After hanging up the phone, Sara's stomach loosened considerably. When she looked up and around at the lab, it seemed brighter. Even if the sky outside looked darker, the lab did feel like the same safe haven it had occasionally felt on some of the more grueling cases. Which is not how she thought she would describe the one she was on, but still...
Morgan had gone and returned with their field kits in what felt like a matter of seconds. "All set yet?"
It struck Sara to try saying "no", just to see what kind of a reaction she would get. But she didn't. And so she soon found herself staring out the window of the department's GMC, wondering what was happening in her old lab of San Francisco... And if their cases had ever been as grueling as some she could remember in Las Vegas...
"This should be fun," commented Morgan, as they pulled in to park at the printer business. "Every step on this one has been."
"Just promise me we can run for the door if anyone comes out wearing a shawl," Sara replied.
"Right."
But the inside of the printing business was considerably less gloomy than the jewelry store had been. There were tasteful, if industrial decorations on the walls. The people were friendly enough to smile and wave, and move on with their affairs without pushing too hard. They were dressed the part, as well: suits and ties, skirts and high heels, and not a single shawl in sight, save for one of the customers setting up for a round of business cards. And she was a nice-looking, middle-aged woman. And Sara found that she was really grateful for the sight of something as normal and non-threatening as her, the more she listened to the reassuring sounds of pleasant customer interactions...
"Good evening, madams," the studly young gentleman from behind the desk they approached greeted them. "And how may I help you young ladies today?"
Sara flicked one eyebrow up, but Morgan seemed to fall right into it. "We have questions, good sir," she quickly bubbled back. "About a postcard we believe may have been forged here..."
He blinked a couple of times, and lurched his torso back in false surprise. "'Forged'?" he repeated.
"That's right," said Morgan. "Here..."
She produced the card in its bag from her vest pocket. The man looked it up and down for a moment, and a crease formed between his eyebrows.
"I... don't recognize it. But we can run it through our records, I suppose. We usually don't use this type of ink for a common postcard. And we usually only make postcards for the actual Post Office."
"Then somebody got something they shouldn't have," realized Sara. "This was found on an old lady, in this state."
"Indeed... 'Help'..." read the man. "Help with what...?"
His expression was one of mild panic. He looked at them with the eyes of a person who had never seen someone in need of help outside of television before. Sara suddenly felt kind of sorry for him.
"We don't know," she explained. "But that's what we're trying to find out. We're from the Las Vegas crime lab. We're treating this investigation as a homicide."
At the word "homicide", the masculine secretary was definitely frightened. "Uhm... let me get my manager," he offered hastily. "Just a moment, please."
His exit into the back room was very abrupt, and it seemed to Sara very inept. She sighed, and looked over at Morgan to ask for her opinion. Where she was met with a look of high school girl-like dreaminess.
"Did you see the abs on that guy?"
Sara bit her lip, and choked on her question about "the guy". She was sure she would get little more than that...
"What about the rest of the place?" she tried instead. "What do you think? On the up-and-up...?"
Morgan shrugged. "We can't see a mountain in every molehill."
Sara grinned, and diverted her gaze. Morgan was not young enough to get away with that kind of crush-driven remark, but she was young enough to get more of a pass than Sara would have. So she looked for oddities in her environment, herself... and waited for Morgan's Rock Star to wear off a little.
She took a few steps away from the spontaneously-struck blond, and ran her eyes over the lobby. She had to admit, there seemed to be a certain truth to Morgan's description of it: a molehill, perceived as a mountain. She would have expected nothing less of a printing press lobby than black-and-white photos with tidbits of printing's history written on them, and abstract pieces of metallic arts all over the side tables. Magazines of all kinds seemed to be scattered everywhere, including the latest issue of the one she had been trying to read in the lab earlier. By all accounts, there was a lot of normalcy on hand, and nothing in the way of extraordinary. Unless one counted the thinly-disguised attempts at a timeline on the walls...
"Sara!" called Morgan.
She spun around, and saw that the secretary had returned with a gentleman in a managerial-looking suit. "Oh..." she muttered to herself, and hastened to join them by the desk.
"Good evening, ladies," the manager said as she reached the counter. "I understand you have legal questions for us?"
"Not for you–" Morgan began to say.
But Sara cut in. "Yes. We think we may have connected your facility with a homicide."
"A homicide...?"
Sara indicated the postcard that Morgan had set down in front of her. "We have reason to believe that an older woman, by the name of Geraldine Samekey, may have been trying to reach out with it. In a manner that did not alert someone who was with her."
The manager crinkled his eyebrows in much the same way as his employee had done. "Reach out for help? Subtly...?"
"That's what we suspect," Sara continued. "We did some tests, and the ink used here was a match to the one on this postcard. We're eliminating businesses from the list that don't sell this type of printer by collecting samples of the ink."
The manager seemed very confused. He blinked, and regarded them each in turn. "You need to collect a sample of my printer ink?"
Sara tried very hard not to smile. Clearly, the entire place was very unassuming, and not well accustomed to the notions of real world things like murder and conspiracy. She imagined that if Nick wasn't in their line of work... and/or had never experienced the Gordons... that he would have been very much like the charming, but red-faced manager she was talking to now.
"Yes, sir," she confirmed. "I need a little from all your ink batches to compare to this card. And maybe a sample of printed material, as well. To narrow down which machine may have been used..."
He did not much care for the idea, that was clear. But he didn't argue. He called his own higher-ups to ask them, which required Sara and Morgan to patiently explain the situation to about three more people before finally being given clearance to collect what they came to collect. During the process, Morgan continued to exchange soap opera-esque looks with the young man they'd first spoken with, whose participation in the scenario was becoming more and more obsolete.
Sara kept shaking her head. But she did say "thank you" on their way out. A glance at the clock had her asking herself how that had only taken twenty minutes. On their way back to the lab, Morgan teased about the idea of quitting CSI for printing work.
"Alright..." Sara sighed, when the evidence was splayed out in front of them. "Ink or machines for you, Morgan?"
"Oh, definitely machines," answered Morgan, like it should have gone without saying. "I could use the humming sounds to keep me up and moving."
Realizing that a humming sound would have had the opposite effect on her, Sara nodded over-enthusiastically, and slid the machine sample stack over the table. They split to each end of the room, and worked with the same postcard at different computers to compare their samples to their evidence. It didn't take Sara as long as it took Morgan. But then, it didn't take her much time, either. And soon, they were reconvened.
"I don't think the machines at the printing place were used at all," Morgan assessed. "I couldn't find any comparison matches at all in here."
Sara frowned. "Really? That's weird..."
"Tell me about it." Morgan placed a hand on each hip. "Whoever did it, did it away from Pressing Printers."
Sara looked down at her own results, and blinked a couple of times. "It was done with ink from the place."
Then, it was Morgan's turn to frown. "Seriously...? So someone stole ink from Pressing Printers to forge a help message, and then made it somewhere else? Before dropping it in an old lady's bag...?"
"That's what it looks like," Sara sighed. She tossed the lab report down on the table, and leaned against the edge of it. "Someone went way out of their way to cover this one up."
"Yeah... But they haven't done a very good job," Morgan commented. "I mean, we have lots of evidence."
"But none of it goes anywhere," rebutted Sara. "That's the mark of a real genius murderer. I never told you about Hannah West, did I...?"
Morgan shrugged, and folded her arms. For a moment, there seemed to be nothing further to say. In the corner of her eye, Sara could see Morgan really grinding away in her mind for solutions. She knew she should be doing the same, but the cold air that always seemed to be drafting through the lab – and was rarely a comfortable thing – reminded her of waking up on Nick's warm couch. And how much she wished she hadn't come in to work...
"Hey," Morgan suddenly spoke up. "Wait a second... The box!"
Sara broke from her reverie. "The box...?"
"Yeah, and the watch! We never looked them over!"
Sara blinked, and growled more at the wall than anything else. "I thought you dusted all the jewelry–"
"–Yeah, but the box, itself, I mean. And the watch! The Rollex...! We should look at them."
Sara took a second to let it sink in. Then she nodded, and followed Morgan for the evidence vault with a semi-renewed sense of vigor.
"So, what are you thinking?" she asked, as they hauled it down from the shelf.
"Well, serial check never led us wrong... What if we start there?" suggested Morgan.
Sara grinned. That look Nick had always called "toothy"... "I'll start with the watch."
There was a distinctly taunting feel about the lack of sufficient evidence for a warrant. Nick sat and stared at the same notepad, over and over... He could almost see the cartoony mouth and eyes forming a smirk on its pages. Could almost hear the words of the high-pitched voices that would have been used in the kinds of things his nephews and nieces watched on TV...
"I hate you," it simpered at him in his mind.
"Oh, stop mocking me," he mumbled, and flung it off the desk he was borrowing.
It landed right by the door. But his eyes did not register Sara's foot stepping by it until she was offering it back to him. He sighed, and just allowed himself to feel the little worms of embarrassment to crawl over and off of him. He would get through it faster that way.
"Thank you," he said, and accepted the little pad. "And sorry. I've just... run out of room, here."
She seemed to think it over for a moment. It was almost as uncomfortable as the sound of Russell's old clock ticking away, up on the shelves that used to house Grissom's various oddities. And when she finally moved, it was without saying anything. She just slid one of the chairs that would normally be for Russell's visitors around, and set it down next to his. His eyes moved over to her, but not the rest of his head. She set something down in front of him.
"What's this?" he asked, taking it between two fingers. "The jewelry bo–?"
But his words were cut off. There was the unmissable feeling of a head... her head... resting on his shoulder. His eyes closed for a moment. He sighed...
"All things considered... I'm glad I got you for all this."
Part of him had been expecting another sarcastic remark. "All things considered, huh?" he chuckled.
He removed his hands from his head, and let them fall onto the desk. Sitting by his left hand, his phone shook again.
She looked down at it, and something flashed across her face that he could only think of as 'agitated'. "Is there anyway you could tell me who that is?" she said.
He thought about it for a moment... But when he could see no reason not to, he nodded, and slid the phone from one hand to the other... and then set it down in hers. She didn't lift her head, at first.
But when she'd had a moment or two to read it, she sat up straight. "Your grandfather died?"
He felt almost forty years younger when he looked over at her. "Yeah..." he exhaled. "My grandpa died..."
"Oh, God, Nick. I'm sorry..."
Her arms came up around his neck. Her chin replaced her temple on his shoulder. He returned the favor somewhat greedily. Like a dry plant sucking up water... And for a moment or two, they just stayed like that. And memories of his family... his life, in Texas, grandfather or otherwise, flooded in like water through a broken beaver's dam.
And then, there was a voice. "Uhm... I assume he took it well?"
They leaned back, and looked away from each other to the doorway. Where the voice had come from, and where Morgan seemed to be awkwardly out of place in the frame.
"Oh..." Sara said, in a hushed tone. "I don't know. I haven't told him yet."
Nick couldn't help the slight smile that came to his lips, then. "Told me what?"
When she answered him, her voice was much quieter than he could ever remember it sounding when she was talking evidence. "We found something interesting about the postcard we followed up on."
He leaned on his elbow on the desk, and braced himself for a new challenge. "Lemme hear it," he groaned.
She seemed to know what he was thinking. She laughed once before she reassured him. "It's progress, Nick. Something good, actually."
"Oh...?"
"Yeah," pressed Morgan. "We did a little research on the jewelry box and the watch, too."
He blinked, and puzzlement came over his features.
Sara put a hand on his shoulder. "The postcard was made with ink from the printing place. But not with any of their machines..."
"Yeah, in fact... it was made with a machine from 1993," interjected Morgan. "The same year as the jewelry box. Which came from Brandon's mother's place."
A sort of stun began to settle on Nick. He looked up from his knees to where Sara was sitting across from him.
"And that's not all," she added. "The hands in the Rollex were made with small, but completely legitimate diamond pieces. And they traced back to Woman's Best Friend."
It didn't take long for elation to replace the sense of discouragement he'd felt moments earlier. "So, we have it!"
He jumped up and almost ran for the door. Sara and Morgan didn't catch what he meant at first... and didn't catch up to him in the hall for a few seconds more.
"We have what?" inquired Morgan.
"The warrant we need for the place," he replied, spirits unhampered by the unreasonable annoyance over their lack of foreknowledge about what he meant.
"Oh..." offered Sara. Though she still clearly did not quite get what was going on...
Nick laughed, and picked up his pace a little bit while they went. "We needed a way to get in to Madame Challal's, so now we–"
But then, he almost ran right into the suited men by the lab doors.
"Whoa!" he exclaimed. "Excuse me, gentlemen–"
"Uh, Mr. Stokes?" one of them said.
He stopped. "Yeah?"
"Excellent. I'm Mr. Worthinton. With IA...?"
That did it. In the words of the dad from Finding Nemo – something his nephews and nieces definitely watched a lot of – "good feelings gone."