Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  And that wasn’t all. There were some other very significant things that distinguished this trip from the previous one. On their last venture out to the trailer park, Grissom and Sara had been reasonably certain that the Fairmark Lake floater Greg Sanders had dubbed Green Man was indeed and truly the gemstone prospector Adam Belcher, owing to Profiler’s facial reconstruction and the positive identification provided by Professors Gaines and Evercroft down at Aldren. Rattling along right now, they were absolutely, one hundred percent convinced of that initial ID and moreover were firmly persuaded that Adam had met his premature demise at the Belcher mining camp, then either fallen or gotten dumped into the drip pool at the back of the onsite cave, and then been washed off and away into Fairmark Lake during the near-biblical flooding of two—now going on three—weeks past.

  Flipping on his headlights in the early evening twilight, Grissom mentally reviewed the evidence that bore out that rather bizarre sequence of events. There were Sara’s comparisons of the shoeprints from the Belcher camp with the heel and sole markings on the dead man’s premium-quality Pakistani leather work boots. There was Grissom’s own absolute determination that the Stygobromus lacicolus arthropods he had gathered at the Belcher site’s drip pool were the same species of egg-laying critter that had used the floater’s mouth as a hatchery for its impending brood. And there was the perfect microscopic match between the algae Grissom had collected in the cave and the green vegetable fuzz that had rampantly overgrown on the floater’s hands and face to earn him his unfortunate Sesame Street–inspired sobriquet.

  Last but not least, adding to that evidentiary picture, there was the computerized water-flow animation Warrick and Sanders had worked up to demonstrate in visually dramatic fashion—and to a high degree of arithmetical probability—the likeliest path Belcher’s dead body would have taken as it was swept downslope from the overflowing drip pool into the artificial lake far below.

  Grissom spotted the access road to the trailer court up ahead and motioned out his window to signal the uniforms behind him that they were approaching the turnoff. Then he pulled his arm back inside and thought some more. Still very much a matter of conjecture was what Gloria Belcher’s shoeprints were doing in the cave and why she had been having a wrestling match with a cart or wheelbarrow of some kind near the drip pool. And, of course, the biggest unanswered questions—those at the nub and hub of the investigation presently wreaking havoc on whatever was left of his car’s suspension system—remained very much at the front of his curious mind: What were the circumstances of Adam Belcher’s death? And who, if anyone besides Belcher himself, was responsible for it?

  Grissom had expected to find everything at the trailer court in about the same bad shape it had been in the other day, and what he saw as he drove through confirmed it, the neglect and storm damage combining to make for a scene of dismal shabbiness.

  But something about the Belchers’ plot had changed. He noticed it the moment the battered, rusty Skyline Nomad came into sight. Gone now was the front deck made out of worn wooden planks in front of it.

  He glanced across the seat at Sara. “What do you think’s up with the deck?”

  “I was wondering that, too,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  But then again, maybe it did, and the looks they exchanged said they both knew it.

  The deck hadn’t been fixed in place. It was rigged to come apart in sections. So, Grissom thought, the Belchers might have decided to bring it inside for storage or repair. Or they might have done it with intentions of vacating the plot.

  He cut his ignition and waited for the two police cruisers to pull up behind him.

  “Okay.” He looked at Sara again. “Ready?”

  She nodded.

  The CSIs opened their doors and got out, saw the unis piling from their patrol cars.

  It was a few minutes after six o’clock, nearly dark out, and Grissom could see lights from inside the trailer come seeping around the sides of its drawn shutters.

  Probably, then, somebody was home. But tonight Grissom had no concern about whether anyone would be. He had the search-and-seizure warrants in his pocket and could have the cops knock down the door as a contingency.

  In a sense, he thought, it would make things easier if the place was deserted—possibly not better, though. He was smart enough to know that. He and Sara had to get what they needed.

  Her probable antics aside, they wanted Gloria there.

  “You want us to go in with you?” one of the cops said, walking up to Grissom.

  He considered that.

  “You guys hang back a little,” he said. “I’ll take first crack.”

  “All right.”

  Grissom went up toward the trailer, waving for Sara to stay behind him. Surely, he thought, whoever might be inside knew there was company outside. The sound of the arriving cars, and then his footsteps, would have been easy to hear through the aluminum walls.

  Whoever was home, then, was not in any apparent rush to conduct a meet-and-greet.

  Grissom went up to the door, standing slightly to its side. This was standard procedure when there was even a hint of the possibility of violence, and Gloria had already proven herself to be of shaky constitution…putting it graciously. America was a society of gun toters; everybody thought they were cowboys and cowgirls in the Wild West these days. He was not about to stand directly in front of that door, not about to make an easy target of himself if she got to thinking she was Annie Oakley.

  He heard voices through the door now. Several voices, both male and female, one of them sounding like Gloria’s.

  He knocked, slipping the warrant out of his jacket pocket.

  “Mrs. Belcher…whoever’s inside with you…I suggest someone answer immediately,” he said in an even voice. “We have a court order that entitles us to enter the premises—”

  The door swung open almost immediately, Charlie Belcher staring at him from the inside of the trailer. Wearing a tank-top undershirt and cargo pants, he was unkempt and unshaven, several days’ worth of beard shadowing his cheeks, blurring the definition of his mustache.

  “What the hell you doin’ back again?” Charlie said. He looked at Grissom, then past him at Sara and the uniforms. “How come you got them cops with you?”

  Grissom had been doing precisely the same thing as Charlie, only in reverse—taking rapid inventory of what was visible through the doorway. He saw cartons on the floor, some of them shut, others with clothes draped or tumbled about them. He saw a counter with quarrying tools spread out all over its surface—chisels, hammers, reamers, shovels, rock drills, more specialized equipment he couldn’t identify. He saw segments of the transportable deck leaning against the wall. He saw a combined kitchenette and dining area with a bluish Formica table in the center and molded plastic stack chairs around it.

  An overweight, heavily made-up woman of around thirty sat very still in one of the chairs. Dressed in a violet tube top and stovepipe jeans, a peroxide blond perm overflowing her shoulders, she was looking out at Grissom with rigid apprehension.

  Anything but still on another of the plastic chairs, Gloria Belcher had spun around to face him.

  “Get away from here, and take those police with you!” she said. “I already told you once to leave us alone!”

  Grissom took a breath. He had guessed this was how things would go with Gloria and found himself wondering if she’d ever made an utterance that wasn’t of hostility or spoken at anything less than peak volume.

  “Mrs. Belcher, we aren’t going anywhere,” he said, holding out the official document in his hand now. “I have a warrant issued by the Superior Court giving us authorization to search the premises—”

  His sentence was quickly interrupted. Gloria sprang to her feet like a jack-in-the-box, the sudden movement bowling her seat over onto the floor with a crash.

  “No,” she said. “No, you ain’t. You can bring them papers right back where you got ’em? Bring ’
em back or shove ’em, hear me?”

  Grissom was thinking, yes, he could hear her quite well. It was possible he would go deaf someday, and for that he could thank a genetic abnormality he had inherited from his mother. The surgery he’d had to mitigate and perhaps avert his developing condition seemed to have taken—the loss of hearing he’d experienced some years back was barely noticeable these days. But he was half convinced he would be able to hear Gloria Belcher’s rantings even if his cochlea had turned to stone.

  He flicked a glance around at the unis, his calm expression letting them know that he was doing all right so far, but that they had better get ready for trouble, just in case.

  “Mrs. Belcher, I think you’d better step aside—”

  And that was when Gloria propelled herself across the trailer at Grissom, both hands raised and clutching at him, her fingers hooked into claws.

  “Filth!” she shouted at him, a look of uncontrolled wrath on her face. “Such vile filth—”

  “No, please.” Charlie had half turned, trying to position himself between them. “She can’t—it won’t do us any good. She can’t…”

  “Don’t you say that to her!” Gloria’s eyes were large white circles, her cheeks flushed to an almost bruised purple color. “Don’t you dare tell her what to do!”

  She lunged around her son, rushing forward with her fingers opening and closing, opening and closing, as if ferociously tearing invisible hunks out of the very air. Grissom had turned to avoid her, but she still managed to wind up almost on top of him as a couple of uniforms came racing past Sara to the trailer, shouldering Grissom aside and then hustling through the door, one of them with his nine-mil drawn from its holster and pointing at Charlie, his partner somehow getting his arms around Gloria, pinning her against the wall with an audible, ugly smack of flesh against metal, and then holding her up against it as the other two officers came in to join them. One of these last cops inside jerked her arms behind her back, restraining them until the other could get her wrists flex-cuffed together.

  Grissom was suddenly aware that the woman at the table had stood up at some point during all the uproar and started bawling away, her eyes horrified, her hands flying up to her mouth to stifle her great, hitching sobs.

  “Darlene.” This was from Charlie, facing her, his voice sorrowful. “Don’t cry, I’m gonna take care—”

  “Take care a yourself an’ forget that whore-woman!” Even with three cops on her, Gloria had wrenched her head around to look at the woman. “She’s responsible for all our family’s troubles. All of ’em.”

  Charlie stood there with his face devoid of expression. His shoulders slumped, he seemed almost spent. “Mama…”

  “They give gifts to all whores,” Gloria was shouting with her cheek up against the wall. “To all whores…”

  Standing behind Grissom and the cluster of police officers, Sara ran her eyes over to Charlie, holding them steadily on him for several seconds.

  Watching him closely, closely, before moving on to help Grissom commence with his search.

  It was full night when they left the trailer park in Grissom’s car, the two police cruisers loaded with evidence from the Belcher family’s mobile homes. This included cartons of mining tools that might have been used to render the blunt-force trauma to Adam’s head and Charlie and Gloria Belcher’s mining boots.

  Charlie’s boots had been removed from a corner of the double-wide where he had taken them off sometime before. Gloria had been wearing hers. When she repeatedly refused to surrender them, two uniformed officers had been forced to hold her prone on the floor as a third cop struggled to pull them from her feet against her will.

  She had screamed, spat, kicked, and thrashed. As the boots were unlaced and removed, she had gnashed her teeth, and the sounds issuing from her mouth had ceased to be intelligible. Foamy saliva had run over her lips and chin.

  Watching her behavior, Grissom had related it with concern to a grand-mal seizure and asked Charlie Belcher and the younger woman in the trailer—she had identified herself as Darlene Newell, Charlie’s live-in girlfriend—whether either knew if Gloria had a history of epilepsy. Charlie had insisted she did not and then pleaded with her to calm down.

  Grissom had been relieved when she finally subsided.

  Now, his high beams streaming out ahead to give him some chance of dodging the road’s most hazardous pitfalls, he jounced over miles of ruined blacktop toward the downtown area, where the flood was forgotten and tourists could drive their cars in smoothly restored lanes. In his rearview mirror, he could see the bright circles of the headlights from one of the police cruisers, keeping pace several car lengths back.

  To Grissom’s right in the passenger seat, Sara stared out into the darkness. She had not spoken a word since they left the trailer court.

  She looked drained. It occurred to him that her eyes were staring out the windshield but not seeing what was in front of them. Her thoughts, too, would be somewhere far away.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She gave him a shrug. That was good, Grissom thought. Entire days had gone by when he’d been unable to lift Sara from her reveries.

  “Gloria wasn’t easy to watch,” he said.

  She shrugged again. “Just another night with your average squabbling family,” she said in a flat voice. “Raving mom calls her son’s girlfriend a whore. She’s wrestled to the floor so we can tear off her shoes and practically works herself rabid. But the son says it’s okay, she gets a little out of control when she’s excited, and all’s well that ends well. We get what we came for. And maybe it’ll help us determine if Adam Belcher was killed by his mother or was a victim of fratricide or if it was a collaborative effort. Or possibly none of the above. Though it sure looks like Mom dumped him in a cave pool.” She paused. “It goes on and on and on. And then we march in to sort through the wreckage like the cleanup crews at the Fairmark golf course.”

  Grissom considered the last thing she’d said. “Are you only talking about the Belcher case?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, then paused and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  Grissom drove on in silence for a while. “She didn’t only call the girlfriend a whore,” he said. “Do you recall the specific phrase Gloria used when she went into that tirade about her?”

  “Something about giving her gifts,” Sara said. “That what you mean?”

  “‘They give gifts to all whores,’” Grissom said. “It’s a quote from the King James Bible. Or part of one. Ezekiel, chapter sixteen, verse thirty-three.”

  Sara’s thoughts seemed to come further out of her mind’s own depths. Grissom had been hopeful they might. He’d wriggled the same kind of baited hook that might draw at them.

  “The entire verse is, ‘They give gifts to all whores, but thou givest thy gifts to all thy lovers, and hirest them, that they may come unto thee on every side for thy whoredom.’”

  Sara looked at him.

  “Eidetic memory in action,” she said.

  Grissom liked that. He had her back. “Ezekiel was one of the latter prophets of the Old Testament,” he said. “He lived during the Jewish diaspora in Babylon, and that passage was from a reprimand to Hebrews who’d deviated from traditional practices. He was writing figuratively, comparing their cultural assimilation to an adulteress giving her affections to her lovers. And scolding them for it.”

  Silence. The car shuddered over a rough grade. Grissom grappled with the steering wheel as it tugged toward the nonexistent road shoulder.

  “So was Gloria calling Charlie or Darlene names?” Sara said

  “Good question. Maybe both.”

  Sara’s face was thoughtful. “When Charlie was upset, he used the pronoun she as a direct form of address to his mother. As if he were talking about a different person.”

  “I noticed that too,” Grissom said. “Gloria stuck with the same form of response. Used the word her, third person, referring to herself.”r />
  “It fits,” Sara mouthed quietly.

  “What does?”

  She looked out the windshield into the night.

  “When I was a kid, one of my foster homes was in Tulare County, California. A town called Higby,” she said. “You have some of the poorest communities in the country there. Farms that can’t compete on the market with growers in Peru. No jobs, illiteracy, disenfranchisement. And that leads to frustration, alcoholism, and abuse. It wasn’t a fun place, and I was glad I got pulled from it fast.”

  Grissom glanced at her briefly and drove on without comment.

  “I had a girlfriend in school. Her name was Britney. She had a single mom on welfare. It seemed to me that Britney always had a black eye or a split lip. Once she came to school with a broken arm.”

  “The teachers didn’t become suspicious?”

  “In those days, they’d say she was accident-prone. It made it easier on them,” Sara said. “Maybe things have changed nowadays, I don’t know. But I remember going to Britney’s house once. We were in her room playing, and her mother came stomping through the door. She was mad or drunk, probably both. And she just went off on Britney. Screaming at her. Throwing her toys around the room. I remember she slapped her across the face for no good reason. I didn’t know what to do and just found a corner to hide in and cried.” Sara closed her eyes. “Britney kept screaming. ‘She’s hurting me, she’s hurting me.’ I didn’t know who she was talking about. At first, I thought maybe she was blaming me for something so her mother would stop wailing on her. And then I realized she wasn’t talking about me at all.”

  Grissom considered that a second. “I pick up the psychological journals sometimes,” he said.