"Severe dehydration," was Grissom's assessment. He had his fingers against the unconscious man's wrist, taking his pulse. "And you're right, his pulse is abnormally high. I think he needs medical attention as soon as possible." He pulled out his phone and began to dial 911.
Sara, meanwhile, had gone right over to the freezer and checked the area where the corpse had been kept. "No signs of forced entry or exit," said Sara. She popped the drawer open, and shone the flashlight inside. "And no marks or other indications of distress from inside. Which means he probably didn't wake up until he was actually outside the freezer. I'd assume that anyone who woke up inside would probably be in a bit of a panic." She paused, thinking through the evidence at hand. "Unless it was all an act and he knew he'd wake up here." Her eyes darted back towards Grissom (who was finishing up his 911 call) and the not-so-dead-man on the floor. She sighed. "At least this one looks the same dead and alive," she muttered.
"It was not an act," Robbins insisted. "I'm not an amateur at this. I know a dead body when I see one. That man was definitely dead."
Sara began to head over to the bins of clothes that had been carefully catalogued and stored as evidence. She stopped herself. This time, she realized, she wouldn't find any missing clothes, because this time, the vic hadn't managed to run off.
"Let me guess," said Sara. "He was dead, completely, one hundred percent dead. And then he just woke up and started talking?"
"Yes," said Robbins. He looked at her suspiciously. "You seem remarkably calm about this."
"Would you imagine this is not the first time that I've investigated a man waking up in a morgue?" Sara asked.
Grissom put the cell phone away and looked at Sara with a bemused expression on his face. "Really?" he said, a hint of a laugh in his voice. Sara thought she saw a twinkle in his eye. "Would you care to enlighten us, Sidle?"
Sara rolled her eyes. "You remember three years ago, when you offered me this job, how eager I was to just drop everything and leave San Francisco?"
Grissom nodded.
"Well," said Sara. "It was because of this one case. We called it the 'Case that Never Ends'. It started off as just a normal…"
From across the room, Sara heard a sudden and loud "click."
Sara and Grissom started, looking at the autopsy table. There, lying neglected and apparently forgotten on the table, was Robbins' audio recorder. Sara could feel the grin spreading across her face, and she was sure Grissom had one on his face as well. They both dove towards the tape recorder, but Grissom got there first.
"You recorded it!" Sara said to Robbins.
"Well, of course I did," said Robbins. "I always record the autopsy reports. I'd just started the preliminary report when the man woke up."
"You know what this means?" Grissom asked Sara.
Sara nodded. "He wasn't dead when Robbins got him out of the freezer," she said.
"No, he wasn't," said Grissom. "But we knew that before. Remember? Congealed blood?" Grissom shook the tape recorder in his hand. "What this means is that our no-longer-vic was awake and aware of his surroundings from the moment that Robbins pulled him out. He was waiting for you to turn on that tape recorder; it was his cue to get up."
"He wasn't breathing when I called you," said Robbins. "No pulse, no breathing. I checked. Definitely dead."
"Just like the other guy," said Sara. "What do you think, Gil? Some sort of deep meditative state?"
By way of answer, Grissom rewound the tape a little and pressed play.
They listened as the incident played out before their ears. The moment they heard the no-longer-dead-man collapse, Grissom stopped the tape. He was looking at Sara, who had suddenly ducked down beside the unconscious man and put her ear against his chest. It looked like she was checking his heartbeat, but then she moved her ear over to the other side of the man's chest. Her eyes widened.
"Oh no," she said.
Robbins began plying her with questions, but Grissom just looked at her, urging her to go on with his eyes. She looked back at the unconscious man in her arms, and then at Grissom. And then, oddly enough, she laughed. "I came to Las Vegas to get away from the Case that Never Ends," she said. "And now, it's followed me here!" She began breathing heavily, and Grissom began to feel a bit worried for her health. "Oh, now it's all starting to make sense," she said. "Everything that Sarah Jane told me, the double heartbeat, the big blue box! Yes, it's all related. It's all the same!"
She jumped to her feet, and advanced towards Grissom. "The cover ups! The people babbling nonsense! The little clues everywhere that keep making things more complicated instead of making them simpler. And that word that Sarah Jane used—I knew I'd heard it before. Tardis. It's the same man, Grissom. This guy, the Doctor. It's exactly the same man!" Suddenly she grew serious, all the mirth draining from her face. "We can't take him to the hospital," she said. "That's what they did last time. That's what the whole thing was about. They thought it was a double exposure. They killed him."
Grissom held out his hands in surrender. "Hang on, hang on," he said. "Slow down, we can't make out what you're saying." He waited for Sara to take a few deep breaths. "Now," he said. "From the beginning. What happened in San Francisco, and what does it have to do with Dr Smith?"
"December 31, 1999," said Sara. "End of the millennium. I remember that. To put it simply, man with two hearts enters a hospital, gets killed, wakes up a little while later in the morgue looking completely different. Like, he died one man, was reborn another. Hospital tried to cover it up—that's why we were called in." She sighed, looking back at the unconscious man. "It's the same guy, Gil. I'm positive."
Robbins began to protest, but Grissom just leaned over and began to listen to the chest cavity himself. Sure enough, Sara was right. Strong heart beat on the left, strong heart beat on the right. Two hearts. He looked up at Sara. "How'd you work that one out?"
"He said it on the tape," said Sara. "Something about stopping one heart and keeping the other going. I knew it sounded familiar. I just knew it!"
"And he did the same thing in San Francisco?" Robbins asked. "Just woke up on the autopsy table?"
"More or less," said Sara. "Scared the mortician half to death, stole some clothes, and ran out of the hospital. The whole thing was just a big cover up for malpractice. They shredded all relevant documents, dumped his personal possessions, fired the doctor who'd performed the surgery, and pretended he never existed."
"Just like the prison," Grissom mused.
"Exactly!" said Sara.
"Out of curiosity, why did you call it the Case that Never Ends?" Grissom asked.
Sara rolled her eyes again. "Because every time we thought we had the whole thing wrapped up, little pieces would come up that didn't fit. Vandalism on an atomic clock. A police officer who claimed a man ran out of an ambulance, offered him a candy, then threatened to shoot himself in the head. A young Chinese-American kid who stole a bag of gold dust, then miraculously manages to escape from prison a week later."
"And you know these things are all connected how?" asked Grissom.
Sara could hear the sirens and ambulances approaching. She looked over at the poor, unconscious man on the floor—this man who kept nearly dying. She remembered how it felt, thinking she was to blame for his death. She couldn't let him die again. She knew she couldn't.
"Because all of these separate incidents revolved around one man," she said. She pointed at him. "That man!"
Grissom looked at her curiously. Paramedics began to swarm through the room, placing the man on a stretcher. Sara draped a cloth over his still naked body, and slipped the tag off of his big toe.
"You can't just die one man and wake up another," Grissom said. "It doesn't make sense."
"It does if you're an alien," said Sara. "And, yes, I know he looks human, but trust me, I heard from pretty much everyone I talked to last time. The guy's an alien and he has two hearts."
Grissom was still not clear exactly why this made sense to Sara, but she was watching the paramedics with something approaching panic in her eyes, and Grissom knew he had to let this drop, at least for now. He gave a sigh. "Sara," he said. "Go with Dr Smith. Make sure they don't kill him again. And if you can get some answers that make sense, I think it would help my sanity."
Sara was halfway out the door, when Grissom shouted, "Oh, and Sara!"
She turned around.
"Only peal-able fruit and only sealed bottles of water," said Grissom. "Make sure everything you give him is tamper-proof."
Sara gave a small but worried smile, and then ran off to follow the mysterious man.
Grissom watched Sara go, then turned back to Robbins. His eye caught the tape recorder still lying on the autopsy table. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands.
"Grissom," said Robbins. "I have the other autopsy reports here."
"Hm?" Grissom blinked. "Yes, yes, thank you. I'll have a look at them later."
"Is something wrong?" asked Robbins.
"I've just realized," said Grissom, "that nothing's what it seems. When you can arrange the time you die and the time you wake up, when you can sabotage all the cameras and leave secret messages everywhere…" Grissom put the tape recorder down on the table, scooped up the autopsy reports, and nearly ran back to his car.
He needed to listen to the last tape. The one they'd found in the tape recorder beside Sammy's body. Because if the Doctor could decide when he'd start living again, Grissom was betting the Doctor had been able to control when he died. And he was betting it was on tape.
Something about this wasn't real. Large portions of this case weren't real. And it was the Doctor who'd suddenly turned them into reality. Grissom didn't know what to believe and what not to believe, but he knew the Doctor had done this for a reason. And above all else, Grissom wanted to know why.
Sara Sidle had just gotten off the phone with Nick Stokes when she heard a small groan from the stretcher in front of her. She put the phone away and met the deep brown eyes of the man whose death she had been investigating for the last 24 hours. He looked around, and suddenly sat up, the sheet sliding down his body. "Where am I?"
Sara gently tugged the sheet back on so that he was decent—or as close to decent as he could get—and explained what had happened. She handed him a water bottle from her bag.
"Sealed," she said. "Grissom said only sealed water and peal-able fruit. I called my friend Nick from the crime lab—he's getting you some food."
"Ah," he said. "Only the fruit from the tree that the Emperor picks with his own hands." He took the water bottle from her, eyeing it carefully. "But you know, Livia still managed to poison her husband. Coated the figs in poison, while they were still on the tree. Never saw it myself, but Gallius Cerapticus swore to me it was the truth."
Sara wasn't sure what he was talking about, but she was sure that Grissom would know. She felt a little lost, and retreated back to her chair. "Am I supposed to be stepping in, here, to correct you?" she asked. "Because I honestly have no idea what you're going on about."
The man opened the top of the water bottle, sniffed it, licked the rim, then gave her a huge grin. "Ancient Rome, Emperor Augustus," he said, raising the bottle as if toasting her. He tilted his head back as he drank, draining half the bottle in one go. "Oh, that's lovely! Haven't had real water in… oh, months now." He gave her another smile, this one no longer so manic, but a sort of genuine, sincere smile that Sara had never seen before on his face. "Thank you," he said. Then he suddenly seemed to recall his surroundings, and looked back at her, and this time she could see fear in his eyes. "Look, Sara, we've got to get out of here. This whole… hospital thing… it's not a good idea. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's really rather a bad idea. Yes, bad, bad, bad, definitely bad." He peered ahead through the windshield. "The moment we hit traffic," he whispered, "you distract them while I jostle those doors open. We'll leap out and find some place to hide, lie low until the pressure's off."
Sara regarded his current state. "Yeah, no offense," she said. "But I'm pretty sure you're not going anywhere the way you are now."
The man looked down at himself, for the first time actually noticing that he was unclothed, and a blush came across his face. He looked back at Sara. "You wouldn't happen to have picked up some pants at the morgue?"
"So you really did just wake up in the morgue and steal someone else's clothing," she said. "I'm not sure if you knew this at the time, but that clothing isn't being kept around as donation items for Goodwill. They're evidence for cases that people like me are trying to solve. Although we never could figure out why you took that Victorian costume instead of any of the normal clothes."
The man in front of her suddenly looked apprehensive. He clutched the water bottle to his chest as if it were a teddy bear, and eyed Sara warily. "Who are you?" he asked.
"I'm Sara Sidle," Sara said, defiantly. "And you, apparently, have been the biggest thorn in my backside since I left San Francisco three years ago." She could feel all the irritation and frustration she had felt from three years back flooding through her system, and she couldn't help but vent. "Every case with you, I get the same thing. DNA evidence? Crashes the machinery. Motivation? None that I can find! Witnesses? They keep turning up, but every time you ask them a question, they just say, 'you wouldn't believe me.' And the trail of bodies that follows you around!"
The man looked down at his lap, with a theatrically sad look. Like a little boy who has just been thoroughly chastised and isn't sure how to get out of it. Good, Sara thought. He deserves it.
"I should slap you, you know," she said. "But since I'm strictly against violence of any kind, I don't think I will."
"You're not a mother, by any chance?" the Doctor asked her. "I always seem to get slapped by people's mothers. I can't figure out why."
Sara felt herself calm down. She actually began to feel a little bit embarrassed about her sudden outburst, though probably not nearly as embarrassed as he felt. She remembered Catherine, and the way she had ignored the mention of Lindsey and suddenly, Sara began to feel a little sick. She looked back at the man in front of her. "So now that you know who I am, I think you'd better return the favor," she said.
The man sighed. "I'm…"
"The Doctor, right," said Sara. "Just the Doctor. No actual name? No actual identity? No actual birthplace?"
The Doctor shook his head.
"Right," said Sara. "Just like Sarah Jane said, then. Just 'the Doctor.'"
At the mention of Sarah Jane, the Doctor's face lit up. "You spoke to Sarah Jane!" he cried. Then he stopped, and suddenly, his face fell. "You spoke to Sarah Jane," he repeated, in a more subdued tone of voice. He scratched the back of his neck. "And it's, what, 2003? Should have thought of that before I made that recording. Well, I guess that explains why she was so sure that I was dead when I met her back in 2006."
Sara could feel her head spinning again, and it was just like it was back in that interrogation room, when he'd been talking nonsense to her. She got herself together, and told her head to cut out the spinning and stay in one place.
"Oh no," Sara said to the Doctor. "You're not about to start doing that again."
"Doing what?" the Doctor gave her another manic grin. "I'd offer you a jelly baby, but, well…" he looked down at his lack of clothing and shrugged. "No pockets," he said.
"Talking jibberish," Sara answered, ignoring his subsequent babble. "Acting like you know the future. Trying to convince me that things didn't happen the way they happened. Talking me around in circles. You know, I was ready to ship you off to a mental institution last time I met you. The only reason I think you're sane now is that Grissom appears to believe all your rambling is just some elaborate trick."
The Doctor tilted his head to the right, considering this. "Grissom," he pondered. "That's the second time you've mentioned something clever he's done. I think I'd like to meet this Grissom. Always good to meet clever people. Make sure they aren't too clever for their own good." He looked back at her with those deep, brown eyes. "But first," he said, his voice suddenly hushed and quiet. "I think we'd better figure out how to get out of here."
"We're not getting out of here," said Sara. "You need medical attention, and I need you to answer a few questions. I'll make sure nobody else kills you." She hesitated. "Again." She looked at him pointedly. "You know, I've seen you die twice and you're still talking. That's got to be some sort of record."
"Yeah, neat trick, don't you think?" said the Doctor. "Just… before we get to the bit where I start telling you that this is a very, very bad idea, and you start explaining to me all the various reasons you think I'm mad… just tell me one thing. How did you figure out that I'm the same as that person who was running around San Francisco on New Year's Eve?"
"Well," said Sara. "I was the one who interviewed Grace Holloway. I'm pretty sure she knew you."
The Doctor had that dopey grin on his face again. "Yeah," he said. "Bet you didn't believe a word she said, though."
Sara shrugged. "Yeah, well, when you've eliminated what's possible, you have to believe the impossible. Isn't that how the saying goes?"
"Sherlock Holmes," said the Doctor.
"Yeah," said Sara. "So go on. Impossible. I've got time."
The Doctor sighed, and lay back on the cot. The water bottle lay abandoned by his side, and he laced his hands behind the back of his head as he stared at the ceiling. "You want me to tell you what happened on December 31st, 1999," he said.
"No," said Sara. The Doctor darted his eyes over to her. "No," she repeated. "Absolutely, emphatically not. And if I never hear anything mentioned about that particular event again, it will be too soon. I want to know who that man was that visited you in prison, and why that visit convinced the warden to poison you. I want to know how you managed to plan a break-in that took place three days before. I want to know why Joseph Trudge is convinced you were in two places at the same time. And I want to know why it is that you and your friends have me scared to move just in case little mind parasites burrow into my head and take over my mind!"
The Doctor waited. "Are you done?" he asked.
Sara nodded.
"Well," he said. "Then it appears that we've reached the part where you tell me I'm mad." He looked over at her. "You still want to hear?"
"I want to hear a rational, reasonable, logical explanation for all of this," said Sara.
"Ah," said the Doctor. "Can't promise you that. Can't promise you anything close to that, actually. But, well, like you said. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And that's the correct quotation, by the way." He gave her a wink.
She just stared at him. "Go on," she said.
"Well, I sort of travel through time," the Doctor began.
Sara threw her hands up in the air, but stopped herself before she interrupted. She lowered her hands, looked back at the Doctor, and just nodded.
The Doctor let out a long breath. "Right," he said. "As I was saying, travel through time. And every so often, I meet myself. Not always looking like myself, mind you. I sort of… well, like you said. I die, and kind of… change. Like I did back on New Years Eve—all right!" he said, cutting off Sara's coming protests. "You told me not to talk about it, and I won't. But that's what happens when I die. Well, when I actually die. Didn't actually die this time, just played dead long enough that they'd leave me alone. That's why I still look like me." He suddenly dropped his voice, looking around himself. "Tell me, Sara Sidle. You wouldn't happen to know, for a fact, that we can trust these people, do you? You see, I'd feel a little silly if I were to spill my guts to you only to inadvertently let something slip that I really ought not to."
Sara looked around, suddenly noticing how very alone she was. She looked back at the Doctor. "No," she said, just as quietly. She bit her lip. "Now you've got me paranoid again."
"Good," he said. "Always good to be a bit paranoid. Keeps you on your toes." He winked at her. "One last very, very important thing. Did you find the Tardis?"
"No," said Sara. "I haven't even had a chance to look."
The Doctor frowned. He seemed shaken, almost panicked, by this revelation. "Did you find Sammy?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Sara. "We definitely found him."
"Good," said the Doctor. He looked relieved. "Very good," he muttered, as he closed his eyes.
Gil Grissom got back to the crime lab and sat down in his office, the last tape in his hands. He was just looking at it a moment, trying to puzzle out everything that it might contain. This was the beautiful moment. The moment just before you open Schrödinger's box, the moment when possibilities span out as far as you could imagine, the moment when anything is possible.
He heard a knock on the door. He put down the tape, called for the person to come in. Somehow, he was not surprised when Catherine Willows walked through the door.
"Heard you just got back from the morgue," said Catherine. "How'd the autopsy go?"
Grissom picked up the autopsy reports off the table, tilting the paper so that she could not see what was written on them. "It's an autopsy, Catherine," he said, mildly. As if the question hadn't mattered. As if none of this confrontation mattered. "How's Lindsey?"
Catherine seemed taken aback by the question. "She's… fine," answered Catherine, a little too defensively.
Grissom looked up at her from the autopsy reports. As if she were normal. As if she were Catherine. As if she were just using the brusqueness to cover up an insecurity. "Did you see her?"
"I talked to her on the phone," not-Catherine put in quickly.
Grissom gave her a pointed look. He stuffed the autopsy papers into a drawer, and folded his hands on his desk. "Catherine, can I talk to you, friend to friend?"
Not-Catherine hesitated, but soon decided in the affirmative.
"I know how important your work is to you," said Grissom. Just the same way he would have if this had actually been Catherine. "But you know, you've done this before. And you remember what happened last time? With Ed? Sometimes the best medicine is just being there. For both of you. You told me yourself, you fall too far into this job, your brain becomes clouded with nothing but blood and death. Take the time off, go home, see your daughter, and enjoy living. Okay?"
Not-Catherine eyed Grissom suspiciously, as if looking for some hint that he'd figured her out. But Grissom knew better than that. He knew that she'd be looking for that spark, that suspicion, that hint that something wasn't right. But he'd given her this speech before. And if he told himself this really was Catherine, then he could give it just as truthfully again.
Not-Catherine got up, slowly, and walked out of the office, without so much as a 'goodbye.' Grissom got up, shut the door, and went back to his desk. He looked at the tape where it lay abandoned on the table. The moment didn't seem quite so magical this time. Perhaps because all he could think about was poor Catherine. He couldn't say that he believed that there were mind parasites taking people over or intergalactic plots to destroy the Earth. In fact, he was pretty sure that the Doctor wasn't an alien, either, although Sara certainly believed he was.
Grissom frowned. This case was becoming crazier and crazier by the minute. Grissom believed in following the conclusions he made from the evidence, and he needed to think through the evidence he was presented. How much of it was real, and how much of it might have been fabricated? Grissom got out a pen and some paper, and began to make a list.
1. The Doctor has two hearts, and his DNA crashes their computers.
2. A growing number of people appear to be acting in a way that is wholly unnatural to their character, and are unable to accurately identify important cultural elements.
3. The Doctor was, apparently, framed for a murder he did not commit, found guilty despite the lack of evidence on hand, sentenced to a far harsher punishment than usual, and then isolated and tortured for three months.
4. During those three months, Dr Bradshaw had never acquired certain information: how to enter the police box in the basement, and the identity of the Doctor's mysterious visitor. The Doctor, on the other hand, also never acquired certain information: the identity of Dr Bradshaw (since he clearly was not Dr Bradshaw), and why he was torturing the Doctor.
5. Despite being skinny, geeky-looking, and easy prey for a frustrated prisoner, the Doctor apparently was well-liked. Given the presence of every prisoner's fingerprints on each of the tape recorders, it appears that each of the prisoners were willing to take a risk in order to help him out. Grissom had also figured out that Sammy had, apparently, been able to escape since the Doctor was first isolated in the medical ward. However, instead of escaping, Sammy had continually visited the Doctor and helped him record messages for Sara.
6. The Doctor is innocent of the murder of Katherine Marshal.
7. The Doctor is still a murderer (although who or what "Gallifrey" might be is still a mystery to Grissom).
Grissom reviewed this list and, like Sara, found more questions than answers. Usually, by this point, he could begin to see what had happened. But not so with this case. The case continued to unravel and get more complicated, leaving Grissom further and further in the dark.
And so much of the evidence they'd gathered seemed to revolve around those tapes. If the Doctor had faked his own death, why bother with the tapes? After all, the Doctor could just as easily have waited and given his story to them in person. Grissom assumed it was to get off of his murder charge, or maybe to receive some chance for parole. Convince a listening audience that he wasn't such a bad guy. But whatever the motivation, Grissom had a sneaking suspicion that his answers lay on that final tape.
Grissom put the tape into the player, and pressed play.
"I've worked it out," said the Doctor.
"I'm sorry?" said Dr Bradshaw.
"I said, I've worked it out. What you're trying to do," said the Doctor. "The reason you keep asking me questions you already know the answers to. The reason you keep flooding my body with poisons and toxins but always find a way to bring me back when my hearts give out. The reason you seem more interested in me than in breaking into the Tardis. I've put the pieces of the puzzle together, and I know what you want." He paused. "You want me dead."
"I believe," said Dr Bradshaw, "that you've mentioned the fact once or twice before. We have been working endlessly to rid you of these paranoid delusions."
"Oh, no," said the Doctor. "No, no, no, no, no. I said you were trying to kill me before, and I have to say, you really did a brilliant job of convincing me of that. Molto bene! No, you don't just want to kill me. You're not trying to bleed information from me, or strangle it out of my dying throat. You're not looking for information. You already have all of the answers. You just want me dead."
"And why would you come to this conclusion?" asked Dr Bradshaw.
"Oh," said the Doctor, "you see, that's the clever part. Since you've already established that you know who I am and you know that I have had nine other faces, it's clear to me that you've figured out that I don't really die when I'm dead. I regenerate. Every single cell of my body ripped apart and replaced with a new one. New, fresh, healthy body, with none of those pesky mental barriers that I can feel you working so hard to take down. That's what you want, isn't it? You don't want my ship; you want me!"
Dr Bradshaw said nothing for a long time, and the Doctor began laughing. It was harsh, contrived. Forced out through a hoarse and scratchy throat.
"Go ahead!" cried the Doctor, a note of triumph in his voice. "Ask me that question you always love to ask. Ask me again! It's been the highlight of every one of your days so far."
"You want me to ask you about Gallifrey?" Dr Bradshaw asked. "About how it felt to destroy those billions of lives?"
"No," said the Doctor. "Ask me if I feel trapped. Go on! Look at me. Restrained to the bed. Five armed guards with loaded rifles aimed at my head. Sonic screwdriver nowhere in sight. I'll bet you're itching to hear the answer."
"Do you feel trapped, Mr. Smith?" asked Dr Bradshaw, a little hesitantly this time.
"No, Dr Bradshaw," said the Doctor. "I'm in complete control. Because there's one thing you've overlooked in your little plan, one itsy bitsy little thing. And that's control. That human body you're inhabiting has all sorts of involuntary habits. Breathing. Thinking. Digesting. And so you think that all species have those same involuntary little habits. Pumping poison through the bloodstream. Allowing myself to breathe. The beating of my poor little hearts." He paused. "Or perhaps, regenerating after death?"
The Doctor gave another triumphant laugh, this one so hoarse it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. Dr Bradshaw began murmuring to some unheard entity in the room, but the Doctor clearly wasn't paying any more attention to them. "I don't have to keep living, Dr Bradshaw. I don't have to survive in order to deny you what you want. All I have to do is to stay dead. After all it's what I deserve, isn't it? That's what you keep telling me. To just give up, finish us all off, end the species now and forever. It's my right, isn't it, as the destroyer of my own world! I can finally kill off the Time Lords once and for all."
And then, there was nothing. A soft, southern voice echoed through the recording. "I think he's dead."
"Just give him time," said Dr Bradshaw. "He'll come back."
They waited about thirty seconds, none of the voices saying anything. Then, suddenly, Dr Bradshaw's voice came through, far louder than before. "What is that?" he shouted. He sounded as though he was trying to shout over some alarm, but the room behind him was silent.
"It's that thing in the basement!" shouted the woman's voice. "He must have got some sort of alarm connected to his vitals. It knows. It knows he isn't coming back. You killed him, you idiot. We needed him, and you went and killed him for good!"
"No!" shouted Dr Bradshaw, and he sounded worried now, honestly worried, the way he hadn't when he had been questioning his prisoner. There was a sudden sound like a knife slicing through meat, as Dr Bradshaw began shouting, "Regenerate! Regenerate!"
The door opened, and a new voice entered the conversation. It was the voice of Verity Cordman. "What's going on?" she shouted. "I can barely hear myself think." Verity said nothing for a moment, then there were footsteps, and she suddenly gasped. "You moron!" she shouted. "You said you couldn't make this work without him. Why'd you go and kill him?"
"He wasn't supposed to stay dead!" Dr Bradshaw insisted.
Another set of footsteps, then a sudden angry yell. Grissom recognized the voice from the tapes spread around the prison. It was the other man in the room when the Doctor had left his messages.
"No!" Sammy shouted. He sounded like he was trying to decide whether to sob or fly into a rage. "That man was better than anyone else in this miserable hell hole. He could have escaped any number of times and he stayed because he wanted to help you and you just… you just…" he gave out another angry yell.
Five gunshots echoed through the room. Verity Cordman shrieked.
"That was a real person!" said Verity. "Not content with just going all Roswell on us, you actually had to start gunning down people now."
"He knew everything," said the southern voice. "How did he know everything?"
"You know what this means," said Verity. "We're going to have to call the police. We're going to have investigators crawling all over this place in no time. We can't just cover this up. Not when human beings are involved."
"We need another plan," said the southern voice. "The Doctor was our only hope, and now he's dead."
"I'll take the ship," said Dr Bradshaw. "I'll make an escape, hide somewhere until I can find someone else."
"There is no one else," Verity spat. "The Doctor killed them all! He killed every one!"
"Then I'll find another way," Dr Bradshaw retorted. The running of footsteps echoed through the room and down the hall.
"What do we do?" asked the southern voice.
"Well, get him out of here," said Verity. "Wipe the records, delete the files. He's not a real person anyways. Just toss him out with the trash."
"And Sammy?" asked the southern voice.
"I'll call the police," said Verity. "Just don't mention the Doctor. As far as I'm concerned, the Doctor never existed. You got that?"
There were more footsteps. "So," Verity's voice echoed softly through the room. "The mighty Doctor. The destroyer of worlds. The man who wiped out his home planet. The man with ten billion deaths on his head. Just another piece of garbage." And Verity left the room.
Grissom tried to keep his composure after he heard the recording. He tried to think about the facts, the evidence, the crime scene. He tried to revise his list, to put all the pieces together. But all he could think about was Sara, Sara was alone with this madman, and when had they become so wrapped up in all this that they had forgotten that they were still dealing with a dangerous murderer? Grissom left the tape playing in the background. There was nothing of any consequence. People were still shouting, footsteps still echoing, but the chaos and commotion that had accompanied the murder. Oh yes, the Doctor had planned this all right. He had planned all of it. And how many others had he sacrificed in the name of these insane plans? When had he come up with the idea of sacrificing these other prisoners just so that he could feel oh so very smart and wake up in a morgue 24 hours later? What gave him the right to live, when the man who'd helped him died?
And Sara's still out there. Sara's still with him. And she's going to die.
Grissom knew Sara needed answers. And she was waiting for the Doctor to give her those answers. But that was all they had, Grissom realized. The only answers they'd received had been from the Doctor. And he had manipulated everyone and everything around him. He'd brought them all to this point. And the Doctor had singled Sara out.
Right now, Sara was waiting in the hospital, alone, with a madman. A man who had specifically gotten her to that point, a man who'd made sure he'd be alone with her. And in that instant, it didn't matter to Grissom how guilty Sara would feel if the Doctor died. He didn't care about Sara taking the initiative or learning from her mistakes. He didn't even care about constitutional rights or the Geneva Convention. His world, his entire universe had shrunken to Sara.
He pulled out his phone, and dialed Sara's number. He heard every ring echo through his mind, its timbre setting his teeth on edge. Every time he heard that sound, he thought he could see her, a little bit more clearly, the life squeezed out of her. The testimony from the other prisoners came back to him. The Doctor was strong. He was icy. He could make your life flash before your eyes with only a look. He was like death itself.
"Hello?"
Grissom felt so overwhelmed with relief upon hearing Sara's voice, he almost couldn't speak. He tried to make out words, but his voice would not cooperate. He cleared his throat, and tried again. Still, nothing.
"Grissom?" Sara asked. She sounded concerned. "Gil? What is it? Is something wrong?"
"Sara," Grissom finally managed to say. "Get out of there. Now."
Sara paused a moment, as if considering. "I'll be back in a little bit. We're finally in a hospital room, and we're waiting to make sure everyone leaves the room before he answers my questions. I know you said it wasn't paranoid, just cautious, but…"
"Sara," Grissom said. He felt like he was pleading with her, pleading that she see reason, that she see sense. "Sara, stop. Don't be alone with him. Just call for backup and leave."
"Grissom, I can't do that," Sara said. She was speaking in a far more hushed tone now, and Grissom figured she didn't want the Doctor to hear. "He's really scared they're going to kill him. He was that close to running out of the ambulance naked. He keeps looking around like he thinks something's going to leap out of the walls. Gil, that man was tortured because of the evidence I put forward in court. I can't just leave him."
"You don't know who that man is," Grissom countered. "There was a reason he was in jail, Sara, and it wasn't just your evidence. It wasn't just Katherine Marshal."
"You know something, don't you?" asked Sara. "You've worked something out."
"Yes," said Grissom. "I know what Gallifrey was. It was his home, Sara. It's where he comes from. You told me you think he's an alien, right? Well, if he is an alien, Gallifrey's his home planet. If he's an alien, it means he destroyed his entire planet, and everyone on its surface."
Sara paused. "You're kidding me," she said, but she didn't sound so sure.
"Ask him," said Grissom. "He said so on tape. He knew we'd be listening. He knew we'd be trying to figure it out. Sara, he worked it all out ahead of time. He's trying to get you alone with him. He's been manipulating us this entire time."
"Breathe," Sara coaxed. "Breathe Gil. Deep breaths. Just tell me what you know."
And Grissom told her what he'd worked out. How the Doctor had worked to manipulate the bars in his cell, not so that he could escape, but so that Sammy would be able to sneak over to him and organize his crazy tape exchange. Grissom explained how the Doctor figured out that he would be taken, he programmed whatever was inside of that box to alert everyone else when he died, which made Sammy rush into the room and led to his death. Grissom told her about how triumphant the Doctor had sounded when he said he'd finally killed off an entire species.
"Okay," said Sara. "Okay, you're right. I'll go, Gil. I'll just… let me just wrap a few things up here and I'll go."
"You can't be alone with that man," said Grissom. "I don't know what he wants with you, but he's been working very hard to get you alone with him. And in my experience, that's never good."
"I won't be, I just… look, I'll be there in a bit, okay? Just… wait for me there. I'll be back, I promise I'll be back. Talk to you soon!"
Grissom was about to protest, but Sara had already hung up.