Title: Of Heroes and Comics
Author: podga
Pairing: Nick/OMC, Gil/Nick
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: CSI and its characters do not belong to me. I write and post for fun only.
Summary: Grissom displays a surprising knowledge and Nick solves a case. Sequel to The Dating Ritual.

It starts to drizzle just as they arrive at the scene. A few of the onlookers duck their heads and hunch their shoulders, but nobody takes cover. As they drive past the silent crowd and Nick sees their pale, shocked faces, he wonders if most of them are even really aware of the rain. This is ordinarily a quiet street, with modest homes and well-tended, small gardens. There are a couple of neighborhood watch signs up, but they’re probably more for show than because any of the residents thought there was a chance of anything bad ever happening here. In any case, neighborhood watches only guard the streets and sidewalks against strangers. They rarely, if ever, observe or prevent what happens between family members inside their homes.

Warrick pulls up at the sidewalk and switches off the engine.

“Ready?” he asks.

Nick squares his shoulders and nods. He hops out of the truck and moves quickly to the back to pull his kit out, then up the pathway to the front door of the house, Warrick close at his heels. He doesn’t really register the cop raising the yellow tape to let them through until she greets him by name.

“Hi Nick.”

He stops in his tracks so suddenly that Warrick bumps into him.

“Hi Kate.”

“It looks like we’re running into each other all the time these days,” Kate says dryly.

“Yeah,” he says automatically, looking over her shoulder to where Brian is standing, his hands on his hips. “Brian.”

“Hey,” Brian says in a flat voice, his face impassive.

Nick nods awkwardly and moves past them into the house, stepping to the side to let Warrick through as well.

“Holy shit,” Warrick breathes.

The coppery smell is almost overwhelming in the small entranceway and Nick swallows hard, trying to control a wave of nausea. The woman lying at the bottom of the stairs is in her fifties, her eyes staring sightlessly, the flowery pattern of her robe almost entirely obscured by blood. She’s been slashed repeatedly, her face, throat and chest a crisscross of deep wounds. They stand silently for a while, studying the scene and the body, gaining the necessary distance from the first shock, so that they can do their jobs.

“A lot of anger,” Nick finally says, stating the obvious. “Her husband?”

“In here,” Grissom’s voice comes through an open doorway to their left. “Walk along the wall.”

Nick and Warrick glance at each other. You lose, Warrick mouths soundlessly, pointing at Nick and grinning. Nick shrugs, shaking his head. One of these days they’ll beat Grissom to the scene and he’ll win a bet against Warrick. And pigs will fly.

 

 

Almost four hours later, all they can say with any certainty is that it wasn’t the husband, because his body was found in the kitchen, his throat slashed. The evidence tells them that he was killed fist. The wife must have heard a noise, perhaps her husband calling out, and come down to see what was going on. There’s obviously been a third person living in the house and occupying the guestroom, but there’s no trace of him or her now. There are a number of photographs in the house, documenting the development of a little boy with a gap-toothed smile into a man with one arm around the shoulders of a young woman and the other holding a toddler with an almost identical smile. A possible suspect, until they find out that he lives in Boston with his family and is at Logan Airport trying to get on the first morning flight to Las Vegas.

“Poor guy. What a thing to come back to,” Nick says, packing his kit tiredly.

Warrick grunts in agreement.

“Ready to head back to the lab? Brass dropped Grissom off, so we’re giving him a ride back as well.”

“Yeah.”

Kate and Brian are still standing guard outside, and Nick raises a hand in a brief farewell gesture as he walks by them.

“Kate’s not bad-looking,” Warrick says suggestively once they’re in the truck, catching Nick’s eye in the rear view mirror.

“She’s just a friend,” Nick responds from the back seat.

“Uh huh.”

“She has a boyfriend named Buck.”

“Buck?”

“Yep.”

“Isn’t that the name of the big guy in those Archie comic books?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Nick says in amusement, thinking of Buck.

“Moose,” Grissom says quietly.

“What?”

“The character in Archie. His name is Moose, not Buck,” Grissom explains and Warrick and Nick can only gape at him.

 

 

“And you know what really gets me?” Nick asks indignantly hours later, as he half-reclines on Brian’s bed, his back propped against the headboard.

“What?” Brian asks, sounding bored.

“That any time I know something others don’t, everybody assumes I just got it from watching too much television and so it’s somehow not important. And then Grissom knows the name of a character in what has got to be the lamest comic ever created, and now everybody’s wondering if they missed some wonderful piece of literature.”

“He’s just a weird geek,” Brian says dismissively. “Gruesome Grissom.” He yawns hugely, stretching his arms over his head. “What the hell do you care?”

“I don’t,” Nick protests. “And he’s not just a weird geek. He’s a great CSI. I’ve learned a lot working for him.”

“Nick, I really don’t give a shit. Are we gonna fuck again or what?”

Nick frowns. Sometimes he wonders if he even likes Brian that much. Then Brian distracts him by leaning over and taking his cock in his mouth.

 

 

“Nick, did we get a match on the fingerprints from the Kidd crime scene?” Grissom asks, when he crosses paths with Nick in the lab on the next shift.

“Nothing. We did get sort of lucky with the bed linens from the rest room. Semen stains. Greg is working on those now.”

Grissom nods in satisfaction. “That might tie in with what the son told us. He hadn’t spoken to his parents in over a week, but he says that his mother’s brother, who lives in Sacramento, would stay with them whenever he visited Las Vegas.”

“But even if we match the DNA, it doesn’t prove that he was there yesterday, does it? He might have stayed with them weeks ago.”

“I don’t think so. Did you see how clean and tidy that house was? I doubt Mrs. Kidd would have left used bed linen, much less an unmade bed, for anything over a few hours if her guest had left.”

“I’ll have Brass check the brother’s whereabouts last night,” Nick says.

“Okay, good.”

Grissom starts to walk away, and Nick falls into step next to him.

“Uh, Grissom? Mind if I ask you something personal?”

Grissom pauses and looks at Nick. “Depends on how personal.”

“You knowing Moose’s name. Did you actually read Archie comics, or was that just academic knowledge?”

“Why do you ask?”

“No special reason. Just curious.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

Grissom rubs his jaw. “I don’t know, Nick. That’s a pretty personal question.”

“Oh,” Nick says, taken aback, then he realizes that Grissom’s lips are tugging at the corners. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“Maybe some day,” Grissom says, smiling openly now, then he walks off, his hands in his pockets.

About an hour later, Warrick and Nick stand behind the one-way mirror watching as Brass interviews Mrs. Kidd’s brother. He looks suitably grieved and makes all the right responses, but somehow neither his shock at the violent murders of his sister and brother-in-law nor his outrage at Brass’ suggestion that he might have something to do with those murder ring true. And while he admits to having been in Las Vegas, he claims he left three days ago.

“He did it,” Nick grits out. “He did it.”

Warrick nods in agreement. “No strong alibi either. But we can’t place him in the house or even in Vegas at the time of the murders. Either Brass breaks him, or we don’t stand a chance.”

“How does he generally travel between Sacramento and Las Vegas?” Nick asks, a sudden thought occurring to him.

“Car, I guess,” Warrick answers absently, then his eyes widen as he understands where Nick is going with this. “You’re thinking gas stations along the way?”

“How hard can it be? If he did it, he must have gotten into Sacramento early this morning and we know they flew him back this afternoon. He’s retired, so he doesn’t have to go to work. He probably just went to sleep after the long drive. All we have to do is get the police in Sacramento to check how much gas is in the tank. If we’re lucky he didn’t refill right when he got home. We just work backwards from there. He must have filled the tank at least once along the way.”

“More likely twice. What is it, close to 600 miles to Sacramento?”

“If we know the approximate locations to check, we’re bound to find him or his car on a video surveillance tape at some point. It still won’t place him in the house, but at least it’ll prove he’s lying, give us something to press him with.”

“Good one, Nick. Real good,” Warrick smiles, high-fiving Nick.

 

 

“So, you solved the case and saved the day, huh?” Brian asks, having just licked his way from the small of Nick’s back to his nape and kissed him there.

Nick is lying on his stomach, resting his chin on his crossed arms, luxuriating in the full weight of Brian’s warm body lying on top of him. “I guess so.”

“What did your hero say?”

“Who?”

“Gruesome Grissom.”

“Don’t call him that,” Nick says, feeling a prickle of annoyance, then it occurs to him that he’s protesting the wrong part of Brian’s question. “And he’s not my hero.”

“Sure sounds like it. I think you have a crush on him.”

Nick’s first instinct is to flip Brian off his back and then flip him the bird, but he quashes it. “You’re full of shit,” he says, trying to sound disinterested.

“I know the signs,” Brian says confidently. “You talk about this guy just like Kate talks about Buck.” He rolls off Nick’s back onto the bed and sighs. “She drives me fucking crazy. Buck this and Buck that, yak yak yak, for hours on end. What the hell she sees in that wimp I’ll never know.”

“Maybe he’s good in bed,” Nick says, feeling slightly disloyal towards Kate, but happy to take advantage of Brian’s short attention span.

“That can make up for a lot,” Brian grins, trailing a lazy finger down Nick’s spine, then probing further, causing Nick to gasp.

“Yes, it can,” Nick agrees, twisting onto his side so that he can kiss Brian.

Later, lying sated next to Brian, he drowsily wonders about Grissom’s taste in comics. Even if he didn’t read Archie, he must have read something as a kid. Probably Marvel comics. Maybe little Grissom liked Uatu the Watcher. Nick falls asleep smiling.