Chapter Text
March 2nd, 2007
Hank started out as Grissom’s dog, but now he’s her dog, too, Grissom’s and Sara’s, together. They never actually discussed his ownership, but Hank made the decision, and it seems like a good one: he sleeps at the foot of the bed that they share, his muscled body draped across their feet; he solicits belly rubs from both of them in turns; he barks and sets himself between them and any perceived threats encountered en route during their morning walks, full of animal love and devotion; when one of them has to work and the other has off, he waits by the front door and whines, willing the working party to return home, and, once he gets his wish, he wags his tail, boundlessly happy. They are his humans, and he is their dog, and it feels—more than Sara can say—like they are a family, the three of them.
Sara suspects that someone looking at their family this morning would think that they were early risers, but the truth is, they’re night owls, and this pre-dawn hike up Fletcher Canyon is not an invigorating start to a new day but a relaxing end to a rare shared day off. She and Grissom spent their evening hours staying in, enjoying each other’s company, and now they want to get some fresh air before the start of their next shift. It’s a little after four-thirty, and the mountain is still and cool and dark, cloaked deep in night shade. Sara laces up her hiking shoes against the fender of Grissom’s car while Grissom holds Hank’s leash, waiting. Hank strains and strains for them to go.
“You had better be careful,” Sara warns, “or he’ll pull you all the way up that mountain.”
She smirks at Grissom through the darkness, teasing, but he still takes her just a little bit seriously, because he always does. “Yes, dear,” he says, docile. He chokes up on the leash.
Early morning outings like this one are rarities, few and precious because Grissom can’t afford to schedule himself and Sara for too many of the same days off every month. They’ve been secretly dating for nearly two years now, and they’ve gotten the logistics of it down to a science, all carefully choreographed entries and exits, sly innuendos, silences slyer still, tricks of the calendar, Mack and Rock’s principles of inattentional blindness regarding human expectation. To sometimes be able to pack up their car and drive to a mountain, their dog in tow—that’s the payoff for all the nights when one of them has to work and the other stays home, alone through a shift. Sara smiles at Grissom, happy to have this time with him, and he smiles back, happy, too.
They stuff flashlights, water bottles, dog biscuits, and plastic waste-collection bags from the trunk into Sara’s pack before setting off for the trailhead, located a hundred yards past the parking lot. Fletcher Canyon is a four-mile roundtrip hike, and they’ve planned to take the whole trail, all the way to the seasonal waterfall concealed beyond the narrows. They want to watch the sunrise together. They walk close to each other, their elbows brushing, content to keep an easy pace, waiting out the first light over the horizon. There are no other hikers on the trail at this early hour. They have the whole canyon to themselves. The whole mountain, maybe. Rocks and dirt wobble, give way, and clack, loose, beneath their feet, but, otherwise, they make silent progress. For a long while, neither one of them speaks. Then.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Sara says. “Something on your mind?”
“Icaricia shasta charlestonensis,” Grissom says. “The Mount Charleston Blue Butterfly. It may be going extinct. The Fish and Wildlife Service hasn’t observed any examples of an adult population within the last year. If we see any oxytrope or milkvetch growing along the trail, I’d, uh, like to check it for the presence of larvae.”
Sara frowns. “Is it human activity that’s causing the extinction?” She hates to think that she might inadvertently be contributing to the decline of a whole species just by being on the mountain.
“Indeterminate,” Grissom says. “It could be recreational development in the Spring Mountains, use of fossil fuels, introduction of nonnative plant and wildlife species to the region, extreme drought and wildfire conditions—”
“And this butterfly is only found here?”
“Only here.”
“That’s sad.” A pause. “I’ll keep my eye out for milkvetch.” Her hand slips into Grissom’s free hand, and Grissom gives it a squeeze.
They talk about other things—about Wordsworth and the River Wye and the pollution index of the Salt Lake Valley, the National Parks Service and Teddy Roosevelt and the Monopoly Years of Major League Baseball, their own undersheriff and whether or not Greg Sanders may have seen Sara sifting through some of Grissom’s mail, some of which is also secretly her mail, in Grissom’s office, the other day. Hank noses along as they go, stopping to pee next to this tree and that trail marker.
They come to the first creek bed crossing, and, while Grissom and Sara opt to use the fallen log bridge, wanting to spare their shoes, Hank plunges gamely into the water and barks, splashing against the current. When he emerges from the creek on its opposite bank, his silhouette is darker up the hocks than it was before. He shakes himself dry and Grissom and Sara wet beside him, and they laugh and tell him “God, Hank. Good going, buddy!”
The sun still has yet to rise, though the sky has begun to lighten from black to purple, like ink bleeding through soaked paper. They’re about a mile in, not yet confined to the narrows but soon to be. Birds warble their first tentative songs from the trees, and Hank listens intently and sniffs the air. They pause to drink from their water bottles before taking the next stretch of the trail, and that’s when it happens: Hank lets out a desperate, keening whine and strains, hard, against his leash, tugging Grissom off balance.
“Hey!” Sara says warningly. “Hank, buddy, where’s the fire?”
Grissom regains his footing and chokes up on the leash, but Hank still surges forward, his snout working vigorously to catch some scent, his whole body pointing away from the trail. He is usually a very well-behaved dog, content to follow where his humans lead him.
“Hank, no!” Grissom says, redirecting him. Hank pulls and whimpers, and Grissom and Sara share a look. There has to be chipmunk or a jackrabbit somewhere beyond their sight. Hank wants to chase it—that must be it. Grissom gives the leash another tug, careful but firm. “No, Hank. Come on. Let’s go.”
Hank moves as if to follow Grissom’s direction, but when Grissom shifts his weight to allow Hank past him, Hank suddenly veers away and makes his break. The leash handle wrenches out of Grissom’s grasp and retracts with a snap, pulling close to Hank’s body. Sara lets out a surprised yelp and tries to grab for either the leash or the dog, but it’s too late: Hank is a blur through the brush, yards away before either she or Grissom can do anything about it. Hank barks, and both of his humans take off chasing him. He has never tried to run from either one of them before.
Catching a healthy boxer dog possessed of a mind to run free would prove a difficult task even on the smoothest pavement, but it is next to impossible on uneven mountain terrain, with brambles, shrubs, and jagged stones leaping out to attack unwary ankles and shins through the dark. Hank soon disappears from sight, but his idiot bark booms from somewhere up ahead. Grissom and Sara follow the sound as quickly as they’re able to, trundling over fallen logs and scurrying down inclines, their footing tenuous. The trail is far behind them now.
“Hank!” Grissom calls.
Sara worries that should the dog race out of earshot, they’ll lose him entirely.
A succession of barks: this one further up ahead, another further still, and then no more forward progress. Silence. Grissom and Sara see Hank once they round the next tree. He’s just downhill, and he’s stopped running, come up against the lip of a low, rocky gully. Grissom flanks the gully on one side, Sara on the other, both of them still shocked by Hank’s short, strange bid to lose them. Hank whines and dances on the spot, his nose still working hard against some scent. He glances between his humans and the gully, nervous.
Sara is on the side of the gully where he stands. “What is going on with y—?” she starts to say, snatching up the handle to Hank’s leash and pulling it in close to her. But then she sees, and Grissom does, too.
They’re not alone.
Two persons, one tall and one short, lie side-by-side halfway down the gully, their forms partially concealed by scrub brush and low-hanging wax currant branches. They hold hands, the shorter person’s head close to but not resting on the taller person’s shoulder. They could be campers who had fallen asleep under the stars.
—except that they have no sleeping bags, and except that their clothes are in tatters, and except that their mouths are gaping, stretched into long-toothed, long-O voiceless screams, their eyes punched out as if by a perforator, their skin leathered and bodies desiccated, skinnied down to twigs.
—except, except that they’re dead.
A rusted-over Berretta pistol lies beside the taller victim.
Sara immediately double-twists the leash around both of her hands, taking Hank to heel to prevent him from storming the gully, but it’s a moot precaution. Now that he’s shown his humans what he smelled on the wind, he seems willing to submit to them, though his body remains tense and on alert.
“Oh my god,” Sara says.
Who are the dead people, and how did they get here? How long have they been in the gully? They appear mummified, perhaps by the elements. But did they die here on the mountain, or were they moved here from someplace else? Were their deaths natural—a camping accident, maybe—or no? Why is one of them lying beside a gun?
Sara fixates on their skeletal hands, clasped together between them. Numbers and equations gather in her mind like a storm. What is the probability that she and Grissom would happen upon two DBs on their day off—that they, of all the hikers to visit Fletcher Canyon for as long as the bodies have been here, likely the only two crime scene investigators here today and the only two crime scene investigators for miles, would be the ones—that their dog, of all dogs, would sniff out the scene?
Sara knows that there were about two million deaths in the US last year, in 2006, though not every death resulted in someone discovering a body. Say somewhere around one-eighth of the deaths resulted in someone discovering a body. That’s still two-hundred and fifty thousand bodies discovered in 2006 alone. With about two-hundred and ninety-eight million people in the US in 2006, that means that .084% of the total US population discovered a body during the course of the year.
The figures aren’t in for 2007 yet, not when it’s only March, but say that the .084% holds steady. Sara is now a part of that statistic, and that’s a rare enough thing in itself without taking into account the unlikelihood of any one person who discovers a body at random having a career as a crime scene investigator, let alone any two people having careers as crime scene investigators doing so together, let alone one of those two people being one of the most highly esteemed supervising crime scene investigators at the most prestigious crime lab in the country and the other one being a senior member of his team and the both of them making the discovery on their day off, which is one of the few days a year when they don’t plan to encounter any dead bodies at all—
Sara looks to Grissom, wanting confirmation that he sees what she sees and shares in her astonishment. They face each other from across the gully, and even though his features aren’t entirely clear to her through the darkness, she knows that he can feel it, too—the surreal quality of the moment. For a long while, they’re silent. Then.
“Milkvetch,” he says.
“What?” says Sara.
“Milkvetch,” he says, gesturing downward.
Above the bodies: a ground-crawling herb, its trumpet flowers from the year before dried out and standing guard over its new year buds, its roots curled over the edge of the gully, clinging against gravity.
“Not exactly butterflies,” she says.
“No,” Grissom agrees.
And here is the difficult part in having a secret relationship.
They’re going to need to call in what they’ve found, but they can’t be together by the time the first responders arrive. It’s too risky with all the cops and EMTs they call friends, and especially considering that it will be their team called in to process the scene and work the case. Since there is no plausible explanation for why they would be together in the canyon at five o’clock in the morning except for the truth—that they’re in love, that they’re in a relationship, that they live together, that they spend all of their shared days off together, that they were taking their dog on a walk—one of them is going to have to leave, and damn it if they didn’t drive up here in the same car.
All of these considerations they make in silence, both of them accustomed to the strange intricacies of their situation—of hiding their relationship from their trained observer coworkers, for the most part in plain sight.
“It should be me who goes,” Sara says, after a minute. “I mean, it makes sense that you would be here, hiking with Hank.”
“We’ll have to call you a cab,” Grissom concurs.
“I can go home, change, and then drive back here in my own car.”
“We should call the cab now. It will take about a half-hour for it to get here from downtown, then another half-hour to get you home, then, what? Another hour, at least, before you can change and get back here? By then, day shift will technically have started. We could just leave you off of this case. You’re not scheduled to come in again until tonight.”
Sara shakes her head. “Oh, no, I want on,” she says. She gives Hank’s leash a tug and starts to walk toward Grissom, meeting up with him where the gully bottoms out into flatted ground. She hands the lead over, but Hank remains by her side, waiting. She smirks at Grissom. “You know,” she says, “an hour’s worth of taxi service isn’t going to be cheap. Think I could get my supervisor to comp it for me? It is a work expense.”
Grissom offers her a wry smile but doesn’t reply. They’re standing so close together now that Sara feels it when heat blooms over his skin. She never used to know how much her flirting flustered him, but now, after over a year spent living with him, she does. She watches him dig in his pocket for his phone. Her eyes never leave him as he searches out a number for the taxi service in his contacts—a relic from the days when he had no one to drive him to and pick him up from the airport when he attended conferences. Heat lingers between them, despite the coolness of the morning, despite the fact that the sun still has yet to rise, despite where they are and what they’re doing. Grissom speaks in his polite phone voice, directing the dispatcher where the cab should go and telling him whom it will be for. For a second, the dispatcher puts Grissom on hold, and Grissom looks back to Sara, meeting her eyes again. More heat.
“Thank you,” Grissom says as the dispatcher comes back on the line. “Yes, she’ll be waiting in the parking lot by the trailhead.” He ends the call and gives Sara a pointed look. “The cab company says they’ll have someone here for you in thirty minutes, so you had better start hiking, my dear.”
“So much for seeing the waterfall,” Sara says. She leans down to give Hank a scratch by the ears. “Sorry, buddy,” she tells him. “Maybe next time.” The inclination of the terrain necessitates that she stand on tiptoe to give her next goodbye: a kiss pressed to the corner of Grissom’s mouth. “I’ll see you back here,” she says. Then, a better kiss, more fully on the mouth, Grissom kissing back this time.
“We’ll miss you,” Grissom mumbles, and now it’s her turn to bloom with heat.
She wants to say something more, but she doesn't know how to without a particular occasion—not beneath an open sky, not when they're caught up in something else. She glances away from him, unsure.
They make the necessary exchanges, Sara fishing in the backpack for her house keys and wallet before handing the backpack itself over to Grissom, leaving him with the hiking supplies and dog care provisions for Hank. Grissom says Sara might want to take a flashlight, so she takes a flashlight. A few more See you soons and then Sara hikes back up toward the trail. Hank whines to see her go, and she hears Grissom placing his call to PD. Again, it strikes her how surreal her life is sometimes—all of the things she does on any given day that other people don’t do in a lifetime. She smirks as she finds the trail again. Can’t afford to keep the cab waiting.
She switches on the flashlight and runs.
• • •
After placing the call to dispatch, Grissom tethers Hank’s leash to the trunk of a nearby aspen, far enough away from the gully to keep Hank from disrupting the scene but close enough to let him know that he isn’t being punished or sent away. The first hints of true twilight have begun to creep around the eastern edge of the canyon, and Grissom makes use of the increased visibility, surveying the bodies in the gully as the morning light slowly reveals their finer details.
Grissom wishes that Sara were still with him, not only because he wants for her observations and candor but also because he wants for her in a more basic, yearning way. The mountainside is lonely in her absence, quieter, harsher, and more impossibly solitary. Before Grissom met Sara, he never thought he had been lonely in his life, but now he knows that he had always been lonely, and she was the one who rescued him. Back then, he tamped the feeling down, ignoring it like an early hunger. He didn’t want to believe he needed anyone. And maybe he was right in most cases, but not with her.
Knowing now how it can be having a companion—having Sara—so often with him, he realizes that he doesn’t actually like to be alone. He misses her keenly when she’s gone, her laughter and wit and thriving heat. Something deep inside him always reaches for her, and it doesn’t want to have to reach so far. She’ll be back in two hours, but two hours can be a long time. Hank whines from his spot near the tree, and Grissom commiserates.
Peering over the edge of the gully, Grissom sees that the bodies bear evidence of weather damage, a development which suggests that they may have been on the mountainside for some time. Since neither victim’s body shows the usual signs of insect activity, he wonders if they were perhaps killed or dumped on the mountainside in wintertime. No animals appear to have scavenged them, so maybe the gully offered some concealment? Grissom can imagine a scenario in which the bodies lay beneath a blanket fallen snow for many weeks, only to be revealed by the recent springtime thaw. Fresh exposure could have potentially restarted the decomposition process, which might explain why Hank was able to smell the bodies from the trail.
Such a chain of events might also explain the bodies’ poor condition. They are mummified and shabby, dressed in moldering jeans, t-shirts, and tennis shoes, the skulls traumatized—one stellate hole apiece, though in different positions between the two, the shorter victim’s above the left ear, the taller victim’s above the left temple. The holes resemble gunshot wounds, though Grissom knows better than to say for certain that that is what they are; Doc Robbins will have to confirm with the post.
The shorter victim’s dress and pelvic width suggest femaleness, the taller victim’s suggest maleness. A rusted Berretta M9 pistol lies beside the male victim’s left hand. Did he use it to kill himself and the female victim, murder-suicide; did she kill herself with it and him follow after, double-suicide; or did he wield it in an unsuccessful attempt to defend himself and the female victim against an attacker, double-homicide? Grissom’s first blush says murder-suicide or double-suicide, but he can’t rule out the possibility of a homicide or even accidental death for certain.
Due to their advanced state of decay, Grissom cannot guess the victims’ ages, except to say that neither one of them is a young child. Instead, he focuses on what the location of their bodies might tell him about the circumstances surrounding their deaths. The gully is far enough away from the main trail so as to be attractive to both suicides and murderers, though it is not far enough away from the main trail to be unattractive to a body dumper. Fletcher Canyon is not the most popular trail on Mount Charleston, though it does see fairly consistent traffic. Ignoring the possibility of accident for the moment, if the victims were murdered on the mountain or dumped on it after being murdered, it would have had to have been at a time when the trail was empty, or else someone might have witnessed the crime in commission. After sundown but before sunrise? During the off-season for hiking? Grissom will have to put one of his people on talking to a park ranger. He needs to know how often the area is patrolled and whether or not any park employees have noted unusual happenings in the canyon.
Moving around the gully, he examines the bodies from uphill and downhill angles, from both sides, and standing up and crouching down. It puzzles him that the victims are holding hands—and particularly that the male victim’s right hand clasps the female victim’s left, while the gun lies on his other side. He wonders about positioning and laterality. He wonders about proximity. He wonders what it would be like to die holding hands with another human being.
He puzzles and wonders for an hour, eventually taking a seat on a rock beside Hank’s aspen tree. He feeds Hank a Milk-bone from the backpack and himself drinks some water. He imagines that Sara is back in the city.
By now, the sun has fully risen, and the light over the mountain is a sharp, incisive white. His phone buzzes with a text message—Nick announcing his and Greg’s arrival at the canyon and asking for a rendezvous by the creek bed because they don’t know the way to the scene past that point. Grissom untethers Hank’s leash from the tree and takes one last look at the bodies in the gully. He prepares for the inevitable rush.
He finds Nick and Greg waiting for him by the creek, along with a uniformed police officer called Mitchell. While Officer Mitchell looks fresh, Nick and Greg both seem a bit bleary-eyed, and Grissom knows that they are so because they had been just about to finish their previous shift when he called in the 419s today, suddenly putting them onto a double whether they wanted to be on one or not. Technically, he could have asked the day shift to cover this case, but he wanted his guys on it. They’re the ones he trusts.
“Sir,” says Officer Mitchell, giving Grissom a brisk nod.
“So you go looking for bodies even on days when you’re not working?” Greg asks Grissom, incredulous, squinting at him against the light.
“I didn’t know you had a dog,” Nick says, crouching to give Hank an ear-scratch.
“Come on,” says Grissom. He wants his guys and their kits in the gully as soon as possible. “We’ll start on the perimeter until the coroner gets here. Do we have an ETA?”
Officer Mitchell shrugs, but Nick and Greg share a quick look, registering Grissom’s brusqueness between them. Grissom allows it. Once he starts on a case, he is compelled to see it through to a solution as quickly as possible. Some part of him would feel remiss to wait any longer than he already has in getting to work. He came to the mountain unaware that there were bodies to be found, and he doesn’t want to leave it without knowing something concrete now that he has found them.
He leads Nick, Greg, and Officer Mitchell off-trail and down the mountainside to where the gully lies. Nick and Greg mumble at his heels that it’s going to be a bitch for the coroner’s office to pick up the bodies, given the terrain. Hank immediately starts barking when they come to within view of the scene, raising an alert to the humans that they should take notice of what lies ahead. Grissom quickly tethers his leash to the aspen again while Officer Mitchell scopes out a core area. Nick and Greg take their first looks over the lip of the gully.
“Super Dave was on a pickup in Pahrump, so he might not be here for a while,” Nick says, answering the question Grissom asked at the creek bed.
Grissom nods. “Until he gets here, I want Greg taking overalls and details on everything. Nick, I want you to make sketches and talk to the ranger. Do we have an ETA on them?”
“Detective Curtis was right behind us,” Greg says. “She was going to meet the Parks Service rep at the trailhead.”
“Good,” says Grissom. “I’m going to start collecting plant and soil exemplars.” A pause. “Greg, I’m, uh, going to need to borrow your collection jars.”
And so the scene unfolds. Officer Mitchell surrounds the core area with yellow tape, using nearby trees to form a perimeter around the gully and its neighboring terrain. Nick and Greg walk the area once, twice, three times in an outward spiral pattern. They start to make observations—that the rocky soil doesn’t seem to capture footprints, though the sedimentary walls exposed in the gully reveal some top-layer saturation, suggesting recent rainfall in the area, which may have exposed the bodies after they had been otherwise concealed by brush and overgrowth.
Greg flashes hundreds of photographs of trees and rocks and scrubby milkvetch and leans over the bodies to capture their details, careful not to touch them until David Phillips can arrive. Soon Sofia radios Officer Mitchell, wanting directions from the creek, and Nick goes up to meet her. They return with a ranger in tow, and there are introductions made and an interview and expert opinion given. Greg opens up his kit and offers his collection jars to Grissom.
The sun rises ever higher along the eastern edge of the mountain, and the light softens and disperses, becoming less and less intrusive. Each action contributes to the sense of well-organized chaos, to a clockwork with so many machinations as to baffle from an outside perspective.
All the while, Grissom keeps internal time, waiting past seven o’clock and seven-thirty, imagining Sara alone in their condo, readying for the investigation, returning in her own vehicle to the mountain, prepared to insinuate that she hadn’t been there before. He sees her clearly in his mind’s eye, as if he were watching a film. She is on the highway with her window rolled down, and she’ll find him again soon.
• • •
The driver doesn’t ask why Sara needs a pickup from Fletcher Canyon at six o’clock in the morning, but she can tell he wants to. He stares at her in the rearview mirror, and she guesses that he wonders why she seems dressed for a hike but has no hiking apparel with her—no backpack, sleeping roll, or even a water bottle to speak of. He probably also wonders why she is alone and why she needed him to drive her into the city when she was with another person who called in for the ride. Didn’t either one of them have a car? Why didn’t they leave the mountain together? Sara feels self-conscious under his attention and turns toward the window, focusing on the scenery, the landscape flattening out before her, the mountains melding into desert, the greenery dulling into dun. She waits to see the city, and when the first casino spires rise over the horizon to greet her, her chest floods with relief.
Soon enough, the driver has her back to her building, to the condo in West Sahara that she and Grissom have shared for more than a year now. They chose their home strategically—close enough to the lab to be convenient but far enough away to afford them their privacy. Their neighbors are mostly retirees, their neighborhood itself low-crime. While the occasional uni patrols their street, they’re unlikely to encounter any detectives there, and certainly no CSIs. On the weekends, there is a farmer’s market in the bank parking lot next door, and there is a dog park for Hank within walking distance just around the block. They’re considered the young couple on their floor, which is strange but also strangely nice. In some ways, it feels like another world, completely insulated from their working lives.
It takes effort to keep things that way, though. Sara still pays rent on her old rat hole off East Bonanza because she needs a cover—a different address than the one she shares with Grissom to list on her personnel and W-2 forms. They never have any of their coworkers over between shifts, and they stagger their comings to and goings from the lab just to be safe. Sometimes Sara feels like a secret agent, leading a doubled existence, but abiding the weirdness and intricacy is worth it to her, as long as she can live with Grissom. There is such a difference between having a house and having a home.
Even now, with Grissom and Hank back on the mountain, Sara doesn’t feel alone. There is evidence of them, of her family, all over the condo: a pair of Grissom’s work shoes neatly arranged next to her messy, kicked-off sneakers beside the front door; a half-finished crossword puzzle in two different colors of ink and both of their handwritings, waiting for completion on the living room coffee table; a sticky note reminder to buy dog food pinned to the kitchen fridge with a UC Berkeley magnet; a dog toy obstacle course leading into the bedroom, where the bed remains unmade after her and Grissom’s last night spent in. There are photographs and bric-a-bracs, all of their material things, sharing space. But more than that, a knowing that wherever she goes, they go, too, like the lines from that Cummings poem:
"i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)"
She undresses in the bedroom and then heads to the bathroom to shower away the mountain grime and sweat from her run to meet the taxi. She redresses, fetches the mail, and then eats breakfast in the kitchen, reading over one of Grissom’s old collegiate copies of Emerson as she savors her toast. She tries to decipher the notes he has written in the margins. His cursive from thirty years ago is less-practiced than his cursive of today but still familiar. Even in shorthand, he has beautiful thoughts.
Sara feels anxious to return to the crime scene, but she tempers herself, knowing that she needs to play her part. It’s supposed to be her day off, and she has to make it look to everyone like she wasn’t expecting a call-in.
She and Grissom have a rule that they try to avoid outright lying to their teammates, when they can. They favor omission over deception, passively allowing mistaken conclusions to form over actively promulgating them. No broadcasting that they’re dating other people to hide that they’re dating each other. No pretending to be in loathing when they are in love. They don’t act any different in each other’s presence when they are with their teammates than they would in any other public situation. They are still kind to each other, still obviously interested, still prone to slip in little endearments. Their only refrainment is physical: no holding hands, no embraces, no kissing. But that’s mostly out of politeness. They still stand impossibly close to each other and very much share space.
Being so open has its risks, but their consciences won’t allow anything else. It’s bad enough lying to their friends by omission. It would be worse to lie to them directly, and particularly when they respect their friends so much. They decided from the get-go that if anyone ever confronted them with the truth, they would admit to it—but so far no one ever has. For two years, they’ve conducted their relationship quietly though in plain sight, and none of their teammates has realized the subtle shift between how they used to be, during those first few years when Sara moved to Vegas, and how they are now. It’s all about timing and what’s not being said. Sometimes people fail to notice what remains constant day by day.
Once ready, Sara dons her vest and gathers her field kit and a thermos of coffee and drives back to the mountain. By now the sun is climbing in the sky, casting gas puddle mirages along the flat stretches of I-15, despite the coolness of the day. When she pulls into the parking lot at Fletcher Canyon, she sees three squad cars and Sofia Curtis’s unmarked sedan alongside a CSI Denali, Grissom’s car, and a US Forest Service jeep. No van from the Coroner’s Office, though—meaning that Super Dave has either already come and gone or not yet arrived on the scene. She takes her thermos from the cup-holder and rustles her field kit out of the trunk.
Show time, she thinks, starting off for the trail.
Two officers stand posted at the trailhead. They greet her and make a cursory check of her ID, though they both recognize her by sight. “Your guys are up there,” one of them says, gesturing vaguely to the canyon. “I heard they got mummies.” Sara nods, acknowledging him, but doesn’t say anything, as she has already seen the mummies for herself. She takes the trail as quickly as possible without running and makes it to the creek bed in twenty minutes. There is another officer posted at the spot where Hank first veered into the brush, headed toward the crime scene. She tells Sara it’s already a circus down there, as if Sara wouldn’t have known.
So many people have traversed the mountainside down to the crime scene that by now there is a distinct trail through the grass leading to the gully. Sara follows it and soon catches sight of the promised circus. She sets down her kit and her thermos atop it, surveying the chaos: a US Forest Service ranger clad in khaki and green gesturing out a story to Sofia just beyond the yellow tape; three officers, including Larry, triangulated around the core area, clutching their belts as they perform their tedious watch duties; Nick crouched at the lip of the gully, sketchpad and pencil in hand, his tongue poking between his teeth as he concentrates on recreating the scene in his notes; Greg hovering just above the shorter victim’s head, the lens of his camera as close as it can be to the skull without touching it as he snaps photos; Grissom standing off to the side, holding Hank’s leash; and Hank—
—barking his full head off, suddenly in a frenzy, straining away from Grissom toward Sara as she approaches the scene.
He wears an open-mouthed doggy smile and bounds forward, dragging Grissom after him. And then for the second time in the day, he slips free, launching himself at Sara with his paws outstretched, keening, whining, frenetic and joyous to see her, as if she had been gone for years instead of just for hours. He nearly bowls her over, his nose and paws impacting her torso. It’s all his tongue hot on her cheeks and arms, his wet face against her ears, her laughing and him snuffling, his tail wagging as if motorized, Grissom saying “Hey! Hey!” and trying to regain control of the leash, everyone at the crime scene witnessing this hectic, exuberant welcome, undoubtedly shocked. Hank jumps up and down, wanting Sara to pet him, and she does, on his jowls and ears, laughing, full, from the back of her throat.
“Well, hello to you, too!” she says just as Grissom manages to grab him by the collar, yanking him down and off of her.
“Sorry,” Grissom says, and to everyone else it probably sounds like him apologizing for his dog’s impropriety, but to Sara it sounds like him fretting that their dog might somehow blow their cover to their coworkers.
Nick stands up along the edge of the gully and squints from under the brim of his ball cap. He whistles a long, Texas whistle. “Wow,” he says to Grissom, “your dog sure likes Sara!”
Grissom responds immediately: “He has good taste.”
Heat blooms over Sara’s skin both for the artlessness of his compliment and the recklessness of it. She checks faces: Nick’s confused frown, Greg’s uncertain flinch, Sofia’s scowl for coming into the conversation too late to understand anything except that something awkward has just happened, the ranger blank and oblivious, the officers far enough out of earshot so as not to matter. She makes the briefest eye contact with Grissom. If he’s not careful, it won’t be their dog that blows their cover—and yet she wouldn’t have him take back what he said. She adores these little instances of plain, straightforward feeling, of Grissom’s thoughts and heart and words all aligning perfectly. His eyes are very blue, and he seems sheepish but unsorry. He wouldn’t take back what he said, either. He meant it, and it matters.
Before anyone can make a comment, Dave Phillips and his assistant are coming down the hill, carrying a backboard stretched between them. “Sorry I’m late!” Dave says. “The traffic from Pahrump was bad—”
Grissom looks to Sara, suddenly all business again. “You and Greg process the bodies once he clears them,” he says, giving a nod toward Dave. Then louder, to everyone, “I’m going to get Hank to the sitter’s. I’ll meet you back at the lab.”
Sara watches him gather the backpack, Hank’s leash, and a tray of filled collection jars before heading up the hillside. She feels him ascending the trail behind her, though she can no longer see him, his heat and presence leaving. It’s like the Cummings poem over again, always—she carries his heart in her heart. She feels him, even in his absence.