David scuttled after it, Warrick hanging on to the man’s legs as the suspect alternately tried to kick the CSI and pull himself closer to the gun. The guy had just gotten his fingertips on the butt when Brass almost nonchalantly placed the barrel of his pistol against David’s temple.
“Pick that up,” Brass advised, quiet, confident. “See what happens.”
David growled, but his hand drew back from the weapon as if it were white hot.
“Probably a good choice,” Brass said, kicking the gun away and handing a hard-breathing Warrick a pair of handcuffs.
“What are you doing, harassing me?” David screeched. “I did my time! I paid for what I did! This is discrim-i-nation!”
Shaking his head, Brass said, “Matt, we do apologize for dropping by so early, and we know we probably woke you…but even so, it’s darn rude of you to fire five rounds at Las Vegas police officers.”
“How the hell should I know you was cops!” David insisted, twisting his head but stopping when he felt the barrel of Brass’s pistol again.
“Well,” Brass said reasonably, “out front, we announced ourselves—and out back, we were in uniform. But we won’t sweat that charge, really—it’s kinda, you know…frosting on the cake.”
David’s brow knit in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“The rape charge, Matt. The rape charge.”
“What? I didn’t rape that bitch!” David said, struggling against the cuffs now. “Just ’cause I was inside, that don’t mean I can’t have normal, consenuating sex, does it?”
Brass lowered his weapon and leaned in close enough to kiss the suspect, though that seemed unlikely to Warrick. “Matt, does the ‘bitch’ you had ‘consenuating sex’ with happen to live over on Paradise Road?”
“So what if? It was just a date !”
Warrick said, “A date, Matt? A date where you left your hair in her bed, your skin under her nails, and your gloves in her Dumpster?”
David quit talking; he also quit struggling. Something died in his eyes.
Warrick said, “Your ‘date’ is no bitch, Matt—she’s a nice young woman named Tara Donnelly and, thanks to her, you’re going back inside for the rest of your unnatural life.”
Brass said, “You should feel at home there. And you’ll be in the company of your peers. No shortage of rapists in jail, I hear.”
The uniformed cops came sprinting around the house and took custody of the prisoner, dragging him off as if his legs and feet had gone limp.
“Well,” Warrick said. “Don’t you meet the most charming people on graveyard.”
Greg had crawled out from under the Denali some time ago; he approached Brass and Warrick with an embarrassed expression.
“Sorry,” he said, holstering his sidearm.
Brass patted him on the back. “Nice job, Greg.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“No.”
“I mean, damn—I was scared. Nobody shoots at you in the lab.”
Warrick grinned slowly and said, “I considered it a couple times.”
Grinning himself, Brass said, “Greg—you didn’t kill anybody, and you didn’t get yourself killed. That’s a good day, when we have a crazy trigger-happy asshole like that to bring in.”
Greg sighed, but in relief, his chagrin fading. Warrick was pleased with his charge—this kid was going to make it, no problem.
Wiping dirt off his pants, watching the perp being loaded into the squad car, Warrick said, “I got a waffle jones that needs feeding. Anybody up for that? My treat.”
Brass shrugged as if to say Why not?, while Greg nodded his head eagerly. They had all taken exactly one step toward their vehicles when their cell phones rang—at once.
“Damn,” Warrick said. “A man could starve to death in this job.”
Brass smirked, patted his stomach, and said, “I don’t seem to be,” and they answered their phones.
Two minutes later, they were racing up I-15 toward the Speedway Boulevard exit, red lights flashing on both vehicles, Warrick driving the SUV this time, following Brass’s Taurus as the detective wove in and out of traffic.
“I don’t get this,” Greg said, frowning, bracing himself against the dashboard with one hand. “Why are we being called to a traffic accident?”
Warrick glanced at the young CSI. “Didn’t you get the same call I did? Who called you?”
Greg shrugged. “Dispatcher. She said she was calling me in case no one got through to you.”
Eyes back on the interstate, Warrick said, “Didn’t she mention shots were fired?”
“No!…She must have figured the other dispatcher got through to you.”
“Not good,” Warrick said, shaking his head, hands tight on the wheel. “If we weren’t in the same car, you wouldn’t know what you were getting into. We’ll have to tell Gris and Catherine about that.”
Greg nodded, but his discomfort was clear, though whether it was over the high speed of their vehicle or that dispatcher screwup remained unclear.
The accident scene was in the northbound lane of I-15 just past the Speedway Boulevard exit. Traffic had slowed to a crawl before Craig Road, with uniformed officers diverting vehicles off the interstate at both Craig and farther north at Speedway. After that exit, the SUV and Taurus were the only traffic as they sped north the last mile to where a squad car sat on the shoulder, its lights flashing, a late-model four-door Cadillac angled crossways in the road.
The driver’s door and both passenger doors yawned open. Two uniformed officers, the only people visible, stood on the far side of the car.
Brass pulled to an abrupt stop on the left shoulder, while Warrick parked the Denali right in the middle of the road.
The detective and the two CSIs got out of their vehicles simultaneously. While Warrick and Greg fetched their crime scene kits from the back of the SUV, Brass was calling to the officers. “What’s this about gunshots?”
The two officers came around the car. One—short, with a shaved head, light blue eyes, and a wrestler’s build—wore a nameplate identifying him as KRAMER. His partner’s nameplate labeled the blonde female officer as WHITFORD. Her hair in a bun, Whitford wore sunglasses, which was appropriate, because the “night shift” was officially a bright morning now.
As Warrick and Greg trotted up to the small group, Officer Kramer was saying, “This is the weirdest goddamn car accident I ever saw.”
“Looks like an abandoned car,” Greg said with an openhanded gesture.
“On this side it does,” Officer Whitford agreed. “Walk your crime-lab eyeballs around the other side of this bad boy….”
Warrick shared Greg’s opinion—from the driver’s side, this looked exactly like a hastily abandoned car, with three of the four doors left open—but as the senior CSI crossed in front of the vehicle, his outlook changed.
Something scarlet had been splashed across the bumper and up onto the hood.
Looked like blood.
And Warrick at once wondered if it was human; an animal wandering the highway was a possibility—and a human, say a drunk, might have meandered in front of a moving car…not likely but certainly not impossible.
The bumper had been dented, the grill caved in slightly—plus a small dent in the hood, near the blood spot there.
Warrick said, “Most likely, the car had hit an animal…”
“And the driver lost control?” Greg offered.
Warrick nodded, as he swabbed the bumper. The lab would tell them if it was human or animal.
Greg continued: “Okay, then—why did the driver abandon his wheels?”
“Stolen, maybe.”
Walking on, Warrick spotted something and called to Greg, who was behind him several paces.
“There’s why,” Warrick said.
Well past the vehicle, on the road’s shoulder, the view previously blocked by the abandoned Caddy and the squad car, lay Warrick’s least favorite form of roadkill: a human body.
From this di
stance, it appeared to be a male—on his stomach, pants and underwear pulled down around his ankles.
“Oh God,” Greg said. “Dead?”
“Looks that way.”
Brass shook his head as he approached the apparent corpse. “What have we here?”
Warrick thought he knew, and the closer he got, the more sure he was. The CSI looked back toward the car: the passenger-side door’s window had a bullet hole through it.
Now he knew for sure.
The bald officer, Kramer, was just behind the CSI. “Ever see anything like this before?”
“Yeah,” Warrick said, and heaved a sigh. “At a forensics convention. Similar case happened on the east coast.”
The blonde officer, Whitford, asked, “Is this some sort of…gay thing?”
Warrick—who had a clear view of the bare behind of the kid on the ground, baggy jeans gathered around his ankles—shook his head.
“Gang thing,” Warrick said at last.
The vic, his face turned toward Warrick, was an African-American no more than twenty, probably closer to seventeen. Kid wore a white T-shirt with a hole in the back, blood leaking around the wound, and two more in the head. Eyes closed, gaping exit wound in his forehead. Someone had dropped him from a distance, probably explaining the bullet hole in the passenger window, then made it personal with a double tap to the back of the skull.
“Damn,” the CSI said to no one.
Brass was the only one who did not seem surprised.
“This young man screwed up,” Warrick explained. “He offended somebody in his gang, or maybe a rival gang…. They weren’t just going to kill him—they were going to make an example of him.”
“That why his pants are down?” Kramer asked.
“No. His pants are down as a form of restraint.”
Whitford blinked. “Restraint?”
“It’s common among some gangs,” Warrick said. “They can’t afford handcuffs, and they don’t want their prisoners running off whenever they want, so they make them drop trou. Not only makes it harder to run, it’s humiliating.”
Now Whitford nodded, getting it. “The prisoner becomes more compliant.”
“That’s the idea. Doesn’t always work, of course. Especially if you hit something in the road and lose control of the car—that might make your prisoner think he can roll out and run for it…even with his lowriders riding way low….”
Officer Kramer’s eyes narrowed. “And that’s what you think happened here?”
“That’s my first take,” Warrick said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves…. Check around for animal roadkill, would you?”
The officers went off to look.
While Greg worked the car, Warrick investigated the scene outside the vehicle, starting with the body. Standing over the corpse—the vic’s head at left, body sprawled out perpendicular—Warrick began snapping photos of the three wounds: two in the head—one in the middle of the vic’s skull, the next down a little and slightly left—another in the lower back near the left kidney. The scarlet line of bullet holes looked like the jagged line of a falling stock.
The bullet holes were all of pretty good size—probably a nine mil. Uppermost head shot had been a through-and-through that exited centrally in the kid’s forehead. The lower one had exited over the right ear, the two wounds turning the victim’s skull into a pulpy mess. The torso shot had entered but not exited, meaning the bullet was still in the body somewhere.
After taking pictures of the corpse from various angles, Warrick walked the shoulder of the road, looking for footprints. He found several sneaker prints, which he cast in dental stone. Most appeared to be the victim’s, but four more had been made by other shoes—two pairs, as near as Warrick could tell. Both uniformed officers wore rubber-soled police shoes whose tire-tread soles looked like no sneakers in the world and could be ruled out; these prints belonged to the perps.
With the footprint impressions and pictures out of the way, Warrick processed the body, starting by scraping under the victim’s fingernails—the left index fingernail was broken off—and ending by scraping something oily off the soles of the vic’s expensive tennis shoes.
Officer Whitford trotted up and said, “You want to see something weird?”
Warrick stood. “Do I?”
“I found your roadkill.”
She led him across the highway and into the adjacent field where a big shape that could almost be a man lay in tall grass, where it had lumbered off to die.
“Tell me,” the blond officer said, her eyes large in a face gone pale, “if that’s what I think it is.”
“That,” Warrick said, “would be a lion….”
A dead lion, with a full mane clotted with darkening blood, two limbs broken, rib cage crushed, a magnificent if not-breathing and somewhat bony specimen right out of a circus or a movie.
Soon everyone had gathered around and had circled the dead beast, as if this were a burial service and someone was going to say a few words.
So Warrick did. “Circus Circus, or any of the other casinos with elaborate animal-act shows, report a missing animal?”
“No,” Brass said, dumbfounded. “Or a local zoo, or anybody else.”
Greg said, “I think I know where this came from.”
All eyes went from the king of the jungle to the prince of CSIs.
“Remember when a certain heavyweight champ lived here in Vegas? Wasn’t that long ago. He collected exotic pets. A few were rumored to’ve gotten away. I think this beauty was prowling at night—there’s no people around here to speak of, up north. I bet he’s been keeping a low profile in these foothills.”
Brass said, “Well, he didn’t keep much of a low profile when he got in front of those headlights.”
Warrick found himself chuckling. “Brother, would I like to’ve seen the look on the faces of those kids in that car….”
Before long, as Warrick loaded his evidence into the back of the SUV, Greg came over. They didn’t speak for a moment as the coroner’s wagon pulled up and the two-man crew climbed down and took out their gurney.
“You guys done?” one asked Warrick.
“Yeah—all yours.”
The CSIs watched in silence as the coroner’s men loaded the body onto the gurney, wheeled it to their van, and soon were swinging across the median for the trip back to the city. When they were gone, the only signs a body had been lying on the side of the road were a few blood drops and two short wheel tracks where the gurney had momentarily slipped onto the dusty shoulder.
“God, he was young,” Greg said.
“Get anything?” Warrick asked.
“Load of fingerprints,” Greg said. “Mostly off the steering wheel and gear shift, few off the dashboard and door handle on the passenger side. Two ciggie butts in the ashtray. Possible DNA.”
Warrick asked, “What about the car?”
“I got a sample of the blood off the hood. That’s the outside. Inside, registration was in the glove box. I gave it to Brass to run. My guess is—”
“Stolen,” Brass chimed in, coming over from his car to join them. “Registered to a Clark County couple who reported it missing from the parking lot of the Platinum King.”
Warrick asked, “When was it taken?”
“Early last night. Our perps probably grabbed it before they snatched our John Doe.”
Greg asked, “Did you happen to ask if either of the owners smokes?”
“Yeah, I asked,” Brass said. “I saw those cigarette butts, too. And they’re both nonsmokers.”
Greg grinned tightly. “Good. Cigarette butts came from our perps then. I’ll get those right to the DNA lab.”
“Good,” Warrick said.
“What about our John Doe?” Brass asked.
“We’ll catch up to him in the morgue,” Warrick said. “Maybe his prints will turn up in AFIS. He was a kid, but probably a gangbanger. Might be in the system.”
“We’ve got the prints from the car to run, too,�
�� Greg reminded them.
“And if none of those match anything?” Brass asked.
Warrick shrugged elaborately. “Then we’ve pretty much got jack squat.”
Greg shook his head. “We’ve really been rackin’ ’em up tonight. We’ll crack this one, too.”
“Yeah,” Warrick said, not having the heart to rain on the young CSI’s parade. “Tow truck coming for the car?”
Brass nodded. “Should be here any minute. You want it taken to the lab?”
“You know it. Maybe there’s something in or on it we haven’t found yet.”
“How about the lion carcass?”
“We should collect that, too.”
Brass smirked. “You gonna ask Doc Robbins to do an autopsy?”
“I don’t think so. Poor creature.”
“Oh,” Greg said, “something else was in that car….” He got out an evidence bag from his crime-scene kit. Within the bag was another bag, a fast-food sack that looked to’ve been used as a trash receptacle.
“If that belongs to the couple who own the car,” Warrick said, “it’s nothing.”
Brass examined the bag in the early-morning sun. “And if it belongs to the perps?”
Warrick nearly smiled. “Then it might just be a break. And Greg gets another gold star.”
“I’m up for that,” Greg said cheerfully.
Back in the lab, while Greg loaded the various fingerprints into AFIS, Warrick went through that bag of garbage the young CSI had scored. He picked the items out one at a time: cup from a large orange soda; smaller cup from a strawberry shake; four double cheeseburger wrappers; two large fry boxes; and—at the very bottom, wadded into a tiny ball—the receipt from Bob’s Round-Up Grill on Tropicana.
The computerized receipt offered up more information than Warrick could possibly have hoped for: the exact time of the transaction, just after midnight—less than an hour after the couple had reported their car stolen; the register used; the drive-through; and “Sandy,” the name of the employee who had taken the order.
After slipping the receipt into a smaller evidence bag, as well as individually bagging each straw for DNA testing, Warrick took them all with him. He stopped to check on Greg’s progress on his way out.
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