AN: Here's the first chapter, I hope you like it. I still don't own them. Reviews are appreciated.
1 – Gone
Grissom frowned as he listened to a cell phone ring across the country. After about a dozen rings, he accepted the fact that Sara was probably sleeping and had turned the sound off so he wouldn't wake her up when he called. Sighing, he hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. He hadn't talked to her since the morning before, and he missed her voice. He would just have to get home in time to call her before shift that evening.
"What's with the long face, Gil?" A British voice wondered.
Grissom looked up at the owner of the voice, his long time friend and, at the time, co-worker, James Griffith.
"I'm just unable to get a hold of a friend." He replied.
"A friend, huh?" James raised an inquisitive eyebrow and Grissom realized that he didn't have to pretend; there was nobody on this side of the country who would have a problem with his and Sara's relationship.
"Girlfriend, actually." He admitted.
"The loner Gil Grissom has a girlfriend?" James chuckled a little as he sat down opposite Grissom at the table. "Never thought I'd see the day."
"Hey!" Grissom tried to sound offended.
"Don't take it the wrong way, I just pictured you as a life-long bachelor." James defended himself.
"She's… special." Grissom tried to explain.
"She must be." James nodded. "If she's so special, how come she's not here with you?"
"I didn't ask her to come." Grissom stated, wondering for the thousandth time since he left Vegas if he had done the right thing in not asking Sara to come to New York with him.
"Ah. Well, there's always time to change one's mind." James winked at him in a knowing way, and Grissom realized that he might do just that. He knew Sara had a lot of vacation time saved up, she could take a month or two and come stay with him. Wanting to ask her right away, he hit speed dial one on his cell again, with no better luck than before.
"I'll just talk to her tonight." He thought out loud.
"You do that." James agreed. "I guess you're expected to attend the dinner as well?"
"I'm afraid so." Grissom confirmed.
"I'm sure we'll be able to sneak you away for a little while."
xxxxx
"OK, it's a slow night, we have a DB in Spring Valley and a robbery on the Strip, who wants what?" Catherine held the assignment slips in front of her.
"Me and Nick'll take the DB." Warrick snagged the slip before Greg had a chance.
"Guess that leaves me with the robbery." Greg stated. "And, apparently, without a partner."
"Sara's not here?" Catherine looked around the break room, noticing Sara's absence for the first time.
"Nope." Nick replied.
"Has she called in sick?" Catherine wondered, and the three men shook their heads.
"I called her about five minutes ago, she didn't pick up." Greg offered.
"Maybe she's just overslept?" Nick suggested, causing everyone to look at him with disbelief visible on their faces. "OK, not a very likely scenario, I know, but there's a first time for everything."
"She's probably just sick or something." Catherine concluded. "Tell you what, Greg, I'll take the robbery with you and we'll stop by Sara's, it's on the way."
"Sure thing, boss."
xxxxx
"Sara?" Greg called through the door a little later. They had been knocking for a good fifteen minutes without an answer.
"Try calling her again." Catherine suggested, and Greg pulled his cell from his pocket, dialling Sara's home number. They listened as the phone rang inside the apartment, one time, two, three… fifteen, sixteen. Greg hung up.
"I'll try her cell, maybe she had some important errand to run." Greg pressed the call button again and waited for the signals to go through. As he heard the first beep, the sound of Sara's cell phone was heard from the apartment.
"OK, that's it, I'm getting the super." Catherine announced, leaving Greg alone in the hallway. He let the phone ring for a while, hoping that Sara had just not heard her home phone for some reason. When Catherine came back with the super a few minutes later, he hung up.
"This the place?" The super, a man in his late thirties, asked, and Catherine nodded. He unlocked the door with the master key. "Just lock up when you leave." He said before walking back the way he came.
"What if she's just in the shower or something? She'll be pissed." Greg said in an unsure voice.
"What if she's not?" Catherine replied, opening the door.
"Good point." Greg followed Catherine into the apartment and closed the door behind him.
"Everything looks OK." Catherine started, looking around the hallway and living room. "Except…" She bent down, slipping on a latex glove from her pocket before retrieving the cell phone they had heard through the door from the floor. "Why would she leave this here?"
"Maybe it slipped out of her pocket?" Greg shrugged. "It doesn't have to mean anything."
"Her keys are here, too." Catherine noted. "But where is Sara?"
"I'll check here if you take the bedroom?" Greg suggested, and was relieved when Catherine nodded in agreement. There was something about being alone in Sara's bedroom without her permission that just felt wrong to him.
As Catherine left the living room, Greg started looking around, searching for something that would tell them where Sara might be. After a while, he noticed that the answering machine was blinking, and pressed the 'play' button.
"You have one new message and one old message." A mechanical voice said before the actual message started.
"Hey, honey, I guess I missed you again. You must be pulling a double." At the familiar voice, Greg's eyes widened in surprise. He hit the stop button, effectively cutting the man off.
"Catherine?"
xxxxx
Catherine opened the door to what she assumed was Sara's bedroom and peeked inside. Yup, she was right. Walking into the room, the first thing she noticed was that it was empty and that the bed had either been made or not slept in. The second thing she noticed was a box shaped something sitting on the desk that was placed against the opposite wall. Approaching it, she felt her heart begin to race as she realized what she was looking at.
Completely engrossed in her finding, she didn't hear Greg calling her until he was standing in the doorway.
"Catherine?"
"What?" Catherine looked up from the box that was a perfect replica, as far as she could tell, of Sara's living room.
"I think we need to call Grissom." Greg stated, making Catherine frown. What had he found that would make him come to that conclusion?
"Why?"
"Come on." Greg indicated for her to follow him, and they went back into the living room where Greg pressed the 'play' button on the answering machine. Catherine was completely caught off guard by Grissom's voice.
"Hey, honey, I guess I missed you again. You must be pulling a double. I'll call your cell on my lunch break, just turn it off if you need to sleep. I have that dinner thing with the dean tonight, so I don't know when I'll be back, it may not be until late. If I don't pick up tonight, you know why. OK, so I have to go. Eager minds waiting to learn and all that. I'll talk to you later. Love you."
There was a beep and the second message started.
"Hey, I'm back from the dinner. It's only nine thirty here, you can't be at work already, unless there's something really big going on over there, in which case it would probably be all over the news. Call me if you get this before going into the lab, there's something I want to run by you. Love you."
The silence was thick for a moment after a beep announced the end of the messages. Greg was the first to speak.
"Did you know that they were…?" Catherine looked up at his un-finished question, pure surprise visible on her face. "I guess not."
"Why wouldn't they tell us?" Catherine wondered, and Greg shrugged.
"Maybe they just wanted to keep it to themselves for a while." He suggested.
"Maybe." Catherine agreed. "I'm gonna call him, after I call Nick and Warrick over here. This is officially a crime scene. Swing and Days'll have to cover our other cases, I want all hands on this."
"What did you…?" Greg didn't finish the sentence, but Catherine realized where he was going when she saw the horror in his eyes.
"No, she's not…" She cut herself off, not wanting to put the word out there. "She's not here." She went with instead, and saw Greg relax. "You should check out what's on the desk in the bedroom, though."
With that, Catherine went outside to make the necessary calls, while Greg made his way to the bedroom.
At first he didn't notice anything odd, but then his gaze fell on the box on the desk. Hoping against hope that it wasn't what it looked like, he went to take a closer look.
Peeking into the box, he saw a miniature of the room he had just left. Everything was where it should be, including the tiny remote on the table and a dead plant in one of the windows. Even, Greg realized, the cell phone was where they had found it, on the floor in the hallway. Frowning, he poked it with a pen he found in his pocket, but it wouldn't move.
xxxxx
"Great, I'll see you in a little while." Catherine ended the call after Nick had assured her that he and Warrick would leave their crime scene as soon as the other CSIs that had been called in arrived. She had already called Ecklie, telling him about what was happening and, quite surprisingly, getting him to offer the help of the entire lab on Sara's case as well as the night shift's other cases. She only had one more call to make, and it was the one she dreaded the most. Taking a deep breath, she dialled Grissom's cell number.
"Hello?" He answered in a slightly groggy voice after the fourth ring. He must have been asleep, which wasn't odd considering it was after midnight in Vegas.
"Hey Gil." Catherine greeted.
"Catherine?" Grissom sounded confused. "Do you realize what time it is here?"
"Since it's a little after midnight here, I'm guessing around three am." Catherine half joked.
"Exactly." Grissom replied. "Why are you calling me?"
"I need to know when you last talked to Sara."Catherine said. He was silent for a moment before responding.
"What do you mean? I don't…"
"Cut the crap, Gil, the cat's out of the bag." Catherine interrupted him. "Just tell me when you talked to her."
"Yesterday morning, or I guess it would be the day before yesterday by now. Why?" He was starting to sound worried.
"You haven't heard from her since?" Catherine insisted.
"She called me last night, but I was out to dinner with a co-worker. She didn't pick up when I called later, or today when I called. What's going on?"
"I think you might want to call the airport, get a ticket for the next flight." Catherine sighed.
"Why? Damnit, tell me what's going on!"
"Greg and I went over to Sara's place when she didn't show up for work tonight. She's not here." Catherine revealed.
"Maybe she just went to the store or something." Grissom suggested, reaching for any possible solution.
"Without her keys or her cell phone? When she was supposed to be at work?" Catherine paused before continuing. "There's something else too… I found a model of Sara's living room in her bedroom. It looks like it's the same guy."
"But she's not… dead, is she?" For the first time in the many years they had known each other, Catherine heard fear in Grissom's voice.
"The model is just of her living room, empty, so I think he's trying to tell us that he has her." Catherine reasoned. "But we're gonna need your help on this."
"I'll be there as soon as I can get a flight." With that, he hung up the phone.
Catherine put her cell back in her pocket and went into the apartment again. She had decided to take the model back to the lab for a more thorough search, but she didn't want to leave before Nick and Warrick got there.
"Did you get a hold of him?" Greg asked as she re-entered the bedroom, looking up from the model he had been examining.
"Yeah, he's getting a flight out here as soon as possible." Catherine replied.
"How did he sound?" Greg wondered.
"I've never heard him so… scared." Catherine stated. "Not even when Nick was taken."
"This must be harder for him." Greg reasoned.
"Yeah." Catherine agreed. "Anyway, he talked to her yesterday morning, and she called him last night, which doesn't really give us much. She didn't pick up when he called this morning, I'm not sure when. But she must have been at the lab still, since she had listened to the first message. Do you know when she left?"
"No, but she was still there when I left at eight." Greg said, returning his attention to the model.
"So she would be home at eight thirty, at the earliest." Catherine thought out loud. "That possibly gives the kidnapper a fifteen hour head-start."
"Hey, Cath, look at this." Greg indicated the model, and Catherine bent down to get a closer look. "We can assume that the guy has been watching Sara for some time, and he must have gotten a copy of her keys at some point to be able to make this… thing."
"Right…" Catherine wondered where Greg was going.
"But he must have stayed after he attacked Sara." Greg poked the tiny model of a cell phone lying on the floor in the hallway. "It's glued stuck. I think Sara dropped it when he grabbed her. The keys are also glued to the table where you found them. Why go to all this trouble?"
"He stayed behind at the first scene too, but with the Penny Gardner case, he took the model with him to fix it and returned it later." Catherine pondered. "He must have known that he had the time to fix this, that nobody would miss Sara until shift started."
"What about Grissom? How could he know that he wouldn't raise the alarm when he couldn't get a hold of Sara?" Greg wondered.
"He must have heard the message!" Catherine exclaimed. "He heard Gil saying that if she didn't want to get woken up, to turn off the cell. He knew Gil would just assume Sara was asleep."
"Does that tell us anything?" Greg looked like a big question mark.
"It tells us that she was probably taken almost as soon as she got home from the lab, he might even have been waiting for her. If we only knew when that was…"
"Maybe Nick or Warrick will know." Greg suggested.
"Yeah, maybe."
xxxxx
As Sara slowly regained consciousness, she became aware of a throbbing pain in her head and the fact that she was lying on a very hard excuse for a mattress, which didn't exactly help the sore muscles in the rest of her body. Wincing, she opened her eyes, finding her surroundings completely dark.
Where was she?
Trying to remember what had happened, she realized that her mind was one big blur. She had stayed late at the lab, it had been almost nine before she had left. She had gone home, listened to Grissom's messages and then… everything was fuzzy.
Slowly, she got into a kneeling position before standing completely up. She reached out, and found a wall with one hand. Concrete. Following it, she made her way around a room which she estimated to be roughly nine by nine feet. The walls were bare and there didn't appear to be any windows. She found a door that seemed to be made of solid steal, because the only thing she got from banging her fists against it was sore hands. Doing a similar search of the floor, she located an empty bucket. She didn't want to think about what it was for. The absence of windows, the concrete walls and the somewhat cool air made her draw the conclusion that she was underground.
What the hell had happened?