Brass walked with an unaccustomed bounce in his step. Although he was driving her to the airport, he knew he would see her very soon again. His jaw dropped, seeing what was going on between Leinney and Grissom. He broke into a run. Pushing the scientist away from her, Brass spun him around to grab him by the lapels.

"What do you think you're doing, Gil?" he shouted. To his surprise, his mild-mannered colleague stared back vehemently. Brass let him go, but stood between him and the woman who had saved his life.

Grissom waved the sketch in front of him. "Do you know who he is?"

"Don't tell him," Leinney pleaded.

"Why not? It's our job to bring him in. Do you know how much danger you're in harboring him? And not even from the court system..." Grissom's face was full of horror as he thought of the things Lecter was capable of perpetrating.

"Did you know what happened to Inspector Pazzi when he tried to apprehend him? Do you want that — or worse — to happen to Jim? Leave it alone, Wil! Leave him alone!"

"Who?" Brass asked, but was ignored. It barely registered that Leinney had confused Grissom's first name with a similar sounding name. His subconscious chalked it up to understandable heat of the moment forgetfulness.

"If he's here in Vegas, we have to get him. No one will be safe until we do." Grissom was adamant, but with ebbing force.

"Not your job. Let the FBI do it. You yourself stopped looking for him years ago. Let whoever took over after Crawford do it." She hoped that the FBI had relegated the case to the cold files, but knew that suggesting such a thing to Wil Graham would hardly help her argument.

Grissom sat down in defeat. He knew he couldn't go through with it himself; he couldn't take that awful personal risk again. "Call the FBI, Jim."

"No," she said. "I never said anything about seeing him here. I won't be able to help them. Besides, if he were here in Vegas — which I doubt 'cause it's far too vulgar for him — I bet he'd be gone before the FBI started looking for him."

"Who?" Brass was ignored again.

"But you did see him," Grissom insisted.

"Got any evidence to back that up?" She didn't deny it. Her eyes didn't deny it. But she looked at him with steady resolution. She wasn't going to budge.

He waved the sketch at her.

"From a nightmare," she shrugged. "I must have seen a picture in a newspaper and remembered it in my dreams."

"Who is this Asbestos Man?" Brass finally caught Leinney's attention.

She sighed. "When I was in college, some of the dorm residents discovered we had asbestos ceilings. They started jumping up and poking at it with pencils in protest. They figured that by vandalizing it, they'd force the university into replacing the dangerous material." She shook her head, rolling her eyes at their blind stupidity. "If left alone, asbestos can save you from lethal fire, without harming you at all. But if disturbed and airborne, it can kill you slowly and painfully."

"In other words, don't disturb him." Brass couldn't keep the patronizing tone completely out of the statement.

She sighed. "Tell me something, Jim. If it came down to a choice between catching him or preventing him from murdering people, which would you choose?"

With a niggling sense of deja-vu, Brass replied, "Preventing murder — but catching him and locking him away would do that." It was the same answer he had given to Zoë Ellismere when she had asked him a similar question. The two women were so much alike...

Grissom answered, "Many law enforcement personnel — our friends and colleagues — would die in the attempt. She's right. The FBI should take care of this one."

"No. I think the FBI should leave Asbestos Man alone. If you don't chase him, he won't have a reason to kill. Clarice..." she bit her lip, realizing she might have given too much information to Brass.

"Clarice Starling?" Grissom asked. "She was his last victim. They never found her body."

"Clarice Starling..." Brass muttered. "Wasn't she that FBI agent who disappeared a few years ago? Early career fame for catching the guy that kidnapped a senator's daughter by using a convicted serial killer's theories...what was his name? Cannibal something..."

"Hannibal the Cannibal," Grissom breathed, realizing from his long friendship that the detective had figured it out. "Hannibal Lecter. Yes. Afterwards he escaped. His obsession with Agent Starling ended with his kidnapping her along with another FBI agent. They found this other agent with the top of his skull surgically removed and his frontal lobe carved and fried up in a wine sauce. The remains of the meal were found inside his cranium, the skull cap placed neatly back on top. They never found Agent Starling."

Gritting her teeth, Leinney corrected him. "Buerre noisette, with capers and black truffles. To make Paul 'The Misogynist' Krendler more palatable for Clarice." She breathed deeply as if to cleanse her lungs of some sickening stench. "Clarice is alive and well. He fell in love with her and took her with him. Eventually, he stopped drugging her and she stayed to keep him from wrecking mayhem. Loving fascination for her keeps him occupied. Not your typical lawful solution, but it seems to work. At least the FBI hasn't seen any evidence of him lurking anywhere." She smiled grimly.

"How do you know all this?" Brass asked. It was a side of her he wasn't sure he wanted to know about, but his professional curiosity trumped his personal feelings.

"I read a lot." she replied enigmatically.

Brass stared at her, momentarily unable to form a question he could hope she would answer directly. "And what's your connection, Gil?" he turned to Grissom.

Grissom's gaze never left Leinney as he answered, "I profiled him once. For the FBI."

Brass noticed Grissom didn't wish to elaborate further. He remembered from the few times a serial killer had come under the purview of their department, that Gil was skilled in profiling. He now surmised that the bad blood between his friend and the FBI must stem from some past profiling job. Perhaps the FBI hadn't acted quickly enough in a case that still bugged the entomologist. Unwittingly, Brass smiled a little at the pun.

"There's nothing amusing about him," Grissom grumbled quite irritably.

Taking the cue, Brass quickly turned his expression down to frown, shaking his head.

"Well," Leinney said too brightly, "at least you can close one case."

"What do you mean?"

"Now that we all understand who left me in the desert and why, and that I certainly won't be pressing any charges against him, then you don't need to work on it anymore."

"Lecter." Grissom stated grimly.

"Yep."

"I'll press charges." Brass declared.

Sharp intake of breath, Leinney exhaled slowly before asking, "How? Where's the evidence? Do you have any at all?"

"No," replied Grissom glumly. "And I know he's too smart to leave anything he doesn't want us to see. But you said you know why?"

"Isn't it obvious?" She paused, looking at their confusion. "It's a test. But you don't need to take the bait. It's not worth it."

Greg Sanders popped his head through the door, motioning excitedly for Grissom to come talk with him. As Grissom reluctantly walked toward the door, Greg stole a glance at Leinney as if rubbernecking at an accident scene.

Brass's romantic feelings kept interfering with his thoughts of what he could say to convince Leinney to help the FBI catch "the Cannibal." From what he'd encountered in the professional grapevine, he knew the man was exceedingly dangerous — no local law enforcement should attempt to apprehend him but rather call the FBI immediately. However, without her cooperation, they had no information to go on. Even the mysterious Dr. Fell at BMF had turned into a dead end; all the information on the employment documents had been falsified. "Look," he began, "you wouldn't have to be involved. I wouldn't have to be involved, but we should at least let the FBI..."

"Jim?" Grissom interrupted with a strained voice. "Greg has something to show you."

"Excuse me," he said to Leinney and joined Grissom outside. "What is it?" he worried.

After a few minutes of explanation, Grissom offered, "Do you want me to ask her?"

"No," Brass replied. "Let me. We'll use one of the interview rooms."

With a cryptic "It turns out we have some evidence," he brought her to the designated room and had her sit down, while Greg went to fetch their coffee orders: black for Brass and himself and milk-no-sugar for her.

"So, how do you know so much about Dr. Lecter?" he asked conversationally while they waited for their drinks.

"I read a lot," she shrugged.

Brass noticed the repetition of her earlier, pat answer. "So why read about him, particularly."

"I don't understand." she replied flatly.

"C'mon, you're avoiding the question." With a typical suspect at this point, Brass would display anger to cut through the bullshit, but his current response was more gentle and coaxing. He just couldn't see her as anything but an innocent reluctant witness, despite the evidence that might lead in other directions.

"No, no. I don't understand him — people like him. I want to understand."

"Why?"

She paused as varied emotions warred on her face and in her eyes. It seemed to him she relived a puzzled horror of some past event, unable to bring it to words. "I'm a writer. I try to make sense of things," she offered lamely. "But, I'm not very good at it..."

"Is it because you're related to him?" he asked softly, knowing he was treading on eggshell emotions now.

"What?" Startled eyes bored into his. "I'm not..." she drifted off into alarmed speculation...am I?

"Greg ran routine tests on your DNA when we were looking at that snakebite victim from the desert. You have a rare genetic signature — so rare that the few people who have it are mentioned by name in the scientific journals."

Greg returned with the coffee and passed the cups around. Leinney sipped hers thoughtfully as Brass motioned Greg to start his explanation.

Greg's normal expression of frank curiosity was barely restrained by transparent nervousness. "I thought my samples were contaminated, and ran them again." He cleared his throat, taking a swig of coffee for courage. This lady's relatives are infamous! "Then Brass got some fresh samples to run after I cleaned and tested the lab equipment. A left-handed amino acid in your DNA. Technically, sinister — left-handed — molecules shouldn't work — that's why left-handed sweeteners don't come with calories. So I did a little research. Only a few documented cases of this Sinister DNA — in criminal archives, since that's where most of the commercial applications for DNA research are. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the international crime lord, was one of them. And it passed through the X-chromosome to his daughter, Nena Blofeld. Brass says you had an Aunt Nena?" Brass gave him a warning look too late.

"Whoa. You mean to say they weren't half-sisters?"

"Who?"

"Nena and Lopé, my mother. From what the letters said, Blofeld supported Nena's upbringing, sending her to private schools and stuff, but not my mother. Nena said herself that their shared parent was not the one that counted. So much for her Nature over Nurture argument — Lopé was the antithesis of Nena, yet your evidence says they both had Blofeld's sinister X-chromosome."

Brass continued, "And there was another left-handed individual in the database."

"Um, left-handed amino acid," Greg corrected the older man timidly.

Brass merely nodded agreement and finished, "Dr. Hannibal Lecter."

"That's interesting," she frowned, trying to puzzle out the connection. "How...?"

"Could that be?" Greg filled in the rest of her question. "Not a primary family relationship — not enough markers in common. But the sinister amino acid is there, and statistically speaking, they're probably cousins of some sort, on the maternal side of course. Unfortunately, the journals say nothing is known about the Blofeld family history before Ernst shows up, nor do we know where Lecter comes from, if that is his real name."

"Dr. Lecter was an orphan. Saw his family tortured and killed when he was far too impressionable. Both of them were orphans from Eastern Europe, but in different generations..." Her brows furrowed.

"So if you did not know about your family relationship with Lecter, how come you read so much about him?" Brass persisted.

The previous emotional battles resumed on her face before she sighed and answered, "Because of Nena. Dr. Lecter's personality is similar. I wanted to understand Nena and people like her. Futile, perhaps, but I can't let it go. Why do some people choose to be Skinwalkers?"

"Skinwalkers?"

She glanced at Brass vaguely before realizing he wasn't following her thoughts. "Sorry, I thought Lieutenant Leaphorn had mentioned the term at dinner. The Dinee — the Navajos — use the term to refer to people who deliberately choose not to walk in beauty. Traditional Dinee culture sees criminal behavior as a sickness that can be cured if the person wishes to walk in beauty, but Skinwalkers cannot be cured."

"So why the obsession with these Skinwalkers?"

Her jaw worked slowly as she struggled with the answer. "The only thing I knew of Lopé before I saw the newspaper clippings and letters between her and Nena was of a broken person consumed by sorrow. It was the reason for conspiring with nanny to save up and send them on that train trip — hoping to lift her spirits with a vacation. Later, the letters and clippings she kept tied in neat bundles in the desk revealed her as a young idealist transformed gradually by disappointment in little sister Nena's choices. Lopé sort of raised Nena while their mother was working; I think in some ways she was afraid of raising another child..."

"So, at fifteen years old, after your parents died in the train crash, you're saying you just hopped on your bike and rode from Montana to Texas just to meet the woman who turned your mother into a basket-case?" Brass checked his tone too late. He hadn't meant to turn this into a criminal interrogation.

"Cut a fifteen year old some slack, willya? It's all about identity at that age — where you come from, where you're going. Not about whether it's smart to take off on a bicycle alone with no camping supplies and barely enough money for food. Aunt Nena was the only other family and curiosity won out... Funny, I didn't even remember Leaphorn connected with that at all, but it was so long ago..."

"All right, I'm sorry. Back to Lecter, then. So, let me get this straight: you didn't know he was related to Blofeld, your maternal grandfather, nor did you realize Blofeld was biologically related to you, but yet you've read a great deal about Lecter, and he in turn is responsible for your disappearance from Bozeman, Montana some months ago and your reappearance in the Mohave foothills just a few days ago..."

Leinney stiffened, staring at the one-way mirror as if noticing it for the first time. Brass saw clearly that she was wondering who was behind the mirror watching their conversation.

"Is there any evidence to say he was responsible for any such thing?" she quipped.

"Just what you said to Dr. Grissom."

She fell silent, staring at the mirror. A moment later, Grissom entered the room and sat down.

"There's no one on the other side of that mirror now. But we have to get to the bottom of this."

Leinney stared at Brass, unblinking. He could feel the heat of accusation from one betrayed. But her eyes then spoke of deep sadness.

"'Guns don't kill people," she quoted softly. "'Bullets do.' But the Law very sensibly holds the person who pointed the gun and pulled the trigger responsible for the trajectory and ultimate destination of that bullet. And if I sent you down a hallway at the end of which I knew was a firing range, would I or the person firing the gun be held responsible for your getting shot?"

Brass pursed his lips, seeing immediately where this line of thought was heading, but not bothering to stop her. Instead, he considered any rebuttal that might convince her to cooperate. He could think of none at the moment.

"Telling you information that I know will result in you pelting down that hallway to your death, and that's murder in my book. Even if I hated you, I wouldn't do that. I'm sorry, but I cannot say any more."

"You don't know it would result in anyone's death..." Grissom tried lamely.

She now leveled her gaze on Grissom. "I do." Her terse statement reverberated quietly around the room.

"He specifically threatened, didn't he." Grissom guessed, transfixed.

She nodded mutely, holding her end of the unwavering stare with the scientist.

"Who?" he demanded softly.

Eyes glazed as she struggled for dispassion, "Jimbalaya preceded by foie-de-Gris on Graham crackers. Followed by a martini, shaken but not stirred. And a pickled onion instead of an olive." Their staring contest flickered with a profound understanding. A martini with pickled onion was called a Gibson. Or Gilbert's-son. Or the child that no one but Grissom and Zoë knew was a marble-sized entity growing inside her. No one even suspected that he and Zoë had ever had sex. At the same moment, Grissom realized why Lecter had chosen this particular woman as his messenger. She had Zoë's eyes.

Caught in horrified fascination, Greg Sanders ogled Grissom, who blanched. At no time had Greg witnessed Grissom so distraught, no matter how grisly a scene was; Gruesome Grissom never blanched. Wow!

"You need to erase that tape." she said quietly.

Grissom did not argue. He had been taping the interview, hoping to show it to the FBI and goad them into chasing down the mad genius for him. At first, he had held off joining the interview, not trusting himself not to blow it again. But now he realized that she was right. No good could come of their interference. He nodded to Brass, finally breaking eye-contact with the woman.

"She's right."

"What? We need to get this asshole!"

"No." Grissom was calm. Deadly calm. "We can't even hope to do so."

"You've gotta be joking, Gil. We've got to put him behind bars. You heard what she said — he's dangerous!"

"Yeah, and if he's made specific threats, he'll follow through if we try to catch him. He's many steps ahead of us Jim. He's beyond genius. Let the FBI keep chasing him. We're no match here."

"Listen to yourself, Gil. You! Giving up? You have made this the second best lab in the country. Of course we can get him. What's got into you?"

"He did," Grissom's soft voice cut through with the force of truth. "Many years ago. I know him, Jim. Like you'll never have to know, thank goodness. I profiled him. And he profiled me. We don't have the resources for this one. I moved to Vegas to get away from him. I sacrificed everything that meant anything to me to do so." Grissom's memory twinged with Molly, whom he'd had to leave behind. And Molly's son, Willy, who would be about Greg's age now. He now turned to Greg, sad wisdom lending strength to his words, "forget what you heard here. You'll live longer and happier if you do so."

Greg nodded obediently. Somehow, he knew his godlike mentor was right.

Before they parted, the woman with Zoë's eyes gazed at Grissom thoughtfully. "Y'know, you'd look good with a beard."