Disclaimer: All recognizable people, places, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, and CBS. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders is my creation.
Jim Brass had never realized how small Greg Sanders was. What the DNA tech cum CSI lacked in bulk, he had more than made up for in exuberance and tireless energy, but now, hunched in the corner of the break room with his head on his knees, the façade was gone. He looked impossibly fragile, a child in adults' clothing, and huddled between the wall and the couch, he resembled nothing so much as a child hiding from the bogeyman.
That's because he is, Brass thought grimly. I'm just the friendly neighborhood policeman until the blood hits the pavement, and then I'm the jackal, sniffing the air for the telltale traces of motive and alibi and bodies buried beneath the floorboards. Oh, what a shiny badge I have, the better to steal your secrets, little boy.
That sounds more like lycanthropy, mused a peculiarly Grissom voice inside his head. Medieval Europeans believed that those who made a pact with the Devil were cursed to assume the form of a wolf during the full moon. Freud posited that lycanthropy was a manifestation of man's basest tendencies, and modern medicine recognizes it as a legitimate psychiatric disorder.
Fascinating, he thought dourly, and raised his hand to sip from a non-existent coffee cup. He blinked as he caught sight of his empty hand, and let it drop to his side.
In truth, he was at a loss. He knew what he should do; he should go into the room with his trusty notebook and begin the ginger task of peeling away the layers of Greg's life. But what he should do wasn't within a thousand miles of what he wanted to do or what he thought he could do. If he had his druthers, he would walk away and pretend none of this was happening.
You can't do that, Jim.
No, that was the bitch of it. He couldn't.
Bogeyman or werewolf, here I come. He squared his shoulders, tugged ineffectually at his tie, and strode into the room.
"Greg." It was cautious, unobtrusive, and yet it still sounded to his ears as though he had spat it out like a lump of gristle. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Greg."
The figure in the corner did not move. Greg's forehead remained on the rounded peaks of his knees, one hand clasped loosely over the wrist of the other. As the seconds ticked inexorably by, Brass found himself studying the toes of Greg's shoes. They were leather loafers, so unlike the creased Keds and Converse that had once adorned his feet, and perversely incongruous with his perpetually tousled hair.
He's dead, Brass thought with morbid certainty. He couldn't bear the idea of 'til death do us part coming so soon, so he gave up the ghost. I'll pick up his head, and the eyes that meet mine will be glazed and inhuman as a taxidermist's marbles. Oh, won't that be fun, breaking the news to Grissom?
Don't be stupid, snapped the voice of common sense. He doesn't even know she's dead. Nobody does. Right now, all you have is a blood puddle inside a trashed apartment and a missing wife.
All of that was patently true, but he could not shake the conviction that he was staring at the shoes of a corpse.
He could know she was dead. Sly, insistent. If he killed her.
That was a possibility he was unwilling to consider, and he shook his head with a grimace of self-reproach. Greg could no more have killed his wife than he-Brass-could have been voted Mr. Vegas.
How many suspects have you interviewed over the storied span of your illustrious career? Thousands at least. And of those thousands, how many wandered the streets of Vegas with a neon sign proclaiming their guilt? Sure, you've seen bad seeds, lowlife thugs destined for the cellblock since they were playing with blocks at kindergarten recess, but most of the asses that have occupied the seat opposite you in an interrogation room had no prior record. They were just average Joes, schlepping through the same miserable existence as the rest of us, and then one day, an argument over the xeriscaping or the credit card bill ended with them bashing their wives' brains out with an oh-so-dependable Craftsman hammer and stashing her in the hot water heater.
He reached out to shake Greg's shoulder. "Gr-,"
"I heard you. I just didn't want to." Gravelly and strained, as though he had spent a great deal of time screaming. Maybe he had.
He could hardly quibble with the sentiment. "Ah, yeah. Yeah, I guess I can understand that." He sidled from foot to foot and ran his fingers through the scant remains of his hair.
"Can you?" he croaked from between his knees.
He had no answer for that, and so he said, "Listen, I know this is a bad time, but I have to ask you a few questions." Beam me up, Scotty. Anywhere but here.
"Of course you do." It was dry and hollow. "Like was it Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick?" He gave a hoarse caw of mirthless laughter and raised his head.
"Oh, Greg."
He hadn't meant to say it, but Greg's appearance had startled the exclamation from him. Gone was the radiant light of good-natured devilry that had always gleamed in his eyes, and in its stead was the haunted, lifeless emptiness of a razed landscape. His eyes were bloodshot and pouched in pallid hollows. His cheeks were chafed from constant rubbing and bore the unmistakable imprint of his knees. Gazing into Greg's lost, grief-stricken face, Brass put paid to any doubts about his innocence.
"I don't suppose you've found my wife breaking the bank at the Bellagio with what was supposed to be my retirement fund?" he asked.
"Unfortunately not. I wish to God I had."
That's hardly proper questioning protocol. Ecklie would have your balls in a jar if he heard you.
Yes, well, protocol could fuck itself for all he cared, and so could Ecklie, for that matter. It was probably a cherished pastime of their erstwhile Director.
"Listen, before we get started, you want a drink? Water?"
"If you want my DNA, all you have to do is ask." Greg scrubbed his face with his hands.
Brass blinked. "What? No, no, that's-Jesus." He gave a reedy, humorless chuckle and pinced his chin between the web of his thumb. "I just wondered if you were thirsty, is all. If you want, I think I can find the bottle of scotch I keep in my desk. Strictly for medicinal purposes, of course."
A soft snort. "No, thanks. Every time I hit the hard stuff, I wake up in a puddle of my own vomit with my pants on my head and Chewbecca the next pillow over. At least, I did. Grace says I-,"
He stopped abruptly. His mouth worked, and his Adam's apple bobbed convulsively in his throat.
"This is not happening, you know. It's not." It was strangled. "It can't be. When I left, she was at her laptop, banging away at an editing job that was due in the morning. She was always like that, always skating as close to the deadline as she could without going over. It was an adrenaline rush."
"Extreme editing," Brass quipped wryly, and was instantly mortified with himself.
To his surprise, Greg laughed, a hysterical, shrill titter, discordant as unsteady fingers over yellowing piano keys. "Yeah. Yeah, you could say that, I guess. Everybody needs their kicks."
Brass flipped open his notebook and sat on the couch, secretly grateful that he no longer had to look into Greg's bewildered face and ashamed of his gratitude. His knees and ankles crackled and creaked as he shifted on the lumpy cushion, and he winced. The ravages of time grew more strident with every passing year, and it wouldn't be long until the antiseptic, lemongrass aroma of Ben Gay wafted in his wake the way English Leather did now.
That's the booby prize of this job, Jim, ole buddy, said a dolorous voice inside his head. When you were a kid, you thought being a cop was all about catching the bad guys and reveling in the thanks of an adoring public, and it is, but it takes more than it gives. It ages men before them time, turns supple skin to leather and introduces tongues to the chalky balm of antacid. It strips time from the years of your life.
You lost a year the first time you saw the body of a dead hooker fished out of Lake Meade as a rookie. She was blue and bloated, and you've never forgotten the smell-river silt and sewage and decaying flesh. There were gelatinous strands hanging from her body, and at first, you wondered just how seaweed had found its way onto the body, and then you realized it wasn't seaweed, but skin. That kept you up for a week back then. Now it wouldn't even be a blip on the radar.
You lost ten years when you were treated to the sight of a two-week-old infant floating in a toilet bowl in a tenement out on Logan Road. The mother was a junkie, and after two weeks of screaming and dirty diapers, she decided that the kid was a crimp in her style and a drain on her smack fund, so she did what any respectable dirtbag would do and flushed her cares away. Or tried to, anyway.
You know what the real bitch of it is, though? It doesn't just steal time from you; it takes it from everyone around you. Your wife was radiant as a spring rose the day you married her, but it didn't take long for the shadow to fall across her face like the premature coming of winter, for the grooves of constant worry to etch themselves into the corners of her mouth and around her eyes and dust her temples with strands of grey.
And then there was Ellie. One minute, she was a grinning toddler wobbling across the living room with part of a cracker clutched in her chubby fist and the rest smeared over her chin like greasepaint, and the next, she was sixteen going on forty, jaded and defiant and far too old for her years.
It's happening to Greg, too. It happens to all of you eventually. When he was a tech, he was twenty-seven going on twelve, and those who didn't know him would have sworn he was twenty. He laughed like there would always be another reason to party, and he drove Grissom to distraction by shoving markers up his nose or wearing a showgirl's headdress and sashaying down the hallway.
But not anymore. Oh, he still laughs, but not so readily, and when he does, it is no longer so pure. It's been contaminated by knowledge that he can never unlearn. And Grissom has succeeded in inculcating him with the Value of Evidence, so gone are the days of footloose and fancy free. He's twenty-seven and looks it, and by the time this is all over, he might very well look fifty.
Brass couldn't argue with any of it, and so he clicked his ballpoint pen, licked his lips and said, "You said Grace liked to push the deadlines of her projects. She ever push it too hard, miscalculate and miss the deadline?"
An emphatic shake of the head. "No. Absolutely not. Miss a deadline, and you lose business, and Grace had trouble drumming up business. Not because she was sloppy, but because-," He spread his palms and gave a one-shouldered shrug.
"The crutches?"
"For some people, yeah," he answered diffidently, and Brass thought he detected a note of irritation. "They thought that because her legs weren't exactly top of the line, the rest of her must be Taiwan spare part, too. The clients she did have loved her, and she got lots of repeat business and word-of mouth-referrals.
"How many clients did she have?"
"I'm not sure. A few dozen that I know of."
"You think you could come up with a list?"
"I'm sure she kept a record on her laptop, which has no doubt been taken into evidence." He had tried to sound glib, but beneath the thin scrim of detachment was an aching confusion that prompted Brass to study the fascinating grain of the paper in his notebook.
"I'm sure Grissom took care of it," he said lamely. "So, no pissed-off clientele?"
"Not that I know of."
"When was the last time you saw Grace?"
"Eight forty-five. I leave the same time every night. I scarfed a BLT at the counter, kissed her goodbye, and told her to order chicken tandori from the curry place a couple blocks over for when I came home."
"Nothing seemed unusual then? She seem nervous, say anything about going out?"
"No. No, dammit. Everything was-," He slapped his palm against the floor with a meaty thwap. "Everything was like it always was. If I had thought for one second that something was wrong, I would never have left her there alone." It was furious and plaintive. "Grace is tough, but sometimes, she's too stubborn for her own good."
"How do you mean?" Brass tapped the nib of his pen against the paper of his notebook.
"She's so bent on proving that disabled doesn't mean dead that she pushes herself hard. Too hard. She'd climb Everest on a pogo stick if she thought she could get away with it. Half the time, I've got to carry her to bed at night because she's too tired to keep her balance. Fights me, too. Think I've got scars somewhere. You wanna see?" He fumbled listlessly with his shirtsleeve.
Brass held up his hand. "No, that's all right, Greg. I'll take your word for it."
Greg was rambling, but Brass couldn't blame him. In the space of hours, his life had upended. Frankly, he was coping better than many people did; they were several hours into the investigation, and he had yet to throw a chair across the room, assault the investigating officers, or suffer a complete mental breakdown and sever his carotid with a ballpoint pen in the men's room, all of which he had seen over the years.
Besides, his own mind was hopelessly distracted by the image of Doc Robbins stumping up the cragged slopes of Mount Everest on his titanium legs, silver beard frosted with snow and crutch slipping and sliding over the frozen ground. The good doctor was inexplicably wearing Bermuda shorts, and they flapped gaily in the shearing arctic winds.
Jesus, Jim, get a grip. "Do you usually call to check in on her?" he murmured, still dazed by the Felliniesque scenario dancing in his head.
"Every night. She hates it, but it makes me feel better."
"Mm."
"Never in the field, though. Grissom would kill me." A brittle laugh, rice paper clutched too tightly between bruising, clumsy fingers.
"No set time, then."
"Not really. Greg ran his fingers through his hair and sat forward. "You know what I don't get, though," he said earnestly, and fixed him with a bloodshot gaze.
Ah, here we go. That little phrase usually precedes a clue, my dear Watson. Brass straightened on the couch and stilled the tapping of his pen. "What's that, Greg?"
"Why didn't Rufus answer the phone? He should have been there by the time I called."
The vision of Doc Robbins, Bermuda-shorted Sherpa-in-training, vanished in a rush of adrenaline. "Rufus?" he asked sharply.
"Rufus Goodman, her attendant. He comes every night and stays until I get home."
"How long has Mr. Goodman worked for you?" His pen was flying now."
"He works for Grace," Greg corrected him dully. "Has since the day she was born. Well, technically, I guess he worked for her parents first. I mean, infants don't employ aides."
"Anything out of the ordinary about him? Bad temper? Drinking problem?"
"Nope. Rufus and I don't exactly bond over beer and salsa, but the few times we've spoken, he was pretty laid-back."
"This guy spends untold hours a week with your wife, and you never check him out?" Brass asked incredulously.
"I didn't see a need," Greg snapped. "Grace vouched for him, and that was good enough for me. She's disabled, not stupid."
"Whoa, hey, Greg." Brass dropped his pen and raised his palms in a conciliatory gesture. "I didn't mean to insult Grace's intelligence. I'm just trying to pick up the trail." He sighed and scrubbed his nape with his palm. "I'm gonna grab a cup of coffee. You want one?" He rose from the couch.
He had no desire for coffee. In fact, caffeine was the last thing his jangling nerves needed, but he had to move, had to retreat in the face of Greg's raw, flailing misery. Even without direct eye contact, it was cloying and abrasive, alcohol and ether in an open wound. It was a palpable miasma that made his notebook sticky and heavy in his fingers.
"You'll have to make a fresh pot. The sludge that's in there now looks like a refugee from the Pleistocene era. A Brontosaurus could step in it and never be seen again."
"There's a surprise," he muttered as he shuffled toward the coffee pot and the open bag of coffee on the counter."
"I tried to brew a pot earlier, but…,"
That explained the open coffee, then. "I got it. Don't worry."
He was halfway to the coffee pot when Greg said, "I know you didn't mean anything. I'm sorry for losing it, but it's just-," His back was to Greg, and he felt rather than saw or heard the stirring of his hand through the air as he groped for the words to define the inexpressible.
It was funny, that. Since the news of Grace's disappearance, no one could seem to finish their sentences. They all fumbled and sputtered and tripped over their reluctant tongues. Even Grissom and Ecklie, brothers in loquacity, had fallen prey to the odd aphasia that had gripped them each in turn like the constricting fingers of a mischievous god. He had never counted himself as a Rhodes scholar, but his wit had never so thoroughly abandoned him.
Pretty soon, we'll lose the capacity for speech altogether, he thought morbidly. We'll just grunt and hoot and scratch, and by the time Ecklie bows to the inevitable and calls the FBI, even that might be gone. Culpepper and his goons will arrive and find us all stricken dumb, much to their delight. Culpepper will have Grissom hermetically sealed in a glass box and display him in his office, and at Christmas, they'll decorate him with tinsel.
He peered into the coffee pot and recoiled. "Are you sure this isn't one of Grissom's prized experiments?"
"I told you it was nasty."
He wrinkled his nose at the acrid stink emanating from the coffee pot and turned on the tap. Routine, soothing, and a welcome distraction from the questions he was about to ask. "Now comes the hard part, Greg."
There was a sharp intake of breath from behind him, as if an unseen intruder had dealt Greg a swift blow to the solar plexus, but that was all.
He's bracing himself. He knows how this works, this sordid rifling through the secret compartments of life that no other human being should have the right to peruse. I'm so sorry, Greg, he thought bleakly, and said, "Is there any possibility that she just decided to cut her los-leave?" Never before had the measuring lines on the side of the coffee pot held such fascination for him.
Until that moment, Greg had always entertained the notion that preliminary questioning was a necessary imposition that could be borne gracefully, but sitting in the break room, shielded from the staggering brunt of the loss he now faced by the wall and the dingy upholstery of the couch, he knew it was not so, and the enormity of his naivete made him want to laugh and weep all at once.
Brass was treading as lightly as he dared for the sake of friendship, and still the question burned in the pores of his skin and the hard notch of his breastbone, a dagger he could not dislodge and that burrowed deeper with every shallow breath. It was graceless and impudent and galling, made all the worse because he understood the question beneath the polite façade.
Was she fucking around, Greggo? Hey, is there any possibility that while you were performing a valued civil service for Clark County and the grateful state of Nevada, your wife was swapping epithelials and biological contributions with the mailman or the cable guy or a man she met over the Internet when she was supposed to be editing a thesis for a bigshot professor at UNLV? These things happen all the time, you know. How many times have you seen it for yourself?
More than he could count, and that was excluding his years as a DNA tech, when all his case knowledge had come from idle, second-hand gossip of field CSIs and the swabs and blood vials they brought him. Nearly all of his cases in his first year as a CSI had involved adultery or some permutation thereof. Women scorned and jilted paramours had paraded through his line of sight and his interrogation room in a never-ending stream, all with fury and twisted grief in their hearts and venom on their lips.
And what do their friends and luckier lovers all say when confronted with the sordid truth about those they claimed to know best? But that can't be. They were so happy. He would never hurt her. She adored him. It's a song as old as rhyme, as the old Disney song goes, and they cling to it with the tenacity of the desperate, no matter how strongly the evidence points to the contrary.
Maybe she did run. Maybe she packed her bags and left you and your bachelor pad cum love nest behind. Ten hours is a long time to be shut up in that apartment night after night with nothing but the TV and the mind-numbing glow of infomercials with which to while away the time until you return and whisk her away to bed.
She wasn't alone, he countered. She had Rufus, and besides, she knew I'd be home.
Yes, she had Rufus. She's had him since the day the world had her, and I'm sure she loves him dearly, but being alone and being lonely are two very different things, or have you forgotten being in fourth grade and miles and light years ahead of your classmates? While they struggled with the multiplication tables and the geometric bedlam of solar system model kits, you were fiddling with junior chemistry sets in your parents' garage and melting the tires of the family car to the concrete floor. You were outgoing and you liked Transformers and Thundercats as much as the kid at the desk next to you, but you were also smart, and that relegated you to the caste of nerds and geeks and earned you the title of Poindexter.
It was the same in high school and college. You breezed through classes with the greatest of ease, but in the cafeteria or in the parking lot behind the school, it was a different world altogether. You were unobtrusive enough to avoid the notice of the jocks and future dropouts, but the same camouflage that spared you beatings also meant that the girls paid you little mind, either. You were Greg, the nice guy, the one to whom they could confess their secret crushes, but to whom they never gave the time of day unless they needed help with their science project, and then it was all swaying hips and batting eyelashes until the grades came in.
It was the same in college. You were the fun guy, the cool guy, but no matter how hard you flirted-no matter how much pot you smoked or how extensive your knowledge of pop culture, you were never good enough. If you were lucky, they tossed you a sloppy, indifferent kiss that tasted of lipstick and beer or permitted you a fleeting feel of a breast beneath a rumpled t-shirt. It wasn't until your senior year that you lost your virginity on a lumpy mattress in a frat house bedroom, and you barely remember it aside from warmth and wetness and a spasming heat that stole your breath and left you drained and boneless when it was over.
So you ought to know full well the difference between alone and lonely, because unlike Grissom, who reveres his solitude, you spent a great deal of time in a crowded room and wishing that just for once, you could join the bubbling, dizzying gestalt of adolescent life around you.
He did know, and he was heartily glad to be shut of those years. He had friends now, and he had Grace, who hadn't cared that he was a nice guy. In fact, she loved him because he was a nice guy, and she made no secret of the fact. She delighted in his quirky sense of humor and his occasional lapses into true brilliance, and she had let him in more deeply than anyone else. She was sweet, and she was fierce, and when she took him to bed, she meant it.
And she would never, ever have left him alone. She had promised him so in front of a California justice of the peace and a thousand times after, and she was a woman of her word. Even if she had decided to leave him, she would have told him to his face, not crept out under cover of night with her tail between her tottering legs. Gracie would have gone out with a bang.
No, he thought fiercely. She didn't leave me of her own free will. Somebody stole her from me, and if I know her, she fought every step of the way. Gracie never believed in going quietly into that good night. See, Gracie? I'm not just a science guy, after all. How about that literary reference for you, babe?
But-, began the pernicious voice.
No! No buts. I know Grace, and the blood on the floor tells me all I need to know.
He fought the urge to titter even as his throat constricted with the threat of tears. A few hours ago, the blood pool on the floor had represented the sum of all fears, and now it was his totem against the notion of abandonment. Irony, thy name is Greg Sanders.
"Greg?" Brass prompted, and he jumped.
He shook his head. "No," he heard himself say. "No. She wouldn't just leave. Everything is fine between us; if it wasn't, she would have told me. She's not timid."
"Are you sure?"
He suppressed a twinge of irritation. "Grace Elizabeth Sanders is the only thing in my life of which I am absolutely sure."
"Is-,"
"Were there signs of a struggle?" he asked abruptly.
Brass paused in the act of spooning coffee grounds into the percolator. "She put up one hell of a fight." He dropped the spoonful into the percolator without looking up.
"Good," he said savagely. Good girl, Graci-," He splayed his fingers in front of his face and curled them into a loose fist. He would not use that private term of endearment, not here. It was still his, and his alone.
He waited for Brass to resume his questioning, but the only sound was his own ragged breathing. Brass was placing the coffee carafe beneath the dispenser with the reverent solemnity of an acolyte bearing an icon to the altar of his god and fixedly not looking at him. The detective cleared his throat, a phlegmatic rattle, but that was all.
He's waiting for me to crack, he thought with feverish clarity. Waiting for me to crumble beneath the pressure and start screaming or crying or both. He doesn't want to watch me fall apart.
He was light and fragile inside his skin, and with every breath, he was sure he was going to come untethered from the world and drift away, borne on the thin Vegas wind until he touched the cold fire of the stars, but he could summon neither years nor hysteria. There was only an airless emptiness, a sense of fumbling blindly within himself. He lifted his finger to scratch his nose and was unsurprised to find that it was weightless as paper on the end of his hand.
I'm the Rocket Man, he thought nonsensically. And what a long, strange trip it's been and going to be.
Brass flipped the switch on the percolator with dreamy slowness. Finally, "Is there any chance you were having an affair and your other significant other decided to eliminate the competition?" Quiet, painfully embarrassed.
The question should have angered him, but he could only manage an exhausted incredulity, and he uttered a sharp bark of laughter. The idea of cheating on Grace was ludicrous to him. Oh, he still enjoyed the scenery and the seductive sashay of passing ladies on the street, and Grace had often spoken of fitting him with blinders and goggles to keep his eyes in their sockets, but that was as far as it ever went, and she knew it. Hers were the last pair of epithelial undergarments he ever intended to wear.
"No. That would require another significant other and more Viagra than Hugh Hefner could stockpile."
"Ah." Brass turned his pen in his palm. "Okay. Hey, coffee should be ready soon."
Greg said nothing. He was mesmerized by the red glow of the percolator's ON switch.
Like Grace's hair. Not the same shade, no, but the same vitality, simmering and vibrant and searing if you touched it for too long. I took her out to Lake Meade once for wine and necking and lazy canoeing, and after a day of lazing on the water and drinking beers on the shore with our toes it in water, we got ready to leave, and her hair was fierce autumn fire in what was left of the daylight. I had to touch it, run my fingers from crown to tip. It was windblown and damp and soft as silk, and I curled it around my fingers, buried my nose in her hair and breathed as deeply as I could. Grace thought I was crazy, but she let me do it anyway.
That wasn't all you touched, either. You were touching a lot more by the time dark drew down and the Vegas blacktop hid you from prying eyes. You pulled the car off into the desert and steamed up the windows with breaths and urgency and whispers in the dark. The desert was so quiet, and you and the damned shocks were so loud, and near the end, you were convinced that a passing highway patrol car would hear the noise and come to investigate, and oh, wouldn't that be fun, explaining to Grissom how you got caught with your bare ass in the breeze and your wife's dainty ankle draped over the steering wheel? But then Grace found you with her small hands that never stop trembling but always know what you need, and you no longer cared about the Nevada Highway Patrol or anything else, even after her twitching foot found the horn and announced to anyone within a five-mile radius that lo, it was good.
Silk and satin and the bony jut of fragile hipbones beneath his hands. Sweat and salt and the squeaking puff of Grace's breath as coherent thought was swamped beneath the surge of lust and his hips and his name dissolved into mindless noise. He remembered the smell of vinyl and Armor-All and sex and the feel of unsticking his knee from the seat when it was over.
And oh, God, why wouldn't Brass shut up? He was talking again, asking his questions that scoured him raw, and Grace and the desert were slipping away. He clung to the memory, reluctant to leave it and return to a present that smelled of scorched coffee and drywall and sweat. The desert was sweeter, with Grace and her crown of fire and the euphoria of knowing that the world was in the palm of his hand, but Brass' voice was louder, and eventually, it blotted her out.
"-ve any enemies?" Greg heard him say.
"What?" he asked dully.
"Do you have any known enemies?"
"Yeah, and so does the rest of the lab. Grissom's got his own fan club at Northern Nevada Correctional, I'm sure, and we've already met several members of the Nick Stokes Admiration Society."
Brass grimaced and Greg knew he was thinking of Nigel Crane, who had secreted himself in Nick's attic, and of Walter Gordon, who had treated Nick to a preview of his own funeral, and of Paul Millander, over whom Grissom had obsessed to the point of mania. He might even have been remembering Sid Goggle, who had nearly bonded Grissom's skull to a lead pipe before Catherine brought him down with three to the chest in the laundry room of his apartment complex. Rapists and perps and erotomaniacs, these were the things a CSI's goblin was made of.
"Point taken," Brass muttered gruffly, and absently turned the coffee pot. "The coffee's almost done."
"You said that already."
"Oh. Yeah. Does, uh-does Grace have any medical conditions that might endanger her further? I mean, I know she uses crutches, but does she take insulin or asthma medications? Is there a possibility she could be pregnant?"
"Aside from her congenital condition, Grace is healthy as a horse. And no, she's not pregnant. She had a Norplant device implanted before we married. It's kinda nice, the two of us. We want to keep it that way for a while."
That heavy, strangling silence filled the room again, crushing and pleuritic, and he wished that Brass would leave or talk about anything but the fact that Grace was missing. He tucked his chin to his chest and willed himself to breathe, but the air was sticky and cloying in his mouth, and his lungs throbbed.
I'm drowning, he thought matter-of-factly. Drowning in 600 cubic feet of sanitized, sterilized air.
"Gr-,"
"No," he said suddenly. "No more. I can't." I can't breathe. Oh, God, Gracie, I can't breathe.
"Sure, sure," Brass said quickly. "You've given me a few things to run with. I'll get in touch with Mr. Goodman, for starters." He closed his notebook with a snap and made for the door.
"What about your coffee?" Greg called after him. "You were so looking forward to it."
Brass blinked. "Oh. On second thought, it's probably not such a good idea. The doc's been after me to cut back on the caffeine." Then, "Hey, Greg?"
Greg looked at him.
"You got a place to stay? Is there somewhere I can call? I'm sure Ecklie would spring to put you up a few days. I'd offer to let you crash at my place, but under the circumstances-," Brass offered him a bleak, one-shouldered shrug.
"Conflict of interest."
"Yeah." Brass studied the toes of his shoes.
"Don't sweat it. I'll find a place, even if it's the Four Aces."
Brass' lips puckered in a moue of disgust. "One of Vegas' finer lodging chalets," he muttered. "It's on the cheap, though. Ecklie'll love that. Are you sure you don't want-,"
"I'll take care of it."
Brass spared him a last doleful look and trudged out. When he was gone, Greg made no move to call a hotel. Instead, he sat in the room and stared at the far wall until his vision blurred, and when he finally did move, it was to the tan no-man's land of the couch in the crime lab's vestibule. He sat and watched the people pass without seeing them and thought of how beautiful Grace's hair would look artfully fanned over the satin pillow inside her casket.