Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  Warrick made a confused face. “Hang on,” he said. “Weren’t the two of them at Seven Hills when you drove out there yesterday?”

  “And acting like the picture of conjugal bliss,” Catherine said. “Eleanor answered the front door and showed me to her husband’s office. She even mentioned how involved she was with running the family business, and Layton confirmed it. He told me she handles all his appointments and computer records.”

  Warrick looked at her. “They wouldn’t be the first couple to carry on a professional relationship after their marriage broke up,” he said. “Look at The White Stripes. They made a go of it even after their divorce.”

  “Did they?”

  Catherine smiled a little. “Have to admit,” she said, “I’m not really a White Stripes fan.”

  “Then forget about them and think Sonny and Cher.”

  “If memory serves, their postdivorce show kind of tanked,” she said. “But I get what you mean.”

  Warrick grinned. “The Samuelses have a lovey-dovey image to maintain and a lot riding on it,” he said. “I don’t know how many readers are gonna take Redoing Your Spouse seriously when they know the author split with his wife. And you have to figure they’ve got other book contracts in the works, lecture tours…”

  “A mini-empire, I know,” Catherine said. “Like I said, it makes sense that they’d want to keep quiet about their problems. It’s just a little surprising they could actually manage it.”

  “Being personalities, you mean?”

  “Yeah. And very visible ones.”

  “There are even bigger stars who find ways to keep their private lives private,” Warrick said. “If it’s true Samuels was stepping out with Rose Demille—or anybody else—give him credit for keeping it under wraps. There’ve been no public rows between him and the missus.”

  “And no sightings of him out on the town with other women.”

  “Eleanor filing papers on the East Coast probably helped, too.”

  “That and the fact that a legal sep doesn’t stick out like a divorce motion.”

  “Yeah,” Warrick said. “It might have slipped past the gossip trolls who go around digging their grubby hands through court records and hospital admissions.”

  “Might’ve,” she repeated. “Though once I knew that their relationship was dissolved, or is in the process of coming apart, I started to wonder where Eleanor’s been staying.”

  “Since she can’t be living at their home.”

  “No, she can’t,” Catherine said. “Not without violating the conditions of a legal separation.”

  Warrick rubbed the back of his neck. “Suppose she’s too careful to have bought a home in her name, huh?”

  “But,” Catherine said.

  “But?”

  “But on a hunch, I logged onto Book Highway.”

  “That dot-com bookseller?”

  “Right,” she said. “They have that peek-at-the-pages feature, where you type in a search term and it lets you read a sample of what’s inside a book.”

  “And you found something to help tell you where Eleanor lives?”

  Catherine smiled. “I looked at the copyright pages of Samuels’s books. There are three of them, two registered in his own name: Look Better, Love Better and Body Shaping. But the newest book, Redoing Your Spouse, was copyrighted under a corporate name…Olga Inc.”

  “Olga?”

  “I took a course focusing on Picasso in college,” Catherine said. “It’s probably no coincidence that Olga Khokhlova was the name of his first wife. What’s relevant is that there’s a condominium owned by Olga Inc. in Vista Tower. It was sold six months ago, when the units first went on the market.”

  “That’s one of those four new high-rises right on Paradise Road.”

  Catherine nodded. “Near the Hilton, right.”

  “You think Eleanor’s made that her residence?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think Book Highway might’ve led us to Paradise when it comes to getting to the bottom of the Samuels’ living arrangement.”

  Catherine grinned. “There’s something else my potluck searches turned up,” she said. “I don’t know what it does or doesn’t mean. But it’s stuck in my mind.”

  Warrick gave her one of those Don’t keep me in suspense looks.

  “Layton is Eleanor’s second husband,” Catherine said. “Her first was Dr. Carl Melvoy, but that marriage ended back in the nineteen-nineties. November ’ninety-four, to be exact.”

  Warrick was still looking at her with perked interest. “Divorce?” he said.

  “Death,” Catherine said. “According to his published obituary in the New York Times, Carl passed away from sudden heart failure. The obit also mentioned that he was a noted plastic surgeon with the Upper East Side Manhattan practice of Samuels and Melvoy.”

  “Samuels…as in our Layton Samuels?”

  Catherine nodded.

  Warrick scratched his head. “You know how long Melvoy was in the ground before his widow and Samuels came together under the wedding canopy as husband and wife?”

  “They were married in July of the following year.”

  Warrick did a quick finger count. “Eight months later,” he said.

  Catherine was quiet a moment. His tone of voice told her what he was trying to suggest. “There’s nothing odd or suspicious about someone marrying a late spouse’s friend,” she finally said.

  “A consoling hand turns into a loving caress?”

  “Something like that,” Catherine said. “Happens between people all the time. It’s probably a more natural way for a bond to evolve than searching for new relationships at singles meets.”

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

  “Open up your heart to me,” Catherine said.

  Warrick smiled thinly. “You know the words.”

  “Lindsey and her friends are heavy into Nina Tyford,” she said. “They’ve got a whole dance number worked out.”

  A few seconds passed as they sat smiling at each other in silence.

  Catherine managed to pry her eyes from his smile. The way she’d torn herself from his arms when they’d had that awkward moment in a storm culvert investigating a case together a while back. Moments like that could be trouble. And now, as then, she pushed it into an airtight inner compartment and shut the door on it.

  Shut the door with a hard slam.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do the checklist bit. See what we know, don’t know, and maybe ought to find out next. Layton and Eleanor Samuels were both at the Cosmetic Surgery Center and Anti-aging Spa when I got there, acting…how did you put it?…. All hunky-dory?”

  “Lovey-dovey,” Warrick said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Were the words I think I used.”

  “I stand corrected.” Catherine gave him a look. “Anyway, there they were, the picture of togetherness. When I spoke to Layton in his office, he reinforced that impression.”

  “And threw cold water on any suggestion he was having an affair with Nevada Rose Demille. Though you told me Samuels did admit she’d visited his office for a consultation.”

  “Check,” Catherine said.

  “Maybe a couple of times.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “But he didn’t make much of it.”

  “Because she never had the work done.”

  “Cosmetic work.”

  “Whatever sort of work it was she was interested in. Samuels wasn’t specific,” Catherine said.

  “Didn’t Samuels also tell you he and Rose might’ve been invited to some of the same parties for the crème de la crème of Vegas society?” Warrick asked.

  “Check again.”

  “And then tell you they never talked.”

  Catherine shook her head. “Not exactly,” she said. “He did concede they might have had some chitchat.”

  “Chitchat?”

  “That’s right.”

&
nbsp; “His word or yours?”

  “His,” Catherine said. “Is that somehow important?”

  “Could be,” he said. “More than the lovey-dovey-hunky-dory controversy, anyway.”

  Catherine waited.

  “The doc could be telling the truth,” Warrick said. “But if I was a cynical investigator type, it might occur to me that he wants to make sure he’s got his bases covered as far as any sightings of him with Rose Demille.”

  “Sightings that might look compromising.”

  “Like romantic trysts,” Warrick said.

  “Assignations.”

  “Intimate contacts of the kind Nova Stiles, one of Rose’s oldest friends in town, implied they must have had, being that she told me they were hotsie-totsie lovers and that Samuels might even have tapped some dings out of her.”

  Catherine looked at him wryly. “I won’t ask you about ‘hotsie-totsie,’” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  They looked at each other for another extended moment.

  “Samuels and his wife are in line for a follow-up visit,” Catherine said.

  “You want to do it yourself, or we gonna double-team them this time?”

  “I think we both should talk to them.”

  Warrick nodded. “Like Friday and Gannon,” he said.

  “Or Linc Hayes and Julie Barnes,” she said.

  “Coffee and cream.”

  “Salt and pepper.”

  “How about just good cop, bad cop?”

  Catherine chuckled aloud. “I think we ought to make it good criminalist, bad criminalist, and quit while we’re still ahead.”

  Warrick looked at her, smiled, and put out his hand. “Deal,” he said.

  “Deal,” she said.

  As they shook, their grip lingering for the briefest of instants, it happened again with Catherine’s hardened inner vault.

  Slam. Door shut. What she wanted kept out stayed out.

  Catherine refused to contemplate for an instant how that entry managed to keep reopening, over and over and over, in spite of all her determination to keep it locked up tight.

  Sara had just about finished her slide-show preparations when Grissom entered the forensic photography lab’s square little projection room.

  She gave Grissom a small nod of acknowledgment as he came through the door, finished slotting a Type II PCMCIA data-storage card into the rear of the projector, and went to the lower the room’s lights. It had taken her a while to hunt down the projector, finally locating it on a table in David Hodges’s lab, where it had sat after he’d apparently swiped it for some reason.

  “Just in time,” she said, turning the dimmer three-quarters of the way down. “I’m ready to start the show.”

  Grissom sat down facing the wall screen, waited.

  Sara picked up her remote control and pressed a button. First up on the screen was a side-by-side comparison of the residue shoeprints she’d photographed in the ocotillo patch near the cave mouth and the outsoles of Green Man’s boots—the latter a photo Grissom obviously had taken himself, since he’d been the one to bring a snapshot of the shoe bottoms to the Belcher camp with them.

  Nothing wrong with giving the audience a bit of recap, she thought. Although it also might be considered a setup for the dramatic climax.

  “Okay,” Sara said. Her presentation moved from one photo in the series to another. “As we can see even from the partials here, the bottom markings of the boots are identical and recognizable.”

  Grissom nodded. Sara had placed a rigid L scale alongside the prints when she’d photographed them, the shorter base of the scale horizontal to them, the long side parallel.

  “Both the work shoe and the print measure eleven and a half inches from heel to toe and are what footwear companies consider to be a wide width,” Sara said. “The invoice I got from the Pakistani manufacturer called for one pair at exactly that size.”

  “Eleven and a half inches converts to a U.S. size twelve,” Grissom said. “That right?”

  “Extra-wide in this case,” Sara said. “Or twelve double-E.”

  “Mapadi, premium leather,” Grissom said.

  A smile touched Sara’s lips. “The prints were made by Adam Belcher,” she said.

  “Or Bigfoot,” Grissom said.

  Sara’s grin widened slightly. “I’ve never heard a single report of Sasquatch wearing work boots,” she said. “Anyway, if you look carefully at the prints—and I want to zoom in a little here so this is nice and clear—you can see that the individual characteristics of the soles also match. Notice the wear patterns?”

  “On the lower right of the shoe heel,” he said. “And then the instep…”

  “Anyway, one of the other pairs Belcher ordered also measured size twelve. They were a standard D width, though.”

  “Charlie’s boots,” Grissom said.

  “And by process of elimination, a third pair of boots…”

  “A woman’s model…”

  “Was bought for Gloria Baker,” Sara said. “The invoice lists them as American size six, standard width.”

  She thumbed the remote, and the last of her sequence of photos from outside the cave faded to black.

  “Next up here are snapshots I took of the shoeprints inside the cave near the drip pool,” she said, continuing her slide show. Again, she had placed the L scales alongside them. “The boot measures just over nine inches heel to toe. That converts to our women’s size six. Regular width.”

  “Gloria Belcher’s been in the cave,” Grissom said.

  Sara nodded. “I did some scale compositing to create a single, spatially accurate image from several of the women’s shoeprints,” she said. “I wanted to verify something I’d observed in the cave. The light in there being what it was, or wasn’t, it was critical to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.” Another push of a button to bring her comp onto the screen. “You see anything notable about them?”

  Grissom sat with his eyes narrowed, taking a close look. “The left footprint is consistently lighter than the right…”

  “Suggesting that the person who left the print was either hobbled or favoring that foot,” Sara said.

  Grissom cranked his head around to look at her. “Gloria had a limp that day at the trailer court,” he said. “Did you notice?”

  “I did.” Sara used the remote. “There’s something else,” she said. “The prints go in two directions. First leading toward that recess in the wall, and then away from them.”

  “The same as those cart wheel tracks you photographed—and more or less behind them,” Grissom said. He played with the stems of his glasses, visualizing the scene. “A few of the shoeprints are at angles to the wheels…different angles.”

  “As if Gloria was struggling to maneuver the cart,” Sara said. “Stepping this way and that to turn it around or moving to the side…”

  “The way you might if there was something heavy inside it.” Grissom turned to look at Sara again, wondering aloud. “Like, say, a body?”

  She met his gaze with her own, sharing the thought in silence.

  “We’ll need search warrants for Adam and Charlie Belcher’s trailers,” Grissom said.

  “I already filled out the paperwork,” Sara said. “It just needs your signature before I push it up to Jim Brass.”

  Grissom gave her an approving look and rose from his chair.

  “I’m heading back to my office,” he said. “You aren’t the only one who’s been busy. When you bring me those papers, I want to give you a peek at what I discovered about the algae specimens from the pool.”

  Sara ended her presentation with a touch of a button. Then the two CSIs stepped from the room, leaving the lights turned down in their haste.

  When he searched the photo lab for the projector an hour later, Hodges would trip over its electrical cord in the dimness. And while he barely avoided knocking over the projector, the tech would painfully bruise his left toe stumbling against the bolted-down legs o
f a table.

  Not having the slightest clue which of the criminalists at the lab might be to blame, he would make sure to cover his all bases by loudly and vehemently cursing every last, stinking one of them.

  “Have you ever met my friend John Tuttle?” Grissom asked Sara. “He’s a professor of botany and the phycologist with the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection?”

  About five minutes after they left the projection room, she stood with Grissom over one of his binocular microscopes.

  “Tell you the truth,” she said with a shake of her head, “I didn’t know the agency had a resident algae specialist.”

  Grissom carefully positioned a specimen slide under the microscope’s revolving nose turret. “They didn’t always,” he said. “But two or three years ago, Lake Mead was overrun with a type of invasive plant known as Myriophyllum spicatum. It’s also known as Eurasian water milfoil, or just plain milfoil. It has a kind of wispy, feathery appearance and tolerates a wide range of freshwater environments. Hot climates, cold climates, it’s just plain tough to kill. Pet stores used to sell it because it’s so hardy. That makes it popular with hobbyists, who put it in their aquarium tanks because fish like to graze on it.”

  Sara grunted and watched Grissom carefully secure his slide in place with stage clips.

  “About half a decade before Lake Mead’s infestation, the same problem with milfoil occurred in Lake Tahoe,” he said, and turned on the illuminator. “In fact, it’s happened in lakes and rivers ranging from Canada down to Florida. The plant may have been originally introduced by people dumping and flushing water from their fish tanks into local drainage systems. Or it might have clung to the keels and motors of pleasure boats and entered our water bodies that way. However it happened, it spelled trouble. Milfoil proliferates rapidly, forming into dense mats that choke off the growth of other plants and upset entire native habitats. It also interferes with the water intake of hydroelectric generators. I could go on for hours explaining the environmental and economic costs of an infestation.”

  Sara looked at him. “And I’m sure you would—except for my reminding you that we have work to do, starting with your signing off on the search-warrant application,” she said. “Not to be a spoilsport, but I’m also waiting for you to explain how all this ties in with Adam Belcher.”