Chapter IX

Moody Women

Sara had overslept. Of course her personal version of overslept was different from most. By the time she had rolled out of bed and had her first cup of evening coffee, she still had an hour until she had to report for her shift. In some books, that was plenty of time; in Sara's it was a near disaster. Slurping her second cup of newly purchased-and-ground Starbucks coffee, she went around the apartment trying to get her bearings. Her clothes were laid out on the chair beside her bed just as they always were. She had done so before she'd left with Riley to jog that morning. She looked down at them and frowned. Black slacks and a black short-sleeved button down shirt. Paired up with her black boots, black holster and black lab vest and she would blend in with the night. She didn't feel like blending in tonight.

Riley who was still stretched out on the left, and vacant, side of her bed watched her with lazy eyes as she delved into her closet. The clothes inside were meticulously organized as were the shelves and floor space. The closet was moderately sized and each of the three walls held racks for storage. Her work clothes were directly in front of her. An almost neverending supply of slacks and suitable shirts, mostly black, and a few casual jackets and a set of department overalls that had found their way to her closet. The left side of the closet held her more formal attire that was reserved for court and the odd banquet, wedding, and the even rarer night out. The right side was slightly more eclectic. Her casual clothing was arranged with pants, mostly blue jeans, on the bottom rack, and shirts on the top. The jeans were arranged by shade and the shirts in their proper spectrum order, with white on the left going to the one pink shirt that she'd received as a gift to the deep violet shirt and her assorted blacks on the far right.

After letting Riley out for a quick tinkle, she left her apartment complex humming. She was in a surprisingly good mood and her wardrobe selection mirrored that. A three-quarter sleeve length shirt in eye-popping red, jeans that were broken in just right, and she had let her hair do its own chaotic thing. It was a far shot from what she'd laid out for the evening, but it felt good, and yes it didn't look that bad either. Sara chuckled to herself as she walked to her car, one hour of girl talk with Sofia Curtis and she was back in the swing of things. Who would have thought it? She paused at her car. The white environmental-friendly hybrid was a good car, and she even enjoyed driving the machine. Tonight, though, she didn't feel like it. Her eyes slid over one spot to her second and rarely used parking place. What used to hold Gil Grissom's vehicle on the odd event that he came to her place was now taken up by a tarp covered alternative to her hybrid. After being cleared by the doctors, she had gone and bought herself a little gift. A 'Congratulations on Not Dying' sort of gift. It was a tad morbid, but it had cheered her up. Then again what girl wouldn't be cheered up by a brand new motorcycle?
She took the tarp off and wasted five minutes just staring at the bike. Black as the night and just as dangerous, she had bought it right off of the show room floor. Her helmet, black and silver to match the bike, and her matching riding jacket were in the trunk of her car and it was a clear night. She had twenty minutes to make it to work and it was a Saturday night. This was going to be fun.

If Sara Sidle was in a great mood, Catherine Willows, her constant opposite in all things, was not a woman to be crossed with that night. There were several reasons for her mood: her daughter's eighteen year old boyfriend, or the fact that her six-year old car was making sounds that would shortly lead to a trip to an overpriced mechanic. Not to mention the fact that her mother was on some severely misguided quest to have the city of Las Vegas name a street after Sam. As if having the city's newest crime hot spot named after him wasn't enough as it was.

Her watch told her she had three minutes until she was late and wasn't that just the icing on tonight's thick slab of 'Piss Me Off' cake. She was three steps from her car when a motorcycle squealed into the lot. Catherine watched the rider gear down and circle, looking for a parking place. The bike was new and the rider seemed confident, something that irked Catherine for a reason that she couldn't quite put her finger on. She was irked further when the rider parked his bike in the slot right next to her less than brand new Sedan. The rider put his boot-clad feet on the concrete and turned the sleek sport bike off. The engine ticked as it cooled down. Catherine raised an eyebrow, "I hope you're an organ donor." The rider unstrapped and took off the helmet, a quick toss of dark curls revealed Sara Sidle's smirking face, "I am, actually."

If it had been anyone else, Catherine Willows would have let it go. It was, however, Sara Sidle flaunting her new toy and smirking at her and that pushed Catherine the rest of the way over the invisible line in her psyche, the one that marked the border between simply perturbed and completely pissed.

The blonde supervisor clenched her jaw, "Let's get inside, there's work to do, Sidle." Had she waited around before stalking to the Lab's main entrance, she would have heard Sara curse under her breath.

A cliché of the Old West was that when a well-known outlaw came down the main boulevard of the town, the innocent bystanders made themselves scarce. Old movies would show people ducking behind saloon doors, dodging into alleys and in the occasional comedy, jumping into conveniently placed water barrels. The setting was different but the sudden exodus of the Crime Lab personnel from the halls was very much the same. Nobody wanted to be in Catherine Willow's path when she was mad. The one possible exception to this otherwise universal rule was, of course, Gil Grissom.

The Nightshift's leader was either incredibly brave or completely oblivious because he stepped right out into the hallway, "Catherine, I'm glad you're here, can I talk to you for a minute?"

Any other person would have melted under her hot glare; Grissom barely blinked.

Sara hadn't even made it all the way to the locker room when Mandy poked her head out the Print Lab. "I got a hit on your John Doe."

Helmet still in hand, Sara stopped in her tracks and detoured into the lab. Mandy, perky as ever, waved her over to the computer screen, "Meet Stewart Finnigan, Irish by way of Trenton New Jersey."

Sara leaned closer and read through the broad-stroke description and rap sheet AFIS listed. "Well he wasn't a choir boy -- couple of collars for Aggravated B&E, Assault and he skipped out on a Rape One charge and that was before he moved to Vegas." Her eyes skipped down the screen, "He's graduated to Armed Robbery and did three years of a five year sentence, released last month." Scoffing, "He didn't last very long."

She took the printout and tucked it under her arm, "Thanks."

A quick stop to stow her helmet and then she went straight to the Morgue, in hopes of getting the complete Autopsy Reports on both Finnigan and Green. She pushed through the double doors and was met with six sheet-covered bodies. She guesstimated that her two were in the freezer and these must were the mass-cal victims that had been brought in from the I-15 pileup that Days had caught.

A harried looking Super Dave brushed by her and didn't even pause, "Robbins sent the files to your inbox about thirty minutes ago, tox reports included." Since his arms were loaded down with clipboards, and work was obviously piling up, she nodded and left the morgue staff to their grim work.

The CSI bullpen was empty, which wasn't unusual this early in the shift. Most of the team would be in the lounge waiting for the nightly meeting. Her inbox, despite being empty when she'd left that morning, was crammed full. She pulled the whole mess out and figured it would take her the entire fifteen minutes she had before the meeting to sort it all out. The autopsy files were in separate, but neatly rubber-banded together, case folders flagged a neon green post-it-note so she could see it right off the bat. She pushed aside the pink 'While You Were Out' message slips, the photocopied interdepartmental and PD memos and opened up the ME's file. The reports were thorough and had the accompanying photos, anatomical diagrams and a clear-cut summary printed in, the fourteen point aerial typeface that Robbins favored.

She looked at Erica Green's first. The SAE had come back positive -- the girl had been raped. Sara had already known that, of course, but to see it in print made it more concrete. There was no semen, but that came as no surprise. Her blood work had come back negative for drugs and alcohol and the cause of death was, as predicted, asphyxiation by manual strangulation. Robbins had also noted some strange scarring inside her vaginal cavity, noting that the device they had pulled out of her was the most likely source. They hadn't found a next of kin as of yet, but Sara knew Sofia and Jim had that well in hand.

She glanced at her watch and decided that she had just enough time to skim Finnigan's report before reporting in for the worst part of her shift. The nightly meeting was annoying at best and slow torture at worst. Gil Grissom and Catherine Willows in the same room at the same time, both of them trying to make it look like they weren't staring or glaring at her. It was like being caught between fire and ice and she couldn't even flinch because the boys might catch on and the last thing the team needed was another civil war on its hands.

Pushing those thoughts aside, Sara turned her attention back to the case that was literally at hand. Stewart Finnigan had died of traumatic blood loss to his penis. She flipped the pages to the tox report. Her eyes quickly ran over the charts that marked his blood chemistry and read the chemical symbols the same way a layman would read third grade literature. Finnigan had bled out so quickly because he'd been tripping on what had become known as The Rapist's Cocktail. The cocktail was a combination of Viagra, Ecstasy and the newest drug of choice, Cheese. Cheese was heroin mixed with cooked cold pills. The drugs were ground into powder, mixed with the cheese, and had an incredible effect on the mind and body. Erica Green had never stood a chance. Through a pharmaceutical fluke, though, neither had Finnigan. The combination of drugs had contributed to the blood loss and shock that had worked together to kill him. He was a rapist who had died from damage to his penis while raping a woman. That was poetry, dark and bloody. Despite her disgust and hate of rape and rapists, she could not equate Finnigan's bloody end with justice.

Sara wiped her hand down her face, "I guess that's actually a good thing?" The empty room didn't hold any answers for her, and she had a meeting to get to.

Author's Note: What did most of that have to do with this story? Absoloutly nothing. What does it have to do with a little story called 'Mistaken Identity'? Wouldn't you like to know.