DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the characters from ‘CSI’. They’re not my property.

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They walked slowly on the muddy ground with each step being pulled down by the tenuous earth, temporarily swallowing their boots and the retrieval from those traps appeared quite difficult at times, even testing the patience of the unfortunate “victims”. The rain had managed to affect the stable surface so much that the next step which Sara took swallowed her entire foreleg. “Shit!” she swore while trying to sustain her balance. “Nick!”

She called out to her colleague who had managed to get a few meters ahead of her.

“Yeah?” he shouted back.

“A little help here?” She waved towards her. The thickness of the mud had managed to consume her limb securely enough.

Taking hold of her right hand, Nick pulled back with enough might to release Sara’s leg. The sudden tug, however, almost pushed him to the ground as the unexpected rush of Sara’s weight towards him had temporarily disrupted his balance. This time it had been the brunette’s turn to hold onto his arm, saving him from the total ruination of his uniform. “Thanks,” he breathed out.

“Yeah, same to you,” Sara nodded. “Damn this mud!” she complained while looking at the muddy imprint on her leg. It helped little that the smell was not a pleasant one.

“You’d think the killer could’ve chosen a drier location to dump… whatever he had to dump.”

“No,” Sara shook her head while brushing her forearm against her forehead. “He’d done it before it started raining.”

“You think?” he mocked.

“Well… the mud is fresh and we can’t see any traces, prints… so he must have come here while it had still been dry and then this rain comes and wipes away…,” she stretched out her arms, “clues.”

“Considering we still haven’t seen the victim’s body, I’d say your conclusion is…”

“What? Inconsistent?”

Nick shrugged.

“Fine.” She threw her hand toward him and continued walking. “Let’s see why they bothered to call in,” she smirked and continued making her way through the muddy field.

Five minutes later, passing the yellow tape, the two CSIs entered a small, abandoned cabin when they finally stood in front of the crime scene. “Oh God,” she breathed out in annoyance.

“Picasso, you think?”

Sara cocked an eye at him before returning her attention to the site in front of her:

On a small, rectangular, white, marble platform, two inches higher than the ground, was an almost two yard high statue made from the same material. The statue was of a young woman, sitting on her knees with her head down, sadly watching the object in her open arms. On those arms lay a lifeless body of a naked young male with only a small, black, velvet cloth that covered his testicles. Thick, vertical cuts went along his arms, beginning from his wrists, up to his shoulders with the dark, red blood peaking from the openings as small letters were carved in the skin. Very little space of his clear skin had been left on the arms.

His legs had the same engravings with only the torso being left untouched or unscarred. On the statue’s forehead a large stain had been left with the remaining amount of blood making a trail on the woman’s cheek before disappearing beneath her chin.

“I hate it when they go creative like this…” Sara pressed her lips.

---

“Cult ritual?”

With folded arms, Sara leaned back on the wall, surprised by her colleague’s suggestion.

“It could be,” Catherine spoke while holding a photograph of the victim’s left arm.

“Miss Sidle?” a young man with thin red glasses appeared at the door.

“Yes?”

“There’s a young girl asking for you.”

“Who?”

“Um… Evelyn Presnowitz.”

“Great. Thank you,” Sara nodded towards him, sending the young man away.

“Who’s Evelyn?” Catherine watched Sara flatly.

“My little helper on this case,” Sara gave a beaming grin without telling her whether Evelyn would agree to help. Lately the relationship between these two women had become strained and Sara avoided sharing too much information with Catherine unless it involved a case.

---

Grissom walked steadily and quietly, making his way towards the stale atmosphere and close grayness of his office when something made him stop. Trying to sharpen the image through the thick glass wall, Grissom saw a young girl, possibly a teen sitting in the small room absorbed in the play that her fingers offered. Carefully he scouted his surroundings with his eyes but there was no one. She might be a family member of a victim. Curiosity took over and he stepped inside the room.

“Waiting for someone?” An attempt for lack of seriousness in his voice caught the girl’s attention.

When her dark brown eyes turned towards the source of the ‘greeting’, they absorbed the image in front of her with tiny traces of astonishment.

“Is something wrong?” Grissom asked when the delay of her answer and the look on her face prompted him to do so.

She opened her mouth and closed it again, wondering for a moment whether to say something else. Quickly she looked down at her fingers. “No… I… I’m waiting for…uh…” she shut her eyes tightly while trying to remember the name. “Sara!” She nodded when the name caught up with her. “But I forgot her last name,” the girl admitted.

“Sara Sidle?” he took a guess.

“Yes, yes, that’s her. Sara Sidle. Yes,” she nodded once more.

“Alright and who might you be?”

“Oh, I’m…” her attempt for an answer was interrupted when Sara came in.

“Evelyn?” she smiled at the girl.

“Yeah.” Evelyn stood up, not letting go of the game that her fingers had trouble quitting from.

“Hey, I’m Sara.”

“Ok.” Evelyn’s face did not show boldness. She was a shy girl.

Sara only threw a brief glance at the man next to her and a shape of her lips that could have almost resembled a smile. “Thanks for coming.”

“My mum said I could help.”

“Help with what?” Grissom asked.

“The Red Letters’ case,” Sara responded while ignoring his stare.

“How can she help?”

Finally Sara turned her head to face him properly. “She’s familiar with the writings,” she told him.

His eyes shifted slowly from Sara to Evelyn’s faces to finally find their resting place between Sara’s brown eyes. “Why didn’t you call in an expert?” he asked.

“She is one,” Sara pointed at the girl with her arm as she spoke.

The questioning look emerging from his blue eyes took a brief image of the girl’s face and her clothing. “Sara, can I talk to you for a minute?” he requested and took her gently by the arm before leading her out of the room.

Standing in front of him, Sara crossed her arms and took a deep breath. She knew a lecture would be rushing her way.

“Do you need my help on the case?”

“No.”

“Then why did you call her?”

“Because I think she can help.”

“How?” a brow on his face was lifted. “She’s a kid.”

“She’s sixteen, actually,” Sara corrected him.

“Well, that helps.” He was having trouble accepting Sara’s choice. “Sara, we have experts on this.”

“Not on this we don’t. And Evelyn is one.”

He glanced at the small figure in the room and back at Sara. “Where did you find her?”

“At the crime scene.” Seeing his bemused expression she simply continued. “Ok, through her mother. You see, Evelyn’s mother… stepmother actually, was there with the rest of the curious pack watching while we processed the scene and she mentioned that she had a stepdaughter who was familiar with that.”

“A sixteen year-old…” his voice sounded flat.

“Yeah, but…”

“And you agreed to this. Just by having a “chat” with her stepmother?”

“I know it sounds unusual but…”

“It sounds more than just unusual, Sara. It’s madness. You bring a teenager to assist in a case like this, and you arrange to have her here without even meeting her…”

“Grissom, please! I know what I’m doing.”

Evelyn watched them through the windowed walls but the voices were choked by the thick glass. Their arms rested peacefully alongside their bodies but there was an unmistakably thick cloud of tension that surrounded them and Evelyn was feeling its effects a bit too intensively. She hoped the source of that disagreement wasn’t directed towards her; Evelyn disliked being responsible for arguments as she was rarely a witness to such.

After a while the two adults returned to the waiting area. Sara’s smile was trying to force out the previous lingering feeling of annoyance, no doubt brought in by her colleague. “Come to my office,” she told Evelyn softly.

Stepping forward, Evelyn approached Sara. “Oh and this is Gil Grissom, my former supervisor,” she introduced him.

To this Evelyn pulled out a hand that was taken warmly but less heartedly by Grissom.

While holding her hand, he could feel the immense trembling emerging from it. “Are you ok?” he asked cautiously.

“Yeah,” she replied without looking at him and quickly withdrew her hand. “I’m just nervous… haven’t been to a place like this before.”

Sara draped her arm across Evelyn’s shoulders while leading her out to the hallway. “He’s harmless, Evelyn, no one here will bite,” she gave comfort to the teen with a bit of humor, leaving Grissom behind them.

-

When Evelyn sat on the chair in front of Sara’s desk, she moved uneasily in the tight space until a spike of comfort rooted her in one place. “Is it my fault that you two started arguing?” she asked quietly, almost with fear.

Sara looked up at her with puzzlement. “Um, no, Evelyn and no, we weren’t arguing.”

“Ok.” Gathering her hands, Evelyn’s uneasiness was clearly making odd twitches expose themselves through her extremities.

“Evelyn…” Sara called her.

“Hm?” The girl looked up at her with no clear expectancy in her eyes.

Sara sat down on the chair next to her. “You really can relax, you know that, right?” she told her.

Evelyn nodded almost frantically. “Um.” Cautiously, she took a hungry but restrained exploration of Sara’s office. “It’s weird… this whole place is weird.”

“Well, yeah.” Sara tilted her head to both sides while giving a lighter tone to her sentences. “It’s not exactly the happiest place on the planet, but…”

“No, I…” the girl hesitated for a moment and then continued: “It’s like…” she sighed, “How can you work with so much death?”

“The puking buckets stay with you the first couple of days… after that you get used to it.”

“I don’t mean the scenes… I mean the whole psychology of the thing… how do you keep yourself from going insane after seeing such torture…?”

Sara glanced at her papers and bit her lower lip. “It’s hard. You gotta have an iron will and stomach to withstand all those sites. But I guess we have it easier than the profilers… having to be sucked into a killer’s mind each time is not my personal favorite,” she said.

“That’s true. Anyone who’s never come in contact with such monstrous expositions of a man’s behavior should count themselves very lucky.”

A smile plastered itself on Sara’s lips. “That’s something Gil would say,” she spoke warmly.

Evelyn’s brown eyes turned slowly towards Sara’s. Although a tender age of sixteen, she resembled a much older lady, the maturity more present in her eyes; her russet hair gathered clumsily in a single braid that rested peacefully on her right shoulder gave her a fragile image. “Is he the man I met earlier?”

“Yep.”

“He didn’t seem too pleased to see me.”

“He’s alright. He just didn’t know you.”

“Neither do you, but you are nicer to me.”

Sara placed her hand on Evelyn’s back and rubbed it gently. “He’s a wonderful man…” she told herself.