"Greg?" Soft and timid and wavering.

"Oh, God, Gracie." The endearment emerged from his lips unbidden, but he couldn't find it within himself to care. All that mattered was her voice against his ear, familiar as breath and soft as petals despite the tinny distance of the phone line. He closed his eyes, and in the momentary darkness before he opened them again, he saw her hair, red as cleansing fire and fragrant as the leaves that drifted lazily to earth to form constantly shifting dunes beneath the trees on Papa Olaf's farm. "Grace, are you all right? Did he hurt you?"

That's not what you really want to know, is it? asked a glottal, malignant voice. What you really want to know is, Did he fuck you, Gracie? Has he stuck his pecker in my sacred mount? It's not as pretty or delicate as the way you phrased it, but it's truer. It's the first question every man asks when told their wife or daughter has been found alive. Not Is she asking for me? or Was she beaten? but Was she raped? They always hesitate on that last word, as though saying it will be enough to make it come true. It's bitter and heavy in their puckered mouths, and they spit it out like it was poison.

Maybe it is, offered a more practical voice that bore a perverse resemblance to Grissom. What is rape if not corruption of the flesh, the forced acceptance of something foreign into the body? Even after the physical evidence of trauma has been collected or washed away, the psychological consequences linger for years, sometimes a lifetime. Maybe sexual assault is nothing more than a slow-acting poison that consumes the victim from the inside, a corrosion of the soul that sours everything it touches. It would explain why so many women admit to thoughts of suicide after the attack. They'd rather die quickly and on their own terms than wait for the rapist to finish them off. A final act of control over a life that has none.

Yes, but all of that still doesn't explain why that's the first thing men ask. Is it because deep down in their guts and balls, they still see women as creatures to be possessed, property to be jealously guarded with clubs and fists and war cries? Let's face it, Greggo, you're all for equality in the workplace and the right of women to say and do whatever they want and to reject any loser who doesn't tickle their fancy. You're a man of the world, and you'd never raise a hand to a woman, but all your sophistication goes out the window when you catch the stockboy at the grocery store looking down her blouse.

Then it's simple, primitive jealousy, and you wind up putting your arm around her in a gesture clearly meant to denote possession before you saunter away. She's yours. The justice of the peace in California said so. She's yours to love and touch and fuck, and the thought of anyone else touching her makes you sick.

Of course Grace was his. She had said so in front of the justice of the peace, had sworn it in moist-eyed solemnity. She had given herself to him in a Westin motel room that afternoon and that night. She was his because she chose to be, and he was well aware that one day, she might choose not to be, that one day, she might be waiting for him with a suitcase and a sad smile. It was a risk he took gladly for the chance that she might be there for one more hour, one more day, and every day that he turned to find her there, he breathed a little easier.

The voice was right about one thing, though. The thought of Grace's beautiful red hair underneath someone else's rough, dirty hands or in another mouth made his stomach cramp and roll. He swallowed a wave of bile.

"I-," she began, but that was as far as she got before there was the clicking shift of jostling phone and another voice came on the line.

"That's enough for now," it said, and Greg blinked.

Ever since Grissom had come to him with news of Grace's disappearance, he had been bracing himself for the voices that would come. Mostly, he'd replayed in his mind the way Jim Brass' voice would sound when he came to tell him that they'd found what was left of his Grace in the bottom of a gully or stuffed unceremoniously into a storm drain like a wad of discarded newspaper. It would be hoarse and worn, the crackling, hissing pop of an old record left to spin uselessly under a ceaselessly searching needle. He would trudge into the room and watch his feet scrape over the linoleum, and after the perfunctory offer of coffee, he'd clear his throat and announce that the world had ended. Then he'd stuff his stubby, broad-knuckled hands between his knees and stare at the floor for as long as he could stand it or until another sorrow called him to duty.

He'd thought of Grissom's voice, maddeningly clinical despite the expression of sorrow his face would wear. Take all the time you need, Greg, he would say, shadowed from the harshness of raw grief by the murky dimness of his office. If there are any problems with Ecklie, I'll handle it. Your job will be here when you decide to come back.

Of course Grissom would think that the job was at the forefront of his mind as he sat across from his boss with snot in his nose and the irrefutable truth of fifty years alone etched into the corners of his scalded eyes. To Grissom, the job was the only thing that was real, the only concrete reality in a world of shimmering mirages. Grissom loved without feeling, ate without tasting, and slept without dreaming. He would be sincere in his condolences, but he wouldn't understand them.

Not like Catherine, whose voice would be brittle and full of maternal anguish. She would see him as another wounded child to be protected from the viciousness of the world, and she would come to him with arms outstretched and tears trailing unkind, liquid fingers down her cheeks. Grief and pity would age her, and she would smell like lavender and old cotton when she enfolded him in an embrace. She would be the one who would bring coffee and sandwiches in the first weeks after Grace was gone, and she would be the one to wash her memory from the walls and carpet when tradition demanded it.

Sara would, well, sidle, and suck on menthol cough drops until her breath smelled and tasted like the masks he used to wear as a DNA tech, medicinal and astringent as rubbing alcohol. Her condolences would be more awkward than Grissom's, less practiced, but no matter how garbled her delivery, she would mean what she said and know why she said it. If Grissom could speak without knowing why, then Sara could feel without knowing how to say it.

Warrick wouldn't say anything. Not because he didn't care, but because he knew that there was nothing to say. There wasn't enough sorry in the world to close a wound that deep, and he wouldn't be stupid enough to try. He would simply linger on the edges of tear-reddened vision, appearing now and then to sigh and make small talk when the silence got too loud.

Then there was Nick, who would offer condolences because that was how he was raised, and it didn't matter how stupid or useless it was. Nick would be the one to hover fretfully at his shoulder while they lowered his Grace into the earth, and when it was time to lead him away to the idling car, Nick's eyes would be wet. Nick Stokes wore his heart on his sleeve and bled from the eyes, and he would ask after him long after the others had forgotten the reason for his sorrow.

Doc Robbins' was the only reaction he hadn't been able to gauge in the interminable hours he'd spent huddled in the break room. Though they'd both been sequestered within the sterile walls of the lab for the majority of their careers, they'd never been close. The old doctor was hip for a guy whose hairline had parted like a curtain and left his scalp as bare as a baby's bottom, but he was never going to shake his grizzled groove thing down at Whispers on a Friday night, and he was never going to convert Greg to the wonders of vegan rhubarb pie. They ran in different social circles, bound only by the job and the stink of formaldehyde on their clothes.

Maybe it was for the best, really. Intimacy was the last trait he wanted in the gloved hands that would likely eventually drop his wife's brain into a metal scale and weigh it like a gelatinous hunk of cabbage. Better that he remain an enigma, remarkable in his mind only for his forearm crutches and the authoritative clack they made as he strode purposefully down lab hallways with file folders tucked beneath his arm.

As he waited for the man on the other end of the line to speak again, he found himself idly wondering if the crutches they shared would act as a bond between them as she lay on his steel slab with her eyes closed and her lips blue and livid from cold, silencing fingers. Would he feel a kinship with her as the blade of his scalpel kissed her flesh and left its mark in the Y-incision that would lay her heart bare, or would he pluck her dead heart from her chest like an uprooted potato and plop it indelicately into his scale to be weighed?

You asked her about that once, remember? Papa Olaf muttered gruffly, and now he was on the front porch of the Wisconsin farmhouse he'd shared with his Nana Olaf since they'd been expelled from Norway for making babies before taking vows. His straw hat was beside his feet, scant millimeters from the runner of the rocking chair in which he sat. He was rocking with lazy grace, and the warped floorboards creaked mournfully as he moved. He was smoking his beloved pipe, and though it had been years since he'd seen Papa Olaf, he knew how he would smell-tobacco smoke and sweet hay and the musty, meaty stink of dairy cows.

You asked her about the mythical kinship between crippled folks. You figured that shared experiences made for an unspoken brotherhood or some other bit of naïve foolishness of that sort. You had taken her for a walk down the Strip. It was crowded with tourists, kids up way past their bedtimes and adults trying to be kids for one last, mythical night before they settled into the middle age or old age that was waiting for them back home. It was bright and loud with slot machines and casino lights and electronic fortune tellers squatting on the dirty sidewalks like futuristic panhandlers.

She was standing in front of one of them, wavering dreamily between her three disparate centers of gravity, and idly mouthing the tropical-berry sno-cone you'd bought from a street vendor a few blocks back.

You're not gonna waste money on that, are you? you asked dubiously, and raised an eyebrow at her.

She turned her head and flashed you a brilliant smile dimmed only by the red dye of the sno-cone on her lips and teeth. This thing? Please. She snorted and shook her head. No, that puppy is more my style. She jerked her head in the direction of a drop-claw game a few yards away.

You are a woman of unquestionable taste, you told her, and sauntered over to inspect the red belly of the beast.

The game was old in comparison to its sleeker cousins along the Strip. Its façade was dented and battered from countless ill-tempered kicks, and the red paint was faded and flaking. The lights of its marquee flickered dispiritedly, and more than a few refused to shine at all. Still, it was heaped with cheap toys, and the claw had all its grasping fingers.

You stepped up to the controls and fed two quarters into the slot. And what would be the lady's pleasure? you asked with a bow and a grandiloquent sweep of your arm.

She laughed and swayed on her crutches. Forget it, sweetie. No point in wasting money on that stupid machine.

You drew yourself up. Wasting money? I'll have you know that I can wrest whatever trophy you desire from the jaws of this beast in three bucks or less.

She raised an eyebrow at that. You can, huh? This I gotta see.

You accept my challenge? Excellent. Merely select your prize and watch.

She pondered the case for a moment, lips puckered in a loose, shifting moue of contemplation. Finally, she pointed her crutch at a fat, yellow chick in the middle of the inanely smiling dune. That one.

You inclined your head. Say no more. Your wish is my command. Stand back and prepare to be amazed.

Seven dollars later, you were still feeding quarters into the machine, and Grace was pressed against your back, laughing. Your indignation at being mocked was smothered by the occasional kisses she planted on your nape, cold and sharp from the sno-cone she was still licking at sporadic intervals, and by the hand that snaked around your waist and slithered up your t-shirt to stroke your stomach.

You know, I get the feeling I'm being deliberately sabotaged here, you murmured. You were trying to sound casual, but the rake of her nails over your prickling skin made smooth-talking-and a great many other things, for that matter-hard. And besides, you hardly minded.

Oh? It was a coy purr. And what, Mr. Sanders, are you going to do if it is?

You turned abruptly and kissed her, sore fingers wrapped possessively around the sharp spars of her hips. She was so startled that she dropped her sno-cone, and it hit the pavement with a wet splatter. That was all right. It was melting anyway. She tasted like the Hawaiian Punch you drank by the gallon as a little squirt, and like ice, metallic and strangely tart.

You didn't break the kiss until black stars blossomed behind your closed eyelids, and when you came up for air, you were both laughing and panting.

Wow, she managed when she had gotten her feet under her again. Remind me to play the saboteur more often.

You do, and there's more where that came from, you growled, and nipped her earlobe.

As if I'd complain, she replied, and swatted you on the rump. Come on, sweetie. Let's get out of here before you put yourself in the poorhouse in pursuit of a stuffed chick worth a buck-fifty.

I can get him if you give me just one more try, you protested, but she shook her head.

Uh uh. Besides, I'm tired of standing.

That got you moving. If stubborn Gracie was admitting she was tired, then she was one step above dead on her feet. You cast one last, furious glance at the chick that had thwarted you; it was sitting serenely atop the pile like the king of the hill. Then you wrapped an arm around Gracie's waist to steady her, masked your intentions under the pretense of necking, and strolled towards your car.

You passed a man in a wheelchair along the way, and he and Gracie exchanged a nod and a wave. When he was out of sight and rolling doggedly down the sloping sidewalk, you asked, You know that guy?

No, why?

You shrugged. No reason. You waved, so I just thought maybe-

What, you thought it was a sacred cabal hand gesture? She rolled her eyes and snickered. I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but we don't get a membership card into a special club along with our diagnoses. Just bills and bills and more bile than we can possibly swallow in ten lifetimes. Nope, no solidarity amongst the limping masses. Not all of us have the coordination to raise our fists in the air. Makes impressive, strident rallies a problem, but so does busting an axle in a city pothole while marching down the street. She shrugged and rested her head on your shoulder.

You weren't sure what to make of that. If she was joking, you weren't sure you'd earned the right to laugh at that, and if she wasn't, then you didn't want to make an ass of yourself.

Some of your confusion must have shown on your face because she sighed and said, All I'm saying, babe, is that you need to lay off the Oliver Stone movies.

And that was that. Myth busted. You went home, and she stretched out on the couch with a box of ginger snaps to watch Letterman on TV and let her exhausted legs shudder and spasm her cares away. A few nights later, you went to the store and bought her a stuffed chick and a bear as big as she was for good measure. Mr. Cheeples has since put down roots on her pillow, and Sir Honeywell is her constant companion when she's sprawled on the living floor with a good book.

"Mr. Sanders? Are you still there?"

Greg started. "Yeah, yes, I'm here," he croaked. Oh, please, God, don't hurt my Gracie.

The man chuckled. "Good. We wouldn't want you wool-gathering. That might be dangerous. You might miss something important."

He doesn't sound like a monster, Greg thought stupidly. Monsters don't use words like wool-gathering. That's for the old duffers on the shuffleboard courts with their Bermudas hiked up to their nipples. Or science teachers like Mr. Kowalski who pronounced it like it was the mental equivalent of jerking off in class. Or Grissom.

They never sound like monsters, boy. You know that. They sound like lawyers and housewives and accountants, and they talk about the Devil's work with ordinary voices. They discuss bludgeoning their husbands to death with his beloved, autographed Albert Pujols bat like they were exchanging pot roast recipes or the best way to get grass stains out of a blouse. One of your earliest cases was a sixteen-year-old boy who had raped and strangled his own mother because she took his car away. He was a freckle-faced, all-American kid with a straight-A average and a demon's forked tongue inside his mouth. The monsters catch us because they wear our faces and speak with our mouths, and no matter how many of them you see, you will never know them all.

It's not fair, his mind screamedand his sweaty fingers clenched spasmodically around the receiver.

Why? Because it's Grace? countered the gently reasonable voice of Papa Olaf.

Yes, because it's Grace! My sweet, fiery, defiant Grace, who goes through life with her chin up and her crutches clapped to her side like sidearms. She never hurt anyone. She watches Letterman in her socked feet and eats ginger snaps and gets crumbs all over the couch, but I don't care because she laughs at my stupid jokes and tells me it was good even on off-nights. She hugs teddy bears and thinks I hung the moon, and how can she go on believing that when I couldn't even protect her from the monsters?

His cheeks were wet, and he was dimly aware that he was weeping.

"My name is Jacob Brubaker. Does that name seem familiar to you? Think very carefully because it's very important."

A niggling memory stirred in the back of his mind, a flash of tired eyes and polished nails and auburn hair, but the name "Jacob" brought with it no face. He shifted the phone from one ear to the other, licked his lips, and said, "The last name is familiar, but-,"

"Of course you wouldn't remember specifics," Brubaker snarled contemptuously. "God knows how many lives you've fucked up, you pretentious little bastard." He laughed, a cruel, ugly caw. "Maybe this'll jog your memory."

There was a clatter as Brubaker dropped the phone, a beat of silence, and then Grace began to scream. It did not start slowly and build to a crescendo; it simply was. It was piercing and unrelenting, loud even in the distance of the connection. A keening, wailing sob wrenched from the base of the spine that went on and on and throttled his heart inside his chest.

"Stop!" he bellowed into the phone. "Stop! Stop! Jesus, stop! Stop hurting her. Gracie!"

But Gracie continued to scream, his name now, high and piercing and desperate. Greg! Greg! Help me! Oh, God, make-make him-, and from the corner of his eye, he saw an ashen Archie holding the headset away from his ear.

Brubaker picked up the phone again. "Do you remember now, Mr. Sanders?" he shouted over Grace's screams. "Do you? Because if you don't, I'll be happy to continue."

"No!" he pleaded. "No, I remember! I remember!"

And then he did.

You'd been a field CSI for six months when the crumpled slip calling you to that dive crossed your palm. You'd been there yourself a time or two as a customer, back when you were new in Vegas and you were too broke to know any better. You'd lived and learned and followed the beautiful ladies to the trendier clubs on the Strip or just off. If you'd had your way, you'd never have set foot there again, but duty called.

So you and Sara schlepped to the scene, crime kits in hand, and found the vic sprawled in a pool of blood in the parking lot, face-up and staring blindly at the stuttering neon of the sign. You found out later that she was Alice Cromartie, thirty-four, but right then, she was just another broken doll discarded beneath burned-out lights. You processed the body for trace, and Sara photographed the scene, and you traded wry jokes over her battered face.

Her attacker had been savage. Her skull had been caved in, and a chunk of nearby concrete had shattered her occipital bone and flattened her nose. Her face had been slashed, and her left cheek hung in a meaty flap. There were finger-shaped bruises on her throat, and her blouse had been torn and her bra pushed rudely aside. There was more bruising on her breasts, as well as a fluid later identified as saliva. All the signs pointed to a lovers' quarrel gone wrong.

So you were surprised when the preliminary DNA results came back as female. You ran them a second time just to be sure, and when the foreign secretions on her vagina came back as female, there was no doubt. Cromartie's attacker was a woman.

So, it was off to the races, and it didn't take long to put the story together. After all, Bonnie Brubaker had never murdered anyone before, and she was sloppy. She been seen with the victim in the bar less than two hours before the murder, and her trace was everywhere-on the chunk of pavement used to smash the victim's face, underneath her nails, and inside her vagina. Fingerprints, epithelials, and DNA.

Bonnie Brubaker sat in an interrogation room and told you with a straight, dispassionate face that she had killed the younger woman because she'd decided that women weren't her type, after all. For Alice, it had been an experimental fling to scratch an itch before she mended fences with her workaholic husband. It was one last tryst in the grotty parking lot, and so long, sister.

But for Bonnie, it had meant a whole lot more. It had been a renaissance, a second great love affair after the slow guttering of her marriage to a limp-dick husband. She liked the feel and taste of a woman on her tongue. She was in love, and had planned on leaving her husband for her. So when she got the chaste, old-maid kiss and the bye-bye baby, it's been fun, she snapped. She hadn't given all of herself and betrayed her clueless husband just to be tossed out like trash. So she made Alice pay and shattered her looking-glass forever.

At trial, her lawyer argued that her confession had been coerced, but it hadn't mattered. The physical evidence was overwhelming, so much so that your testimony was simply a matter of course. You turned up at the courthouse in shined leather shoes that made your feet hurt and a suit and tie that Grace had picked out the night before. It was far more subdued than the Leisure Suit Larry and Miami Vice ensembles you favored, and that was probably a blessing.

You took the stand with flint in your mouth and your nuts in your navel, and as you testified, you couldn't shake the suspicion that your voice was cracking and breaking. You were a child playing dress-up in your father's clothes, and you were sure that the judge and the defense attorney would find you out and laugh you from the courtroom. Your bladder was a hot, constricted ball beneath your skin, and you fought the urge to fidget.

It was an urge made worse because Grissom was observing from the back of the courtroom, head cocked as if he were studying an interesting specimen of bug. You knew he was there as a gesture of support, but you were terrified that you'd let him down. Yes, the evidence was there and irrefutable, but it was only as convincing as the lips that presented it, and you felt small and stupid and clumsy in front of a cool customer like Grissom. You knew how he would look at you if you weren't perfect, disappointed and aloof and quietly grieving your idiocy. So you gripped your knees to keep your hands from shaking and prayed that you wouldn't puke all over the witness box.

There were other people in the courtroom, too-bailiffs and stenographers, sketch artists and reporters, court junkies. And family members, of course. From both sides of the case. Alice Cromartie's mother and husband were on one side of the courtroom, propped in the forbidding wooden pews like mannequins. If her husband had no time for his wife in life, then she had become his world in death. You couldn't look at him when the prosecutor asked you to recount what you discovered on the victim's genitals.

Nor could you look at the Brubaker side of the room when you testified to the reasoning given for the murder. What seemed so black-and-white in the lab and the interrogation room was a lot less sterile when you had to see the effect of your words on the people left behind in the carnage. It was easier to look at Grissom's stoic face or the pleat of your dress pants.

You were peripherally aware of the hollow-eyed, lean figure who sat behind Bonnie Brubaker's shoulder, but you didn't study him too closely. You didn't want to because than you might have to imagine what it was like in his shoes, what it was like to have your soul shattered by the knowledge that your wife didn't love you anymore. It was a fate words than death, and you averted your eyes. Maybe if you hadn't, Gracie would still be home now, and not screaming for mercy on the other and of this line.

"Do you? You've lied before. How do I know you're not lying now?" Grace reached a register he had thought impossible for the human larynx. "What was my wife's name?"

"Bonnie! Her name was Bonnie! She was tried and convicted of the murder of her lover, Ali-,"

"That whore was not her lover!" Brubaker bellowed. "That was a dirty lie, a lie you made up to send her to jail. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Yes! Just-," he struggled against a ragged sob. "-Just don't hurt her any more. She has nothing to do with this."

A wry snort. "My Bonnie had nothing to do with that whore or her murder, but that didn't stop you, did it?"

"Mr. Brubaker, if I was mistaken, there are better ways to make it right."

"Like what? Appeals? Her public defender is long gone, and as far as the law is concerned, justice has been served. I've been working on appeals since the day your lies put her away, and she's still rotting in jail. It's lonely sleeping alone in a bed meant for two, Mr. Sanders. Do you know that? No, no more wasting time on useless appeals. You ruined my life, Mr. Sanders, and now you're going to fix it. Or I'm going to ruin yours."

"How?"

"How? Oh, that's much better. Now we're getting somewhere." Mercifully, Grace's screaming stopped, though he could still hear her sobbing and moaning in the background. "It's remarkable what a little persuasion can achieve, isn't it?" Cheerful.

Oh, Gracie. I am so sorry. So, so sorry. I'll get you back, I swear.

"Isn't it?" Brubaker repeated, and Greg sensed the implied threat of further violence.

"Yes. Yes, it is," he answered hastily. "Just-oh, God." He took a deep breath. "What do you want me to do?"

"Good. Very good. It's simple, probably far less elaborate than the lies you concocted to frame my wife. All you have to do is admit you lied and prove my wife's innocence. It shouldn't be too hard. The truth is right there in your beloved case file. All you have to do is find it."

"I-all right. How much time-?"

"Five days."

He involuntarily sucked in his breath. "Mr. Brubaker, that's not enough. I need more time. It took me months to process-,"

"That's not my problem. Five days is all you get. Give me my wife, and I'll give you yours. If not, your wife will spend eternity in a shallow, unmarked grave."

Greg sensed Brubaker was about to hang up. "Mr. Brubaker, wait. Let me talk to Grace."

"You've already talked to her."

"I know. Please. It'll help me concentrate. Consider it motivation."

There was a thoughtful silence. "Motivation?" Brubaker mused. "All right. You have one minute."

The phone was passed. "Greg?" Grace, hoarse and watery with weeping.

"Gracie. Gracie, I love you. I'm going to get you back, I promise. Are you okay? Has he broken any bones? Honey-,"

"He twisted my knee joint," she said dully, "but nothing feels broken, and he hasn't…hasn't…" She trailed off.

"Gracie?"

"I'm here. I want to go home."

"You will. I'm going to make it right, baby."

"Greg?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't give this guy his fifteen minutes."

It was the last thing he expected her to say. "I won't, Gracie."

"I love you."

"I love you, too." Strangled, and agonizing in his throat.

Then Gracie was gone, and Brubaker was on the line again. "Remember, Mr. Sanders. You have five days."

The last sound Greg heard before the line went dead was the frenetic ticking of a stopwatch.