A/N: This is a sequel to my AU story "A Beautiful Crime". Story takes place towards end of season six.
Pairing: Gil/Sara
Rating: Mature T. If I think it's crossing into M territory, I'll pre-warn.
Warnings: Murder, profanity, violence, adult situations and relations…the usual.
Summary: Sara goes looking for closure, which forces her to confront a secret she's been hiding for twenty years. Meanwhile, a killer emerges that threatens the life she's made for herself.
Prologue:
The door of the air ambulance opened immediately after landing on the roof near the Emergency Room of Desert Palm hospital. The EMT, Hank Pettigrew, was on top of the patient, working frantically to keep the heart beating as he performed CPR. A woman's hand was gripping tightly the hand of the patient. Turning to her, Hank had to yell over the whipping propeller blades, "You have to let go!"
Medical staff had been waiting for the medevac and were rushing to get the stretcher out the moment it arrived. The woman's hand finally let go and Hank didn't stop performing CPR as the stretcher was pulled free of the ambulance, legs extended, and then rushed down the winding walkway into the elevator bank.
Information about the patient was called out to the doctor waiting in the hallway outside the elevator as the doors opened on the first floor. Hank said, "Male, 49 years old, gunshot wound to the right chest cavity. Puncture of the right lung. BP 122 over 79. Incubated, V fib enroute. He's lost a lot of blood, O Positive—"
"Get him into Operating Room 2," the doctor called out as the stretcher was rushed down the hall to the operating room as he went to scrub up.
The IV bags were injected, senor pads placed on the patient, and Hank notated the heartbeat. "We need a crash cart!" he said as he looked down at the bloody face and body of Gil Grissom.
He climbed off of Grissom's body as the nurse approached with the shock pads of the defibrillator. They had to shock him three times to get his heart going. It started beeping at 71 and he moved aside as the doctor rushed in.
Backing out of the operating room, he turned and saw down the hallway Sara Sidle. Hank removed the bloody gloves and threw them away in a biohazard bin and then started her way. She'd been in the medevac with them and hadn't wanted to let go of Grissom's hand.
Sara was relatively okay except for some cuts and abrasions on her face and a knife wound on her right arm. Stopping in front of her, Hank said, "You need stitches—"
"How is he?" she asked. She was still in shock.
"The doctor's with him. Sara, come with me," he said as he took her by the arm and led her over to an empty triage room.
It was three in the morning, very early and not surprisingly the hospital's emergency room was mostly empty. He grabbed a cart and pulled it over and then went about getting everything he needed to stitch her wound. She was watching him as he sat down.
"What are you doing?"
"I told you. You need stitches. And some butterfly band-aids on your face."
"Isn't there a nurse or—"
"I'm certified," he told her before removing the bandage he'd applied enroute. As he cleaned off the area around the wound, he asked, "What happened?"
She shook her head as she stared out the door, trying to see down the hallway to the operating room.
"Sara?" Hank's eyes were full of concern as he asked again, "What happened?"
Looking down at the slice across her right arm, the blood on her hands, she felt herself go numb. What had happened? "Chaos."
A man stood in the hallway and watched as EMT Hank Pettigrew talked with a female nurse behind the counter at Desert Palm Hospital. Hank had just brought in two patients: Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle. It irked him that Grissom was still breathing. He'd thought he'd delivered a fatal shot to the chest, apparently that hadn't been the case. With any luck, Grissom would die on the operating table. If not, then, he'd deal with him later.
Right now, he had his eyes focused only on one man between him and what he wanted. That man was Hank Pettigrew. Hank and Sara had dated, been lovers, and it angered him that she had spread her legs for him. She'd gone to Las Vegas and had done exactly what he told her not to do: become a whore. Just like all the whores on the streets.
Hank spotted him as he turned to leave. Holding his hands up, he said, "I don't want a fight—"
He smiled as he shrugged, saying, "It's all good. Actually, I was hoping to talk in private. If Sara told you anything about what happened out there in the desert, I need to know."
"Uh, yeah, sure, okay. We can, uh…" Hank searched around the floor as he led him down the hallway to an empty patient room, "talk in here."
Walking in behind Hank, he shut the door and locked it. Facing the man who'd had sex with his girl, he felt the anger surge up into his chest as he unclipped his Kershaw Leek pocketknife from his belt and palmed it.
Hank was telling him, "Sara didn't tell me much of anything about what happened. It was dark and she was hit in the head almost immediately. I think she might be suffering from a mild concussion."
Most would go for the neck, the carotid artery, but it sprayed when severed. It was quick, and he wanted a quick death for Hank Pettigrew, but also something less bloody. He couldn't leave that room with blood over his face and shirt.
The cephalic vein was in the top right side of the chest, above the pectoral muscle. A horizontal cut to the outer side of the pectoral and out to the arm would sever the cephalic vein which would bleed profusely, and it didn't spray when severed. He would take out the trapezius muscle in the shoulder first with a quick slice between the right shoulder and neck to prevent him from using his right arm. Then the cephalic vein.
"She said that Grissom and the attacker struggled for a gun…Somehow she got cut with a knife—"
Once he closed the distance between them, with Hank stepping back into the counter he'd been in front of, he hit the button that unleashed the blade. It was easy and quick; so quick that Hank didn't even realize what was happening until it was too late. Until he tried to reach out to stop him, or to fight back, but couldn't as his shoulder no longer have the ability to move. As blood poured from the severed vein, his eyes rolled back as he swayed and hit the floor. Rapid blood loss from the shoulder and chest wound would kill him in minutes.
Leaving Hank lying in a pool of blood, the killer cleaned the knife blade off in the sink, dried it off with the towels, and then left the room.
He had a date with Sara.
TBC…