“What have we got?” he asked.
Speedle pulled a UV alternate light source case from the floor of the Hummer. “Well, H—we’ve got a mess.”
Not a good omen when a criminalist described a crime scene as a “mess.”
“Chauffeur, Felipe Ortega according to his license,” Speedle explained. “Dead in the trunk of his limo, trussed up with duct tape.”
“Dead how?”
“Looks like he asphyxiated on his own vomit.”
“Somebody really had it in for this guy,” Delko said. “Bad way to go.”
“Evidence tell you that?”
Delko winced, shook his head.
“Work the evidence, Eric. Not your feelings?”
“Right, H.”
The cell phone in Caine’s pocket chirped and he withdrew it and tapped a button. “Horatio Caine.”
The voice was sultry and pleasant. “You’re a hard man to track down, Lieutenant Caine.”
“Well, Catherine—you’re a detective. I wouldn’t expect less of you.”
“Horatio—you recognize my voice…I’m flattered.”
“CSI Willows from Las Vegas—you do make an impression.” Caine wasted no time. “What can I do for you?”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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For Karl Largent—
who has made his
share of FLA getaways….
M.A.C. and M.V.C.
“Gone are all my hours of pleasure,
Vanished with my vanished treasure;
for a deathly shadow fell….”
—HORATIO ALGER
“Every day we meet people on
the worst day of their lives.”
—GIL GRISSOM
Prologue
Lessor Evil
THE WIND WHISTLING down from the mountains, like a mournful conscience, carried with it a solemn chill. As the sun set on Las Vegas, bringing night to a city that refused to sleep, an unusual crispness was in the air, a knife edge that keened the senses. Streaks of purple and magenta disrupted the salmon-colored sky, threatening to deliver a night as dark, if not as foul, as Gil Grissom’s mood.
The supervisor of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department’s criminalistics graveyard shift abandoned his black Tahoe in the white zone, flashing his ID at a protesting security guard and marching toward the entrance of the McCarran International Airport terminal, his white-knuckled fists at his sides. There he paused to search out his prey—Thomas Lessor, vice president of operations for Boyle Hotels, Inc., sauntering away from his stretch limo as a skycap struggled to keep up.
Tall, blond, and decked out in a suit that cost about half again as much as Grissom’s monthly condo bill, Lessor strode the sidewalk with the confidence of a killer who was getting away with murder. Terminal doors opened before him, much as the court system had, not so long ago. Grissom quietly seethed, following Lessor as the man swaggered toward the security gate, the skycap peeling off to check the killer’s bags.
The cell phone in Grissom’s jacket pocket felt heavy. He willed it to ring, but the cell ignored him. Catherine Willows, his second in command, would call him any moment now, to tell him they had the new evidence needed to hold Lessor…or else Grissom would have to stand by and watch as a murderer caught a first-class flight to Florida.
Grissom’s team had worked hard tracking down the killer of Erica Hardy. The young woman in question was a singer who’d built a devoted local following and a growing reputation that had just started to attract some national coverage and the much-needed tourists who were the town’s life’s blood. Her regular gig had been fronting a small jazz combo in the lounge at the Oasis, one of Vegas’s new swank, high-end, high-concept hotel-casinos, this one recalling the Rat Pack cool of the sixties.
Then Erica Hardy’s nude body had been found in her apartment on her bathroom floor. The singer had been beaten, strangled, and sexually attacked. Detective Barney Evans had theorized that the murder was just another senseless, brutal sex crime.
Following the sparse but telling evidence—the lack of any fingerprints but the victim’s on the tub indicated gloves on the part of the perpetrator—Grissom and his team had interpreted the crime scene a different way.
Erica Hardy’s beating had been so severe, her face so pulverized, that she had to be identified by her fingerprints. Grissom prided himself on a reserved, even remote response to even the most sobering crime scene evidence, but he had felt a shudder of sympathy for the dead woman when he heard the autopsy report from Doc Robbins.
“She was beaten with the proverbial blunt object,” Robbins said as they stood over the mutilated body that lay on the cold metal table between them. “My educated guess is an aluminum baseball bat.”
“I’m not much for guesses,” Grissom said.
“I’m well aware—but we’ve had several gang-related killings that involved that specific instrument of choice.”
“Baseball bat.”
“Yeah—interestingly, the beating was post mortem.”
“Not the cause of death?”
“No—manual asphyxiation.”
Grissom frowned. “Semen?”
“No,” Robbins said with a regretful shake of the head. “You’ll have to find your DNA elsewhere.”
“But she was raped?”
“Yes—vaginal bruising and the presence of a common condom lubricant and spermicide.”
Grissom just stared at Robbins. “This guy came to the party with a baseball bat, latex gloves and a condom?”
“I would say so.”
Grissom looked down at the ugly thing that had been a beautiful woman. “This victim was not random, Doc—the killer has a motive for this murder.”
Though the CSIs never found the murder weapon, they did have other strong evidence. Erica had put up quite a struggle against her attacker and they got their DNA from under her fingernails—the killer’s skin.
Tracing the singer’s activities, the team’s resident computer whiz, Sara Sidle, ferreted out a key piece of the puzzle: Erica was the mistress of the man Grissom was now following through the airport, one Thomas Lessor, the Boyle Hotels executive who had first booked the singer into the lounge. The couple had been trading intimate e-mails for months. All had been deleted. All had been retrieved.
Boyle Hotels, Inc., a family business, consisted of two high-rise resorts—the stately and respected Conquistador in Miami Beach and the brand-new, opulent Oasis here in Vegas. With the opening of this new palace, the company’s CEO, Lessor’s wife, Deborah—widow of the company’s third-generation owner, Phillip Boyle—had moved the corporate headquarters to their new home in Sin City…and her current husband had moved into his cushy new VP’s office just down the h
all.
Lessor’s job was to book talent into the lounges and showrooms of the two hotels and his duties called for him to bounce back and forth between Vegas and Miami. Sara Sidle’s digging had uncovered that Lessor appeared to be bouncing Erica Hardy as well.
When Grissom had first met Lessor, barely forty hours after the murder, the man’s face bore several long, ugly scratches. Lessor claimed the cuts came from a scrap with his wife’s angry cat, but a DNA test proved it had indeed been the hotel VP’s skin lurking under the fingernails of Erica Hardy. Lessor had been arrested immediately, an apparent quick CSI victory…
…only since that early triumph, the case had gone seriously south.
The concourse buzzed with traffic and activity and Lessor didn’t immediately notice when Grissom pulled even with him. They went only a short distance before Grissom said, “Cuts seem to be healing nicely, I see, Mr. Lessor.”
Lessor stopped and turned slowly, his ice blue eyes hard, his expression unworried, his smile slight and condescending. “Mr. Grissom. Thank you for your concern…. Taking a much-needed vacation, I hope? So you can bring a sharper focus to your work, and not victimize the innocent?”
People behind them almost piled into the pair, who now stood calmly eyeing each other in the middle of traffic.
“No,” Grissom said. “I’m just seeing off a friend.”
“And who would that be?”
“Why, Mr. Lessor…you. I’ve come to feel I know you very well.”
Lessor sighed and shook his head. “How disappointing. Your behavior, I mean. I really thought you were a professional.”
“Maybe we should walk and talk.” Grissom nodded ahead. “You wouldn’t want to miss your flight.”
But Lessor didn’t budge. “How sad to see a man of your caliber lowering himself to such…harassment.”
People were moving around them now, hostile.
Grissom merely smiled. “This isn’t harassment, Mr. Lessor—I’m just trying to do you a service.”
“And what would that be?”
“To advise you not to leave Nevada.”
The slightest furrow of concern touched the man’s brow. “Why? Do you have a warrant for my arrest?”
“No…but I will shortly. And I’d hate to see you go to the trouble of flying all the way to Miami only to have to get on a plane and fly right back.”
“I see. Just trying to save me bother. And expense.”
“That’s right.”
“I think you should run this concept past Mr. Peters. Don’t you?”
Harrison Peters—Lessor’s flamboyant, thousand-dollar-an-hour defense attorney—had gotten his client off by persuading a judge to throw out the DNA evidence against his client. For a criminalist of Grissom’s standing, and a crime lab of their stature, having such routine, easily processed evidence disallowed was, frankly, humiliating. If Grissom hadn’t had to rely on one of the dayshift lab techs to do the comparison, Lessor would still be in jail awaiting trial.
“This was a courtesy on my part, Mr. Lessor,” Grissom said with dry, unhidden sarcasm. “No need to call your attorney…”
Lessor smiled, his straight white teeth glinting.
“…until,” Grissom completed, “I do have that warrant.”
The smile vanished, Lessor’s face tightened, and he removed his cell phone from a pocket like a western gunfighter drawing a side arm.
Grissom wished he felt the bravado he was displaying to Lessor; but in truth, he was stalling. Catherine Willows—the best and most experienced CSI on his shift—was no doubt at this moment hovering over the shoulder of Grissom’s trusted DNA lab rat Greg Sanders, as he processed their new evidence.
Lessor’s lip twisted into what might be mistaken for a good-natured grin as he punched the speed dial button of his cell phone. “You see,” he said cheerfully, “I’m not sure whether I’m to sue you or the department or both.”
If it had been Sanders who’d processed the original evidence, they wouldn’t be in this bad place. But even Greg got a vacation every now and then, and that was why the DNA evidence found its way into the hands of a dayshift counterpart, one of Conrad Ecklie’s techs, a certain Dennis Spencer.
It turned out that Spencer had once been suspected of dealing cocaine from the evidence locker. Harrison Peters made sure every case Spencer ever worked on became suspect; the media howled, and Internal Affairs got back involved, quickly finding two instances of broken chain of evidence under Spencer’s watch, one of which tainted the Thomas Lessor DNA sample. Peters had his client out of jail and the evidence thrown out of court before the ink was dry on his motion.
Staring at Grissom with those icy blue eyes, Lessor said into the phone, “Put me through to Harrison—Tom Lessor.” After pausing to listen, he added, “I can only hold for a few seconds, dear—I have a plane to catch.”
Grissom summoned an angelic smile to cast upon the killer. Though he had no doubt that they had the right man, Grissom had been forced to watch from the sidelines as Lessor strolled out of jail, the press swarming him, buzzing like the bastard had just kicked the winning field goal in the Super Bowl.
Peters must have pulled some kind of strings because when Lessor walked out of the jail, instead of exiting unshaven and unkempt, he might have been departing some fashionable spa. The tailored Armani suit—this one the bleached tan of the desert—gave him the appearance more of a movie star than a suspected killer being led out of lockup (not that those two categories were exclusive these days).
The reporters had all cried for a comment from the released murder suspect, and he had been happy to oblige.
“I don’t blame the LVMPD,” Lessor said, benevolently, his tone one of pity not censure. “This is just another sad example of what cuts in governmental spending can bring—if they weren’t understaffed and overburdened, surely the LVMPD would not have arrested the wrong man, nor would they have turned a blind eye to the presence of a suspected drug dealer in their own midst.”
It was a pretty long-winded sound bite, but a good one, and it got all the way to CNN, who later interviewed Lessor at the Oasis against a showgirl backdrop in the lounge where the girl he murdered had once sung.
And it didn’t even give Grissom pleasure to see Sheriff Brian Mobley suspend the dayshift supervisor for three days with no pay. Whatever their rivalries might be, however Ecklie might deserve this comeuppance, the bottom line was unmistakable: a killer they had nabbed, cold, was about to stroll onto a plane and fly away to some Florida beach…
…and there wasn’t a damn thing Grissom could do to stop him.
“Harrison,” Lessor said crisply, when his attorney finally came on the line, “I hate to bother either of us with this…but that would-be crime scene ‘expert’ is here at the airport harassing me.”
He listened for a few moments.
“No, not Ecklie—the other one…”
In grim silence, Grissom watched the killer’s face, but it gave away nothing as the man listened to his lawyer, other than perhaps (feigned?) amusement. Finally, Lessor held the phone out to Grissom. “He’d like a word.”
Though the CSI supervisor had hoped for a phone call while here at the airport, this was not the one he’d longed for. On the other hand, anything to prolong this departure, or better yet to delay it, was a positive thing. He looked at the phone curiously, as if it were an object he’d never seen before.
Lessor arched an eyebrow and thrust the thing into Grissom’s face. “If you don’t mind—Mr. Peters bills by the millisecond.”
Grissom took the phone and identified himself.
Peters’s voice was the roar of a jet engine. “What in the hell are you doing harassing my client?”
“I’m in no way harassing your client,” Grissom said, his voice cool, calm.
“What in God’s name would you call it then?”
“I explained to your client.”
“Explain it to me.”
“We are developing new evidence
in the Erica Hardy case and I would hate to see Mr. Lessor using up his frequent flyer miles, not if he’s going to be needed back here, more or less immediately.”
The silence lasted only a few seconds. “What kind of evidence?”
“When we have it,” Grissom said lightly, “you’ll be among the first to know.” Without waiting for a response, Grissom handed the phone back to Lessor.
Lessor turned away and spoke to his lawyer.
Grissom turned and walked off a few feet, giving the lawyer and client some privacy…and getting some for himself. The CSI supervisor pulled out his own cell phone and punched his speed dial.
The familiar musical voice said: “Catherine Willows.”
Still watching the killer, Grissom said, “Where are we?”
There was a sigh in Catherine’s words as she said, “Greg’s working as fast as he can, but it takes time to replicate the DNA into a sample big enough to test.”
“How long?”
“A couple of hours, at best.”
“At worst?”
“Come on, Gil—you know the drill. At worst…tomorrow.”
“He’ll be gone by then.”
“Someone once told me, science jumps through hoops for no one.”
Grissom frowned. “I told you that.”
“Riiiight. Gil, I want the SOB as bad as you do, but we can only do what we can do.”
“And if he jumps from Florida to some South American country?”
“So he’s a flight risk.” Catherine’s tone attempted to minimize the situation. “We have friends in Miami. We can cover that.”
“We’ll need to.” He hesitated. “ ‘Bye.”
“ ‘Bye.”
Grissom punched the END button. He had known this delay was possible, even probable. And he blamed himself—though he was lucky even to have further evidence to examine.
Police photos of Lessor when he was arrested showed not only the deep scratches on his face but a nasty gouge in his upper chest, just below the throat. Originally classified as one of the scratches inflicted by Erica’s fingernails, the cut on Lessor’s chest—when Grissom took a second, harder look—seemed wider than a fingernail, even a thumbnail, might leave. With his original DNA sample disallowed, Grissom embraced the possibility that the cut on Lessor’s chest might have come from something else.
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