Mortal Wounds

by Max Allan Collins

  “Dream Dolls?” she asked, peering over the edge of the note at Grissom. Her expression split the difference between a smile and a frown. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Grissom risked just the hint of a smile. “You know the place better than anybody else on staff.”

  “What’s that, another excerpt from The Wit and Wisdom of Gil Grissom?” She tossed the scrap of paper on the table next to the orange peels. “A very slender volume, I might add.”

  He took a seat beside her. “You can handle this? It’s not a problem, is it? Is this…a sensitive issue with you?”

  Her eyes were wide and unblinking as she said, “You’d know this, why? Sensitivity being your long suit and all.” She sighed, nibbled an orange slice. “A dead stripper, and you immediately think of me—should I be complimented?”

  Grissom thought about that for a moment. “You may have my job one day, you know.”

  “It’s been offered to me before,” she reminded him, adding wryly, “Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t take it.”

  “Me too,” Grissom admitted. “If you were supervisor, and one of your CSIs was a former stock-car racer, and you had a case turn up at a speedway…who would you send?”

  She sighed. “Point well taken.” She glanced at the notes again. “How did the woman die?”

  “That’s what the coroner will tell us…Looks like strangulation.”

  “All right,” she said. “You’re not coming?”

  He shook his head. “I’m meeting Brass in five minutes. He’s invited me along—interviewing the Blairs, the friends who reported the Lynn Pierce disappearance…now that it’s official.”

  Catherine was cleaning up her trash, depositing the peels and her Evian bottle in a bin, when he told her, “I said a CSI team’d be right out.”

  She bestowed him her most beautiful sarcastic smile. “I’ll shake a tailfeather.”

  On her way out of the break room, he called, “And take Sara!” Catherine nodded, threw him a wave over her shoulder, and strode down the hall.

  Catherine found Sara Sidle huddled over her computer monitor, her mouse racing around the pad as she studied something on the Internet. Wearing dark bell-bottom jeans and a dark blue scoop-neck top under her baby-blue lab coat, she looked more like a clerk at Tower Records than a dedicated scientist. Her dark curly hair bounced as she bobbed in time to some internal rhythm.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Catherine said, “but we’ve got a call.”

  Sara barely glanced at her. “Uh, Grissom assigned me to this Pierce disappearance.”

  “Well, he wants you to accompany me on this one. We’ve got a live one.”

  “You mean a dead one.”

  Catherine shrugged.

  “Just give me another minute,” Sara said, her gaze glued to the monitor.

  Catherine leaned in for a look.

  “I’ve been checking hotel reservations and check-ins for the last two days,” Sara said, “and nothing.”

  “We’ll find her,” Catherine said, “or she’ll turn up on her own. Nobody disappears ‘without a trace,’ no matter what you hear.”

  They gathered their equipment, jumped in one of the department’s black Tahoes—Catherine tossing the keys to Sara—and strapped themselves in for the short drive to Dream Dolls.

  “So,” Sara said, with a sideways glance, “this is one of the older, uh, clubs in town, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. And yes, Dream Dolls is one of the clubs I worked at.”

  “Oh. Really. Interesting.”

  “Is it?” Catherine turned and folded her arms and faced the windshield. “Grissom assigned me to this, he says, because I worked there, and have an advance knowledge of the place.”

  “Makes sense. But…why’d he send me?”

  “Probably because he figured it would be less awkward for me than taking Nicky or Warrick…assuming Grissom could be that sensitive.”

  Sara mulled that a moment or two. “Maybe he figures, since we’ll have to deal with a lot of women, you know, at the club…sending two women kinda makes sense.”

  “Maybe.”

  The club sat in the older part of downtown, blocks away from the renovation of Fremont Street. Though it wasn’t that far from headquarters, and she had passed the place numerous times, Dream Dolls—and that life—seemed to Catherine worlds away from where she was now. She wondered if Ty Kapelos still ran the show there. He’d always seemed just one brick short of a pimp; but he had, at least, always been fair.

  “Even your looks won’t last forever,” he’d told her. “Start saving. Think up a future for yourself.”

  In a way, that had been an important point on the winding road to the straight life she now lived.

  Sara pulled the SUV into a parking space beside two squad cars, whose rollers painted the night alternately blue and red. The two women climbed out of the Tahoe, gathered their equipment, and turned toward the club, a one-story faded bunker of a redbrick building.

  Catherine looked up at the garish glowing neon sign on a pole looming over the sidewalk, featuring a red outline that suggested an overly endowed woman, sliding down a blue neon firepole; when the neon stripper reached the bottom, giant green letters…one at a time…spelled out DREAM DOLLS, then held and pulsed…before the sequence started again.

  Smirking, shaking her head, Catherine figured Ty must have finally decided to spend a few bucks on the business. Hearing footsteps on the cement, she looked toward a young male uniformed officer coming their way from where he’d been positioned at the front door.

  “CSI?” the officer asked.

  She read his nameplate: JOHNSTON. A newbie, right out of the academy she’d bet, all wavy blond hair and blue-eyed, vacant stare—was this his first crime scene?

  “Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle,” she said with a nod toward her partner. “Pardon the expression, but it’s kinda dead out here.”

  His voice was a breathy tenor. “I was told not to let anyone in or out, ’cept you guys and the detectives.”

  She nodded and strode past him.

  “Real mess,” he said, hollowly.

  Spinning to face him, Catherine demanded, “You were in there?” All she needed was for some rookie to contaminate her evidence. “You saw the scene?”

  Eyes bright and glistening, he nodded. “Just for a second—from out in the hall.” He swallowed. “Never seen anything like that.”

  “But you didn’t go near the body?”

  “No.”

  She studied his face for a second, then—satisfied he’d been frank with her—said, “Good,” turned back to the club and pulled open the front door. Behind her, Sara tossed a hip to hold the door open. They entered a small alcove with still another door between them and the bar; already the smoky, spilled-beer-stench atmosphere assailed them. To their right, behind a small table, sat a good-looking if steroidally burly doorman in a white shirt, red bow tie, and black jeans.

  “You ladies…” He seemed to have been about to say one thing, in his pleasant baritone, then—perhaps noting Sara’s silver flight-case field kit—finished by saying something else. “…are with the cops?”

  Catherine said, “Crime scene investigators.”

  He nodded, gesturing toward the club, as if there were anywhere else to go.

  Catherine opened the inner door and the blare of amplified rock almost knocked her back into the entryway. The music hadn’t been this loud back in her day—or at least she didn’t remember it that way. Stepping inside, the two women let the door swing shut behind them.

  The stage was where it had always been, still about the size of Wayne Newton’s yacht, filling the center of the room, a brass pole anchoring either end. No dancers were on stage at the moment, though the lights continued to blink to the beat of the music. A few customers dotted the chairs near the stage and most of the girls huddled in a faraway corner with two uniformed officers. In the corner to the left an elevated DJ booth oversaw the room like a prison tower, the
sentry a scrawny guy in headphones, a scruffy beard, short blond hair and a fluorescent DREAM DOLLS T-shirt. His head moved to the music like a head-bobbing toy. He seemed oblivious to the fact that another employee was dead and the stage was empty.

  Detective Erin Conroy stood at the long bar at the right, a notepad in hand, talking to someone Catherine couldn’t see.

  Still moving slowly, Catherine and Sara made their way to the bar and Conroy looked up, her green eyes tight, whether from the situation or the smoke, who could say? On the other side of the bar stood a short, bald, fat man, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, the top three buttons left open to reveal the sort of gold chains it takes hours to win at a carnival.

  Catherine had to yell to be heard. “Hey, Ty!” She jerked a thumb toward the DJ, then slashed her throat with a finger.

  His mouth dropped open, as he recognized her, but he obeyed. Tyler Kapelos looked over at the DJ’s corner and yelled. “Worm!”

  The DJ glanced up—the club owner, too, dragged a finger across his throat, the DJ nodded and the sound system went quiet, though Catherine figured she’d be hearing the echo for hours. Minus the blare of music, the club’s essential seediness seemed to assert itself.

  “Cath,” Kapelos said, a smile spreading like a rash over his ample face. “Jeez, it’s good to see you. What’s it been…ten, fifteen years? I was starting to think you didn’t love me no more. I heard you were with the cops, but still…never expected to see you in my place. You know me, I run a clean shop—no drugs, no hooking.”

  “I’m not a cop, Ty—I’m a scientist.”

  His dark eyes danced; he was in a good mood, considering. “You did make good!”

  Sara—apparently feeling left out—said, “Crime scene investigators—my name is Sidle.”

  Kapelos acknowledged Sara with a nod, then turned his sweaty grinning countenance back on Catherine. “I just knew you’d make something of yourself.” He gestured with a wag of his head to the squalid world around them. “You were always too good for this place.”

  “Okay,” Catherine said, all business, “we’re officially all caught up—now, what happened here?”

  Kapelos began to speak, but Detective Conroy stepped in, glancing occasionally at her notepad. “We have a dead dancer in the back, in one of the private rooms. Goes by ‘Jenna Patrick’—don’t know if that’s her real name or not. Late twenties, strangled—apparently by a john.”

  “Excuse me,” Kapelos said, mildly indignant, “but they’re not ‘johns.’ This is not the Mustang Ranch, y’know. They’re customers. Patrons.”

  “Speaking of which,” Catherine said to Conroy, “if you don’t mind a suggestion—we could use a couple more detectives to question those customers. We can’t release them without preliminary statements, at least.”

  But Conroy was ahead of her. “I have a call in. O’Riley and Vega are on the way…. Crime scene?”

  The detective led the way, Catherine and Sara falling in line behind her as they moved to the back. With the music off and the echo subsiding, the customers and dancers corralled out there were talking too loud, yelling to be heard over music that had gone away.

  As the trio of female investigators edged into the cramped hallway in back, Catherine noticed a small video camera overhead. She paused and pointed it out to Sara, who had seen it, too.

  “We’ll get the tapes before we go,” Sara said.

  The hallway contained six doors, three on each side, all standing open; this area was not part of the building’s original design, and had not been here during Catherine’s tenure—strictly contrived out of sheetrock, cheap trim and black paint, to accomplish a specific purpose.

  Looking through the first door on the left, Catherine saw a room the size of a good-sized closet with a metal frame chair facing the door. The walls back here were black, too, and the carpeting looked like some cheap junk maybe picked up at a yard sale. Each cubicle had a mounted speaker to feed in the DJ’s tunes.

  “Private dance rooms,” Conroy said. “Lap dances, they call ’em.”

  Table dances—where a dancer, between sets, would work the room, squeezing dollars out of patrons for up-close-and-slightly-more-personal glimpses at a girl—were as far as things had ever gone, in Catherine’s day. Nothing to compare with the likes of “lap” dances and the stuff that went on in these private rooms, on the current scene.

  “There are doors on the rooms,” Conroy pointed out, “but no locks.”

  “If a customer gets out of line,” Sara said, thinking it through aloud, “a bouncer can respond to a shout or a scream, and put a stop to it.”

  “In theory,” Catherine said. “But that doesn’t seem to have helped, here…. ”

  Peeking over Sara’s shoulder, Catherine got her first look at the body. Nude except for a lavender thong, Jenna Patrick lay in a fetal position, her long blonde hair splayed away from her face and bare back, something thin and black tight around her throat. Her head faced left, one sightless brown orb staring at the place where the wall and floor met. Full dark lips were frozen in a parody of a kiss and a tiny mole punctuated the corner of her mouth. She had full, heavy breasts and the strong, muscular legs of a dancer. She wore black patent-leather spike heels that would have been a bitch to walk, let alone dance, in.

  “That looks like an electrical tie,” Catherine said.

  “Looks like it,” Conroy said.

  The women remained in the hallway, huddled around the doorway, maneuvering around each other for a better view.

  Sara said, “Cut off the carotids—she was out in seconds…and dead in under a minute.”

  Catherine said to Conroy, “How many men was she in here with tonight?”

  The detective shook her head, ponytail swinging. “Kapelos said they never settled up till the end of the night—he and the dancers split the take, back here…twenty-five dollars a dance.”

  “Plus tips,” Catherine said, “which the girls wouldn’t share, even if they were supposed to.”

  Conroy went on: “Jenna came in at five and was scheduled until twelve—only a couple of bathroom, cigarette breaks. No lunch break.”

  Catherine nodded; she knew the drill.

  “That normal?” Sara asked, wincing.

  “Yeah,” Catherine said. “Most of the girls don’t eat much anyway, gotta stay in shape. If they want a meal, they brown-bag it in the dressing room…. Jenna here would’ve worked straight through till midnight, getting out before the crowd got too out of hand…. Those last hours of the night are the worst.”

  Sara was doing a lousy job of hiding how fascinated she was, hearing Catherine’s inside scoop on the skin business.

  “Or,” Catherine went on, “if there were some high-rollers and she thought she could make some real bucks, maybe she’d stick around another hour or so. That’s pretty typical.”

  Sara asked, “When did you quit doing this…yesterday?”

  Conroy piped in: “Am I catching the drift of this, correctly? You used to dance for Kapelos? Here?”

  “About a hundred years ago, I did. Got my degree, and got out—any other questions?”

  “No,” Conroy said. “None. Glad to have your, uh, insights.”

  The two CSIs unpacked their tools in the tiny hallway and went to work. First, Catherine used an electrostatic print lifter to get footprints off the floor of the room, and then the hallway. She’d have to take shoe prints from the cops, Sara and herself, to eliminate them, but she still had hope of getting something. They photographed everything, dusted the chair and the door knobs for prints; then Catherine bent close to the victim’s neck for a better look at the weapon that had taken Jenna Patrick’s life.

  “About three-eighths of an inch in diameter,” Catherine reported. “Standard black electrical tie, available in every hardware store in the free world.”

  Picking a spot that looked clean, she used a small pair of wire cutters to snip the tie, which she then bagged. It wasn’t very wide, but even if they
snagged a partial print, that’d be useful.

  Over the course of the next two hours, they lifted hairs, samples of stains, fibers, dirt, anything that might help them identify who had killed Jenna Patrick in that room. Using the RUVIS—a sort of pistol-gripped telephoto lens—they turned up occasional white splotches on the carpet, indicating probable semen spills from happy customers.

  “Greg’s going to love us,” Sara said sarcastically, referring to their resident lab rat, Greg Sanders, whose job it would be to wade nose deep in the DNA cesspool they uncovered tonight.

  “This cubicle could be a career for him,” Catherine said with a smile. “But oddly…there’s not as much as I thought there would be. Place like this should be wall-to-wall DNA.”

  Sara nodded, shrugged. “Yeah. What’s up, y’suppose?”

  Catherine thought Sara’s question over for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll be back.”

  Walking across the club—the lights on now, exposing Dream Dolls as the dingy nightmare it was—she saw that the place had emptied out except for cops and employees. She nodded to Detectives O’Riley and Vega, who were interviewing a waitress and the red-bow-tied bouncer. The dancers were in the dressing room in back where Conroy would be questioning them; the DJ in his corner was covering his equipment under tarps. Catherine moved to the bar, behind which Tyler Kapelos moped with a cup of coffee.

  “How long am I gonna be closed down, Cath?” he asked as he poured her a cup, too.

  “You can probably reopen tomorrow if you want. We’ll be done soon.”

  “That’s a relief, anyway.” He nodded and sipped from his cup.

  “Pretty ugly in there.”

  “Shame. She was a nice kid.”

  Catherine knew that whichever one of his dancers had died, Kapelos would likely have said the same thing.

  “But, y’know, funny thing,” she said casually, “it’s not as bad as it could have been.” She sipped her coffee, hot, bitter, but better than the break room swill. “You got a cleaning woman coming in daily or something?”

  He smiled a little, shrugged. “Spent some money, fixed stuff up, some. How d’you like the new sign?”