Grave Matters

by Max Allan Collins

  “Yes, but I’m sorry, I’m not following your line of…I don’t see how my kids…”

  Grissom placed the Missing Persons photo of the deceased Kathy Dean on Black’s desk in front of the mortician.

  Who was pale to begin with, yet managed to whiten further; his mouth sagged open—it was as if he’d had a minor stroke. “Oh…my God…you’re not…no. This is who…?”

  “Your babysitter, Kathy Dean,” Brass said, “was the woman in Rita Bennett’s casket. Yes.”

  “Oh, Lord, what a horrible…Her poor parents…I knew she was missing, obviously, but I…”

  “You spoke to the police when the Dean girl first went missing, correct?”

  Black nodded numbly. He was staring at the photo of Kathy Dean on the desk as if she might have been one of his own kids; but he never touched the photo.

  Brass said, “You drove her home—after she babysat for you that same night she disappeared?”

  “Yes,” he said, and he pried his eyes from the photo, and shrugged, his tone working unsuccessfully at playing this down. “The Deans don’t live far from us, but it was dark outside. Dangerous for a girl her age to walk home alone.”

  “I guess,” Brass said.

  Grissom asked, “You didn’t pick her up?”

  “No,” the mortician said. “No—Kathy had walked over, but the sun was still up then.”

  Brass asked, “Was it normal, typical…for you to drive her home?”

  “Yes. She felt uncomfortable, walking alone at night. This can be a dangerous city.”

  “So we hear,” Brass said. “What time did you drop her off at home?”

  He shrugged. “Midnight, maybe.”

  Brass nodded. “You watched her walk into the house?”

  “Yes,” the mortician said, with a decisive nod, “whenever I dropped her off, I never left until she was safely inside her parents’ house and had closed the door.”

  “Then you went straight home?”

  “Yes, of course.” Black swallowed. “Might I ask you…how she died?”

  “She was shot,” Brass said, “in the back of the head.”

  He covered his eyes with a hand. “Oh…oh God.”

  “Do you own a gun, Mr. Black?”

  The mortician’s hand dropped to the desk and his surprise morphed to shock. “You can’t think…I killed her?”

  Brass offered the tiniest shrug. “You said Rita Bennett was never out of your sight. This is what we call in police work an inconsistency.”

  The mortician leaned back in his chair. His expression would have been no less pained had Brass just punched him.

  “I’ll ask again,” Brass said patiently. “Do you have a gun?”

  “No! I don’t have a gun. I’ve never owned a gun.”

  “You were aware that Kathy Dean disappeared within twenty-four hours of Rita Bennett’s funeral—am I right?”

  Black’s eyes widened in indignation. “Why would I ever put those two events together? This is a funeral home, Captain—whenever Kathy disappeared, I would have been attending someone who had passed.”

  “It didn’t strike you as odd that you were burying one woman you knew at the same time another was disappearing?”

  “Please! I know a lot of people—this is a prominent business, and I have a certain prominence in the community, myself. I deal with deceased individuals who were acquaintances of mine all too frequently. Comes with the territory, as they say.”

  Grissom said, “You do understand we’re raising this issue because one woman turned up in the other’s Desert Haven casket?”

  With a frustrated sigh, Black said, “It wasn’t like the two events happened simultaneously. Rita died on Thursday. I talked to her husband, Peter, about holding the funeral in our mortuary on Friday, Kathy babysat for us on Saturday night, then disappeared sometime after midnight. I didn’t hear about the disappearance until Sunday night, when the police stopped by the house to talk to my wife, Cassie, and me about Kathy. Rita wasn’t buried until Tuesday morning. Why would I assume any connection between these events?”

  “Was your wife with you when you drove Kathy home?”

  “No—obviously, we wouldn’t leave our kids alone. When we got home, the kids were asleep on the couch and Cassie got them up and was walking them upstairs, when I left with Kathy…and when I got home, Cassie was in bed asleep already. So, the police just asked Cassie general stuff about Kathy.”

  “What did they ask you?”

  “Their questions were more pointed to me—after all, I’d driven the girl home. Haven’t you spoken to them about it?”

  Actually, Brass had assigned Sergeant O’Riley to that very task, but the report hadn’t come back yet.

  “That’s not your concern, Mr. Black,” Brass said. “Now, if Rita Bennett died on a Thursday, why did the funeral wait till the following Tuesday? Isn’t that an unusually long time?”

  “It varies quite a bit. In this case, the husband, Peter, had a sister flying in from Atlanta for the services. She couldn’t get in until Monday night.”

  Brass’s gut was twitching. Something was wrong here. For now, the detective would keep this feeling to himself; hold it close to himself, actually, nurturing it….

  “One last question,” Brass said.

  “Yes?”

  “Were you aware that Kathy Dean was pregnant?”

  For just a moment, Black stiffened, the man’s eyes tightening. It wasn’t much of a reaction, but enough for Brass to note.

  Recovering quickly, the mortician said, “How sad…but how would I have known that? Why would I have known that?”

  “The young woman’s parents are under the impression that she didn’t even have a boyfriend. A problem like pregnancy, she might have wanted to turn to an adult she trusted for advice. A father figure.”

  “We were friendly, but I can’t honestly say she confided in me.”

  “Okay. Just wondering.”

  In the parking lot, walking to their car, Brass said to Grissom, “You weren’t exactly chatty in there.”

  “You were doing fine.”

  “Was I?”

  “He knows something he’s not telling us.”

  Brass stopped and turned to Grissom. “Then you saw it, too. He’s guilty of something.”

  Grissom twitched a smile. “Aren’t we all? Question is, in Black’s case…guilty of what? Let’s get some evidence, Jim, ’cause what he’s guilty of is something you might want to know before you read him his Miranda.”

  Sara came into a lab at CSI to find Nick bent over what she assumed was the box of Kathy Dean’s belongings, courtesy of an evidence locker. Smaller items were spread across the table, but most of it was still in the box.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  Nick gave her half a smile. “How about, Kathy Dean had sex the night she disappeared.”

  “She did?”

  “According to the lab report on her clothes.”

  Sara frowned. “There was nothing at the autopsy….”

  A raised eyebrow cut into Nick’s forehead. “She went home and changed clothes, remember, maybe took a shower, and God only knows what was done to her before she went into that coffin.”

  Sara withdrew the bagged note from her crime kit.

  “What’s that?” Nick asked.

  “Give me your opinion.”

  Nick examined the note, leaving it in its plastic home. “Parents have any idea who ‘FB’ is?”

  “No,” she said. “They still think their daughter was a virgin…. They didn’t know ‘A’ either.”

  “What Cracker Jack box did you find this prize in?”

  She pulled out the bag with the book. “In her room.”

  “Lady Chatterley…. Not exactly virginal reading.”

  “Maybe it was research. Anyway, Nick, I’m going to take the note to the document examiner—maybe she can do something with it. What else have you found out?”

  “Tomas Nunez went over Kathy Dean’s c
omputer, back when Ecklie’s people brought it in.”

  “What did Tomas find? Knowing him, he came up with something. That electronic diary, maybe?”

  “No—nothing that helps us. Mostly lots of songs. She was downloading digital tunes like there was no tomorrow.”

  “Legally?”

  “Ninety-five percent of them.”

  “Anything else from the Internet?”

  “There were some e-mails from a couple of people, but they were in that same ‘almost’ language as your note.”

  Sara pondered momentarily, then asked Nick, “Did Tomas trace the sources of the other e-mails?”

  “Yeah, but only a couple were local, and we got nothing from them. They translated the e-mails, but it was nothing helpful. Girlfriends from high school days. Stuff’s still in the box, if you care to read them.”

  “Anybody called ‘A’?”

  “Nope, not even an e-mail handle that started with A.”

  Sara rubbed her forehead. “She’s downloading music, only…there’s no stereo in her room.”

  “No, but she had the computer.”

  “I suppose. Was there a stereo in her car?”

  Nick picked up a report and read it. “AM/FM, CD player. CD burner on her computer, too.”

  “But if music is so important to her, don’t you think she’d have a way to play it?”

  “Besides the CDs?”

  Sara thought back on the room. “I didn’t see any CDs. You got some among this stuff?”

  “No.”

  Sara shrugged. “Then either they’ve disappeared or they never existed.”

  “So she’s downloading strictly to her hard drive, you think?”

  Sara shook her head. “Seems to me she’d have something that would play ’em.”

  “IPod? Rio player?”

  “Something like that, and there was no phone in her room either.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the Deans were good parents with money and yet there was no phone in their daughter’s room.”

  “She had a cell phone,” Nick said, checking the Missing Persons info. “It must’ve been her only phone.”

  “Do we have it?”

  Nick gestured with empty hands. “No. Just the phone records indicating she had one.”

  “Well, where is the thing?”

  “With her MP3 player?”

  She pointed a finger at Nick. “If somebody used the cell, phone records could lead us somewhere.”

  “Sara, that phone’s been dead since the day she disappeared.”

  Sara made a face, then tried again: “Ecklie’s people get anything useful from those phone records?”

  “Just the names of some of her friends that the parents didn’t know about, mostly girls she worked with either at the Mexican restaurant or the blood bank…but they didn’t know jack about Kathy’s disappearance.”

  “Any ‘A’ names among the friends, or ‘FB’?”

  Nick shook his head.

  “How about Gerardo Ortiz?”

  Nick reared back, smiled a little, and said, “What are you doin’ there—pulling names out of a hat?”

  “No, he’s a guy she used to date.”

  “Yeah, he’s in here. Name’s crossed out with a black marker, though. And there’s a Post-It from one of the detectives that has the guy’s name and an address.”

  “My guess is he doesn’t live there anymore.”

  Nick frowned. “And why is that, Kreskin?”

  “You read the Missing Persons file on her, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sara grinned. “You didn’t know who he was. If he was mentioned in the report, if they had found him…you would have recognized the name. Simple deductive reasoning.”

  Nick just stared at her for a long moment. “That’s scary—you’re starting to sound a liiittle too much like Gris….”

  “Yeah, well I could use a liiittle more of his reasoning power right about now. I might know what we should do next.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Nick said, “but I’m going to Trace, to work on the fibers and hairs I culled from Kathy Dean’s clothes and coffin.”

  Sara looked at her watch. “I’m going to drop off the note, then catch some dinner.”

  “Eating. Yeah, I remember that. I used to do that now and then. Anywhere special? Maybe I’ll have you bring me something back.”

  “Pretty special,” Sara said with a smile. “I was thinking of trying this Mexican place I keep hearing about…Habinero’s?”

  Brass passed the Dean home on Serene Avenue, took a right on Redwood and cruised down several houses before he and Grissom saw a massive two-story brick home, the backyard surrounded by a six-foot wooden fence, the top of a swimming pool slide visible above it.

  The detective stopped in front of Dustin Black’s castle, which seemed to belong in Georgetown or a Connecticut country estate, not the Clark County desert. On a pole in the front yard, near the three-car garage, flapped an American flag. A small red, white, and blue sign near the pole said: “We support the Pledge.” A massive white front door awaited the visitors under a portico supported by four gleaming white columns.

  “Quite the all-American little bungalow,” Brass said.

  Grissom shrugged. “Morticians are just like us, Jim.”

  “That right?”

  “Long as people keep dying, we’re in business.”

  “And you say I’m the cynical one.”

  Grissom gave him the charming smile. “You are, Jim. I’m just stating a fact.”

  The front walk wound through a lushly green lawn that might have been hand-trimmed with scissors, two perfectly coiffed bushes standing sentinel on either side of the entrance. The other houses on the block all had healthy grass and shrubbery, too; perhaps the neighborhood hadn’t gotten the memo that Clark County was suffering through a major drought.

  Brass used the huge brass knocker in the midst of that white door. Thirty seconds or so later, the door opened and a tall brunette looked at them accusingly.

  The dignified beauty was in black high heels, tan slacks, and a v-neck black sleeveless blouse showing just a hint of cleavage. Her overly large brown eyes might have seemed cartoonish had they not been glinting with intelligence. Her curly hair rolled to her shoulders like a cresting wave. She had a slightly beakish nose, hinting ill-advised plastic surgery, and collagen-full lips rouged a deep red.

  More work had been done on this forty-something woman than on one of her husband’s average corpses; but the result was nonetheless striking and, Brass thought, she probably looked quite lovely, in low lighting.

  “May I help you?” she asked, her voice a rich alto.

  Brass displayed his badge. “Mrs. Black?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Captain Jim Brass and this is Gil Grissom from the crime lab. Might we have a moment of your time?”

  “I’m busy right now. But if it’s important, I could spare you a few minutes.”

  “If it wasn’t important, ma’am, we wouldn’t be here.”

  She frowned in concern. “What’s it about?”

  “We’re looking into the murder of Kathy Dean.”

  Her hand shot to her mouth; the too-large eyes got larger. “You found the poor girl? She was…murdered?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mrs. Black.”

  “Nice-looking girl like that, when she disappears…you have to think the worst. So many awful people in this world. Values such as they are.”

  “Right. Could we come in?”

  “Where was she found?”

  “Desert Palm Cemetery.”

  “Oh my God….”

  She opened the door farther and stepped back so the two investigators could enter.

  To Grissom, the living room looked more like an Architectural Digest layout than somewhere a family actually lived, everything perfect, magazines fanned out on the coffee table, furniture arranged more for show than for ease of use. Only Mrs. Black’s ta
n suit jacket on the arm of the couch, and her black purse nestled in the corner next to it, clashed with the color scheme of dark green and beige…which Grissom figured a top-ticket decorator had probably referred to as “spruce” and “champagne.”

  “You say the poor dear was found at the cemetery?” Mrs. Black asked, waving them to wing chairs that looked far more comfortable than they actually were. She perched on the edge of the sofa as if sitting back might overwear the couch material.

  “Yes, under frankly bizarre circumstances,” Brass said. “She was in a casket we exhumed a couple of days ago.”

  Mrs. Black, clearly confused, asked, “She was buried…in a casket?”

  “Yes, someone else’s casket. Rita Bennett’s, actually.”

  The hand went to Mrs. Black’s mouth again. “Oh, my God…Rita of all people!”

  Grissom asked, “Your husband didn’t mention this to you?”

  “No, no. When I married a mortician, some years ago, I had only one hard and fast rule—Dustin must leave his work at work. I feel I hardly need to justify that wish.”

  “No.” Grissom shrugged. “But then…having two corpses switch places is probably not business as usual.”

  “The reason we’re here, though,” Brass said, perhaps afraid Grissom was moving the woman down the wrong path, “is to talk to you about that last night…the night the Dean girl babysat for you and your husband.”

  “Well…I’ve already talked to the police about that night. Ad nauseam.”

  Brass nodded. “That was a fairly cursory conversation, I’m sure…. To tell you the truth, Mrs. Black, I haven’t reviewed the interview with the officers involved, so quickly are we moving forward on this homicide. Which is why we’d like to talk about that night in a little more detail.”

  “Well, obviously, I want to do anything I can do to help. These animals who kill young girls, they should all receive lethal injection, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “No argument,” Brass said, and smiled.

  “All right, then, Captain…Bass was it?”

  “Brass.”

  “Captain Brass.” She settled her hands in her lap, like a Catholic school girl about to pray. “What would you like to know?”

  “Well—why don’t you just walk us through it from the beginning?”

  She thought back for several moments, then said, “I had talked Dustin into coming home early that day—it was a Saturday.”