Cold Burn ccsi-3

by Max Allan Collins

  "I'm saying something else, sir. Tonight, we finally figured out why you didn't see the Lexus."

  "My God," Sherman said, jumping ahead a step, sitting up; it was almost as if he'd been woken with a splash of water. "You mean it really wasn't there?" Sherman finished for him, his eyes widening a little behind his glasses.

  Warrick nodded slowly.

  "Well, where the hell was it, when I was looking for it?"

  "That's just it-we don't know."

  "Then how do you know it wasn't there?"

  Warrick explained, in some detail, what had been discovered by Nick, going over the surveillance videos.

  Sherman's voice rose, and possessed a tremble that might have been sorrow or anger or perhaps both, as he said, "Why, after more than a goddamn year, are you people just now figuring that out?"

  Warrick searched for words. Should he tell the grieving husband that the reason was because Nick spilled a pop can? Or maybe share with him the superiority of Grissom's graveyard crew over Ecklie's day shift?

  Brass, who'd been quietly sitting drinking the coffee, now sat forward and bailed Warrick out. "A year ago," he said, "a whole different set of investigators, assigned to a missing person case, were looking for cars coming into the hotel. Now, one of our crime lab investigators, new to the case…the murder case, Mr. Sherman…caught a glimpse of what looked like your car driving past the entrance."

  This seemed to placate Sherman, who said, "Well, you told me fresh eyes would be a good thing for the investigation. And I appreciate the validation of my original statement…but what good does it do?"

  "Plenty," Warrick said. "We think Missy was abducted in her own car, driven away and the car brought back to the Mandalay Bay and parked again."

  "To confuse the issue," Brass said.

  "All right." Sherman seemed more alert now. "What can I do to help?"

  Warrick said, "Allow us to take your van into custody and search for evidence again."

  This seemed to disappoint him. "The police didn't find anything a year ago. And the van has been cleaned since then. Stem to stern."

  "We know. But with this new information, we need to take another look. We hope you won't ask us to go to the trouble of a warrant, because that will slow us down."

  Sherman said, "Whatever it takes. It means a lot to me that you people are doing something."

  As Brass went back to the Taurus to call for a tow truck, Warrick said, "We appreciate this, sir. And we'll stay at it until we find whoever did this."

  Sherman's expression seemed doubtful. "No offense, but you hear a lot about unsolved cases, and even about people who get caught and then walk…"

  "We have high arrest and conviction rates, Mr. Sherman. We're ranked the number two crime lab in the country."

  Sherman found a smile somewhere. "Well, I guess I know what that means."

  "Sir?"

  "You try harder."

  Warrick returned the man's smile.

  "I'll get you the keys," he said, and went off.

  The tow truck showed up quickly and, within an hour, Warrick had the SUV in the CSI garage, ready to do his own search of Missy Sherman's Lexus.

  The exterior was clean and he checked for prints, but came up with only a few, probably mostly Sherman's, and maybe those of employees at the car wash. Warrick had already asked Brass to contact Premimum Car Wash and take employees' prints. Any employees who'd quit in the meantime would have to be tracked down; once again, Warrick was glad not to have Brass's job.

  He compared the prints from the Lexus with Sherman's prints on file; one of two sets of prints on the driver's door and the hood belonged to Sherman. The other set belonged to some John Doe-a car wash employee, maybe…but almost certainly not Missy's killer.

  Being essentially a liquid, fingerprints on the exterior of the vehicle would have long since evaporated in the dry Vegas heat. A fingerprint found in, say, Florida, where the humidity was much higher, would evaporate more slowly. The only way that fingerprint belonged to the killer was if the killer had touched the van a hell of a lot more recently than when murdering Missy.

  Warrick also got prints, some full, some only partials, from the other door handles on the vehicle and also from the hood; but all proved to be Sherman's. Getting trace from the tires-to see where the vehicle had been during its missing time-would be useless after the car wash, and Ecklie's people had neglected to do it at the time of discovery because they'd assumed they knew where the SUV had been the whole time.

  And when we assume,as Grissom was wont to say, we make an ass of you and me.

  Warrick opened the rear hatch and combed the carpeting for clues. As he expected, Alex Sherman's cleaning up after Ecklie's people had left little evidence behind: a scuff mark here, a stray hair there.

  The scuff mark on the plastic seemed to have come from something black and rubber, but probably not from Missy Sherman's shoe. Chances were that if she had been thrown back there and scuffed the plastic with the heel of her shoe, more than one such mark would've been left.

  As for the hair, it was black and short, more likely from Alex Sherman than from his wife or her killer.

  Still, Warrick took a scraping from the scuff mark and bagged the hair. He just didn't expect them to pan out.

  More of the same awaited him in the backseat, where he bagged a fiber or two and another hair, the latter looking like it was indeed from Missy-black, but much longer than a stray from Alex's razor-cut, where it might have fallen from the driver's seat. He drew a blank on the front passenger seat, then finally made his way to the driver's side.

  Using his mini-MagLite, Warrick went over every square inch of the seat and the back. He was about to give up when he glimpsed something pressed between the headrest and the top of the seat. He moved in closer: a blonde hair. Missy's hair was black; also, this hair was longer than Missy's hairstyle would have given up. He plucked it carefully with his tweezers, then bagged it.

  As Warrick closed the last door, Brass strolled in, looking bored; but then the detective always appeared bored, even at his most interested. "Anything?"

  "Few hairs and a couple of fibers, but this wagon's been cleaned so thoroughly, I was lucky to find 'em."

  Warrick stood looking at the SUV for a long moment, as if this were a showroom and he was seriously considering buying. What had he missed? His gut…which he listened to religiously, despite Grissom's warnings…told him there must be something.

  But if there was, why hadn't Ecklie's people found it?

  Then he said to Brass, "Is Ecklie a dick?"

  "Does a bear shit in the woods?"

  "Is graveyard crime lab better than day shift?"

  "You're better than just about any CSI shift in the country."

  Warrick, surprised by this admission from Brass, said, "Yeah, I know. Thanks. I don't think I'm done here…."

  The criminalist went to the driver's side door, bending, looking hard…the top ridge, the window, the handle, the…

  Hoooold it, he thought.

  The handle.

  Just like the guys on Ecklie's crew, he'd dusted the outside, but what about the underside? Getting out his mini-MagLite, he knelt next to the door and shone the beam up at the underside of the door handle.

  "Something?" asked Brass.

  "Another brilliant idea…nets another nothing."

  Warrick stood, stepped back, surveyed the vehicle again. Then he opened the door, glanced around the interior. Looked at the steering wheel, the dash, the windshield and, finally, looked up at…

  …the visor.

  "Jim, get me a forceps out of my bag, would ya?"

  Brass withdrew the instrument from the silver case and brought it to Warrick. "Got something?"

  "Don't know yet."

  Using the forceps, Warrick slowly pulled down the visor. Next to the airbag warning label lay a small plastic lid. He used the forceps to raise the plastic and a tiny light came on next to a business-card-sized mirror. Warrick looked at hi
mself in the mirror, and also at a small bit of fingerprint on the corner of the glass.

  "There you are," he said, as if to his own image.

  Brass was alongside the vehicle now. "Like what you see?"

  "It's more than just my handsome face-it's a fingerprint that Ecklie's people missed."

  "How'd they manage that?"

  "Didn't pull down the visor. And I bet once I dust the plastic lid, we may have more."

  "I thought you didn't bet anymore," Brass said.

  "Not often," he said, climbing out of the car to go after his fingerprint kit. "And I couldn't tell you what the odds are, here…other than that they've just improved."

  A white plastic Sears bag in hand, Catherine Willows walked briskly down the corridor, like a shopper at a mall heading for a really great sale.

  Catherine, however, had already made her purchases. After making the rounds of just about every appliance store in Clark County, Catherine had finally ended up "where America shops," to quote a slogan from bygone years. The Sears bag held-potentially-two of the most elusive answers in the Missy Sherman inquiry.

  She barged right in, startling Dr. Robbins, who was at his desk taking care of paperwork.

  "Need a look at one of your customers, Doc," she said, striding over to the vault where Missy Sherman still resided.

  "Catherine-what are you doing?"

  Setting her bag on a nearby worktable, Catherine opened the vault, slid out the tray bearing Missy's body, then turned and grabbed something from the shopping bag. As she did, Robbins came hustling over, barely letting his metal crutch touch the floor.

  "You're pulling a Grissom, aren't you?" Robbins asked.

  "I prefer to think of it as a Willows." She held up a small blue piece of rubber that looked a little like a pudgy bullet, rounded at one end, flat on the other end, barely an inch long.

  "What do you have there, Catherine?"

  Carefully brushing the hair away from the face of the victim, Catherine placed the rounded tip of the rubber nipple against the dead woman's cheek.

  The indentation matched perfectly.

  Smiling triumphantly and holding up the blue rubber object between thumb and forefinger, Catherine said, "Doctor, you are looking at a frost warning device found in Kenmore chest freezers sold at Sears."

  "So," Robbins said, "she was kept in a Kenmore freezer."

  "That's the theory. Give us girls a hand, would you?"

  "My pleasure."

  Grunting, Catherine said, "Here-let's sit her up…"

  "Okay…"

  They lifted Missy's corpse so that she…it…was now sitting on the slab, leaning a little left toward Robbins, almost as if Missy were trying to lay her head on Robbins' shoulder, restfully.

  Then, while Robbins held Missy more or less upright, Catherine removed the other item from the bag, a metal rack covered with white plastic, designed to sit across the opening of the freezer and hold smaller items.

  Catherine held the tray to the hash mark on the back of Missy's arm.

  "Shit," Catherine said.

  It didn't match.

  Perplexed, she stepped back. "Why didn't that work?" she said.

  Robbins looked at the corpse's arm, then at the rack and finally back at the arm. "Flip the rack," he suggested.

  She did, then placed it against Missy's arm-perfect!

  "That's more like it," she said with some satisfaction. "Now we know what kind of freezer we're looking for."

  She helped Doc Robbins lower Missy back down. As the coroner covered his charge carefully, and eased the slab back inside the vault, he asked, "How are you going to track down the specific unit?"

  She shrugged. "Frankly, Doc, I have no idea. I'm just happy to put a couple of the pieces together, and start making out a picture. What do you think? Should I go door to door?"

  He closed the vault, consigning Missy Sherman's remains to cold storage-again. "How many Kenmore chest freezers with racks and little blue plugs are there in Vegas?"

  "Haven't the foggiest. No database I know of would be any help at all."

  "What about sales records?"

  "Possibly," she said, "but if we go back to when Kenmore started using the blue plug and the rack, that might be a year ago or it could be twenty. Haven't checked, yet."

  "If it's twenty," Robbins said, "I would imagine Sears has sold its share here in Vegas."

  "And who's to say the freezer was sold in Vegas? Hundreds of people move here every month, bringing their freezers and other things along in the back of their covered wagons."

  Robbins nodded. "No offense, Catherine, but I'm glad I don't have your job."

  Catherine glanced toward the vault where Missy resided. "You may find this hard to believe, Doc, but I don't spend much time envying you, either."

  He smiled at her. "Nice work, Catherine."

  "Thanks. Later, Doc."

  For almost five minutes, Catherine raced around CSI HQ looking for Warrick and Nick, going room to room with no luck. Finally she found Warrick in the fingerprint lab.

  "You wouldn't be in here," she said hopefully, "if you hadn't found something in that Lexus."

  Warrick reported his findings, concluding, "The hair and fibers are at Trace, and I'm doing the print off the mirror."

  "And?"

  "And it doesn't belong to either Alex or Missy Sherman."

  "Dare I hope…? But it could be someone from the car wash."

  "Could be," Warrick admitted. "And we won't be able to print and eliminate any of them until the car wash opens in the morning."

  "You don't have to wait till morning to run it through AFIS, though."

  "That's my next step…. You've got that look, Catherine."

  "What look?"

  "Cat? Canary? What have you come up with?"

  She told him what she'd learned about the freezer.

  "Sweet," Warrick said. "Forward movement. Gotta love it."

  Nodding, she said, "Stay on those prints."

  "Try and stop me."

  She was barely out the fingerprint lab door when her cell phone chirped; she answered it.

  "It's Nick." In the background, she could hear the familiar howl of the Tahoe's siren.

  Talking and walking, she said, "Where are you rolling to?"

  "Murder scene! I think you need to be in on this."

  "We're focused on the Sherman woman. You've gone solo before, Nick-what's the problem?"

  Nick worked his voice up over the siren: "Radio chatter I been listening to, street cops think it's a strangulation. But no ligature marks!"

  Like Missy Sherman.

  "Who's the vic?"

  "As-yet-unidentified woman about Missy Sherman's age. If she's a thawed-out corpse-sickle, too, we could have a whole 'nother deal, here."

  Just what they needed: another serial killer.

  "Where's the crime scene?" Catherine said, almost yelling into the phone, which leached siren noise.

  Nick was almost yelling, too. "Charleston Boulevard-all the way out at the east end."

  "Nick-there's nothing out there."

  "Just our crime scene…and some houses, up the hill."

  "I'll grab Warrick and we'll meet you there." She clicked off without waiting for his response.

  In the Tahoe's front passenger seat, Warrick said, "This damn case didn't make any sense when it was just a missing person turned murder. Now you're telling me it might be a double homicide?"

  Deciding not to get him stirred up with her serial-killer notion, Catherine-behind the wheel-shook her head. "We don't know the murders are connected."

  "Then why are we heading out to the crime scene?"

  She shrugged. "Back Nick up."

  After that, the pair drove mostly in silence, Warrick unsuccessfully fiddling with the radio trying to scrounge up the same kind of chatter Nick had overheard. They surely would have arrived at the scene a minute or two sooner if Warrick had been driving, but his race-car tendencies made Catherine nervous, so she'
d slid behind the wheel. She had enough stress right now.

  Soon, she was easing to a stop near Nick's Tahoe. They exited their Tahoe into the chilly night with field kits in latex-gloved hands, their breath visible. Streetlights didn't reach this far past the end of the paved road and halogen work lamps had been set up near the body.

  Charleston Boulevard dead-ended at the foot of a mountain, near where several half-million-dollar homes nestled on a ridge, modern near-mansions with a view on rocky, scrubby desolation. Little more than a hundred yards to the south from the houses, near the entrance to a construction road that led off around the mountain, a ditch on the very edge of the desert had become a dumping ground for trash-bulky waste items like carpeting and old sinks, and-tonight-the nude body of a slender white woman around thirty years old.

  Just off the side of the construction road, on her back, arms splayed, legs together, the corpse rested amid the garbage, alabaster skin glowing under the brightness of the halogen beams. The glow intensified every time the strobe on Nick's camera went off.

  Catherine and Warrick came closer. The uniformed officers were divided into three pairs, their cars blocking the eastbound lane of Charleston Boulevard and a gravel area to the left of the CSI Tahoes. The first pair of officers stood guard near the body, the second pair were assigned to keep any cars coming up Charleston from stopping and gawking and the last pair stood between the dead woman and a handful of concerned, confused residents who'd wandered down from the expensive homes in the mountain's shadow.

  "She frozen?" Warrick asked.

  Nick snapped off two more quick pictures. "You'd have to ask Doc Robbins, but I'd say no-none of that moisture under the body found at the Lake Mead scene."

  "Strangled, you think," Catherine said.

  "Suffocation, anyway," Nick said.

  The woman's eyes were open, staring skyward at nothing-with the distinctive petechial hemorrhaging of asphyxia.

  "Want me to check for tire marks?" Warrick asked.

  "Please," Catherine said.

  Moments later, Catherine glanced over to see Warrick slowly looking over the gravel area at the end of the road, in search of tire tracks from the vehicle that had dumped the body. Catherine walked up to the detective who'd caught this case, Lieutenant Lockwood, a tall, athletically built African-American. He gave her a grim smile as she approached.