by Ken Goddard
“So, what’s the plan?” Officer Lakewell asked, somehow managing to look both energetic and enthusiastic in spite of the beads of water streaming down her face.
“Two plans,” Grissom said as he considered his team assignments. “The first one involves Catherine and Warrick, who are going to conduct a grid search of this scene with the assistance of Sergeant Cooperson and five of her patrol officers. And to assist that search, Warrick will use the 3-D digital model of the shooting he generated earlier this morning to help all of you place the twelve shooter-location cones back into their previous positions.”
“Remember, for all of that to work out correctly, we’re going to need to use the same numbered cones for the same shooter positions,” Warrick said.
“Okay,” Grissom went on. “Once you all have those cones in place, Warrick is going to use that same model to establish a laser-illuminated corridor along a line that includes two specific points: the high-velocity bullet hole we found in the corner of the truck’s rear windowpane—when the truck was halfway to its final stopping point from where Officer Grayson hit the first rear tire—and a second point roughly two feet to the right of the spot where Officer Mace was standing when he felt a bullet whiz past his head.”
“How accurate is that going to be?” Catherine asked.
“Not very,” Warrick admitted. “The uncertainty of that second point is definitely going to give us an increasingly large error factor as we move farther out along the corridor from the truck, but there’s not much we can do about it. Those are the only two reference points we’ve got for this phantom bullet.”
Grissom looked around at his assembled team.
“Once that search corridor is established,” he said, “Catherine and Sergeant Cooperson will each take a metal detector and two uniformed officers with searchlights and conduct grid searches of areas specifically marked out by Warrick along that corridor. The two teams will continue these grid searches until someone finds a single hardened rifle bullet of unknown caliber that may or may not be bloody, and may or may not have a green tip.”
Grissom paused, waiting for a reaction. But, to his amazement, no one commented on the immensity of the task, or the remote likelihood of success. “There’s little or no evidence to suggest this bullet slowed down very much as it ripped through the skull of our John Doe; and the corresponding hole through the rear window of the truck was definitely made by a high-velocity bullet, so it could easily have landed some considerable distance away. But, on the positive side, a bullet is significantly bigger than a needle in a haystack…so it ought to be a lot easier to find.”
“It’s still a pretty big haystack out there,” Sergeant Cooperson said.
“Yes, no question about that,” Grissom acknowledged. “It’s a huge task…and this weather isn’t going to make things any easier.”
“What about the rest of us?” Lakewell asked.
“The ‘rest’ of us—you, Nick, Sara, one of the uniformed officers, and I—will proceed up the mountain trail to the clearing where we earlier discovered the body of Toledano and amale mule deer. We’ll then proceed to re-search and reevaluate the entire scene in an effort to determine why and how the hollow-tipped bullet that apparently ripped through our male mule deer’s throat, before killing Mr. Toledano, managed to acquirefemale mule deer tissue along the way.”
The flickering of headlights had warned Viktor Mialkovsky of the approaching CSI team long before the roar of the GMC Denali engines became audible on the high mountain clearing.
Thus by the time the two CSI vehicles, four LVPD patrol cars, and one Fish & Wildlife Refuge truck had parked at the abandoned campsite, and the thirteen distant figures were gathered around the fire ring, the hunter-killer had moved to a position at the edge of the high clearing—overlooking the valley below—where he could observe at least some of their activities through the crosshairs of his weather-impacted but still-functioning nightscope.
The storm that had forced him to stay tucked into the shelter of his small cave for the better part of the night seemed to be tapering off. Now, a little less than an hour and a half before dawn, the pounding rain had turned into a steady drizzle only intermittently swirled by gusts of ice-cold wind. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell if the storm was truly dying out…or just catching its proverbial second wind. In spite of the protection of the small cave, and his continued efforts to stay warm, fed, and hydrated, Mialkovsky realized that his extended high-altitude exposure to the elements was starting to have a significant impact on his strength, endurance, and concentration. He knew he couldn’t wait much longer to begin his descent, even if the storm started back up again. But before he did that, he wanted to satisfy his curiosity about what was going on at the distant campsite.
Mialkovsky focused the nightscope on the one small and indistinct figure that appeared to be giving instructions to the others. It wasn’t possible to distinguish one person from another at this distance, even if they hadn’t all been dressed alike in foul-weather gear; but he was looking for some visual clue that would confirm his sense that Grissom had returned, once again, to haunt his waking hours as well as his dreams.
Yeah, it’s you…has to be. So goddamned stubborn, aren’t you? What did you find in all that evidence you collected? Had to be something significant to drag your entire team all the way back out here in this weather.
Fearless and self-confident in so many other ways, Viktor Mialkovsky found it ironic that the reappearance of a single forensic investigator at an abandoned shooting scene would make him uneasy. Part of it, he realized, was the fact that he still hadn’t come up with answers to all the other wild-card factors in the whole mess.
The thing that truly frustrated Mialkovsky was his sense that Grissom and his investigators had either found the answers themselves or were about to do so. And if that was the case, the hunter-killer knew that the success of his mission—and even the necessary elements of his escape—could be undone by events that he could neither predict nor control.
He was still mulling over those frustrations when five of the distant figures suddenly broke away from the others and started walking toward the parked vehicles.
Moments later, Mialkovsky felt his heart tighten in his chest as he observed two of the vehicles—the USFWS Refuge truck and one of the dark Denalis belonging to the CSI team—pull away from the campsite and begin heading up the dirt road toward the base of the Sheep Range.
“You did find something, you bastard,” he muttered to himself as he broke out of his hidden recon position and began to quickly scramble back across the clearing toward the cave, wondering as he did so if he would ultimately be forced to start shooting the CSIs in order to make his escape.
Not something I want to do,Mialkovsky thought as he carefully worked his way down a particularly steep and slippery section of rocks, forcing himself to execute slow and deliberate movements,but these people may have pushed things too far this time.
18
THE MULTIPLE SETS OF BLURRED TIRE TRACKS—all badly marred by the storm, but still distinctly visible in the headlights of the USFWS Refuge truck—caught Grissom’s attention as the two climbing vehicles approached the base of the Sheep Range.
“Pull off the road, Shanna, over there,” he said to the young refuge officer, pointing to a relatively flat section of dirt and gravel about fifty yards from the base of the mountain.
As soon as the truck came to a stop, Grissom was out the front passenger door with a high-intensity flashlight in his left hand, a canvas kit bag in his right, and a stuffed backpack over his shoulder. He moved toward the sets of interwoven tire tracks, rapidly followed by Nick, Sara, Lakewell, and uniformed LVPD officer Joe Carson, each of whom had their own flashlights, kit bags, and backpacks—all of which appeared to be stuffed full of equipment and supplies, except for Sara’s.
For about two minutes, the three CSIs and two officers quickly ran the beams of their flashlights across the track sets as they spread out in
five different directions.
“Anybody find a useful segment?” Grissom finally called out from his position next to a pair of large boulders about fifty yards from the base of the mountain.
“Nothing here,” Nick replied. “Tire width at best; and even that’s going to be an estimate. And, as far as I can tell, all of the tread patterns that should have been left in dirt or sand have been washed away.”
“That’s what I’m seeing too,” Sara agreed. “But you can definitely tell there were two different vehicles up here, both of which went back down the road at pretty high speeds.”
“And you can also tell that the vehicle with the narrower set of tires—which, I think, are consistent with the tires on the red pickup in terms of width—came up here after the first vehicle, and then left ahead of the first vehicle,” Nick added as he started taking strobe-enhanced photos of the tracks with his digital camera, using a two-dimensional grid ruler as a scale.
“Which accounts for our red pickup and the big dark-painted SUV,” Grissom said as he swept his flashlight beam across the relatively flat area that had clearly served as a parking lot for at least one of the two vehicles.
“And here’s the trail where they went up…and apparently came down at a pretty fast clip,” Lakewell called out, standing near the base of the mountain with Officer Carson and shining her light beam at a gap between a pair of graffiti-painted boulders.
“Where does it lead to?” Grissom asked as the three CSIs quickly gathered around Lakewell and Carson.
“It comes out on a pretty large rocky clearing about two hundred yards up,” Lakewell replied. “Maybe two-fifty if you count all of the weaving back and forth.”
“And that’s the clearing where we found Toledano’s body?” Grissom asked.
“Yes, I’m sure it must be,” Lakewell replied. “It’s the only large flat area on the southern portion of the range.”
“Six hundred feet uphill, in the dark, and with a drizzling rain just to make things interesting,” Sara said, sweeping her flashlight beam across the exposed rocks above her head. “Sounds like a great way to take a nasty fall. Maybe we ought to wait for the helicopters?”
Grissom consulted his watch. “It’s going to be a while before they arrive, even if the weather stays reasonably calm,” he said, “and we do need to get up there and conduct our search before dawn.”
“We do?” Nick and Sara echoed, their eyebrows rising in unison.
“Yes, definitely,” Grissom said without further explanation.
“It won’t take us all that long to get up there, but it’s not going to be an easy climb,” Lakewell warned.
“That’s okay, we’re going to need to conduct a thorough search of the trail as we go anyway,” Grissom said as he started up the trail, his flashlight beam sweeping across the narrow pathway. “And besides, it’ll be a lot easier coming back down.”
“How do you figure that?” Lakewell asked. She’d made the trip at least a half-dozen times in the last few months while getting to know the refuge, and knew all too well how easy it was to slip and fall coming back down the treacherous trail.
“I’ve made arrangements for Greg to pick us up,” Grissom said over his shoulder, his eyes already focused on the patch of ground illuminated by his flashlight beam.
It was LVPD Officer Carson—a competent and experienced climber, as he’d claimed, though nowhere near as agile and energetic as Lakewell—who found the helmet about a hundred and fifty feet up the trail. A dented and shattered nightscope was still attached by a single partially torn strip of duct tape.
“Isn’t that one of those first-generation night-vision scopes? Those haven’t been around for thirty years,” Carson said as he handed the helmet to Grissom.
“Yes, I think so,” Grissom said as he examined the helmet closely before handing it to Sara. “And it looks like we’ve got some blood inside the tube. Can you get a swab?”
“Sure, no problem.”
Sara waited while Nick took a quick photo of the helmet-and-tube assembly, put away his camera, and then pulled a small folded tarp out of his backpack. With the help of Grissom, Lakewell, and Carson, he opened the tarp up and held it over Sara as a protective shelter as she removed a swab from her raincoat pocket and quickly collected a sample of the blood from inside the broken and bent tube. Then she slid the helmet and tube into a plastic bag, placed the bagged piece of evidence into her empty backpack, and looked up at the group. “Next?”
It was Lakewell—still moving about the rocks like one of her treasured Bighorns with her flashlight, kit bag, and backpack, while everyone else was starting to breathe heavily—who found the shattered pair of night vision binoculars…and then, a few feet away, a badly dented and scarred Uzi sub-machine gun, about halfway up the trail.
“Automatic gunfire, indeed,” Nick commented.
“And very possibly the reason why our John Doe was so anxious to get away from this mountain,” Grissom said, once again holding a corner of the unfolded tarp while Nick carefully unloaded the lethal assault weapon, placed it in a large paper bag, and then slid the parcel into Sara’s backpack.
Three-quarters of the way up the trail, it was Lakewell, again, who found the next item of evidence while the rest of the CSI team were sitting on the most comfortable rocks they could find, trying to catch their breath.
“Do you think this could be relevant?” she asked as she handed the wooden contraption to Grissom.
“I do indeed,” Grissom said as he used his flashlight to examine the crude weapon with reverence, as if he were a devout believer handling an ancient religious icon.
“What is it?” Nick asked as he forced himself to his feet and walked over to examine the latest find.
“I believe it’s a crossbow,” Grissom replied with a slight smile.
“That thing? You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“I don’t think our good Doctor Robbins would call it aclassically constructed crossbow,” Grissom said, looking up at Nick with a smile, “but a rusted strip of truck-spring steel screwed to the end of a piece of two-by-four ought to create a considerable amount of tension on a wire bowstring. Granted, it doesn’t look especially safe to operate, or even easy to cock; but if you were poorand hungry, and didn’t mind bending the local rules a bit…”
“The deer blood in the back of the truck…” Nick stared down at the crudely made weapon in sudden realization. “Are you thinking our John Doe may just be a deer poacher, and not a drug dealer or an assassin?”
“It’s certainly a possibility,” Grissom said.
“Then…what happened up there?” Lakewell asked, staring at the trail.
“That,” Grissom said as he looked at his watch, and then forced himself to stand on his aching legs, “is precisely what we need to figure out.”
19
CAPTAINJIMBRASS ENTEREDthe crime lab’s expansive garage and saw Greg Sanders outside through an open bay door, loading a three-foot-tall stainless steel canister into the back of one the CSI team’s Denalis. Two more canisters were lying on the ground next to his feet.
“Hey, Greg,” he called out, “where’s Gil?”
“Out at the crime scenes with the rest of the team, Captain,” Greg said as he reached down for the second canister.
“You mean the UC shooting scene out by Sheep Range?”
“Yep, that one and the hunting accident up on the mountain too, I’m pretty sure.”
“What’s he doing back up there?” Brass demanded.
“I don’t really know,” Greg said, looking at his watch. “I think they went back to look for more evidence.”
“More evidence of what?”
Greg shook his head. “He didn’t say. All I know is, I have to be back out there, too…and I’m running late because we didn’t have enough of the premix in the lab, and I had to go find more in the stockroom…and Grissom’s going to be really upset if I don’t—”
“Go, go,” Brass said, waving his hand in dismi
ssal, and then looking bemused as the young CSI bolted for the driver’s-side door of the Denali. Moments later, the black CSI vehicle disappeared into the darkness and drizzling rain.
Rolling his eyes, Brass hit the button to close the garage bay door, and was starting to walk over to the shot-up red pickup when computer tech Archie Johnson burst into the garage.
“Sir, do you know where I can find Grissom?” the young tech asked, looking wide-eyed and—from Brass’s perspective—possibly even a little scared.
“Greg just told me the entire team went back out to Sheep Range,” Brass said. “Is there anything—?”
“Oh, great,” Archie whispered.
“What’s the matter?” Brass demanded.
“I—uh, think you’d better come with me.”
When Brass entered the crime lab’s conference room behind Archie Johnson, he found firearms examiner Bobby Dawson and an Army officer whom he didn’t recognize and who was dressed in a field uniform sitting at the conference table. Both of them were staring intently at the screen of a laptop computer, but Bobby rose to his feet instantly.
“Captain Brass, this is Colonel Sanchez,” Bobby said, motioning with his hand to the rising Army officer.
“Colonel,” Brass said warily, “what can I do for you?”
“Actually, it may be more a question of what I can do for you,” the colonel responded, taking Brass’s hand in a firm grip.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand—?”
“I’m the one who started it, sir,” Archie said quickly, still looking wide-eyed and scared. “Grissom asked me to pull some digital photos off his flashcard and then help him determine some kind of trajectory on that hunting accident scene up on Sheep Range. So I downloaded all of the photos, and I was starting to go through them, to find the ones he described, when—”
“When I came into the conference room with Colonel Sanchez, whom I called and asked to come over as quickly as he could because I’m pretty sure I spotted what Ithink are the distinctive markings of a TX-twelve-twenty on the bullet Doc Robbins took out of Enrico Toledano’s neck,” Bobby interjected.