“Great,” Greg said. “Does this mean we’ve got a sicko who likes to kill animals? Because that is a crime.”
He went toward the sheep, his gut churning unpleasantly with every step. He didn’t expect to like what he found.
The sheep had been dead for a week or so, Greg speculated, but no more than that. Its flesh was loose and just starting to cave in under the coils of wool. Further investigation could reveal precisely how long it had been dead—that was the sort of thing Grissom was good at; he could look at the insects crawling around on and inside it and pinpoint a time of death within hours, under most circumstances. Greg had yet to amass the experience to do that.
“I have a dog skull here with a bullet hole in it,” Riley announced. “Execution-style, back of the head.”
Greg didn’t answer. The sheep appeared to be the biggest animal in the pit by a wide margin. The smell of its decomposing flesh and filthy, bloody wool was cloying, almost gagging him, and he found himself breathing through his mouth. The wool twitched with activity. Maggots, probably. He tried not to think about those as he reached for it. The animal was on its side, legs toward him, head curled in toward its chest, where most of the blood was gathered.
He had a bad feeling about that.
“It’s a ewe,” he said.
“It’s a you?” Riley echoed. “What do you mean, it’s a me?”
“E-w-e. A female… never mind.” Why was he such easy prey for her? Because he didn’t expect such a pretty woman to be such a smart-ass? Not like he hadn’t known plenty of pretty smart-asses in his life. Humor was how Riley dealt with tense situations, though, and if he had to be the target this time, so be it. But he couldn’t allow it to distract him. Focus, Greg. Look at the throat. He took a handful of wool and tilted the head back. It moved easily. Too easy.
When he exposed the neck, he knew why.
An opening gaped there, like a black-rimmed smile, the flesh curling away from the gap.
Greg made a choking noise and released it.
Someone had slit the ewe’s throat.
That didn’t happen in nature. Not that way. Not that clean a cut.
A knife had made that slice.
Bullets, knives, cut marks. Animals of varying sizes and descriptions, all killed and then left here.
What kind of person would do something like this?
From the look on Riley’s face, her jaw tight and trembling, her lips almost vanished in a thin white line, her eyes gleaming in the reflected glow of her flashlight, he knew he wouldn’t want to be that person if she found him.
But he couldn’t help hoping that she did find him.
7
NICK STOKES HAD OBTAINED a warrant to search Deke Freeson’s office. There wasn’t, as it turned out, much of anyone to object to such a search. Freeson had once been married and had a son, but he and his wife had been divorced for years, and she and their son had both died during Hurricane Katrina, when they were trapped in an apartment building that collapsed on them.
From what little Nick knew about Freeson’s private life, tragedy seemed to buzz around him the way flies did around feces. Nick was surprised the man could still get dates, particularly from some of the beautiful women he had been seen with, considering his lady friends had a history of developing terrible diseases, running into immovable objects while driving fast cars, or otherwise becoming former lady friends in various, usually painful ways. He had been the subject of an investigation once, when someone had noticed that very pattern—Nick remembered that Jim Brass had handled the case, in fact—but it had turned out that Deke Freeson was simply a very unlucky guy.
Or, to be more precise, any woman who spent too much time with him was unlucky. Brass had told Nick once that he thought Freeson just attracted women on a downward spiral. He moved through Las Vegas’s underbelly, and the people he met were rarely without serious problems. Freeson himself never seemed to suffer, except perhaps emotionally or psychically. He was healthy, had all his original body parts, and no more scars than the average guy. He had made it through the Gulf War and a career on the LVPD after that conflict, and then years as a private investigator, without once getting shot or stabbed or run over.
Until he had the misfortune to go to a room at the Rancho Center Motel. That place should be razed, Nick thought, and the ground salted where it had stood. An exorcism might not be out of order. Its continued existence was a blight on the city of Las Vegas, and didn’t say much for humanity in general.
Freeson’s office was small, a single room upstairs over a coffee shop on Charleston, with two desks and some filing cabinets crammed into it. It didn’t even have a bathroom of its own, but shared one with several other office suites. The little room smelled like sweat and mildew. Freeson had a part-time assistant named Camille Blaise who had come over and opened the office for Nick. She was waiting in the hallway now, reading over the warrant Nick had handed her.
When she wasn’t around, Freeson used a voicemail system provided by the phone company, for which Nick knew he’d have to get the luds. Before he sent her into the hall, he’d had Blaise show him which desk was Freeson’s and give him Freeson’s computer password. There was a flat-screen monitor on the desk. Nick reached under the desk and turned on the computer. Once booted up, he scanned the files, but it looked like he used it mostly for e-mail and web browsing. That was a lot of what PIs did these days, hitting the online databases instead of doing old-fashioned footwork. It was no doubt quicker and more efficient, but Nick thought it eliminated some of the perceived glamour of the profession. It made a PI into just another keyboard jockey, like an accountant or a programmer.
According to Camille Blaise, Freeson kept all of his records on paper, not on the hard drive. He stuffed his receivables and payables in file folders, except for the most recent ones—piles of credit card receipts and bills were tossed without organization of any kind into a desk drawer. Nick briefly wondered what exactly Camille did for him. She looked like the kind of assistant someone hired at a strip club after a few too many margaritas. Freeson had a week-at-a-glance calendar in his top desk drawer where he jotted notes and appointments—coded ones, it appeared, in most cases, but Nick didn’t see any notes written in a female hand. Nick guessed Freeson met clients downstairs in the coffee shop rather than letting them into his office, which would hardly inspire confidence, whether or not his assistant was around.
Like Catherine, Nick had heard that Freeson was a pretty good detective. Which meant he didn’t keep his place this way because he couldn’t afford anything better. Nick’s interpretation was that he just didn’t care about the trappings—the nice office, the presentable staff, the latest high-tech gadget or accounting system. Deke Freeson wanted to focus on the work, on solving his clients’ problems, and anything that didn’t contribute directly to that wasn’t important to him. Nick couldn’t fault that. He liked his work area more organized, but if he had chosen to be a private detective, he figured he’d be much the same way about an office—he wouldn’t care if it was impressive to clients, he would just want it to be functional so he could do the work.
Urgency gnawed at him. Psychoanalyzing the dead man wasn’t his job. Finding the possibly live woman who was missing—that was his job now, and he had to give up trying to figure out Freeson and keep looking for Antoinette O’Brady. He rifled through the filing cabinets but couldn’t find any files with the name O’Brady on them, Antoinette or otherwise. He looked through the calendar entries, trying to find an entry that he could decipher as her name or initials. No luck.
He went to the door, opened it. Camille was sitting on the floor, still studying the warrant as if it contained every fact she would ever need to know. “Ms. Blaise, can you come in here please?” he asked.
She snapped her gum and nodded.
She looked nineteen or twenty. Dark eyes popped out of her pale, skinny face, framed by limp, dark brown hair. She wore too much mascara, smudged by tears that might well have been the
genuine article, and her lipstick was a bright red that made Nick think of Hollywood starlets from eras gone by. He didn’t know if the clothes she was wearing were typical work clothes or not, but her white cotton tank top was almost too loose to confine her small breasts, and her pants, clinging desperately to skinny hips, could have been torn off by a strong wind. When she moved, there was a liquid quality to her motion, as if she had been poured rather than grown.
“Yeah?”
“I need some information about Deke.”
“Yeah?”
No wonder she’s part time, Nick thought. If she worked full time she’d drive anyone crazy. “I can’t really make heads or tails of his filing system.”
“You and me both.”
“So you didn’t do any of his filing?”
“He never wanted me to touch that stuff. Or his, you know, money stuff.”
“You mean like accounting?”
“Right, that.”
“What exactly did you do for him?”
“Exactly?” She held Nick’s gaze, but there was the slightest lowering of her eyelids. She probably thought it made her look sexy. Maybe it worked on some men.
“Of a professional nature, I mean.”
“Oh, that.” She pressed a fingertip to the corner of her mouth, as if there was an on-off button hidden there. “I answered his phone. I handled his correspondence—you know, dumping his junk mail, prioritizing the important stuff. He was teaching me to use some of the online databases so I could help with public records searches and things like that. And if he needed a map or a book or something like that, I would get those for him.”
Nick had to admit he was surprised by her answer. “What if I wanted to know what cases he was working on now? How could I find out?”
“He keeps his files in the cabinets, alphabetically. He’s good at that. Kept, whatever.”
“Is there any chronological cross-reference? I couldn’t find the name I was looking for in there.”
“What is it? Maybe I did a records search or something on it.”
“Antoinette O’Brady.”
She shook her head, causing her hair to flap into her face. “Nope. I’ve never heard of her.”
“Not as someone associated with some other case?”
“I just said no.”
“Okay. How about this—have you ever heard of the Rancho Center Motel?”
Camille swallowed. “That’s where he… where you said he ate it.”
“That’s right. In a room registered in his name. Do you have any idea why he would get a room there?”
“As far as I know the only reasons to go there are to catch something, from dirty needles or diseased hookers.”
“So you have heard of the place.”
“Heard of, yes. Deke never said anything about going there, though. I would have made him wear a body condom.”
“Would he have told you if he was?”
“Like I said, not if he was going there to catch something.”
“We don’t think that was the case.” Nick searched for some other angle of questioning that might shed more light on Freeson’s relationship to the missing Antoinette. “Do you know his e-mail password?”
“Hell, no. And he doesn’t know mine.”
“Did he write down notes? If he was talking on the phone or something? Any kind of pad, or—”
“Ooh, yeah,” Camille interrupted. “There’s a notepad somewhere. One of those deals with a spiral binding on top.”
“I didn’t see it on his desk.”
“He left it all over the place. One of my jobs was to find wherever it was and put it back on his desk.” She started searching through the drawers of her own desk, which Nick had already glanced in—mostly empty, but she had a phone book, a manicure set, and a plastic container with something frightening beginning to grow inside it shoved into them.
Then she turned over a stack of newspapers on the one visitor’s chair, and shoved them off onto the floor. The small notepad had been tucked beneath them. “Here it is!” Camille declared. She handed it to Nick, who flipped through the pages quickly, watching for Antoinette O’Brady’s name or initials, or any reference to the Rancho Center. Something in this office had to connect Freeson with Antoinette, and he meant to find it.
On the second to last used page of the notepad, a phone number had been scribbled down, but with no name attached. Nick was about to flip the page, but something about that number struck him. He stopped, stared at it. Definitely familiar. He turned the page, saw nothing of interest on the next one, and turned back.
And realized whose number it was.
To confirm it, he checked his own cell phone’s contact list.
Bingo.
He pushed a button and the phone started to ring.
“This is Supervisor Willows,” Catherine said. She had been back at her desk, working on seemingly endless amounts of paperwork as she waited for results from Trace, when her cell phone rang once more. She grabbed it up hoping for an update from Lindsey, but the ring tone was wrong and the name Nick Stokes showed on the screen.
“Hey, Catherine.”
“Nick, did you find anything at Deke’s office?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe. You know where Brass is tonight?”
“He’s off duty, so no, I have no idea. Why?”
“I found his cell number written on a pad in Deke Freeson’s office,” Nick said. “On the next to the last page that had any writing on it. He doesn’t seem to believe in dating anything except his actual case notes—oh, and bills. But his assistant says he used this notebook all the time, to record phone conversations and that sort of thing. So I’m guessing he called Brass in the last few days, or had a call from him.”
“That’s a little coincidental, maybe, but not necessarily anything more than that. A lot of PIs have occasion to call cops from time to time. And we already know that Deke knew Brass.”
“Because Brass investigated him?”
“They probably knew each other even before that. They were on the force at the same time. Don’t read too much into it, Nick, that’s all I’m saying. I’ll give Brass a courtesy call, tell him what’s up, and see what he says.”
“Sounds good.”
“Did you find anything on Antoinette O’Brady?”
“Not a damned thing. It’s like she doesn’t exist. Freeson’s assistant has never heard of her, either.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Keep looking, Nick. I don’t think a woman who doesn’t exist needs clothes and toothpaste and makeup.”
She had just hung up and was still holding the phone, thinking about the endless forms requiring her attention, when there was a soft knock on her door. She looked up to see Mandy Webster standing there, her stance awkward, with a hesitant half smile on her face. Dark bangs fell across her brow, almost obscuring her right eye. “What is it, Mandy?”
“I’ve got results on some of those impressions lifted at the motel,” Mandy said. “Interesting ones, maybe.”
“What’d you get?”
“Well, some of them belong to Deke Freeson.”
“Which makes sense,” Catherine said. “Since we know he was in the room.”
“Yeah, no big shocker there. But another one—well, when I got a hit, I ran it again. Same thing the second time.”
“Mandy…”
“It belongs to Captain Brass.”
“Jim Brass?”
“He’s the only Captain Brass I know. He was in the motel room. The fingerprint was on the doorknob to the bathroom. There was a partial on the nightstand that might be his, but there’s not enough of it to get a positive match.”
“You’re right,” Catherine said. “That is interesting. Or it might be, anyway. Do me a favor, Mandy. Let’s keep this between us for now, okay?”
Mandy cocked her head, obviously surprised by the request. “Sure,” she said. “No problem.”
When she left, Catherine looked at her phone—still in her
hand, but almost forgotten.
She should call Jim and ask him about the phone number and the fingerprints.
She should call Nick and tell him not to say anything about the number he’d found to anyone else.
Instead, she left the paperwork unfinished on her desk and hurried to her car. She wouldn’t have minded if she’d never had to go back to the Rancho Center Motel, although she was convinced that was a pipe dream. But she hadn’t anticipated going back quite so soon.
It was like waking up from a bad dream, then going back to sleep and finding herself stuck inside the same nightmare.
8
“YOU EVER HEAR OF A man named Jim Brass?” Nick asked. He had sent Camille Blaise back into the hallway while he called Catherine, then retrieved her. She seemed relieved to be let back into the office.
“Umm, let me see. Nope.”
“You don’t like being in the hall?”
“It’s, like, boring out there. And kinda scary. These guys have some kind of office down the hall, just past the bathrooms, and they get some freaks through here.”
“What kind of freaks?”
“Like homeless guys, I guess. I know I shouldn’t be afraid of them. But I think they look at me and see someone who they could carry around in their pocket. If they have pockets.”
“How old are you, Ms. Blaise?”
“I’m twenty.” She pressed her arms flat against her sides and stuck out her chest, as if standing for inspection. “Three days ago, in fact. You need to see my license?”
“That shouldn’t be necessary. Do you live alone, with parents, or what?”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
“I’m just trying to get a clearer picture of Deke’s life.”
“I live alone. My parents are back in New Haven.”
“Been in Vegas long?”
“Couple years. Okay, four years, I guess.”
“How did you meet Deke?”
“Can I sit?”
“Sure.”
She took her own chair, rolling it in behind her desk. Suddenly she looked more professional, her mood more serious, even her posture toned down somehow. “I like being an assistant, you know?”
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