Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  “No.”

  “You sure? Because I got a special formula of my own, treats hair loss.” Rusellia winked at him. “This way, you can stop hiding it underneath these caps.”

  Warrick reached for the cap’s brim and flipped it off to display his thatch of coarse reddish-brown hair.

  “See?” he said. “No thinning.”

  Rusellia eyed his head a moment and winked again. “That’s some rockin’ natural,” he said.

  5

  THE NEW ADDRESS Sara had gotten for Charlie Belcher from Evercroft and Gaines was outside town in a place called the Sunderland Trailer Court.

  She drove out with Grissom just hours after returning from Reno, and as he swung right off Route 612 onto one of its branching two-laners, it became apparent that this forlorn neighborhood around twenty miles from the Strip might easily have been a whole wide world away.

  In the heart of Sin City, the flooding had been little more than a passing, unsightly inconvenience. Better drainage had mitigated the effects of the heavy rains, and its worst eyesore transgressions had been cleaned up within a week or two. Lane closures for road repairs were brief and smoothly coordinated. The government had turned its manpower loose where it counted—in the gaudy tourist playground where people who didn’t live within a thousand miles of Vegas spent their cash.

  But travelers did not flock to the city for snapshots of low-income residences with clotheslines hung outside and three-wheeled beaters on concrete blocks in the carports and tumbled plastic kids’ toys in the beaten patches of grass and dirt out front. Where there was no inflow of tourist dollars to counter the waters that had furiously come raging down from the mountains, many roads were still without restored banks, and some remained collapsed in places where the rushing torrent had washed out the drainage culverts that ran beneath them. If the damage wasn’t too extensive for patchwork fixes, local firefighters and county cops had rigged temporary repairs out of wood planks and truckloads of gravel to allow passage. Other lengths of road were simply barricaded off with yellow traffic cones and an occasional deputy routing vehicles onto negotiable detours.

  Looking out her window as Grissom bumped along in fits and starts, Sara saw few NDT bulldozers and heavy-duty trucks around and had a feeling the sheriff’s men would be out waving drivers onto hastily improvised bypasses for a long while to come.

  She unenthusiastically sipped the lukewarm coffee they’d picked up at a local filling station, swished it in her mouth, gulped, and pushed the cup into the holder.

  “I think that’s the access road up ahead on the left,” she said, pointing.

  Grissom drove on for another quarter-mile and then swung off the main road.

  The court had been hit hard by the flood, and its residents were still sorting through the wreckage it left behind. Charcoal grills, cheap lawn chairs, and plastic lawn furniture were toppled everywhere. A little girl’s pink dollhouse lay splattered in mud like a weird play version of the horrendous mess her parents must be dealing with. As she continued to look out her lowered window, Sara could smell mold and mildew from the water damage inside the trailers.

  “Charlie Belcher’s in Unit Twenty-four,” she said.

  Grissom glanced back and forth out the windshield. “Which way’s that?”

  Sara checked her map printout. “A right, a left, and then another sharp left,” she said. “It should be near the end of the road.”

  Parked on a small lot right where the satellite map said it would be, Unit 24 was an aged, white, rust-scabbed Skyline Nomad double-wide with do-it-yourself painted blue shutters and a transportable front deck nailed together out of weathered gray wood. Grissom pulled the car to a halt four or five yards away from the trailer and then sat looking at it for a minute.

  “Charles Belcher looks to be down on his luck even by Sunderland Trailer Court standards,” he said with a thin smile. “I suppose it just goes to prove treasure hunting isn’t as romantic as it’s cracked up to be.”

  Sara slipped on her sunglasses. “Do we really need proof?” she said. “Evercroft told me the brothers were making out okay for quite some time. But they put themselves in hock to lease and finance their latest mining project.”

  “The morganite dig?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And finding the Nevada Rose led to a falling out between them.”

  “I’m not clear on how it ought to be characterized,” she replied. “I know Adam was supposed to be the purist. He wanted to accept the Smithsonian’s offer because the museum could guarantee the Nevada Rose wouldn’t be cut up for jewelry. He was afraid a private collector might do it even if he said he wouldn’t, or that it’d be resold to another collector or dealer who would, or that whoever bought it would take good care of it for a decade or three and then die and leave it to an heir who’d cut it up.”

  Grissom considered that. “Commendable,” he said.

  “You’re thinking you’d feel the same about your bees.”

  “And my specimens,” Grissom said. He smiled faintly again. “Fortunately, I know someone who’ll be a good steward if something happens to me.”

  Sara glared at him through her dark glasses. “When it comes to that formaldehyde pig fetus, don’t count your luck,” she said, and reached for her door handle.

  Before she’d even swung her legs out of the car, the trailer door opened, and a woman stepped onto the weather-beaten deck boards.

  Thick, wavy gray hair flowing past her shoulders, she was a big woman—as tall as Sara but a good fifty pounds heavier. Probably around sixty, she wore a loose-fitting men’s T-shirt, a plain brown prairie skirt, and large, inexpensive-looking red-framed glasses. She had a wide, homely face, and it appeared she did not bother with makeup.

  Sara pushed the rest of the way off her seat, Grissom emerging from his door at the same moment. She remembered Evercroft and Gaines telling her Charlie Belcher lived with his girlfriend and that his mother was staying either with him or with Adam in a separate mobile unit at the court. Sara also knew the brothers were both in their thirties, giving her a fair hunch this was the mother.

  She tried to recall her name. Jodie? No. Jacqueline? Though it was written in her notepad, she didn’t open it there in front of the woman. People always got nervous and put off when they saw someone from the police bring out a pad, and she already looked wound up enough.

  She came out to the splintery edge of the deck, her hands clenched at her sides, moving with a slight hitch in her step.

  “You’re here about my son,” she said. Her voice shaking, hands closing more tightly. “I know you’re here about Adam.”

  Sara looked at her. She read more than anxiety in her tone and body language—there was a kind of angry aggression, too. This wasn’t anything unusual. When you came to deliver bad news, it was human nature for the recipient to blame the messenger. And when you as the messenger wanted someone to stay calm, it started with being able to call that person by his or her name.

  Sara tried to get her memory to cooperate. What was this woman’s name? Jolene? Not that either, no. But almost…

  Ah, okay.

  “Gloria Belcher?” she said. “I’m Sara Sidle with the LVPD. And—”

  “Tell me what happened to my baby boy!” the woman shouted. She shook her fists, her eyes flaring white behind the outsized frames. “You goddamn better tell me where he is right now.”

  Sara took a deep breath.

  So much for calm, she thought.

  The hardest part of the job for Grissom was notifying someone of a loved one’s death. Walking up to a door, knocking or ringing the bell, waiting for the door to open with the weight of a mountain on his shoulders. And then looking into the face of the husband, the wife, the mother as he broke the news.

  Grissom was a contained, analytical man, rarely given to open displays of emotion. But it would have been a mistake to conclude that he lacked empathy simply because he was not demonstrative of his feelings.

 
If certain times were worse than others, none was easy. Like anyone else, Grissom related differently to different people. His reasons might be quantifiable, intangible, or a combination of elements. Did the face at the door remind him of someone he knew? Was the victim a child? A teenager? An elderly man or woman? How had he or she perished? By what means?

  Grissom’s center of gravity rested around scientific investigation. Knowing the cause and circumstances of death were necessary for him, and realizing what its agonies must have been came along with that knowledge. There were instances when he could place himself fully and completely in the skin of a victim, rewind to the last hours and minutes of life, and then track forward through the series of events leading up to the final painful blow or wound, the gasping struggles for breath as the body’s systems shut down.

  At the age of seven, he’d begun collecting animal cadavers from the beach for autopsy. He was ten when his grandmother died. The day it happened, he had stood outside his mother’s bedroom door and overheard her phoning close friends and family members. Grandmother had suffered a massive stroke, his mother tearfully explained. The doctors had said it stemmed from a brain aneurysm.

  Stroke? Grissom, seeking to understand this new term, had read through his encyclopedia, studied its medical and anatomical diagrams. Then, stifling tears of his own, he had ridden his bike out to the canals near the beach and pedaled up and down their concrete walks for hours, scouring the plant growth and sand along the water. Finding a dead raccoon in the shrubs, he brought the furry remains home for autopsy and opened the animal’s skull. As he cut into its brain, Grissom deliberately punctured one intracerebral artery with the tip of his scalpel and observed the cold blood flowing out onto the table.

  When he was finished, Grissom had thought he’d understood what killed his grandmother. He had hoped, as well, to understand better the cause of his inner ache. But he was less successful in that.

  At church for the funeral service, Grissom had turned his eyes toward his grandmother’s casket and kept them there. Staring at the flower sprays and wreaths that bedecked its lid, he imagined the sudden hemorrhage from a burst artery in Grandmother’s brain, pictured its lobes and whorls swamped in blood.

  Seeing Grissom bow his head while he took communion at the rail, Father Donnelly had laid a hand on his shoulder and offered a few quiet words of solace.

  He’d been mistaken. Finding what he’d learned from his autopsy a shield against his terrible sense of helplessness, the boy had wished to thank the dead raccoon for giving him what an unseen God could not. By contrast, the father’s sermon, and the hymns sung from the pews, had made Grissom feel lost and untethered.

  But that was long ago. The laboratory was Grissom’s only church now, its test tubes and Bunsen burners his phials and censers. Possibly whatever followed death was like the biblical metaphors of sleep and eternal peace. Possibly it was, but he did not spend much time thinking about it. Where was the evidence? The data? Without facts, he would never know.

  What Grissom did know and understand were the physical processes that began when a killer’s hand shot out of the shadows. He knew the route this shocking visual stimulus would take to the ventral and dorsal streams of the victim’s cerebral cortex. He knew how the alarm reaction pumped adrenal hormones into the blood, knew the mechanism by which the hippocampus and amygdala went into throes of growing panic, knew the neural pathways by which the pain of being shot or stabbed reached the somatosystem. Grissom knew these things and much more about dying and death, and his mind would draw graphic perceptual parallels as he contemplated how a life must have ended. At times, he almost felt torn from his body, as if he were having a lucid nightmare or his consciousness had been projected into another self.

  Grissom still wasn’t quite sure how Adam Belcher had met his particular end and had not even conclusively determined that the body in Robbins’s morgue belonged to him. While that seemed highly probable based on the mining gear Green Man was wearing—and Gaines’s and Evercroft’s unequivocal recognition of the Profiler image—the CSIs had neither established what killed him nor decided how he’d wound up floating in lake water. Furthermore, it would be a broad and irresponsible jump to start speculating about fratricide based solely on what Sara was told about Adam and Charlie’s relationship.

  All Grissom knew, in fact, was that he was about to inform a mother that her son was likely dead. And that she was standing outside her other son’s trailer looking very agitated…and intensely belligerent in spite of Sara’s attempts to settle her down.

  This was going to be among the tougher ones.

  He stepped forward and announced himself, thinking he’d better do something to keep the situation under control.

  “Mrs. Belcher, it might be best if we speak inside,” he said. “I—”

  The trailer door swung open again, a man coming out onto the deck this time. Tall and broadly built, with heavy features, brown hair, and a bushy mustache, he had on a pair of bald-at-the-knees dungarees, a checkered shirt with ragged cutoff sleeves, and work boots. Grissom took only an instant to notice his resemblance to Adam—or the Profiler image of Adam. Then he realized his boots were identical to those found on Green Man.

  “Charlie Belcher?” he said.

  A cautious expression on his face, the man nodded, looking from Grissom to Sara and then back at Grissom.

  “You two with the police?” he said.

  Gloria’s hand shot up before Grissom could answer.

  “They are,” she said, half turning to Charlie. “And I still ain’t heard either of ’em say why they came to see us.”

  Grissom stood there for a long moment. “What I have to say may be difficult, ma’am. For both of you. I really would suggest we discuss this in—”

  “I told you out here’s fine.” Her voice was trembling again. “You go ahead an’ talk, we gonna see where it leads.”

  Grissom took a deep breath. He was not inclined to inform them about Adam while they were all standing out in front of the trailer. But Gloria wasn’t giving him any choice.

  He groped for some alternative he hadn’t considered, came up blank, and finally gave a slow, acquiescent nod of his head.

  “We believe we’ve found Adam’s body,” he said. “I’m going to ask at least one of you to come down to see it and help with a positive identification, but we’ve brought a photograph—”

  “You goin’ to tell us he’s dead?” She scowled at Grissom. “That what you want us to believe?”

  He hesitated a second. “We’ve found the remains of somebody fitting his description,” Grissom said. “He was recovered from Fairmark Lake.”

  “The man-made one?” Charlie said. “Out on that big new golf course in the foothills?”

  Grissom kept his eyes on him. “He was wearing the same type of boots you’ve got on,” he said. “From that Pakistani company…Mapadi.”

  Charlie shook his head. “No,” he said. “This has got to be a mistake. We ain’t the only people around that wear those boots.”

  “It turns out you are, actually,” Sara said, moving up alongside Grissom. “That’s how we were able to start tracking you down.”

  Charlie looked at her and continued to shake his head, the muscles of his jaw working. “I’m tellin’ you,” he said. “You got to have made a mistake.”

  Sara reached into her shoulder bag, produced the file folder she’d brought to show the men in Reno, and held it out to him.

  “I have the photo,” she said. “We need you to take a look at it.”

  Charlie remained motionless for a span of perhaps ten seconds. Then he gave a reluctant shrug, came down off the deck, took the folder from her, and looked inside.

  “Christ in heaven,” he said, studying the computer print. “His eyes…they’re shut, but he don’t look dead.” He looked at Grissom. “A minute ago, you told us he was dead.”

  “The picture’s a reconstruction based on MRI and CAT scans…he’d been in the water for
a period of time,” Grissom said. Then, as gently as possible, “Charlie, is this man your brother?”

  Belcher stared at him but said nothing.

  “Is it Adam?” Grissom urged.

  Belcher cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. He seemed to sag physically, his hands lowering the open folder from his chest. “Yeah, it’s Adam.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Grissom spun around toward the deck. Standing there on its edge, Gloria had shouted out in a cracked, excited voice, her cheeks having at once paled and broken out into splotches of feverish color.

  “I don’t know what kind of picture you have, but it ain’t my baby!” she cried, shaking the tight balls of her fists again.

  Grissom stood looking at her, Charlie turning to do the same now, his gaze momentarily clinging to his mother’s.

  “It’s him,” he said. “It’s his face.”

  “No!”

  Gloria suddenly tore off her eyeglasses and threw them off the deck, an outburst Grissom took as a fit of anger, protest, denial, or perhaps all three. Then she doubled over, heaving with sobs. Charlie glanced over at her, pushed the folder back into Sara’s hands, and hurried back to her side.

  “We’re all she’s got in the world, “he said, putting his arms around her. “Adam and me.”

  Grissom nodded. “I understand,” he said. Then waited a beat. “Charlie…we need to ask, do you have any idea what might have happened to your brother?”

  “No,” he said. “None.”

  “When was he last in contact with you?”

  “Been a couple weeks since we heard from him.”

  “Was it before or after the rainstorm?”

  “I guess it was right around that time.”

  “And you haven’t notified anyone?”

  “No,” Charlie said. His Adam’s apple went up and down. “He’s done it before. Took off without lettin’ anybody know where he’s gone, that is.”

  “For this long?”

  “Sometimes longer.” Charlie paused. “We were havin’ a disagreement.”