Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Grace Sanders is a figment of my imagination. Contains Spoilers until S6.
Gil Grissom was not in the habit of lying to himself, and so he did not. Sitting in his office and staring at the fetal pig as it floated in the ersatz amniotic fluid of the jar, he knew that Agent Rick Culpepper of the FBI was an inevitability who would soon darken his door. He would come with his spit-polished, leather shoes, impossibly white teeth, and meticulously slicked hair, and he would use his people as pawns with the full measure of his government clout. Greg's life would be turned upside down and inside out, and Greg would be hulled and shucked, disassembled until all that remained was a quivering husk and wounded innocence, and when there was nothing left for Culpepper to strip and poison with his empty accusations and unbridled ambition, he would offer emptier condolences and leave him to clean up the mess.
Not that there'll be much to clean up. Greg has already been hollowed. He's been in a daze since you broke the news, and when last you checked, he was in the lab vestibule, putting down roots in the vinyl couch and unplugging from this unpleasant reality with every sluggish blink of his eyes. He was there when you left with the team, and he was there when you returned with the faint traces of his wife in baggies and sterile phials. His eyes followed your progress down the hall, but he did not follow. He'll still be there tomorrow if no one goes to peel him off and lead him away, ripening with the tart stink of unwashed body and quiet, sinking despair.
Theoretically, here at the lab was the last place Greg needed to be. Eventually, the numb stupor in which he had encased himself would fade, and in its place would come the blind rage and the need for answers. He would linger in the doorways of the Trace Lab or the DNA Lab like a harried phantom, eyes wide and entreating, his grief a fatal distraction to the team. And if the answers did not come quickly enough-and they never did to a heart throbbing in the throes of a mortal wound-he would be tempted to take matters into his own hands. Just one moment of carelessness or exhausted inattention was all he would need, and all their work would be undone by a slick defense attorney in a three-piece suit. Grace Sanders could be found beneath the floorboards of his client's house with his DNA smeared over her violated corpse like rancid frosting, and the merest whiff of tampering would earn an acquittal. He knew he should send Greg away, for his safety and the integrity of the lab.
But for once, he could not bring himself to put a solid theory into practice. Its logic was flawless, but its perfection held no beauty for him. It fact, it was possessed of a cold ugliness when held up beside Greg's pale face and haunted, bruised eyes. There was no humanity in it, no gentleness. It was the bureaucratic ass-covering he so despised in Conrad Ecklie, sanitized and sterilized and utterly devoid of emotional sentiment.
Since when have you cared about humanity or gentleness? Catherine scoffed inside his head. With you, it's always been about facts and figures and what you can prove. You like bugs because they're predictable. They all have six legs and too many eyes, and none of them will ever call you up on a Friday night, wasted to the gills and wanting to talk about old times.
That's because insects don't have gills, Catherine, his logical mind countered. And they don't all have six legs, either. Spiders have eight.
Whatever. The point is, you've never cared about any of those things before, so why start now?
He opened his mouth to protest that that was unfair, that he did care about those things and always had, and then an image arose in his mind of Catherine after the Adam Novak incident, when she had attracted the attention of a sleazy attorney cum murder suspect. She had tried, in her sly, flirtatious way to put the matter behind her-behind them-and he had only brushed her aside, secure in the invulnerability of the cocoon in which he'd so smugly swaddled himself.
How long is this going to go on? she'd asked in exasperation when her playful gambit had been met with a put-upon sigh and the shuffling of papers in the manila folder he'd been carrying.
I don't know, Catherine, he'd replied, aloof and dismissive.
I went out after work for a drink. Is it a crime to want a little human contact? she'd cried, hurt and stunned at his smug self-righteousness.
And what did you tell her? prodded the remorseless, analytical voice of his conscience. Did you offer her a pat on the shoulder and a sincere, Don't make that mistake again, Cath. You could have been badly hurt.? No, you didn't. You looked her in the eye and said, That's why I don't go out with a straight face and left her in the wake of your unassailable virtue.
You never apologized to her for that. After all, how can one apologize for absolute moral rectitude? You were right, and she was wrong, and that was that, except that nothing has been quite the same between you since that day. You've no doubt that she still considers you a friend and would leap into the breach on your behalf without a whimper or a backward glance, but the ease and warmth you have always had is no longer there, and she is no longer so quick to confide in you. Sometimes you wonder now how different things might be if you had had the common sense to say anything other than what you did in that hallway. Maybe if you had, she would have told you about Sam Braun's check sooner than she did, and perhaps you wouldn't pass her in the hallway and ponder what else she no longer cares to tell you.
Nor is she the only one. There's Sara, of course. She's followed you from the lecture halls of Harvard to the dry, desert hardpan of Vegas, and she still isn't good enough. You have rejected her every overture and driven her to drink, and when you smell the beer and menthol on her breath, you turn away because it is the smell of dying hope. She was once vivacious and pretty, but not anymore. She fell under your corrosive spell, and like your beloved spider, you bound her to you and drained her of all vitality.
That's not fair, he protested. I never led her on, never let her think there was a chance for anything between us. I told her there could be nothing. If she chose to hope otherwise in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, then, I'm very sorry, but the fault is not mine. Adults sometimes have to live with unkind and unpopular decisions.
Like you do? the voice challenged.
That's my job as a scientist and as the assistant director of this lab.
Your dependence upon science won't save you now. In fact, science had nothing to do with why you drove Sara away and turned her inward to herself. You did that because you were afraid, and fear is the oldest and basest emotion of mankind. You were terrified of the feelings she aroused in you, the jealous want and the animalistic need. You were a scientist, self-contained and above the muddled. Illogical morass of human interaction, and you could not understand why you often woken in the middle of the night and found your perfectly serviceable, tidy double bed was simultaneously too confining and too empty, nor could you comprehend why the scientific refutation of such an erroneous perception brought you no comfort.
That isn't true. As assistant director, a relationship with a subordinate would have been inappropriate. I had to consider the integrity of the lab and the cases it handled.
And your career, of course, the voice pointed out mercilessly, and now it reminded him of Conrad. That first and foremost. You may hate my guts, Grissom-and I can assure you that the feeling is entirely mutual-but we're not that different when you get down to the brass tacks. You can thumb your nose at me and call me an amoral, social-climbing, glad-handing asshole until you get your rocks off, but you cling to your career as tenaciously as I do. You hid from your team for more than a year because you didn't want them to know that you were going deaf. You were so afraid of being found out that you left them to be eviscerated by a high-powered, ball-busting attorney for some hot-shot Hollywood punk. Oh, you mounted a heroic, last-minute charge to save the day, but not before each of their reputations had sustained monumental damage. Yours, though, was immaculate as ever, wasn't it?
So your integrity excuse is bullshit, Gil, because if you'd had half as much as you like to think, you wouldn't have let your team take the bullet while you hid in your office. Your refusal to go to bed with Sidle had nothing to do with your vaunted integrity and everything to do with your terror of ending up like Sanders, sitting on a couch somewhere and watching your world go by in a caravan of evidence bags.
He was perversely relieved that the subject had returned to Greg. What was happening now was about him, not the Many Failures and Unexpiated Sins of Gilbert Grissom, Scientist. To think about Greg was-
Safer? offered the voice of pitiless self-examination, and the Conrad Ecklie lodged in the basement of his subconscious smiled over the soggy rim of his styrofoam coffee cup.
More appropriate, he amended primly, and pinched the aching bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
The Sanders' apartment had obliterated any hope that it was anything other than a crime scene. Even if he had been able to explain away the flower petals and the shattered glass and the ominous blood pool over which Nick had been hunched when he arrived, the crutch leaning haphazardly against the table would have spoken the truth, as would its sister crutch, lying in the middle of the living room like a severed limb left behind in haste. The moment he had seen them, he had known that Agent Rick Culpepper would be receiving a phone call.
He had never met Grace Sanders, but he had signed off on Greg's change of insurance forms, and life with his mother and his insatiable curiosity had given him a nodding acquaintance with other disabilities. Ataxic Cerebral Palsy had bound Grace Sanders to her crutches with an iron tether, and she would not have left them behind. They were her legs and her center of gravity, and without them, she would be a virtual amputee, helpless and floundering on her atrophied legs. Had she marshaled the will to move without them, the anticipation tremors triggered by adrenaline and the fight-or-flight reflex would have ensured that the signals sent from her rapidly-firing neurons and synapses emerged as a disorganized spate of random spasms and flailings. Her abductor wouldn't have had to subdue her; her body would have done so of its own accord.
Those crutches were her spine and her independence. Without them, she has no chance, and you know it. That's why you insisted on taking them into evidence yourself and being the one to bring them back to the lab. You didn't want Greg to see them with blood stippled down the aluminum and smeared on the tip. You didn't want him to see the dent just above the rubber tip on the right crutch. It would have been as indecent and alarming as seeing his wife's body being paraded down the corridor, so you pressed the clear, plastic evidence bag to your side and wedged yourself between Warrick and Nick, used their bulk to hide your sad burden from Greg's desperate, anguished eyes as you passed.
Everybody has a piece of the evidence now. Nick has the blood pool from the carpet, and Warrick has prints. Sara and Catherine have trace, and Archie has Grace's laptop. Doc Robbins is the odd man out at the moment, cloistered in his cool, sterile morgue with no body to tend with his gloved hands and efficient scalpel, but it won't be long now. A day or a week from now, someone will find Grace Sanders, and Dave will collect her and bring her to Greg's home away from home. Doc will brush the leaves from her hair, and Dave will wash the grit from the bruised soles of her feet, and together, they'll gather the pieces of the puzzle for you to put together again with your infinite, soulless patience. When it's over, you'll be able to tell Greg a fairy tale from which the Brothers Grimm would have turned their heads.
You'll see to the crutches yourself. They are the most sacred of the relics taken from the apartment, and if anyone must profane them, it will be you. You will lay them on your metal table and brush the dirt from their battered metal with a soft-bristle brush, the bones of a dinosaur lain bare. You will collect the dirt and the dust and the sloughed skin cells from the cuffs and the handgrips, and under the powerful light of your microscopes, their story will unfold.
They will speak of daily use, of gummy-eyed mornings passed tottering to the bathroom on unsteady, sluggish legs, and of afternoons spent stumping around the worn pile of the living room carpet or hobbling down the sandy sidewalk to the corner store. They might even whisper of an amorous meeting. If you are lucky, they will testify to nothing but life, but if they are as cruel as you suspect, they will murmur of darker treats, of death and decay, and of minute traces of hair and blood spatter and brain tissue.
Yes, he would handle the crutches, but first, he had to settle the unpleasant business of calling the buzzard to the tantalizing whiff of carrion. He opened the topmost drawer of his desk and rummaged through the well-ordered contents until his sensitive fingertips found the business card in the furthermost corner. He had a Rolodex perched on the corner of his desk, and it contained every contact he had ever made in the field, all ordered alphabetically. Except for Agent Rick Culpepper's card. For some reason, he couldn't bring himself to include it with the others, and he had shoved it into the darkest corner of his desk.
Because it was tainted, whispered an irrational voice. It was permeated with his oozing arrogance and blatant disregard for human life-Sara's life. It was sticky with his finger oils and smelled of wool and linen and the musky, overbearing reek of his expensive cologne. Your skin recoiled from it instinctively, as if it sensed the corrosive malevolence lurking within the fibers and embossed letters of his name, and you separated it from the rest because you were afraid the contagion would spread to the better people tethered to the plastic axis of your world. It was counter to every logical tenet by which you had lived your life; intellect insisted that it was nothing but fancy linen paper and human pretension, but that didn't stop you from shunning it.
He held the card between his thumb and index finger, and his lips puckered in an unconscious moue of distaste. Images flickered through his mind of Culpepper sitting in a surveillance van, watching Sara entice a wolf out of the shadows with her aura of naïve vulnerability. He had been so nonchalant, almost lupine himself, crouched in his chair with the headset clapped to his ear and a predatory grin playing in the corners of his mouth like the sharpening of claws. For a petty, swooning instant, he had toyed with the notion that Culpepper was the wolf, and then the real one had sprung from the darkness and missed Sara by inches. Culpepper had been so glib when it was over and Sara had been cocooned in the drab, grey security of an ambulance blanket, so unconcerned about the risk she had taken, and Grissom had loathed him. In fact, Culpepper had earned the dubious honor of vaulting Conrad Ecklie in his personal pantheon of incorrigible bastards.
Well, there's no help for it now, Gil, his mother said briskly, and he heard her unbreathed huff of maternal exasperation. Culpepper might be an inconsiderate ass, but he's an ass with authority, and like it or not, those investigatory protocols you hold so near and dear demand that you call him. It's like that purple cough medicine you always hated so much; the label proclaimed its natural grape goodness, but you swore it tasted like turpentine and made me chase you around the house with threats of a spanking before you'd relent. It's time to take your medicine, Gil, dear. Soonest begun, soonest done.
He grimaced and swallowed his hatred like a clotted lump of gristle. He was just about to lift the receiver when the phone rang, strident and shrill. He blinked and picked it up, convinced it would be Culpepper on the other end, that his spit-polished nemesis was a precognitive savant attuned to his slightest discomfiture.
"Grissom," he told the receiver, and stifled the dry Agent Culpepper with a heroic effort of will.
A crackling burst of static, a nasally rasp. "Mr. Grissom." Polite.
"Yes?"
"I believe I have something you want."
The hackles rose on his neck, and he groped for his pen. "And what would that be, Mr-?"
A thoughtful silence. "We'll get to that. But what you're looking for has red hair, a temper to match, and faulty legs."
Grace Sanders. His stomach lurched, and his palms began to sweat, but his voice was eerily calm. "Is she alive?"
A reedy chuckle. "Of course she is, Mr. Grissom. I wouldn't go to all this trouble to kill her. If I'd wanted that, I'd've killed her and left her on the living room floor for that arrogant little prick to find."
"Greg." It was not a question.
"Yes, Mr. Grissom. Though I understand why you'd ask yourself the question. You've got a regular menagerie of assholes and morons at that lab of yours."
"I'm not sure what this is about," he said cautiously, but I can assure you that the Las Vegas police are willing to negotiate."
"This isn't about negotiation," the voice interrupted coldly. "This is about life. It's not something you can measure with your neat little swabs and slides and expert testimony. It's an intangible, and even the pointy-headed philosophers agreed that it's precious. If you don't do exactly what I tell you, the woman dies."
Adrenaline and bile flooded his mouth in a sickly-sour tang. "And what is it that you want?" he asked evenly, and glanced through the open door of his office in the delirious hope of seeing Brass peering around the doorframe in hangdog expectancy. But the hallway was deserted. Everyone was processing evidence in their respective labs.
I need a trace on this phone, he thought, and scribbled a note on his desk calendar.
"Justice," came the reply. "It shouldn't be too hard to come by. After all, it's in the science, and you're a scientist."
The vicious irony of the statement was not lost on him. "I'm not sure-,"
"I'll make it simple for you, Mr. Grissom. I'm going to hang up now, and in two minutes, I want Greg Sanders on that phone. If it's anyone else, she dies."
"How do I know she's alive?"
"You don't. Two minutes, Mr. Grissom." The line went dead.
He slammed the receiver into its cradle, immediately picked it up again, and dialed the extension for the AV lab. The line was busy. He hung up and shot to his feet, ballpoint pen clutched heedlessly in one tight-fisted, nerveless hand. He was merely striding at first, but by the time he reached the door to his office, he was running.
It's personal, he thought with clinical clarity as he sprinted down the hallway like the world's oldest collegiate track runner. It's not business or politics or an eco-terrorist group on the rampage because our precipitate is manufactured by a company that uses animal testing. It's a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend, bent out of shape because Greg was a connoisseur of liquid latex and the use of Propecia for his hydraulic system. The wrong name came out in bed one night, and now Greg is paying the price.
Maybe he should take a page out of your social playbook and never leave the house, Catherine muttered laconically.
No offense, Gil, Brass piped up, but unless you think Greg spent his singles days wowing the ladies with tales of his hep-kat boss, Gil Grissom and the Six-Legged Seven, I don't think this has jack to do with his love life. Someone else's love life, maybe, but not his. It's a case. Just like Nick, who's tasted lightning twice. Somebody he put away has come back to give him a heaping helping of a dish best served cold, or maybe it's a DA who's pissed that the evidence wasn't enough to put the pedophile away.
He ran, and with each slap of his feet, a face gazed up at him, the cards of the forensic tarot upturned. Nick, the Hanged Man, trapped in a madman's box while dirt sifted through his coffin like stardust from a black hole. Catherine, The Empress, born to mobster royalty. Sara, The Fool, who chased rainbows and butterflies and paupers in a prince's clothing. Warrick, The Knave, held in thrall by diamonds of red and black.
And Greg, The Jester, or so he should have been, but the card staring up at him with Greg's face was a darker card by far. Death.
Because Greg is all your fault. He became a CSI because of you. He wanted to impress you, but no matter how prompt and thorough he was with his DNA work, it never earned him so much as a pat on the back. After all, perfection was a prerequisite of the job. He tried to draw you into his world, share with you the anecdotes that made Greg Sanders who he was; he told you about Papa Olaf and Nana Olaf and weekends spent with pretty girls on the shores of Lake Meade. But you didn't want to hear it because it was irrelevant to the task at hand.
He followed gamely in your wake, and when his track record in the lab wasn't good enough, he followed you into the field. He studied the procedural manuals with feverish tenacity, as if his life depended on it, and maybe it did. What he lacked in common-sense experience, he made up for in enthusiasm. He was willing to listen and learn, even if each rebuke from you stung him like a slap.
He was so proud when he passed the final field proficiency test, and you still remember the way he looked at you through the bubbling shower of spraying champagne, hopeful and adoring and determined not to disappoint you again. You should have told him that he had never let you down and never would, but you didn't. It was too hard, too dangerous. You only told Nick how proud of him you were after you'd nearly lost him, and even then, you didn't tell him. You told the flickering computer screen in the AV lab, which was in no danger of talking back. Because that's how you like your social interaction-one-sided. Well, now we're on the fourth verse, same as the first, and you haven't learned a damn thing.
The AV lab was dark except for the flickering, wavering light of the computer monitors, but he could just make out the lanky silhouette of Archie Johnson hunkered in front of the lab phone with the receiver cradled between cheek and shoulder.
Grissom plucked the phone from his ear and slammed it into the cradle.
"Hey, Grissom, what the-," Archie began incredulously.
"Archie, I need you to set up a trace on my office phone. You've got-," He checked his watch. "-ninety seconds."
Archie stared at him in bewilderment. "I-but-I'm on it." He lunged for a set of headphones and a nearby laptop and sprinted from the room.
Grissom turned on his heel and ran into the vestibule in search of Greg. He was still where despair had planted him several hours earlier, wilted on the sofa with his head in his hands.
"Greg."
Greg's head shot up at the sound of his voice. "Grissom? Did you find her? Did you find Grace?" Choked and panicky with hope and terror.
He shook his head. "No, Greg. But you have to come with me right now."
"What? Why?"
Grissom seized him by the arm and tugged him in the direction of his office. "I don't have time to explain. We've got less than sixty seconds."
Greg wrenched free of his leading grasp. "Sixty seconds for what?" he demanded hoarsely. His eyes were raw and anguished, and Grissom thought he had tears on his breath.
"If anyone but you answers my phone, she dies."
Greg wobbled precariously on his feet and then sprinted down the hall, feet a blur on the white linoleum. Grissom could only follow. By the time he caught up, Greg was looming over Archie, who was frantically plugging wires into the back of his laptop.
"I'm doing the best I can, Grissom, I swear," he said when Grissom opened his mouth to remind him of the relentless onward march of the second hand. "You're asking for a miracle." Archie tapped frantically on his keyboard, squinted at the screen, swore under his breath, and pulled a plug from the back of his laptop. "I need another minute."
"You have twenty seconds."
Archie looked from him to Greg's pinched, bloodless face and trembling hands and redoubled his pace. "Come on, come on."
The phone rang just as Archie snapped the last plug into its port.
"Did you get it?" Grissom asked.
I don't know, Archie mouthed, and squatted in front of the laptop.
The phone rang again, and Greg flinched, hand fisted and sweating at his side.
"Answer the phone, Greg," Grissom prodded gently.
Greg looked at him, eyes glassy and shocked. His mouth worked. The phone rang again. "Gris, what if she's dead? I can't…I…what if he's calling to tell me she's dead?"
"Pick up the phone, Greg. Right now, it's the only choice you have."
Greg's hand floated out and hovered over the receiver. The phone rang a fourth time, then a fifth. "Gris, she's-,"
"If you don't pick it up right now, Greg, she's dead," he snapped, and Greg's paralysis broke.
He snatched the phone from its cradle. "Hello?" he breathed.