“Good witnesses?” Catherine asked.
Brass grunted a bitter chuckle. “Would you believe, biker gang?”
Nick smirked humorlessly and said, “Not ideal witnesses, but harder than hell to break down their stories, I bet.”
“You bet right, Nick—none of ’em budged. ‘Our code is our word!’”
“Oh-kay,” Catherine said, and slapped her thighs. “We’ll start working it again.”
Brass seemed damn near on the edge of tears. “We worked that case hard, Vince and me—can’t believe we missed anything …”
“I’m sure you guys did your best,” she said. “But times, and technology, have changed…. Did you guys happen to keep any of the semen?”
Brass brightened. “Hell! I forgot all about that. I mean, it has been a long time …”
“Spill,” Nick said.
Brass, reenergized, said, “Vince, thinkin’ ahead, had it frozen, just in case. We were in early days with DNA, and we hoped the science would improve. Vince thought it would be best to be prepared, though—every unsolved murder case is an open file.”
“Good,” Catherine said. “Very good.”
Suddenly Brass was smiling. “You know, I hadn’t thought about that in … I dunno, ten years, maybe. Yeah, check the evidence freezer! Should be there somewhere.”
They were just about to break up the confab on this high note when North Las Vegas detective Bill Damon came scowling into the conference room.
“What the hell?” he asked, the vague question directed at Brass.
“What the hell what, Bill?”
Damon came over to loom over the seated detective, then got right in the smaller man’s face, saying, “Atwater thinks me and my guys are leaking information to the media!”
Brass kept his calm, rising. “No, Bill—from what I understand, our sheriff doesn’t know where the leak is coming from. Just that there is one.”
Sneering, Damon gestured to Nick and Catherine. “Well, I say it came from here—right here!”
Nick, teeth showing but not really smiling, said, “Well, it didn’t, Bill—maybe the sheriff has it right.”
Brass gave the CSI a hard firm look that said the detective would handle this.
“Now look, Bill,” Brass said, his voice quiet, easy-going, “the sheriff’s not accusing you, or anyone else in your department—or ours—of being the leak. He just wants to know who the leak is, at this point. Can you blame him? And, personally—I don’t think it’s you.”
Damon’s body language shifted slightly, the detective somewhat appeased.
Catherine knew better than to mention that she had been the one to suspect Damon and Logan this morning, wondering herself if it wasn’t one or both of them. The two NLVPD cops had seemed vaguely resentful of Brass absconding with their investigation.
Having gone to all of the trouble of working himself into a lather, Damon stayed angry enough to say, “And what about sharing information? I haven’t heard anything from you people for, what? Three days?”
Brass held up a gentle palm. “I was just going to call you. The lab results have started coming back today, and we’ve got some info, finally.”
Nodding a little, finally satisfied (at least slightly), Damon said, “Good. Well, good…. So, so tell me.”
“I will,” Brass said, “in the car.”
Surprised, the younger detective parroted, “In the car?”
“Yeah—we’re going to go talk to the TV reporter who called Sheriff Atwater, asking about CASt.”
Catherine could see the young cop was feeling better about where this was going.
“Which reporter?” Damon asked.
“Jill Ganine,” Brass said. “Over at KLAS?”
Everything seemed to have calmed down. Damon and Nick exchanged embarrassed smiles and sorrys, and Brass and the NLVPD detective had each taken a step toward the door when Grissom came back in, Greg Sanders trailing behind in that bright-eyed way of his.
The CSI supervisor, however, did not appear bright-eyed: His expression was grave, even troubled, as he looked down at a sheet of paper in his hand.
“Who died?” Catherine asked.
Grissom’s voice was flat: “CODIS matched the semen from Marvin Sandred’s back.”
Catherine shrugged a little. “And that’s good news, right?”
“Normally I would say, yes. But CODIS says the DNA belongs to a guy named Rudy Orloff.”
Brass looked at Damon. “I know that name from somewhere—do you?”
Damon shook his head.
“I know that name,” Brass repeated.
Grissom said, “Says here Orloff’s got a history of male prostitution.”
“Ooooh yeah,” Brass said. “I remember him. We pulled him in for questioning on the Pierce case, remember, Gil? That skinny little scumbag doesn’t have the stomach to kill anybody, let alone—”
“Evidently,” Grissom said, “he developed the requisite stomach a year ago in Reno. He stabbed a john, nearly a fatal wound. Since then, he’s been in Ely, doing life with the chance for parole for attempted murder.”
Catherine felt something like a stomach punch. “Our best suspect has been in a maximum-security prison? For the last year?”
Grissom waved the paper. “Actually, just for about the last two months—the Reno cops didn’t catch him right away; then there was the trial, a quick appeal, and finally, he was taken to Ely. Where, presumably, he still was when Marvin Sandred was slain.”
They all looked at each other for a long, stunned second. If their best suspect was in prison, how had his semen ended up on the back of a murdered man in North Las Vegas?
Probably not great trajectory, Catherine thought wryly.
“What next?” Brass said, his voice filled with exhaustion and exasperation. “What the hell next?”
Greg stepped forward with a weakly hopeful expression. “Maybe the epidermal cells will help us. Why don’t I get back to work on them?”
“Why don’t you, Greg?” Grissom said, without looking.
And Greg did.
Brass was shaking his head now, a vein throbbing in his forehead. Catherine was afraid he might stroke out right in front of them.
“It’s hard to have the worst luck in Vegas,” the detective said, “but we’re special—we did it. The semen at the scene comes from a guy in prison, the skin cells on the rope will probably end up belonging to Bugsy Siegel.”
Catherine was about to offer her own cynical comment, when her cell phone had the good sense to ring. As she withdrew it from her pocket, Nick’s, Grissom’s, Brass’s, and Damon’s cell phones all started chirping as well, a tiny technological chorale.
Suddenly thrust into the middle of six unsolved murders, over the course of a decade, Catherine Willows had only one thought as she punched the button on her phone, and it was even not her own voice, but that of Jim Brass, saying …
… What the hell next?
FOUR
The second murder did not require the full team’s attention.
Catherine and Nick remained behind at CSI HQ, to get digging into the old cases. Grissom, Sara, and Warrick took the ride out to the suburb of Coronado Ranch.
Unlike the crime scene at the Sandred house, where he’d worked the front yard, Warrick Brown spent his time indoors. The house on Buried Treasure Court belonged to Enrique Diaz—the recently deceased Enrique Diaz, that is—a successful TV producer for the Tourist Channel, a cable television network dedicated to travel, with a particular bent toward its home base of Las Vegas, which lent itself to local production.
The house was well-to-do but not ostentatious, revealing success without rubbing your nose in it. Stucco with a tile roof (like every other house in the neighborhood), the Diaz home was a long, lean two-story with an immaculate lawn despite the water shortage.
While Brass and Damon went off to canvass the neighbors, Grissom, Sara, and Warrick worked the scene. Sara took the outside, Grissom the inside but for the liv
ing room, which Warrick concentrated upon—where the murder had gone down.
Warrick had seen the Sandred crime scene firsthand, despite working the lawn, and also knew intimately the photos from the first victim’s house; so he saw at once that this crime looked strikingly similar—difference being the surroundings were decidedly more upscale than Sandred’s seedy bungalow.
Twice the size of Sandred’s front room, this one gave off a strong Mexican vibe—serapes of red, green, and yellow stripes tossed on the furniture, carefully casual; a potted cactus in a sunny corner looking healthy; family photos in funky rough-wood frames dotting the walls and end tables. A matching rough-wood crucifix above the front door seemed more decorative than religious, and the floor consisted of inlaid Mexican tile, a far cry from the cheap carpeting on which the previous victim had earned numerous rug burns during the course of dying. The south wall was mostly windows and—dark as the crime might be that the CSIs were investigating—the death site itself seemed to swim in sunlight. A plasma television hung on one wall while a huge sofa, twin recliners, and a wing chair, all covered in the same beige leather, stood mute sentry over the corpse.
Centerstage, heavy-set Diaz—his dark curly hair held in place by wet-look hair product—lay nude, stomach-down, right hand outstretched, the index finger severed, the other hand tucked under his body. The murder weapon—a length of rope that Warrick estimated would measure a foot and a half or so—remained wound around the victim’s neck, the reverse-eight noose pulled tight.
Again the killer had left a pool of semen on the victim’s back above the buttocks. The producer’s eyes bulged, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, as if mocking Warrick, an effect grotesquely heightened by the sloppily applied garish red lipstick.
And again, the lack of blood spatter made Warrick believe the vic’s finger had been separated only after the heart had stopped beating.
The cooly objective Warrick allowed himself a moment of subjectivity, by way of a disgusted half-smirk. He’d worked a lot of murder scenes, but the various and sometimes bizarre ways people got themselves killed was not nearly as surprising as the way their killers chose to live….
While Diaz was Hispanic, he was extremely light-skinned and could easily have passed for Caucasian, though these surroundings indicated pride in heritage. White victims had been the original CASt’s preference, and Sandred had fit that bill as well; whether Diaz had been mistaken for Caucasian, or had simply been “close enough” for the killer, remained to be seen.
Maybe this was a copycat who hadn’t picked up on that aspect of the original crimes, and who wasn’t aware that most serial killers stayed with one ethnic group, usually their own….
Of course, that wasn’t a hard and fast rule; homicidal maniacs had a way of making their own rules, and rewriting them as they went, on murderous whim. Still, anything as structured as the CASt murders, which seemed to follow some sick ritual within the perpetrator’s psychology, indicated a deadly attention to detail that should prove helpful to crime scene analysis.
Certainly the similarities between this and the Sandred murder were striking, and Warrick had little doubt they were dealing with the same killer—either new or old CASt.
And, anyway, despite Grissom’s surprising announcement of his own hunch that the killer was just getting started—which had already been born out by the body in this room—Warrick knew his supervisor would not tolerate assumptions, even in a situation like this. Warrick would follow the evidence to see where it led. Period.
Getting out his camera, Warrick started snapping pictures. He wasn’t even through the first roll of film when Grissom seemed to materialize at his side.
“First pass,” the CSI supervisor said, “rest of the house looks clean.”
“Nothing jumped out?”
“Nothing except how undisturbed the place is—and how much like the Sandred scene it is, in that respect.”
“Ah.”
“I’ll go over it more closely, but my guess is the murderer never went into any of the other rooms.”
“A guess, Gris? What next? A vision?”
“A third corpse, if we don’t do our jobs better than we have so far.”
“I hear that.” Warrick clicked another photo, then shook his head. “This guy is definitely out there. You realize the kinda gear he left behind? Televison alone is worth a couple G’s.”
“Sometimes a killer’s pathology won’t allow him to steal, even though he’s committed murder. It would somehow desecrate the sacredness of the act.”
“Yeah, yeah I know,” Warrick said, “but the guy has to be really nuts to leave a nice TV like that behind.”
They exchanged small, wry smiles, and went to work their separate ways.
After finishing the photos, Warrick took a sample of the semen. Then he carefully removed the rope, and turned the body over.
That was when Warrick saw something clutched in the fingers of the stiffening hand—something that had been out of sight beneath the body.
“Hey, Gris! … You better come get a load of this.”
Moments later, at Warrick’s side, Grissom was looking down at the hand. “You get a picture?”
The body was getting heavy, but Warrick made no complaint as he held it up. “Not yet.”
Grissom picked up Warrick’s camera and snapped off three quick photos.
“Go ahead and roll him all the way over,” the supervisor said.
Warrick eased the body to the floor, pulled a forceps out of his crime-scene kit and knelt next to the victim. As he moved closer and studied the card, Warrick could see that the object was a magnetic key of the type used by virtually every hotel in town and many businesses. Typically, this one had a magnetic strip down one end, with standard directions.
Using his forceps carefully, Warrick got the card by its edge, doing his best not to disturb any fingerprints. After he eased it from the dead man’s fingers, Warrick turned the card over: Five words were printed in blue letters on the white plastic …
… Property of Las Vegas Banner.
“Well, that’s not good,” Warrick said.
Holding the card up, Warrick remarked, “Usually I like finding clues, don’t you?”
Grissom’s eyes were tight.
Warrick expected a typically dry comment from his chief, but all he got was: “We better get Brass back over here—right away.”
Nick Stokes searched the aquamarine halls of CSI for Catherine. The low-key lighting sometimes worked against the nightshift, encouraging sleepiness; but considering the harshness of what they were frequently up against, Nick didn’t mind the soothing atmosphere.
When they had started looking into the old CASt cases, the first problem to crop up had been that they couldn’t find addresses on two suspects (the ones not exiled to a mental hospital). Now, after hours of digging, he had an address for one, but right now it looked like Nick might be filling out a missing persons report on his coworker.
He had just pulled his cell phone off his belt when Catherine stepped out of a restroom, a heavy folder under one arm.
She saw him coming and gave him a chagrined grin and a chuckle. “Quietest place to read in the whole building.”
Thinking about the men’s room across the hall, Nick shook his head. With the heavy men-to-women ratio in the LVPD, he couldn’t say the same.
“Find anything?” she asked.
Nick said, “How about an address for Phillip Carlson?”
“Our gay basher … where?”
“On Baltimore, near the Sphere.”
“What are we waiting for?”
“Brass and Damon to get back, maybe? You know, the detectives aren’t crazy about having CSIs outside of the lab, running loose….”
Catherine considered that, then shook her head. “Grissom put us on the old cases, and we’ll look into the old cases. Anyway, Brass isn’t a stickler on that policy. With the workload like it is, can you see hauling a detective off a current case while we ru
n out the ground balls on the old ones?”
“Wow,” Nick said. “You trying to convince me, or yourself?”
She smiled and shrugged. “I dunno—but I’m convinced.”
“Me too,” Nick grinned. “But let’s call for a black-and-white to meet us there anyway.”
Carlson’s apartment was in a building that looked like a two-story stucco motel from the fifties that had gone to pot decades ago without anybody doing anything about it in the intervening years.
Nick, behind the wheel, said, “Nice digs our boy has for himself.”
Nick parked the Tahoe on the street, hoping it would still be there when they got back; then the two CSIs made their way up the outside stairs and across the concrete walkway of the second floor.
Somewhere in the neighborhood, somebody had the bass on their car stereo turned up way too loud, and although Nick knew most of the new music on the street—prided himself on that—the distortion made it impossible for him to identify the rapper in question.
Catherine knocked on the door of apartment 2E and they waited for an answer that did not come.
Nick put his ear to the orange-paint-peeling door, but heard nothing. He stood back, shrugged at Cath, then knocked, louder this time.
And again, they waited.
Nick had just pounded on it the third time when the next door over swung open and a figure leaned out.
“What the hell do you want?” called a rail-thin white dude, a sixties flashback in a white tank-style undershirt and jeans that had faded not by fashion statement, threatening to slide down his narrow skeleton at any moment.
He was an eternal “kid” of maybe fifty, with graying, unkempt hippie-ish hair and green eyes so cloudy, it might have been raining inside his skull. He’d shaved sometime this month but not this week.
As they moved closer to apartment 2D, the aroma of marijuana wafted their way.
Gone to pot is right, Nick thought.
Nick displayed his credentials and a polite smile and said, “Stokes, Willows. We’re from the Crime Lab.”
The cloudy eyes widened. “Something bad go down around this place? I didn’t hear about it!”
Catherine had a polite smile going, too. “Could you step out here, please?”
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