DISCLAIMER:Don't own anything associated with the show… I just like playing with the characters in it.
RATING: T – Teen (language and adult issues)
PAIRINGS: GSR & Yo!Bling pre-established in previous fics of this timeline.
SPOILERS: Sequel to "Displacement" and "Transitions"
SUMMARY: Everything is changing around Nick Stokes. Can he deal with it, and how it will affect him in the end?
A/N: Another one of those slightly humorous and angsty chapters... I was also gad to hear that everyone had to appropriate reaction to my new OC. And just so you know... She's just getting started. :D
REVIEWS: Reviews are the way I know if people are enjoying the work or not. So, if you leave one, THANKS! And if not, I hope you found at least a little something to brighten your day, and thanks for taking the time to read.
Chapter 5
20:00 – 2006.12.04
CSI Lab: Processing Room
"Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrgggghhhhhh," Nick's exclamation was only matched in a display of frustration by his posture, with his fists planted onto the counter and his shoulders hunched over.
"No wonder this got pulled to nights," Sara said as she flopped the folder she had been looking through onto the counter top beside Nick. "Did they do even one thing right out there?" She shook her head in disgust at the mess they had been entrusted to clean up and said, "We've got no choice… We have to go back out there and hope we get lucky."
Though it would have seemed impossible, Nick's shoulders slumped even more. "I hate it when you're right."
Sara nudged him with her elbow and teased, "C'mon… It can't be that bad."
Nick rolled his eyes at her comment, and then set his jaw when he answered her challenge. "Trust me… It can."
Her face became a question when she sat down on the stool with her arms crossed over her chest and asked, "You mean there is someone else on this planet immune to your charms?"
When he grabbed at the bridge of his nose, in a gesture she knew marked his frustration, she reached for another folder and flipped to a specific page. "So, I take it this Dr. Desmaiseaux is not a pleasant person?" The name practically sang when Sara said it.
Nick looked up at her with surprise and asked, "How'd you do that?"
She was taken aback by his question and had to ask for clarification. "Do what?"
"You said her name perfectly. How'd you know how it was pronounced?" Nick was impressed that Sara understood the complicated name so easily.
"Four years of French in college for the elective language credits… I'd already taken Latin in high school." Nick laughed at her answer, because he could not think of another person who would have chosen Latin over French for their language requirements in high school, and then turned around and taken it as an elective in college. "And besides, I think there was an obscure French writer with that name… I'm pretty sure Gil has some of his works at home."
Except Grissom, of course, he thought with a smirk.
Before either of them could continue the discussion Judy poked her head in the doorway. "Do you think you guys could start picking up your messages when you come in the door, please? I am not a messenger service, ya know." The diminutive woman was attempting to chastise them for their error, but Nick always had a hard time taking anything Judy said seriously. Hard to be afraid of a pixie, he thought.
Sara reached out and took the two stacks of messages from the woman and apologized, "Sorry, Judy… We were just trying to get a jump on our case… Must have slipped our minds."
The look Judy gave her showed she was not buying the excuse, not one bit. However, her annoyed expression still looked a little too cute to be effective and she simply left the room before Sara's smirk turned into a laugh.
"Am I the only who finds it hard to keep a straight face when the 'Lolipop Guild' is trying to stare you down?" Sara's question was the first bright spot of his day and he could not contain the laugh that sprang forth.
Nick chuckled at her attempt at humor, but he was too far down inside his own head to really enjoy her joke.
With another devilish smirk on her face, she looked down at the report and asked Nick about the latest gossip in the lab. "So, have you talked to Greg about his big trick roll case yet?"
Nick shook his head and said, "Nah… He tried rambling on about somethin', but I wasn't really payin' attention."
"Haven't you noticed how quiet it is over in Trace?" Sara was determined to get him out of his funk.
"Yeah, didn't Hodges just have a vacation? How can he be out again?" Nick looked up and noticed Sara's sideways grin. "Wait a sec… Are you tryin' to tell me…" He looked around to see who might have been listening and then leaned in to whisper in a conspiratorial manner, "Hodges was the trick roll?"
Sara nodded and gave him a raised eyebrow. "Cuffed, jellied and all."
Nick dropped onto one of the stools and cut loose with a hearty fit of laughter before he leaned back and let out a big sigh. "Thanks, Sar… I needed that."
Sara tried to appear nonchalant by flipping through her messages when she asked, "So, are you ready to talk about what's eating you yet?"
He dropped his chin at her mention of his recent unease, but he really was not ready to go into it, so he tried to deflect her attention. "Right now? I'm still a little ticked off about this mornin'."
Her face returned to its questioning appearance and she asked, "What? You mean getting the run around at the-" She stopped mid-question when she came across a message from the assistant lead from the research site about her request to visit the site. "Well, looks like we gotta get the Doc's permission to head back to the crime scene."
Nick looked up with dismay and said, "You're kidding right?"
Sara knotted her brow and asked, "No… Why is that a problem?"
He winced and explained, "Well, let's just say that things did not end well over at UNLV this mornin'." Her scowl told him that he had better elaborate. "I sorta screwed up."
She slammed her eyes shut before she looked for a better answer. "Screwed up how?"
"Well, first off… She's not a gnarled up old man… Though after our interaction, I'm still holding to the gnarled up description." He tried to find a good way to spin it to his side of things, but even Nick knew he was in the wrong on that one. "And she's got a mouth like a trucker."
"Sometimes… It's the only appropriate way to speak to some people." She put her hand on her hip to emphasize her next question. "So, besides insulting her by automatically thinking she was a man and obviously butchering her name, what else did you do?"
He winced as he said, "I might've said somethin' about getting a subpoena to make her talk to us, and maybe I got a little hot under the collar and said somethin' about this being about a man's life and she should have some respect…or something like that."
Sara's hands went to her face and drug them down over her cheeks as she said, "Damnit, Nick!"
"Look, I know I screwed up… I already said that, but-"
"But nothing!" Her arms were thrown out in a gesture of extreme irritation that Nick instantly recognized. "Do you have any ide-" She was interrupted by her pager going off, she looked down at the message, and then shut her eyes against the information contained there.
"What?" Nick's voice betrayed his worry.
"Well, here's your chance to fix this mess." She threw the pager at him, gathered up their notes on the case so far, and started for the door.
Nick looked down at the screen and his whole body cringed when he read the message:
Rock Doc is here… & U Btr HURRY B4 she jets!
Nick swore to himself and ran out of the room to catch up with Sara at the door for the stairs. There was no time for him to come up with anything eloquent to say to Dr. Desmaiseaux, so once again his only option was groveling.
As they raced down the steps, he hoped to be able to muster the nerve he needed to get through his next encounter with the bristly geologist. But that hope was short lived when they reached the doors to the Autopsy Room and he felt his stomach turn to lead at the look his arrival elicited from the woman. Her expression made it painfully obvious to him that she was still fuming from their previous meeting.
Fortunately for him, he had Sara and Stephanie to act as buffers this time around. At least, that was what he hoped would happen. When Sara started talking, he breathed a little sigh of relief.
"Dr. Desmaiseaux?" The woman gave a slight nod and Sara continued, "I'm really sorry, but I wasn't aware you were stopping by."
"Well, it wasn't really my intention, but I was flipping through your lab report and something caught my attention." With her left hand, she opened the folder and turned to the page she was referring to and then continued, "The plant matter found in the man's clothing was unusual."
Sara moved closer to examine the page she had turned to and said, "Yeah, we're thinking that the body may have been dumped at your sight an-"
"Not likely, since the site is so remote… No, it's more likely that it washed into the ravine from somewhere else." She bent over stiffly, retrieved the leather briefcase from the scooter basket, placed it on the table and struggled to remove another folder from it with her left hand. When she brought her right hand up to the steady the folder pouch as she dug into it, they could not help but notice its mangled appearance. "If you'd have found that stuff in his shoes, I'd get it, but stuck in his clothes would be highly improbable."
She handed Sara a vegetation report for the Lost Gringo Mountain Recreation Area and upon skimming through it, she realized the woman was right. The pollen pods they found were from a variety of tree that carried the pods at the tops of its height, as they made up the canopy of a pinion forest.
"Are you suggesting this guy came through the canopy?" Sara asked as she was processing the information.
The doctor shrugged with her left shoulder and asked, "Well, they did find him with a harness… Which is what didn't make sense in your report…" She pointed to the inventory list of personal effects and asked, "My field supervisor told me the guy had on a ripped jumpsuit and a pretty serious harness rigging, but there's no mention of it here."
Sara's shock must have been obvious to everyone in the room because Stephanie felt compelled to ask her about it. "What is it, Sara?"
"What harness? There's nothing in the report about a harness." She started flipping through their notes and Nick tried scanning through his mind about the case. They both came up empty in regards to a harness on the body. "Was there a harness when he got here?"
Stephanie picked up her own report and skimmed over the inventory of items that had been removed from the corpse. When she found nothing, she went to her office and started looking through a binder on the file cabinet. The next thing they heard was her own brand of exclamation with the slamming of the binder. "Son of a motherless sheep!"
When the coroner re-entered the room, the scowl on her face was more than enough of an indication that her good humor had turned off, but when she picked up the phone it was confirmed in her voice. "Judy?... Would you please get that worthless excuse for a human being, Talbot, back here ASAP. And then get Doc Robbins on the horn for me, please?"
Sara watched her with apprehension as Stephanie grabbed at the back of her neck and stretched her chin up in the air in an attempt to ease the tension that had obviously landed there. "Problem?"
"Yeah, bonehead Talbot cut the thing off and dumped it in the waste bin for incineration. Didn't want the decomp smell in the room." Stephanie's head shook with her frustration, "Luckily, Ricky noted it in the inventory register."
The doctor seemed somewhat amused and hazarded a comment about the situation. "Do things always run this smoothly around here?"
Stephanie's half-hearted smile was almost feral when she said, "Only on the weekends… For the moment." Her last remark was dripping with the threat of danger. And since she had become, by default of attrition, the second most senior coroner in the morgue, that danger was very real.
Sara took that as her opening for their request and she jumped in head first. "So, as you can see… We're dealing with a serious learning curve because of the previous team's deficiencies. And we were really hoping to be able to get back out to the scene to try and salvage this case."
"And you already heard from my assistant that the sight was closed and you'd need my expressed permission to go out there, right?" The woman was quick and to the point.
"Yeah, and look I know that this is a huge imposition for your team, but we really need to get this one closed. So any help you could provid-"
"No need to beg… My assistant and I are planning a trip out there for Wednesday morning to repair some of the equipment that was damaged in that last storm, and to fix the mess left by your people." She added her last comment with a dark look fixed on Nick.
Nick had purposely remained silent through the entire exchange, in an attempt to keep from getting on the woman's bad side any further. However, with her pointed look in his direction, he knew that had failed completely and it was time to come clean. "We'd be happy to assist in any way we coul-"
"Highly doubtful, but you are both welcome to ride out there with us to get what you need." She withdrew a card from her jacket pocket and handed it to Sara with her left hand. "Be there no later than seven AM, and dress appropriately. It's rough terrain and we'll be out of range of most everything out there, especially cell service." She returned the briefcase to the scooter's basket and then had another thought, so she added, "And we don't have the capacity to pack out invalids. That's what the rangers are for." Her gaze was squarely set on Nick as she spoke that last line and he felt the chill of her words.
He listened, with his head down, as the scooter whined out of the Autopsy Room.
Stephanie was the first one to speak, after she heard the familiar bell of the elevator doors closing, "Damn! I know it's the morgue and all… But THAT was cold."
"Right," Nick had no snappy comeback for Stephanie's analysis of the situation and chose to leave it at that.
Thankfully, Sara came to his rescue. "So, did she have any other insights into the case before we got here?"
Stephanie seemed to be shocked back into reality with a start and she immediately grabbed for her notebook. "Yeah, in fact she thought that your primary is probably about two hundred feet up from the base of the ravine, based on the plant matter we found in the vics wounds. And the soil samples seemed to confirm it as well."
Sara took the notebook from Stephanie and looked over the notes the coroner had made. When she came to something of interest she handed it to Nick while pointing at the item. "What's this about the mottling from the exposure?"
"Oh yeah." Stephanie slapped her forehead in an all too familiar gesture. "She said that based on their data, there's no way there would have been such a significant risk of exposure, based on the presentation on the body. It would have required substantially lower temperatures to have caused the mottling we saw on the extremities."
"What data are they using?" Nick had finally recovered enough to participate in the conversation.
Stephanie handed him a printout showing temperature, barometer, and dew point, as well as wind direction and velocity readings from six different weather stations. "They have a bunch of weather stations set up in the area surrounding the site to gauge what really happens over the course of their research in terms of weather. And from their data, there weren't any temperatures coming even a little close to being able to cause the kinds of exposure damage to the tissue on this body."
Sara was looking over Nick's shoulder to see the data in question. "So, what you found in the autopsy shows a more drastic form of exposure?"
"Yeah," she reached over the table and removed a folder to hand to her before continuing. "I found indications of third degree frostbite along the extremities, and that there was enough time for thawing to begin before the TOD."
They both looked through the coroner's notes, but Nick was still a little confused. "How can you tell this guy had started to thaw?"
The coroner walked closer to the two CSIs and turned the pages of her report to a series of photographs detailing the area of frostbite. "You can see here that the swelling and hemorrhagic bullae had already begun to form in places." Stephanie then turned to another page and said, "And then there's the opacification of the corneas."
Nick was shaking his head at that symptom and commented, "Yeah, but that happens when the body has been out there for so many da-"
"Completely different pathology… This is the kind of thing that happens during exposure to extreme temperatures while the heart is still pumping, and not the simple clouding that occurs post-mortem." Stephanie was quick to shoot him down on his supposition.
"Well, the only thing this is accomplishing, is giving us something to work with once we have some kind of idea what the hell happened out there." Sara grabbed up all the reports and turned back to thank the coroner. "Thanks for calling us down and this," she held up the autopsy report, "but it looks like me and Nick have a lot of video and trace to wade through tonight."
Sara and Nick were already walking out of the room when Stephanie called back to the pair. "Glad I could help." They were about to push through the doors when she turned back and said, "Hey, do I need to bring anything Saturday night?"
"You're still making the dessert right?" Sara turned back to face the woman with her question as Nick watched the exchange with interest.
"Yeah, Linds is coming by Friday afternoon to help me, and to stay out of her Mom's hair. But I've gotta work some Saturday, so I wanted to make sure Thomas knew what to have ready before he picks me up."
When she spoke, Sara noticed that Stephanie seemed even more tired than she did up in the Break Room earlier, so she made a mental note to bring it up to her later. "Nah, I think we've got everything else under control, since we still have your serving platters from the last time."
Stephanie laughed and said, "Yeah, and obviously I've really missed 'em, seeing as I hadn't even thought about it since I loaned them out."
"Awright… I've got sisters and I know where this conversation is goin', so I'm outta here." Nick pushed through the door and left Sara and Stephanie laughing at his parting remark.
"I better follow him, see ya later." Sara finally left the room and Stephanie took a seat on the stool by the table and got back to work.
She sat there for a few moments, until the silence became too much. "Okay enough with that nonsense." She picked up the remote control beside her on the table and the room was suddenly filled with the sounds of Bizet's Carmen. "Should've figured it out when I always liked the murder scene best."