by Donn Cortez
“The nerve gas you stole isn’t lethal, John. It temporarily affects people’s minds, but it doesn’t kill.”
“I kept the canister with me. Theria said whatever killed me still had power, even here. So I used it on the demons and we escaped.”
“Tell me about Theria.”
“Theria just wanted to rest. No more demons poking and prodding her, no more pointless tests, no more questions. I knew they’d never leave her alone, so I took her with me.”
Ray nodded. “You were just trying to help her.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Bannister turned his head to look at Ray. He studied Ray for a moment but said nothing.
“She thought she was dead. If you both believed that, what was the point?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why? Because I’m supposedly a demon?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“Try me.”
Bannister dropped his gaze back to the table. Ray waited; he could tell the man was mulling it over. At last, Bannister spoke. “It’s not possible to lose everything. No matter how much gets taken away from you, you still have something left. That’s the cruel part.
“Dying wasn’t what I expected. It happened by inches. That day I woke up and everything was different—well, it took me a long time to realize that. Most things still seemed the same, only. . . flatter. Grayer. That’s because none of them were real anymore, and I hadn’t figured that out yet. But bit by bit, I started to see what they really were. Ugly, decaying, false. It wasn’t like I had died, more like the whole world had died and the corpse was beginning to rot.”
“Did that include other people around you?”
“There weren’t any. Just empty husks. Pretending to be alive. But I didn’t figure that out until I met Theria.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That she knew she was dead. That she knew all of us were. And suddenly, everything made sense.” Bannister paused. “The ones who kept us locked up didn’t like that. The dead aren’t supposed to know what they are; that’s part of the horror. Once you know, there’s nothing else they can do to you, nothing else they can take away. That’s what Theria told me—but she was wrong.”
“Because they took her away.”
“Yes. And that’s when I decided I had one last thing to do. Not for myself, but for Theria. And that’s just what I did.”
“What did you do, John?”
“I kept her safe.”
Ray chose his next words carefully. “There was blood on your shirt when you were picked up, John.”
“You want me to admit to something, is that it? Okay. I did it.”
Ray felt something cold in the pit of his stomach. “I need more than that, John.”
“The blood. It’s not mine. I fought someone—something. One of the demons. I suppose he wants his payback, right? Go ahead, bring him in. I don’t care.”
“Where did this happen, John?”
“Some kind of Arabian desert wasteland—what does it matter?”
A casino with a Middle Eastern theme, perhaps? He’d have to check with any that might fit the description. “Was Theria hurt in the fight?”
This time there was no reply, no matter how long Ray waited. John Bannister, it seemed, had nothing else to say.
But the evidence did.
11
SARA SIDLE KNEW THAT not all cases were solved in the lab. The certainty of physical evidence was one of the factors that had attracted her to forensics work, but she was self-aware enough to recognize that this was personal bias; no matter how messy or imprecise, cases were ultimately about people and their choices. She tried to remind herself of that from time to time, when the temptation simply to concentrate on the science and ignore the human factor crept in.
Jim Brass helped her do that. You could always count on Brass to provide a pithy viewpoint on humanity, one that usually made Sara grin.
But not always—sometimes he was the bearer of bad tidings. “Sorry,” Brass said. He reached across his desk and handed her the report. “Credit card was a fake. Hotels have been having problems with a ring cranking out phony plastic here in town.”
She took the report and studied it with a frown. “Thanks, I guess.”
She started to rise from her seat, but Brass waved her back down. “Hang on there, Speedy Gonzales. I might have something for you anyway.”
She settled back down. “Oh? Like what?”
“Like I might have an unofficial lead to where said plastic was coming from.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Unofficial?”
“Well. . . more like a hunch. Nobody’s been able to pin down a source for this particular outbreak of credit-card-itis, but a friend of mine in Jersey told me something the last time we talked. The boys in Brighton Beach have apparently been pushing into this market pretty hard lately.”
“Brighton Beach? You’re talking about the Russian mob?”
“The so-called Red Mafiya, yeah. That’s why I called you in here to talk instead of just dropping this on your desk.”
“Oh? Worried I might end up in a shallow grave with a hammer and sickle in my back?”
“That’s communism, not crime. I just wanted to give you a quick rundown on the players in town so you’re prepared for what you might encounter. If you’ve got a minute, I mean.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay. First up is Grigori Dyalov—he’s the big cheese, Der Kommissar, the local Stalin. Reports directly to Little Odessa. He’s into prostitution, money laundering, bootleg DVDs, anything that’ll turn a profit. Rumor has it he’s ex-KGB, but that’s not exactly rare with these guys. He’s been around awhile, dozen years or so. Real hard case.”
“Ever been busted?”
“Not in Nevada. He keeps enough layers between himself and his boys that nothing sticks to him. His number one guy is Boris Svenko, a Chechen with a nasty reputation. You get anywhere near him, be careful. He’s got about as much respect for a badge as a Kalashnikov does for a bull’s-eye.”
“Got it. Anyone else?”
Brass pushed a sheet of paper at her. “Here. I made a list, but it reads like the cast of War and Peace. I can’t pronounce half the names, so I won’t try. You’ll do better with a hard copy for reference than trying to memorize it all.”
She picked up the list and scanned it. “Thanks.”
“No problem. You got any questions, let me know.”
Greg walked into the DNA lab and found Wendy Simms talking to Henry Andrews, the tox specialist.
“So what you’re saying,” said Wendy, “is that, essentially, everything is poisonous.”
Henry, a somewhat meek-looking man in his twenties, said, “No. What I’m saying is that, potentially, almost any kind of food could be poisonous.”
“Well, sure—botulism.”
“I don’t mean food that’s spoiled or been laced with something. I just mean something that you were planning on eating. Meat, vegetables, whatever.”
“So my honey-garlic chicken wings—”
Henry nodded rapidly. “Mountain laurel. Chickens that eat it don’t die, but their meat becomes poisonous. Bees that collect nectar from its flowers—or from azaleas, oleander, or rhododendrons, for that matter—produce poisonous honey.”
“An order of French fries?”
“Unripened potato sprouts contain Solarum tuberoscum. Related to deadly nightshade.”
“A nice salad?”
Henry shook his head. “Don’t get me started on greens. Monkshood, fool’s parsley, hemlock . . .”
“Uh. . . French onion soup?”
“That’s the stuff with the croutons on top, right? Well, right off the bat, you’ve got potential contamination of the bread from ergot or corn cockle. And do you have any idea how many lethal plants are mistaken for onions? Meadow saffron, black snake root—and if the cows that produced the milk the cheese was made from were grazing anyw
here near white sanicle, forget it.”
Wendy sighed. “Great. You know what, I’ll just give up eating as a bad habit.”
“There’s always pie,” said Greg.
“Pie?” said Henry. “Are you insane?” He shook his head as he walked away, muttering under his breath about elderberries.
“Ohhh-kay,” said Greg. “Sorry to interrupt what seemed like a fascinating discussion, but I was wondering—”
“About your DNA results, right?” said Wendy. “From that security guard uniform?”
“Yeah. I already know the blood is from a pig, not a person, so don’t worry about that. I’m more interested in the epithelials.”
Wendy sorted through a pile of papers in front of her on the counter and pulled out a sheet. “Yeah, I’ve got it right here. Already ran it through CODIS and didn’t get any hits, but you might find it useful just the same.” She handed him the sheet.
Greg’s eyebrows went up as he read. “Huh. Our guard was disguised in more ways than one.”
“Yes, she was,” said Wendy.
Nick, Sara, and Greg sat in the break room and discussed the case over lunch.
“Okay,” said Nick. “Here’s what I’ve got so far. On the bear front, I went out to the ranch where they live and talked to the woman who runs the place, the handler in charge of the bear that supposedly attacked, and the owner of the ranch. I also brought in the vet who looks after the animals.” He shook his head. “Somebody’s lying to me. The vet seems clueless about bears in general, the bear that attacked may have been switched with another one—they claim it was an accident, but I’m not convinced—and all of the physical evidence of the attack was removed from the animal in question and destroyed.”
“How about the dirigible?” asked Sara.
Nick took a swallow of his milkshake before answering. “Going to see Hodges after lunch for results from the mass spec. Archie says the remote we found in the pool couldn’t have been used to control it—too unsophisticated. He thinks it was just a simple activation trigger.”
“Like maybe setting off a firebomb?” suggested Greg.
“But why have that be a separate remote?” asked Sara.
“Yeah, it’s messed up,” said Nick. “How about you guys?”
“We found toeprints on the outside of windows within swinging range of a fire hose dangled from the roof,” said Greg. “Pretty small prints—could be a woman. They led us to a hotel room, where I pulled another fire-hose fiber off the window frame.”
Sara nodded. “We’ve also got some unidentified white powder from the room and evidence that something heavy rested on the carpet. Wendy’s still running the DNA from the bandages we found in the penthouse.”
“But we do have results from the bloody clothing,” said Greg. “The blood might not have been real—well, not real human, anyway—but the epithelials from the uniform were. Our mysterious missing rent-a-cop is also a she.”
“Huh,” said Sara. “So we’ve got two unidentified women, and a plus-size guy on wheels wrapped to go.”
Nick put down his burger and leaned back in his chair. “We’ve also got a phony clown in the air, a staged bear attack in an elevator, and a barefoot acrobat swinging from the top of a twenty-story building. Is anybody else seeing a pattern here?”
“Sounds like the circus is in town,” said Sara.
“This is Vegas,” said Greg. “The circus is always in town. The real question is, which one?”
Nick frowned. “Well, I’ve been running into an awful lot of Russian names so far—the people who run the ranch have family connections to the Moscow State Circus.”
Sara glanced at him. “Really? The hotel room was booked with a fake credit card, and Brass just told me the Russian mob in Vegas is probably involved in cranking out phony plastic.”
“Russian circus, Russian crooks, Russian bears,” said Greg. “There go all my Yogi and Boo-Boo jokes.”
“There’s a Russian circus performing at the Caribbean,” said Nick. “I think I’ll go have a little talk with them.”
“Let us know what you find out,” said Sara.
“Will do.”
12
CATHERINE STUDIED THE CLOTHING and other items laid out before her on the light table. They were everything John Bannister was wearing or carrying when he was picked up.
She catalogued each mentally. One short-sleeved shirt, bloodstained. One pair of blue jeans. One pair of socks, white. One pair of sneakers, white. One pair of boxers. One length of white cloth, tied in a loop. One wallet. Seventeen dollars and seventy-three cents in cash.
“Guess hell doesn’t have much of an economy,” she murmured. She clipped a tiny amount of bloodstained cloth from the shirt.
She examined the loop of cloth next. Hospital linen, most likely from the ripped sheet she’d found in one of the rooms. She pulled out the evidence bag and compared the two pieces side-by-side; they matched.
She opened the wallet and looked through it. Driver’s license, VA card, a few credit cards. An inkjet-printed picture, folded in four, of a smiling John Bannister in full combat gear posing with his unit beside a dusty armored vehicle. Nothing that gave any clue to where he and Theria Kostapolis had gone, what they’d done, or where she was now.
She examined the shoes next. They were cheap but almost new, with virtually no wear on them. The underside of one shoe had a bit of shiny material stuck in the tread. She pulled it out with a pair of tweezers and studied it: gold foil. She held it up to her nose and sniffed.
Chocolate.
She turned her head as Ray Langston walked in. “I just finished talking to John Bannister. He’s still convinced this is some version of the underworld, making the officers who picked him up—and, by extension, you and me—demons. He wouldn’t talk about the whereabouts of Theria, but I did get him to discuss the situation in more general terms.”
Catherine nodded. “Demons, huh? Well, I’ve been called worse. You ask him about the blood on his shirt?”
“I did. Apparently, he was in an altercation of some sort. The only description he gave of the location was someplace vaguely Middle Eastern.”
“Plenty of casinos with a desert theme. Any other details?”
“He claims he’s being cheated by the devil.”
“Really? What did he do, buy a used car from him?”
“He didn’t give me any specifics, just implied there was some sort of agreement that was broken. I’m not sure what it means.” Ray scanned the items on the light table. “How about you? Find anything revealing?”
“Maybe.” She showed him the foil.
“Could be a candy wrapper from just about anywhere.”
“I don’t think so. Most commercial chocolate bars use foil with a backing of thin waxed paper, but this is just foil. The Orpheus Casino gives out chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil; you see the wrappers out front all the time.”
“It’s a start.”
The Orpheus Casino featured an Arthurian theme, lots of stone parapets, suits of medieval armor, and serving wenches in revealing bodices. The fountain out front had a marble statue of the Lady of the Lake, holding aloft an Excalibur that seemed to be made of running water; it was a clever illusion, utilizing a transparent sword blade and carefully crafted fluid dynamics.
When Catherine and Ray entered, a woman dressed in Renaissance Fair finery tried to hand them each a gold coin. Catherine accepted hers, then grabbed Ray’s when he said, “No thanks.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to accept gifts,” he said.
“Turn down chocolate? Yeah, right.” Catherine glanced around. “I’m not sure why Bannister would go into a casino in the first place. From what he said to you, he was looking for a place for Theria to rest. Casinos are designed to inspire everything but.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his idea. Let’s take a walk.”
They strolled through the casino, keeping their eyes open.
“If they were here, I wonder what they saw,�
�� said Catherine. “I mean, Vegas is surreal at the best of times. I can’t imagine what it would be like while being surrounded by constant three-dimensional hallucinations.”
“Well, the type of dementia Bannister has produces hallucinatory images that aren’t necessarily disturbing, and the BZ tends to generate imagery that’s mundane as opposed to bizarre.”
“How does that translate into being trapped in hell?”
“The problem is the folie a deux. Theria’s condition makes her see the world through a much darker lens, and Bannister’s psychosis has synchronized itself with it. The BZ is exaggerating this effect, amplifying what’s already a powerful feedback loop.”
“That almost sounds like telepathy.”
Ray smiled and shook his head. “No. They’ve just become extremely attuned to each other’s emotional cues, both subconscious and overt—body language, word choice, intonation. They’re sharing a singular worldview, not a single mind.”
“Too bad that view is terrible. Otherwise, it’s almost romantic.”
“It’s obvious John Bannister cares deeply about this woman. The problem lies in his conviction that she’s already dead; it means that ultimately, by trying to help her, he’s going to do her harm.”
“We always hurt the ones we love, Professor. That one holds true no matter where you are.”
When a complete circuit of the place produced no results, Catherine headed for the security offices to review surveillance footage, while Ray decided to go back and talk further with Bannister. “I’d like to try something,” he told Catherine. “It may not work, but if it does, Bannister might be more forthcoming.”
“Good luck.” She took another glance around the casino. “Even if they were here, footage alone won’t tell us what they experienced. In this case, the camera might not lie, but it won’t be giving us the whole picture, either.”
“We’ll figure it out. The first step toward an accurate diagnosis is to gather as much information as possible, even if it doesn’t make immediate sense.”
