Brass in Pocket

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Okay. You don’t mind if I swab your hands?”

  “If you what who?”

  “Swab your hands.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Nick didn’t think there was any harm in explaining. Penfold’s story sounded pretty convincing. “I’m looking for something called gunshot residue,” he said. “It usually dissipates in a couple of hours, or through hand washing, but sometimes traces of it hang around.”

  “How would I get it on me?”

  “By shooting a gun.”

  Penfold smiled. “Swab away, boss. I haven’t shot a gun in fifteen years.”

  Nick opened his kit and took out several pieces of filter paper. He brushed one over Penfold’s right hand—he had used that one to grip the soda bottle, so Nick knew he was right-handed—then brushed his left hand with another, then swiped his arms and finally his shirt.

  “That’s it?” Penfold asked.

  “Almost,” Nick said. He put a couple of drops of diphenylamine on each piece of paper. They didn’t change color.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means nothing.”

  “What?”

  “It means there’s no gunshot residue on you. If it had turned blue, then I’d have to run some confirmatory tests to make sure it wasn’t reading urine, tobacco, or certain other substances. But it didn’t, so you’re clean.”

  “I told you.”

  “Unless you washed it off and changed clothes.”

  “Dude, I told you, I didn’t shoot nobody! I was making my rounds. Check my truck!”

  “I will.”

  “Do I get to go home?”

  “Soon,” Nick said. “Just hang for a while. You can go after I’ve looked over your truck.”

  “Dude, my truck is at home! The cops drove me here!”

  Nick closed his kit up. “Then I guess you’ll have to hang for a little while longer.”

  15

  AFTER BENNY KRACSINSKI left the hangar, Greg turned back to his work once again. Too many interruptions. He still had to lift some of the prints he had revealed with the dust, so he took the tape and captured them, pressing the tape down on a white backing card to preserve the impressions intact.

  A few minutes later he heard a rapping at the door. This is getting insane. Greg suppressed a curse and looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t not answer it—what if it was Williams, or Officer Morston with something important? He went to the door and unlocked it. Tonya Gravesend stood there, her hands stuffed into her pockets.

  “You can’t come in right now,” he said, wondering where Officer Morston had gone for lunch. California, maybe, at this rate.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She shrugged. “Am I okay here?”

  “Where you are is fine,” he said. “Just stay right there.” He really would have preferred her just about anywhere else—at her own home, or in the airport office, or thirty-five thousand feet in the air behind the controls of a jumbo jet. Or maybe lunching in California with Officer Morston. But Jamal Easton had suggested she be looked at for Dunwood’s murder, so he figured it couldn’t hurt to give her as much time as the others had taken. Maybe he would learn something helpful. “What can I do for you?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh… I just… I wanted to thank you for what you’re doing here.”

  Greg gave a modest shrug. “It’s our job.”

  “But someone’s got to find out what happened to Jesse, and you two seem like the people who can do it.”

  “We’ll do what we can. The detectives will figure things out, don’t worry about that, and we’ll provide the physical evidence they need to get a conviction.”

  “I sure hope so.” She touched the inner corner of her right eye, like a bad actress faking tears. “I really do.”

  “You and Mr. Dunwood were… close?”

  “Oh, close, yes. We were… well, let’s just say we were close for a while. Very close.”

  “Close like close friends? Or lovers?”

  “Oh, I’d say both. Both. Lovers and friends.”

  “But you said you were close for a while, which sounds like it means not anymore. Did something happen to end it?”

  Tonya chewed on her lower lip. “You could put it that way. I guess what happened was that I found out that Jesse and I had different agendas. I wanted something that might last for a while, and he wanted changes of scenery. Constant changes of scenery.”

  “So you two broke up.”

  “Yes. Oh, we broke up, yes.”

  “You sound a little… angry? Bitter, maybe?”

  “I can’t deny that he pissed me off. Not so much the breaking up with me part, because I was expecting that all along. It was more the way he did it… or didn’t do it, because he didn’t really do anything. He just kind of assumed it was understood.”

  “I can see how that might upset you.”

  “Oh, I’m not the only one who gets upset with Jesse. Not by a country mile, no, sir. He’s got a knack for upsetting people.”

  “Is there anyone in particular you’re thinking of, Ms. Gravesend?”

  “Oh, I don’t… oh, okay. I guess it’s all right to tell you.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “I found out we were done when he showed up with another woman for one of his night flights. When you’re flying your own small plane, it’s hard to… you know, join the mile-high club. But there are still things you can do. Things that can be done to you while you’re flying, if you’re a guy. Things that Jesse was particularly fond of. He brought this woman in a couple of weeks ago—”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “No idea. Slutty McBoobsome is what I called her. She was hot-looking, you know what I mean? Tons of long red hair, great figure. The kind of woman who doesn’t mind showing off what she’s got, and she’s got plenty to show. Anyway, I saw them headed for the hangar and I stopped him to ask, you know, what’s up. And he said we had some laughs, and now he was going to have some laughs with this new woman. What they didn’t know was that her husband apparently didn’t trust her very much. Didn’t trust her for good reason, I guess. He was pretty sneaky about it, and when they landed, guess who was waiting?”

  “The husband.”

  “The husband. Oh, you should have seen her face when she got out of the plane and saw him there. It was priceless.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened was that this guy—you could tell he works out and he had to be twenty or thirty years younger than Jesse—he laid Jesse out. Bam! One good punch put Jesse on the floor.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. I was so mad at him I didn’t really even mind seeing it happen. Then, while Jesse was down, the guy leaned over him and lifted his head up by the hair and told him that if he ever saw Jesse sniffing around his wife again, he would kill him.”

  “He really said that?”

  “Oh yes. He said that he would kill him.”

  “I meant ‘sniffing around.’”

  Tonya laughed. “Maybe he’s the old-fashioned type. I tell you, it was something to see him drop Jesse like that.”

  “Do you think he really would have killed Jesse?”

  “I don’t know. He could have, that’s what I wanted to tell you. Because the guy was royally pissed off. Like he shouldn’t have known all along that his wife was that kind of girl. But I guess maybe he did, and that’s why he was following her.”

  “Did you tell all this to Detective Williams?” He should have asked that question first, and maybe saved himself ten minutes.

  “No. I didn’t like him. He was too… I don’t know. Abrupt.”

  That didn’t sound like the Grayson Williams he knew. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work, Ms. Gravesend.”

  She gave an exaggerated shrug. “Oh, bad me. Are you going to spank me now?”

  “No, but I’ll have a detective interview you again.”

 
; “There’ll be no spanking during working hours,” Riley said.

  She had finally emerged from the cockpit and stood outside the airplane.

  Tonya gave another shrug, a minimal one this time, and turned to leave. “I’ll talk to whoever you need me to,” she said.

  “I appreciate that.”

  “That one likes to make trouble,” Riley said, after Tonya was gone and the door was locked again.

  “She does? Is that an insight from growing up with psychiatrists?”

  “It’s an insight from living my life in the real world. You should try it sometime.” Before Greg could form a response, she asked, “Did you find anything in there? When you weren’t busy chatting?”

  “Plenty of impressions,” Greg said. “We may find that they’re perfectly legitimate, but at least Mandy will earn another day’s pay.”

  “Job security is never a bad thing. I’ve got a few from inside the cockpit, too.”

  “I thought you were vacuuming.”

  “I was. Then I wasn’t. Do you hear the vacuum?”

  “Now that you mention it, no. But I kept being interrupted. You didn’t hear all those people come around? Half the airport staff, it seems like.”

  “I guess I must have missed them.” She wore a wry grin.

  “Or you chose to miss them.”

  “We’ll never know.”

  Greg got a grip on the tube and yanked it free of the hole. It was black, its opening an eighth of an inch in diameter. “We’ll have to figure out where this came from,” he said. “It’s polyethylene, not the softer rubber I would have used if for that purpose.”

  “It worked, though. So maybe you wouldn’t be as successful a murderer as whoever rigged this.”

  “I think I’d be pretty good at it,” Greg said. “I mean, if I wanted to be. You learn a lot in this job about what to do, and especially what not to do.”

  “Yeah. Like don’t get caught. Can I see that?” She held out her hand, and he handed the end of the tube to her. She turned it around in her hands, looking at every side. “This looks like irrigation tubing. We should see if the airport has a drip irrigation system for the landscaping. And check out these faint marks around the cut end. This was cut with something that circled around the tube, and it was circled a few more times than necessary.”

  “It could have been a knife, just slicing around the outside instead of bearing down or sawing.”

  “Either way, we have tool marks. If we can find a suspect tool, we’ll be able to match it up to these.”

  “That’s a good catch,” Greg said. “I guess if you can work without a lot of people distracting you, it’s easier to notice things like that.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Riley coiled the tubing and put it into a big plastic bag. “Maybe you should try that sometime, too.”

  16

  SEE,” CATHERINE SAID, “the thing about DNA is that it’s highly individualized.”

  “So I understand,” Sam Vega said. They were in his unmarked car, heading for an address in west Las Vegas. “I do pay attention, Catherine.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like an Intro to Forensics professor, Sam. What I’m trying to say is that everybody has their own distinctive DNA, as you know. Everybody’s has lots of things in common, but enough different that nobody matches up exactly. Except…”

  “There’s an except?”

  “Except identical twins.”

  “Really? They have the same DNA?”

  She found herself wanting to explain, but holding her tongue. Sam was a smart cop, and he probably knew everything the average detective needed to know about DNA.

  Except for the part about twins. But that wasn’t the kind of thing that even the experts thought about in every case. Generally speaking, when you found a DNA match for somebody, that was the person you were looking for. Nobody wanted to have to check in every case to see if that suspect had an identical twin.

  The basic building blocks of all life were the four purine bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. Scientists, in a rare example of common sense, referred to them by their initials, A, C, G, and T. They could be combined in DNA strands by the billions, in any order whatsoever. Every human being had about six billion bases in his or her DNA. Because the combinations were so variable, nobody matched anybody else, and DNA typing was the most accurate and reliable way science had yet found to positively identify an individual.

  Unless, of course, that individual was an identical twin.

  “Same DNA,” she said, leaving out the rest of it.

  “But they don’t have the same fingerprints. I arrested a pair of identical twins once. Prostitutes. They had a wild scam going, confusing their johns and stealing them blind. You could not tell them apart. But their fingerprints were different.”

  “That’s right, identical twins have the same DNA but still have different fingerprints. We’re not quite sure why.”

  “The world is a strange place.”

  “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t need so many cops.”

  “That’s an excellent point.”

  “So this guy we’re going to see…”

  “His name is Cliff Gorecki. He’s the twin brother of a man named Bart Gorecki, who died in prison in California, several years ago. Because he was in prison, and DNA evidence was used in his trial, a semen sample we collected at the Rancho Center Motel matched his DNA. But it couldn’t have been his, because while that motel doesn’t do its laundry that often or that well, the chance of a sample from pre-2002 turning up on a bedspread today is exceedingly slim.”

  “Slimmer than the chance that he had a twin brother.”

  “Statistically, I’m not positive. But I checked the twin angle before I tried to date the semen.”

  Sam smiled. “I don’t blame you.”

  “Since Cliff lives here in Las Vegas, it seems far more likely that it’s his deposit at the motel, not his brother’s. Cliff has a record, too, although not one as colorful as his late brother’s. He pleaded guilty to a B&E a few years ago, and he’s had a couple of misdemeanor convictions, but nothing where DNA came into it. Since he was in the same room where Deke Freeson was murdered, we’d like to find out what he was doing there, and when he was doing it.”

  “I have a pretty good idea what he was doing,” Sam said.

  “And with who,” Catherine added. “That might be important, too.”

  “Well, we’re here. Let’s find out.” He parked in front of a two-story apartment building. All the rooms faced onto the street, with a walkway running in front of the doors on the second floor and a staircase at each end. VISTA MONTANA was spelled out in wrought-iron script on a brick wall. Catherine couldn’t see any mountains, but then again it was dark.

  They went up one staircase and Sam rang the doorbell of Apartment 11. He waited a couple minutes, then rang it again.

  “Some people,” he muttered.

  “It is late.”

  “We’re awake. Why aren’t they?”

  “If we start comparing civilians’ lives to ours, Sam, none of us is going to come out well.”

  He had his finger on the buzzer again when the door opened. A man stood inside, wearing boxer shorts with cartoon characters on them. His legs, arms, and chest were covered with a thick mat of curly black hair that crept up his neck, as if he had waded up to his chin in glue and then barbershop clippings. “What the hell?” he asked.

  “Cliff Gorecki?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, who the hell are you?”

  Sam and Catherine showed him their badges. “Detective Sam Vega, and this is Supervisor Catherine Willows of the crime lab. We’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Do you have any idea how many people ask us that?”

  “I’m not surprised, if you go around knocking on people’s doors at all hours. Don’t you have any common decency?”

  Catherine wanted to make a crack about how an
yone with common decency would cover up the fur on his body, but professionalism won out. “We’re sorry to disturb you at this hour,” she said. She sniffed the air coming from the apartment, which carried a faint odor of leftover Chinese food. Suddenly, she was hungry. “We wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.”

  A sleepy female voice called out from inside the apartment. “Who is it, baby?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.” He glared at Catherine and Sam. “Now you woke up my wife, too. Good job.”

  “Mr. Gorecki,” Catherine said, “when were you most recently at the Rancho Center Motel?”

  Gorecki looked at the ground for a second, then snapped his head back up. “Never heard of it.”

  “That’s not very convincing, sir,” Sam said. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “I mean, I drive by it sometimes, I guess. But I’ve never stayed there or been inside.”

  “My understanding is that more people take rooms by the hour than actually stay there,” Catherine said. “Are you saying if I look through their check-in records and credit card receipts, I won’t find your name?”

  He stepped outside the door and pulled it behind him, apparently more concerned about keeping something quiet than his lack of clothing. He spoke in a low voice. “Look, I got nothing to hide from you people. But my wife… she might not understand.”

  “I’m not your wife, so why don’t you try me?”

  “A man’s got needs, right?”

  “As do we all,” Catherine said.

  “I love Lori, but you can’t always get everything you want from one woman. So sometimes… okay, hell, I admit it. I pick up a girl from time to time. Just for a little variety. And that motel is a handy place to take ‘em. Not expensive, nobody asks any questions or looks too closely at you. Like you said, you can get a room by the hour there.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Sam said. “When were you there last?”

  Gorecki looked skyward this time. “I guess it was… four days ago?” he said. “In the afternoon.”

  “Are you sure about that? Nothing more recent?”

  “It’s not something I do so often I can’t keep track.”