“No harm, no foul,” Hanson insisted. “Go back to your parties. Grab some booze, grab a snooze…. Goon, get outta here! These guys won’t cause any trouble…and they’re just about to go, anyway.”
Many in the crowd were still eyeballing the two intruders even as the bikers slowly dispersed, seeming to vaporize back into the night.
When the three were alone again, Hanson said to the CSI, “You mean you deliberately didn’t kill the snake.”
“Tell me, Mr. Hanson,” Grissom said, his tone light, “what was to be gained by killing that snake?”
“Plenty—would’ve stopped the threat of us getting fanged and poisoned, and there’d be one less snake in the world. I hate snakes!”
Grissom’s eyebrows frowned; his lips smiled. “Hate? Certainly that’s uncalled for. That creature has an important place in the ecosystem. Just as we all have our place, Mr. Hanson.”
“Well, when a snake’s in my place, I kill its scaly ass. Find a place in your ecosystem for that, Doc.”
Moving a step closer, locking eyes with the biker, Grissom said evenly, “Let me put it another way—just because my presence makes a predator feel threatened, that doesn’t mean I have to destroy it.”
Hanson was chewing on that when Grissom’s cell phone chirped.
Reholstering his pistol first, he yanked the device off his belt. “Grissom,” he said.
“It’s me,” Catherine’s voice said.
“How are things?” he asked.
“Weird. Not good.”
“Oh?”
A sigh. “Nicky just called—Valpo’s body has been stolen from the mortuary.”
Grissom shot a look toward Lopez, whose own cell phone was ringing. “It’s evidence. We need to find it.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “We’re working on it. Bullet’s still in the body, by the way. Nicky’s working the mortuary crime scene, and Sara and I are still here at the Four Kings; but this is not a fun development.”
“I concur,” Grissom said. “Where do you want me?”
“Can you check on Nick?”
“Yes.” He signed off, then turned to see Lopez looking at him and rolling his eyes. Obviously the chief had just gotten the same news that Grissom had.
“What’s the matter?” Hanson asked.
Lopez blew out a deep breath. “As long as it’s just the three of us out here, I’ll tell you. Jake, this is a show of good faith, a vote of confidence in your leadership if I tell you this.”
“Tell me what?”
Lopez looked to Grissom, who nodded; then the chief told the biker honcho, “Your friend Valpo’s body’s been stolen from the mortuary.”
Grissom had thought Hanson might explode, but instead the guy seemed to sag a little, a hand going to the bridge of his nose. “Aw, hell…how does that happen?”
“Don’t know yet,” Lopez said.
“But,” Grissom said, “we will.”
“My guys find out about this,” Hanson said, nodding toward the bonfires, “don’t look at me to control ’em.”
Lopez stepped very near the biker. “That’s why, Jake, you have to make sure they don’t find out.”
His eyes went wild. “How the hell am I going to do that? Why did you even tell me?”
“Because,” Lopez said. “You’re the leader, and leaders need to be informed and respected. I could have kept it from you, but it’s not that big a town and you’d probably’ve found out by lunch and figured I kept it from you. Like I said, this is an act of good faith, Jake. I’m trying to make things right…for everybody.”
Hanson nodded; Lopez seemed to have gotten through to him. “Chief, I’ll do what I can.”
“I’ve got your word,” Lopez said.
“If the Spokes did this…”
“Hey!” Lopez said. “That’s just what we don’t need.”
Hanson gave Lopez a sly smile. “Chief—that was for me…get it out of my system.”
“You’re sure that’s all it is?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He grunted a sort of laugh, but the biker’s eyes were somber. “I heard what you said before, Chief….”
“Just for the record,” Grissom said, “what would be the motive for the Spokes to steal Valpo’s body?”
“They hated his ass!”
Grissom shook his head. “If they killed him, no need to take the body.”
Grasping at straws now, Hanson said, “Maybe to destroy the evidence.”
“What evidence?” Grissom asked. “The bullets that killed him? Why not just pitch the gun?”
Hanson had no answer for that, but he did say, “Look, man, they know damn well we’d want Val’s body for a Viking funeral, a real blowout to honor his memory. That’s reason enough to snatch him.”
“Maybe,” Grissom admitted. “But we will find your friend’s killer—that I promise.”
“You’re pretty goddamn sure of yourself.”
“Thank you. Mind another question?”
“Go.”
“How did you Predators know you could get guns into that casino, past the metal detectors?”
Without hesitation, Hanson said, “Val told us the fix was in—those detectors would be off or dead or something.”
“How was it managed?”
“Some friend of Val’s, on the inside—that’s all he ever told us.”
Lopez looked unconvinced. “Come on, Jake—you were the number two guy. That’s all you knew?”
Hanson shrugged. “You see anybody but me talking to you right now, Chief? Top guy knows things nobody else does. All I know is, Val had somebody inside the casino. He wouldn’t tell me, or anybody else, who that was.”
The conversation was over. Nods of goodbye were followed by Grissom and Lopez returning to the Blazer.
The two of them rode back to town, still in the early-morning darkness.
“Why was the body stolen?” Lopez wondered aloud.
“Maybe whoever stole the body,” Grissom said, “doesn’t want to give up the gun.”
“Murder bullet vanishes, then the gun doesn’t have to?…Well, if that’s the case, we better figure out who stole that goddamn corpse, ’cause this town’s a powder keg, and I just handed a lit match to the leader of the biggest gang of bikers in the southwest.”
Grissom pondered that. “I think you did the right thing, Jorge. If there’s an official inquiry, and this comes up, I’ll back you all the way.”
Lopez glanced sideways at Grissom, wondering if the CSI was kidding. But Grissom’s expression gave no clue.
7
Saturday, April 2, 2005, 5:45 A.M.
THE MICROWAVE PINGED and Warrick Brown withdrew the bowl of soup like a lab sample whose processing was complete, carted it over to a break-room table, and sat. He was waiting for Mia Dickerson to finish the DNA testing on the sample he’d given her from the scraping under Tara Donnelly’s fingernails.
An attractive African-American of around thirty, Mia possessed straight black hair, large brown eyes, and a formidable IQ. He smiled at the thought of her as he dipped a spoon into his steaming tomato soup. The CSI and the lab technician had flirted from time to time, and she’d alternated ignoring him with giving him a hard time, which he chose to interpret as a sure sign that she dug him.
A buoyant Greg strolled in, removed a bottle of juice from the fridge, shook it up, then joined Warrick. This was Greg’s normal shift, so the graveyard hours weren’t fazing him. Warrick—who had been on the swing shift for a while now—was feeling the hands of his inner clock spinning in confusion.
“Are you tired?” Greg asked, with an impish grin. “Or just laid back?”
“Don’t mistake ‘cool’ for ‘beat,’ Greg—I’m here for the long haul.”
“Don’t feel bad. I’m starting to drag, too.”
If the young CSI had looked any fresher, Warrick would’ve had to dump his remaining soup on him.
Warrick asked, “How’d you do with the glove?”
Greg swig
ged and swallowed, then said, “I did what you told me—turned it inside out, then hung it in the super-glue chamber.”
“Raise a print?”
Greg grinned in satisfaction. “Oh yeah—two clear ones: middle finger and index.”
Often criminals made their biggest mistakes when thinking they were at their most clever. To avoid leaving fingerprints, a perp would wear gloves—not realizing that cotton gloves had fibers that could be matched, or that leather gloves showed wear in a particular fashion on a particular person and were, therefore, as good as fingerprints.
When criminal masterminds graduated to latex gloves—and once more considered themselves bulletproof (or anyway fingerprint-proof)—they were again proved wrong.
Lawbreaking has a natural tendency to make even the coolest criminal nervous. Sweating, a criminal might wipe his or her brow—then, if touching something at the crime scene, leave a print behind just as if he were wearing no glove at all. The same thing occurs on the inside of the glove; most criminals didn’t realize that the inner latex surface is a perfect place for the energetic crime scene investigator to search.
Warrick asked, “How’d you get those prints?”
Greg worked at seeming matter-of-fact, though Warrick could tell the young CSI was proud of himself. “I filled the fingers of the glove with one-inch PVC pipe, then rolled each finger over a black gel lifter. I got clean prints from those two fingers, and various smears from the thumb and other fingers.”
“Nice,” Warrick said. “Now we’ve got reverse prints from the inside of the gloves.”
“That’s pretty slick procedure, ’Rick,” Greg said. “Where’d you learn that one?”
“Velders and Zonjee—two Dutchmen I saw at the IAI conference last year.”
“Who are they, anyway?”
“Theo Velders is a cop from the Netherlands and Jan Zonjee is the research chemist who helped him. They kept trying to find a way to lift prints out of latex gloves, and they came up with this—God bless ’em.”
“I’m impressed,” Greg said, bright-eyed. “What’s next?”
“Go back and photograph the prints you lifted, then reverse them so they’re not backward, and run them through AFIS.”
Greg chugged the rest of his juice. “What are you up to, now?”
“Gonna catch up with you…soon as I check on the DNA testing on that skin you got from under Tara’s fingernails.”
“Oh, really?” Greg said with a smile. “That may take a while.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Greg got to the door, dropping his empty juice bottle in the recycling tub on his way by, before saying, “Just, somehow, you seem to spend more time going over DNA evidence with Mia than I ever rated.”
Greg fired off a grin and was gone before Warrick could throw his soup spoon at him.
Shaking his head but smiling, Warrick cleaned up after himself, then headed for the DNA lab.
Mia, in a neat ponytail, was leaning over a microscope, studying a slide as Warrick sauntered in.
“Hey,” he said good-naturedly.
She glanced up at him, eyebrows tense. “Did I call you? Funny, I don’t remember calling you.”
He managed a smile. “People work as well and closely as we do, you can anticipate the other guy.”
“You figured just because it was you,” she said, giving him a smile that was all sass and challenge, “I’d drop everything and put you at the head of the line?”
“Well…yeah. Kinda.”
She returned her attention to the slide.
Warrick, who’d felt himself on fairly solid footing when he came in, noticed a shift beneath him and wondered if he was hovering on a precipice. Of a deep hole. “So…I should come back later…?”
Mia glanced up from the slide. “Are you still here?”
Warrick could see no way of winning this round, and no way of exiting with even a modicum of grace. “Okay. I’m at your beck and call—lemme know when you have something.”
He was halfway out when she said, “You are gonna have to sharpen up your game, Slugger, if you’re gonna play in the big leagues.”
She was looking up at him with just a hint of a smile.
He regarded her with suspicion. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Now get out of my lab.”
“I can take a hint.”
“Oh, and…take this with you.”
She held out a folder.
He came back and took it, responding like a kid on Christmas morning getting that big gift he’d given up on. “My test results?”
“Was about to call you,” she admitted.
Risking no snappy comeback, Warrick merely thanked her and scooted.
In his office, Warrick plopped onto a chair and read the results of the DNA profile; then he punched them into CODIS. The COmbined DNA Index System stored DNA samples from criminals and crime scenes in all fifty states, Puerto Rico, the FBI, and the U.S. Army.
Warrick did not expect much. CODIS worked, sometimes; but nowhere near always. Many offenders were not in the system, and the odds of his getting a match were against him.
Which was why he jumped a little when the ping from the computer went off.
The name staring at him from the screen was Matt David, a convicted sex offender paroled by the state of Nevada less than six months ago.
If convicted of Tara Donnelly’s rape, David would be a three-time loser and would go into the system for good and ever. Warrick slow-scanned the material again as he printed the file. If Greg’s fingerprints brought up the same name, they were really in business.
On his way past the DNA lab, he stuck his head in, acknowledging Mia with “Paydirt—thank you,” winning a sincere smile for his trouble.
Greg was staring wide-eyed at the AFIS computer when Warrick rolled in.
“Don’t tell me,” Warrick said. “A match.”
“What are you, a witch? I thought Grissom was the only warlock around this place….”
Warrick leaned over Greg’s shoulder. “Didn’t take a magician to read the look on your face—anyway, I got a hit, too—on CODIS.”
“Matt David,” Greg said with a nod toward the screen.
“Matt David,” Warrick agreed. “You find an address—I’ll call Brass.”
“Deal.”
Getting the address was not as easy as either CSI had hoped: the CODIS address was a downtown flophouse that had closed over a year ago, and the AFIS address was a house in North Las Vegas that had burned down while David was in prison.
They only had one idea left when Brass joined them.
“Need you to make a phone call,” Warrick said to the captain.
“Hey, nice to see you, too,” Brass said.
Warrick said, “No, seriously. Our suspect, Matt David—you gotta call his PO.”
“His parole officer?” Brass said with a frown, and looked at his watch. “You know, real people are asleep right now. Only criminals and damn fool cops are up.”
“Tell me about it. Look, this guy’s a serial rapist, Jim, and we need to get him off the street.”
Warrick held out a piece of paper with the PO’s number; Brass took it and made the call.
“Mr. Tinsley? Sorry about the hour—Captain Jim Brass, LVPD.”
A short pause followed, during which Brass shot Warrick a thanks-for-this-dirty-job look.
“Yes, sir, I do know what time it is. That’s why I said I was sorry about the hour…. It is ‘goddamned important’—about one of your parolees, Matt David.”
Another pause.
“We don’t know for sure that he’s done anything, sir—but evidence in a rape that went down earlier tonight indicates we need to talk to him. May I have his address?”
Another pause, this one longer. Brass cradled the phone against his neck as he got his notepad and pen out, and soon he was scribbling.
“Thanks, Mr. Tinsley, uh, yes—Joe. Yeah, I’ve got it, thanks.”
One last pause.
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Brass ended the call and gave Warrick a grin. “Officer Tinsley reminds us to respect the parolee’s rights. And citizen Joe Tinsley suggests that should Mr. David be guilty of the crime we’re investigating him for, one of us might put a foot in Mr. David’s ass, with Mr. Tinsley’s compliments.”
“Always willing to pay reciprocal service to our brothers in law enforcement,” Warrick said. “I see you have an address on our sex offender.”
“Gold Avenue—not far from MLK Boulevard.”
Greg raised an eyebrow. “Always a fun part of town to visit after midnight.”
But midnight was a memory, the sun rising over the eastern horizon, when they pulled up in front of the dilapidated one-story stucco house on Gold Avenue, just east of Martin Luther King Boulevard. An old blue Ford in the driveway was the only sign of life as Brass, Warrick, Greg, and two uniformed officers approached.
Brass waved the uniforms around back while Warrick pulled his pistol—Brass already had—and the detective and lead CSI went up to the front door, Greg hanging back near the Denali.
Ringing the doorbell did no good. Nothing happened the second time, either, or the third. But when Brass pounded on the door and yelled, “LVPD, open up,” he got a reaction, all right.
Three bullets blasted through the front door…
…and everybody hit the deck, Greg practically hurling himself under the SUV.
Then, silence.
Silence in which, despite the ear-ringing noise of the gun, Warrick could hear his heart trip-hammering as he struggled to discern the slightest sound from inside the structure.
After a long moment, he heard sounds that were anything but slight—two more gunshots, ripping through the back door, and the uniformed officers returning fire.
On his haunches now, Warrick was just thinking about peeking in a window when the front door swung open and a wild-eyed Matt David burst out wearing nothing but a pair of ragged cutoff jeans and waving a big handgun.
The suspect started to sprint across the yard, apparently having not seen Warrick or Brass, his target clearly Greg and the SUV. Before David was halfway across the dirt yard, Warrick ran and tackled him, the two men rolling to the ground, David’s gun seeming to fling itself from the suspect’s fingers and skimming across the hard-packed earth.
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