nickngreg | Fic: Life Changes 4/29 (Reply)

TITLE: LIFE CHANGES
RATING: PG-13 this chapter/NC-17 eventually
PAIRINGS: Nick and others
WARNINGS: None
SUMMARY: A casual remark can change a life
SPOILERS: None
DISCLAIMER: If you don’t recognize it, it’s mine. Otherwise, everything belongs to Bruckheimer, CBS and Zuicker.
BANNER: By Bflyw

A/N: I know I said I would be posting Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday but I’m going into the hospital tomorrow and I don’t know when I will be back.

Previous chapters can be found here

The clothes had yielded nothing BUT the wife had stuck the ticket stubs in her purse. Nick wasn’t sure why but Cath knew immediately. She wanted to keep them as a remembrance of this special time; maybe put them in a scrapbook to remember their night of celebration. The ticket stubs were from a local firm that specialized in getting tickets to the impossible shows, in the shortest possible time, for the most amount of money.

They went to the firm and both reacted to the waves of fear coming off the young receptionist who took their names and called the office manager. The office manager was completely innocent and was willing to open his office to anything they wanted if they thought it would help. They asked if they could speak to the receptionist but surprise, surprise, she was out to lunch. They got her job application and got Archie started on a complete examination of every part of her life. They found some interesting deposits to her checking account that were pretty impossible on a receptionist salary. They also found that her 1st cousin had been released from the Nevada State Prison 3 months earlier after serving 5 years of an 8 year sentence for Armed Robbery. From that point on it was embarrassingly easy to find the cousin, his 3 buddies and pick up the items that had not been fenced yet that were stored in the garage. The final nail in the coffin was the pants from the laundry room that had smears of the wife’s vaginal fluids and the husband’s blood. They picked up the terrified receptionist at the local bus depot but by that time they had so much physical evidence, talking with her was a mere formality. They were both praying that the DA would be able to ask for the death penalty since the babies death occurred during the commission of a violent crime. Nevada law was not always clear on whether a fetus could be considered a murder victim.

Cath and Nick were almost drunk with pleasure and smiling with complete satisfaction at the recap meeting that morning.

Nick finished the account of their case by adding, “You gotta love the stupidity of the bad guys.”

Everyone smiled but Greg said “I don’t think it was stupidity.”

Everyone started arguing with him at the same time until ‘Papa’ Grissom raised his voice slightly and said “Why not Greg, What do you think it was?”

“I think it was ego. Think about it; the whole scheme was damn clever. Would you look at your cousin working a low-paying, entry level job and figure she was the key to an almost fool-proof crime? She produced a spreadsheet every morning for her boss with all the sold tickets, which included names, addresses, credit card numbers, times of shows, whether the clients wanted them to arrange a reservation for dinner; even if the clients wanted to be picked up by limo or would be using their own transportation. When she finished the sheet, she e-mailed a copy to her cousin, printed off a copy for her boss and went on about her business. They got so used to everything working perfectly that they expected it would always be that way. They probably never expected anyone to connect them to the high-scale robberies. Why should they cover their tracks at home? They never expected anyone to find their home”

After working the case as hard as they had, both Catherine and Nick had to agree with Greg. The four robbers had left them nothing. The footprints they were so excited about turned out to be the kid who mowed the lawn who had come into the kitchen to get a glass of water and his money. The trace of blood they had found on the sink was the husbands. All of them wore latex gloves, the heavier kind and one of them had rinsed the blood off his gloves in the sink. Since it wasn’t his blood, he had just wiped the sink out with a paper towel and missed the little bit of blood under the rim. They even took the paper towels and the gloves with them.

Nick and Cath had had maybe 5 hours of sleep between the time they dropped the suspects off and the time they had come back to work that night. Both had been flying on endorphins but that ran out awhile back.

Cath leaned over and said quietly in Nick’s ear, “My God I hope we both get home OK. All I can think of is a warm, soft bed with clean sheets.”

Nick nodded. He had been praying for the last 2 hours that they would last until the end of their shift when they could get off and fall in bed. Nick almost dropped his coffee cup when he realized that he had added the word ‘together’; they could get off and fall in bed together. My God, was he going to be at the mercy of his libido forever? When was he going to get his control back? All he could do was give thanks that he had been thinking inside his own head at the time and hadn’t said anything out loud.

Two nights later, Nick realized that he was not going to get control until he got his life straight. He went into Grissom’s office and asked for a month of vacation time. After Grissom got his voice back he asked if Nick needed to talk; to him, the department shrink; anyone. Nick noticed with amusement that Grissom, who was usually unflappable, sort of squeaked on the ‘anyone’. He said No, he just realized that he hadn’t really had a true vacation in years. He had the time coming, he had always wanted to do a little traveling and you couldn’t do that when you took a week at a time and your folks just took it for granted that you would be in Texas for most of the week. Grissom asked if he could have a little time to switch people around. Nick said of course; he wasn’t going on an organized tour or anything like that; he was just going to get in his truck and ramble. Two weeks later, Nick Stokes locked his front door, stopped by his bank, dropped by the post office and arranged for his mail to be held until further notice and left Las Vegas.