“So,” Greg said. “What exactly is in these hundreds of e-mails?”
“Pretty much everything you would want for a motive,” Nuñez said. “Both of them saying, ‘I love you,’ both complaining about Kelly, what an obstacle she is to them, and one from this morning where Charlie said, ‘We’re not going to have to worry about her anymore.’”
The computer expert had a folder of printed-out e-mails, with significant ones marked with Post-its. This he handed to Warrick, who perused them.
“One more question,” Warrick said, sitting forward. “If I didn’t want to wait until morning and get a court order…how might someone go about finding out who [email protected] is?”
Nuñez eyeballed him. “Are you going to use this knowledge before you get a court order?”
Warrick waved that off. “I’m not going to use it in court. Just looking to move forward faster.”
“Nothing else?”
Serving up a nasty chuckle, Warrick said, “Well…I thought I might whisper it in Charlie Ames’s ear. Like a sweet nothing?”
Nuñez seemed to like the sound of that. “Okay, then…. If you’re not going to mention how you obtained the info, you might just ask me.”
“Ask you?”
Nuñez grinned again. “I have an old friend at nev.isp who I spoke to just a short time ago…. You know—just trying to move forward faster?”
Warrick grinned slowly. “I see…and what did your old friend have to say?”
“That things have been going really well at work and she got a promotion.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah. Oh, and she also mentioned that Plasticgirl is the user ID of a certain Henderson woman named Paula Ferguson.”
“Tomas,” Warrick said, “has anyone ever told you you’re a genius?”
“First time tonight,” Nuñez admitted. “One other little detail you might care to know.”
“What’s that?”
“Plasticgirl, Paula Ferguson? She works at Cactus Plastics.”
Warrick’s eyebrows rose. “Tomas—you…are…the…man.”
“Second time tonight,” Nuñez said with a toothy grin, “for that one….”
Forty minutes later, Warrick and Greg met up with Brass out in front of the Ames house; a black-and-white rolled in seconds later. Throughout the neighborhood, lights were off, the Ames house shrouded in darkness. The only sound was a lone dog squawking at them from down the street, behind a fence.
Brass signaled the uniformed officer from the black-and-white to go around behind the house, and for Greg to back him up.
Warrick and Brass went up to the front door and spread out on either side. The detective’s look silently asked Warrick if he was ready, and the CSI nodded.
Then Brass hit the doorbell.
Both men had their pistols unholstered and at their sides. They waited, the night air cool, but not enough to keep sweat from running down Warrick’s back beneath the navy blue CSI windbreaker.
Nothing happened.
Brass rang the bell again.
This time a light clicked on inside and they heard someone moving around. Finally, the outside light came on and Charlie Ames peered at them through one of the door’s tiny windows.
Shaking his head, Kelly Ames’s husband threw open the door, wearing navy blue boxers and nothing else. His chest was pasty white with very little hair, and he had skinny arms and spindly knob-kneed white legs. And yet at least two women had loved this prize specimen.
Ames’s voice was a whisper so harsh and loud that the idea behind whispering was nullified. “What the hell do you people want at this hour?”
Several other dogs in the neighborhood picked up the chorus of the first.
“You might want to ask us in,” Brass said, “so we can tell you.”
“And maybe I might not. Maybe you have something official to show me, like a warrant, if you’re gonna bother me again, after what I been through.”
Warrick stepped forward and his eyes locked with the husband’s. “It has been a rough night, hasn’t it, Mr. Ames?”
Brass’s sigh was beyond world-weary, though his smile was perfunctory. “We’re going to talk, Mr. Ames—out here, in there, it doesn’t matter to us. But we are going to talk about you and…what’s her name?”
Warrick said, “Paula Ferguson.”
Brass said, “Thanks…you and Paula Ferguson, Mr. Ames. And we’re going to talk about you and her right now.”
Ames’s face went whiter than his chest; then another color, a yellowish green, began to spread across his features, and Warrick wondered if the guy might not throw up on the porch.
“Inside,” Brass said, and gently nudged Ames back into the house. Ames did not protest. Warrick followed them.
“What do you people think you know, anyway?” the husband asked.
Brass did not answer, and neither did Warrick, as Ames turned on a light and led them into the living room, a tiny area with ratty olive-green carpeting, a sofa, a chair, a cheap coffee table, and a good-sized TV with a DVD player and a game system hooked up to it; no books in the room, only a few magazines (People, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated), and a newspaper opened to the sports section.
Their host sat in the chair and gestured to the sofa, but neither Brass nor Warrick took his invitation.
Into his walkie-talkie, Brass said, “We’ve got him.”
“Ten-four,” came the uniform’s voice through the radio.
“What do you mean,” Ames said, ever more alarmed, sitting forward, “‘got’ me?”
“Before we go any further,” Brass said, “I need to tell you something.”
Ames was getting testy now. “About time you explained yourselves!”
“You have the right to remain silent…”
“What…?”
Brass shook his head. “Don’t interrupt, Mr. Ames, and this will go faster. You have the right to an attorney….”
The detective went on a while, finally saying, “Do you understand the rights I have just explained to you?”
Ames nodded numbly.
“Out loud, please.”
“I understand.”
Warrick sat next to the man on the sofa and Brass hovered over them.
The CSI asked, “You want to tell us why you did it?”
“Did what?”
“Murdered your wife.”
The three words seemed to hit Ames like physical blows, and he said nothing for several long moments.
Finally, he managed, “It’s an absurd accusation. I loved her. We hit a rough patch. She committed suicide. End of story.”
“Not even close to the whole story, Mr. Ames,” Warrick said. “We knew this evening this wasn’t a suicide.”
Ames glared at Warrick as if the CSI were insane.
Warrick said, “Mr. Ames, carbon monoxide will turn your skin red. Kelly’s wasn’t. She had no carbon monoxide in her lungs and she had cotton fibers in her nose and lungs, indicating she’d been smothered, probably with a pillow. She was murdered. End of story.”
“I don’t see it,” Ames said, obviously stalling for something, anything.
Greg and the uniformed officer came in through the front door to join the party.
Warrick signaled to the hall with a head bob, and Greg headed down toward the bedroom, pulling a roll of large garbage bags out of his jacket pocket as he went. When he returned, Greg had the pillows from the Ames’s bedroom in four plastic bags.
“Mr. Ames,” Warrick said, “fibers from one of those pillows are going to match the fibers from Kelly’s nose, aren’t they?”
“I…I don’t see how.”
Brass said, “Let’s talk about six months’ worth of hot e-mails between you and Paula Ferguson.”
Ames’s face fell into his hands.
“Charlie,” Warrick said, shaking his head, getting familiar for the first time. “Where did you think all those e-mails went when you deleted them? Outer space? Blew off into the ether, may
be? And you certainly couldn’t think we wouldn’t catch that the ‘suicide note’ was written well after Kelly died. You may think you know your way around computers, but our guy can make them talk and sing and bark on their hind legs.”
Ames did not respond.
“You had a nothing plan, Charlie,” Warrick said, “and you carried it out badly, to boot. Let me refresh your memory.”
You’ve finally had enough of Kelly and her bitching and plan to trade her in for a new model—Paula, but you don’t want to give up the house or any of your stuff. You’ve got a nice little nest egg in the bank, too, right? So you catch Kelly while she’s still sleeping. You press the pillow over her head and push down. She thrashes as she fights, but she’s not strong enough to keep you from smothering the life out of her. It’s relatively quick and not that hard on either of you….
You dress her, but you’re so jacked up about the whole thing and how smooth it’s going, how smart you are, that you don’t pay any attention to the colors or the fact that you’re putting her shirt on inside out. You place her in the car, then go back in and type the suicide note, change the computer clock so it looks like Kelly wrote it before she died, then you put that in the vehicle, too. Then you turn the key on and leave while clouds of carbon monoxide form.
Never dawns on you that her friend will miss her soon enough to cause trouble, and it never even occurs to you that she won’t have carbon monoxide in her lungs. Dead people don’t breathe, after all.…That’s what makes them dead.
Warrick finished with, “My only question is…did Paula know? Was she in on this, maybe even this was her idea…?”
Ames’s head shot up, his gaze burning into Warrick. “Paula had no idea—you have got to believe me.”
“Yeah,” Brass said affably, “because you’re so well known for your honesty, right, Mr. Ames?” He signaled to the uniformed officer, who got Ames up. “Get him dressed, cuff him, and take him in.”
“Really,” Ames pleaded, his distraught look bouncing from Warrick to Brass and back again. “Paula had nothing to do with it. She’s innocent!”
Warrick thought, Innocent isn’t the word for those steamy e-mails, but he said nothing. Besides, the e-mails did not indicate a murder plan, just a motive.
“About…about Kelly’s clothes,” Ames said, hesitating to look back at Warrick.
“Yeah?”
“That…that wasn’t my fault.”
“Oh?”
“I’m…I’m color-blind.”
Warrick grunted. “Not your only blind spot, huh, Charlie?”
He said nothing, head hanging now, and the uniformed guys hustled him away.
With their suspect gone, Brass asked the CSI, “Do you believe him about the girlfriend?”
Warrick shrugged. “Kind of. But we’ll check her out just the same. We’ve already got Kelly Ames’s killer, though. Between the evidence and what he gave up even after he’d been Mirandized…he’s nailed.”
“At least we got him quick,” Brass said.
“Let’s hope quick’s the way Kelly died,” Warrick said. “Because there’s nothing more we can do for her.”
They walked outside and, before they’d reached their cars, their cell phones started ringing.
“Brown,” Warrick said. He heard Brass answer his as well.
Greg loaded the bagged pillows into the back of the Denali and came around just as Warrick’s call ended.
“What is it?” Greg asked.
“Another case. We’ll head to the new crime scene from here.”
“Where?”
“An apartment house on Paradise Road,” Warrick said, “over by the convention center…. You drive.”
Brass came up. “You get the call for the apartment on Paradise, by any chance?”
Warrick nodded.
“See you there,” Brass said, and climbed into his Taurus.
Driving more confidently now, Greg turned off Sweeney, going south on Tenth Street to St. Louis Avenue, then back west to Paradise Road and south again. After crossing Sahara, he passed the Hilton on their left, then the convention center. On the other side of Paradise, the monorail tracks followed the road and beyond that the night sky was spiked with the silhouette of V—Shawn Victor’s latest billion-dollar hotel.
Immediately south of the convention center, across Terry Drive, squatted a two-story white stucco apartment house that looked more like a cheap motel. Instead of the usual orange-tile roof, this one bore a grimy green number, guaranteed to hold the heat. Tiny air conditioners stuck through the walls below small picture windows whose only view was the convention center and its parking lot. Cars were parked nose-in toward a building in which only a few lights were on.
Their call was on the second floor, toward the east end of the building.
Not like a motel, Warrick thought, reassessing. More a minimum security prison.…Missing only the fence.
They went through a central first-floor door and climbed dark stairs to the second floor, where the dimly lit corridor was lined with wood-frame doors on either side. White paint, perhaps intended to make the place seem homey, gave instead an institutional feel.
Halfway to the east end, they found a door ajar, revealing a uniformed officer inside talking to a young woman.
The officer was a tall, slender African-American with a very short-trimmed Afro and wide brown eyes. A thin black mustache trailed across his upper lip and his name plate read CHARLES.
He nodded to them as they came in; Brass trailed by Warrick and Greg.
“This is Tara Donnelly,” Charles said.
The young woman, maybe twenty-eight, sat on a large brown sofa. Her hair was long and red, her eyes brown and red-rimmed from tears, her skin pale white. Warrick estimated she weighed maybe one-eighty, and she had a certain well-fed farm-girl attractiveness, wearing a long shiny blue skirt and a black Clash T-shirt while she clutched a tissue. At the mention of her name, she looked up and tried to smile politely, but it didn’t come off.
Brass introduced himself, Warrick, and Greg.
“Ms. Donnelly,” Brass began, “would you care to tell us what happened?”
She blew her nose into the tissue, took a deep breath, and said, “I went out tonight…with a couple of girlfriends?”
Warrick knew Brass wanted to know the girlfriends’ names, but that could wait. They let her talk.
“We’ve been wanting to go to Drizzle. You know, the club?”
The trendy, expensive nightclub inside Las Palmeras Hotel and Casino was the vision of the Mateo brothers, Julio and Enrique, who had grown up in Vegas with the dream of owning the coolest, hippest casino in the city; and now they had it.
Warrick and Brass both nodded for her to continue.
“We’d been there for an hour or so…when I met this guy?”
She was an up-talker, Warrick thought, a Valley Girl malady with which CSI Sara Sidle was mildly infected; but this woman seemed terminally afflicted.
“Guy have a name?” Brass asked.
“He said ‘Rick.’ He was medium tall, with dark hair? Receding hairline, I guess you’d say, brown eyes, and he hardly ever smiled. I thought he was way serious and smart and stuff? Turns out he was psychotic.”
“Did your girlfriends see him?” Brass asked.
She thought about that. “No, actually, they’d hooked up with their own guys by then. Jamie had left already with some hunk. And Natalie, she was dancing with this dude, but they were on the other side of the club. With his friends? So I could barely see her.”
Brass asked, “What happened next?”
“I told Rick I had to get home. Because I had to work tomorrow. He must have followed me, because the next thing I know, he’s in the staircase with me, offering to walk me to my door? I tried to say no, but he just kept, I don’t know, easing me toward my apartment. Then we were here, and I unlocked the door and he pushed me inside.”
“Did you scream?” Brass asked.
She shook her head.
“I was going to, but from out of nowhere, he had this little gun, and he pointed it at me! He said that if I made a sound? He’d shoot me and whoever else came through the door.”
Brass nodded. “Then?”
Looking down at her lap now, Tara said, “Then…he raped me.”
That, Warrick noted, she did not phrase as a question.
“Did he hurt you?” Warrick asked.
She gave up another half shrug. “He was rough, but…he didn’t really hurt me. Not…not physically, anyway.”
“Did you fight him?” Brass asked.
Shaking her head, she said, “I scratched him once, but he slapped me…and I stopped.”
“May we scrape under your fingernails?” Warrick asked.
“If you think it will help?”
Greg did the honors, scraping the skin from under her nails into a small cellophane bag that he sealed.
Brass asked, “Would you recognize your attacker if you saw him again?”
“In a heartbeat,” Tara said, her jaw set. “I don’t drink, Officer—I was dead sober when this happened.”
“Did he take anything?”
She thought about that. “No—he just…did me…and then he left.”
“Did he wear a condom?”
“Yes! Thank God for small favors. And latex gloves, too.”
Warrick frowned. “Really?”
“Yeah! It was weird. It was like he was afraid he’d leave fingerprints on me?”
Brass gestured to Warrick and Greg. “Do you mind if our CSIs have a look around while you and I chat a little more?”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Anything you want, anything you think’ll help.”
Warrick and Greg went to work, Greg starting in the kitchen, Warrick in the bedroom. The room was small, a queen-sized bed taking up most of the space. A dresser sat on the wall to Warrick’s left, a chest of drawers on the same wall as the door, a small television on top.
The bedspread had been disturbed—obviously where the attack had occurred—but using his alternate light source, Warrick could find no sign that the pair had sex on the bed. He did discover a couple of dark hairs, presumably the attacker’s; nothing else.
Greg came in from the kitchen. “Nothing,” he reported.
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