Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  “WAS ALL THIS CAUSED BY WHATEVER LEFT THOSE BLOOD SPOTS UNDER HER FRONT RIBS?”

  “Maybe,” Robbins said. “Theoretically, there could be a range of causes. Bad posture, a sports injury…”

  “Bottom line, Doc,” Warrick said.

  Robbins thought a moment and released a long breath. “Rose Demille was a young woman. If we can believe half of what we read about her, she had a vigorous lifestyle. I doubt she could have gotten through her normal daily activities with a condition this severe—intensive therapy, if not surgery, would have been needed to relieve the acute pain.” Another exhalation. “My opinion? These injuries weren’t preexisting. She sustained the spinal trauma while being suffocated to death.”

  Catherine’s eyes narrowed. “You said you were confused by something?”

  “Mainly, it’s that she didn’t appear to struggle. Even if she was tied to the bedposts, you’d expect to find some evidence she resisted. Bruising on her hands, arms, or legs, whatever. Assuming she was conscious and alert.”

  “And assuming she wasn’t conscious,” Catherine said, “we’d have some indication of what knocked her out.”

  “Which we don’t,” Warrick said.

  Robbins was nodding. “The negative tox line includes results for common painkillers that might bring on a state of impairedness or incapacitation,” he said. “And she didn’t take any blows to the head. It’s almost as if she willingly, knowingly submitted to being asphyxiated.”

  Original novels in the CSI series:

  CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

  Double Dealer

  Sin City

  Cold Burn

  Body of Evidence

  Grave Matters

  Binding Ties

  Killing Game

  Snake Eyes

  In Extremis

  Serial (graphic novel)

  CSI: Miami

  Florida Getaway

  Heat Wave

  Cult Following

  Riptide

  Harm for the Holidays: Misgivings

  Harm for the Holidays: Heart Attack

  Cut & Run

  CSI: NY

  Dead of Winter

  Blood on the Sun

  Deluge

  Four Walls

  Pocket Star Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either 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.

  Copyright © 2008 by CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Entertainment AB Funding LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION and related marks, CBS and the CBS Eye DesignTM CBS Broadcasting Inc. CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION and all elements and characters thereof © 2000–2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Entertainment AB Funding LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9642-4

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-9642-9

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  For Suzanne, again, always.

  Never spit in the fire. It will draw your lungs up.

  —Cajun proverb

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  About the Author

  Prologue

  HE SAT IN the dimness of the room with his third glass of whiskey, the blinds drawn over the windows, their slats tightly shut. He didn’t want light seeping through the slats, didn’t want any brightness from outside tracking across the walls to remind him how long he’d been out.

  The radio was on. Sometimes when he was alone and undisturbed, and there was only the music, listening to the radio would relax him.

  Last night was bad, the worst he could ever have imagined, and now a headache was coming on along with the unavoidable dawn, and he was hoping the soft sounds would help keep it from getting out of control. He liked the ballad that was playing—it was a popular love song, he’d heard it everywhere around. It usually put him off, those bombardments. The sort that came when you were driving or hurrying to get through the store. When you were wherever you happened to be, going wherever you were going, and needed silence more than anything else in the world.

  There was a time and a place for music. When you didn’t want it, it could turn into a hateful thing. But this song was different…even at the wrong time, in the wrong places, he’d found that its words and melody had caught his ear. The singer’s voice…the emotion pouring out of it, the anguish…

  Nina Tyford. That was her name.

  Her voice had gotten to him, touched something inside him. And right now, he was hoping it helped.

  Along with the whiskey.

  “First line,” he said into the black. “Cortisone, Verapamil, lithium. Whiskey, Nina Tyford, Angel Heart.”

  His eyes closed, the tension behind them packed into a tight, pulsing ball. He swallowed what was in his glass, reached across his armrest for the bottle, poured another drink, and then listened to the soft, sad music on the radio.

  Angel…Angel…Angel…

  You always call me Angel

  But I don’t know why

  You never understand me

  No matter how hard I try

  Keeping his head very still, he held his glass out in front of him and moved it rhythmically in the dimness. Back and forth like a conductor, back and forth, with some up and down for effect till a little whiskey sloshed over the rim of the glass—not much, but enough to put a spot of wetness on the base of his thumb.

  He pulled the drink in toward his lips, licked off what was on his hand.

  “Second line,” he said. “Sansert, Depakote, triptans, whiskey. Sing to me, Nina Tyford.”

  He emptied the glass again and listened.

  Loving you is easy

  And I know you love me too

  There are moments, passing moments,

  When it shows in the little things you do

  Still in my heart’s a sorrow

  I’d thought that time would fade

  Guess it’s the kind of love you give

  The kind of love we’ve made

  He reached for the bottle again, filled up. When the episodes reached their cyclic peak, nothing usually remedied them better than the whiskey. That, soft music, and now his singing girl on the radio. And after last night…after last night, God, how he needed her beautiful voice and her song. Nina Tyford almost made him believe there were women somewhere who could feel as deeply as he felt. Women who knew how to give love the way he’d always given it.

  Given, and given, loving his woman to death without ever getting enough in return.

  “Nina Tyford, I want to think you’d understand,” he said. “I want to think you would, I truly do. DHE, intranasal cocaine drops, whiskey. Third line.”

  A cold little chuckle, and he went back to his conducting.

  A love of pain and pleasure, a love that lasts forever

  Open up your heart to me

  Angel…Angel…Angel…

  Why not change it all tomorrow, free our love from sorrow?

  Open up your heart to me

  He sloshed some whiskey
around in his mouth, swallowed, reached for the bottle, poured again. How many would this make? Four drinks? Five? He’d lost count, but what did it matter? He didn’t have to go anywhere, and wasn’t going anywhere he didn’t have to. For today, and maybe longer, he was staying put.

  And for a few minutes more, at least, he would have Nina and her song.

  Angel…Angel…Angel…

  You always call me Angel

  But I don’t know why

  You never understand me

  No matter how hard I try

  He suddenly felt a sharp, crackling bolt of pain between his temples and sat up straight even as the music began its gradual fade-out.

  “Fourth line,” he said. “Nina Tyford, please, shit. Fourth line.”

  But there was no fourth line for him, and he knew much better than to expect it. He had nothing now but the whiskey that had failed him without warning and the last traces of Nina Tyford’s refrain drifting off in the reinforced dimness of the room.

  Nothing but nothing but nothing.

  And next up on the radio, a song he didn’t want to hear.

  He whimpered miserably, tossed the glass from his hand, and heard the jagged sound of it breaking against the wall, shattering the way his head felt it would at any moment. As he doubled over at the edge of the seat cushion, he covered the upper part of his face with his hand, so he could hardly breathe, pressing his thumb and forefinger deep into his tightly shut eyelids.

  Pressing his fingers in until it hurt, then pressing harder, wondering if he could keep it up till the awful pain matched his headache or he’d punched his eyeballs back out of their sockets.

  He would take whichever came first, having finally learned one thing about life.

  Call it a lesson, call it a basic fact: You could choose your pleasures and your remedies but never your punishments.

  1

  A TABLETOP ALTAR stood in the corner just inside Rose Demille’s bedroom door, draped in a deep blue satin cloth accented by a pleated valance. In the center of the cloth, an extinguished yellow votive candle, delicately scented with honeysuckle, had almost melted down to the socket of its polished brass holder.

  As he entered the room a step or two behind Catherine Willows, Warrick Brown paused to regard a framed portrait of Saint Peter on the wall above the altar. Somehow, its presence there surprised him, though, considering the victim’s background, he could not have explained why.

  After a moment, Warrick turned toward the bed, where the woman known from one end of town to another as “Nevada” Rose Demille lay sprawled atop her sheets, her sightless gaze fixed on the ceiling, her arms and legs tied to her bedposts, the posts appearing to be made of the same shiny orange brass as the candlestick on the meditative altar near the door.

  Crouched over the body, Dave Phillips, the assistant coroner, was busy fishing around in his medical examiner’s field kit. Warrick moved deeper into the room behind Catherine, readied his camera, and waited. He could hear the maid wailing out in the driveway with Jim Brass, but if the picture of the saint had caught him off guard, her carrying on was very easy to explain.

  Warrick knew there was a good chance of hysterics whenever anybody stumbled on a corpse, anyway. Mariah Valley was a swank master-planned community about fifteen miles from the Strip, and this was among its most exclusive sections. The affluent residents of these neighborhoods tended to have domestic help—maids, pool keepers, gardeners, fitness coaches, personal cooks, and so forth. When the vics lived alone, as Rose apparently had, it wasn’t unusual for their bodies to be discovered by a hired hand. Pay someone to show up at a certain time every day, and he or she was more liable to do so than your loving husband or mother.

  For Warrick Brown, the odds were the thing. Not the stacked odds of the casino floor but legit statistical probabilities. There were always mathematical predictors for evaluating people’s behavior—and the fewer variables involved, the easier it was to calculate how the dice would roll. The record downpour of a couple of weeks ago had been a significant X factor, giving Las Vegans all sorts of reasons to get sidetracked in their everyday lives. But Warrick had observed that money was a great equalizer when it came to remembering obligations and appointments…even for someone struggling to bail out from under the floodwaters that had turned entire suburban neighborhoods into soggy river deltas.

  Now Warrick and Catherine continued waiting for Dave to wrap up his exam of Nevada Rose’s bound, gagged, completely naked, and admittedly still very beautiful body. Dave manipulated her wrists and ankles, wobbled the lower jaw, and lifted an eyelid over a filmy pupil with his latex-gloved fingertip.

  “There’s mild rigor mortis,” he announced without looking up from the corpse.

  Warrick not only got the sense that Dave was talking to himself, but also had a feeling he was unaware anyone else had even joined him. He watched the coroner in silence a moment, and then let his gaze drift around the room.

  Besides the altar and the bed, its furnishings consisted of a dresser, a nightstand, and a large antique cane chair. Telephone on the stand, a ceramic bowl on the dresser. The bowl was the color of red earth, with a simple blue decorative pattern on the outer surface. Warrick thought it was Native American…possibly Shoshone or one of the other local tribes.

  He went over to see what, if anything, it contained and found only loose odds and ends—the kind of stuff Rose might have emptied from her pockets or picked up off the rug, tossed into the bowl meaning to either discard or put them away afterward, and then promptly forgot about.

  Carefully shifting the various items around with a latexed finger, Warrick noticed several AA batteries, an unopened package of sugarless chewing gum, a pencil with a broken point, a thin red leather watchband, paper clips, a cigarette lighter, a square of yellow Post-its, and a few dollars worth of mixed change. Also, partially buried under the rest of the bowl’s contents was one of those pill dispensers with reminder features that were used for everything from prescription medications to daily multiple vitamins.

  Warrick lifted the dispenser from the bowl, snapped it open, and found nothing inside. Considering all the junk that had been scattered on top of it, he doubted it had been used recently. If drugs had contributed to Rose Demille’s death, they probably wouldn’t have come from this pillbox. Still, it might pay to find out what it had contained.

  He bagged it in a Ziploc before turning to check on Dave’s progress.

  All signs were that he’d moved right along. Reaching into his kit for a digital thermometer, Dave had raised the body slightly onto one hip, inserted the rectal probe, and held its nonbusiness end steady in his hand. A series of electronic beeps, then he checked the temperature.

  “Her core’s ninety-three-point-nine degrees Fahrenheit,” he said, reading the display. “Couple that with the rigor and lividity of the extremities, and I’d estimate she’s been dead around two hours.”

  Warrick checked his watch. It was nine A.M. on the dot.

  “One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock,” he said to Catherine.

  She looked at him and gave a thin smile. Dave, meanwhile, seemed about finished with the DB. He carefully extracted his probe, cleaned it with an antibacterial wipe, stuffed the wipe into a plastic zip bag, closed the kit, and rose to his feet

  “She’s all yours, “he said, finally acknowledging the criminalists. “I’ve gotta get back. See you guys later.” And with that, he headed out the door.

  “Later, Dave,” Catherine called out.

  The CSIs went about their work, Catherine going around the bed toward the victim, Warrick raising his camera for a series of snapshots. Though he wasn’t inclined to be judgmental about how Rose had conducted her life, he’d pretty much ruled out the possibility of her being canonized in death like the guardian of her altar. No candidate for sainthood would boast a rose tattoo on her shapely—and to all appearances implant-free—right breast. Nor was a saint-in-progress likely to have worn the sheer robe that had be
en haphazardly tossed over an arm of the living-room sofa. Or the pair of stiletto heels outside the bedroom door. Or the skimpy thong panties Warrick had seen on the carpet near the foot of the bed.

  “It’d be very quiet here so early in the morning,” Catherine said, turning to him. “If any of the neighbors were awake and about, they might have noticed someone running out the door around that time.”

  “Or heard someone go barrelling down the road at ninety miles an hour.”

  “Assuming our certain someone didn’t stick around to admire Rose after she died.”

  Warrick nodded. They had left Jim Brass out front taking the housekeeper’s statement, part of which related to a gym bag she’d found on the lawn alongside the garage. According to her, it was there when she arrived for work, and her first thought was that the driver of a car might have dropped it while hurrying off. This had given her a nervous feeling, though she wouldn’t in a million years have expected what she discovered inside the house.

  Warrick fell into thoughtful silence. At the bedside, Catherine had put down her kit and knelt over the body. In her black field vest, black jeans, and latex surgical gloves, she might have been a cross between a SWAT cop and a medical doctor on house call.

  “Her lips have a slight bluish discoloration. Also, I see petechial hemorrhaging,” she said, indicating the pinpoint blood spots in the whites of Rose’s eyes.

  Both were characteristic signs of hypoxia.

  Warrick shifted his camera lens onto the dead woman’s hands and feet. It was important to get abundant photo documentation of the ropes binding them to the posts, since they’d be cut and bagged as evidence before Rose was wheeled into the morgue wagon. The placement of the knots—and the way they were tied—could reveal a lot about whoever had done the tying. Particularly if what they were seeing here turned out to have similarities with other crime scenes.