Chapter Text
The 50 th Annual Forensic Academy Conference
February 9-12, 1998
Hilton and Towers Hotel
San Francisco, CA
two years before CSI begins
Gil Grissom arrived in San Francisco with mixed feelings and a stomach ache. As the massive height of the Hilton and Towers Hotel came into view down the street, he took a breath. There were so many things about the annual Forensic Academy Conference he looked forward to—groundbreaking innovations from his colleagues across the country, interesting case studies, new techniques—and one thing he dreaded: the noise. The convention was loud in every sense. The display floor would be packed with hundreds of vendors catering to thousands of attendees. Words and voices and videos all competed for your attention. Then there were all the lecture sessions, all at conflicting times in rooms that were impossible to find. All together it made his head buzz.
Still, every year he came back. As exhausting as the conference could be, he couldn’t stay away. There was simply too much to learn, and to teach.
The cab pulled to a stop outside the long gray awning that marked the hotel. Grissom paid and thanked the driver, then retrieved his one small suitcase where it sat beside him. W the cab pulled away he was left with the glittering lights of downtown San Francisco. It was Sunday evening. The conference proper would start bright and early the next morning, but all he had to do tonight was check in and make it to his room unnoticed.
Grissom entered the lobby and was struck by how massive the place was. A short, wide flight of stairs dipped into a space that could have been a college campus center or a large, strange coffee shop as easily a hotel. A small fleet of arm chairs and coffee tables filled the center of the room and a bar ran the length of the back wall. People sat around drinking and chatting, and Grissom recognized a few faces. He kept his eyes on the ground as he bypassed the lounge area and made his way to the check-in desk.
“Here for the Academy of Forensic Science?” asked the woman behind the desk.
Grissom confirmed that he was. The woman handed him a keycard and pointed him to a nearby hall.
“Registration is down this hall and to the left.”
Grissom nodded his thanks. Sure enough the hallway opened into a larger corridor connecting various parts of the hotel. Custom-made signage in the Academy’s familiar teal and navy colors pointed him toward the registration event. He had arrived toward the tail end, which was just as well. There were only a few people in line now, though the size of the rope queue suggested they had quite a crowd earlier, or expected one tomorrow. When his turn came, he stepped up to the E-G table and gave his name. The girl scanned through what remained of a field of lanyards and handed him one, along with a map and a schedule. “Enjoy the conference Dr. Grissom.”
“Thank you.”
Grissom followed the clearly marked path out of the registration room and found himself back in the connecting hallway. He stepped aside, looking between his map, his keycard, and Academy sign in front of him to find the way to his room. Just then a familiar voice cut through the hotel chatter.
“Gil? Gil Grissom!”
Oh no.
A tall man in a polo broke from a small crowd. He rushed up and rubbed Grissom’s shoulders before he could stop him. “How’s my favorite entomologist doing?”
“Fine, Davis. How are you?” Grissom said. The man’s name was Raleigh Davis. He was a CSI out of Memphis whom Grissom tended to run into at these things.
“I’m good, I’m good. Worked a real interesting case last year. Severed heads, ritual symbols, the whole deal. My guys are I are presenting the case study on Wednesday, you should come.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Grissom said politely.
“Oh and my oldest just got into Harvard. Wants to study biology, making her old man proud.”
“Congratulations. You must be very excited.”
Davis gestured to the group of people waiting for him down the hall. “Say, a few of us were off to grab a drink at the hotel bar. You should join us.”
“Thank you, but I’d like to turn in early tonight, make sure I have my lecture materials in order and so forth.”
“Nonsense! It’s barely 5pm.” Raleigh clapped a hand on Grissom’s shoulder. He leaned in close, and kept his voice low as he said, “Besides, I kinda told the gang you’d come.”
Grissom raised an eyebrow. “You did?”
“They’re big fans. We’d love to hear what you’ve been up to, ain’t that right y’all?” He raised his voice toward the end so the group could hear him.
They cheered. Grissom recognized most of the faces from previous conventions. He was interested in hearing about their work, but tomorrow in the lectures and poster sessions. He couldn’t think of a worse way to spend the evening than drinks with Raleigh Davis and his buddies.
“I’d like to drop my suitcase off in my room,” Grissom said.
“Oh no you don’t,” Raleigh said. He grabbed the handle of Grissom’s suitcase and started dragging it along behind him. “You tend to get lost up there, remember Seattle?”
Grissom did remember Seattle. Three years ago he had told Raleigh Davis he was going to drop his bag off in his room and conveniently forgot to come back down.
Raleigh trotted back to his group, still toting Grissom’s suitcase behind him. “Come on Gil, live a little.”
Grissom had always hated that phrase, “live a little.” As far as he was concerned he lived quite a bit, and he could do so perfectly well for the next few hours in the comfort of his hotel room. It crossed his mind that he could replace most of what he’d brought at any drug store. However, his suitcase also contained the slides for the seminar he’d be giving later in the week, and he’d be hard-pressed to replace them in time.
Grissom shook his head and followed begrudgingly after Raleigh and his gang as they all piled into the elevator. Raleigh pressed the button for the 46th floor.
“Gil, you seen the lounge yet?”
Grissom shook his head.
Raleigh whistled. “It’s sweet!”
Sure enough, the elevator opened into a large lounge space with panoramic views of city out seemingly endless plate glass windows. Although it wasn’t particularly late, the room was already loud and crowded. Raleigh pushed forward and wove his way to the bar in the center of the room. He grabbed three seats together, offering one to Grissom. Raleigh took the second and a woman Grissom recognized from the ’97 conference took the third. Phoebe Forigno, pathologist turned expert witness from L.A, if he was remembering correctly.
Grissom took a moment to familiarize himself with the rest of the group as Raleigh signaled the bartender. A CSI out of Portland, a lab tech from Houston, and a prosecutor out of Boston or New York, somewhere on the East Coast. Overall an eclectic group. What they all had in common, it seemed to Grissom, was that these people all seemed to enjoy the company of Raleigh Davis.
“What’ll it be, G-man?” Raleigh said, interrupting Grissom’s thoughts.
Grissom considered ordering something strong enough to erase the memory of being called “G-man” but instead he said, “Beer is fine.”
“So, what does the world’s leading entomologist have for us this year?”
“Country’s” Grissom corrected, “and one of several.”
“Always so modest this guy,” said Raleigh. “Come on, tell us what you’ve been working on.”
“I did have a particularly interesting case on a cattle ranch,” he said.
“Whodunnit?”
“The son, but what was fascinating was that the blowfly we would typically use to identify PMI was out of sequence, and we couldn’t tell why,” said Grissom.
“That’s the most interesting thing you’ve done all year?”
It was. But it clearly wasn’t what Raleigh was looking for. On the one hand, this was a scientific conference and people here generally were interested in his work. On the other hand, this was Raleigh Davis, and he liked to put on a show.
“Well, there was the grease man.”
This seemed to get the group’s interest.
“We found a body that had been stored beside an industrial furnace. All it’s fat rendered out and the remaining tissue was basically jerky.”
This seemed to please them, so Grissom elaborated a bit. It wasn’t nearly as interesting to him as the blowfly case, but it certainly sounded more dramatic.
When he was through, they moved on to the next person until everyone had had the chance to compete for the most gruesome and unusual case of the year. (The title went to the lab tech, who had the unfortunate task of processing fourteen flavors of semen ice cream.) Though it was always interesting to hear about a good case, Grissom couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something unsettling about how these people talked about their work. Strange or gory as they might be, these were people’s loved ones they were talking about. They were making judgements on people who could no longer defend themselves.
After that the group broke into several conversations and Grissom found himself alone in the noise. He could hear pieces of several exchanges, including a couple on the other side of him who had no idea the forensics conference was in town and had been thoroughly perplexed by a man strolling though the hotel with a full skeleton on wheels. Grissom was also distracted by the television he could see from the bar. The winter Olympics had started the night before, and he found himself watching a replay of the cross-country skiing metal ceremony that had taken place in Japan that morning.
Grissom eyed his suitcase, which Raleigh had left beside his chair. He was just about to reach for it when Raleigh turned to him. Grissom sat back in his seat like he hadn’t been leaving.
“Gil, have you gotten a chance to meet Justine?”
Raleigh gestured to the attorney from Philadelphia.
“Other than hearing about her beheaded statue case, no I haven’t.”
She came over to Grissom and offered her hand. “Justine Phillips, Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.”
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Phillips.”
“You know you two have a lot in common,” said Raleigh. “Justine’s specialty is organized crime. She’s presenting a paper this week on the rise of off-shore banking in mafia families. Interesting stuff. If I heard correctly, she’s also being head-hunted by the FBI.”
“They’ve made overtures,” she said with a smile. “You of course need no introduction, Dr. Grissom.”
Raleigh patted Grissom on the shoulder—that was the third time tonight and Grissom couldn’t figure out why this kept happening—then got up and offered his seat to Justine.
“I’ll let you too get to know each other,” he said.
Ah, Grissom though. So that’s what’s happening. Beyond whatever credibility he gained having Grissom in his circle, Raleigh must have promised this woman Justine that he could introduce them.
Grissom tried to keep the exhaustion from his face. This was already more socializing than he wanted to do tonight, and now he was stuck on something like a date.
“So,” said Justine. “Tell me about yourself.”
“I thought I needed no introduction?”
Justine smiled. “I know what you do, but I want to know you. who is Dr. Grissom?”
Grissom could think of a few ways to approach such a question, but he had a feeling Justine wasn’t looking for an exploration of existential philosophy or a crash course in comparative religion. The uncertainty must have shown on his face, because she changed her tactic.
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
“Here, probably,” he said. “Well, wherever the Academy holds their conference that year.”
“No silly, what do you want? What do you aspire to?”
Right now Grissom aspired to sleep, be he decided that wasn’t an appropriate answer. “I get to do the work I care about every day. What more would I want?”
“I assume you’re already a Level III?” Justine asked. Grissom nodded in response. “So, supervisor, lab director, Sheriff even.”
“Oh no,” Grissom said. “Politics and I have never gotten along.”
“Alright, what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done? My girlfriends and I took a last-minute trip to Rome in college. No plans, no packing, we just hopped on a plane and went for it. It was amazing. The pasta was to die for.”
“I went to Italy once,” Grissom mused, “for a symposium on the forensic archeology being done at Pompeii.”
Justine sipped her martini as she waited for him to answer.
“The craziest thing I’ve ever done?” Grissom wasn’t sure how to answer that either. He’d gotten the sense over the years that he tended to think about “big” versus “small” life events a little differently than some people. Dissecting roadkill for the local PD as a boy had felt normal; breaking into the summer camp office to retrieve his confiscated book had felt crazy. Spending several weeks mummifying a pig to prove a theory had felt average; asking out a girl he fancied in college had felt completely insane.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you Justine, but I’m not a crazy person. I like my books and my bugs. Someday I’d like another dog.”
He could see on her face she was indeed disappointed. The famous Dr. Grissom—and in this particular circle he was somewhat famous—was a boring old man.
Justine tried a few more questions. His ideal vacation (volunteer archeology did), his favorite artist (Beethoven), the last new thing he tried (exploding a knife in a microwave to prove the resulting projectile impaled a victim).
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m just going to go freshen up.”
Justine wound her way through the crowded lounge to the restroom, but it wasn’t lost on Grissom that when she returned she went to the other side of the group to join in on whatever the lab tech and the CSI from Philadelphia were discussing. Raleigh was telling some loud but uninteresting story to the others, and Grissom was once again alone. He stayed long enough watch the Russian women’s team take gold in the 4 x 5 km cross country relay while he finished his beer. Then he slipped the suitcase away from the by now rather drunk Raleigh, who was occupied laughing at his own joke. Grissom left the lounge without a fuss. He doubted the others even noticed he’d gone, but that was just as well.
He rode the elevator back to the lobby floor and picked up where he had left off an hour or so earlier, examining the path to his room. He found his way to Tower Three, room 1602, but he did so now with an unsettled feeling he hadn’t had before. Grissom wasn’t a social person and he was fine with that. What bothered him, on occasion, was being so aggressively reminded of it. Raleigh’s little get-together had been one such occasion. In a room like that it was clear everyone knew a script he didn’t. Everyone seemed to be following the steps of the same dance and he was left to improvise.
Grissom arrived at his room and the door shut behind him with a heavy thud. Finally.
Grissom placed his suitcase on the luggage rack and checked inside to confirm that his slides were, indeed, intact. That worry eased, but the squirmy feeling from the evening remained. Grissom laid down on the bed. He had been hit on before at these kinds of conferences, but he had never accepted a date and there was a reason for that. He wasn’t cut out for romance. That wasn’t to say he didn’t want it, didn’t sometimes think about how it might feel like to be loved, but Grissom had long ago accepted that he wasn’t meant to be around people and that included in the romantic sense. He was forty-one, and though he’d dated some in college he’d never had a serious girlfriend. He simply wasn’t one for love, and that was alright with him, as long as it wasn’t staring him in the face asking him icebreaker questions and being visibly disappointed by his answers. No, he was fine with his books and his bugs and his Beethoven and his crime scenes.
Grissom showered, mostly to give himself something to do. Ideally he would like to go so sleep now, but he couldn’t seem to settle down. The feeling clouding over him wouldn’t seem to let go, and it didn’t help that on a work night his day would just be starting. He didn’t dare go back down to the lobby for fear of being caught in some other social butterfly’s net, so he curled up with a granola bar and the book he’d tucked in his suitcase in case of a situation like this: a worn paperback copy of Much Ado About Nothing. Grissom read late into the night, until his mind started to dwell less on what had happened that evening and more on the days to come. Finally, when his mind had found its way back, as it always did, to science, it also found its way to sleep.