Snake Eyes

by Max Allan Collins

  A dispatcher, a short, thin woman of fifty with trim blonde hair, stuck her head in the glass enclosure. “Chief, the Highway Patrol just called—Predators’ve run the roadblock…. They’re on their way into town.”

  Lopez kept his voice calm, even as he rose from his desk. “Get everyone inside now, Gloria. Blow the horn.”

  “Horn?” Catherine asked.

  “Emergency horn for foul weather,” Lopez explained. “But everybody in Boot Hill knows, they hear that, they get their butts inside.”

  “Might keep some innocents from getting hurt,” Grissom said.

  Catherine rolled her eyes. “I won’t be offended if the guilty stay indoors, too.”

  “Where’s Cody?” Lopez yelled, but Gloria was gone.

  The tall, paunchy, fiftyish detective, in jeans, boots, and a blue short-sleeved shirt with western pocket trim, swung into his chief’s office.

  “Right here, boss,” Jacks said, thumb in a loop of a belt that included his holstered sidearm. “Just got back. What’s up?”

  Sara seemed to materialize, her hair slightly mussed as if she’d come on the run; perhaps she had. As she entered the small office, her expression grave, she first noticed Jacks.

  After a beat, she said to her fellow CSIs, “Guys, can we talk a sec?”

  Sara gestured with her head, arcs of hair swinging, that she wanted to do so in private.

  Catherine frowned, but Grissom said, “Sure.”

  And they joined her in a hallway just off the bullpen.

  The trio gathered in a tight little circle, Sara’s voice as soft as her expression was grave.

  She said, “Sofia just called. Grissom, you gave me a name to run earlier…a local girl.”

  “Right,” he said. “Wendy Sierra. What about her?”

  “She’s that cop’s daughter.”

  Catherine, startled, said, “Lopez?”

  But Grissom, who’d seen the girl in question and now put a faint family resemblance together, said, “Jacks. Cody Jacks.”

  Catherine turned to Grissom. “Remind me why you wanted her name checked?”

  Grissom did so, painting a quick picture of the makeshift memorial at the chain-link fence of the Four Kings, and Wendy Sierra’s tearful delivery of roses in memory of Nick Valpo.

  “So Wendy is Cody’s daughter,” Catherine said. “It’s a small town. Does this tell us anything?”

  Nobody seemed to know for sure. Nick came down the hall from the modest crime lab and fell in with his colleagues.

  “The Rocky boots from the mortuary are not Officer Montaine’s,” he said.

  Sara asked, “Did we suspect him?”

  “Not really,” Nick said. “But he’s eliminated as far as this line of evidence goes.”

  A piercing electronic scream made the CSIs jump—the emergency horn…three long blasts.

  Lopez appeared at the mouth of the hall and said, “Would you folks step back in my office for a moment?”

  They did, standing with their backs to the window-wall on the bullpen. Jacks was seated behind Lopez’s desk.

  “We clearly have a situation here,” the chief said, approaching the CSIs. “I know you’re all pros, but I don’t want you on the front lines. With my own people, and the Highway Patrol, I think we can hold on.”

  “You need to call the governor,” Catherine said.

  “I have. He says he’ll do what he can.”

  “Specifically…?”

  “He wasn’t specific. He’s getting back to me, ASAP.”

  Catherine shook her head. “What the hell kind of—”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Ms. Willows, but I do have to get out there.”

  “Which leaves us where?” Catherine asked.

  Lopez pointed a finger at the floor. “Right here. Cody’ll stay with you guys.”

  “Chief,” Grissom said, “we’re all proficient in firearms. It’s part of the job.”

  “I’m aware of that, Doc—and have full confidence in your abilities. Remember Rio Bravo?”

  Nick and Sara exchanged looks: what the…?

  The chief was saying, “I need you here to keep an eye on these locked-up Spokes. We may have a mob—hell, two mobs—on our doorstep any time. One’ll want to spring and save the prisoners; the other’ll want them made dead, in a hurry. At least in the old days, they took time to find a tree and string up a rope; it’ll be quicker now, and probably even uglier.”

  The CSIs passed glances around; they were being kept off the front line only to guard a beleaguered fort.

  Lopez nodded to Jacks, then returned his gaze to his guests. “I need the five of you to make sure that nothing happens to our ‘guests,’ either way, while I’m out there trying to keep the lid on this sucker. With the exception of Detective Jacks, and the dispatcher down the hall in her cubbyhole, you’ll be on your own. Ms. Willows—you’re supervisor. You up for this?”

  Catherine said, “Yes.”

  Lopez said, “Thank you, ma’am. Good luck.”

  He tipped his Stetson and went off to lead his tiny contingent, twenty or twenty-five strong…to hold off ten times that many.

  Nonetheless, Nick offered Catherine a smile. “Did he just call you ‘ma’am’ ?”

  Catherine said, “Be quiet,” through a smile, albeit a troubled one.

  Sara said, “I’m pretty sure he called you ‘ma’am.’”

  “Sara…”

  Grissom faced Catherine. “We could phone Sheriff Burdick…”

  “No,” she said, with one shake of the head, “this is Lopez’s judgment call.”

  Nick said, “On the other hand, it’s our butts.”

  Jacks was up from behind the desk and parting venetian blind blades to look out at the street through one of three windows side by side that formed a sort of picture window, though each had individual blinds.

  With his gray sideburns, gray eyes, and vaguely wolfish countenance, Jacks evoked the image of an old Western sheriff, which was underscored when he drew his sidearm, a Glock, checked the clip, then reholstered the weapon.

  “We should be safe enough here,” he said, turning his head toward them but maintaining sentry. “But if things gets hairy, you do all know the way back to the cells, right?”

  Nods all around.

  The detective went back to looking out the window, waiting for trouble that seemed ever more inevitable.

  Grissom and Catherine took the visitor’s chairs, while Nick and Sara kept their own watch out the wall of windows onto the vacant bullpen and on a door that they all hoped would open only when Chief Lopez returned.

  “Did you see this coming?” Grissom asked Jacks.

  “Damn bikers’ll likely do anything,” Jacks said. “Normal humans don’t shoot up a casino like that and endanger civilians.”

  “That type might do about any evil thing,” Grissom said.

  Catherine frowned at him.

  Jacks, rather absently, eyes on the street, said, “Might at that.”

  “Even seduce an innocent girl away from her family,” Grissom said.

  Now Jacks spun his whole beefy body away from the window. His eyes were hooded, his complexion pale. “What do you know about Wendy?”

  Grissom said, “I know she shed tears for Valpo. I know she put a dozen roses under his picture at that improvised memorial.”

  Lopez’s top sergeant heaved a sigh. Then he returned to the window, fingers prying open blinds; but his glazed expression indicated he wasn’t looking at the street…

  …perhaps just into his past.

  “Her mom, Nancy, and me,” he said in that resonant radio announcer’s voice, “we got divorced over what happened to that girl.”

  Jacks’s fingers dropped from the blinds, no longer holding them open. Now he stared directly into the metal slats.

  “Two years ago,” he said, “this bastard Valpo managed to seduce four underage girls into having sex with him…four!”

  “Roofies?” Catherine asked.


  He shrugged. “Some kind of goddamn drugs. Wendy…was one of them. In retrospect, we probably sheltered her. Casino trade or not, this is a small town—church and school and family. She was sixteen then, and’d just…developed, kind of overnight; went from being a flat-chested little girl to a…looked like she was twenty, or even twenty-one…and all of sudden, she started to dress like it. Real…trampy.”

  His eyes closed.

  “I tried to put my foot down about that slutty crap, but…that girl has a way she can look at you and melt you…if you’re her dad, anyway. Hell, and me, supposed to be so goddamn tough. But her and her mom? I couldn’t never say no to them about nothing. Nancy…wasn’t that upset about how Wendy dressed…least, not until the thing with Valpo, and the drugs.”

  “If it was date rape,” Catherine said, “you could have brought him in—”

  “It wasn’t roofies! It was…weed and pills and…stuff Wendy liked to use. She got into that lifestyle, not every day, but when the bikers rolled in, it was something…rebellious she could do.”

  “Sixteen’s the age of consent in Nevada,” Grissom said. “So a statutory rape charge was out.”

  “You are unfortunately dead right on that one, Doc…and then she started disappearing weekends—going to Vegas and Phoenix and God knows where.”

  Catherine asked, “Meeting Valpo?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Wherever it was, she got her drugs there—weed mostly, but still…. And when I couldn’t get our daughter off the stuff and straightened around, my wife took it out on me—blamed me for babying the girl, divorced my sorry ass, went back to her maiden name, Sierra. Wendy went with her and took her mom’s name, too. My name—they didn’t even want that no more.”

  His expression and his tone bland as a glass of cold milk, Grissom asked, “Is that when a daydream started evolving into a plan?”

  Jacks’s wolfish eyes narrowed and a faint smile formed. “What the hell you talkin’ about, Doc?”

  “Your plan to execute Nick Valpo.”

  Jacks grunted a laugh. “Somebody spike your chaw with peyote, Doc?”

  “I don’t use ‘chaw,’” Grissom said softly. “And I don’t mind when my friend Chief Lopez calls me ‘Doc,’ but I’d prefer you didn’t.”

  Thumbs looped in his belt, Jacks said, “If that, before, was some kind of serious accusation, you better have something to back it up.”

  “Oh, I’ll be able to prove it by the end of business today, if we’re not too distracted by another shoot-out. That can provide a real distraction—don’t you think, Sergeant Jacks?”

  “I think you’re on thin ice.”

  Grissom smiled gently. “Not a terribly apt analogy, in this climate. By sundown, everything will be clear, and you’ll be—”

  Jacks’s lip curled. “On the stage out of town?”

  Grissom nodded in the lockup’s direction. “No. Behind bars.”

  Jacks tilted his head toward the street. “You don’t think that biker rabble’ll have something to say about that?”

  Shrugging, Grissom said, “I hope not. A lynching in any form I find distasteful.”

  The eyes of the other CSIs were glued to these two men now as they batted each other the ball….

  “And what makes you so sure you’ve got this figured…Doc?”

  “Same thing that always convinces me I’ve got it ‘figured,’” Grissom said. “The evidence.”

  The detective snorted a harsh laugh. “You don’t have anything on me.”

  “I’d say we have plenty.”

  Jacks frowned. “Like what?”

  Grissom shrugged. “Well, there’s your boot print at the mortuary, where you stole Valpo’s body. You do wear Rocky boots, don’t you?”

  “Who doesn’t around here?” Jacks said with a dismissive wave. “Department policy.”

  “But no two pairs of boots wear the same—they indicate the feet that trod in them…kind of like leather and rubber fingerprints. Plus, there’s a tire print that Nick lifted. That’s going to match your car, too.”

  The gray eyes grew cold. “What makes you think I was at the mortuary?”

  “Because you couldn’t get rid of the murder weapon without raising suspicion,” Grissom answered. “So you had to get rid of the bullet—that meant getting rid of Valpo’s body.”

  Jacks looked as though he were trying to follow a foreign film, minus subtitles. “Back up—what murder weapon?”

  “Small-caliber pistol,” Grissom said. “A twenty-two. You got a hideout piece—maybe on your left ankle?”

  Catherine jumped in. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind showing us your left ankle, Sergeant?”

  Jacks shrugged, said, “Sure, why the hell not?”

  And he lifted his right leg up onto the chief’s desk, baring his hairy ankle as his pants rode up…

  …showing them an S&W model 2214 automatic pistol.

  From behind Grissom, Nick said slowly, “Just like Keith Draper’s.”

  Jacks returned his foot to the floor and said, “So what? It’s a typical backup piece. What in hell does that prove?” A wolfish smile bared yellow teeth. “Anyway, my esteemed colleagues from the big-time Vegas crime lab…without the bullet, who’s to say what gun fired the shot that killed that animal?”

  Grissom ignored the question. “Just to satisfy my curiosity—why didn’t you just pitch the gun? Would’ve been considerably simpler than body-snatching.”

  Jacks’s lupine grin contained not a hint of humor. “Since I didn’t kill him, I don’t need to dump any gun…. Besides, it was a gift—from my wife and daughter.” He waved this off, literally. “And, hell—everybody in the department knows I have that little gun. I’ve had it for years!”

  “Years?” Grissom asked.

  “Wendy’s mom bought it for my thirtieth—gave it to me in both their names. Little something extra to make sure Daddy…Daddy made it home every night.”

  Grissom noted the emotion the detective had betrayed and said, “Well, keepsake or not, we’ll need to test if it’s been fired.”

  “Why bother? I’ll tell you it has—I was out at the range yesterday before work…which I can prove, easy. Both my guns were fired there; and so, yes, I’ll check positive for GSR—so what?”

  Gunshot residue would tell them if Jacks had fired a gun recently and tended to hang around even if the shooter washed his hands; but Jacks’s admission was meant to make that go away. In Grissom’s view, it didn’t, not entirely.

  Jacks returned to his window. Easily, not looking at them, as if it were part of his guard duty, Jacks withdrew the Glock from its holster and held it loosely at his side, the barrel pointed toward the floor. “Maybe that pit-boss sleaze Draper took Valpo out. He hates bikers like poison.”

  The weapon in the suspect’s hand stiffened every CSI spine; but no one moved.

  “We won’t know,” Grissom said calmly, “until we match bullets from both guns against the ones that killed Valpo.”

  Still smiling, Jacks said, “Gonna be kind of tough to match bullets without the body, isn’t it?”

  Grissom smiled as well. “I don’t have the body…but I know where it is.”

  Again Jacks faced them, the venetian blinds at his back. “Really? Well, surprise me—where are the earthly remains of that prick?”

  “Here’s what happened,” Grissom said.

  You hated Valpo for what he did to your daughter, and whether that wrong was real or imagined, you decided you had to take him out for it—like a diseased branch that had to be pruned from society’s tree.

  Valpo would come into town, but with you being a cop, he’d be a frustratingly inaccessible target, always surrounded by company—a social breed, bikers. You couldn’t get close enough to execute him without some sort of diversion. So you recruited Tom Price. All Price had to do was not change the metal-detector batteries one day during the Biker Blowout…and you made sure Finch and the Spokes knew when that would happen.

  All they had
to do was come in, fire off a few shots, and you would take care of Valpo, making the Spokes’ biggest problem disappear. Perhaps Finch knew about the execution you planned, or maybe he just thought you were helping them out in order to get back at Valpo and the Predators for what they’d done to your daughter.

  You of course knew where the blind spots were in the Four Kings video security system, and when the shooting started, you waited for your chance…and pounced. The safest place to commit a murder, after all, is a battlefield. And when Valpo got wounded, you had the perfect opportunity to finish him off. He was even magnanimous enough to fall into a blind spot for you. In all the commotion, the act was practically invisible—what were a couple more gunshots when there were over a hundred others going off, and where most everyone was ducking for cover?

  So you had your revenge…and the Spokes had made their “statement” to the Predators, who’d dismissed them as weekend warriors. The perfect solution—almost. You still had that precious gun, with its nostalgic family ties, that you couldn’t bring yourself to give up…and there was Tom Price to deal with. But as lead investigator in the case (a predictable turn of events) you had the freedom to deal with both those loose ends.

  You hit the mortician, Mr. Erickson, over the back of the head and whisked Valpo’s body away. Of course, you hadn’t thought about the footprints and tire prints you were leaving in a dusty parking lot…maybe that was the small-town cop in you.

  Under the pretext of searching for the missing Tom Price, you went out to his place in the mountains to clip off your only remaining loose end. You probably got him to stay there by promising to bring the money out as soon as the deed was done. Or perhaps Price had second thoughts—he might not even have known why you wanted the metal detectors tampered with. Price might have wanted more money or perhaps suffered true remorse—maybe that suicide note was a confession he’d already written up, which you utilized for the occasion. At any rate, you went out, dealt with him—that is, killed him—making it look like a suicide.

  Price lived in a remote area, far out of town, and you were necessarily gone so long, and out of touch, that nobody would notice the extra time it took for you to bury Nick Valpo’s body on Price’s property. With the murder victim buried, and the other loose end on the books as a suicide, the only possible problem left for you is Buck Finch. After all, in your eyes, you weren’t murdering anyone, just a drug-dealing biker renegade—you were dispensing frontier justice.