His hands were still on her sides. Where they had sunk after realizing the deer's head was just a plaque. Sara sighed, and leaned her head back on his shoulder. For a moment or so, he felt hazy, as if he wanted to mirror the movement.

But then she spoke, and stepped away to examine it closer. "A hunting family?"

He looked down at his hands, and rubbed his fingertips together. "Yeah. That's what I'd say."

She knelt down by it, and appeared to smile up at him in the dim light as she set her flashlight down, and applied gloves. "Something you did a lot of in Texas."

A horrible sensation settled in his stomach, as he realized he'd forgotten about his family happenings almost entirely in the last hour. But he nodded... and answered her question with a verbal "yes".

She nodded, too, in acceptance, and brushed her fingers closely on the antlers of the deer trophy... Since she seemed to have it very well under control, he decided to look for a discovery he could call his own.

But even his own footfalls unsettled him. There were no other noises anywhere nearby. The only window in the room did not face out to the front yard, where the officer was waiting, presumably on guard. There were slight flashes of the rotating police lights, illuminating the yard every time the bulb spun, but it only served to make the creepy place look even creepier.

At least, that's all it did at first... But then, as he went to step away from the window, he saw it: a little dent in the decaying wood of the sill. He stole a glance over at Sara, who was studiously dusting down the deer trophy for prints, and undid the velcro strap on one of his vest pockets to access a pair of his own gloves.

Setting down the kit on the floor of the attic-made-bedroom, he accidentally uncovered something else: a hollow sound from within the floor. He squinted at it, and tried again by lifting and dropping his kit several times on the same spot. In the window, the reflection he could see of Sara looking up, and her grinning at him somehow diminished the ridiculous feeling he felt. Perhaps, he thought, it was because they remembered Grissom doing similar things when he'd thought he was on to something...

But it had always worked for him, and it worked for Nick, too. Beneath the kit, there was a hole. Large enough for a finger to fit. And when he slid his own finger inside, it lifted as effortlessly as a handful of sand.

"Uh, Sara...?"

She must've found something good; her voice was light and willing. "Yeah?"

"Take a look at this." And her chin was at his shoulder in seconds.

It was a toolkit. Propped open, and loaded with tools that were covered in a red, smokey-looking fluid bearing a lot of similarity to blood.

Sara sighed. "What the hell...?"

Nick shrugged the shoulder she hadn't put her chin on. "Couldn't tell ya. Yet..."

He took a sample of it from the wrench with a swab, and drenched it in a drop or two of that all-revealing chemical concoction he was so grateful had been invented before he'd gotten into the work...

And it did, indeed, turn the swab purple. "Blood."

Sara sat back, and removed her gloves from her hands with a snap. "What was this, a horror movie setting?"

Nick shook his head, more in disgust than in answer to her. "It was something... And God only knows what..."

Her toothy smile was visible in the light that rested on the floor. "You really believe that?"

"Sure," he answered simply. "I think I've expressed as much before... But either way, we've got a situation on our hands. We've–"

"Nick!" she whispered sharply.

"Yeah, I know... I still need to–"

"No, no, no... Nick."

He leaned back a little, and observed her for a clue about the suddenly conspiratorial look that had taken up on her face. And she was pointing right up at the window; that ought to be a good indicator... So he turned, and followed her gesture. It took a couple of seconds, but then it began to come into view.

There was something in the refraction of the yard. It was only visible with the blue light from Mitchell's squad car, but it was definitely there... Nick followed an unidentified instinct, and huddled down a bit closer to the floor. Sara did the same, and crawled right by him. He reached into his pocket, and felt around until his fingers closed on his cell phone.

Officer Mitchell answered in a single, professional ring. "Nick...?"

"Hey, Mitch, you might want to get around to the back in about a minute. There's somebody there."

It took a second before that seemed to register with the good cop on the other line. "What...?"

"There's somebody behind the house," Nick explained. "We can see them in the window from the attic. They're sitting in the bushes, and their head is just barely poking out of the top."

There was only a click on the other end. Nick sighed, and regained his feet suddenly.

"Whoa!" protested Sara. "Where are you going?"

But he was already halfway to the door. "Out to provide backup."

He heard a scrambling, and hurried footsteps that slowed as they came closer to him from behind. "Well, don't go without me. Haven't we been there before?"

He clenched his fist momentarily before drawing the pistol from his belt. He didn't much care for the reference at a time like that, but he didn't answer; just tried to listen to both her following him, and whatever else might be ahead.

They were out the back just as Mitchell was around the house corner. "Las Vegas PD!" he was shouting.

The rustling came from right beside him, where there was a bush he hadn't realized was so close. He threw an arm out across Sara's front, and pointed his gun straight at the rustling figure that was extracting itself from the greenery.

"Come out where we can see you, and keep your hands in the air as soon as you can lift them without falling!" commanded Mitchell.

Whoever it was, they cussed at the bush, and continued to struggle against its brambles for a second or two more. But they sounded male... and just as Nick was beginning to think they might have found Brandon, he was surprised yet again. Just not by anyone he knew...

But Sara did. As the man came to his feet, and lifted his hands above his head as instructed, Sara edged around Nick and spoke in breathy disbelief. "Richard...?"

"Please, don't shoot! I'm unarmed," answered the man.

Nick lowered his pistol, and eyed Sara in puzzlement. "'Richard'?"

She returned his question with a knowing look, and returned to regarding the suspect. "Yeah. One of the men from the jewelry store."

"Ah," Nick replied, as if he understood what was going on.

But she wasn't fooled. She grinned, and shook her head with playful condescension. And unlike the way he had handled she and Morgan's laughing at his crashing of the lift, he shrugged it off. It was time for some questions.

"I don't understand," Sara repeated for the fifth time. "You were at a crime scene tampering with evidence, but you expect us to believe you weren't doing anything wrong?"

"No, no," answered Richard. "No, I wasn't tampering with evidence. I just knew that Clara had never been allowed to leave the police station, so I went to see if she had left anything incriminating."

Morgan exchanged a glance with Sara that almost put the latter in stitches. "What's wrong with you people?" the former demanded.

"I assure you, absolutely nothing," said Richard. "We are just trying to make a living."

"No, no, no. I mean, upstairs," pressed Morgan, flicking her head back indicatively. "You run the weirdest little store in the entire city of Las Vegas. You don't call for police help when you receive a very clear message asking for it from an elderly female customer, and you don't define removing items from the scene of a crime... to cover up your co-worker's filthy sexual exploits with a murder victim... as tampering with evidence? What the heck is wrong with you?"

Richard looked down. And suddenly, Sara felt a little sorry for him. His eyes were brimming with tears, and his sweet demeanor was betrayed by the sudden honesty he seemed to operate in. And it felt cruel to her that he was faced with a situation in which such goodhearted intentions were getting him nowhere.

"Look..." she tried a little softer. A little wearier... "It's illegal to sneak onto a crime scene at all. And it's super illegal to take anything from it. Do you understand that?"

"I am just trying to look out for my family," sobbed the broken, older man. "There is no intent to cause harm."

At this, Morgan seemed to soften up some, too. "Your family...? Clara is your family?"

"She is my daughter. Through adoption."

Sara frowned. "She called you by name when we first spoke at the store."

"It is not what we would call public knowledge. She is... well, Ms. Sidle, surely you can see, she is white. I am not. I am an Arabic man. We adopted her, my wife and I, when we came to America ten years ago."

Under the table, Morgan touched Sara's knee. Sara glared down at it for a second before urging Mr. Jaffel on.

"And, well, Clara is such a sweet girl. But she is, as you say here in this country, 'loopy'."

"That's one way of putting it..." muttered Morgan.

"Yes. I know there are worse ways of describing it, but Clara needs protection. She doesn't understand what her behavior could do to her, if she is not watched out for."

In her mind, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which she imagined on a card table by a Christmas tree for extra visual effect, were coming together. Sara blinked prominently at the shaking hands of the suspect, where a wedding ring was shining somewhat in the little bit of light coming through the high-up windows. Outside of which, it was starting to get dark.

"So, when you were pressing Clara to hook up with the old lady's grandson..."

"I was trying to find her suitable mate to watch out for her! She needs help! She doesn't understand..."

Morgan held two reassuring hands out. "Okay, okay... We get what you mean. Believe me... And we're doing the best we can, but someone has died, here. And we have a responsibility to find out how it happened. And Clara has become involved. So if you want to get her out of the picture, we need you to cooperate. Can you do that?"

Sara leaned back. Morgan had it. The saddened, shorter man nodded, and brushed the tears away from his kindly eyes, with his questionably-guided hands.

"Please tell us: what were you removing from the crime scene?"

Richard began to tear up again. He looked down, and hugged himself with both arms. "Just the plant that Clara had taken to the house with her. It was a gift from her birth mother, before she died. She has kept it with her all of her life."

Sara's frown returned. "She went to sleep with a handsome, older stranger, and she took her mother's plant with her?"

"It was with her when she closed up that evening," Richard explained, and seemed to calm down some as he again cleared his eyes. "But she left it behind before she left, and when she saw the other young man who was there, she tells me she set it outside, and would go back for it later. She was scared..."

"Wait– 'The other young man'... You mean, Brandon? The old lady's grandson?" inquired Sara.

"I do not know. Just young man with bruises."

Sara knew she shouldn't. It was against policy, in full view of the suspect. But she turned and looked at the one way mirror that served as a large chunk of the wall. Where she knew Nick was standing in wait, watching the whole thing.

"Do you know where the plant was earlier?" came Morgan's voice from the other side of Sara. "We had collected some spores from the house, and they have gone missing."

"Do not know," answered Richard, thickly accented, and with a shrug. "Just that it was there on the table when I came to get it. And then, police arrived... Can I see Clara?"

Sara leaned her elbow on the table, and let her forehead rest on her hand. "She's in holding. If you want to see her, you will have to agree to remain in holding until we release you."

The kindly man grasped at this chance with all the eagerness of a child excited to begin school, before grasping all that it would entail. "Yes. Yes, let me call my wife, and tell her where I am. Then, I will see Clara. I will stay with her."

Sara nodded, and offered the faintest, fakest smile in any recent memory of her life.

Outside the interrogation room, as they watched one of the officers leading Richard to the phone, Nick was staring in deep concentration at the back of the man's pant leg. "Did you get a look at the grassy pattern on his hem?"

Morgan blinked. "His what?"

"Hem," repeated Nick.

But when she still looked confused, Nick made a discouraging wave with one hand, and looked away, back at their suspect.

"It means the bottom cuff of his pant leg," explained Sara.

Nick looked back at her from his observations. A smile was adorning his face. "That's right. It's an old word I used to hear from my grandparents..."

The implication of such a simple statement really stung. Sara took a deep breath, and smiled back. Having forgotten until then, quite guiltily, that his grandfather had just died...

Morgan's eyes moved between them. "Okay," said Morgan. "So, what about it? His hem, I mean... What did you see?"

"There's something on it," he said. "It's not just the grass from the yard, or the wood pieces from the bush. He's got a little something black, or dark green stained on his very white pants."

Sara crinkled her eyebrows, and looked where Nick had indicated.

And there it was. "Yeah..." And then back to him. "What do you think?"

"I think we need to know what it is," he replied. "Which means one of us will have to collect it."

There was, of course, no doubt about who that would be. Both she and he looked over at their third companion without any pause.

"Me?" questioned Morgan indignantly. "Why me?"

"Because he likes you," answered Nick, simply. "And you were so good with him during the interrogation."

"Yeah, and... because you just love these people. You know you do," reinforced Sara. "And because we still need to visit Dave in the morgue."

"Right. And there's no reason to call Greggo all the way over here," added Nick. "So just go for it!"

Morgan crossed her arms. "Is that it...?" she said, with what sounded like some kind of teasing in her tone.

Sara flicked her eyebrows. "Yes. What else would it be?"

But Morgan waved a dismissive hand as Nick had done. "Oh, I suppose nothing... Alright, alright. Let me go and get one of the PD kits, and I'll get started. But I want you to know, you both suck for this."

As she left, the sound of Nick's chuckling resonated with Sara's own giggling. And not long before Morgan was gone around the corner, they set off down the same hall, except going left where Morgan had gone right. There was brief silence as Nick's gaze seemed to go everywhere. From the literature hanging on the walls to the beautifully-illuminating city outside the windows, and then to her... He seemed quite willing to go for anything.

"So, what are we really going to do?" she asked him, at last.

"You mean, while the homies are off in every corner?" he laughed, chest vibrating from behind his folded arms.

Which he had not undone at all since they had started walking. And as she realized that, another detail of him stood out, suddenly.

"Hey... you're still covered in plaster."

But he was clearly not listening. His face had relaxed into some kind of a dopey smile. He wasn't looking away, and she refused to, either. Or, perhaps, she couldn't bear to tear away from the nostalgia she was feeling... With his lighter and happier demeanor, in that moment... and the last of the day's sunlight glowing off him... he looked almost as young as he had been when they'd met. It made her feel a little self-conscious, suddenly.

"Am I?" he finally said, after she had picked at the lower tips of her hair a few times.

She smiled, and placed both hands on his forearm. "That's evidence you're wearing, you know."

He laughed once. "I suppose it is. And I better get out of it before Russell gets here."

"You and your shirts..." mused Sara.

"I guess it is a recurring circumstance in my life," he replied. "Shall I wait for Morgan to come and do that, too?"

She giggled again at his joke, and shook her head. "No, no... There was no reason to call Greg for some guy's pants, so there's no reason to call Morgan for your shirt. I seem to remember some prior experience with this, anyway. Since we're looking back a lot, lately..."

His face lit up more, with another old memory that she hoped was pleasant for him. "I think I got rid of that 'hideous' shirt almost immediately after that college frat case, too."

"Good," she shot back playfully. "It was just not working for you."

"I disagree. But what do you think of this one?"

"I'll take a closer look at it when it's mine."

"Now, wait a second, I need it back." He affixed her with a completely unconvincing look.

And she wasn't fooled. "No, you don't. And once I've got it, I'm keeping it for the rest of the case."

"Heh. I'll meet you in the locker room."

"Ooh, Stokes, you do that," she simpered in jest.

Or, well, as she watched him go... half in jest.

The air was electric in the locker room before she even got there. He was sitting on the edge of the bench with his cell phone out. Probably texting his family... He looked so very drawn out, and wearier than a marathon runner at the end of a race..

As he realized she was there, he hopped up, a little younger looking than before. And his expression changed, from wistfulness to hopefulness. In the form of a smile, that she was liking to see on him more. She leaned against the door frame, and regarded him thoughtfully. For a second, there was nothing funny, or even flirty, that she could think to say. And then it became another second. And another followed it...

So she settled on something serious, and honest, instead. "How's your family holding up?"

He scratched the back of his head. "Well... My mother's in the worst shape, it sounds like. They're wondering about me, over here..."

She lifted her cheeks into a smile of her own. A bigger one... "I bet they are. I bet they do a lot, actually."

He frowned, and cocked his head to the side. "Why's that?"

"Because if I had a family like yours, and a relative like you lived so far away, in such a dangerous line of work, I'd wonder all the time. Probably never stop, really..."

It took her a considerable amount of self-restraint to not let her own shock show. Had she really just said that? But as his grin grew from behind his beard, and he inclined his head forward, she figured he was not about to latch onto it. So she let it pass.

"Right, let's get this off me," he said.

And his hands went up over his head. Gripping his shirt at the back, between his shoulders. Eyes sort of down, but not entirely; she imagined he was looking at her knees.

"Hmm..." she hummed, lips pressed together both in pretend consideration, and in an attempt not to laugh.

But she couldn't help it. And she would later be grateful that he didn't mind. In fact, they were soon both laughing. And it reminded her: this was why she had tried so hard to loosen up over the years. Where had her grittiness actually gotten her in life? At the end of the day, she was still divorced. And she was still doing the job in the city she had sworn she wouldn't stick around in, after being called there by the man she was divorced from. And Nick was still fun. And still family, even if not literally. And still there... Still nervously laughing, because that was how they dealt with those kinds of things. The understanding of which was slowly causing her own to fade...

Yes. He was indeed still there... Standing, right where they were, on the proverbial edge with her. In the same boat that she was. Half-naked, and vulnerable in his current state, though he would never say it aloud, and she never would, either. But there.

There like no one else. Not her mother or father... or Grissom, or Catherine, or Warrick. Or even Greg, younger enough than her and Nick, both, to be removed from some understandings that they had acquired with just their few extra years. Understandings like why they laughed, in the first place...

And she appreciated it. She felt like she hadn't shown it quite like she should. But she appreciated it. And she turned her lips back up, as he seemed to register that her mind had gone on from their moment, and held his shirt out to her.

"Thank you," she said, feeling a little like it was a firecracker as it passed from his hand to hers. But the joke wouldn't be complete yet, so she clicked her tongue, and appraised his torso for a second or two. "Still fine, there, Nicky..."

"Oh, you know it," he shot back. "I was waiting for you to say it last night, actually." He jutted his lower lip out in a false attempt to look pitiful. "My feelings have been kinda hurt..."

She laughed, and stuffed his shirt into the bag she had brought. "God..."

"Well, hey: I thought you'd have my back."

"Don't I always?" She began to scribble on her clipboard, writing more with habit than with intention. "Even when you drive me crazy?"

He made a so-so gesture. "Can't argue with that. But, you know... it's personal."

"I can see that," she said, teeth shining in the little bit of sky light left. "Why else would you have mentioned it?"

He shrugged, and rubbed one hand on his neck. "I don't know. Maybe I'm just on edge..."

She looked up from her notes, and let her eyes go between each of his.

"I know you're there, though," he continued. "And I'm sorry, I haven't been much fun this shift."

She looked back down again, head angled slightly to the side. "You're distracted. I get it."

"But that isn't your problem. Except when I make it that. That's what I'm sorry for."

She nodded, but she didn't think she would like to look up again.

Until, that is, he said it to her outright. "Why do you do that?"

And then bursting curiosity made her look. "Do what? Why do I do what...?" she asked, a little hint of worry in her tone.

But his face was all intrigue. "Look away from me like that."

Her cheeks made themselves into a grin. "I do it with everybody, Nick. We all just have our ways of dealing with the little things that suck."

"Ah," he responded immediately. "Then my apologies on the double. I try my very hardest not to suck."

One hand came up to his heart, and the other raised like he was taking an oath. She shook her head, and let herself share in one more bout of laughter that came over them.

"Get a shirt," she said when they were done. "As much as I've enjoyed, I don't think Ecklie would buy it if we said you were bare-chested for professional reasons again."

"What... Me?" Nick joked. "Nah." But he was already looking around, searching...

"Right there," she answered, indicating with the pen she had used. "Hanging on the rack."

"Oh... And how did they get there...?"

"I hung them there. Greg was about to throw them all in the hamper. And I know how much you hate doing laundry, so I saved them."

She had partially been kidding. But as he finished buttoning up his new attire, he looked at her like she hadn't been at all.

"Thank you so much, Sara," he said.

The sound of his voice when he was contented made her relax. "Sure."