence as though guided by unseen hands, and behind the spotless lenses of his glasses, his eyes were scanning the scattered and strewn contents of the room.

"You knew?"

"I had to sign off on his change of insurance form." He shrugged and crouched on his haunches beside her. He set his kit down and opened the latches with a sharp click.

"And?"

Grissom turned his unsettling gaze on her. "And what?" he said mildly. "Grace Sanders has ataxic Cerebral Palsy." He pulled on a pair of gloves.

"And that is?" she prodded.

His offered her an enigmatic half-smile. "Where are Warrick and Sara?"

Grissom-speak for none of your damn business, she thought irritably. "In the bedroom, looking for evidence of a secondary crime scene."

"Good. Anything so far?" He was busily inspecting the rubber tip of the fallen crutch.

"As far as a secondary crime scene? No, but we think whoever took her used these flowers as a ruse to gain access to the apartment."

Grissom merely tapped his chin with the forefinger of his right hand.

"Did you…break the news to Greg?" she asked when the silence had stretched too long between them, hot and sticky as saltwater taffy.

"Yes." Flat, mechanical.

"How did he take it?"

That gaze again, smooth and inscrutable as black glass, and though she had passed adolescence long ago, she fought the urge to squirm and stammer like a schoolgirl who had shown herself for a fool in front of her teacher. Her scalp prickled with unexpected heat.

"Touche," she murmured and bent to her work, and she was glad when the fall of her hair obscured her face.