FIC: Sins of the Father (9/11) Gil/Nick

[knightmusic]

Title: Sins of the Father (chapter 9/11)
Author: Knightmusic
Rating: PG to NC-17 (not this part)
Pairing: Gil/Nick
Summary: An orphaned girl and a murdered son, and Gil and Nick are left to discover the impressions a father leaves on the life of his child.
Author's Note/Warnings: The end is near!  Chapter 11 needs one more scene, and chapter 10 is being beta'd.  And on that note: All praise the name of laurelgardner who makes me fix things when they suck.

Disclaimer: I still don't own CSI.  If that changes, you'll be the first to know.

Previous chapters can be found here


How in hell do you let someone just walk out with one of your patients? is what Nick didn’t say as he entered Desert Palm hospital. Neither did Whose sorry ass is responsible? pass his lips, as much as he wanted to let it.

It was about the only nod he had given to composure since he’d arrived. He’d never booked it to a crime scene like he had this morning. There was always a sense of urgency when an open case took an unexpected turn - when a suspect made a move and you had to jump on it, regardless of whose shift it was - and certainly it was always present in any kidnapping case. But it wasn’t mere urgency that was making his blood surge and feet fly. Oh, no.

If he wasn’t careful, this could easily become panic.

But he was too good at his job to let that happen. He could let the worry simmer in the back of his mind while he did what needed too be done. So, instead of verbally assaulting the hospital staff on the subject of incompetence, he reverted to worn habits of calm and professionalism.

“So what happened, exactly?” he asked.

The woman who’d been introduced to him as the head nurse for this shift looked uncomfortable and worried, but seemed to be holding herself together well enough to talk to him.

“A man came in about nine o’clock this morning, just as I was coming on shift” she said. “He was highly irritable -pitched one hell of a fit - and demanded to see his daughter.”

“Did he ask for her by name?” Nick asked.

“No,” the nurse said, shaking her head. “He gave us the mother’s name. Told us he wanted a paternity test. Wanted to file for custody.”

“And you obliged him,” Nick continued. The nurse nodded.

“I took them both down to our lab to draw blood.”

“You did? Anyone else with you?”

“It was just me, but I left them with a lab tech and went back out to the desk to call you. You told us to keep you informed.” Nick couldn’t find it in him to be grateful for that thought. She should have called him first.

“I’m afraid no one looks twice at a father leading his daughter out of our facilities,” the nurse offered, with a sincerely apologetic tone. Nick nodded sharply and walked away, letting Vega wrap up the conversation. He didn’t have much to process, but he had never been more motivated in his life.

It didn’t take long to collect enough evidence to tell him who had done this. The hospital staff gave him the papers the man had signed. He didn’t need to look at them to know the name would be Matthew Winters. But that wouldn’t help him one bit in trying to find out where he had gone.

He wondered if the man was criminally brilliant or just a damn lucky SOB. There was no way the hospital would have released Chloe to him, not given the circumstances. The lab was a much more functional area to launch an abduction. The nurse was right; it would not have looked at all odd for Winters to simply take Chloe by the hand and walk her out the front door, past half a dozen nurses and techs who had no idea who she was, let alone that her escort was the prime suspect in a homicide case.

Feeling frustrated and thwarted by everything in the hospital, he went outside and looked up and down the street. The hospital was a semi-remote location. He would have needed a car to get away from here. Matt Winters was the registered owner of a blue ‘95 Camry, but they’d found that ditched in the parking lot of a coffee house the day after the murder. If he had a car, it was probably stolen.

“Hey!”

Nick turned to see who was yelling for him. A middle-aged man was walking across the street towards him.

“You a cop?” he asked.

“No sir, I’m with the crime lab.”

“Close enough,” the man said, stopping next to Nick. “I need to report a reckless driver.”

“Sir, I don’t handle these kinds of things. If you’d like to go down to the station, you can file a report there and-”

“I don’t want to go down to the station. You’re here now.”

Nick tried again to protest, but the man hardly stopped for breath. “About half an hour ago I came outside to check my mail, and this damn idiot nearly ran me over. Had to have been going fifty miles an hour. In a residential neighborhood! What kind of half-brained maniac-”

“Half an hour ago?” Nick said, taking his turn at interrupting. Half an hour ago was when Matt Winters would have been fleeing the scene.

“Yes. Don’t you listen? I though you people wrote things down-”

“Did you see what kind of car? Did you get the license plate number?”

“A green something. I only got part of the plate,” the man sounded more than a little put out that Nick kept deterring his narrative agenda. “381. Lunatic was gone before I could get-”

“Did he have anyone in the car with him?” Nick was getting anxious, excited, now.

The man glared at him. Nick really didn’t feel like indulging his storytelling ego, but knew he would if it came to that. Fortunately, it didn’t.

“You know, I think he did,” the man said, apparently feeling satisfied exchanging his dramatic high ground for moral. “Little girl. As if he wasn’t crazy enough, driving like that, but with a kid-”

“Thank you sir, you’ve been a big help.” Nick raced back into the hospital to find Vega. In minutes he had officers setting up roadblocks and an APB out on the car. That was something at least. They wouldn’t get out of Vegas.

Nick went back to his SUV, intending to head straight for Matt’s house to try and find any indication of where he might have gone. But before he pulled away, he picked up his cell phone and dialed.

* * *

Gil could have left the lab when his shift ended. He probably should have, but he’d hung around, fiddling with ongoing experiments and even poking at a cold case or two. No one asked him why he was staying late.

Brass called when they had Tromba in custody.

He wasn’t part of this interrogation; he was going to watch from the observation room, but they waited until he arrived to start.

“You ever hear that money can’t buy everything, Joseph?” Brass said, circling the room in a leisurely mosey. “Guess that’s not something you encountered much, is it? When you’re making your money from coke, there’s not much you can’t get. Or get done, is there?”

“The problem with buying loyalty,” Greg added, leaning on the table, “is that when someone with a better offer comes around, it leaves you high and dry.”

“That’s also something you’re used to, isn’t it? At least, you should be by now,” Brass added.

Officially, Gil was here as a supervisor; observing Greg. But for the first time ever in his memory, he was more interested in Greg’s showmanship than the information he was presenting. He didn’t know what Greg had in his hand, although he had a pretty good idea how this game would end. But the really interesting thing would be seeing how he played it and the reaction from Tromba when he did.

Right now, Tromba wasn’t playing the game. He didn’t move; didn’t betray anything he might be thinking. He was sitting back in his chair, hands folded in his lap, his head cocked to one side in a manner of bored disinterest. He met Brass’s stare with a cool one of his own.

But his lawyer wasn’t so restrained. “Captain Brass,” he said, “would you kindly get to your point?”

“Oh, I’d love to,” Brass said with an unpleasant smile. He sat down next to Greg. “Your boys in the office rolled over on you. Told us anything we could ever have wanted to know. About your, your business. Kain,” he said meaningfully, but it earned nothing from Tromba. “Amazing how fast that’ll happen when you tell them their big brother is about to go down for murder.”

“Kain had been stealing from you for months,” Greg said. “And he was using that money to buy off the other employees. They tell us he was tired of playing second banana.”

“There was a coup being staged, and you were on the wrong side of it,” Brass said, picking up the instant Greg stopped. “So you set him up. Called in, made an appointment. You knew he’d be there. You also knew he wouldn’t think there was anything odd about you showing up as well.”

“Bet you get some important clients,” Greg said. “You’d want to meet them together. Handle the negotiations as a team.”

“Did he think it was odd that you were wearing gloves?” Brass asked. “Or did you put those on when his back was turned? Right before you stabbed him?” Tromba was good, Gil had to admit that. Not even his breathing faltered in the face of Brass’s accusations.

“Afterwards, you got in your car and took off. But you weren’t in a hurry. Didn’t want to attract attention to yourself, did you?” Brass continued, standing up and wandering around the room as he talked. “Bet you even buckled your seatbelt, just like any good, upstanding, law-abiding citizen.”

“What do you have to support this?” the lawyer said, not interested in showing good form. “My client is not going to sit here and listen to you theorize any longer.”

“Good,” said Greg, looking up brightly, “cuz we’re done with that.” He pulled out the crime scene photos. “You left a couple of gifts. You know, to remember you by,” Greg said.

“The knife, for Kain,” he said, and tapped the close-up of Kain’s face. “And that’s your loogey,” he finished.

The lawyer lifted an eyebrow. “So you speculate,” he said. “You can’t prove that.”

Greg waved a hand in irritation. “Yeah, it’s on my ‘to-do’ list,” he said without making eye contact. From behind Tromba and his lawyer, Brass chuckled and shook his head a little, but Grissom frowned. He recognized Greg’s build-up; this was a feint. He wanted to know what the real play would be.

“We’ve got a warrant for a DNA sample, and that’ll place you at the crime scene,” Greg said, sounding almost bored.

The lawyer glanced at Tromba, who nodded. “So go ahead,” the lawyer said. “Even if you’re right, it will only prove he spat on a corpse. That’s insubstantial at best.”

“No, the word your searching for is ‘superfluous,’” Greg corrected with a smug grin. When no one joined him in his good humor, he shrugged and continued. “You ever hear the phrase ‘Blood is thicker than water’? Well, so’s spit. And while viscosity doesn’t help us, alleles do.” He pulled out the DNA profiles “Oh, and this,” he added, retrieving Gil’s birth certificate and tapping Tromba’s name on it.

Greg kept talking, probably explaining how they’d gotten the warrant - the process had appealed to his sense of the dramatic - but Gil stopped listening. Instead, he was watching Tromba. For one instant, when Greg had pulled out his birth certificate, Tromba had faltered. It had been subtle; just a rapid double blink, out of time with his normal rhythm. Gil doubted Greg or Brass had noticed, but it told him something: Tromba was getting nervous. He wasn’t calling the shots in this room, and he didn’t like it. A tiny grin started to tug at Gil’s mouth.

His gamble had paid off. He’d hoped his actions would have granted them a warrant for Tromba’s DNA, but the issuing judge had gone one better. He’d looked at their evidence and connected the dots himself: matching alleles plus Tromba’s name listed as Gil’s biological father had equaled probable cause and gotten them a warrant for Tromba’s property as well. Brass had called him right away as a courtesy. It was the only information he’d received on the case since taking himself off of it.

“Let’s just say our judge found that to be more than slightly probative,” Brass was finishing the explanation. “But, just to be on the safe side, we went ahead and got a warrant for all Gil’s living male relatives.” He paused and then said, in an almost-whisper, “Wouldn’t want you to feel singled out.”

Tromba still looked perfectly serene. His hands were still folded in front of him, and his mouth was starting to twitch in what was almost a smug smile.

“But I gotta hand it to you,” Greg said, shaking his head. “You didn’t make it easy for us. I had to really look for the evidence that’s going to put you away. But I found it.”

There it was again. For an instant - just a fraction longer this time - Tromba’s mask slipped. Gil could see Tromba’s mind working; trying to figure out what Greg could be talking about. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men, Gil thought.

“There’s one part of my car that I never think to clean. I bet most detailers don’t either,” Greg said. He pulled out two final photos. They showed the back of the seat belt and it’s retraction well. There were faint rust colored stains on both. “That’s were we found Kain’s blood. I figure it must have transferred during your upstanding citizen act.”

He mimed putting on a seatbelt and traced the outline of the shoulder strap across his chest. “I hear murder’s messy,” Greg said. “Wouldn’t know, myself. But I’m guessing that letting a guy bleed out all over you is the kind of thing that’ll seriously ruin your Armani. I don’t care what the Oxy-Clean commercials say.”

“And to think that buckling up often saves lives,” Brass mused. The lawyer deflated completely. Tromba sat back in his chair, but otherwise his demeanor didn’t change at all.

“Did you even know he was your son?” Greg asked. Tromba gave the slightest of shrugs and looked away over Greg’s shoulder.

“You ask as though it matters,” Tromba said. He sounded almost bored and nothing at all like the polite, sophisticated business man that had been in here before. He cocked his head to look at Greg. “You think I wouldn’t keep track of my children? I’ve always known, even if their mothers thought I shouldn’t.”

Brass laughed, an ironic, harsh sound. “Well, now I really don’t get it, man!” he said. “If you don’t know how many creeps like you Gil Grissom puts away in a month, you’ve been living in a cave. You had to know he’d nail you for it.”

Tromba flicked his eyes up at Brass, but set his jaw and pursed his lips. He was through answering questions. And Gil was through watching. Tromba’s words were awakening rank vestigial bitterness. So he left the room, choosing to drown the feeling in the much stronger pride he felt at Greg’s work. He doubted that he would have felt much better if he had been the one to find that last damning piece of evidence himself.

His phone rang as he left the building. He fished it out of his pocket and answered it. “Grissom,” he said.

“Gil, it’s Nick.” He sounded worried. Gil was about to ask what was wrong when Nick spat it out.

“Chloe’s been kidnapped.”