SLOW BURN

~ Chapter 5 ~

"But Sara's alright, yeah?" Sliding her coffee cup onto the break room table, Morgan pulled out a chair and sat down directly opposite Greg with a worried frown. "I mean, I heard that they'd kept her in the ER longer than expected but they eventually sent her home so she's got to be okay, right?"

"As far as I know she's perfectly fine," he replied with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "I've tried calling her a couple of times but both her phone and Grissom's are going straight to voicemail." He shrugged. "I'll give it another shot in the morning."

"I imagine they decided to shut the world out for the night." She took a cautious sip of the piping hot liquid. "God knows, after a scare like that, I'd probably do the same."

"Yeah, probably." Greg agreed as he rubbed a finger back and forth across a tired eye. Between the discovery of Kay Nicholson's discarded body and Sara's abduction and subsequent reappearance, it had been a long, tiring day and, with only a couple of hours sleep under his belt, he wasn't exactly in the mood for small talk.

"Evening, guys." Bustling in through the open doorway, Catherine dropped the file she was carrying onto the table and made her way across to the coffee machine. "I don't know about you two but I've got my fingers crossed for a quiet night."

"That'd work for me." Greg answered truthfully as he frowned curiously at Catherine's clothes. "Isn't that the same outfit you had on this morning?"

"This morning and this time last night." She plucked at the lapel of her jacket. "I haven't had time to go home and change yet; I've got a couple of things to do here that'll keep me busy for the next few hours but I'm hoping to squeeze a shower in sometime tonight." Filling her cup to the brim, she carried it back to the table and slid onto the chair to Greg's left. "So…" Reaching across, she pulled the file closer. "I guess it's update time on Sara, huh?"

"Shouldn't we wait for Lindsey?" Morgan queried as she watched her flip through the first few pages in the folder. "She'll be here any minute."

"Actually, she's already out in the field." Finding what she was after, Catherine smoothed out the paper as she looked up with a grin. "She made the mistake of coming in early again so she caught the first call of the night."

"Still trying to impress the boss, huh?" Morgan smiled, knowing all too well how difficult it could be to find yourself essentially working for a parent.

"Not quite, she was anxious to help with Sara's case but there really wasn't anything for her to do so she got stuck with a 419 instead; some drunk found his car missing, blamed the wrong guy for stealing it and ended up dead on the floor with a knife in his chest." She tapped her finger against the paper in front of her to bring their attention back to Sara's case. "Okay, let's take it from the top."

Catherine drew in a deep breath as she prepared to begin.

"Less than five minutes after Grissom left Sara and Ben to go into the Galleria mall, an early-model white van pulled up next to the Murano." Rifling through the file, she pulled out a series of screen grabs of the two cars side by side. "Now, unfortunately, both vehicles were parked far enough away from the nearest security cameras that we don't get particularly detailed pictures but we do get enough to see what went down." She spread the photos out so her audience could see. "The van driver obviously says something through the window to Sara as he pulls up because she puts her window all the way down and the minute that she does, he sticks his arm out of his window, points his hand towards her then you see her recoil and start to frantically brush at her face."

"He sprayed her with something." Greg guessed as he drained the last of his coffee.

"Yep," Catherine nodded. "And courtesy of some handy speculation from Grissom, we now know exactly what it was he used; traces of Midazolam were found in her blood and we also managed to find evidence of it on her clothes as well as on the Nissan's passenger seat where she was sitting."

"I've come across that stuff before," Greg told her. "There was a Swing case years back where a male nurse was using it as a date rape drug; it has a very short half-life." He shrugged. "It's surprising you were able to find it in a blood sample at all."

"Another fifteen minutes and we probably wouldn't have but, thanks to Grissom's guess, that was the first thing we tested for." She touched the next photo. "Now, after spraying her, the driver appears to keep talking to her and within a minute or so, Sara calms right down so, clearly, the sedative has taken hold and, not long after that, she gets out of the Nissan, walks around to the passenger side of the van, climbs in and then the van pulls away."

"Is Ben all right?" Morgan queried worriedly. "His car seat is usually right behind the front passenger seat."

"Ben's fine." Catherine assured her. "You don't actually see any movement from his position until after Sara's gone so I think he's just woken up to find himself alone and got a little scared; his father was back at the car within minutes and there was no evidence of overspray or anything else around the car seat so he was just upset, that's all."

"So, we don't have anything that might help us ID this guy?" Greg asked studying each of the images arrayed before him.

"Not from the Galleria cameras we don't but we do get a little luckier with the footage from the Old Orchard mall." Reaching into the folder again, Catherine extracted another photo. "This was taken as the van turned in to the parking lot from Maryland Parkway and it gives us our one and only peek at Sara's abductor."

"Still a little grainy but…" Leaning forward, Greg stared at the photograph with interest. "I'm going to say mid-fifties to mid-sixties, a little on the heavy side, grey hair, receding hairline." He shrugged. "Might be able to tell a bit more if he wasn't wearing those sunglasses but, all in all, he looks kind of average, doesn't he?"

"In my experience, that's the best way to blend in." Catherine smiled then shrugged a little dejectedly. "It's not a lot but at the moment it's all we've got and, if nothing else, we can at least run it by Sara and see if it might jog her memory; according to the doctors, that's highly unlikely with Midazolam, which is why they use it for twilight sedation, but I'm hoping she was with him long enough for something to have taken hold.

"We've got the California licence plates." Sitting back, Greg pointed towards the printout. "Something's been smeared over the top of them to try and obscure the letters and numbers but it shouldn't be too hard to work out what they are."

"We already have," Catherine told him. "And, according to the records, they were reported stolen off a 2012 Chevy Malibu in Victorville two months ago."

"That's what, two and a half hours away?" Greg frowned. "So, he's either commuting or he's a fairly recent arrival."

"But he knows Vegas and, perhaps more tellingly, he knows Sara's history; there's no way that leaving her at the mall next door to her old apartment block was a fluke."

"So, he drives up, parks the van, takes Sara to that service corridor and then takes off?" Morgan asked. "That seems a little risky, doesn't it?"

"He didn't take her in; Sara took herself in." Catherine looked up, still mildly amused by the security footage she'd watched earlier. "He drops her off at the door, drives away and then she enters the mall alone, lets herself into that corridor and then, a couple of minutes later, steps back out and looks around as if she's never seen the place before." She shrugged. "That's all courtesy of the final hold of the Midazolam, he's obviously told her what to do and she's obediently done it."

"Bastard!" Filled with anger and indignation on his friend's behalf, Greg almost spat the word out. "She's going to be okay, isn't she? There'll be no side-effects or anything?"

"The drug is completely out of her system," she promised him. "I've given her the rest of the week off but really all she needs now is a good night's sleep and she'll be fine." Catherine paused for a moment before continuing. "There is something you guys ought to know though." She cleared her throat self-consciously and, lowering her voice, leaned in a little towards the others. "Under normal circumstances I wouldn't be telling you this but everyone's going to know about it soon enough and, as the people who'll be working closest with Sara, I think it's important that her team know exactly what it is that's at stake." She looked from one to the other, a smile slowly forming on her face. "I found out today that sometime around mid-March, Ben is going to be a big brother."

"Really?" Greg's weariness disappeared instantly and he chuckled at the news. "You know, I had a feeling something was going on with her." He grinned happily at Morgan, seeing his own delight clearly mirrored on her face. "Hey, we've got another member on our team."

"Uh, let's keep that to ourselves for the time being though, okay." Catherine held up a restraining hand. "Like I said, Sara and Grissom will make it public soon enough but, for now-"

"My lips are sealed."

Her head shot round at the unexpected words and Catherine felt her stomach drop at the sight of a bemused and smirking David Hodges standing in the break room doorway.

He'd hoped for something a little bigger but the downside of appropriating vehicles from drunks had always been that, until you found it in the parking lot, there was almost no way of knowing exactly what it was they'd arrived in. You could, sometimes, get a hint thanks to the keys that you lifted from them but, more often than not, it still turned out to be the vehicular equivalent of a lucky dip and, this time, he thought as he stretched his long legs out as much as the Kia Forte's foot well would allow, had not exactly been a winner.

The color was good, black was almost as generic as white when it came to blending a vehicle in amongst others and the seven year old car was still young enough to mix with those already parked on the street without standing out too much but the coupe was, without a doubt, too small for him to sit in for long and, glancing at the clock on the dashboard, he decided that ten minutes more would be his absolute limit.

Not that there was much point in hanging around he thought as he stared over at the Grissom house, neither of them had shown themselves and the place had been in darkness for the past half hour so he assumed they'd decided on an early night. He could hardly blame them for that, after all, it had been an eventful day for all of them.

He hadn't meant to show his hand the way he had but when the opportunity arose he couldn't pass it up. True, it hadn't panned out quite the way he'd envisaged but he was more than satisfied with his day's work and he now had a range of possibilities open to him.

Bright headlights flashed in the rear-view mirror and he slid as low down in the driver's seat as he was able, watching transfixed as a marked LVPD sedan slid almost silently past his position and slowed to a crawl as it traveled by the house. This was the third drive-by that he'd sat through and he guessed that patrols in the area had been stepped up in light of the day's events; par for the course considering who the key participants were but if there was one thing he'd learnt about law enforcement over the years, it was that they wouldn't be able to keep up that frequency - newer, fresher crimes would take precedence and resources would be stretched so thin that eventually things would return to normal. All he'd have to do was wait it out.

Satisfied that all was well, the patrol car sped up and, seconds later, disappeared around a curve in the road and, sitting up straight in the driver's seat, he decided he might as well do the same.

Gazing over one last time at the darkened house, he mentally planned his trip back home. He'd have to dump the Kia of course and then, unfortunately, his van since he had to assume it been seen but once he'd done that, it ought to be a relatively easy trip back to the house in North Las Vegas; a house he'd left before dawn to dispose of the lifeless body of Kay Nicholson and was returning to after dark filled with ideas and plans for his future and also for the Grissoms.

After all, it would be a while now before he could take her and truly make her his but he could, in the meantime, have a little fun with the family and if one, or more, of them ended up hurt - or worse - in the proceedings, as far as Zephyr Dillinger was concerned, that's just the way it had to be.

A/N: Thank you, SylvieT :)