Brass in Pocket

by Jeff Mariotte

  The man must have said something funny. Melinda—on her third drink now—bent forward laughing. The man put one hand on the back of her head, forcing it even more forward, and at the same time swept his other hand over the top of her drink. With her head at the angle he held it, Melinda couldn’t have seen him do it.

  “He drugged her!” Catherine said.

  “That’s what it looks like. Rohypnol, GHB, ketamine, we can’t tell from here, but those are the date rape drugs of choice, right?”

  Catherine was all too familiar with all of them, both as a CSI and as the concerned mother of a teenager who she hoped was still sleeping soundly in her bed. “Yeah, they’re the usual suspects.”

  Again, Archie described what Catherine watched on the screen. “So a few minutes later, our girl is getting a little unsteady on her stool. They’re still laughing, still having fun. By this time, I figure she thinks the booze is finally hitting her—or from what you told me, she might not be experienced enough with it to know that it hit her a long time ago, and now she’s feeling the dope. And now look at this move.”

  The young man snatched off his porkpie hat, exposing lank dark hair and a sallow complexion. He jammed the hat onto Melinda’s head. Then he got off his own stool and helped her from hers. He looked down, toward her feet, toward the floor, as much as possible—shielding his own face from the camera, and making sure that she did the same. The hat blocked the camera’s view even more, so that even though she had to turn to leave the bar, it only caught the lower third of her face.

  “Ordinarily, modern FR software uses 3-D modeling to capture faces,” Archie explained. “It doesn’t need the full-face image the old 2-D software did. But it has to have some nodal points to go on, and what we can see here, the length of the jaw and shape of the mouth, just isn’t enough. If he would take off those dark glasses, or even look up at the camera, we might be able to get a read on him. And we already know who Melinda is, but with the hat on and her face toward the floor, the Palermo’s software couldn’t find her.”

  As they left the bar, the footage showed the bartender scooping up their glasses, dumping them into soapy water, and wiping their place at the bar with a damp bar rag. Another couple took the stools almost immediately. “So much for fingerprints,” Catherine said. “They’re gone. Not that we’d have been able to isolate his. There must be hundreds of prints on those stools at any given time.” Sometimes there was a fine line between building an airtight case and wasting precious time, and with the number of prints they would find on those stools and the difficulty of matching them all to their owners, checking the bar and surrounding seats would be a pointless effort.

  “And you couldn’t even locate her at this point with gait recognition software,” Archie pointed out, “because she hasn’t walked like this since she arrived in Las Vegas.”

  Melinda swayed on her feet, unsteady even in those flat, sensible shoes. The young man put an arm across her back, helping her, but also steering her so that she never faced directly into the security cameras.

  “Man, this guy is taking no chances. Do we know who he is?”

  Archie tapped a couple of keys and a close-up of his face appeared, his gaze downcast. “I did get one pretty decent shot of his face,” he said. “But it’s not matching to anything in our system. Apparently he’s never been in trouble, either with us or at the Palermo.”

  “Great. At least we have that, though. Copy that image, and a couple of those shots of them leaving the bar together, and get them over to Sam Vega. I’m going to call this an abduction, based on what we’ve seen. Where do they go from here?”

  Archie punched the keys again. A new camera’s footage came onto the screen, this one mounted in a parking garage outside the casino. “Garage,” he said. “Watch that Camry on the right side of the screen.”

  The young man reached into his pocket, and an instant later the Camry’s rear lights flashed. “Electronic locks,” Catherine said.

  “That’s right.” Melinda was almost unconscious by this point, moving forward slowly and only with the young man’s help. He put her in the Toyota’s passenger seat and closed her door. She immediately slumped against the window. The man got in behind the wheel, backed the car from its parking space, and headed toward an EXIT sign.

  “That’s it?” Catherine asked. “No shots of the plate?”

  “He was parked in a good spot, for his purposes,” Archie said. “If he’d been farther from the camera, we’d have the plate. As it is, he made the turn just before the plate came into view. And it’s a free lot, so there’s not even a parking ticket to check, or a camera on the way out.”

  “What year is that Camry?”

  “2002,” Archie said.

  “And how many 2002 Camrys do you figure there are in Las Vegas right now?”

  “Assuming it’s even got Nevada plates? A couple thousand, easy.”

  “Right. I need something to go on, Archie. I need to know who that guy is. He took Melinda Spence.”

  “Yeah, it looks like it. If I can find anything else in the footage the Palermo gave us, I’ll let you know.”

  “You do that,” she said. It seemed as if Mr. Spence’s worst fears about Las Vegas had been realized, or were in the process of being, and Catherine didn’t want to let that happen. “You let me know right away.”

  Catherine headed back to her own office. She had never kept particularly conventional working hours. For most of her adult life, day had been her night, and the hours of darkness her day. Her mother had held to a similar schedule.

  But regardless of when she woke or slept, there were common threads. Midnight was the witching hour, and the dark night of the soul came between three and four in the morning. For inexplicable reasons, even though it was part of her working day, everything had greater import at that hour, more tragic resonance. Seeing Melinda drugged and taken away gave concrete life to her fears, eliminating the possibility that the young woman was just having too much fun to call her family. Melinda’s fate weighed more heavily on her now than it had fifteen minutes before. Adding to it was the knowledge that the same thing could happen to almost any woman in Las Vegas. Even Lindsey.

  With that certainty—the acute awareness that no one was truly safe, no one’s daughter immune from harm—weighing on her shoulders like barbells left there by accident, she turned her attention back to the task at hand.

  Melinda Spence had to be found, and fast. Catherine would accept no other outcome.

  23

  WENDY WAS GLAD THAT her dog DNA idea had borne fruit, even if it had ultimately been a dead end. She believed it was important to play all the angles, not to let her tasks become so routine that she couldn’t come up with new ways to utilize the data she developed in her lab.

  Another idea had been nagging at her, though, as she worked on the last of the hairs from the burial pit. These hairs had provided one potential lead, and might still offer more. The likelihood grew slimmer with every one she analyzed that offered no positive results, however, and she wasn’t optimistic.

  But that ewe that had been brought in… she was still relatively fresh. And to get her into the pit, the killer would have had to move her, most likely by hand. Maybe he wore gloves… but maybe not.

  She took some of the last bits of hair follicle and put them in a chloroform and phenol mixture, which would separate the DNA from other material found in the cell nucleus, and headed for the morgue.

  “Duane Allman was a far better guitarist than Eddie Van Halen,” Doc Robbins was saying when she passed through the doors. “Not that Van Halen is bad. A little showy, but not bad. But Allman’s lilting notes could carry as much emotion as a poem, a soulful voice, and Van Halen could never approach that sort of meaning.”

  “I guess,” David Phillips answered. He was sitting on a stool near the sheep’s rear end, while Doc Robbins removed what looked like its liver. “But Eddie just… he just rocks, you know? And sometimes that’s what you want, a guitarist w
ho can drive a song from beginning to—Oh, hi, Wendy.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Wendy said. “And has anybody mentioned Albert Lee, if you’re talking great guitarists?”

  “Already stipulated to,” Doc Robbins said. “What brings you to our little fiefdom, Wendy?”

  She nodded toward the table. “The little lost lamb. Can I see her for a minute?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “You ever notice sheep in nursery rhymes never have names?” David asked. “Little Bo Peep lost her sheep—but she didn’t lose Susie and Chuckie and Daisy, just a bunch of nameless sheep. And ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ is named after the noise the sheep makes, not the sheep’s name.” He hesitated a moment. “Or if that is its name, it’s a lame one. Have you ever heard of a dog named Bark Bark Dog?”

  Wendy eyed him briefly, then turned back to the ewe. “This is a little unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Having a sheep on my table?” Doc Robbins said. “Yes. Perhaps not quite scrapbook material, but certainly not an everyday occurrence. I concur with Greg’s inclination—it does look to me like the possible work of a would-be serial killer—so it behooves us to find out if it was really the slit throat that killed her, or something else. I’d hate to have the PD out looking for a cutthroat when they should really be looking for a poisoner.”

  “Makes sense.” She walked around the animal a couple of times, trying to ascertain where someone might grip her to carry or drag her. Probably drag, she guessed, although a person could hoist the animal up if necessary. She would try lifting it herself, but she didn’t want to risk wiping away exactly what she was searching for. Finally she decided the most reasonable spot would be just behind the front legs—conveniently for her, a place where the wool didn’t cover the skin. She pulled the right front leg out of the way and swabbed the fleshy area. “And what happens when you’re done with her? It’s not like she’ll be embalmed and buried or anything, right?”

  “We’ll turn her over to the city’s animal control officers for disposal. I’m not a big fan of embalming under any circumstances, in fact.”

  Wendy replaced the swab in its protective vial, hoping she had picked up some skin cells that hadn’t belonged to the ewe. She would find out upstairs. “Why not?”

  Doc Robbins leaned on his crutches and fixed her with a steady gaze. “Embalming is done for the benefit of the survivors, not for the dead. It’s been promoted as a permanent solution, but in reality it’s far from permanent. It keeps the body looking vaguely lifelike long enough for a funeral, and then for a little while after. But there’s absolutely no purpose for it, once the body’s in the ground. And taking up precious space, at that. Cremation makes far more sense in most cases. Embalming corpses and sticking them in fancy brass caskets is stupid, when it would be far more practical to encourage the bodies to decompose quickly, to return essential nutrients to the earth. If I had my way, burials wouldn’t involve caskets at all—we’d just wrap the bodies in some easily biodegradable fabric, bury them, and plant a tree.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Did you know that embalming fluid is a relatively recent invention?” Doc Robbins continued, on a roll now. “It became commonplace during the Civil War. Any liquid works—the point is just to replace the blood with something that will decompose more slowly. For years the liquid of choice was arsenic, which was cheap and widely available. Old cemeteries can be picturesque, but so much arsenic has leached into the soil in some that they can also be hazardous. To anyone not yet dead, that is.”

  “I’ll, umm, keep that in mind. When I’m doing my planning.”

  The medical examiner had turned his attention back to the sheep’s insides, but he eyed her over the top of his glasses. “See that you do.”

  “Thanks for the swab,” she said. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “Touch DNA?” Doc Robbins asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re looking for touch DNA—DNA traces left behind when a person touches another person or object.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “It’s a relatively new technique, but I’m trying to get better at it, and figured this might be a case where it would come in handy.” She would use polymerase chain reaction and short tandem repeat on the extremely small specimen she expected to have, to amplify the sample, making enough copies of the cells so that she would be able to analyze the DNA.

  “So you’re saying that if someone just touches some object, he might leave DNA on it,” David said.

  “That’s the theory. We leave a little something behind everywhere we go.”

  “No more searching for drops of blood or saliva or flecks of skin or tiny strands of hair?”

  “Those things still help, don’t get me wrong. But they might not be as crucial as they once were, once touch DNA becomes more commonplace.”

  “Weird.”

  “Anyway, thanks,” Wendy said again. She really wanted to get busy processing the swab, to see what she might have picked up.

  “Good luck,” Doc Robbins muttered.

  “Let me know if you think of a nursery rhyme sheep with a name,” David called as she was leaving.

  “I will, absolutely,” she said. She let the door swing shut.

  I am completely surrounded by nerds, she thought on her way back to her lab. Like I’m an island in a sea of them. And global warming is raising the sea levels.…

  In science, as in most aspects of life, patience often pays off.

  Greg had thought he would go crazy before he finished comparing edged tools to the marks left on the irrigation tube. Even his interrogation of Fred Rosen only offered a short break, and Rosen’s knife hadn’t come close to being the right tool.

  Finally, he found a match.

  It was a pair of pruning shears that he had taken from a gardening shed at the airport. The marks he made with them on identical black tubing were a precise fit—the same tool had definitely cut both tubes. It wasn’t what a professional landscaper would use to cut irrigation tubing, he was sure, although it was a tool to which that landscaper would have access.

  His next concern was who had handled the shears. If the same fingerprint turned up there as on the muffler, canopy, cockpit, or tube, then he would have a solid suspect. There had been no landscaper on duty, so he hadn’t yet fingerprinted any, but he did have a list of airport employees and could send an officer out to collect those prints.

  Mandy was busy with other things, so Greg checked the shears for fingerprints himself, fuming them in a small cyanoacrylate fuming chamber, which made two friction ridge impressions stand out distinctly under ultraviolet light. He added a little powder for contrast, photographed them, and lifted them with low-tack tape. Finally, he downloaded the images from the camera and ran them through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS.

  A short while later, he had his answer. Or part of it, anyway. One of the fingerprints had come from someone who wasn’t in the system.

  But the other belonged to the night janitor at the airport, Benny Kracsinski.

  He realized there could be a perfectly legitimate reason for Benny to use the landscaper’s clippers from time to time. Greg had no way of knowing how much overlap there was between the two jobs. Ordinarily a janitor worked inside and a gardener or landscaper worked outside, but he supposed it was possible that the janitor had needed to prune an indoor plant, or wanted to cut back one that had grown too close to a window he had to wash. Any number of other scenarios presented themselves.

  Still… since it was the only print he had that definitively linked an airport employee with a tool used in the commission of a homicide, he had to dig deeper.

  Benny’s prints were in AFIS, he learned, because they had been taken when Benny had joined the Air Force, years before. That was strange in itself—Greg wouldn’t have taken Benny for a veteran. He had assumed that Benny’s disability had been long term, maybe from birth, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

&nbs
p; He delved into what he could find online and in law enforcement databases about Benny Kracsinski, and the picture filled in a little more. Time to bring Catherine into the loop, he decided. We just might have a murderer here.

  24

  WHEN HER CELL PHONE rang, Catherine snatched it up, hoping it was Jim Brass with some sort of explanation for his presence in Deke Freeson’s motel room. It was already halfway to her ear when she recognized the tone assigned only to Lindsey. She smiled. This late, Lindsey had to be calling back to tell her that the earlier emotional crisis had been resolved. The storms of youth blew furious but passed quickly. “Lindsey? What are you doing up? It’s a—”

  “It’s July, Mom, there’s no school tomorrow. And anyway, it’s Friday night.”

  “Okay, I know that, but still—”

  “Jeez, do you want to talk to me or not? Because sometimes you say I don’t communicate enough and then when I try—”

  “Fine, I’m sorry. What is it?”

  There was a long silence, as if Lindsey was reconsidering her phone call. “It’s about Sondra,” she said finally.

  “Sondra.”

  “You know, Sondra. My friend.”

  Catherine’s turn to reconsider. She wanted Lindsey to be able to come to her with any problem—never wanted her daughter to feel that her troubles were unimportant, or that she would be turned away. But how had Sondra’s problems become hers? “I know. Is this still about her and what’s his name, Jayden? I tried to call you earlier, by the way. I thought you were in bed.”

  “I’m still out.”

  “Because?”

  “Because Gemma is, like, freaking out over it.”

  Now she had inherited Gemma’s problem, too. Was this how it worked these days? She didn’t think she had ever dumped all of her friends’ emotional issues on her own mother. She had given her grief in plenty of other ways, but not that one. “Okay…”

  “I mean, when I called you we had just left the club. But then Gemma wouldn’t get in the car. She waited around in the parking lot until Sondra came out with that guy she was with, and then attacked her. Like, physically.”