Disclaimer: Wish I owned them...still don't.

Breaking Stasis

By Tallulah

Chapter 5

"There was pizza? Why did no one tell me there was pizza?"

"Hi, Greg," Grissom and Sara intoned simultaneously without looking up from their work.

"I can't believe you guys ordered in and didn't tell me." He flipped the top off of the left-over pizza box and was temporarily pleased to see several slices remaining, only to discover they were stone cold. "Good gravy, how early did you guys come in tonight? This stuff is practically petrified." He thumped a slice against the box in disgust, then bit into it anyway. "Veggie?" he said, giving Sara a dark look. "You let me eat vegetarian pizza? That is such a crime." He slouched back into a chair and proceeded to demolish the two remaining slices. Sara and Grissom exchanged a look and went back to ignoring him.

"So what's on tap tonight?" Greg asked after a few moments of blissful quiet.

Grissom glanced up at the clock. "Your guess is as good as mine, Greg." He pushed away from the table. "I haven't checked assignments yet."

"No need, boss." Warrick entered the room and handed a small stack of paper slips to Grissom. I passed Ecklie on my way in." He made a face.

"Where's Nicky?" Sara asked.

Grissom looked up from the messages in his hand. "His B&E in Fairdale turned into a prostitution ring bust. He's down at PD with ladies and their, ah…manager." He looked back down. "You'd think these people would learn not to call the cops out to their place of business…at least when it's an illegal place of business."

"Stupid is as stupid does." Greg said wisely. Grissom's looked at him quizzically. "Forrest Gump," the younger man went on, citing his source. Sara and Warrick rolled their eyes in unison; Grissom's puzzled look didn't change. "What?" Greg said, "I can't quote too?"

"Do you have somewhere to be, Greg?" Grissom asked.

"Well, if you don't have anything for me then I have about a million pieces of trash evidence to sort through on my drug distributor." He leaned across the table towards Sara, "Did you know that drug dealers tend not to recycle?" She gave him a blank look.

"Happy hunting, Greggo," Grissom said cheerily and glanced meaningfully at the door.

The young CSI groaned and dragged himself out of his chair. "Well, one man's trash is another man's evidence." He pulled a plastic clip out of his pocket and clipped it over his nose. "Wish me luck," he said, the clip distorting his voice, and marched out of the room.

"He's a trooper," Sara said with a grin.

"Yeah, remind me to give him a medal." Grissom looked at Warrick over the top of his glasses. "What do you have going on tonight, Rick?

"I got court in the morning so I'm going over case notes, but I don't have anything else pending right now. Y'all need a hand with your dead doctor?"

Grissom nodded and handed a copy of Brasses notes to him. "There are the names of two people who were fired from NorGen Labs two years ago. Dr. Morris was involved in the firing. It's a long shot, but we just want to make sure these guys aren't involved. Seems unlikely, but you never know. If you can get an alibi for them, we can count them out as suspects. We're short on those and motives right now."

"You got it." Warrick took the notes and left to make the calls.

Grissom turned his attention to Sara. "See anything interesting?" She tilted her head to the side with a smile and quirked an amused eyebrow at him. He elaborated, feeling inexplicably warm, "In the data. Do you see anything interesting in the data?"

She looked down at the pages spread in front of her. "I see what Dr. Morris meant when he talked about these results being too neat. This is what you see after years of narrowing your search, not months." She sat back in her chair, her brow furrowed in thought. "No wonder he was so thrilled. This type of research should span an entire career, not be something you bang out in a couple of months." She chewed on her lip thoughtfully for a few moments. "Did you ever see the movie Office Space?" She asked.

Grissom gave her a confused look. "Have we started a new conversation or is this related to the case somehow?"

Sara rolled her eyes. "Yes, Griss, it relates to the case."

"I'm very interested in seeing where you're going with this. No, I haven't seen it."

She leaned forward and clasped her hands together. "Okay, in a nutshell, it's about a couple of programmer's who write a program, kind of like a virus, that gets buried in some financial software. The idea is that anytime a transaction occurs that involves fractions of a cent, their program shaves off the fractions and puts it into an account that they have set up. They figure that with enough transactions over a long enough period of time, they'll have a decent sum set aside and it'll be such small amounts, no-one will ever notice. Does that make sense?"

Grissom obviously looked as though he wanted to say 'no', but instead said, "I think you watch too many movies, but yes, I'm with you so far. How does this relate?"

"I'm getting to that." Sara waved him off impatiently. "The point is, it didn't work, or rather it did work, but better than they thought it would…people noticed."

He pursed his lips and crossed his arms. "Go on."

Getting into her groove, Sara continued, "Okay, what if we had someone at NorGen who was desperate to keep the grant money coming in, but didn't think they had the results they thought they'd need to keep the feds interested? This is a cut-throat business like Jenna was saying, right? At any minute another lab somewhere else in the world could announce findings that would make NorGens' contributions obsolete and there goes all of their hard work and possibly their funding."

Grissom nodded, interested. "Morris wouldn't appreciate anyone manipulating his results, especially not when you consider how much the Alzheimer's predictors meant to him personally."

"Right, I don't think he'd tolerate it for a second. She went on, holding up the neat print outs of data. "I think somebody messed with Dr. Morris's data somehow so that when it was taken before the grant review board, they couldn't help but award the extension. With demonstrable results, it would have looked like the genetic predictors for Alzheimer's were right around the corner for NorGen. The only problem was…"

"They did too good of a job." Grissom supplied, fascinated.

"Exactly." Sara laid several sheets of graph paper on top of each other and held them up to the fluorescent lights so the ink showed through. The graphs on each page were nearly identical. "I think whoever did this meant for the correlations to appear, but only just barely. Maybe they meant for them to grow stronger over time, but they did something wrong. It happened much too fast."

"How would someone go about sabotaging the data like that?"

Sara shrugged. "That I don't know. There are a couple of places in the process where it would be possible, though I can't imagine anyone would have access to the data before Dr. Morris vetted it himself." She narrowed her gaze thoughtfully. "Logistically, Deena might have had the opportunity, but I just don't see the motive. She's only a research assistant. Her career doesn't depend on NorGen's success. My guess is that whatever software the lab uses for compiling these results has been tampered with, but that's just a guess."

Grissom shook his head. "No, that's a theory." He met her eyes across the table. "We're going to have to have diagnostics take a closer look at Dr. Morris' computer, and we're going to have to go back to NorGen."

A tapping on the glass wall of the breakroom brought their attention around to Archie. He swung into the room on one hand, leaning in the doorway. "You guys are gonna want to see this."

They followed the tech back to the A/V room where he had the surveillance footage from the NorGen security cameras cued up. Archie settled in behind his impressive display of state-of-the-art equipment and swiveled in his chair to face the two CSIs.

"I've been running over the footage from the security cameras at NorGen and comparing each entry that day with the names logged on the card scan manifest." He held up the stapled list, now highlighted and notated. "Now, I did find a handful of instances where more than one person entered the building on a single card swipe; people holding the door for each other – that type of thing, but on continuing review of the tapes, all of those people also exited the building before the murder took place.

"So our murderer had to swipe a badge to get into the building." Grissom offered.

"Well, yes," Archie replied, "but don't get too excited." He flipped a couple of pages over into the manifest and pointed to an entry. "10:16 – Richard Greenway scans his own badge to enter the building."

Turning back to the still screen on the monitor, Archie moved forward a few frames, the time stamp in the lower corner counting up in slow motion. As the seconds ticked leisurely by, a figure entered the cameras view from the right and proceeded up the steps to the card reader by the side door. Richard Greenway was easily recognizable even in the dim lighting, but a brief turn of the head brought his face into clear view and verified it.

"Yeah, that's Greenway alright." Sara's tone made it clear that her opinion of the man hadn't mellowed in the intervening hours since their interview. Grissom smiled to himself.

"Okay, so Greenway enters at 10:16." Archie allowed the recording to move forward at regular speed until Greenway's silent form had disappeared into the building and out of the cameras range. He paused the video again and spun his chair to face a second monitor which was cued to a shot from the same camera. The only difference between the two images on the screens was the small green numbers glowing in the bottom corner of each shot. "At 10:43, we see Greenway exit the lab from the same entrance he entered." The A/V tech advanced the video until the subject moved back into sight, pushing through the inner door and back out into the night. He glanced up at Grissom and Sara who watched the flickering images without comment. "I checked with computer diagnostics and they confirm Greenway's story. The time stamp on the system login and keystrokes shows that he was in the computer room from 10:18 to 10:40.

"We pretty much knew all of this Archie, though this does back up what Greenway told us so technically it does give him an alibi," Grissom said. "What is it that you wanted to show us?'

"I'm getting to it," Archie replied. "Trust me, it's relevant." He handed the manifest to Sara. "Look at the card swipes after 10:00 p.m. Does anything jump out at you?"

Frowning in concentration, Sara looked over the neat columns of information. "No, I don't see any…oh, wait." She looked up at Grissom in surprise. "Richard Greenway logged into the building at 10:16 and again at 10:25."

"Right," Archie said. "Only it wasn't Richard Greenway. Look." Turning back to the first monitor, the time stamp reading 10:17 – just after Greenway's disappearance in the building, Archie scanned forward until the numbers rolled over to 10:24. "Here's our mystery player." He hit play and sat back in his chair with his arms crossed. Within a minute, a dark figure moved into the camera's focus and walked up the steps to the card reader. The identity of the person would be impossible to make out. Aware of the camera's presence, they kept their face turned away and a baseball cap pulled low over their forehead. Attired in a windbreaker and tan pants, it was impossible to tell much from physical makeup alone.

"Odds on, that's our guy." Sara squinted a little closer to the screen. "Or girl."

"It seems likely," Archie said, "but you guys are the experts. I just push the buttons." He sped the tape forward to 10:51 and the same figure reappeared in the doorway, hurrying, but still making a conscious effort to avert his or her face away from the camera's eye.

"Okay, so our possible murderer entered the building at 10:25 and didn't exit again until 10:51." Sara looked at Grissom. "Twenty-six minutes is more than enough time for the perp to enter the building, get into Dr. Norfield's office and get the gun from the cabinet, go up to the third floor, kill Dr. Morris, return the gun and then get caught on tape making an exit.

Grissom nodded. "It's certainly a reasonable time frame."

"Do you think the murderer knew that Greenway would be coming back that night?" Archie asked.

"Not necessarily," Grissom replied. "In fact, it's likely that our perp assumed he wouldn't be. It would have been a safe bet if it weren't for the hardware problems Greenway told us about. It would look perfectly normal for Greenway to log into the building so late. If he hadn't actually had to go back in that evening, we might never have realized it wasn't him." He pursed his lips in thought for a moment. "Thanks Archie," he said finally and then to Sara, "Let's get diagnostics on the computer from Dr. Morris' office. We'll go to NorGen first thing in the morning and have a talk with Richard Greenway about how someone else got a hold of a copy of his id badge. We may luck out and get a chance to speak to the elusive Dr. Ayers as well."

Grissom and Sara exited the A/V lab and headed back to the break room. On their way down the hall, David Hodges, the trace lab technician spotted them and veered in their direction. Sara pretended not to see him as he strode toward them and quickly sidestepped into the ladies room. She could do without Hodges preening for one night. Besides which it was Grissom that the oily tech most wished to impress, and thus suck up to.

"Hey boss."

Grissom steeled himself for the encounter with his least favorite team member. He dearly wished that Hodges wasn't as good at his job as he was. At least then he would have a legitimate reason to dislike him. He took a deep breath. "Hello, David."

"And how are you this evening?" Hodges asked. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and an inquisitive look on his face.

"I'm fine. Do you have results for me?" Grissom hated to be short, but…well actually he didn't.

Hodges looked disappointed. "Well, yes. Yes, I do. I got the results back on your LBH, that's a 'long brown hair', from the lab shooting."

"What do you call it if the hair is blonde?" Grissom asked.

"What?"

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Grissom gestured for the man to continue. "Never mind, what did you find?"

"Well, just so you know, the hair tag was only a partial and what we did have was deteriorated – probably from overuse of chemical products – so it took some extra time and a good bit of extra effort on my part to get the sample extracted for replication…"

Grissom cut him off. "I'm sure it was a lot of hard work. Now, can you please just tell me if you got a match?"

Totally unperturbed at having his self-promoting diatribe cut short, Hodges immediately switched gears. "You were right of course. The hair belonged to Deena Michaels, The doctor's research assistant.

Grissom nodded. "That's what we expected. It doesn't eliminate her as a suspect, but at least it doesn't add anyone else to the pool. Thanks, David."

Hodges visibly preened. Grissom resisted the urge to roll his eyes again. "Goodbye, David," he said and continued on his way down the hall.

"Do you want the report?" Hodges called after him.

"Just leave it on my desk," Grissom replied over his shoulder, without breaking stride.

Sara joined him a few minutes later in the break room.

"Chicken," he said with a wry look.

She looked surprised for a moment and then smiled. "Yes, well I didn't want to risk getting caught between the ass kiss-er and the ass kiss-ee. I thought it would be safer for me to keep my distance."

"Hmm," Grissom replied, but smiled as they both went back to their work.

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A few hours later, the sun slowly began to make its way through the Nevada sky and the never-sleeping town of Las Vegas began the official part of its day. The traffic flow on the strip slowed to a trickle – though it never actually stopped no matter what the time of the day – and the commuters on their way into the business parks began to clog traffic on the other side of town.

Sara and Grissom had spent the evening compiling data and contrasting results from the reams of printouts they had taken from the lab and from Dr. Morris' office. Nothing else of great interest had presented itself, but the correlations that had so enraptured and puzzled Dr. Morris were becoming much more evident.

Sara sat back in her chair and indulged in a spine-cracking stretch. "I need coffee. Want some?"

Grissom nodded and gave a monosyllabic grunt that more or less conveyed acceptance, but did not look up from his work.

She ambled over to the coffee pot and fiddled with the ancient contraption until it started percolating and producing something that looked at least somewhat like coffee. Leaning against the counter as she waited for the pot to finish, Sara was annoyed to discover that at some point in the last few hours, her backside had gone numb. After checking to be sure that she was standing out of Grissom's peripheral vision, she rubbed the offending area surreptitiously, trying to get the blood flow going again. Back in San Francisco, in her early days as a young and eager CSI level 1, she would never have guessed that this job could entail so much sitting.

As the coffee's aroma began to permeate the room, Warrick came ambling in. He took a deep breath. "Ah, glorious caffeine – fodder of the gods." He dropped into Sara's vacated chair and glanced over the stacks of printouts spread across the table. "Hey, this looks like fun."

"Oh, it is. Feel free to pitch in. We could use an extra set of eyes."

Warrick raised his hands in surrender. "You got me. I'd rather go help Greg sort through Mt. Trashmore out in the garage."

"Wuss." Sara smirked at her co-worker and plunked a coffee cup down in front of him. As soon as the pot gurgled to a finish, she brought it over and filled Warrick's mug, re-filling Grissom's at the same time. She poured another one for herself and took the seat next to her boss, who had still as of yet failed to acknowledge either of them. After a moment, he reached out blindly for his cup, still too intent on his reading to look up long enough to locate it. Sara gave Warrick a wry glance and pushed the elusive mug into Grissom's questing fingers.

"What do you think? Should we carry on without him?" Warrick asked. "It looks like he might be a while."

Sara peeked over Grissom's shoulder. "Nah, he's only got a couple of paragraphs left. Let's let him finish."

They sat in amused silence for a few more minutes until Grissom finally lowered the pages. He took off his glasses and gave each of them a dirty look. "You know, just because I don't acknowledge you, doesn't mean I can't hear you."

"Duly noted boss." Warrick grinned and handed him a thin folder. "I've been on the phone all night tracking down your former NorGen lab rats." Grissom opened the file as Warrick explained the contents. "Robert Culver and Thomas Sizeman were both let go at the same time for 'inappropriate conduct' according to the official reports from NorGen's HR department, but it really just boiled down to two idiots horsing around in one of the labs during a late shift. Apparently they were playing round and inadvertently turned on some heating equipment. The problem didn't get caught in time and all of the specimens being stored that lab were destroyed. They did get fired for it, but it doesn't look like there was any real heat behind it on either side. Nonetheless, just 'cause I'm so thorough, I tracked your boys down. Culver currently works for a small lab in upstate New Jersey that does blood analysis. I spoke to him briefly and he can account for his whereabouts the day of the murder. He was at work. I checked with his supervisor and he backs the story. Sizeman was harder to track down, but easier to eliminate. He's been in Wichita Falls Hospital for the last six days after side-swiping a deer with his motorcycle. I'm thinking he's not your guy." At the end of his re-cap, Warrick settled back in his chair and wrapped his long fingers around the warm mug. "Oh, and for the record, neither of them could figure out why anyone would want to kill Dr. Morris either. They both said they liked the guy."

"Well, at least that's two out of our cast of dozens eliminated," Sara said and slumped back in her chair. "How many more are there? This could take weeks."

"Eliminate all of the impossibilities and what you're left with are possibilities," Grissom said. "Thanks, Warrick."

"Sure thing. He nodded. "Oh, I've got the results on your murder weapon too." Warrick produced another folder and handed this one to Sara. "You can thank me for running interference with Hodges later. I'll let you buy me breakfast."

She laughed. "Small price to pay for such a large favor. Deal." She was quiet for a moment as she read over the evidentiary report and then looked up, addressing Grissom. "Not much help, I'm afraid. There were no prints on the weapon, I knew that, but trace came back with very little either. The only substances they identified were gun oil, talc and good old fashioned dust. Dr. Norfield should consider cleaning his piece more often. All that dirt's rough on the firing pin. The talc was a match to the brand of latex glove that the lab uses, but wasn't found in a significant enough quantity to say for sure that the shooter was actually wearing the gloves. It could have easily been transfer picked up from trace amounts in the drawer where Dr. Norfield had it stored."

Grissom nodded. It wasn't a lot, but so much of this process involved eliminating unrelated information and finding context for the relevant facts that any steps at all were steps in the right direction.

Sara closed the file and stood. "I'm going to go down to diagnostics and see if they've gotten anywhere on Morris' lab computer. I had them prioritize that over his home laptop since that's the computer he would've using to run the data for the cycles. Maybe they can find something that will support my 'Office Space' theory." She rinsed her mug and added it to the dishwasher before leaving the break room.

Warrick looked puzzled. "Office Space? What has that got to do with anything?"

Grissom was pleased to know that he wasn't the only one out of fashion with the current trends in entertainment. "I wondered the same thing."

"Isn't that the movie with that Milton guy and the Swingline Stapler?"

The CSI supervisor gave him a dry look. "You guys all have way too much free time on your hands."

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"Hey, Scott," Sara called as she pulled open the door to the computer diagnostics lab.

There was no immediate response. After a moment of silence, dulled only slightly by the steady hum emanating from the dozen or so PCs and laptops scattered around the room, a voice said, "Dammit!"

"Scott?" She called again, peering around the room for the County's best computer expert. Shelves of computer equipment in every shape, size and possible function lined each side of the room. There was no sign of Scott.

"Oh, for God's sake. What the hell was that?"

Sara followed the staccato sound of rapid-fire typing through to the back of the stacks until she found Scott Bradford, MIT graduate and computer expert extraordinaire, typing furiously at a workstation in the back corner of the room.

"Son of a…Oh, come on you bastard!"

Sara could see why he hadn't responded. He hadn't heard her. A pair of headphones covered the computer techs ears. He was bent over the keyboard, typing at breakneck speed, but his eyes never left the screen. She reached out and tapped him on the shoulder.

Scott exploded out of the chair as though he had been shot.

"Oh, good God, Sara!" He leaned against the desk, breathing heavily. His blue eyes were wide behind his glasses and his hair stuck out where the headphones had been ripped off his head during his ascent. "Don't do that!"

"Sorry. Sounds like whatever you're working on isn't cooperating. Big project?"

"What? Oh, right…big project…not cooperating." He looked nervous and wouldn't meet her eyes. She noticed that even in his surprise, he was careful to keep his body between her and the monitor.

"Scott…"

"Uh, what?" His fair skin flushed under her scrutiny.

"What exactly are you doing in here?"

He opened his mouth to reply and then closed it again. The young man's shoulders slumped. "Don't tell Grissom…please?" He moved away from the screen.

"Video games?" Sara exclaimed in disbelief. She looked at him incredulously. "You're playing video games. You have got to be kidding me".

He shrugged uncomfortably and gave her a weak smile. "It's multi-player Quake. A bunch of the guys from other labs all log on at the same time and we play teams…"

Sara stopped him, angrily. "I don't care what you're playing Scott. I care that I have two computers here that need your attention, that are part of a murder investigation, need I remind you, and you're back here playing…"

The guilty look was quickly replaced by a panicked one. "No, no no!" He waved his hands back and forth. "No, I'm done with those. I even have the report for you." He grabbed a folder from his desk and thrust it into her hands. "It's all there, everything from the computer at the lab and the laptop from the home. I went over them both with a fine-toothed comb. I was able to recover some deleted emails from both of them, but nothing seemed relevant." He gestured at the hefty file. "I printed everything out for you of course, so you can see for yourself, but there was no 'get murdered today' appointment in his calendar…" He chuckled nervously, but Sara's expression didn't change so he continued. 'I looked into every crevice of the software package that the doctor used for compiling his results…" He trailed off, looking apologetic. "There's nothing there, Sara. This instance of the software tool is straight out of the box. The only customization that has been done at all is to register Dr. Morris as the primary user and that happens when the installation is done."

"Damn." Sara pressed her lips together. "I really thought I was on to something…" She opened the file and looked it over with a sigh.

"Well, I don't know if it makes you feel better, but what you were thinking is actually possible with this software."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you don't exactly buy this kind of product at Office Depot. It's very specialized and written for specific applications, but there is room left for individual customization by the end user."

"What kind of customization are we talking about?"

Scott shrugged. "It depends on the user, but the way it is written, there are…'holes' left in the code that anyone who knows the programming language can activate and fill. This reroutes the logic outside of the standard code and allows the end user to manipulate the data with his…," he darted a quick look in Sara's direction, "or her own calculations. It's a user exit."

"But you didn't find anything like that anywhere on this computer did you?"

He shook his head ruefully. "Nope, sorry. Wish I could say I had, but the exits on this baby have never been accessed, much less activated."

Sara chewed on her lip for a moment. "Thanks, Scott," she said distractedly as she turned towards the door.

"Uh, Sarah…"

"Yeah?" She turned back, curiously.

Scott shifted from foot to foot and nodded at the monitor which was still showing scenes from the video game. Occasionally, a computer-animated creature of some kind would amble onto the screen in hot pursuit of a camouflage clad, bazooka bearing, computer-animated soldier. "Are you going to ah…tell Grissom about…"

She pantomimed locking her lips and throwing away the key. Scott drooped in relief.

"You might want to consider turning the volume down a little though," she suggested, laughing at his rueful grin. Waving at the tech over her shoulder, she headed back to the break room to catch Grissom up on what she had learned.

A/N: RL has been keeping me uber-busy so many apologies for the delay in getting this updated. My thanks once again to Foxtoast

Oh, and can I get an amen that our favorite geeks are together in canon? My cup runneth over...