As the day progressed, the investigation unraveled the tangled threads of the McBrides' disappearance. The ATM receipt led to the identification of three teenaged suspects and a search of the boat they'd taken out Friday night revealed plant matter that placed them at the McBrides' home and trash bags that explained the lack of blood on the boat. Fingerprints on the cough medicine bottle under Cassie's bed came back to one of their three suspects: Cassie's swim coach.
Sara, Nick, and Grissom were watching through the observation window at the local precinct as Sheriff Brackett interrogated their swim coach suspect, when Nick's phone buzzed. Sara leaned toward him, and Nick tilted the phone so they could both see the photo from Archie as it loaded slowly.
It took Sara a moment to process what she was seeing – Cassie McBride in the back seat of the car, her head in their suspect's lap, sucking her thumb. She had been alive when she left the house, alive when they went to the ATM for cash leaving the dead bodies of her entire family cooling on the floor of their home.
Before Sara could formulate a response, Nick was pushing past her, through the door to the interrogation room.
In the blink of an eye, his hand was in their suspect's hair, jerking him back, his other hand slamming down the suspect's arm, drawing attention to his bruised knuckles. "How'd you hurt your hand? What's the matter? She fight back? You tried to drug her, but guess what? She was too smart for you!" Nick's voice was full of vitriol, his words coming so fast they barely made sense. Everyone was frozen, caught off guard by this sudden outburst.
Nick's face was inches from their suspect's now, his whole body trembling with anger. "You coach the little girls' swim team because you like to watch them in their bathing suits. Is that it?"
Then Nick was dragging their suspect from the chair, slamming him against the wall, screaming in his face. "You're going to answer me right now! No more screwing around! Where is she? Where is she! Where is she!"
Grissom was through the door in a flash, and Sara watched as he pulled Nick from their suspect, holding him back with a hand to his chest. "Take a walk, Nick," Grissom said, tilting his head toward the door.
Nick shrugged off his touch, and stalked out of the room. Brackett said nothing, but escorted the suspect back to a holding cell, leaving Grissom and Sara alone in the interrogation room.
"He's on edge," Sara said softly. "He thinks she's still alive. He wants to rescue her."
Grissom raised his eyebrows. "He's too close to this. I'm going to take over lead. He can-"
"No," Sara said, cutting him off.
Grissom looked at her incredulously. In the six months since their relationship had progressed to…whatever it was now, she had been careful not to blur the lines between home and work. Though it wasn't unusual for them to discuss cases off the clock, when they were at work, she never used their relationship to curry favors or assert influence over his decision-making process.
"Let me talk to him," she countered. "We've all gotten emotional with suspects. He doesn't need to be reprimanded. He needs…our support."
Grissom was quiet for a moment, but he held her gaze, and she knew they were both thinking the same thing.
She knew better than anyone else on the team how the seeds of trauma could bloom into emotions that were hard to control. She knew also that no one was more deeply injured by those trauma responses than the person lashing out. She couldn't begin to count the times she had berated herself about her actions at a crime scene, about her inability to cope with the emotions that overwhelmed her.
A year ago, she had nearly lost everything – her job, her career, her home, her family – because she couldn't control her emotions. It was only Grissom's intercessions that had saved her. And in the following months, his gentle, quiet support had sustained her, helping her find the diversion he had been telling her she needed for years. She still felt her cases deeply. She knew she always would. But the darkness didn't swallow her the way it used to.
"I think…he needs to do this," Sara said finally, breaking the silence between them. "I think he needs to be the one to lead this investigation. Whatever the outcome."
"I know he thinks that," Grissom said. "But if it's too much for him, if he's too personally involved, that's not good for the case…or for him."
Sara nodded, hearing his subtext loud and clear. He had spent years trying to protect her from her demons.
"Let me talk to him," she said again. "Let me make sure he's okay. He'll be honest with me. If he's not okay, I'll tell him to take a step back. Let you take over. If he is, I'll remind him that he needs to keep his cool."
Grissom hesitated again, but Sara could see him softening. "Don't punish him because you're trying to protect him," she said softly. "Let him decide what he's strong enough to handle."
"Okay," he said finally. "I trust your judgment. But let me know if he needs to tap out."
She nodded in agreement, and for a moment, the air between them crackled with emotions. She darted a glance automatically at the open door to the busy hallway and then to the two-way mirror that hid the observation room, before letting her gaze settle on him again.
"Go ahead," he said softly, his voice the gentle caress he couldn't afford to risk. "I'm going to check on Greg and call Archie. You go with Nick to the lake. If you need me, call."
"Okay," she said softly. "I'll see you later."
She slipped out of the room, and made her way quickly to the parking lot, where Nick was standing beside their Denali, talking animatedly on the phone to someone from the Las Vegas search and rescue team about meeting them at the marina where their suspects took the boat out Friday night.
Nick was quiet on the drive to the boat launch, but the anger seemed to have gone from him. At the dock, they were met with the full force of the local law enforcement community. Sara arranged for the two of them to join the crew boarding the LVPD search and rescue boat, and watched as the officers on deck loaded the sonar and video equipment they would use to search for bodies to recover. Meanwhile, Nick canvassed the local officers to see if they had any new information.
Sara straightened as Nick headed back her way.
"Okay, my guess is the guys stopped at the ATM to get cash for gas. That's cash only," he said, nodding his head in the direction of a lone gas pump where a marina employee was gassing up a small fishing boat. "And Eddie over there says he filled the tank to the top Friday night."
Sara nodded, processing that information quickly. It fit with everything they had discovered so far. She also knew that before they went out on that boat to look for bodies, she needed to touch base with Nick. He looked calm and cool and focused now, but she was concerned with how he would react when they found what they were almost certain to find at the bottom of the lake.
"Can I talk to you?" she asked gently.
"Sure, what's up?"
"I think I need to talk to you about what happened at the station," she said, and she watched his face fall, guilt creeping around the edges of his grimace.
"Oh, well…." he said, his voice trailing off. She watched him reach for an explanation or apology, and interrupted before he could say any more. She didn't want an apology. She just wanted to make sure he was okay.
"I'm slightly concerned about its effect on the case, but more than that, I'm concerned about this case's effect on you, Nick. And I'm absolutely sure that six months ago, you wouldn't have lost it like that."
"I know," he said, his face serious, his voice quiet and filled with shame. "I'm sorry. I apologize for that."
Sara held his gaze for a long moment, letting him see her lack of censure. She thought again of the darkness that had threatened to consume her last year, and how hard it had been to battle back from the edge. She didn't want that darkness to swallow Nick. His light had shined on her for years, and now she needed to make sure he knew he had someone in his corner, someone who was watching out for him. Not to save the case from him, but to save him from the case.
"How much gas was left?" she asked finally, putting this conversation behind them and refocusing their attention on the case.
Nick's face spread into a wide smile, and she knew he understood and was grateful for both her intercession and her grace. "Three quarters of a tank," he said. "It took an eighth to get out there and an eighth to get back, and according to the gas mileage on the Locke's boat, it would have been about three miles out from the launch point."
Sara took a step forward, following Nick to the boat, and felt something squish under her boot. She lifted her foot, and slowly peeled the wrapped piece of Bubblicious gum from her treads. It was the same gum Cassie chewed; the same gum Sara had found on the boat when it was still parked in the Locke's driveway yesterday; the same gum Nick had found in Cassie's room.
Sara had been skeptical when Nick asked her yesterday about the gum. She had been convinced it was a coincidence, and that Nick was grasping at straws when he told her thought Cassie was leaving a trail of gum as clues, like a modern day Gretel hoping to find her way home. But now Sara wasn't so sure.
"Nick," she said, drawing his attention and holding up the flattened piece of bubble gum.
He grinned, and she saw the light of hope brighten in his eyes.
They found them an hour later, bodies wrapped in plastic trash bags but faces exposed. They were weighted down with a boat anchor, upright at the bottom of the lake like a grotesque version of the underwater tea party Sara used to play with her neighbors at the public pool when she was a little girl.
Three times they had scanned the area, looking for a fourth body. But Cassie was nowhere to be found. The bodies were sent back to the morgue in Vegas, where Warrick was waiting along with Doc Robbins and Dave, all other pending autopsies waiting while these were given the highest priority.
While they waited for the results, Sara and Nick reconvened with Grissom and Greg for an early dinner on the patio of a local Mexican restaurant.
It didn't take long for them to exchange their latest findings, and then conversation lapsed and they fell into a comfortable silence. It was late afternoon, a time when they would all normally be sleeping, their internal clocks off kilter.
Sara felt eyes on her, and looked up to find Grissom watching her. She gave him a small smile, lips pursed for just the briefest of moments.
Nick was antsy, unwilling to stop the search for Cassie when he believed the clock was ticking, every moment that passed one minute closer to being too late. Finally, he and Greg left, headed back to the station to check in with Brackett and his men, to see if they had been able to glean anything more from their interviews with the two teenaged suspects sitting in lockup.
Once they were gone, Sara smiled at Grissom again, an easy, intimate smile she didn't have to hide. He smiled too, slow and lazy, and she found herself wishing they were back in Vegas, half asleep, wrapped around each other in the hazy glow of his darkened bedroom.
He slid his hand forward on the table, past the communal bowls of chips and salsa, and grazed his thumb over her hand, and she knew he was wishing for something similar. Their eyes locked, and she could feel the ghost of his touch across her body, his lips against her neck.
She withdrew her hand from his slowly, not a rejection, just a return to their current reality, and he nodded slowly once, acknowledging their need to be circumspect in public.
"How's Nick?" Grissom asked finally. "You talked to him?"
"He's okay," Sara said, nodding. "He apologized for his outburst. He felt bad. He was calm and professional on the boat. This is going to be…one of those cases for him. But he's going to be okay."
Grissom nodded. They all had those cases. The ones they still remembered years later when most cases had blurred into a sea of names and faces and alibis and motives. The ones that haunted their dreams. The ones that shaped who they were.
She had her cases, and she knew Grissom had his.
She had a flash of him, a few years younger, hair just barely gray at the temples, shoving a cart of evidence vials across the floor of the DNA lab, and Greg, still years from being a CSI, nodding in stunned agreement as Grissom snarled that until his case was solved, Greg would work no other cases.
Sara had watched the incident with her heart in her throat. She had been on the phone with Grissom when the dogs had alerted, and he had run after them, the call still connected but their conversation long forgotten. She heard later, not from him but from a cop who had been on the scene, that Grissom had been the one to lift the tiny baby's body from where it had been been wrapped in a blanket and laid to rest on the neighboring golf course, and that he had cradled the baby tenderly in his arms as he carried him to the coroner's van.
"I'm worried about how he'll react when we find Cassie's body," she admitted softly. "Not in the moment. I think he'll keep his cool. But I'm worried about what it will do to him."
"You're assuming we're going to find her body," Grissom said with the lilt in his voice that always took her back to their early years when he was her teacher, her mentor, passing down his wisdom as he nurtured her raw talent.
"You're not?" she asked, surprised.
He shrugged. "The evidence is still out. We have no blood. She was alive in the ATM photo."
"But…" she said. "They murdered her whole family. Surely they wouldn't just…."
Grissom shrugged again. "Follow the evidence. You're worried Nick is making assumptions, but you're not exactly approaching this with an open mind."
Sara was quiet for a moment. She took a sip of her water, and considered his gentle reproof. A little tickle of hope fluttered in her chest, and for just a minute she allowed herself to imagine them finding the little girl alive and unharmed.
Then reality descended on her, and she smiled sadly and shrugged. "I guess we'll see."
"I guess we will," Grissom said gently, and she wished again for just a moment alone with him somewhere safe from prying eyes.
She glanced around the mostly empty patio, before returning her gaze to his, her smile morphing into a smirk. "When this is all over," she said quietly, "you owe me breakfast. Don't go thinking this dinner counts."
He smiled, that crooked, half-hidden grin that she loved. "I wouldn't dream of it, my dear," he said with a wink.
Her heart leapt in her chest, the way it always did when he was sweet and affectionate with her, and she could feel her cheeks warm with pleasure. Grissom continued to smile at her silently, and she knew he could see the way he affected her and was delighting in her reaction to his flirting.
"We should go back to the station," she said reluctantly. Grissom nodded and reached for the check their server had left. Together, they walked to the register, where he paid the tab, and then out into the bright Nevada sunshine.