by Ken Goddard
In fact, his initial plans specifically assumed the Las Vegas PD would eventually locate and track the stolen dune buggy back to the auto shop. And when they did so, they would find a blue tarp protecting a carefully arranged pile of empty boxes from the sun, instead of a twenty-thousand-dollar ATV, but nothing whatsoever to link him to the theft. The black recon clothing, hairnet, hood, and gloves he’d worn that night were very effective in retaining hair, fiber, and latent print evidence; and he’d had plenty of time to make sure that all of the prints left in the dirt by his soon-to-be-disposed-of boots were thoroughly eradicated.
The problem Mialkovsky was now deeply concerned about, as he began to transfer the small pile of essential equipment to his backpack, had little to do with abandoned items of evidence, and very much to do with the rapid passage of time.
Right now, time was his true nemesis.
Mialkovsky had counted on being back in Las Vegas—carefully and methodically cleansing his hotel room of any latent or genetic evidence of his presence—long before the body of his target was discovered and the CSI teams arrived at the scene. But that initial plan, long since abandoned, hadn’t accounted for an unexpected third party arriving on the scene in a noisy red truck.
Withdrawal Plan Bravo had died in a blaze of gunfire, along with the driver of that truck.
And his alternate Withdrawal Plan Charlie had quickly evaporated in the rotor-wash of the Black Hawk helicopter as it came roaring overhead in a wide loop across the eastern face of the Sheep Range.
So that left Mialkovsky with the one remaining emergency escape plan he’d never really expected to use: an estimated one-hour climb and two-hour descent in complete—albeit night-vision-enhanced—darkness, followed by another half-hour trek across mostly open desert to reach a small motorcycle he’d prudently concealed as a backup for just such a situation.
Three and a half hours would still give him plenty of time to sanitize his hotel room and be well on his way to Los Angeles before the Las Vegas PD picked up the scent of a professional assassination. But he knew all too well that his earlier estimate had been based on “reasonably expected” conditions that had certainly not included helicopters that might happen upon him at any moment.
If the searching pilots did come this way, and he was forced to take a more circuitous route down the mountain and out to the hidden motorcycle, Mialkovsky knew he could easily find himself on foot—and openly exposed to anyone who happened to glance in his direction—when the sun began to rise in the eastern sky.
That would be a terribly bad situation, one almost certain to result in his surrender, or a fight to the death that he would inevitably lose if the responding Metro officers recognized the non-civilian-like tactics of their adversary and possibly called for military backup.
The rules ofposse comitatus supposedly forbade the military from ever interceding in civilian law enforcement affairs; but Mialkovsky knew from experience that a clever police scene commander could always get an extremely competent and heavily armed response if he claimed the suspect was operating in military uniform and with military equipment. He’d been a member of one of those special response teams on three separate occasions.
Nothing I can do it about that until it happens,he shrugged to himself as he hoisted the now much smaller and lighter pack over his shoulders, and then leaned down to pick up his nightscoped rifle and folded canopy, vaguely aware as he did so that his survival instincts were responding to some unseen and unheard stimulus, and beginning to demand attention.
Five minutes later, he understood why.
Tightly encased in a mountain-camouflaged winter survival parka that effectively retained his body heat, but necessarily limited his hearing, Mialkovsky was carefully working his way around the clearing where his target and the hapless mule deer lay crumpled and still on the ice-cold dirt and rocks, when the suddenly echoing roar of an approaching helicopter sent him scrambling for the shelter of another nearby juniper.
5
AFTER SEPARATELY AND METHODICALLYworking their way around the circumference of the perimeter tape in opposite directions, Grissom and Catherine finally met back where they had started and briefly compared notes.
Then they entered the scene at the point where the patrol car illuminating the right side of the devastated truck was parked. They did so carefully, one at a time, gently holding the tape up for each other, and then started toward the truck; hesitating before each step to scan the ground with their flashlights, making sure they didn’t step in or on any potential evidence.
Fifteen minutes later, the two CSIs finally stood at the passenger-side door of the bullet-pocked truck, having taken a total of sixty-three medium-ranged and close-up photos to document their progress. In their wake, a scattered field of bright-colored flags—sticking up out of the sand on long wire stems—marked the location of numerous expended pistol, rifle, and shotgun casings, and the few boot prints in the soft sand and dirt that offered some promise of a match back to one of the UCs or Jane Smith.
Around their boots, the light from the two flashlight beams reflected off thousands of glass shards—both slivered and cubic—scattered across the hood of the truck and the surrounding sand, dirt, and rocks out to a radius of approximately ten feet.
As Grissom and Catherine slowly swept the flashlight beams up the side panel of the truck…over the crackled surface of the mostly broken-out side window…and then finally into the truck cab, the waves of intense white light reflected colorfully off a similar collection of laminated and tempered glass fragments and widely splattered patterns of coagulating blood, splintered bone, and brain tissue that covered the seat and the entire rear window.
The body of the suspect lay twisted across the seat with the right arm extended toward the passenger door and the left dangling over the floor-mounted shift, as if he was looking under the dash for something he’d misplaced.
“Pretty obvious why Jane Smith couldn’t positively ID this guy,” Catherine commented as she swept the beam of her flashlight across the suspect’s shattered skull, barely recognizable as human.
“Not much to go on visually,” Grissom agreed as he turned on a small tape recorder attached to his vest, and then began to talk his way through the cab interior. “Subject is sprawled sideways across the single front seat of a red Ford pickup truck of undetermined age. He appears to be a muscular Hispanic male of uncertain age—possibly in his late twenties or early thirties—wearing what appears to be black nylon ski clothes and cheap work boots with broken leather laces. His facial features appear to have been destroyed by multiple high-velocity projectile impacts. His exposed wrists and neck are bare; no watch, no jewelry, no visible tattoos…but some very distinct scarring present on both sets of knuckles.”
“Bare-knuckle brawler?” Catherine suggested.
“Or professional thug,” Grissom replied with a shrug as he continued his visual inventory. “A set of keys are in the ignition switch. There’s a bolt-action rifle lying on the passenger-side floor…and what appears to be powder burns on the exterior web of the subject’s right hand.” The CSI supervisor briefly painted the blood-splattered hand in question with his flashlight beam, and then switched the recorder to the OFF position.
“Not what you would call an auto-firing weapon,” Catherine said as she panned her flashlight beam across the rifle’s rusted bolt action.
“Definitely a slow rate of fire, not to mention a pretty poor choice in general if you’re planning on taking on a team of armed drug buyers or undercovers single-handed,” Grissom said as he continued to examine the blood and brain splatters on and around the body. “Odd, don’t you think? I got the impression that in addition to being armed, tough, and violent, this Ricardo Paz Lamos had to be a reasonably smart and successful drug dealer if he’s managed to frustrate the DEA all these years.”
“You wouldn’t know it from his apparent taste in clothes, weapons, and vehicles,” Catherine responded as she too continued to examine the cab�
��s shabby and splattered interior. “This truck has to be at least thirty years old—probably older than he is…or was.”
“Maybe that’s how he’s managed to sell drugs and evade the narcs all these years: maintain a poor migrant worker cover that puts everyone at ease…until it’s too late.”
“It would have definitely fooled me,” Catherine replied. “Do you see any other weapons?”
“I’ll take a look from the driver’s side in just a second, as soon as I finish…this,” Grissom said as he knelt down next to the truck’s flattened right front tire and used a small spray can to create a bright perpendicular line of green paint from the rusted hub to the ground, and then outward at a ninety-degree angle along the sand for about twelve inches.
Next, he placed three self-adhesive three-inch-diameter white dots—smaller versions of the photo-locator dots on the red traffic cones, each bearing an identical crosshaired grid of thick and thin reference lines and shapes—in a random triangular pattern on the external right side of the truck cab and bed, and then marked them sequentially as “1”, “2,” and “3” with a broad-tipped permanent ink marker.
Finally, he attached an identical bright-yellow-colored photo-locator dot in the exact center of the tire hub, and marked that dot “R-F” with the same broad-tipped marker.
“Okay, now for the other three.”
After noting with satisfaction that Brass, Warrick, Nick, Sara, and Greg were engaged in placing pairs of traffic cones into position with the assistance of the five UCs, Grissom worked his way around the truck, painting identical green reference lines on the remaining three flattened tires, and placing randomly triangulated sets of three white photo-locator dots on the top of the cab, the cab bed, the hood, and the rear, left, and front exterior sides of the truck cab and bed, along with the three bright yellow photo-locator dots on the other three tire hubs, all of which he numbered or lettered with the broad-tipped marker.
The white dots were uniquely and visibly identified as photo-locators “1” through “18,” and the yellow dots properly designated the four—right, left, front, and back—tire hubs.
“I’m surprised you could find enough nonpunctured space to set the front locators,” Catherine commented, shaking her head in amazement at the amount of projectile-impact damage the grill of the truck had absorbed as she watched Grissom hesitate and then place the last two white photo-locator dots on the far opposite ends of the rusted front bumper. “How many shotguns are we talking about?”
“I saw two leaning up against their truck, both equipped with extended magazines, and what looked like an M-four carbine with a thirty-round magazine,” Grissom replied as he continued to search the ground underneath the truck engine compartment with his flashlight, noting the presence of numerous torn and/or partially flattened lead pellets.
“With this many impact points, it’s going to be really tough to map out the individual shot patterns, and then work out the timing sequence,” Catherine said.
Grissom grunted in agreement.
“You do know that Greg’s been hot to work a puzzle like this in like forever, don’t you?” Catherine offered with an air of casualness, suggesting she really didn’t care who got assigned the mind-numbing impact-pattern segment of the reconstruction.
“Really?” Grissom looked up at his senior CSI.
“I could be wrong, but this one would certainly be character-building; and Greg could certainly use some help in that area…maybe an extra dimension beyond cool and cocky,” Catherine added with a grin that was part teasing and part hopeful.
Grissom hesitated. He knew from years of experience how difficult it was to try to identify and sequence these multiple-shot and overlapping pattern puzzles when only three or four shotgun rounds had been fired at a single target. So far, he’d counted seven expended shotgun hulls, and there could easily be at least three to five others he hadn’t seen yet, depending on how the shotguns had been loaded. He wondered if it would even to possible to sort out and sequence the patterns formed by eighty-four individual buckshot pellets—much less a hundred and forty-four—in such a small impact site.
Greg’s brilliant, but I’m not sure he’s really ready for something like this,he mused.
The sound of another arriving vehicle caught Grissom’s and Catherine’s attention.
“Looks like Phillips is here,” Catherine said, motioning with her head in the direction of the approaching coroner’s van.
“Good,” Grissom replied. “We’re going to need him to get that body out of the truck before we can start the reconstruction; but he’ll have to be very careful doing it.” He slowly stood up, wincing as his long-abused knees cracked, and looked around with a satisfied smile. “Okay, I’m checking out the cab from the driver’s side.”
As Catherine waited patiently, Grissom slowly worked his way toward the driver’s side of the truck. He paused halfway there to examine the ground around his feet out to a radius of approximately six feet, and briefly frowned before walking up to the truck and aiming his flashlight through the partially blown-out side window and into the blood-splattered cab.
For almost half a minute, Grissom remained silent, an intently thoughtful expression on his face.
“See anything?” Catherine finally asked.
“Yes, I do,” Grissom acknowledged, the flickering beam of his flashlight illuminating the bloodied and hammerless stainless steel revolver that was just barely visible under the front passenger seat.
“And?”
“As unlikely as it would seem at this point…I think our reconstruction job just got a little bit more complicated,” Grissom replied with a sigh.
Assistant Coroner David Phillips and his morgue technician driver were standing beside the opened rear door of the brightly marked coroner’s van, talking casually with the other four CSIs, when Grissom and Catherine finally ducked back under the scene perimeter tape and headed their way.
As the two senior CSIs approached the waiting group, they noted with approval that the five UCs were back in their camp chairs—now set approximately six feet apart from one another—and sitting quietly under the watchful eyes of the uniformed patrol sergeant.
“David, glad to see you made it,” Grissom said, genuinely pleased to see the skilled and hardworking body-handler.
“I understand you’ve got a pretty messy situation out there,” Phillips commented. “Are you ready for us to start things?”
“Not quite yet,” Grissom replied as he gestured with his head at Warrick and Nick, who were standing next to each other with diametrically opposed sets of surveying equipment. “Warrick and Nick need to do a little work to stabilize and document the scene first.”
Requiring no further instruction, Warrick walked over to the section of perimeter tape directly across from the truck’s right-side door, a heavy-duty tripod in one gloved hand and a black twelve-inch-square Pelican case in the other. Kneeling down in the sand, he began to set up the tripod about three feet outside of the perimeter tape, utilizing a dozen ten-to-twenty-pound rocks that he’d already collected and positioned nearby to keep the three base-connected legs solidly in place.
“Any preference?” Nick asked, holding up a five-foot metal spike in one gloved hand and a twenty-pound sledgehammer in the other.
“I think directly in front of the truck, just inside the perimeter tape, should do fine,” Grissom suggested with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “The ground looks pretty stable there.”
“In front of the truck it is,” Nick replied as he walked over to the perimeter line, ducked under the tape, placed the sharp end of the spike into the ground, and made a few light taps with the sledge to set the stake more or less upright. Then he began to drive the spike into the hard ground with grunting swings of the heavy hammer until a little less than three feet of the solid half-inch-diameter metal spike remained aboveground.
After tapping the top of the spike with his gloved hand to see if it would move, and nodding in satisfaction,
Nick used a permanent marker to inscribe a red “X” across the slightly smashed spike-head surface, then returned to the group.
“Our triple-zero is set,” Nick commented as he placed the sledgehammer in the back of his SUV, then picked up a second identical tripod and Pelican case set and a six-foot-by-two-inch-diameter plastic-pipe carrying case. “That stake is not going anywhere.”
As the group around the coroner’s van watched and waited patiently, Warrick helped Nick set up and secure the second tripod on the opposite side of the perimeter, directly across from the truck’s left door. The two CSIs then proceeded to remove a pair of multifunctional rotating laser heads from the Pelican cases, secured them to the top of the tripod platforms, and used the built-in bubble-gauges to carefully level the platforms—both of which were now extended to a height of five feet from the ground.
“Reading true from your end?” Warrick inquired.
“On the bubble,” Nick replied.
“Okay,” Warrick said, “time for a little computer magic.”
Moving over to the hood of the first patrol car, Warrick opened up a laptop computer and began to activate the first of his crime scene surveying programs. As he did so, Nick slowly pulled a six-foot-long-by-one-inch-diameter aluminum pole out of the plastic-tube case. The pole had a tapering ice-pick-like pointer-tip at one end and a multifaceted receiver/reflector on the other.
After pausing to connect the reflector/receiver at the end of the pole to a palm-sized Pocket PC, Nick carefully placed the pointer-tip in the exact middle of the “X” he’d drawn on the hammered spike-head, and examined the small PC screen to confirm that the pole receiver was picking up a signal from both rotating lasers.
“Computer acknowledges our triple-zero, and is waiting for data,” Nick announced.