Brass in Pocket

by Jeff Mariotte

  “There’s a gun here,” David said. “Close to his right hand. I think he was holding it when he fell.”

  “Desert Eagle?” Nick asked. “Fifty caliber? Brushed chrome?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Deke did love his firepower,” Catherine said. “You found a license for that too, right?”

  “Yeah. Maybe it would be easier if you tell me what you don’t know about this guy, and then I can try to fill in the blanks.”

  “That should be obvious,” Catherine said.

  “Obvious how?”

  “What we don’t know,” she said, “is who killed him.”

  2

  AFTER THE PHOTOGRAPHS were taken and David Phillips had completed his preliminary examination, what was left of Deke Freeson was taken away. Catherine and Nick were not so lucky.

  Their task was to process the room, which naturally required them to remain inside it. The smell was horrific, blood and urine and sweat competing for dominance with less immediately identifiable stenches. The room contained more fluids than Catherine cared to think about. Her first pass through, she focused on semen; the blood was more or less apparent, and by locating and identifying semen, she would be less likely to stand or sit in it or to accidentally place a hand in it. Her hands were gloved in multiple layers of latex, so she could peel off any that became contaminated. But still… she had her limits of tolerance, and the Rancho Center Motel room seemed determined to test them all.

  She started with a handheld UV light, under which semen would often fluoresce. Holding the light, she moved in a careful pattern, sweeping the room to find each incidence. As expected, she found multiple specimens, none of them particularly fresh (and several, to her dismay, apparently having survived multiple launderings of the sheets and bedspread). Each spot had to be swabbed, and the swabs treated with alpha-naphthyl phosphate and Brentamine Fast Blue. More often than not, the swabs turned purple almost immediately, indicating positive results. All the spots were dry, which made collecting and bagging them easier, but given the sheer number of them in the room, it was still a long process. Each would have to be analyzed back at the lab, where DNA analysis would help determine who had been in the room. Given the age of the stains, she suspected they wouldn’t factor into the investigation, but until she knew for certain when Deke Freeson had arrived at the room, and what he was doing there, she couldn’t afford to discount any potential leads.

  Nick, meanwhile, had been taking a more global approach. After collecting bullets from the ceiling and headboard, he rummaged through drawers and the closet and the single suitcase and purse found in the room. “The purse belongs to Antoinette O’Brady of Las Vegas,” he announced. “There’s a wallet and cell phone still inside. Plenty of cash. She’s fifty-six years old.” He showed Catherine the driver’s license picture. Antoinette O’Brady looked young for her age and wore her long blond hair and makeup in ways that made her look like she was trying to come across as younger still.

  “If she lives in town, what’s she doing staying in a dump like this?” Catherine asked.

  “And where is she now? Maybe she’s the shooter, not a motel guest. The room was registered to Freeson. He checked in yesterday.”

  “Which doesn’t necessarily mean that one or both of them weren’t here before that, either staying with someone else or registered under a different name. I doubt this place is too picky about checking ID. We’ll have to look for any connections between them,” Catherine said. “What about that suitcase?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not Deke’s,” Nick said. “Clothing and toiletries are consistent with the woman’s height and weight, based on her license.”

  “How old is the license?”

  “Less than a year old.”

  “Most people shave a few pounds off when they get a new license,” Catherine said. “But if it’s that recent, chances are it’s in the ballpark. And I’ve never heard of anyone bringing a suitcase on a hit.”

  “Even if they did, they wouldn’t unpack their toiletries in the bathroom,” Nick observed. “It looks like she expected to stay for a while. Few days, anyway.”

  “A few days in this room might be enough to make me start shooting people too,” Catherine said. She had finished with fluids, and used tweezers to lift a hair from the carpet and drop it into a small plastic envelope. Like the semen and blood, it would go to the lab for analysis. Chances were good it would have nothing to do with Deke Freeson or Antoinette O’Brady, but it had to be done. “What else do we have?”

  “Well, blood,” Nick said.

  “Obviously there’s no shortage of that.”

  “That’s for sure.” He pointed at the bed. “High-velocity spatter here and on the headboard. More on the ceiling. Consistent with the two shots David described. I think the shooter came in the door—”

  “Using the battering ram,” Catherine interrupted.

  “—right. Smashed in the door, dropped the ram, and fired the first shot. It hit Freeson just below the collarbone. Freeson was standing in front of the bed—there’s backspatter on the floor in front of his position—when the shooter came in and fired. Blood sprayed his feet and the floor there. Someone—presumably the shooter, since the transfer pattern doesn’t match the shoes Freeson was wearing—stepped in it. The print is a sneaker print. Converse. And there’s a void in the blood spatter on the bed.”

  “I noticed that too. So Deke was trying to shield someone—maybe Antoinette O’Brady—who was on the bed when he got shot. She was hit by blood spatter.”

  “Do you think Deke got off a shot?”

  “Either that or just the sight of that big Desert Eagle made the shooter hesitate,” Nick said. “The difference in the angle between the two shots indicates a delay of at least a second or two—first shot from a bit of a distance, the second closer, and at an upward angle.”

  “But if he did fire, where’s his round? And a witness said someone fired from near the pool. What’s up with that?”

  “That’s right. I’ll have a look around out there.”

  “I’ll be here,” Catherine said. “Probably still collecting hairs.”

  Nick walked out to the pool area, stopping every few feet to look back toward the open door of the room. As long as there were no tall vehicles parked in front of the room, someone could have fired from around the pool. But why would they? And if there was someone else in the doorway, would they take the shot, knowing they might hit their partner or accomplice? He supposed the first shot could have been fired from there… but it didn’t make sense to shoot at a closed door, and they hadn’t found any sign of a bullet or bullet hole in the wreckage of the door. And no one would ram in the door and then run to the pool to shoot.

  The pool smelled almost as bad as the room. Nick let himself in through an unlocked gate in the tall chain-link fence and walked around the concrete basin. At least a foot of trash coated the bottom, maybe more. He wondered if the motel had quit paying their Dumpster fees and intended to just use the pool instead.

  He swept his flashlight’s beam around but didn’t spot any shell casings on the concrete surrounding the pool, or any other sign that someone had fired a weapon. He hoped he wouldn’t have to go wading in the collected trash. But as he let his eye drift over the scene, taking in the fence and the view back toward the motel building, he saw that one corner of the fence, where it connected to an upright and a top rail on the side nearest the building, had been broken loose.

  He circled back around the pool to take a closer look. The fence was broken so cleanly that it might have been clipped. But there was a crease in the top rail, the steel slightly blackened.

  Nick stood in front of it and looked toward the room. Right on line.

  He was starting to think the witness had been wrong. The guy didn’t see a muzzle flash, he realized with sudden certainty, he saw a spark. Nick could confirm his hunch with laser beams, since the distance was too great for trajectory rods, but it looked like a bullet
fired at a slight upward angle from near the bed in Room 119 would gain just enough elevation to hit the top rail right where the fence was broken. The witness reported that he was already trying to leave, that the first loud noise—no doubt the battering ram taking down the door—had frightened him. Looking through a rearview as he was trying to get the hell out of there, in the dark, even a small spark might have seemed like a bright flash.

  If the round had glanced off the rail, then it had to have gone somewhere.

  Unfortunately, the most likely place was down in the pool. The bullet would have been slowed, redirected by the rail, and fallen in. He shone a flashlight along the wall and spotted what looked like a fresh chip in the pool wall, but the momentum had been slowed enough that the bullet hadn’t become embedded there.

  Nick would have to go wading after all. And in something far worse than stagnant pool water.

  “Deke Freeson did take a shot,” Nick said when he came back into the room. “But his shot missed. It flew out the open door and struck a steel rail by the pool, causing a spark, which our witness saw and confused for a muzzle flash.”

  “He’s from Iowa,” Catherine said, knowing even as she spoke that it didn’t explain anything. “Anyway, it didn’t slow the shooter for long. He took another step or two into the room, and at closer range, shot Deke in the face.”

  “Both of those rounds I collected were nine millimeter,” Nick said. “And the one I found by the pool was fifty caliber. Deke’s trusty Desert Eagle.”

  “So did the shooter snatch Antoinette O’Brady?” Catherine asked. She stretched, working out the kinks that set in from too much close examination of evidence.

  “I don’t think so.” Nick beckoned her into the bathroom. She suppressed a shudder as she walked in, imagining what a close examination of the room’s every surface might reveal. “Look,” he said. “The bathroom window’s open. There’s blood transfer on the window frame. We know whoever was on the bed behind Freeson was covered in his blood. And not only is his car not in the parking lot, but there are no cars in the lot that were not identified as belonging to a guest or motel staff. I think Antoinette O’Brady got out the window and took Freeson’s car.”

  “So we need to post a Be on the Lookout.”

  “Already done.”

  She was impressed. While she had been examining bodily fluids, Nick had been busy too. “I found some hairs and fibers,” she said. “At a guess, I’d say the hairs came from five or six different people. I have short and dark, long and blond, short and bleached, and a couple of fragments that are hard to make out with the naked eye but look to be more of a light brown. Various fibers, mostly cotton or acrylic, I think. It looks like there are some used tissues in the wastebasket by the sink, but I haven’t collected those yet. Friction ridge impressions—lots of smudges but a couple of good clear ones, including some palm prints on the headboard.”

  “In the blood?”

  “Under it. Oh, and look at this.”

  “What?”

  She pointed to a spot near the door. “Bits of oily black soil on the carpet. It’s fresh.”

  “Any guesses?”

  “It could be a lot of things,” she said. “I’d rather find out for sure than make assumptions now.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “For the moment, anyway.”

  “I live in the moment,” Nick said with a grin.

  Catherine appreciated the gesture. Nick knew Gil Grissom was his real boss, and he looked up to Gil. In his early days at the crime lab, he had practically hero-worshipped the man. But Gil was gone, and chain of command meant he reported to her.

  Catherine’s crime lab family had been shrinking lately—as had her real family these past few years, for that matter. Professionally, she had lost Sara Sidle, who had quit the lab and left town, and Warrick Brown, to a killer’s bullets. In civilian life, her father and her ex-husband had both been murdered, and her daughter Lindsey was rapidly becoming a young woman who would need her mother less and less as each day passed.

  Maybe the years were changing Catherine too, drawing out her maternal instincts and making her want to shelter people, to clutch those she cared about close to her. The urge not to be abandoned anymore was growing.

  “Let’s wrap this up and get out of here,” she said. “The sooner we get this stuff to the lab, the better I’ll like it.”

  “You and me both, Catherine.” Nick took a plastic evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from his field kit and started collecting the black soil she had pointed out. “You and me both.”

  3

  THE DRIVE TO THE Desert View Airport in North Las Vegas would have been an incredible pain at rush hour, since the city’s population boom had overwhelmed its highway system, but at quarter after nine at night it wasn’t so bad. Greg Sanders drove one of the lab’s Yukon SUVs, with Riley Adams riding shotgun. Catherine and Nick were stuck at the Rancho Center Motel, a fleabag that Greg was not at all sorry to miss out on.

  From the brief report he’d been given, he wasn’t too certain why they were bothering with this trip. The real reason they had gone was that Catherine had told them to, and when Catherine was in charge they obviously went where she said. What he wasn’t entirely sure of was whether or not a crime had been committed at the airport. And determining that wasn’t the job of the crime lab—that was right there in the name. They investigated crime scenes, after the LVPD made the determination that there had, in fact, been a crime.

  Apparently somebody was convinced, though, because they were rolling. Desert View was a small airfield, with a combination tower and administrative office building, some work sheds, an assortment of hangars, and a single runway lit by a series of low blue lights. Most of the buildings were of corrugated steel, but the tower/office complex was stucco or adobe, painted a pale green color. A uniformed cop met the Yukon at the entrance and directed them to the runway. “This is kind of cool, isn’t it?” Greg said. “Driving on a runway where only airplanes get to go.”

  “And service vehicles, and random pickup trucks,” Riley reminded him. “Just be sure you move before the next seven-forty-seven lands, Greg.”

  “Seven-forty-sevens land—” Greg began. Which was just what she wanted. When she replaced Sara, it took him weeks to get used to her quirky sense of humor. Even now, when he was concentrating on something else—driving on a runway, for instance—she could catch him off guard. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a sense of humor. He’d been class clown for most of his school years, and liked to think he continued the tradition at the crime lab. But hers was—well, it was different. It seemed to come from dark, unexpected places inside her, and she had such a wry, deadpan delivery that it was almost always surprising.

  The runway was paved, but just barely. After the pavement ran out, there was nothing but scrubby desert leading up into the hills. The lights of Las Vegas glowed to the south, turning the night sky a sparkling gray color that always reminded him of frost riming the black paint of the rented Volvo wagon his Nana and Papa Olaf had used when he visited Norway with them as a child. Flaccid air socks showed how still the night air was. A breeze would be nice, Greg thought. It would cool down eventually—and fairly rapidly, once all the city’s concrete and steel and the hard desert floor released the day’s heat—but for the moment, sweltering was the word that came to mind.

  Two more uniformed cops flanked a small private plane. “There we go,” he said, happy to change the subject from imaginary 747s. “That looks like our goal.”

  “It does indeed,” Riley said. “Assuming our goal is a Piper Malibu Mirage, and those unis aren’t just admiring it.”

  “They have their backs to it,” Greg pointed out.

  “Could be a cultural variation. You can never tell with cops.”

  “You do know your planes,” Greg said, ignoring her other comments. That was, he had learned, the best way to deal with her. “Assuming you’re right and you didn’t just make that up.”

&n
bsp; “My mother wanted one of those,” Riley said. Both of her parents were psychiatrists, Greg knew. Which meant a private plane that could cost a million bucks or so wasn’t necessarily out of reach for them. “She had brochures, catalogs, DVDs. But my father thought they were dangerous.”

  “Did she know how to fly?”

  “No.”

  “Then he might have been right.” He braked the SUV a dozen feet away from the plane. The uniformed officers started toward them. “And depending on what we find here, we might decide he definitely was.”

  “Oh, there’s no question about that. She isn’t even a very good driver. If she got behind the controls of an airplane, I would go into an underground bunker until it was safe.”

  As they introduced themselves to the uniformed officers and signed the security log, a couple of people hiked out from the shadows, apparently coming from the tower or a nearby hangar. One was a woman, tall and lean as a fencepost, with sandy blond hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore a blue workshirt open over a red T-shirt, grease-stained blue jeans, and black work boots. The man with her was equally slender. His hair was short and dark, graying at the temples but mostly hidden under a ball cap bearing the Garmin logo. He wiped his hands on his jeans and then offered his right to Greg. “Stan Johnston,” he said. His grip was crushing, his eyes deeply creased around the edges and terribly sad. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure, but thanks for coming, Detective.”

  “We’re not detectives, Mr. Johnston. We’re with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I’m Greg Sanders, this is Riley Adams.” Stan Johnston looked confused. “There has been a crime committed, right?” Greg asked.

  “I’m Patti Van Dyke,” the woman said in a throaty voice that made Greg think of whiskey and cigarettes. Neither of which seemed especially suited to aviation, but maybe she, like Riley’s mother, remained earthbound. “Would it help if we told you what happened?”