Snake Eyes

by Max Allan Collins

  “I’m going to print the vics,” Bynum said. “We want to be able to eliminate them.”

  Warrick ignored being told the obvious and asked, “Do we know what he touched while he was here?”

  “You guys can dust the whole front counter,” Bynum said, with a nod in that direction. “All the vics agree he touched it in several places.”

  “No gloves?” Greg asked.

  “No gloves.”

  “Nice break.”

  “Could be,” Bynum admitted. Addressing both CSIs, he said, “You can also collect any physical evidence you can find. I’ll probably start by processing the evidence at your lab, just for the sake of speed.”

  “We’re on it,” Warrick said.

  They retrieved their crime scene kits, and while Warrick dusted the counter, Greg collected evidence.

  After printing the victims, Bynum slipped behind the counter and searched for evidence back there. Warrick knew Reese would be talking to the manager, Mr. Warner, about dye packs and marked bills as bait money the robber might have taken. Greg bagged several items from the front side of the counter, then headed to the rear to retrieve the security video with the help of the bank manager.

  Meanwhile, Reese and his fellow agents interviewed the vics in separate areas of the lobby so they would not contaminate each other’s memories.

  When the CSIs were finished, they had scant evidence to go on.

  Tons of fingerprints from the counters, but it would take a good while to sort them out. Greg had bagged the manila envelope that had hidden the robber’s gun, as well as some hairs he had found, and had photographed the guard’s head wound in case there might be a clue about the gunman’s pistol.

  Along with the security videos, that was pretty much everything.

  Bynum told them to take what they had to the lab, adding that he’d catch up as soon as he could.

  “Huh. You do all the work, we’ll take all the glory,” Warrick muttered.

  If there was any, Warrick reminded himself. Should the evidence lead to a dead end, the FBI would simply move on to the next case, no skin off their collective nose. Warrick and Greg, on the other hand, were working a twenty-four-hour shift…and would end it by doing somebody else’s dirty work….

  “Get anything from the witnesses?” Warrick asked the FBI analyst.

  Bynum shrugged. “Not a whole hell of a lot. One customer thought she saw the UNSUB get into a cab in the parking lot. That’s about it.”

  Back at the lab, Warrick told Greg to get the hairs to the trace evidence lab, then use ninhydrin to find fingerprints, which he would then load into AFIS. In the meantime, Warrick would settle in to study the security videos.

  He had been at it for over an hour and had seen all the tapes at least once from the time of the robbery, and now he was doing a more in-depth search, since none had given him a good view of the robber.

  The problem with banks was the same all over: though they certainly had high-end money, they notoriously tended to buy the lowest-end video security equipment, depending on the well-known fact that they had cameras as a deterrent.

  This meant looking through more blurry, scratchy images searching for one frame that might hold a clear shot of the UNSUB’s face….

  Greg came in carrying the envelope in a metal tray. “In the mood for good news?” he asked.

  Warrick looked up, his eyes burning with fatigue. “Always. Anyway, I need a boost to keep me going.”

  “Took the hairs to trace.”

  “And?”

  “Composed of Dynel and konekolen.”

  Warrick didn’t even have to think. “A synthetic wig, and a cheap one at that.”

  “And now for the bad news.”

  Feeling a little deflated, Warrick asked, “You didn’t say there was good news and bad news.”

  “Couldn’t. You looked too pitiful.”

  Warrick sighed. “Hit me with it.”

  “No prints with the ninhydrin.”

  And sighed again. “Okay. So we have to try something else.”

  Greg looked perplexed. “What?”

  Warrick said nothing, rose, and left his office for the lab. Greg trailed behind.

  “You sprayed on the ninhydrin,” Warrick said as they walked, “then heated the envelope in the oven, right?”

  “Yeah,” Greg said as they strode down the hall. “Of course. Mother Sanders raised no idiot pups, y’know.”

  “Good to hear. And you got nothing?”

  “Right.”

  They turned into the lab, where Warrick tapped the counter for Greg to set down the tray.

  “There’s this new thing the Canadians have been doing. Hasn’t even been in the JFI yet, but they asked Grissom to verify their tests…and he did. Gris says it works great, even showed me how to do it.”

  “So,” Greg said, honestly and openly impressed, “you got this process before it was even in The Journal of Forensic Investigation?”

  Warrick smiled. “Sometimes it’s not what you know, but who you know…and Grissom? Guy knows everybody. Like Anissa Rawji at the University of Toronto and Alexandre Beaudoin from the Sûreté du Québec.”

  Greg frowned in interest. “Who are…?”

  “The guys who came up with this solution called Red Oil O. It’s better on white or thermal paper than this brown stuff, but it’s worth a try.”

  Greg hovered nearby. “How does it work?”

  “Instead of all the steps and mess of physical developer, Red Oil O only involves three steps.”

  Greg squinted. “Uh…what is Red Oil O again?”

  “A lysochrome used in biology for staining lipoproteins,” Warrick said, “recovered after electrophoresis separation. Sometimes it’s used in electron microscopy as well. Didn’t you ever use it to stain lip prints on a porous surface before?”

  Greg shook his head.

  “Well, with fingerprints it’s the same theory as with lip prints. The ROO stains the lipids, and we’re left with a red print on a pink background. That is, if we get anything at all.”

  Warrick walked Greg through the process; but, when they got through soaking the envelope and drying it, they still had nothing.

  “Another dead end,” Greg muttered.

  Shaking his head, Warrick held the envelope up to the light. “There’s just nothing here….”

  “At least we tried,” Greg said.

  “Wait a minute,” Warrick said, turning the envelope in the light. “What’s that little rectangle at the bottom?”

  Greg peeked over his shoulder. “What?”

  “Did you look inside the envelope?”

  “Yeah, of course. There was nothing.”

  Warrick opened the envelope and, using tweezers, gently withdrew a slim rectangle of thermal paper. “No, there’s something—a receipt.”

  The paper had turned pink; a beautiful red fingerprint showed up right in the middle of it.

  “Beautiful,” Warrick said as he pressed the receipt out flat. “The wig! He bought it at a dollar store at a mall.”

  “Maybe they have security video,” Greg said. “A buck’s worth, anyway….”

  “You contact them, I’ll photograph the print and get it into AFIS.”

  The partners met two hours later in the break room to mainline coffee and compare results, sitting across a table from each other.

  “What’d you get?” Warrick asked.

  Greg pushed a photo across the table. “Beautiful head shot of our perp from the dollar store’s security system. All digital, very cool.”

  “I’ll see your head shot,” Warrick said, “and raise you a fingerprint match from AFIS….” He opened a file folder and compared the security photo to the mug shot inside. “Craig Rogers, real piece of crap character.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Assault, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary—just got out of the joint two weeks ago.”

  Greg grunted a little laugh. “Our new best friend Craig also left a nice mark on the g
uard’s head and drew blood. We can probably match the pistol if he’s still got it.”

  Warrick said, “Judging from his rap sheet, Craig’s just too damn dumb to dump it. I went back to the bank security tapes and—though I didn’t get a better picture of Rogers—I did find a shot through the lobby that showed him climbing into a black-and-yellow striped cab.”

  “Sunburst Taxi,” Greg said. “Easy trace.”

  “Better tell Reese,” Warrick said, getting out his cell phone.

  He caught the FBI agent in his office and filled him in.

  “Nice work, Mr. Brown,” Reese said in a genuine manner. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Warrick ended the call, expecting to never hear the FBI agent’s voice again.

  But half an hour later, as Warrick finished bagging up the bank robbery evidence, his cell phone chirped. He pulled it off his belt and hit the talk button. “Brown.”

  “Jamal Reese.”

  “Special Agent Reese, what can I do for you?”

  “We tracked down Rogers. He’s at a fleabag hotel downtown. I’m getting ready to go bust down his door and ruin his day…thought you and your partner might want the pleasure of joining in. You earned it.”

  Warrick smiled. “Appreciate the gesture, Special Agent—”

  “Jamal,” Reese interrupted. “You can call me Jamal.”

  “I appreciate the gesture, Jamal, and the name is Warrick…but to tell you the truth, we’re just too tired. We are running on fumes right now, after the shift from hell.”

  Reese chuckled. “I hear you.”

  “Anyway, he’s your bust—put him away. Shut the door on his cell hard enough, maybe we’ll hear it over here.”

  “All right. Give it my best shot.”

  “Really, thanks. Mention the crime lab if you get a chance at the press conference—my boss, Ecklie, would like that—but Greg and I were just doing our job.”

  There was a short pause, then Reese said, “And you do it very well, Warrick. Both of you. Thanks again.”

  Warrick ended the call and reported the FBI agent’s words to Greg, emphasizing the “both of you” part.

  Greg obviously liked hearing that.

  “Is this shift finally over?” Greg asked.

  From the break-room doorway, looking half asleep, Captain Jim Brass said, “No.”

  Within minutes, Warrick and Brass sat across the table from Isaiah “Fleety” Fleetwood in an interrogation room.

  After so many hours on the job, Warrick felt like death warmed over; but Fleety looked like it. The kid was obviously terrified after spending hours in a holding tank, waiting to find out just how screwed he was.

  Brass drummed his fingers on the table, adding to the kid’s anxiety. “Look, Fleety—here’s the deal. Jalon’s going down for murder. Right now, you’re going with him.”

  “But, man, I didn’t kill nobody!”

  Warrick said coldly, “You damn near killed me.”

  “No, man, I was jus’ talkin’—I woulda never—”

  “Knock it off, Fleety. Now,” Warrick said, and he sent his hardest, iciest gaze across the table to Fleety.

  Who ducked those laser beams, hanging his head.

  Brass said, “You do have a chance here. You can tell us what happened—how and why Jalon murdered DeMarcus Hankins. That way, you can avoid death row.”

  The kid’s eyes looked everywhere but at Brass and Warrick. “I ain’t no rat.”

  Warrick said, “Fleety, we’ve got both Jalon’s and your footprints at the murder scene. We’ve got Jalon’s gun with his prints on it, and his bullets in DeMarcus. We have both your fingerprints in the car. We have both your DNA on the straws from Bob’s Round-Up Grill. Jalon’s DNA matches the skin under DeMarcus’s nails. We even have a dead lion you fellas ran down. Truth is, Fleety, we don’t need you. Jalon goes down, or you both go down—you choose.”

  With the evidence laid out that way, Fleety needed little time to make a decision. “Damn straight Jalon did it! But it wasn’t supposed to be no murder. Hell, I didn’t even want to go out on that party, anyway. But Jalon, he told me, if I didn’t drive? Then I was a punk-ass bitch, and he’d make sure that all the Hoods knew it.”

  “What was the party supposed to be?” Brass asked.

  Fleety shook his head. “Jalon jus’ wanted to knock this chump down to size. We grabbed him in a parking lot? He been, you know, soldierin’ through our neighborhood like he own the damn place. Jalon said, ‘Fuck that,’ and we grab him. Jalon say we had to teach the MSB a lesson, that we ain’t no pushovers whose turf don’t need respecting.”

  Tears streamed now, and Warrick decided that Brass could finish this interview without him.

  The CSI had had enough of this gang stuff for one shift. Hell, enough for every future shift, too; enough of watching strong young brothers going down this weak old path that ruined so many lives.

  Maybe it was exhaustion from a twenty-four-hour shift, but Warrick felt sick to his stomach. He made his way to the break room, where he grabbed a bottle of juice, dropped into a chair, and held the cold bottle to his forehead.

  Greg came bounding in like the shift had just started. “That oily substance on DeMarcus Hankins’s shoes was motor oil.”

  Warrick nodded. “They snatched him in a parking lot. He probably stepped in somebody’s oil leak. Puts him in that car, too, though.”

  Greg sat across from Warrick, leaned forward. “How bad will it go on Fleety?”

  “He’s cooperating. That’ll help. But you don’t draw down on cops and not do some major time. Felony murder, too, though his age may help him.”

  Greg shifted in his chair. “I talked to Paula Ferguson—Charlie Ames’s mistress?”

  Again, Warrick nodded. His head felt heavy. The Ames case seemed like a thousand years ago….

  Greg was saying, “She said she was getting ready to dump Charlie’s behind, next time she saw him. She’d already figured out he wasn’t playing with a full deck.”

  “Oh, he was playing with a full deck, all right—all jokers. You believe her story, Greg? Or is she an accessory, backpedaling?”

  Greg considered that. “No—it rang true.”

  “Got any evidence against her?”

  Greg shook his head. “No.”

  “She’s probably in the clear, then.”

  Greg yawned and rested his head on his folded arms, like a kid catching a nap at a school desk.

  And it looked so damned restful, Warrick did the same.

  12

  Saturday, April 2, 2005, 1:30 P.M.

  THE EMOTIONALLY EXHAUSTED CSIS and the stunned Boot Hill police chief took chairs at the empty desks in the bullpen and sat facing each other. Grissom, tired of talking, nodded to Catherine, who filled Lopez in.

  When she’d finished—a concise and accurate account that Grissom admired—Lopez, shaking his head, his eyes rather dazed, muttered, “I was…I was just coming in to call the governor again and tell him that we were about to be overrun.”

  And the chief reached for a phone.

  Catherine raised a hand. “No—get Finch out of his cell.”

  “What?” Lopez said, astonished. “Why?”

  Her colleagues gazed at her in bewilderment—all but Grissom, that is.

  Quietly she said, “What does that mob want?”

  “Half of them want Finch free,” Lopez said. “Half want his head.”

  “Get him,” she repeated. “And I’ll need a bullhorn…. Chief, you have to trust me on this.”

  Lopez looked searchingly at Grissom. “Doc…?”

  “Do what she says, Chief,” Grissom said. “I think I know where she’s going, and it’s our best chance.”

  Less than two minutes later, Chief Lopez and the cuffed prisoner, Finch, emerged onto the front stoop of the station, several steps above the crowd of several hundred agitated faces. Catherine, Grissom, Sara, and Nick came out right behind them.

  Before them milled two distinct groups, the Spo
kes and the Predators, a thin line of Highway Patrolmen and Boot Hill cops between the two groups in riot squad formation; another line of lawmen stood behind some flimsy barricades in front of the station.

  The two biker contingents had been shouting each other down, but a hush of surprise fell across both camps at the sight of the cops and the prisoner at the top of the short flight of cement steps.

  To Catherine Willows, the bullhorn in her hands felt heavier than any weapon she had ever held. Her stomach was doing a fluttery dance and she knew that if she botched this, if her instincts were wrong, they all might die.

  She took a deep breath and raised the bullhorn.

  “Everybody please listen,” she said.

  This prompted the shouting to resume, but now instead of each other, screams and yells and obscenities were directed at the front of the police station, in defiance of Catherine’s request.

  She pressed on: “No one has to die here today!”

  These words—she would never quite be sure why—caused the crowd noise to dissipate. They were looking up at her, bikers and cops alike, with the same bewilderment that her colleagues had when she first suggested Buck Finch be brought from his cell.

  “We know who killed Nick Valpo.”

  With the Spokes leader there in custody, on public view, the Predators assumed Catherine meant Finch and began to cheer. And the Spokes roared their disapproval.

  Catherine put a quick stop to this: “The killer was not Buck Finch! Not any of the Rusty Spokes!”

  And now the Spokes whooped and hollered, while the Predators booed and catcalled, the small presence of cops below looking uneasy as hell, and Catherine knew the scene was as close to erupting into violence as it had ever been.

  “Sergeant Cody Jacks, a Boot Hill police officer with a grudge, killed Valpo. Minutes ago, Jacks was taken down by Chief Lopez inside the station.”

  The crowd fell eerily silent as it absorbed these words.

  Every face, Predator or Spoke or police, froze; so many wide eyes and gaping mouths—it might have seemed comic to Catherine had she not been so terrified.

  “You had to have heard the shot.…Valpo’s killer is dead. Not a result of your feud, but of Cody Jacks wanting revenge.”