A/N: A lot of the information in this chapter is inferred from reading countless Kathy Reichs and Clea Koff books. Although I could never live up to those standards, this chapter is appreciation of those two authors. I would dearly love to thank you all for reading and especially those who take the time to review. You guys rock!

Chapter 9

Grissom drove and Nick rode shot-gun. For once Sara was glad as she didn't really want to talk to Grissom right now. She kept remembering him as he was in her dream and it made her extremely uncomfortable.

They met Brass at the front end of a neat suburbia home. Brass glanced at Sara and she looked away, purposefully studying the front lawn. She always felt that Brass could see or guess more than any of her other colleagues.

"You guys are gonna love this. A team was digging a pool and the crew found more than just rocks and earthworms. Come take a look."

Brass filled them in as he led them to the back yard. A large pile of excavated dirt was piled on one side of a large hole. The digging crew was standing around it, peering in. The project manager was shifting from foot to foot, clearly annoyed by the delay.

When the CSI looked down the hole they saw a skeleton, or rather – part of a skeleton. The pool digging crew had cut through what appeared to be a femur of one of the legs. The fractured end of the femur lay forlornly at the bottom of the hole, along with the tibia and fibia still attached at the knee joint. The foot had fallen of and lay next to the piece of bone. The shoe was partly disintegrated, but retained enough structural integrity to keep the foot bones together. The broken end of the femur was sticking out of the ground about 5 inches from the bottom of the hole. The rest of the body was presumably still attached to it.

"That appears to be human," Grissom said dryly.

"That's why we called you guys," the supervisor replied irritably. "Look it took you long enough to get here, can we just please dig the guy out so we can continue with the pool? We get paid for the job, not per day if you get my meaning."

Grissom purposefully ignored him.

"Right now all I see are parts of a body, we don't even know if foul play was involved or a crime was committed. But the fact that the body wasn't buried in a cemetery speaks for itself." Grissom added.

Sara didn't much care for the attitude of the project manager.

"Surely the finding of human remains is more important than finishing a pool on time." She added scathingly.

The project manager huffed and, throwing his hands, in the air stalked off. Sara scowled at his retreating back then, looking back at Grissom she was surprised to find him smiling at her. His eyes were sparkling which made her blush and she turned away quickly, faking interest in the rest of the area.

Grissom arranged to have the ground scanned with Doppler ultra-sound radar, to identify possible areas of disturbance. It wasn't exact but it least it gave them an indication where to dig.

Because they could see on what level the body was, Grissom had the pool digging crew remove a lot of top soil with the back hew. Then the CSI's moved in themselves with trowels and small shovels. They soon revealed a complete skeleton. Most of the clothes had long since disintegrated. A few scraps still clung to the bones here and there. Once the skeleton was completely exposed they had to wait for the coroner to arrive.

The ground survey revealed disturbances like that in at least three more areas of the backyard. Those were marked off with crime scene tape. While they waited for the coroner, Sara and Nick moved to the next site and started digging. They were going to do all of the ground removal themselves this time so as to not miss or destroy any possible evidence. They numbered the sites, with the first body recovered marked as number one.

Every yard of dirt removed was to be put onto a different plastic layer and sifted for evidence. Sara and Nick were shoveling the dirt onto the plastic bags of the area designated as number 2. Grissom would collect the dirt removed and run it through the siff. It was really hard work but Sara was relishing it. She and Nick were wearing blue overall with white gumboots. They were already standing more than waist high in the grave and it was becoming harder to lift the shovelful of dirt up onto the waiting plastic. They also needed to start going slower as the body was not much deeper than they were now. The sun was just rising over the horizon, and already the thermostat was climbing. Nick unzipped the top part of his overall and let it hang loose around his waist. Sara considered for a moment before following his lead. The tight white T-shirt she wore underneath was much cooler. The sun crested over the trees and picked out the dust particles in the air, making them shimmer. Flies were starting to become attracted to the site, again indicating the nearness of a decomposing body. Grissom was taking careful note of the species that were arriving whilst sorting through the dirt Sara and Nick removed from the grave. The smell of decomposition also became stronger and stronger the deeper they dug down.

Sara deposited another shovelful of dirt and when she looked down again, three tiny bones poked through the earth. She smiled with satisfaction. This is why she did this job. Knowing that they had found a person that a perpetrator took great pains to hide, who might otherwise never have been found. There was a reward in that no easily explained.

It was human phalanges. The tiny little bones forming the toes. Now it was down to trowels and paint brushes. There was always a chance that they misjudged the positioning of the body. If that was the case, they would have to widen the hole, starting at the surface. The Doppler-ultrasound gave a rough idea of disturbance in the ground, and that's what they used to guide their dig. After some searching and digging though, it seemed that their estimation of the location of the skeleton was correct.

Sara and Nick carefully scraped away the soil from the body. Finally revealing an almost fully decomposed body. The smell from the rotting flesh left in the torso and skull cavity was all encompassing. It always seemed strange that, although some parts of the body could be nothing but bone, flesh still clung to other parts. Every dead body was different.

The various insects also lost no time in getting to work on what had so long been denied to them. The flies landed on the body and on the investigators pretty indiscriminately and Sara was forever shooing them from her hands and face. There was hardly enough room in the grave for both the CSI's to stand, without standing on the body so Sara got out to give Nick more room to take photographs of the body. She plodded down on the grass and watched him as he included the scale strips, case ID numbers and an arrow pointing north in all his photographs.

Coming up behind her, Grissom handed Sara a cool bottle of still spring water which she accepted with a grateful smile. He sat down next to her and they both watched Nick work. There were still two more areas of disturbance where they assumed bodies were buried that they needed to exhume. Yet Sara was eager to get them out. She studied Grissom out of the corner of her eye as he drank deeply from his water bottle. She reflected how it seemed they got on best when there was a serious case to work on.

It was sad really.

"Find anything in the dirt so far?" She asked Grissom .

She could feel the sweat drying on her skin and her muscles starting to feel a bit stiff as she cooled down.

"No nothing so far. But I bagged a sample of each level anyway. I also collected a few nice entomological samples."

"Will they help with a time line?" Sara asked smiling.

"Only to a limited extent, as the body was buried fairly deeply. Pupae collected from the body itself will tell us more. Here you go Nick."

Grissom tossed him a bottle as he also climbed out of the grave. They waited for David to remove the body. They just sat there watching and Sara realized that it had been a long time since there was such a companionable silence between her and Grissom. She was sweaty and stinky, the palm of her right hand was becoming raw, she knew she had a bruise on her inside of her left thigh from dropping her shovel, her back ached and they were no-where near finished, but right at that moment, she could think of nowhere else she would rather be.

Warrick, Greg and Catherine arrived, also dressed in blue overalls and white gum boots. Their shift was finished, so they came to help with the excavations. Sara was once again struck by how close to a family the team was.

Getting up to greet the others, they stood looking down on the body in the grave. The body was lying on its side with his legs flexed almost 90 degrees, his one arm was pinned underneath his chest. There was a big gaping hole in the skull, presumably from a gunshot wound.

"I think he was kneeling on his knees when he was shot," Sara remarked as she looked at the body.

"Yeah, why's that?" Nick asked wiping sweat from his forehead.

"Well if he was standing and fell into the grave, or was pushed in, wouldn't the limbs be more extended?"

The CSIs stood silently as they processed this.

"I think you might be right Sara. We would need to confirm with an experiment I think," Grissom remarked, cocking his head to the side.

Sara felt herself glow from the praise.

Grissom set the new arrivals to excavate the body at site 3.

Getting back to work, Sara and Nick searched the area under the body on their hands and knees for any evidence. Sure enough she found some carpal bones, the small wrist bones, as well as skull fragments lying loose. She bagged those individually. It was approaching mid-morning by the time they finished the grave. Grissom would not allow the cadets or the cops to exhume the supposed graves for fear of losing evidence. Sara and Nick tackled the next, and hopefully last, grave, designated site 4. Sara was surprised to find this body much shallower that the other two she had helped excavate. The body that Catherine and Warrick exhumed was also buried very shallowly, and judging by the decomposition of the body, also the freshest. Sara puzzled as to the reason but put the question aside for later. Both the other bodies were also found with their legs flexed. Both also showed major trauma to the skulls. The body looked strange to Sara. Usually she could at least get an idea of how long a body had been dead, days, months or years. This body looked almost grey, almost translucent. The entire left shoulder area had a greenish color that Sara hadn't seen before. The body was in a much less advanced state of decomposition than the other two unearthed so far.

The last two bodies was finally removed from their graves and also sent to the morgue.

Sitting on a piece of grass that had somehow escaped the rampages of the backyard, Grissom held a quick meeting. It was now late afternoon. Sara was hungry, filthy and thirsty. She had drunk a lot of water during the day, mainly at Grissom's urging, and he had also pressed a Cheese-and-Tomato sandwich on her at around noon. In fact he had been extremely attentive the whole day. He also gave food and water the the others, but Sara felt he paid just that little bit of extra attention to her. She reflected that it felt nice to be taken care of.

"The bodies are on their way to the lab, but I told Doc Robbins to hold off on the autopsies of the two skeletonized bodies till tomorrow," Grissom said. Sara opened her mouth to protest but he cut across her quickly, raising a placating hand.

"These are old cases, they will keep till tomorrow. There are other fresher leads for us to follow. Also it will give the forensic anthropologist I called time to get here."

The rest of the team looked at each other. It made sense, but Grissom wasn't known to readily ask for outside help.

"Terry Miller?" Catherine asked, referring to the forensic anthropologist that the lab has used in the past.

"No, Dr. Temperance Brennan," Grissom answered. "She flies in from Quebec tonight."

He looked at their curious faces

"I met her at a conference once. These cases are right within her area of expertise. Ok, guys go grab a shower. We'll meet back at the lab in one hour." Grissom told Nick and Sara, looking proudly at their sweaty, dirt stained faces. "Warrick, Greg, Catherine thanks for your help; I'll see you in a few hours at the start of next shift."

"Enjoy guys," Catherine said over her shoulder.

Even after a dig in the dirt, she still somehow managed to look groomed. Sara knew she definitely did not. Her hair had kept coming loose so she had had to retie it numerous times, finally giving up and ramming a cap on her head. Sweat from her forehead kept running into her eyes, mixing with the dust as she smeared it away with her hand. She also smelt of death. She needed a shower, badly.

"It's ok, I'll shower at the lab," Sara said.

Besides her car was there anyway. Grissom glanced at her before nodding. Catherine, Greg and Warrick were already walking to their cars. They were on their way home.

Sara, Nick and Grissom would definitely pull a double.