Sin City ccsi-2

by Max Allan Collins

  And now, once again, three nightshift CSIs, including their supervisor, were dragging their weary bones into the sunshine. Or at least Warrick and Nick were weary: Grissom never seemed tired, exactly, nor for that matter did he ever seem particularly energetic-except when evidence was stirring his adrenaline flow.

  Soon Warrick was steering one of the team's black Tahoes out Lake Mead Boulevard, Route 147, past Frenchman's Mountain and on toward the recreation area as he followed the twisty road west of Gypsum Wash and then down the Lake Shore Scenic Drive. The landscape was as untamed and restless as the Old West itself, rugged, chaotic, God working as an abstract artist, sculpting rocks in countless shapes in a raw rainbow of colors-snowy whites, cloudy grays, gentle mauves and fiery reds.

  When Warrick swung into the parking lot for Lake Mead Tours, Brass's Taurus pulled up and parked next to them.

  The autumn morning was cool enough for their windbreakers. None of them bothered with field kits yet-they would get the lay of the land, first-or maybe the lake, the endless expanse of which glistened nearby. Grissom and Nick climbed down and followed Warrick a few steps to where a man in a tan uniform stood next to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife pickup. Brass caught up quickly.

  "Warrick Brown," the criminalist said, pointing to his necklace I.D. "Las Vegas CSI."

  "Jim Tilson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife."

  The two exchanged polite smiles and handshakes-the latex gloves weren't on, yet.

  "This is Nick Stokes, CSI," Warrick went on as the rest of the group caught up with him, "and our supervisor, Gil Grissom, and Captain Jim Brass from Homicide."

  Tilson nodded to them-more polite smiles, more handshakes.

  Warrick was studying the guy, brow knitted. "I feel like I know you, Mr. Tilson."

  A real smile creased Tilson's face now, revealing a row of uneven but very white teeth. "I played a little ball-Nevada Reno, then the CBA, couple years…till I blew my ankle out."

  Snapping his fingers, Warrick said, "Yeah, yeah, I remember you! Jumpin' Jimmy Tilson. You spent some time with the Nuggets, too."

  Tilson nodded. "That was a while ago."

  "Mr. Tilson," Grissom said, "why did you call us?"

  Tilson led them around his truck. "Over here…Not pretty."

  Grissom smiled thinly. "They so seldom are."

  They walked across the parking lot and down to the edge of the lake, where the water lapped at the sloping cement, and Tilson's USFW flat bottom boat was tied to the cruise boat's dock. If they looked hard, they could see the tour boat down at the far end of the basin; but that wasn't what they'd come to see. Warrick gazed into the flat bottom's bottom, where a canvas tarp covered something in the middle of the boat.

  "I was on the lake this morning taking samples," Tilson said, a grimness in his tone.

  "Samples?" asked Brass.

  Tilson shrugged. "Testing chemical pollution in the lake, at various depths. It's an ongoing USFW concern. Anyway, I bring up my container, then start hauling up the anchor to move to another spot. Well, the damn anchor snags on something." Another shrug. "Happens once in a while. Lotta shit's ended up in this lake over the years."

  "I can imagine," Brass said, just moving it along.

  "So," the wildlife man said, "I start pullin' the anchor chain back in, and damn, it's heavy as hell." Tilson moved close to the boat, then glanced up toward the parking lot-to make sure they were undisturbed-and pulled back the tarp. "And this is what I found."

  Even Grissom winced.

  "That's one nasty catch of the day," Nick said, softly.

  The lake had bleached the slab of flesh the gray-white of old newspaper. Someone had severed the body just above the navel and near the top of the femurs, leaving only the buttocks and vagina and the tops of the thighs. The unctuous odor of rot floated up and Warrick forced himself to breathe through his mouth.

  "This is all you found?" Nick asked, frowning down at the thing.

  "That's it."

  Grissom was gazing out at the lake now. "Mr. Tilson, can you tell us where exactly you found this body?"

  Now Tilson looked out across the water, gesturing. "Straight out-half a mile or more."

  "You have GPS?"

  Global positioning system.

  Nodding, Tilson said, "I took a reading, but the damned thing flamed out on me. Bad batteries, I guess."

  "We can send divers down," Nick suggested.

  Grissom and Tilson both shook their heads at the same time, but it was Brass who said, "Too deep."

  "Nearly six hundred feet in places," Tilson added.

  "Besides which," Grissom said, "there's no telling how many different places parts were dumped into the lake."

  "Whatever happened to dragging the lake?" Nick asked.

  Tilson said, "You don't drag a lake that covers two hundred forty-seven square miles…and, man, that's just the water, never mind the seven-hundred miles of shoreline. And you take in the whole area, you've got twice the size of Rhode Island to deal with."

  "And you have over ten million visitors a year, right, Mr. Tilson?" Grissom asked.

  "That's right, sir."

  "Lotta suspects," Warrick said.

  And yet all of them knew, if this torso belonged to a certain missing woman, that one particular suspect would head their list. Warrick also knew that Grissom-whose mind had to be buzzing with the possibility of this being what was left of Lynn Pierce-would never countenance such a leap.

  "I get the picture," Nick was saying. "So…what can we do?"

  Warrick twitched half a humorless smirk, and said, "We can do a DNA test on what we have, and hopefully identify the body."

  Again, neither the criminalists nor the police detective said what they all were thinking.

  "Mr. Tilson," Brass said, a mini-tape recorder at the ready, "can you tell us exactly what happened this morning? In detail?"

  Though this version of the tale took longer, it added very little to the original, more succinct story Tilson had told earlier.

  "Did you see anything unusual on the lake this morning?" Brass asked.

  Tilson looked at Brass with wide eyes, and gestured down into the boat.

  "Besides that," the detective said quickly. "Other boats, suspicious activity, anything at all noteworthy?"

  The USFW man considered that carefully. Finally he said, "There were some boats…but, I mean, there's always boats. Didn't see anything odd, not like somebody dumpin' stuff into the water or anything. And we keep an eye out for that kinda thing."

  For several minutes, Brass continued to question Tilson, without learning anything new. Tilson requested permission to confer with some of the recreation area personnel, who were nervously hovering at the periphery. Brass-after glancing at Grissom, for a nod-okayed that.

  Finally, Brass said to Grissom, "We can't exactly go door to door with a picture of this, and ask if anybody recognizes her."

  They were near the flat-bottom boat. Grissom was staring at the torso, as if waiting for it to speak up. Then he said to Brass, "There's a body of evidence, here."

  "Are you kidding?"

  Grissom tore himself away from staring down at the torso to give Brass a withering look. Then he returned his eyes to the evidence and said, "Look at the edges."

  The criminalist pointed first to the waistline, then the jagged cuts to the thighs. Warrick and Nick were looking on with interest.

  Grissom was saying, "We'll figure out what made the cuts-that will help. She'll talk to us…. She already is."

  Nick took pictures while Warrick carefully searched the boat for any other trace evidence. Once he had photos of the torso, where it lay in the boat, the two CSIs removed it from the snarled anchor chain and gently turned the body over.

  Nick winced. "That left a mark…"

  "Gris!" Warrick called. "You're gonna wanna see this!"

  Striding over from where he'd been conferring with Brass, Grissom called, "What?"

  Warrick raised an eyebrow and gestured in tadah
fashion at the torso.

  Glancing down, Grissom saw intestinal tissue sticking out of a slice in the back, like Kleenex popping out of a box.

  Brass joined the group. "Something?"

  "Whoever cut her up made a mistake," Grissom said. "He tried to cut through the pelvic bone. Whatever he used got jammed up, and when he pulled it out, the blade snagged on the intestines."

  Warrick didn't know which was grislier: the torso, or the glee with which Grissom had reported the butcher's "mistake." But Warrick also noted Grissom reflexively referred to the unknown killer as "he."

  In the hour it took the CSI team to finish, the paramedics showed up, as did news vans from the four network affiliates. Uniformed officers held the reporters and cameramen at a distance, but there was no way Brass would get out of here without talking to them.

  Gil Grissom did not envy Brass this part of his job. The CSI supervisor watched as the detective moved over to the gaggle of reporters. It was a calculated move on Brass's part: if the cameras were focused on him, they'd be unable to shoot the body being loaded into an ambulance.

  Grissom watched as the four reporters and their cameramen vied for position, each sticking his or her microphones out toward Brass's unopened mouth. Grissom recognized Jill Ganine. She had interviewed him more than once, and he liked her well enough, for media. Next to her, Stan Cooper tried to look like he wasn't shoving Ganine out of the way. Kathleen Treiner bounced back and forth around the other two like a yappy terrier until her brutish cameraman managed to elbow in next to Cooper and give her some space.

  Ganine got out the first question. "Captain Brass, is that the body of Lynn Pierce, the missing Vegas socialite?"

  Leave it to the press to ask the question none of them had spoken. And just when had Born-Again suburban mom Lynn Pierce become a "socialite," anyway?

  Grissom wished the TV jackals hadn't jumped so quickly to the conclusion that it was Lynn Pierce; more than that, he wished he could keep himself from making that jump. The torso could, after all, be any of hundreds of missing women. Evidence, he told himself, just wait for the evidence and all will come clear.

  "We have no new information on Lynn Pierce," Brass said.

  Cooper jumped in. "But you did find a body?"

  Brass seemed unsure how to answer that. "Not entirely true," he finally said.

  That was a nice evasion, Grissom thought; but as he listened to the reporters and the detective play twenty questions, Grissom kept his eyes on Ned Petty. Working carefully, the innocent-looking reporter was nearly around the tape line set up by the uniformed officers, as he and his cameraman moved toward the ambulance. The reporter was to Grissom's right, and slouching as he moved, no one-other than Grissom-seeming to notice Petty closing in.

  Slipping behind the ambulance, to block the media's view of him, Grissom moved around until he was hidden by the ambulance's open back door, waiting.

  With the body bag riding atop it-the rather odd shape of its contents plainly visible through the black plastic-the gurney was rolled by the EMS guys to the back door of the ambulance. Petty stepped forward, his microphone held up as he said, "Clark County paramedics load the body…"

  "May I help you?" Grissom interrupted pleasantly, stepping out from behind the door and directly into the path of the cameraman's lens.

  Petty didn't miss a beat.

  The reporter swiveled, said, "On the scene is one of Las Vegas's top crime scene investigators, sometimes the subject of controversy himself-Gil Grissom. Mr. Grissom, what can you tell us about the victim?"

  And Petty thrust the microphone toward Grissom, like a weapon.

  Maintaining his cool, Grissom gave the camera as little as possible-a blank face, and a few words: "At this point, nothing."

  Petty fed himself the mike, saying melodramatically, "That didn't look like a human body on that stretcher."

  The mike swung back toward him, but Grissom said only, "That isn't a question."

  "Do you believe you've found Lynn Pierce?"

  Another shrug, this one punctuated by a terse, "No comment."

  Finally the ambulance doors closed behind him, the paramedics all loaded up now, and the ambulance left-no siren; what was the rush? But the newspaper contingent made a race out of it anyway, peeling from the lot in pursuit of the emergency vehicle.

  Having the scene to themselves again, Nick, Warrick, and Grissom gathered their gear, and left, finally letting Lake Mead start the process of getting back to normal-tourists would soon enjoy the sunshine shimmering off the lake, unaware of the gruesome events of the morning.

  That night, a few hours before the official start of his shift, Grissom-blue scrubs over his street clothes-slipped into the morgue where Dr. David Robbins still had the torso laid out on a table.

  A whole body, a female body, Lynn Pierce's body. She is already dead. In a sparse bathroom, the body sprawls in a tub, unfeminine, undignified. A chainsaw coughs and sputters and spits to life, then growls like a rabid beast.

  First it gnaws through the arms at the shoulders, then the legs below the hip sockets. The gnawing blade eats through the neck, severing spinal cord, nerves, and muscle. The body is limbless, headless.

  The animal feeds on, but its keeper aims too low and the saw grinds to a halt in the middle of the pelvic bone and that blade is pulled out savagely, bringing with it a rope of intestine. With a snarl the blade shivers back to life, and this time the keeper aims higher, severing the body, just above the navel.

  Pieces are packed into garbage bags with something to weigh them down, and hefted into the trunk of a car, driven to Lake Mead, loaded onto a boat beneath cover of night, dumped into the dark waters, here, there, scattered to the sandy bottom to never be found-save for one piece somehow freed, escaping the depths, floating, armless, legless, finding its way into the boat of the Fish and Wildlife man.

  As Grissom approached, Robbins looked up. The pathologist had been at Grissom's side for so many autopsies they had both long ago lost count. Robbins, too, wore a blue smock.

  "You know," the coroner said, gently presenting the obvious, "the DNA test is going to take time…no getting around that."

  Grissom shrugged. "I came to find out what you know now."

  Using his single metal crutch, Robbins navigated around the table. "I could share my preliminary findings."

  Just the hint of a smile appeared at the corner of Grissom's mouth. "Why don't you?"

  "There's this." Robbins pointed toward the victim's episiotomy scar. "She's had at least one child."

  Grissom nodded curtly, and moved on: "Dismembered before or after her death?"

  "After death." Robbins gestured. "No bruising around where the cuts were made. If she'd been alive…"

  "There'd be bruises at the edges of the cuts. If the dismemberment didn't kill her, what did?"

  Robbins shook his head, lifted his eyebrows. "No other wounds. Tox screen won't be back for a couple of days, at least…. Truthfully, Gil, I haven't got the slightest idea how she died."

  "She is dead."

  "Yes. We agree on that. But if the tox screen doesn't reveal something-and I doubt if it will-we may never know cause of death."

  "Any other good news?"

  "One very good finding-birthmark on her left hip." Pulling the light down closer to the torso, Robbins highlighted the spot, which Grissom himself had glimpsed, earlier, at the lake.

  Grissom rubbed his forehead. "Be nice to have a little more."

  "Well, really we're just getting started," Robbins said, touching the corner of the table as if that might connect him to the victim in front of him.

  "What's next?"

  "We'll deflesh the torso."

  "Good. Maybe the bones will talk to us."

  "Yes. Let's hope they have something interesting to say."

  "They often do," Grissom said. "Thanks, Doc. I'll be back."

  "I'm sure you will."

  Grissom made his way back to the break room where Warrick and Nick
each sat with a cup of coffee cradled in hand. The coffee smelled scorched and the refrigerator in the corner had picked up a nasty hum. Although he liked working graveyard-because it helped him avoid dealing with much of the political nonsense, and obtrusive building maintenance, which happened nine to five, as well-Gil Grissom wondered why his day shift counterpart, Conrad Ecklie, never seemed to get around to getting that fridge fixed…much less teach his people not to leave the coffee in the pot so long that it became home to new life-forms. That was one scientific experiment Grissom was against.

  Filling Nick and Warrick in on what Robbins had told him, Grissom concluded, "I want to know who she is."

  Warrick shook his head. "Well, that could take a while."

  Grissom's voice turned chill. "I want to know now. Not in a month or even a week, when the DNA results roll in-now. Find a way, guys," Grissom said, heading for the door, "find a way."

  Still shaking his head, Warrick called out, "Gris! Two hundred people a month disappear in this town, you know that…a lot of them women. How are we going to track down one of them without DNA?"

  From the doorway, Grissom said, "Eliminate the missing women who haven't had children."

  Warrick, thinking it through, said, "And any that aren't white."

  Nick was nodding. "And then we'll track one down who had a birthmark like that on her left hip."

  "See," Grissom said, with that angelic smile that drove his people crazy. "We have a lot."

  Moments later, Grissom was back in his office, seated behind his desk, jarred specimens staring accusingly at him from their shelves. A voice analysis report of the audio tape provided by the Blairs was waiting on his desk, and he read it eagerly.

  He never would have admitted it to the reporters, and certainly not to his team, but Grissom was battling a small yet insistent voice in the back of his mind that kept telling him that they had just found Lynn Pierce.

  And since one of his chief tenets was that the evidence didn't come to you, you went to it, Grissom picked up the phone and got Brass on the line.