Binding Ties ccsi-6

by Max Allan Collins

  The woman sucked in breath through her nostrils, and tried to stand firm as the authority figure in charge of this desk; but in three seconds, she had withered under Catherine's stare. "No. No, that wasn't him."

  The CSIs moved away from the woman's post.

  "Outside," Catherine said to Nick, with a gesture toward the door. "If Obi-Wan's warning someone in here, we might have an early checkout, out a window."

  "What about those stairs?"

  "Mine."

  Nick's expression said he didn't love her plan; but she was the senior officer, and he tore through the lobby and out the door.

  Catherine ran to the stairs, taking them two at a time, easing her head out when she got to the second floor.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but an open door about halfway down, on the left, the side of the hall whose rooms might have windows facing the back alley. Assuming this was the right room, Catherine hoped Nick was on his way around. Tough for one man to cover all four sides of a building….

  She let the heel of her hand slide down until it touched the butt of her pistol, reassuring herself of its presence. Then she started down the corridor, the pungent smell of disinfectant tweaking her nostrils.

  At the open door she ducked in and found the silver-haired near-codger from the lobby hovering over another man, who lay in the cot along the lefthand wall in the cell-like room. A small, square, endlessly scuffed wooden table and two mismatched kitchen chairs were by the only window, and a squat bureau took up a fair piece of the righthand wall.

  To the man in the bed, the silver-haired man said, "You sure this is what you want, Dal?"

  The bedridden man must have nodded, because the silver-haired man shrugged and said, "Your call, buddy," and stepped aside.

  That gave Catherine her first look at the sunken-cheeked scarecrow on the cot. His hair was graying too, if less rapidly than his friend, and he had shaved recently, maybe even yesterday. But his skin was as gray as his hair, and his eyes were a plea for mercy-not from Catherine, but God.

  "Dallas Hanson?" Catherine asked.

  The man on the cot nodded. It took some effort.

  "I'd like to talk to you."

  He had sunken cheeks, high cheekbones, and a prominent forehead that made his narrow face look like a skewed metal framework full of sharp angles with skin thinly stretched over it.

  "Pretty woman like you?" he said pleasantly, his voice surprisingly deep. "Sure. Don't get much company of your…caliber."

  He looked small and bony beneath the blankets.

  She got her radio out and pushed a button and said, "Nick, our man's not running. We're in…" She looked at the door, which was white and recently painted; a plastic card in a slot said: 218. She told Nick.

  Nick said he was on his way.

  She glanced at the silver-haired man, who looked embarrassed. "Gonna help your friend take the back way out, huh?"

  "No law against stopping by a buddy's room," the old guy said, his voice midrange, quavery. "Or is this a fascist state already?"

  "This is a murder investigation. Do you really think standing in its way is a good idea?"

  He didn't answer, just put his head down, eyes not meeting hers, and started for the door.

  As he passed, Catherine said, "A lot of people could have gotten hurt because of you."

  The man paused, then looked at her; his eyes were bloodshot, rheumy. "Everybody in here, lady, is hurting already. You got a badge and real nice clothes. We got each other."

  Catherine began to say something, then thought about what the woman at the desk had said about the privacy and dignity of the "guests"; and said nothing as the old boy, chin on his chest, walked out.

  "Don't blame Bruce," Hanson said. He had worked himself up on his elbows, and he had a yellow smile going. "Most of us have had trouble with the law at one time or another-we kind of watch out for each other."

  "I understand."

  "Do you?"

  "Yeah. I do. Would you like to sit up?"

  "I would love to sit up." He tossed off the blankets and Catherine got a good look at the blackened toothpicks he called legs. "But the cancer makes it pretty much impossible…without help."

  She was giving it to him when Nick entered and got his own good look at their suspect.

  "This is my associate," Catherine said, showing her credentials to Hanson, now propped up with a pillow behind him. "I'm Catherine and this is Nick. We're from the Crime Lab. We wanted to talk to you about-"

  "CASt," Hanson said.

  Nick frowned, hands on hips. "You know that?"

  "Cancer's eatin' my body, boy, not my brain. I can still read the papers, and we got a couple TVs in this Jesus factory. Now that someone's resurrected ol' CASt, I figured Sin City's finest would come sniffin' around again."

  "When was the last time you were out of that bed?" Catherine asked.

  "Other than meals and to go to the john? I think it was my last chemo treatment. Three weeks ago maybe?"

  "How do you get to chemo?"

  "Lori, she's the girl downstairs, she took me. Look, I haven't been able to do anything on my own for six months, and I've got another six left if I'm lucky…make that unlucky. I don't have the time or energy for an ambitious hobby like killin' people."

  Catherine nodded. "What about eleven years ago?"

  Hanson shook his head. "I was innocent then, and I'm innocent now. That cop, Champlain, he was after my ass. He didn't have anything to go on except some circumstantial crap. I didn't kill Todd Henry or any of the others. That hardass cop just needed to nail somebody, probably gettin' pressure from upstairs, and he figured he'd serve me up."

  Nick said, "Mr. Hanson, if you read the papers, you know there's speculation that the new CASt killings are the work of a copycat."

  "Oh. So I'm still a suspect in the original crimes? What a crock!"

  Holding up a buccal swab, Catherine asked, "How would you like not to be?"

  Looking skeptically at the swab, Hanson asked, "How?"

  "DNA."

  "You want to clear me or set me up?" Hanson asked, only a trace of sarcasm in his voice.

  She found his eyes and held them with hers. "I don't want to do anything but find the truth."

  "I don't know…"

  Nick said, "Respectfully, sir, let me point out that with what you're facing, with this illness? You might want to consider cooperating."

  "Why in hell's that?"

  Nick shrugged. "Right now your legacy, your place in posterity, is as a suspected infamous serial killer. You don't have to leave that blot on your memory."

  Hanson grunted, "Huh. You make a hell of a point, son. I got a couple kids out there, somewhere. Maybe even some grandkids. I don't take pleasure in my descendants thinkin' I was some kinda homicidal lunatic. Okay, sold-what do I gotta do?"

  "Open your mouth," she said. "You don't even have to say, 'Aaah….' "

  Gil Grissom was still at his desk when his cell phone rang. Picking it up, he pressed the talk button. "Grissom."

  "It's me," Brass said.

  "Where?"

  "Headed back to the city."

  Grissom could hear the car's engine. No siren, but Brass was clearly not taking his time. "Learn anything?"

  "Good chance Perry Bell's our copycat."

  "Tell me why."

  Brass outlined his theory, including a recap of the Orloff interview; it took a while.

  "That all sounds good," Grissom said. "But where's the evidence?"

  Testily, Brass said, "I thought it was your job to find the evidence."

  "No-that would be your job. I process evidence."

  "…Sorry."

  "No problem. I located Bell's daughter."

  "Good! See, you do find evidence!"

  "In a way. I certainly got information."

  Grissom filled Brass in on what Patty Lang had told him.

  Brass asked, "Do we have enough for a search warrant?"

  "Borderline. But I'll work
on tracking down Bell before you get back."

  "Bless your little evidence-processing heart."

  "I'll see where everybody else is, right now. I've got Warrick and Sara working that Banner package, Catherine and Nick out in the field, chasing the original suspects. By the time you get here, we might be at warrant stage."

  Grissom spent the next two hours searching for Perry Bell.

  He called the reporter's friends and coworkers, put out an APB for the man's car, and sent a squad car to Bell's home. A uniformed officer went to Bell's house, got no answer at the front or back door, found curtains drawn on windows, looked in a garage window to see Bell's vehicle gone, and-on reporting back to Grissom-got posted out front till further notice.

  No probable cause to break in. If Bell was inside, they would have to catch him when he came out. Anyway, if he was indeed the copycat, the threat of him having a potential victim in there was minimal-the copycat had struck twice so far, but (staying to the original CASt) always in the victim's home.

  If Bell was outside the house, that was a different problem entirely. The reporter could be anywhere, doing anything, and unless they caught a break, Grissom and his crew wouldn't have any idea of what Bell had been up to until…well, possibly until the CSIs were summoned to the next crime scene.

  A third troubling possibility occurred to Grissom: Bell might be innocent. The crime-beat columnist could, as the man had told his daughter, be out working on a big story; and that story wasn't even necessarily the CASt one. But if so, where was the reporter? Why couldn't anyone find him?

  Deciding he'd done all the detective work possible from his desk, Grissom got out of there, and his first stop was the morgue, where Dr. Robbins was finishing up the autopsy on Enrique Diaz.

  With a mildly puzzled frown, Grissom asked, "Two days to get to Diaz?"

  Robbins shot a barely patient look toward Grissom, then continued his work. "I know you're focused on this serial killer, but in those two days, besides the late Mr. Diaz, nearly two dozen people have died under questionable circumstances in this city."

  Grissom hadn't meant to antagonize Robbins; maybe this was one of those "people skills" instances everybody was always after him about.

  The CSI asked, "Find anything?"

  "Very preliminary. Diaz died of strangulation caused by the ligature you found around his neck. Everything else matches the Sandred murder…no carpet burns this time. Otherwise, identical."

  "Nothing new?"

  Robbins picked up a small envelope from a metal table beside the slab. "I did find these."

  Grissom accepted the envelope and carefully lifted the flap. Strands of something dark lay in the bottom of the envelope, but he couldn't quite make them out. Closing the envelope, he asked, "And what do we have here?"

  "Synthetic hairs…my guess? They're from a bad hairpiece."

  "Bad?"

  "Cheap…but Greg will tell you more than I can."

  Interest piqued, Grissom asked, "Synthetic hairs from the killer?"

  "Could be," Robbins said.

  "You have doubts?"

  The coroner shrugged. "Well, more like misgivings."

  Grissom said, "Locard says two objects cannot come into contact without some kind of exchange."

  Robbins stepped away from the body and looked around the morgue, as if unsure he and Grissom were alone-perhaps a corpse or two might be faking it.

  "Gil, you and I both know Perry Bell. He's a nice enough guy; probably the most honest, helpful guy in the media, where our work is concerned. Certainly harmless."

  "No argument."

  "Synthetic hairs are going to send you in his direction as a suspect."

  "Yes. We're already looking in that direction, Al."

  Robbins was shaking his head. "Staging serial murders, to help himself make a career comeback? That would take a kind of genius, and a sociopath's world view. Gil, honestly-does that sound like Perry Bell to you?"

  "No, it doesn't. But I remain a student of human psychology, not an expert. And right now, my concern is whether the evidence points to Perry Bell. Which it does. My next concern is to make sure that no one else is put in danger."

  Robbins rested a hand on Grissom's arm. "I understand. But don't just listen to your head on this one. You have a good heart, Gil. Don't be afraid to listen to it, too."

  "That's…generous, Al. But I listen to the evidence."

  "No. You interpret it. And in any case where crimes are being staged, the evidence is as suspect as the suspects."

  Grissom thought about that momentarily, and said, "I don't know about listening to my heart, Doc-but I won't ever make the mistake of not listening to you."

  The two men exchanged smiles, and got back to their respective work.

  The circumstantial evidence against Perry Bell was growing with every passing second, and Grissom felt he had enough to go to a judge for a search warrant. Though he couldn't directly tie Bell to the murders, what he did have pointed to the writer: synthetic hair that he might be able to match to Bell's hairpiece; the magnetic keycard from the Banner; and the semen that came from a "collector" whose description matched Bell's. Add to that the reporter being out of touch with friends, coworkers, and family since before the second murder, with no alibi for the first one, and the makings for a warrant were there.

  No, not one of these things fell under the heading of compelling evidence; but as a whole they were puzzle pieces that added up to an image that, so far, resembled Perry Bell.

  Judge Goshen's courtroom was busy, as usual, and, as usual, Goshen had to be completely convinced before he granted the warrant. The good thing about a warrant from this judge was that it would hold up under inspection if/when a case came to trial; the bad thing was, you damn near had to argue the case as if at trial….

  Plus, like everybody else in the criminal justice system around town, Judge Goshen knew and liked Perry Bell. In the end, however, Grissom prevailed, although it took the CSI every bit of two hours to come out of the judge's chambers with that precious sheaf of papers.

  Once outside, he called Brass's cell. "You close?"

  "Yeah. What have you got?"

  Grissom filled Brass in, and the two agreed to meet at Bell's home in half an hour. The CSI wanted to take Warrick and Sara with him, so he drove from the courthouse back to headquarters where he found the pair busy going over the CASt package they had gotten from the Banner earlier. At one table, Sara hunkered over the box itself while across the way, Warrick bent over the mummified finger.

  Grissom approached Warrick first. "Point to anything?"

  Granting his boss a smile, Warrick said, "Anywhere I want, actually…."

  And held up his right hand to reveal the skin of the finger sheathing his own latex glove-encased forefinger. "I rehydrated the skin as much as I could, removed it from the digit, and then slipped it on."

  "And got a nice clear print, I bet."

  "Oh yeah. The finger belongs to the last original victim, Vincent Drake, the supervisor in the city garage."

  Grissom felt his stomach tighten. "So the message is from CASt."

  "Hard to read it any other way."

  "Our first killer is still out there somewhere. Which means we need to find him before the copycat goads the real CASt into trying to compete. Stay with it and call me if you get anything else."

  Warrick nodded grimly.

  Grissom went to Sara's side, and she needed no prompt to report.

  "The box is a generic white gift box available at any drugstore or gift shop or half a dozen other outlets in your average mall. Ditto on the ribbon-generic red, available anywhere. Envelope is common, but it's being fumed for prints now."

  "What about the fabric?"

  "Still working on that."

  Grissom nodded. "Sara, put that on hold. Grab your kit-I need you with me."

  She flashed her a grin; she loved the lab, but the field was her passion. "Where to?"

  "We're serving a search warrant at Pe
rry Bell's house."

  Her smile faded. "Almost hope we're wrong about him. Almost kinda like the guy. Feel sorry for him."

  "If he's our killer," Grissom said, "save the empathy for the victims."

  Bell had a nice two-story stucco home on Beacon Point, just off Gilmore and not far from El Capitan Way. The Durango Hills Golf Course, a favorite of Bell's, sprawled just a few blocks south.

  Winding up with the house when his wife moved to LA after their divorce, Bell had kept the place in good repair, removing the lawn in favor of the more drought-friendly Xeriscape desert plants that were replacing grass in many Vegas middle-class neighborhoods.

  The squad car remained posted out front, the uniformed officer leaning against the front fender, his back to the house as he smoked a cigarette. When the Tahoe parked behind him, the officer stubbed the butt out under his shoe and walked briskly up to the driver's side window.

  "House hasn't made a move," he said good-naturedly.

  Grissom recognized Carl Carrack from numerous crime scenes and knew the ten-year vet to be a sharp, good patrolman. Maybe thirty-five, Carrack stood just under six feet and carried a well-distributed two hundred pounds on a compact frame.

  "Anybody at all been around?" Grissom asked.

  "No neighbors, no salesmen, not even a paper boy."

  Grissom and Sara were still unloading when Brass's Taurus pulled up behind them.

  Brass and Damon joined them at the rear of the SUV.

  Brass looked toward the house. "Do we know if Bell is in there?"

  "Doesn't appear so. Carrack's been here for the last two hours, reports no movement."

  "And no word of Bell otherwise?"

  Grissom shook his head. "Nobody's radioed in to that effect."

  Damon asked, "What about the APB on his car?"

  "Nothing yet," Grissom said. "He may be holed up writing, inside, or at a motel on a bender or…Why don't we stop speculating and break in?"

  The front door was recessed, and hidden from the neighbors on the north by the protruding two-car garage, in the shadow of which Grissom pulled on latex gloves. So did Sara. The cops did not.

  Then-Brass at his side, Damon and Carrack behind them, Sara bringing up the rear-Grissom knocked on the green steel door.

  "You want to try the bell?" Damon asked.