Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  “Bedtime reading?”

  He didn’t smile. “There have been articles about the origins of terms of reference. They’re complex. But that sounds like a twisted sort of politeness in a dominant-submissive relationship. With associations of power and control for the person being addressed.”

  Sara nodded. “And who do you think does the controlling in the Belcher clan?” she asked.

  “She.”

  “Yeah.”

  Grissom was oblivious to rolling over a pothole. Sara braced herself by grabbing on to the top of the dash. A five count later, the patrol car behind them went banging over it.

  “Gloria’s very powerful in that family dynamic,” he said. “She won’t talk if we bring her in. As long as he’s under her influence, Charlie won’t, either. And if they don’t, we may never know what happened up at the Belcher quarry.”

  Sara took a moment to answer him. She appeared to be concentrating.

  “I have a hunch about Charlie,” she said.

  Grissom raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”

  “I’m not sure. A hunch is a hunch. It’s something about how he acted toward Darlene.”

  “Omnia vincit amor. She presents competition for Mother.”

  “Maybe.” Sara shrugged. “It might be what that whole whore of Babylon rant was about. Or part of it.”

  “Charlie would have to be removed from Gloria’s influence for us to get results,” Grissom said. “Talking to them separately wouldn’t be enough. She couldn’t find out about it.”

  “I know.”

  “You think that can be done?”

  Sara watched Grissom’s brights fan over the crumbled road.

  “While you were overseeing the evidence collection, I offered Charlie my business card,” she said. “I didn’t say anything…just held it out and let him choose whether to even acknowledge me.”

  The car veered a little. This time, it was Grissom’s fault. He’d let the wheel slip in his surprise. “And?” he said.

  Sara looked at him. “He took it right out of my hand and stuffed it into his pocket,” she said. As the car swayed again, she added. “Now, will you please pay attention to your driving before those uniforms pull us over?”

  Warrick was snoozing in the break room when the hubbub started.

  His exhausting day had begun with an early meeting of the noggins with Catherine about the Nevada Rose probe. It had been followed by Grissom’s decree that he assist Greg Sanders with the flood-pattern CG animation in the other Nevada Rose investigation, and later on brought him and Cath to the condominium tower where Eleanor Samuels secretly resided, and where the zillionaire celebs buying up its lavish high-rise apartments like little red Monopoly hotels stacked one atop the other had taken to calling them sky mansions to impress one another and the plebs populating the world below—though Warrick could imagine his Tonte Mavis in New Orleans simply praising them as “bully ol’ places.” After all that, plus some odds and ends at headquarters to take him through to the early evening, he had found himself stumbling around cross-eyed and dead on his feet.

  Retreating to the break room for what he’d figured would be a brief intermission, he’d gotten a ham and American cheese on white and a Gatorade from the vending machines, plopped into a chair, and conked out before he’d even flicked the cap off his drink, let alone peeled the cellophane wrap from his sandwich.

  This was right around five-thirty in the evening.

  Forty minutes later, Catherine stopped into the room to get a coffee and screw around with Grissom’s chess pieces, to find Warrick snoring away with the unopened Gatorade bottle still tucked between his thighs. His sandwich having long since been snatched from his lap by some stealthy food thief, she knew nothing of it. But the sight of him with his head lolling against the back of his chair, his eyes twitching under their lids in deep REM sleep, and his mouth agape had tweaked a merciful impulse in her, and she had quietly left the room, figuring she would give him another half hour or so to rest up.

  Not five minutes passed before the outbreak of commotion snapped Warrick from his deep slumber to full, wide-eyed awareness without an instant’s transition, causing him to spring from his chair with a startled bound that sent his beverage flying from his lap to the floor, where the bottle would roll under the seat to lie forgotten until a member of the office cleaning staff found it and took it home to her kid, who was heavy into Rollerblading and sports drinks.

  Rushing across the room to its entryway now, blinking the glueyness from his eyes, Warrick stuck his head out to see what was going on.

  What met his eyes were at least twenty uniformed cops and detectives filling the corridor wall to wall, the group hustling in his direction like a single multiheaded organism. As they came closer, he recognized Vince Millar, Fireball Baker’s attorney, hustling along in the middle of the throng, his expression clearly one of intense dismay and agitation.

  A heartbeat later, Warrick saw what he’d already assumed must be the reason for the lawyer’s unhappiness to his immediate right.

  Dressed in a plain blue sweatshirt and brown dress jeans, Fireball Baker was walking briskly toward the examination rooms up the hallway. As Warrick spotted him, it looked as if Baker saw him, too, something that was confirmed moments later when the baseball player halted in midstride to face him outside the break-room door, his mixed escort pulling a short stop around him.

  The two men looked at each other, Warrick just inside the doorway, Baker just outside.

  “Well,” Baker said, “I’m here.”

  Warrick looked at him and nodded.

  “Dave tells me I don’t know what I’m getting myself into,” Baker said. “Would’ve liked it better if I stayed home tonight, where those photogs camped out in your parking lot couldn’t mob me. I told Dave I didn’t do anything to Rose. And that I’d be okay.”

  Warrick groped for a response. When he finally gave one, it wasn’t anything he’d have expected. “How’d your tournament do the other day?” he said.

  “Took in over three million dollars for the kids,” Baker said. “We were setting our goal at two.”

  “That’s great,” Warrick said. “Congrats.”

  Baker looked at him. “I figure you were my man,” he said. “Might’ve brought me luck after all. It helped me decide to listen to your advice and take those tests.”

  Warrick once again found himself at a loss for words. Meanwhile, the crowd was stirring restlessly around Baker, and he seemed well aware of it.

  “Well,” he said, “catch you later.”

  “Later.”

  Baker took a step along, hesitated, looked back at Warrick. “Still my man?” he said.

  Warrick looked at him steadily and thought back to something Baker had said to him at the golf course. “I’m hoping you won’t need to depend on that,” he said.

  The ballplayer grinned and turned away.

  Hanging back in the entry for a while, Warrick watched Baker and the mob around him continue to push on up the hall.

  After leaving Warrick dead to the world in the break room, Catherine had brought her coffee back to her office, taken off the lid, and decided to make a phone call before she drank it.

  She had been trying to get hold of Dr. Layton Samuels ever since she and Warrick had left the Vista Tower condos, which was now several hours ago. But his office receptionist had said he’d gone home after a surgery that evening—his residence was in the same Seven Hills neighborhood as the Cosmetic Surgery Center and Anti-aging Spa—and Catherine’s multiple attempts to reach him there also had failed, yielding one-way conversations with an answering machine.

  Still, CSI-3 Willows was nothing if not stubbornly persistent and was hopeful she could get hold of the good doctor and give him a follow-up visit.

  She reached for the phone, punched in his number for the third or fourth time, and listened. Ring, ring, ring, and his outgoing message came on again.

  Catherine frowned. Okay, she thought. Two ca
n play the same game. I’ll keep listening to your recorded voice, you’ll listen to mine. And we’ll see which one of us cracks first.

  “This is Captain Willows from the criminalistics lab again,” she said into the phone. “Same message as before. It’s absolutely urgent that you return my call as soon as possible. You can contact me at my office at any time—I’ll arrange to be paged if I’m out. Thank you very much, Dr. Samuels. I do look forward to hearing from you.”

  And that was that.

  Eyeing her coffee, Catherine was about to rack the receiver when a couple of things happened to her almost simultaneously.

  The first was hearing a sudden clamor out in the hallway.

  The second was looking toward her open door to see David Phillips, the assistant coroner, framed within it, looking back at her with clipboard in hand.

  “Dave,” she said. What brings you to the lab?”

  “A couple of things about the Nevada Rose Demille inquiry,” he said. “I’m meeting one of the techs on my break and figured I would stop by our office rather than call. Little did I know about the commotion.”

  Catherine peered past him. “You have any idea what’s going on out there—”

  “Not what, but ‘who’,” he said, flinging an imaginary pitch. “The baseball guy’s come in for an examination.”

  “Mark Baker.”

  Phillips nodded. “I figured you’d know who I meant when I showed you my four-seamer. As opposed to breaking balls, for instance.”

  Catherine refrained from making a comment. She was thinking Warrick had obviously done a better job of swaying Fireball to cooperate than she had thus far of getting a lousy phone call returned. And she was still wondering about the noise outside.

  “Did Baker bring along his whole damn team?”

  Dave shrugged. “That pack of reporters in the parking lot tried to mob the guy. So a bunch of uniforms and detectives went out to rescue him.”

  Catherine looked at Phillips. Why was he standing there in her doorway, anyway?

  “So,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Couple things about the Nevada Rose Demille inquiry,” he said. “Got a minute?”

  She waved him in.

  “By the way, before we get to this,” he said, tapping his clipboard, “was that Dr. Layton Samuels I heard you talking to on the phone?”

  “Actually, I was having a limited communication with his answering machine,” she said. And then realized she’d never told him about Samuels’s connection to Rose Demille. Or, in fact, discussed the case with him at all since the day the body was discovered. “Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing having to do with anything,” he said. “Well, you know, I was curious. On a personal level. Considering his reputation.”

  Catherine gave him a bemused glance. “You thinking of having plastic surgery?” she said.

  He shook his head. “Why mess with perfection? My wife says I’m an Adonis.”

  “And who would ever doubt her?”

  “Ha-ha,” he said. “But you know, seriously, Samuels is a pioneer. Going back.”

  Catherine looked at him. “How far?”

  “Like back to when I was a kid,” he said. “He was the first plastic surgeon to use the drug succinylcholine.”

  Catherine dug in her memory for knowledge of it. Found zip. Well, except…“Choline’s what they put in vitamin B complex, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Right,” Dave said. “It affects the neurotransmitters. On its own, it helps with memory, cognition, even heart function. But succinylcholine’s a different animal.”

  “That being?”

  “Synthetic curare,” Phillips said. “Curare really being a kind of blanket name for a whole bunch of natural neuromuscular blocking agents. The thing about the drug is that it works fast. Back in the ’seventies, it had the shortest duration of all muscle relaxants. Doesn’t put patients out for too long, because it starts breaking down into its chemical ingredients once it’s in the system.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  “In plastic surgery,” Phillips said. “When they perform rhinoplasties—”

  “Nose jobs.”

  “Right, sorry for the medicalese. When you do a nose job, it’s desirable for a patient to remain semiconscious and recover quickly from anesthesia. There’s a lot of blood running down the throat, and it’s better to have the swallow reflex going so there’s less chance of choking.”

  Catherine thought about that a second. “Short version…what are the drug’s specific effects?”

  “Basically, it brings on short-term muscular paralysis,” Phillips said.

  “And the danger of overdose? If any?”

  “Well…I suppose because it relaxes the chest and abdominal muscles, the drug could impair respiration and heart activity, even lead to asphyxia—”

  He abruptly stopped talking, his mouth opening and closing as if he’d been suddenly rendered mute.

  Catherine looked at him, her mind racing. “What is it?” she said.

  “Catherine,” he said, “were you talking to Dr. Samuels in connection to the Nevada Rose case?”

  She nodded briskly in the affirmative.

  “Wow, jeez, “Dave said.

  “Wow, jeez what, for God’s sake?” she said. “Dave, will you quit keeping me in suspense?”

  He fingered the top sheet of paper on his clipboard again. “I was putting fresh toe tags on the body—”

  “Rose Demille’s?”

  “Right, Rose Demille…the first set of tags got smudged up during the initial autopsy, and I like to keep them legible.”

  “And?”

  “And I noticed tiny needle marks between the fourth and fifth toes of her left foot,” Phillips said.

  Catherine straightened in her chair. “You show them to Robbins?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “He told me to let you know about it,” Phillips said. “And said he was following through.”

  Catherine sat facing him, her thoughts still speeding along.

  “Say succinylcholine was injected into Rose Demille after she was tied up and gagged…”

  “It would have put her in an almost immediate state of muscular paralysis.”

  “And left her that way long enough for someone to have burked her?”

  “Definitely could have,” Phillips said. “And the thing is, you wouldn’t detect it with the usual toxicological batteries.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Like I said, it metabolizes at a rapid rate. Succinic acid and choline are chemicals normally found in the human body. That’s why you find them in all those natural vitamin supplements. The breakdown levels in the bloodstream were probably so unexceptional the tox lab didn’t chart them.”

  Catherine studied him carefully. “There’s a but,” she said. “Give it to me.”

  “If she was injected with succinylcholine and we conduct a fresh battery of tests on her brain, it’s likely its components will show higher-than-normal levels. Since the drug’s an alkaloid, it’s absorbed by neurotransmitters and builds up there.”

  All at once, Catherine found herself thinking about the death of Eleanor Samuels’s first husband.

  “Tell Robbins I’m looking into a connection between Samuels and Rose Demille,” she said. “And that we need to get those tests done right away.”

  Phillips nodded but didn’t move an inch from where he was standing in front of her desk.

  “Was there anything else?” She wished she could teleport him back to the morgue with a glance. The information he’d just reported was too damned important for her to want to lose a minute.

  Dave looked down at his clipboard. “Remember that empty pill organizer that was in Rose’s dresser drawer?”

  Catherine nodded.

  “We found minute traces of Verapamil and lithium in it,” Dave said. “That’s probably incidental, no big deal. My guess is Rose may have suffered from migraines at some poin
t. It’s a pretty common problem, and those drugs would be used in combination for first-line treatment.”

  “First line?” Catherine was unfamiliar with the term.

  “Depending on a patient’s responsiveness to migraine therapy, doctors go from first-line to second-line to third-line designations,” he said. “First-line works for most people with moderate occurrences. Lots of times, the condition clears up, and that’s that. But if you have to go third-line, it means the patient’s having a severe, persistent problem and that nothing else has helped.” He paused. “At that stage, you’d use stronger drugs…I’ve even heard of liquid cocaine nasal drops being used to ameliorate the pain in severe cases. But it’d be very rare.”

  Catherine was recalling Doc Robbins’s summary of the tox findings during the autopsy. “There were no traces of those substances—Verapamil and lithium—in Rose’s body,” she said.

  “Right.” Phillips nodded again. “So what’s in the pill dispenser’s probably incidental. The drugs didn’t contribute to her death.”

  “Thanks for the rundown, Adonis,” she said with a wink.

  Phillips gave a small, shy smile. “Some people around here think you’re quite an Aphrodite yourself,” he said, and spun around on his heels to exit the office hastily.

  9

  KYLE GIBBONS SAT in the antique wing chair with a cognac, using his remote to browse through the channels on the large flat-panel TV screen in front of him, trying to decide what would be the lesser of two horrible evils. He wasn’t much of a drinker—or a television watcher, come to think. He liked doing physical things, working up a healthy sweat. That was apart from what he did for a living, maybe the reason he’d taken a lifelong hobby and turned it into a profession. Having grown up in northern Massachusetts, where it was freezer-cold outside for half the year, too cold to do anything but stay cooped up indoors, he’d fallen in love with the warm climate here in Nevada.

  Even now, after dark, he would have rather been outdoors. In the pool or maybe on the jogging track or the lighted basketball court.

  It was what they would do together sometimes—or had done until recently—shooting hoops, going one-on-one. More times than not, Mark had him beat. What the hell, though. It didn’t matter what kind of shape he himself was in. He’d helped Mark these past few years, no doubt about it. Worked out a torturously extreme fitness routine that had enabled him to adjust to the wear and tear that came from pushing his body to the max and beyond for almost two decades.