Brass moved closer to him, so their heads were inches apart, and lowered his voice. Blago had to strain to hear. “It’s about frying pans. It’s about decades of abuse and suffering. It’s about a troubled but decent woman finding herself married to a dirtbag loser with a defective cerebral cortex and no moral compass.”
Blago licked his lips again, and when he spoke, spittle flecked his chin. “You’re calling me a loser, Mr. Can’t-Wait-for-My-Pension? Remember, I got some rights here. The law is pretty clear about someone coming between a husband and wife—”
Brass raised a hand to Blago’s collar, then dropped it again without actually making contact. Catherine could read the tension in his spine, the set of his chin, the edge in his voice. “No. You don’t get to claim the protection of the law. You forfeited that right, Blago. The only thing you need to know about all this is that you’ll be getting divorce papers from her lawyer. He won’t be a Las Vegas lawyer, he’ll be from some other city, but that won’t be where she is. You’ll sign those papers right away, giving her whatever she asks for, which I assure you won’t be unreasonable. You will never appear in court together. And you will never go looking for her. That’s a key thing here. You will not search for her, or send anyone else to look for her.”
“I don’t know who you think you are, Brass, but I got friends who can—”
“I don’t want to hear about your friends. I don’t care if you know judges and senators. You probably do. So what? None of that matters here, because we’re talking personally, not professionally. Just two guys ironing out a difficult situation.”
The cars had started up the straightaway again, and Brass raised his voice to be heard over their deafening approach. “Those cars go pretty fast! I bet it would hurt a lot to be hit by a car going that fast!”
Blago tore his sunglasses from his head. His eyes were small and squinty. Catherine was reminded of a cartoon mole emerging from his burrow. “Are you threatening me?” he asked as the din faded.
“Not at all, Mr. Blago. If I wanted to threaten you, you wouldn’t have to ask. Here’s how that would go: It would be something like me describing how if you ever bothered Antoinette in any way, yourself or through any intermediaries, I would hear about it, and then I’d see that your legs were tied to one car heading south and your arms to another car heading north, and we’d get to see which parts were glued on better.” Brass gave one of his special grins, the ones Catherine expected small fish might see on a shark’s face right before becoming breakfast. “Now that would be a threat.”
“Hey, you’re a cop!” Blago sputtered. “You’re a cop too, lady. You’re standing right here! He can’t just threaten a citizen like that! Aren’t you gonna arrest him?”
Catherine shook her head and poked one of her ears with a finger. “Those cars are awfully loud,” she said. “I can’t hear a thing you boys are saying.”
Blago put the shades back on, crossed his arms over his chest, and turned to look at the racetrack. “I got a busy day,” he said. “You got no more official business, you need to get off the track.”
“We’re going,” Brass said. “You just remember our little talk. And by the way… I’m going to be keeping an eye on you from now on. So you’d better behave yourself—one slip and you’ll find out how it feels to live in a cage.”
Blago didn’t look at him. He said something but it was lost in the whine of a pneumatic lug wrench from the nearby pits. Catherine didn’t imagine it could be very interesting anyway.
Brass was quiet until they reached his car. Once they were settled inside it, seat belts fastened, he looked over at her. “Thanks, Catherine.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have missed it. Do you think it’ll work? You think he won’t go looking for her?”
Brass shrugged. “Who knows? If I understood how the mind of a guy like that operated, I’d have to give myself a lobotomy just to get to sleep at night. I hope he won’t, but there aren’t any guarantees. Especially when you’re dealing with head cases.”
“But you think scaring him is the best way to go?”
“Well, I can’t afford to buy him, and I don’t think there are many things his kind responds to. Fear and money are two of the old standbys, though.”
“That’s true.”
“Anyway, I appreciate you coming along. Backing me up”—he let that hang in the air for a moment, then added—“and volunteering. I felt like it would be presumptuous to ask you. It’s the kind of thing I might have asked Gil to do, but…”
“But I’m a woman. The tender sex.”
Brass didn’t say anything.
“Presume away, Jim. We might have different equipment, but Gil and I are alike in a lot of ways. Maybe he’s rubbed off on me.”
“What is it you CSIs are always talking about?” Brass asked. “Locard’s exchange principle?”
“Any contact between a person and another person, place, or object leaves behind traces,” she summarized.
“That’s right. I think maybe it works with people, too. Gil has left traces on all of us.”
So have you, she thought. So has everyone I’ve worked with—Warrick, Sara, Nick, Greg, and the rest of them. They’ve all left more than traces, but Gil Grissom has left the most. “Big traces,” she said simply. “And lack of patience for guys like Emil Blago is one of them. Anyway, he left me in charge, so that makes it my business.” She didn’t add that she was glad Brass was still part of her extended crime lab family. She’d had her doubts about him during the night, and probably she shouldn’t have. She hadn’t had much choice, though. She had to listen to the stories the evidence spun for her. As she had told Lindsey, you couldn’t know what was in someone’s heart, you could only go by the facts available to you.
The facts had pointed to Brass’s involvement in a murder. Now they didn’t.
Now they pointed to a soft spot inside a hard man—a spot that would prompt him to put himself on the line for someone who had hurt him, decades before. Someone who had become a stranger to him, but who had once meant something.
So how could Catherine not be there when he needed her?
She was only pleased that he had given her the chance.
“One more thing,” she said. The raceway was dropping away behind them. The sun was high in the sky, throwing shadows that were compact and dark. “Wolfson and Tuva, those two cops from Select Stop Mart? They should be the first ones you interrogate when you try to build a case against Blago.”
“Who says I’m building a case against Blago?”
“I’m just saying… I have a feeling they’ll be easier to roll over than Vic Whendt. They’re not so tough, and Whendt knows he’ll go down for murder one, but they’re only accessories. By now they know they’re going to do time, so they’ll probably beg to tell what they know.”
“Well, if he’s got people inside the department, we have to root them out,” Brass said. “Stands to reason.”
“Stands to reason, Jim.”
“Wolfson and Tuva, you say?”
“Lee Wolfson and Garland Tuva. That’s right.”
Brass showed his shark’s smile one more time. “I’m already looking forward to my first conversation with them. Hey, you want to be in on it?”
“Jim,” Catherine said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
About the Author
JEFF MARIOTTE is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels, including Missing White Girl, River Runs Red, and Cold Black Hearts (all as Jeffrey J. Mariotte); horror epic The Slab; teen horror quartet Witch Season; CSI: Miami—Right to Die; and more, as well as dozens of comic books. He’s a co-owner of specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, and lives in southeastern Arizona on the Flying M Ranch.
For more information, please visit www.jeffmariotte.com.
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