Snake Eyes

by Max Allan Collins

  “How you doin’?” Warrick asked.

  Greg shrugged. “Blood on the car belonged to that lion. Otherwise, slow going.”

  “Stick with it. Give Animal Control a call about our lion corpse—they should be informed about this incident, and anyway, they’re the ones who can properly dispose of the remains.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Warrick handed Greg the bags containing the two straws. “And do me a favor—get these to the DNA lab, too.”

  “Okay.” Realizing this was from the garbage he’d found, Greg asked, “How’s it looking for that gold star?”

  “You may get two…. You find anything, give me a call on my cell.”

  “Why,” Greg said, frowning, “where are you headed?”

  Warrick said, “I’m gonna take Brass for a breakfast burrito.”

  “Damn,” Greg said. “Forget the gold star. Bring me one of those, will ya?”

  Warrick held up the receipt and Greg’s eyes widened. “You may get breakfast and a gold star, if this pans out….”

  Twenty minutes later, Warrick and Captain Brass sat in Bob’s Round-Up Grill with Mark Christopher, the day-shift manager—a rail-thin, fiftyish guy with butch salt-and-pepper hair and a slightly saltier mustache.

  “Yeah, sure,” Christopher said, pressing the evidence bag to better read the slight piece of paper within. “This is one of ours. And Sandy? That’s Sandy Worthington, our overnight manager.”

  Brass said, “Looking at your drive-through before we came inside, we noticed you folks have video surveillance.”

  “You bet,” Christopher said. “Two inside, one for the lot, one for the drive-through. Keeps vandalism to a minimum, plus which we’ve only been robbed once since we put those babies in. We used to get robbed two or three times a month.”

  Brass nodded. “Please tell me it’s not for show, that those cameras are live, and there’s tape in your video recorders.”

  “Live and recording, absotively.”

  “Cool,” Brass said. “We’d like to see the drive-through security tapes from last night.”

  “And the parking lot one, too,” Warrick added.

  Christopher hesitated.

  “This is a homicide investigation,” Brass said.

  “It’s the right thing to do, Mr. Christopher,” Warrick said. “Might make for some nice publicity, too.”

  “All right.” He rose. “I’ll get ’em for you.”

  When they had the tapes and had given the day manager a receipt, Brass and Warrick got to their feet.

  Brass said, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Christopher. Just one more thing—could we have the home address of Sandy Worthington? We’ll need to talk to her, too.”

  “She’s probably sleeping,” he said. “Night shift, you know.”

  Warrick grinned. “We know. We’re on it.”

  Brass smiled, too. “Still on it, actually.”

  “I been there,” Christopher said with a nod, and wrote the info on a napkin and handed it to Brass. “Glad to help,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “Actually, yes,” Warrick said.

  “What?”

  “Breakfast burrito to go?”

  8

  Saturday, April 2, 2005, 7:17 A.M.

  AT A TABLE IN THE FOUR KINGS SNACK BAR, Catherine sat nursing a cup of coffee—enjoying her first lull since taking on the biker/casino shoot-out crime scene.

  The last of the witnesses had been cleared out. Two local investigators, Bell and Hamilton, had left for the police station; she’d lost track of the lead investigator, Cody Jacks. For now, she had the place to herself, not counting the two waitresses in a booth near the kitchen door, anyway.

  She hadn’t pulled a shift this long for some time. At least she didn’t have to worry about her daughter, with her mom taking care of Lindsey. Comforting as that was, there remained the aches in her neck and back, the weariness in her legs, and the general exhaustion that came with being up for over twenty-four hours. She was doing all right, she’d make it through fine; but when this case wrapped up, she’d need a day off to collapse and recharge.

  Sara ambled up, coffee cup in hand, plopping into the chair opposite. The younger woman didn’t look any more peppy than her supervisor. “Are you as tired as I am?”

  “At least.”

  Sara allowed herself a yawn, covering with a hand. “Long haul. And I was in the laundry room, at my apartment house, when the call came in—just put in a load.”

  “Washer or dryer?”

  “Washer. Had to pull everything out and throw it in the sink in my kitchen.” Sara grinned in her appealing way. “Always nice to have a mess waiting, huh?”

  Catherine smirked and shook her head in commiseration. “Nature of the job, though.”

  “Yeah, and I’m not ready to buy a house yet. I’ve been in an apartment for a long time now, and that’s bad enough. Don’t know if I could handle all the hassle that comes with a house.”

  “There is a lot of stuff,” Catherine admitted. “But at least you can leave your laundry in the washer when you get called in to clean up somebody else’s mess.” Her cell rang and she picked it up on the second ring. “Catherine Willows.”

  “Sofia, Catherine. How are things in the wild west?”

  “Wild is right. Got something from the home front?”

  “The CSI mantra, I’m afraid—good news, bad news.”

  “I can use the good,” Catherine said.

  “We’re making progress with the videotapes. We’ve picked out several of the Spokes who opened fire, so we should be able to sort out the perps from the self-defense crowd…. We’ve just been unable to identify them all yet.”

  “That last part—was that the bad news?”

  A long pause was finally broken by, “Sorry. Not really.”

  Catherine swore silently to herself. “Okay—lemme have the bad.”

  How bad could the news be? All Sofia was doing was checking security tape….

  Sofia said, “We haven’t found any footage of Valpo’s murder.”

  That bad….

  “Impossible,” Catherine said. “You obviously haven’t gotten through all the tapes yet.”

  “But we have. And the Valpo murder isn’t anywhere.”

  “Damn.”

  “We got footage of the shoulder wound taking him down…but he falls out of frame and we can’t see him after that. And that’s when the execution happened. We don’t see it, so we can’t pinpoint the shooter.”

  Catherine allowed herself a sigh. “When can we expect you back at Boot Hill?”

  Sofia considered that for a moment. “I’m not sure. Archie and I are going through tapes again and again, trying to identify shooters based on file and database photos of Spokes and Predators. And the labs are going all out on the other evidence.” She let out her own sigh. “Cath, I’d like to go through the tapes one more time myself. Let’s say…late afternoon?”

  “See you then,” Catherine said, and rang off.

  “What’s the problem?” Sara asked.

  Catherine filled Sara in.

  “Will they be bringing in the riot wagon,” Sara asked, “now that Sofia’s getting the shooters I.D.’d?”

  “Probably by the end of the day, yeah.”

  Sara frowned over her coffee. “That could get nasty.”

  “Yeah—sure be a pity if this turned nasty, huh?”

  Sara sipped and swallowed; her grin was MIA. “What are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

  Catherine rose. “Keep at it. We can start by finding out one thing.”

  “Yeah?” Sara asked, getting up.

  “Let’s talk to casino security and find out why those tapes don’t show everything they should.”

  They asked directions from the waitresses and, on the second floor, found Henry Cippolina in the security suite, a less high-tech affair than just about any comparable Vegas casino setup, taking Catherine back, in fact, to the kind of gear she ran into when
she first became a CSI.

  A bank of videotape players occupied one wall to the right; three uniformed guards sat at different stations watching monitors, even though there was little to see with the casino closed down for business. One guard was keeping an eye on the hotel screens, since that side of the operation was up and running, on a limited basis, anyway.

  Three offices lined the left wall and Cippolina was in the middle one, door open. The floor manager sat behind a massive wooden rectangle of a desk, with an equally large workstation to his left laden with computer equipment. The walls blazed with posters touting getaways to, and performers appearing at, the Four Kings Casino. The office otherwise was a joyless affair, medium-sized, Cippolina’s desk and workstation taking up much of the space, a few filing cabinets between posters taking up the rest.

  Two visitor’s chairs were opposite the fortyish security chief, his receding black hair parted on the left and well-oiled, his mouth a thin, straight, colorless line, his skin tone flat-out cadaverous. On one chair was the security chief’s jacket, wrinkled, underarm sweat stains visible, tossed haphazardly there.

  Though the air-conditioning was working overtime, Cippolina’s shirt looked at least as wrinkled and sweaty as the jacket, and the casino man had rolled the shirt’s sleeves up to the elbow. He had dark circles under his eyes that seemed to suggest more than simple exhaustion, rather full-time malaise.

  Entering without knocking, Sara on her heels, Catherine said, “We need to talk.”

  Cippolina started to rise, but Catherine held up a hand for him to remain seated as she and Sara came in and ignored the visitor’s chairs, taking a position just inside the door.

  “Make yourself at home,” he said, with just a hint of sarcasm. “Need to talk about what?”

  “For starters, about how your cameras don’t cover the whole casino floor.”

  Cippolina held his hands out. “Why, is that illegal? Look, Ms. Willets—”

  “Willows.”

  “Willows—sorry.” He got up, removed his coat from the visitor’s chair, and gestured for them to sit.

  Sara glanced at Catherine, who nodded, and they took the chairs while Cippolina got back behind the desk, draping his suit coat over his own chair, and sat.

  The security chief did his best to affect a genial expression. “Look—you folks up Vegas way get more visitors to the Strip in one day than we get down here in Boot Hill all year. We simply don’t have as much money for security as we would like.” He spread his hands. “Good God, people—everything in this joint is at least twenty years old. You think I don’t know our security’s subpar?”

  The speech had no effect on Catherine. She folded her arms and looked daggers at the man. “Mr. Cippolina, we’ve been going over your security tapes, searching for a needle in a haystack for hours…and now I find out there’s no damn haystack. Your cameras didn’t catch Valpo’s killer.”

  “What can I say? Nobody’s perfect.”

  She ignored his remark. “If there was a flaw in your system, you had a responsibility to point it out at the start of this inquiry. An investigation this size, with violence all around us ready to erupt any instant…I expect full cooperation.”

  “I have been cooperating. You people waltz in, take over, and—”

  Catherine held up a palm. Then, almost gently, she said, “Just please tell me why and how it happened.”

  Cippolina leaned on an elbow and his expression was almost painfully earnest. “Look, Ms. Willows…Ms. Simon was it?”

  “Sidle.”

  “Ms. Sidle. Like I said, I haven’t had enough money to do proper security in this place since I got here, what…eight years ago. So, I do the best I can with a…not a bad situation, exactly—a limited one.” He shifted in his chair. “That means utilizing my assets to cover the most territory. There are, accordingly, blind spots on the floor.”

  Catherine felt her temper rising again but curtailed it. “How many ‘blind spots’ in that casino?”

  “We operate on the principle that the very presence of the video cameras discourages misconduct.”

  Sara said, “Like a security company sticker on a homeowner’s window…when the homeowner doesn’t even have a security system.”

  “Well…not quite that bad, Ms. Sidle, but—”

  Catherine tried again: “How many blind spots?”

  “Four.”

  “Four?” Catherine asked, appalled.

  He shrugged; he had the expression of a schoolkid in the principal’s office trying to explain after getting caught cheating. “We cover as much space as we can.”

  “Just how big are these blind spots?”

  Cippolina toyed with a paper clip on his desk. “Three of them…maybe a bit bigger than the size of this desk…the fourth one is about twice that. There are no slots or poker machines in any of those areas, although they’re all busy traffic sections of the casino.”

  Catherine and Sara exchanged glances; each knew what the other was thinking.

  They had been swimming upstream all day against this crime scene and now they were being jerked around again, this time by the economics of trying to secure a casino this size with a convenience-store surveillance system budget.

  Sara asked, “Mr. Cippolina—how many people in this casino know about these security-cam blind spots?”

  Another embarrassed shrug. “Everyone in upper management—the security department, of course, even some of the floor employees.”

  Catherine raised an eyebrow. “Who in the casino doesn’t know about the blind spots?”

  Cippolina swallowed. “The customers.”

  Shaking her head, Catherine said, “Are you sure about that?”

  That took Cippolina by surprise. “What do you mean, Ms. Willows?”

  “This is a small town—you’re a big employer here, and even the lower-echelon staff seems to know about these security limitations.”

  “So?”

  “Well…loose lips sink ships.”

  He shifted heavily in his chair. “Uh—I suppose you make a valid point….”

  “So,” Catherine said, quietly seething, “it’s conceivable that the only people who didn’t know about your faulty security would be…us?”

  Cippolina’s head lowered again. “I’d like to be able to say that remark is unfair. But…frankly…I can’t.”

  The security chief had taken enough of a beating. Catherine shifted gears and asked, “Have you had any luck locating your missing employee—Tom Price?”

  “No. He’s not on the premises anywhere.”

  Sara smiled and said, “You might check and see if he’s standing in a blind spot.”

  Catherine gave her a look and Sara backed off. “Well, I do appreciate your frankness and cooperation in this meeting.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  On that, Catherine agreed with him. “I need a picture of Tom Price. Can you provide one? Soon would be good. Now would be better.”

  Cippolina, as if anticipating the request, had one in a manila folder on his desk. He handed it over. “Thought you might want this.”

  She studied the face of a bespectacled man bearing wide-set eyes, short brown hair with bangs, and a countenance that appeared not to have smiled since sometime early in childhood.

  “Can you e-mail one of these as an attached file?”

  “Yeah, we do have the internet here,” Cippolina said a little defensively.

  Catherine gave him Sofia’s e-mail address.

  He said, “I’ll do it right away,” got up, and left them alone in his office.

  Catherine punched a number into her cell phone and connected with Sofia.

  “This Tom Price character,” Catherine told her, “who seems to have made himself scarce—his photo should be showing up in your e-mail any time.”

  “Okay. I’ll check right now….”

  “See if you can find this guy in any of the videotape.”

  “Will do,” Sofia said. A short pau
se followed. Then: “Yeah, it’s here…I’ve got the photo just fine. Get back to you when I have something.”

  Cippolina came back into the office as Catherine returned the cell to her belt.

  “That was fast,” she said, and gave the security chief a smile and a nod. “Nice job.”

  “We’re not incompetent,” he said wearily, “just poorly funded.” He resumed his seat behind the desk.

  “Thank you, Mr. Cippolina,” Catherine said, rising, Sara following suit. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

  Catherine took the manila folder with the picture of Tom Price with her.

  Once the two CSIs were in the stairwell, heading back down, Sara said, “He seemed embarrassed by their security shortcomings, but not really, uh…broken up about any of this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when your workplace gets shot up and your fellow employees get wounded or even killed, doesn’t a normal person feel it?”

  Catherine’s father, Sam Braun, was a casino mogul in Vegas. She thought back to her relationship with him, and said, “Casinos are a lot more about making money than friends—it’s a guarded world that doesn’t usually put strong interpersonal relationships first.”

  “How odd. And sad.”

  Catherine nodded. “Our friend Mr. Cippolina’s biggest concern might just be that a customer named Valpo died with unbet money in his pocket.”

  At the bottom of the stairwell, Catherine opened the door and led the way back onto the casino floor. Even hours after the firefight, she could still detect the odor of cordite in the air.

  “So,” Sara asked, “what’s next?”

  “Everything with this crime scene has worked against us so far. I’d just like one thing to go our way.”

  “Maybe one thing has,” Sara said.

  Catherine shot Sara a curious frown. “Spill.”

  Sara’s half smile held a hint of apology. “That 3D scan of the crime scene Nicky and I did? We got so busy collecting evidence after that, we never got a chance to really study it.”

  “Well, why don’t you, then?”

  “Why don’t I. Why don’t we?”

  On the way back, Sara picked up her laptop from the cashier’s cage that had become a de facto HQ for the team and storage site for their equipment. In the café, she took a seat at a table in the middle of the room and rested the computer on the formica surface before her.