Double Dealer ccsi-1

by Max Allan Collins

  "You know," Warrick said, in the bathroom doorway, "Grissom never once mentioned anything to me, about, you know . . . me working an investigation in a casino."

  Still hard at it, Sara said, "Well, that's Grissom."

  "Yeah. I just wasn't sure he would ever trust me again."

  Studying him now, Sara asked, "Warrick?"

  "Yeah."

  "Is it tough for you?"

  "What?"

  "Being around it. A casino, I mean."

  He looked at her for a very long time. "No harder than a recovering alcoholic working a crime scene in a liquor store."

  Her gaze met his. "That hard?"

  A slow nod. "That hard."

  Awkwardly, she said, "Look, uh . . . if I can help . . ."

  "If anybody could help," he said, "we wouldn't be having this conversation."

  They continued working the scene, silently.

  4

  THE LAS VEGAS CRIMINALISTICS DEPARTMENT-HOUSED IN A modern, rambling one-story building tucked between lush pine trees-was a rabbit warren of offices, conference rooms, and especially labs, with a lounge and locker room thrown in for the hell of it. This washed-out world of vertical blinds, fingerprint analysis, glass-and-wood walls and evidence lockers was strangely soothing to Catherine Willows-her home away from home.

  Catherine had managed to pick up her daughter Lindsey from school, have a quality-time dinner, and even catch a couple hours of sleep before coming into work a little after nine in the evening.

  Now, a few minutes after ten, her eyes already burned from the strain of studying the computer monitor. Buried in the minutiae of an unsolved missing persons case-this one a fifty-two-year-old white man named Frank Mayfield who had disappeared thirteen years ago-she sensed someone standing in the doorway to her left.

  She turned to see Grissom there, briefcase in one hand, the other holding a stack of file folders and a precariously balanced cup of coffee. In a black short-sleeve sportshirt and gray slacks, he managed to look casual and professional at once. He held the door open with a foot.

  "You're in early," he said.

  "Trying to figure out who our mummy is."

  His eyes tightened. "And you are . . . ?"

  "Going through missing persons cases, back ten to twenty years ago. The preliminary report says Imhotep died about fifteen years ago."

  He was at her side now, the coffee cup set down on the desk. "How many cases?"

  "No more than grains of sand in the desert," Catherine said, stretching to release the tension in her spine. "You know, there's been over thirty-two-hundred missing persons calls in the last two years alone."

  Grissom shook his head. "Any luck?"

  "Not yet."

  "Is this kind of fishing expedition productive?"

  She smirked, shrugged. "I've got to do something. Can't use DNA or dental until we at least have some idea who our guy is."

  He sat on the edge of the desk. "Got anything at all?"

  "A ring with an 'F' in diamonds inlaid in it."

  Grissom's eyebrows rose; he liked that. "First name or last name?"

  Catherine shrugged again. "Your guess is as good as mine."

  "Any other engraving? To so-and-so, from so-and-so? With love?"

  "No. Just an effin' 'F.' "

  Grissom raised an eyebrow. "Do we know how the victim died?"

  "Shot in the head."

  ". . . Funny."

  "Ha-ha?"

  "The other kind-our hallway corpse was shot in the head."

  Another smirk. "Well, nothing separating the corpses except maybe fifteen years."

  Grissom pressed. "Have you fingerprinted him yet?"

  "I was waiting for Nick to come in. Our mummy's in pretty bad shape. One foot already fell off when they were hauling him out from under the trailer."

  "I hate when that happens."

  "I figured it would be easier processing the prints with two of us."

  Nodding, Grissom said, "Good call. But you're here now, and Nick isn't-how about I lend a hand?"

  "Or a foot?" Her sigh turned into a yawn. "I appreciate the offer-I can use a change of scene. It's like searching for a needle in a hundred haystacks."

  Grissom nodded, hefting the stack of files. "Let me put this stuff in my office and we'll get right on it."

  Turning off the computer, she rose; he was already back to the door, but had left his coffee behind. Detail work on a crime scene was Grissom's strength; but in daily life he had a hint of the absent-minded professor.

  Joining him at the doorway, she said, "Hey, thanks for the coffee, Grissom."

  He frowned at her, as she seemed about to drink it. She handed him the cup. "I'm kidding. Come on."

  In the hallway, between sips of coffee, Grissom said, "Sometimes I can be a little thoughtless."

  "I wouldn't say that. Not just any guy would walk a girl to the morgue."

  And soon that was where they stood, blue scrubs over their street clothes, John Doe #17 outstretched on a silver metal table in front of them, his hands still bagged at his sides.

  "I can't believe we already have seventeen John Does this year," she said.

  Putting on a pair of glasses, Grissom moved forward; he didn't seem to have heard her. Catherine stood back a little as he studied the corpse. She knew he loved this part of the job-he was much better with dead people than live ones. There was something almost innocent about Grissom, something pure in his love for investigation and the search for truth.

  But even more, Grissom loved to learn. Each new body presented the opportunity for him to gain more knowledge to help not only this person, but other people in the future. Wherever his people skills lagged, the criminalist made up for it in a passion for serving the victims of crime, and compassion for the grieving survivors.

  At first, he took in the whole body. Catherine got the impression that Grissom wasn't so much seeing the body as absorbing it. Stay curious, he always said. He circled the metal table, observing the mummy from every angle.

  "Your killer did us a big favor hiding the body the way he did," Grissom said.

  "You didn't crawl under a rotting trailer to get at him."

  His eyes flicked to her. "You know if we lived anywhere but the desert, there wouldn't have been anything left but a few bones."

  She nodded. "Your bugs got cheated out of their buffet."

  He stepped in next to the body and pressed gingerly on the abdomen. "Feels like the organs might still be intact."

  Grissom with a body reminded her of how Lindsey had been when Catherine had given her that glass tea set last Christmas, the little girl examining each item, careful not to damage or crack the tiny pieces as she inspected each one. The criminalist did the same thing with the mummy, poking here, prodding there, bringing the work light down to more closely examine a section of the chest.

  "Okay," he said finally.

  "You through?"

  He looked at her sheepishly. "Sorry. This is your deal-where do you want to start?"

  Before they could move, Dr. Robbins, the coroner, walked through the swinging doors, a set of X rays in one hand. "Oh, sorry-didn't know anybody was in here."

  "Bad place to be startled, Doc," Catherine said with a half-smile.

  Around sixty, bald with a neatly trimmed gray beard, the avuncular Robbins-like them, he was in scrubs-slid his arm out of the metal cuff of his crutch and leaned it against the wall.

  "What have you got, Doc?" Grissom said.

  "Cause of death." Robbins stuck the first X ray under a clip on the viewer and turned on the light. The fluorescent bulbs came to life, illuminating a side view of the skull of John Doe #17 with several dark spots readily apparent. The second X ray the coroner put up showed the back of the skull with only two dark spots. He pointed to that picture first. "These two dark spots are your entry wounds."

  "Are you sure?" Grissom asked, eyes tight.

  Robbins looked at Grissom the way a parent does a backward child. "Why wouldn't I
be sure?"

  "Have you got the right X rays?" Grissom was having a closer look-much closer. "Is this John Smith or John Doe #17?"

  "The mummy, of course, John Doe #17," Robbins said, more confused than offended, now. "I don't even know who John Smith is."

  "Victim from the Beachcomber," Grissom said. "Two entry wounds vertically placed almost precisely one inch apart. Just like this. . . ."

  Catherine frowned, shook her head, arcs of reddish-blonde hair swinging. "The same pattern? You're kidding."

  Grissom twitched half a frown back at her. "When do I kid?"

  "Well," Robbins said, "there's no mistake, I haven't even seen the other corpse yet. Hell of a coincidence."

  "I don't believe in coincidences," Catherine said. "There's always a way to explain them away."

  Grissom shook his head slowly. "I don't deny the existence of coincidence-particularly when our corpses are separated by so many years."

  Mind whirling, Catherine said, "Do we have two cases, or one case?"

  Grissom's eyes almost closed; his mouth pursed. Then he said, "We have two victims. We work them as two cases. If the evidence turns them into one case, so be it. Until then . . . we live with this coincidence."

  "But we keep our eyes open."

  Grissom's eyes popped wide. "Always a good practice."

  Pointing to the other X ray, Robbins indicated a dark spot on the right side of the forehead. "Here's a good place to start looking-there's one of your bullets. Embedded itself in the skull."

  Grissom asked, "And the second one?"

  "EMTs found it on the gurney when they brought him in. Little devil just rolled out."

  "Where's the slug now?" Catherine asked.

  "With the other evidence," Robbins said, picking up his crutch again. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I better go make the acquaintance of Mr. John Smith."

  After the coroner left, Catherine and Grissom got down to work. They carefully unbagged the hands.

  Grissom said, "Killer took the fingertips. Thinks he stole the victim's prints."

  "I love it when we're smarter than the bad guys."

  He raised a lecturing finger. "Not smarter-better informed."

  "You think we should rehydrate the fingers?"

  Studying the desiccated fingers, he finally said, "It might help raise the prints."

  Catherine set out two large beakers, each a little more than half full of Formalin; behind her, Grissom was rustling in a drawer. When she turned back, Grissom stood next to the body with a huge pair of pruning shears.

  Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly through her mouth, Catherine moved into position next to the mummy.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  "Yeah." No matter how many times they did this, she never learned to accept it easily. At least this would probably be better than the times he had made her wear the skin stripped from dead hands as gloves, to provide fingerprinting pressure.

  She held the leathery right hand still as Grissom stepped in and lopped it off. Catherine flinched a little, the sound echoing in her ears like the snapping of a pencil. She took the hand, slipped it into one of the beakers and they moved to the other side of the body and repeated the process with the left hand.

  Setting the shears aside, Grissom said, "I can't get over the similarity of those wounds."

  Slowly, Catherine turned the mummy's head so Grissom could see the bullet holes.

  He stared at the wound. "You know what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said?"

  "About what?"

  "Coincidence."

  "Why don't you tell me."

  He gave her an unblinking gaze, as innocent as a newborn babe, as wise as the ages. " 'There are no mistakes, no coincidences-all events are blessings given to us to learn from.' "

  "I thought you didn't deny the existence of coincidence."

  "I don't accept it, either."

  "Identical wounds, over a decade apart. And from this we learn . . . ?"

  He shook his head. "Just keep digging. It's two separate cases. We treat it as two separate cases."

  Was he trying to convince her, she wondered, or himself?

  Catherine examined the wounds. "It is funny."

  Nodding, Grissom said, "But not ha-ha. Sooner you find out who this guy is, the sooner we can lay the coincidence issue to rest."

  "Nick and I will be all over this."

  Grissom granted her a tiny smile. "Keep me in the loop, Catherine."

  She nodded and watched him leave. Something in his manner didn't seem right, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it; he seemed vaguely distracted, even for Grissom. She told herself to keep an eye on her boss.

  In the meantime, she'd hunt up Nick and if he didn't have any ideas, she'd go back to digging in the computerized records. The hands would take about an hour to rehydrate.

  Nick sat in the break room, sipping coffee, a forensics journal open in front of him.

  "Hey," he said to her.

  "Hey," she said.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat across the table from him. "Where have you been?"

  He turned to the clock on the wall. "You mean since the shift started three minutes ago?"

  Following his gaze, she looked at the clock. She grinned and shook her head. "Sorry. I came in early. Tired, I guess."

  "I thought we were going to do the mummy's prints."

  "Been there, done that. Grissom helped."

  Nick frowned. "I wanted to lend a hand."

  "So to speak." Catherine shrugged. "Grissom offered."

  Nick was already over his disappointment. "Well, he's the best. Learn anything?"

  "I've got the mummy's hands in the Formalin now-we can look at them later."

  He grinned at her. "Isn't that an old movie?"

  "What?"

  "The Mummy's Hands?"

  "His hands are only part of the show. We found one of the bullets in his skull. Popped up in the X ray."

  "Just one?"

  She nodded. "The other fell out on the gurney. We'll wait for Robbins to dig the one out of the skull, then take them both to the firearms examiner."

  He sipped his coffee. "What do we do in the meantime?"

  "Back to the computer for me. I've been going through missing persons cases that somehow involve the initial 'F.' "

  "Seems worth doing. I think I'll go through the guy's effects-maybe I can find something."

  They finished their coffee, sharing a little small talk, and exited the break room, moving off in opposite directions.

  Nick went into the morgue to study John Doe #17's clothes more thoroughly. Though the suit had survived fairly well, it had now become part of the mummy, in essence, his second skin. Head wounds bleed a great deal, which was the reason for the dark stain on the back of the jacket.

  The clothes gave the mummy a musty smell, not exactly the aroma Nick would have expected to find coming from a dead body. He took scrapings from the bottom of the mummy's shoes in hopes that Greg Sanders, their resident lab rat, could tell him something about where the man had been walking before his death. He picked lint out of the mummy's pockets and bagged that. Anything that might give them some kind of hint to who this long-dead murder victim was.

  Next, he studied the two dollars and fifteen cents in change: six quarters, five dimes, two nickels and five pennies. The newest was a 1984 quarter, the oldest a 1957 nickel. The coins, except for the '57 nickel, were all pretty clean and Nick dusted them but lifted only two usable partials.

  The ring yielded no prints, but did have a set of tiny initials carved into it-not an inscription. He knew enough about jewelry to recognize they probably belonged to the jeweler that crafted the piece and not the victim. Well, at least that gave him something to go on. It would still be a few hours before he'd be able to find any jewelers in their stores.

  Finally, he looked at the bag with the cigarette filter remains. Not much left after fifteen years, but more than he would have expected. Filters never biod
egraded-an environmentalist's nightmare, a CSI's dream. Taking the bag, he wandered back toward the lab to find Greg Sanders.

  Nick found the skinny, spiky-haired guy, as usual, poring over his microscope. Though well into his twenties, Sanders always had the cheerfully gleeful expression of a kid with a new chemistry set.

  "Studying the DNA of another prospective soul-mate?" Nick asked.

  Sanders looked up, eyes bright. "Dude-science can be used for better things than putting people in jail."

  "Marriage and jail-I sense a connection there."

  Sanders batted the air with a hand. "Some guys are boob men-some're leg men. Me, I'm an epithelial sort of guy."

  Nick held out the bagged cigarette. "Swell-'cause I need DNA on this."

  Picking it up, holding it to the light, Sanders said, "Ugh-grotty! How long has this baby been part of the ecosystem?"

  With a shrug, Nick said, "I don't know. You tell me."

  "Take a number. Got a backlog. Gonna be a while."

  "What else isn't new?"

  Sanders shot him a look. "Hey, I'm only one guy."

  "I know, Greg, but who else is ready to loan you Gran Turismo Three on PlayStation Two?"

  All business now, Sanders said, "You just hit the top of my list."

  The files rolled by one after one, blurring into each other, the coffee growing more bitter with each cup, and still Catherine couldn't seem to find a lead.

  Nick came through the door and plopped down on a plastic chair just inside her office. "Anything?"

  "Well, I think I've eliminated about forty missing persons with either a first initial or a middle initial of 'F.' "

  "And now?"

  "Starting on the 'F' last names."

  "How many are there?"

  "From ten to twenty years ago, only another hundred or so that are still open."

  "If our mummy's from Vegas."

  A look came across Catherine's face. "Got a better idea?"

  Nick checked his watch. "Time to try the prints."

  Returning to the morgue, they lifted the hands out of the Formalin, and set them on an autopsy table to dry.

  "Give them a while, then we'll print them," she said. "Let's get something to eat, then come back."

  He nodded. "Sounds good."

  She smirked, shook her head. "You think there's anything gross enough to spoil a CSI's appetite?"