Title: Jane
Author: RFC
Summary: A blast from Nick's past shows up in an unexpected capacity
Disclaimer: Uh not mine. In fact CSI, etc. are the property of lots of people who aren't me.
Author's Note: This is my first CSI fic so please tell me what you think. Should I continue?

*I'm going through and re-editing all of the parts for this story, so this is a new(ish) part 1. Hopefully I'll have the others up sometime in the next few days.*


Part 1

The body had been found at two am, a regular Jane Doe. A couple of kids out after curfew messing around had stumbled upon it in the wasteland outside of Vegas, partially buried in sand. She'd been dead for maybe a couple of hours; rigour mortis had yet to set in but that didn't mean a whole lot. The sub zero temperatures of the desert at night had the same effect on the cadaver as a big sandy freezer. According to the coroner she'd been killed by a single bullet to the left temple, shot at close range. Robbins had dug a standard issue nine-millimetre slug out of the brain tissue. There was no ID of any description so Sara was running the victim's prints through their database. It was a long shot but, given that Missing Persons had come up with nothing, it was all they had. The lack of a purse in her handbag suggested that this had been robbery except that the wound was clean, straight to the brain. It had been done by someone who knew what he or she was doing.

Unsurprisingly, Gil Grissom, head of Las Vegas crime lab, was not having a good night. He was, at least for the time being, stumped and it wasn't a feeling he liked. He was all for the perps making his job challenging -challenging meant interesting - but not to such an extent that they actually got away with the crimes they committed. That was in no way part of the deal.

His office seemed suddenly small as he reviewed the case photos that he and Catherine had collected earlier that evening, or rather morning. She looked harmless, like someone's mother or grandmother, maybe fifty to fifty-five. This was the kind of crime that really screwed his people up. The kind that didn't make sense. They couldn't hide behind the evidence with these. They had to get involved in the victim's life. Of course, that was only if they could actually find out who the victim was, a little voice at the back of his mind added.

What surprised him was that there was nothing to suggest that any kind of a struggle had taken place: no bruises on the victim, nothing under her fingernails, no fingerprints on the body itself so the perp had to have been wearing gloves. Another sign that he or she, mostly likely he, was a pro. There had to have been contact between Jane and her killer when the body was transported which meant that even if there were no bit of him on her that had to bits of her on him, or on whatever he had used as transport. She had definitely been a body at that time - the blood, or rather lack thereof, on the ground told him that, which meant that there was blood somewhere else. All they needed was a viable suspect and a viable somewhere else'. They'd crack this, it was just a question of listening to the evidence, unfortunately the majority of which had been buried or displaced by the same sand that had obscured the body itself. It was going to be a long night.

He gave up after five minutes. His argument being that even five minutes was a long time when you were staring at images of a dead person. It had seemed like a long time at least. There was nothing there, or rather nothing that he hadn't already seen. He had started to put them back in to their wallet as the rest of his team filed into his office.

He looked up at them expectantly from his desk, "Anything?"

"No matches for the prints," Sara Sidle slumped back against his filing cabinet and crossed her arms. The tall brunette looked as frustrated with this case as he was.

Catherine Willows shrugged. She'd got back to the lab thirty minutes ago having found little at the crime scene itself. Whoever had executed the murder had done so with precision. The sand had already filled in any tracks that had been left when the body was dumped.

"I got something," the pure distaste that registered on Warrick Brown's usually amiable face said that, in this case, nothing would be better than this particular 'something'. His colleagues waited for him expand on that. He wasn't the squeamish sort. You didn't become a CSI if you were. "Semen," he finally continued, "on the scarf in the vic's bag."

"Assault?" Asked Sara

"Inconclusive," the tall black man responded. "I gotta do some more tests but it isn't fresh. There was no sign on the body, right?" Grissom nodded affirmative. As undesirable as this development was, if they could trace its source they'd at least have a means of identifying Jane if nothing else

His train of thought was interrupted by a knock at the door. Moments and several confused glances later, it opened and a grinning head popped through followed by an athletic looking body. Nick Stokes' grin widened as he took in the scene in front of him. He shouldn't feel smug about not having to work but it was just too hard to resist. Especially in the mood he was in, after just coming back from a lazy holiday with his sister and her kids. God he loved those kids; they were at that age where they'd got over the worst stage but they still knew how to have fun.

"What's up, guys?"

"Jane Doe," muttered Warrick.

"Damn." They were never easy. He almost felt sorry for them. Almost.

"If you're here to gloat Nicky, you can leave now," muttered Grissom. He smiled slightly at the teasing. The break had apparently been just what his youngest CSI had needed. Nick Stokes hadn't had a good year. It had been hard on him psychologically and physically after being stalked and then eventually attacked by Nigel Crane, on top of the usual stress that simply came with the job. Now though, he seemed almost back to normal. The easy banter, although essentially superficial, spoke volumes.

"Can I help? Seriously, I've got nothing to do." Nick pouted slightly in an attempt to look engaging. It worked every time and he really didn't want to go home until he had to. It still felt strange to him, foreign. He so needed to look for a new place.

While she rolled her eyes at his attempt at 'cute' and making a mental note to ask him to baby-sit her little girl sometime - Lindsay would show him cute' - Catherine handed over the wallet of photos that she'd started to flick through. There was nothing new to her in there anyway.

"So what's up?" he asked, surveying his colleagues as he absentmindedly removed the covering.

"No Identification, not listed as missing, not on the database," supplied Sara, succinctly.

"Nice," responded Nick, before he looked down at the crime scene photos. His hands shook slightly as he took in each of the images. It'd been years, she'd changed but not so much that she was unreconcileable with the image imprinted on his mind of the woman who'd haunted his childhood. "Guys, she's, uh, she's not a 'Jane Doe'." His voice shook like his hands as he supplied them with a name. If he'd looked at the small mirror across the room he'd have seen his face drain of colour. All he could think was: 'Not now, not after everything else'. He looked up to see his friends staring at him with concern, worried that she was a friend or a relation. He smiled wanly, looking round before seeking out Catherine's green unflinching gaze. He shrugged and repeated to her what he'd said just a few months before: "Last minute baby-sitter."