Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  “There any ligature marks on the throat?” he asked.

  Catherine shook her head, her gaze suddenly a bit distant. “No superficial bruises on the body, either.”

  Warrick clicked away. Her expression told him she was visualizing how Rose’s final moments could have gone down, the images flickering across the screen of her mind. All of the lab’s veteran criminalists got that remote look in their eyes from time to time—and came to recognize it in one another.

  “Could be Rose was having a sexual role-playing fantasy that went too far,” she said.

  Warrick nodded, thinking along with her. “Then her partner flees in a panic after realizing how far it went.”

  “Yeah,” Catherine said. “Look around this place.”

  Warrick assumed she was being rhetorical. They’d done that together during their walkthrough and observed nothing to indicate forced entry at the doors or windows. Nothing whatsoever broken or disturbed in the room. And no fingernail scrapings that pointed toward a struggle. Furthermore, the scattered locations of Rose’s robe, heels, and panties suggested she’d voluntarily shed them—or let someone undress her—on the way from the living room to the bedroom.

  “BDSM games.” Warrick lifted the camera to his eye. “Seems…plausible.”

  Catherine picked up on his uncertain tone, tilted her head.

  “Except…?”

  “I’ve seen people who’ve died from oxygen deprivation while taking hot licks in the sack,” he said. His lens whirred, auto-focusing. “It mostly happens when a victim’s been hog-tied on his or her stomach. With your hands and feet restrained behind your back, the abdominal muscles tire out, and it gets harder and harder to breathe.”

  “Until you stop,” Catherine said.

  Warrick nodded, pressed his shutter button a few times.

  Clickclickclick.

  Moving around the bed now, Catherine took her ultraviolet flashlight from a belt holster, snapped an amber filter behind its head, and thumbed it on. She ran the beam slowly over Rose’s thighs, then onto the sheets between them, searching for obvious stains from semen or vaginal secretions. It helped that the shades were drawn—the dimmer the room, the easier it would be to detect UV fluorescence.

  “She might’ve been using narcotics or alcohol,” Catherine mulled aloud. “Or she could have had a preexisting health condition. Heart disease, asthma, bronchitis…any one of those could lead to her suffocating in this position.”

  She paused and studied the bedding through the filter.

  “Well?” Warrick said. “Anything?”

  “No.”

  Warrick shrugged. “Her romantic evening might’ve gone bad before the real fun and games started.”

  Catherine didn’t answer. She had returned the flashlight to its case and produced a hand magnifier from a vest pouch. Warrick lowered his camera and went over to where she squatted. Maybe there’d been no sex stains, but it was clear that something had caught her attention.

  She looked at him, motioning toward a rumpled wedge of top sheet between the dead woman’s bare thighs.

  “Blond hairs,” he said.

  “But not naturally blond.” She passed him the magnifier.

  Warrick peered through the lens, grunted. “Lower down the follicle, the color’s more a sandy brown.”

  “They’ve been frosted,” Catherine said. “And it doesn’t match our victim.”

  He nodded his understanding. Spilled across her pillowcase in disarray, Rose’s tresses were long, thick, and uniformly chestnut brown. Even a quick look at the hairs under the lens revealed them to be a different texture and color.

  He moved aside as Catherine collected the hair samples with her tweezers and deposited them in a small glassine envelope.

  “I wonder if the lightener’s a professional or consumer brand?” she said. “If it’s a salon product, that’d definitely help with—”

  “You two might want another look at this.”

  The interruption jerked their attention toward the half-open door, where Captain Jim Brass had suddenly appeared with the gym bag recovered from the front lawn—a navy blue nylon duffel with the Nike swoosh on its side. Warrick realized he could no longer hear the maid carrying on outside.

  “We miss something before?” he said.

  Brass entered, holding the gym bag with one hand, displaying a small, flat object in his opposite palm.

  “One of the uniforms found this ID tag in a hedge a few feet from the driveway. Looks like its fastener might’ve snagged on a branch and gotten torn off the duffel’s zipper.”

  Catherine stood up and looked it over.

  “Mark Baker,” she said, reading the name penned under the clear plastic window.

  Brass seemed disappointed at her lack of immediate familiarity with it. Dressed nattily in a dark gray suit with a polished detective’s badge on the lapel, he was a broad, stocky man with a receding hairline, features as blunt as his typical disposition, and eyes that had seen it all far too often.

  Just at that moment, those eyes jumped off Catherine to land on Warrick’s face.

  “How about you? Name ring a bell?”

  Warrick’s brow creased thoughtfully.

  “Fireball,” he said.

  “The Fireball, right.”

  “Wait a minute,” Catherine said with dawning recognition. “Isn’t that some baseball player’s handle?”

  “Might be the greatest lefty pitcher ever,” Warrick said, nodding. “He’s also got a rep for being a ladies’ man…”

  “They’ve been spotted together around town,” Brass said. “Nevada Rose and Baker. As a couple.” He looked at Warrick. “My guess is I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

  Warrick was silent. The captain was one of the straightest shooters he’d met on the job and didn’t waste time getting to the point.

  No stranger to the Vegas nightlife, Warrick had once come close to signing with a minor league baseball team—an interest in the game stuck with him long after he enrolled in college. By that time, though, he’d already realized that betting on pro sports (and coming up a winner) was a much quicker and easier way to make his tuition than waiting tables.

  “I heard they were an item,” Warrick said after a moment. “There were stories that they were ready to tie the knot. No pun intended.” He shrugged. “Who knows what’s true? It isn’t like I sit around watching those entertainment shows. Or like they’re known for their high standards of reporting.”

  “But Rose had a relationship with him,” Brass persisted.

  Warrick didn’t know why he suddenly felt defensive. “This woman had a whole lot of relationships. She was known as a maneater…”

  “Famous athletes having been her favorite menu item.”

  Warrick looked at him but said nothing.

  “Do what you need to in here. I’m going to have this gym bag tagged as evidence and make some phone calls,” Brass said. “We’ll want an expanded perimeter around the crime scene. And added uniformed details for when the carny train rolls up and clowns start spilling out all over the goddamned place.”

  Warrick and Catherine exchanged meaningful looks, then watched Brass turn on his heels and stride heavily out the door.

  “I don’t blame him,” Warrick finally said. “He sees what’s coming. The media’s going to be at this with steak knives and barbecue sauce.”

  Catherine kept looking at him but didn’t say anything.

  “I heard Rose Demille was from New Orleans,” Warrick said. “Last of a high-stepping family line. After Katrina, she loaded up her good looks and expensive tastes and moved to Vegas.”

  “Fabulous Las Vegas, that is,” Catherine said. “Swimmin’ pools, sports superstars.”

  Warrick smiled soberly. “Rose chased players,” he said. “Their big-time lifestyles, their bank accounts—”

  “And their hard bodies,” Catherine said.

  “Yeah,” Warrick said. “Them, too, I suppose.”

&n
bsp; Their eyes met.

  “You do know stuff about her,” Catherine said.

  “Some.” Warrick rubbed his light scruff of beard. “Of all the guys she hooked up with, I figure Mark Baker’s got to be the richest and most famous.”

  “The prize catch, huh?”

  Warrick was silent. His gaze had drifted back to the wall above the satin-covered altar, hung with a bland portrait of Christ’s second apostle holding the key to heaven against his white-robed breast.

  “It’s an old-time Creole custom to have an altar and a picture of your patron saint in the bedroom,” he said. “A yellow votive candle near the door’s supposed to bring people wealth. And Saint Peter with his key’s a symbol of quick success. They say he holds the key to everything and opens all doors.”

  Catherine glanced briefly at the picture, then returned her attention to the nude, lifeless woman on the bed.

  “Sure is looking like Nevada Rose opened her door to the wrong person,” she said.

  2

  “WOW,” GREG SANDERS said. “I guess it really ain’t easy being green.”

  Gil Grissom adjusted his glasses by the stems. “Is that your empirical scientific assessment or Kermit the Frog’s?” he said.

  Greg didn’t miss his boss’s frown of disapproval, its camouflage on a mild baby face notwithstanding. He also saw the simultaneous cautionary glance from Sara Sidle, who briefly turned from her camera’s viewfinder to send it in his direction. She’d joined them at the lakeside moments ago, after talking to a group of horrified groundskeepers some yards back near the trees.

  Greg dropped his shoulders. The night shift was barely an hour old. No way did he want it getting off on the wrong track.

  He gazed out across the water, figuring he’d give Grissom’s annoyance a minute to pass. The Fairmark Resort’s man-made lake was pretty large, he thought. Well, actually, very large by local standards. Its basin held, what, fifty million gallons of water? Something close to that, anyway, a volume that would make it about double the size of the artificial lake outside the Bellagio Hotel. Very large, yeah, and establishing a new standard of ecological wastefulness right here in the foothills of a desert mountain range. Greg had to hand it to the resort’s developers, though. Nestled amid the slopes with hundreds of feet of elevation change, its new world-class championship golf course—and the lake that was its picturesque centerpiece—represented an impressive feat of engineering and landscaping.

  Greg ruffled his short, choppy hair with his fingers, a habit that made him look kind of awkward and even younger than his thirty-four years. Add these qualities to his semi-intentional slouch, and he hoped his body language would transmit on a simultaneously innocent and contrite bandwidth.

  He continued staring out at the lake another few seconds. The late-afternoon sun, sputtering in over the craggy western slopes, had fallen over its surface in weak orange patches, and Greg watched its mute swans swim elegantly between and through them. Swimming being a big part of what the birds did. The floater also had been doing what floaters did before getting hauled onto dry land. It was, in fact, first observed drifting among the bevy of swans, which by all accounts had seemed as unaffected by its presence as they were by the dozen or so law-enforcement officers, crime-lab personnel, and Clark County emergency-cleanup volunteers now milling about the lakeside.

  Of course, Greg thought, those birds had probably gotten used to circumnavigating foreign objects over the past few days, the floodwaters having washed untold tons of debris off the slopes.

  What was the golfer’s term for a large body of water? He couldn’t nail it and finally left it alone. It would come to him later, he told himself. And besides, Grissom’s irritation had visibly passed. He was ready to enter his momentary penitence.

  “What I meant to say about this guy a minute ago is that, besides being green all over, he’s been dead awhile,” Greg said. He cocked a thumb over his shoulder at the group of deputies. “They told us he was level in the water when they found him. His head and arms on the surface.”

  Down on his knees beside Sara, Gil Grissom nodded his understanding.

  Soon after a person died, the methane and other gases in the stomach and intestines formed pockets in the abdomen, in the colon, or up inside the lungs and esophagus. In that state of primary flotation, the head, arms, and torso tended to dip below the surface while the inner body cavities filled with gas. But as progressive decay swelled the body’s outer tissues, its buoyancy got more evenly distributed throughout the extremities—a telltale sign of secondary flotation.

  That was basic, and far easier than determining their John Doe’s rate of decomposition. The amount of time he’d taken to reach his present state depended on what he’d last eaten and drunk before he died, his general health, the lake water’s temperature, its mineral, chemical, and organic content…a whole checklist of variables had to be considered.

  Still, Grissom had been around long enough to know a ripe cadaver when he saw one. Some of the damage had been caused by scavengers picking at its soft tissues—the eyelids, ears, and left nostril were missing, and the upper lip was eaten away to bare the front teeth and gums, giving its open mouth an angry, snarling appearance. But the face was also bloated from advancing putrefaction, and the skin had begun to slough off the bones of its macerated hands like thin, moist gloves.

  Besides which, all three CSIs could smell the odor of human rot.

  Ignoring the stench now, Grissom looked intently into the dead man’s blind, lidless eyes. They were protruding from their sockets, and the breakdown of red blood cells had given them a cloudy, whitish appearance. Their outer surfaces were flattened—Grissom couldn’t help but think of failed poached eggs. Not an appetizing comparison, but not awful, either. The flattening would have occurred as vitreous fluid leaked through their connective tissues and the layers of the eyeball globes collapsed.

  Grissom brought his face closer to the dead man’s, grunted. The lens of the left eye had detached and slipped down below the iris—more connective tissue decay. But he’d noticed something else of particular interest.

  He got an ophth scope out of his kit and took a closer look. “I see a horizontal line,” he said. “Between the cornea and sclera. Both eyes.”

  Sara knelt there with her booted toes pressing into the muddy embankment. The ground squished under them when she shifted her weight.

  “The front of the eyeball had a chance to dry out,” she said, picturing it exposed to air through a partially raised lid. “You think he died on land?”

  Grissom pointed to the dead man’s fingers. They were outspread, their skin loose and sloughy like the formalin-preserved skin teased from a specimen frog.

  “A drowning person will grasp at plants, reeds, clots of bottom muck…there’s an instinctive impulse to get a handhold even if none is around,” he said. “The clutching motion typically leaves fingernail marks on the palms.”

  “And he has none,” Sara said.

  “No, not of that type,” Grissom said. “If he wound up in water after he was killed, the questions become how and when that happened. We don’t know his rate of decomposition. But the fish and crustaceans wouldn’t have waited to turn him into a buffet course.”

  “What about this algae on Green Man’s face?” Greg motioned toward a flaccid cheek. “He’s pretty shaggy…it’s more than a five o’clock shadow.”

  Grissom produced another low grunt of concentration. While he wouldn’t have put it that way himself, Greg was right. The dead man’s exposed head, neck, and hands were covered in prokaryotic fuzz. It would have taken time to spread to that extent and might very well turn out to be all over him—the CSIs still hadn’t had a chance to look under his clothing.

  Nevertheless…

  “A lot of microorganisms that used to be considered algae aren’t anymore—it’s a fairly obsolete term,” he said. “What they’ve got in common is that they all perform photosynthesis. Blue-green algae are closer to bacteria than
plants. But hundreds of varieties could thrive in the lake. And more than one could grow on the body. We need to determine the species to know the growth rate.”

  “I already took a scraping from the film on the back of his hand,” Sara said. She handed the ophth scope back to Grissom. “Wouldn’t it give us the reproductive patterns and chlorophyll levels?”

  “In theory. Although—”

  “The lake water’s composition would affect the life cycle,” Greg volunteered. He took a sample vial from his pocket. “I’m gonna go bottle some for a culture.”

  Grissom was pleased, his earlier annoyance massaged away. “That’ll help,” he said.

  Sara returned her attention to the floater as Greg started toward the bank. “Have you noticed that he’s glowing?” she said, raising her camera.

  “And not from blissful contentment.”

  She glanced at Grissom over her shoulder. He took a moment to appreciate her hint of a smile.

  “Prokaryotes have iridescent qualities,” he said. “As do most related life-forms. Diatoms, for instance, are being biofarmed as pigment ingredients for Day-Glo cosmetics.”

  “Snazzy.”

  Grissom shrugged. “The ancient Greeks had a saying: ‘Who glows not, burns not.’”

  She smiled a little more and went back to taking pictures. “He’s wearing work clothes,” she said.

  Grissom took in the tattersall shirt, the sand-colored cargo pants, the heavy leather gear belt with its oversized pouches. Then he motioned to the boots.

  “They look like they’re professional quality,” he said.

  “For hiking or climbing?”

  “Maybe.” Grissom paused. “We’ll check out their manufacturer—there’s a logo on the ankle, see?”

  Sara took a shot of the stitched-in lettering and then shuffled around the body for a close-up of the dead man’s head.

  Her eyebrow suddenly shot up. “I can see a foamy substance in his mouth,” she said. “Toward the back of the tongue.”