Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

Grissom leaned forward as she got a tongue depressor out of her kit. Everything the body had revealed thus far contradicted a drowning scenario. But a froth of mucus, air, and water would exude from the airway of a victim who’d gasped for breath before going under.

  Sara pushed down on the pale, thickened tongue with her right hand, opening the mouth wider with her left.

  Her eyebrow rose another tick. “Does this look like a bronchial secretion to you?” she said.

  Grissom hesitated. There were tiny whitish specks in the fluid.

  “No,” he said.

  “Doesn’t to me, either.”

  “I think it’s an oviparous cluster.”

  “Eggs?”

  He nodded. “If I’m a pregnant fish or amphibian, I find a sheltered hole to lay them in. The dead man’s open mouth would make a perfect underwater nursery.”

  Sara looked at him. “Rock-a-bye baby,” she said. “You want a swab from my kit?”

  Grissom reached under its open lid for a Magill forceps. “I’ll borrow this from you instead, it’ll work better.” He inserted the instrument’s grasping end into the mouth. “Push the tongue down a little more so I can get in there, thanks.”

  He was capping an evidence tube filled with the fluid when a sheriff’s deputy approached with a member of the cleanup crew. They stopped a few feet away, behind the crime-scene tape that had been hastily placed between a couple of police barricades.

  Grissom bagged his vial. “Gentlemen,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  The cleanup worker stared uneasily at the floater a moment. A beefy man in jeans, waders, and an orange vest, he had his hands stuffed into heavy-duty rubber work gloves.

  “I’m Eddie Yost,” he said. “A foreman with the Fairmark’s grounds crew.”

  Grissom waited.

  “I need to know when you’re gonna be done with that thing,” Yost said.

  Grissom looked at him. “Thing?” he said. “You mean this dead man?”

  “Dead guy, stiff, whatever.”

  Grissom knelt over the body, trying to decide how to answer.

  “We’re collecting evidence for the LVPD crime lab,” he said. “We’ll be done when we’re done…why?”

  Yost frowned and gestured toward the group of men near the trees. “My guys’re trying to get this green in shape. And all they can do’s hang around this here water hazard till you finish up.”

  Grissom considered how to answer, found himself at a loss, and did a little more considering. Meanwhile, Greg had come up behind the groundskeeper as he returned with his water sample.

  “What were those words you just used?” he asked the foreman.

  “You mean ‘finish up’?”

  “Before that.”

  Yost looked at him. “Water hazard,” he said flatly.

  Greg grinned, and looked as if he would have patted Yost’s shoulder. “Right, that’s it. Thank you. Water hazard.”

  Grissom gave Sara a look. “How appropriate,” he said.

  3

  SHE PHONED AT six o’clock, about the time they usually ate supper. He knew who it was right off the bat, so what if her number was blocked? She’d gotten into the habit of interrupting him as they sat down at the table—it was a jealousy thing.

  Tonight, though, he was still on the road when he heard the ring tone.

  He took a hand off the steering wheel, lifted his cell out of its dash holder, and flipped it open.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “What’s going on?” she answered. “She ain’t heard from you. Not since this morning.”

  “Look, calm down.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way. She just tried you at home, and nobody answered.”

  He frowned. “I’m just drivin’ in.”

  “Now? You’ve been out all day?”

  “Since before the sun came up,” he said. “An’ here it is dark again.”

  A pause.

  “I swear, she’s sick to her heart,” she said. “Why didn’t nobody answer the phone at your place?”

  “If somebody was there, somebody would’ve picked up.”

  “She shouldn’t have to talk to no machine—”

  “Did you hear me? I just said nobody’s home there. Everything’s been upside down lately. You ain’t got to be told that.”

  Another silence. She was a jealous, possessive bitch when it came to him. Sometimes he hated how good that made him feel. How damn important.

  He stepped on the gas, inching up over eighty-five. He knew he’d start hitting traffic maybe ten, fifteen miles up the road as he got closer to the cutoff. But on this stretch, he could go for a long while without seeing another driver’s taillights.

  “You still there?” she said.

  “I’m here.”

  “Were you up there lookin’ for him?”

  “All day, like I told you.”

  “And?”

  “She would’ve heard about it if I found him.”

  Her frustration came on hard through the phone. “Damn your precious Nevada Rose,” she said. “Been nothing but sorrow for me.”

  “No,” he said. “That ain’t fair.”

  “Don’t you tell her what’s fair. Her heart’s been broke.”

  “But she’s talkin’ crazy.” And he knew there’d be no end to it, not once she got on a rant.

  “You listen up,” she said. “She loves you. She can say whatever she wants. Not like that other one.”

  “Why you got to bring her into this?”

  “Because others come and go. But you’re always gonna be her baby angel. And she needs to know that you love her most.”

  “She knows.”

  “If she did, she wouldn’t have to ask.”

  “C’mon. That’s more crazy shit—”

  “Don’t you use that language with me. Crazy this, crazy that. She heard it her whole life, and plenty worse besides. You want to be addin’ to her hurt tonight?”

  “’Course not—”

  “Then she needs to hear that you love her. Her heart’s broke.”

  “Stop. I love her. She knows I love her.”

  “Most?”

  “Most.”

  “That’s better. And she loves her boy. She loves you, and don’t ever forget it, no matter what selfish thoughts that other puts in your head.”

  “I wish she wouldn’t start in on that again. I can’t stand no more of it.”

  “You know it’s her who’s at the root of our troubles. Couldn’t even answer the phone—”

  “No, stop.” The left side of his neck had started to throb. “I wish she’d stop.”

  “Then do what’s right. You promised her somethin’. You put dreams in her head. And now you look at how she suffers.”

  “It ain’t my fault—”

  “That Nevada Rose. So special. So perfect. And look. It’s you that started this. And it’s you alone who has to set things right. Or right’s they can be.”

  “But—”

  “You make things right for us,” she said. “Please, baby angel, I need you to make things right.”

  He tried to think of something to say, couldn’t, and instead just tossed his phone onto the seat beside him without another word.

  Flooring the pedal now, feeling the surge of speed push him back into his seat, he resisted the momentary urge to shut his eyes and keep them shut as he sped on over the dark, empty road.

  Catherine Willows entered the morgue room to find Warrick and Al Robbins, the LVPD’s chief coroner, conferring over the autopsy slab where Robbins had laid out Rose Demille for his exam.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Kid stuff.”

  Robbins continued talking as the door swung shut behind her.

  Catherine approached the slab, looked at the draining cadaver. She could hear the slow, steady drip of blood and other fluids into the sink basin.

  A moment ago, she had been on the phone with her teenage daughter, who’d called from school to say she would be
home late—and was immediately coy as to the reason why.

  Catherine breathed. It was like slipping between different worlds. When one intruded on the other, even briefly, she sometimes found herself a bit jarred from her frame of reference. It rarely happened. And it mostly passed in the scant moment it took her to inhale and exhale—too quickly for anyone to notice. But ever since Lindsey had been kidnapped, snatched from Catherine’s car on the way home from dance class, even a budding argument about what she was up to when Mom wasn’t around could occasionally prompt Catherine to reflect on the overlap between her normal routines as a woman and mother, and the horrors she saw on the job every day.

  Once, after a courtroom appearance that helped convict a serial murderer, she had gone out for a drink with the lead detective on the case. It was a tough, exhausting prosecution for them—not from an evidentiary standpoint but because the victims were young children and their killer had been a mutilator. And because he’d been brutally inventive with his carving tools. Lindsey was in second grade at the time. The detective told her he had eleven-year-old twins.

  At the bar, their one drink had turned into several rounds. Between her second and third, Catherine had asked the detective what people who work violent crimes often wonder about one another, and themselves, in somber, reflective moments.

  “What makes you want to keep doing it?”

  He’d held his Scotch below his lips, slowly blinked his eyes. “I think of myself as speaking for the dead,” he had replied. “It sounds overdramatic, but it’s how I feel. I speak for them because they can’t speak for themselves.”

  He’d paused after that, gulped his drink, and then spun the question back at her.

  “How about you, Catherine? What’s the pull?”

  Catherine was momentarily speechless—it was something Grissom had also said almost verbatim on more than one occasion. Meeting his haunted stare, she’d suddenly clamped down on the answer rising inside her. Her words to him came from no deeper than her vocal cords. “Plain, simple curiosity,” she’d said, and quickly started on her cocktail. “When I get to a crime scene, I just want to know what the hell’s happened.”

  Catherine wasn’t sure why she’d flashed on that recollection right now. But occasionally things sprang into her mind at odd times. She hadn’t been candid with the detective, not nearly, and she supposed she regretted it. Considering she’d raised the question in the first place, it had been unfair of her.

  “There was no semen, no vaginal trauma, and the initial toxicology results are clean,” Robbins was saying. He flipped over a sheet of paper on the clipboard in his right hand and scanned the one beneath it. “A standard multipanel drug test shows alcohol in her bloodstream. But its level is insignificant, less than two-tenths of one percent. No trace amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cocaine, cannabis, methamphetamines, MDMA…”

  Warrick eyed the chart over Robbins’s shoulder. “How far along are the poison batteries?” he said.

  “Again, we’ve excluded the common substances.” Robbins glanced up at him, leaning his weight on a metal cane in his left hand. “I can offer an educated guess about the cause of death. Pending the outcome of additional tox screens. And, I suppose, chemical trace testing on the pill dispenser you brought in.”

  “I’m listening,” Warrick said.

  “The term burked should ring a bell with the two of you? From the Tony Braun murder?”

  Catherine nodded. “Old but not forgotten business.”

  “Older than you might realize—the word has an interesting history.” Robbins said. “‘Up the close and down the stair, in the house with Burke and Hare.’ It’s the first line in a nineteenth-century British nursery rhyme. Many of them have dark origins—they were meant to scare the kids into bed.”

  “And keep them from sneaking back out, I imagine,” Catherine said.

  Warrick had remembered something. “Whoa. Hang on a second. Weren’t Burke and Hare body snatchers?”

  “Not quite,” Robbins said. “The rhyme tells it all. Body snatchers—or resurrection men—would go to graveyards for their merchandise. But close was slang for a narrow hall or alleyway. Burke and Hare found live bodies easier pickings than dead ones. Digging up corpses from under six feet of soil was sweaty work. And their client, a Professor Robert Knox, preferred fresh subjects for his anatomy classes in Edinburgh.”

  “Sounds like the formula for a lasting business relationship,” Catherine said.

  “Knox was a member of the Royal Medical Society,” Robbins said. “A respected doctor and teacher. In those days, only bodies of executed criminals could be used for human dissections. There were too few to meet the demand.”

  “So our ghoulish entrepreneurs jumped in to exploit the supply-side shortage.”

  Robbins gave her a shrug. “I can appreciate Knox’s predicament,” he said. “Human beings are machines that just happen to have soft, perishable parts.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Doctors sometimes get lost in the workings.” He looked at her neutrally a moment. “Burke and Hare murdered sixteen people in less than a year. While one covered the nose and mouth, his partner would sit on the victim’s chest to pin him or her down. Death occurred through smothering and left the bodies with few outward signs of violence. It enabled Knox to have his no-questions-asked policy.”

  “Or see no evil,” Warrick said. “Depending how you look at it.”

  The coroner’s bearded face remained expressionless. “Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, Knox the man who buys the beef,” he said. “I can imagine myself in the doctor’s shoes. It doesn’t mean I’ve got a stake in how posterity treats him.”

  He shrugged again, his left shoulder rising higher than the right because of how he pressed his weight on the cane. His legs were both prosthetic, the consequence of a terrible accident he rarely ever mentioned. Warrick had long ago noticed he favored the left side and supposed it must give him chronic aches.

  Now he watched Robbins go around to the morgue slab’s headstand, the tip of his cane clacking softly on the autopsy-room floor.

  “The burking scenario makes preliminary sense, but a few things confuse me,” he said. “Take a look.”

  Robbins motioned toward Rose Demille. She’d been opened up for examination, the scalpel slicing across her collar bone and then down to her pelvis, the flesh peeled back and spread wide. The bony chest plate had been set aside on a work surface near the slab, the heart and lungs placed in hanging weight scales.

  For all his dispassion, Robbins had a sensitive hand with the blade. He’d used a T cut on Rose, peeling the flesh upward at her neck in a single flap over her face to reveal the throat structures. The routine Y, with its double incisions up either side of the throat to the ears, left more unsightly stitch lines after it was sewn closed.

  “I found froth in her trachea and bronchial canals but nothing lodged in her throat that would block her airway,” he said. “And she didn’t have any pronounced petechial hemorrhages beyond what I’ve seen in her eyes. They typically show up as purple rosettes, or spots, above the area of compression on the neck after a manual strangulation, or on the face when violent force is used to stifle breathing through the mouth and nose.”

  “If she was smothered with a pillow, it would’ve absorbed some of that force,” Warrick said. “Or someone might’ve covered her head with a plastic bag.”

  “In those instances, we might not see the sort of trauma that results in petechial bleeding, correct,” Robbins said.

  Catherine folded her arms across her scrub shirt. “I want to be sure I’m with you here,” she said. “You mentioned burking involves pressure to the chest or abdomen…”

  “Yes,” Robbins said. “Possibly even the entire torso. I’ve seen it in crushing deaths where a person was pinned under a heavy object. A fallen beam, for example. Or a rolled-over vehicle.”

  “So if you’re thinking Rose was burked…”

  “I noticed
faint petechia on her abdomen,” Robbins said. “Just a few spots below her rib cage, I could barely make them out. But they indicated a significant weight had pressed down on her diaphragm and made me extremely mindful of internal signs.”

  “And you found something,” Catherine said. It wasn’t a question. Robbins had the look of a hunter who’d picked up a trail. She’d seen it in his eyes before.

  He turned abruptly from the autopsy table, slipped off his bloody surgical gloves, and tossed them into a pan. Catherine noticed a tiny splatter of red from a glove land on the pan’s rim.

  Home from school late.

  Robbins had reached to lift a wireless remote off a counter and jabbed it at a large wall-mounted flat-screen panel.

  “I took a musculoskeletal MRI,” he said as the display winked on to show the curve of a spinal column, its vertebrae stacked one atop the other. “Bear with me, I haven’t got the hang of this imaging software.”

  Robbins clicked the remote to enlarge part of the image, clicked again to border it in, then trackballed the arrow cursor onto a blocklike vertebra.

  “The twelve thoracic vertebrae are in the middle of the spine,” he said. “You’re looking at T-11 and T-12. They’re in the lower thoracic region, where ligaments, cartilage, and highly movable gliding costovertebral joints connect the spine to the rib cage. The disks are pushed closer together than they should be. And look at the T-11 joint—”

  “It’s fractured,” Catherine said.

  Robbins nodded. Click-click-click. The CSIs watched the image zoom in another level.

  “You see this close-up area? Where it looks like a bit of fabric caught in a zipper?” Robbins moved his cursor. “That’s entrapped meniscoid tissue. Soft cartilage pushed between the joint and spinal disk. Similar impingements can be found with two other thoracic joints.”

  Catherine looked at him. “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.”