Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  “I don’t want to investigate a single IP address,” Langston interrupted.

  Archie shrugged. “Still shouldn’t be too complicated. If you’re looking at multiple users, my guess is you’d just list each of them on your request. Or maybe you’d need separate requests. And separate subpoenas. I don’t know the legal formalities. Again, you might want to run next door—”

  “Flash Ink has thousands of registered members,” Langston broke in again. “I think the actual number it gives is ten thousand.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I don’t know how many need to be checked out,” Langston said. “It could be a dozen, twenty, five hundred… at this stage, the pool includes all of them.”

  “All?”

  “For now, yes.”

  Archie blinked. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’ve got no names to check out.”

  “Correct.”

  “No IP addresses.”

  “Also correct.”

  “Absolutely none?”

  “None.”

  “Then where are you going to start?”

  Langston looked at him and smiled. “Right here with you, Archie,” he said.

  “Starglow banquets,” the woman answered her phone. “This is Karen Esco.”

  Nick sat up behind his desk. It was a little past nine A.M. on Sunday, and his back felt tight and achy, a price he’d paid for having dozed off for several hours behind his desk. His stomach, meanwhile, wasn’t in much better shape and had been making strange burbling noises thanks to the greasy sausage omelet he’d ordered from the breakfast joint around the corner. But by the time Nick had decided to stop pulling up reports and other info about the Dumas case late Saturday night—or early that same morning, however you chose to slice it calendarwise—he hadn’t seen the point in going home just to crash for a while, jump out of bed, shower, and make a quick turnaround for the lab. Instead, he’d decided to save on time and gas and stay put in his office.

  “Ms. Esco, I’m Nick Stokes, a criminalist with the LVPD,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “Criminalist, ma’am.”

  “Isn’t that kind of like a police scientist?”

  “We have scientific backgrounds, yes.”

  “I saw a drama about it on television, and it seems fascinating. Though I wouldn’t know if it’s the same in reality.”

  “There’s never a dull moment,” Nick said. “Anyway, Ms. Esco—”

  “Karen, please.”

  “Karen…”

  “Oh, my dear!” she exclaimed with sudden concern.

  “Something wrong?” Nick asked.

  “That’s what I just wondered,” she said. “We haven’t had an incident of some sort at the Starglow, have we?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So nothing’s gone on here overnight?”

  “Not in terms of a crime,” Nick said, thinking that if walls could talk, they’d have plenty to tell her about what went on at every hotel in Sin City after dark.

  “Well, I’m certainly relieved,” she said. “I walked in maybe fifteen minutes ago, then listened to my voicemail while having my coffee. When I heard you were with the LVPD, I figured I’d better get in touch right away… though, if I may ask, why would a criminalist be calling unless it was about a crime?”

  “I was just getting to that,” Nick said. “Karen, are you acquainted with Stacy Ebstein?”

  “Of course, I know Stacy. I was her assistant before, you know, the incident. Reported directly to her. And then… oh, I’m sorry. I’m rambling. I must seem dizzy to you. But I generally come in to find messages from people wanting to throw catered affairs. Weddings, engagement parties, convention dinners, things of that variety. It’s anything but a typical morning when I hear from someone investigating a crime. And now that I know this is about poor Stacy… is she all right?”

  “I spoke with her a couple of days ago,” Nick said, aware that wasn’t really an answer. He didn’t think Stacy Ebstein would ever be all right again. Not by any definition. “She indicated that she’d held her job at the Starglow for quite a few years.”

  “Over a decade, I believe,” Karen said. “As I told you, she preceded me as banquet manager and was already a senior employee when I was hired. So brilliant—and she couldn’t have been more generous as a mentor. We used to call the position ‘special events coordinator’ back when she held it, incidentally. Then new ownership came in when we renovated and changed things around. Basically just for the sake of change, you know how that goes.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nick said. “Karen, are there still calendar listings on file for the affairs Stacy booked? She thought there might be.”

  “There are for the recent ones,” Karen said. “We get many repeat clients, especially on the corporate side. So it makes sense to have a record of their preferences and so forth. Also, we occasionally mail solicitations to parties who’ve booked events with us before.”

  “What about listings of older events?”

  “By older, you mean…”

  “Going back about ten years.”

  “Ten?”

  “Would you have them?”

  “I’d have to check,” Karen said. “If I may ask, does this have anything to do with finding out who kidnapped her?”

  “It might,” Nick said. “I won’t know till I see those listings.”

  “Are there specific dates you require?”

  “Yes and no,” Nick said. “I’ll give you a range. But I’d also want to know whether Karen ever booked any parties for someone named Quentin Dorset. Or if he happened to be a guest at a party she booked, if that information’s available.”

  “Did you say Dorset?”

  “Right, the spelling’s D-o-r—”

  “Isn’t he the judge that was found murdered the other night?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My God, talk about dizzy, how big a numbskull must I seem?” Karen said. “I saw the news reports about his body being found in that truck lot. There was a mention that he’d been, you know, disfigured in the same manner as Stacy. Is the same person responsible? The one they’re calling Tattoo Man?”

  “I can’t comment on the case, Karen,” Nick told her, reminded that Ecklie and the mayor would be saying whatever they wanted about it at their press conference in a few hours. “Back to my question… do you think you can dig up the information?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Stacy was meticulous. She kept everything in our computers. I’ll do what I can—it’s slow today, and I may have a chance to follow up. I’ll need to check the files, then get permission from my superiors at the hotel to release them. I don’t think that will be a problem… but with the changeover in ownership, I can’t tell you what was retained.”

  “Try your best,” Nick said. “Will you do that for me, Karen?”

  A pause. His phone to his ear, Nick waited out the silence. “Yes, naturally,” she said then. “And for Stacy.”

  The clock in Willows’s office showed it to be ten-thirty in the morning in Las Vegas, which Sara Sidle had just wistfully pointed out was early evening five thousand miles away in Paris, where her husband, Gil Grissom, was trying to get the Sorbonne’s board of trustees to shake loose some funds for a research project.

  “You must miss him,” Catherine said from behind her desk.

  “I do,” Sara said, sitting opposite her. “The separations are rough. But the one thing I realized being away from Vegas, from my work here, was how much a part of me it had become. I think distancing myself from it for a while left me… I’m not sure I can give you the right word for it.”

  “Refreshed?”

  Sara smiled. “It shows, huh?” she said. “Score one for a half year of studying primate behavior in the Costa Rican rain forest—not that capuchin monkeys don’t scheme, steal, go into jealous rages, fight turf wars, and exhibit occasional psychotic tendencies.”

  “Our closest living relatives?”


  “You got it,” Sara said with a chuckle. “When our research grants tapped out, it was off to Paris and the Sorbonne to try to refill the coffers. Gris is good at meeting with trustees in stuffy boardrooms, but I felt kind of superfluous and was itching to get back here to do something constructive.”

  Catherine was nodding. “Gris was such a rock. I never understood how much of a load he shouldered dealing with higher-ups. What it took to buffer us from outside pressures so we wouldn’t be distracted.”

  “I think he always trusted us more than we trusted ourselves,” Sara said. “It was his recommendation that you head the team after he left, Cath. My advice would be to remember that when things get tough.”

  Catherine smiled a little, then turned to her reason for calling Sara into the office. “Has Gris gotten a chance to read my e-mail about the… ?” Hesitating, she sought a suitable term for what Phillips had seen at the museum.

  “He did,” Sara said. “I spoke with him about an hour ago. Most of his files are in storage with the rest of our stuff.”

  “Here in Vegas?”

  Sara nodded. “Right before he left for Costa Rica, Gris was actually working on a kind of minivid about the work he’d done on those artifacts.”

  Catherine was silent. Artifacts. Sara always had been a contradiction. The most clinical and dispassionate of investigators, she’d never shown how deeply she was affected by the nightmares every crime scene represented. But there had seemed to be an old wound inside her, and the horrors had penetrated it, darkness drawn to darkness, until something unbearable came seeping up. She’d left the job to purge it and mend her spirit, and Grissom had soon followed, adding his love to her healing.

  “Okay,” Catherine said. “What’s our next step?”

  “I’ll head over to the storage warehouse. Gris archived all his research, including the video material, on flash drives. Once I get hold of them, I can shoot the files over to him via e-mail. It shouldn’t take him long to pull everything together.”

  Catherine nodded.

  “A request from Gris,” Sara said. “He considers this one of his personal projects—an unfinished piece of historical detective work. He knows for sure he’s on to something but hasn’t been able to take it too far. If it’ll help find our killer, we can run with it. Otherwise, he’d prefer we keep his research to ourselves—he doesn’t want innocent people’s reputations hurt.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Catherine said.

  Sara rose from her chair. “I’d better get moving. I need to go see Hodges about my epithelials before shooting over to the storage place. If I have any problems finding the material—or uploading it—I’ll give you a call.”

  Catherine nodded. “When you’re sending Gris that e-mail, tell him I said thanks. I owe him, Sara. Seriously.”

  Sara gave her a smile. “Off to the races… laissez les bons temps rouler,” she said, and left the office.

  “Okay, what have you got for me?” Sara said.

  Hodges turned to see her standing in his entryway. He’d been glancing back and forth between his high-powered microscope’s binocular eyepiece and the large flat-panel display of the computer to which he’d output his comparative specimen images, calibrating their color and focus so Sara could see with her own two eyes what he was about to explain about his findings… not that she sounded significantly appreciative.

  “Thank you, Hodges,” he muttered under his breath. “I appreciate you busting it. On short notice. While subbing for an AWOL evidence clerk and acting as Nick’s office gofer.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I was just contemplating the invariables of forensic lab work.”

  She pulled a face. “C’mon, Hodges,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for these results.”

  Hodges decided not to reply that he heard that familiar refrain a dozen times a night on average shifts and that it had only grown in frequency and volume over the past few days, what with most of the CSIs on short strings, working nonstop to resolve two different cases Mayor Stancroft had been determined to blend into one.

  “Just a second.” He leaned over the ocular tubes, further sharpening the split-screen image. “I’ll show you what intrigues me.”

  She took another couple of steps into the lab and waited, arms folded across her chest. Hodges made a final adjustment or two and decided he was satisfied.

  “Notice anything about the images?” he said, nodding to indicate the screen. The image on its right side, tagged with a capital D, showed a wide granular patch of crimson with faint grayish vertical lines. The one on the left, tagged with an N, was exactly the same, red with those darker rodlike stains.

  “They look identical,” she said. “Are those the epithelials?”

  “They’re mineral traces I obtained from them,” Hodges said. “Or, more precisely, that I extracted from their tattoo inks.”

  “Does the D stand for Dorset?”

  He nodded. “The sample’s from one of the lips on his backside.”

  “But if N is for Noble, where did the red pigment come from? The samples from his face were black.”

  “Some only appear to be,” Hodges said. “The base pigment is powdered jet and an iron oxide called wustite, which are used in some black tattoo inks. But if you carefully examine the photos, you’ll see that his face has subtle accents. Mix red, blue, and green in equal proportions, and you’ll have solid black. Vary the proportions, and you’ll get the washes Tattoo Man used for his accents.”

  “In other words, the red pigment in those washes is exactly the same as the pigment in the butt kisses.”

  “Yes.” Hodges was nodding. “It’s an extremely fine-grained sandstone composed of quartz, feldspar, and metallic silicates, including hematite, a red iron oxide. I’d estimate it accounts for three percent of the material in the grains, which doesn’t seem proportionately significant. But since the quartz, its primary constituent, is translucent and colorless, a thin layer of hematite is enough to give it a striking red color.”

  “Does any of this tell us where the pigment came from?”

  “Generally, it’s a type of red sandstone that dates back two hundred fifty years to the late Permian era—when the dinosaurs started dying off. Before that, the American Southwest was covered under an inland sea that left similar formations from the Colorado Rockies to California.”

  Sara frowned. “Half the country, in other words.”

  “True, unless we look at other features of the sandstone,” Hodges said. “The most conspicuous are those gray stripes. They don’t show up to the naked eye in the pigment because only an infinitesimal portion of the sample material in the epithelials contains them. But when the grains do have these stains, they’re the result of a type of lichen that forms encrustations on natural rock walls. That narrows our range to Utah, Nevada, and a slice of southeastern California. And I think I can bring us even closer to the source… much closer.” He paused. “Do you know what tuff is? That’s t-u-f-f.”

  She shrugged. “A word I see on shirts with reggae slogans.”

  “Very good—except we’re discussing mineralogical science, not Jamaican patois,” Hodges said. “There’s another meaning. People sometimes call it tufa, like those stones you see in fish tanks. It’s volcanic ejecta. Ash and other materials that blow from the caldera during an eruption.”

  “And?”

  “And, you see, tuff from any given region has very distinct characteristics. You can tell one tuff from another by its makeup. Caetano tuff, for example. It comes from Mount Caetano up north in Lander County and is loaded with smoky quartz and a mineral called sanidine. Thirty-three million years ago, that mountain was a supervolcano, one of the biggest in the history of the earth. Its caldera was twelve miles wide and blew its guts hundreds of miles into the air. The ash was carried around by the wind, then deposited all over northern Nevada. Take a hike in the desert outside Vegas, I can virtually guarantee you’re going to get Caetano tuf
f on the soles of your boots.”

  Sara looked at him. “Is this stuff—”

  “Tuff.”

  “Is it in the pigment you took from the epithelials?” she said, no amusement whatsoever in her voice.

  “It’s loaded with geochemical traces, Sara,” he said. “My educated guess is that Tattoo Man blends his own inks and that we can reasonably pinpoint the location of his source for red pigment.”

  Her eyes tightened. “Where?”

  “Walk out my door, hang a left in the hallway, and keep walking for about twenty miles.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you’ll be at Red Rock Canyon,” he said. “And you can stop.”

  “Got some bad news, man,” Nick said, coming up behind Archie.

  Archie frowned with his hands on the computer keyboard, thinking his neck was sore from cranking it around to face what seemed like a different CSI every fifteen seconds.

  “No security video?” he said.

  “Not so far.” Nick looked dejected. “I’ve phoned a couple dozen places in the past hour. Hotels, casinos, shops, and so on. Same story from all of ’em. You were right, none stored anything for close to the length of time we need. And most never migrated older video from one format to the next—too expensive. It’s basically routine to discard stuff after a while unless it’s got image captures of known criminals, cheating rings, repeat scammers… people they want to stay on the lookout for.”

  Archie was thinking he ought to be relieved to get the job of making a retro photomap off his plate, considering he’d have his hands full tackling one problem at a time, among them sifting through mountains of electronic log-in data for Doc Ray’s inside-out Flash Ink user-tracking quest.

  Ah, well, sorry, wish you’d had better luck, he considered replying.