Grave Matters

by Max Allan Collins

  “What?”

  Brass got out his cell phone. “You see, I’m about to call a tow truck to impound your Caddy….”

  The detective did so, then continued to the mortified mortician: “Now you could make up a story, about your vehicle going in for service or whatever. But Mr. Black—and I say this whether you are guilty or innocent…”

  “Innocent!”

  “…the time has come to start telling the truth. You can’t cover up this affair with the babysitter any longer—and any effort to do so will only look like you’re covering up the girl’s murder.”

  Black blanched. “But I haven’t done anything!”

  Brass grunted. “Really? You were having an affair with a teenager who may have been pregnant with your child when she was murdered. I wouldn’t sweat keeping that information from your wife temporarily, when you should be worrying about other little things…like possibly facing lethal injection.”

  “Oh my God…”

  “Mr. Black—can you account, I mean accurately account, for your time the night Kathy Dean disappeared?”

  The mortician sat frozen, as stiff as the corpses that passed through his portals.

  “I didn’t think so,” Brass said.

  “What should I do?” the mortician asked, leaning forward with sudden animation. The helpless expression was unusual for such a highly successful businessman, particulary one whose specialty was offering controlled consolation.

  The detective felt a wave of something for the suspect so much like pity that it surprised him. Maybe it was this room, where so many of the bereaved had received sympathy while making arrangements that would make Dustin Black wealthy.

  “Mr. Black,” Brass heard himself saying, “you really should call your lawyer.”

  While they waited for Dustin Black’s DNA results, Nick got to work on the Escalade in the CSI garage. He glanced at his watch and hoped Sara would be back soon. Either he or she could run the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer on samples of the Escalade’s carpeting while the other searched the vehicle itself for more evidence.

  He started in the back, the most likely place for Kathy and Black to have trysted. The carpeting was navy blue, which would make it harder to pick out hairs and other kinds of fibers. Still, Nick was diligent and that usually won out in cases like this. With a suspect like Dustin Black, who’d been so prone to lying since jump street, Grissom’s dictum about trusting what can’t lie—the evidence—seemed particularly apt.

  Nick began at the rear bumper and worked his way slowly forward. The two rows of seats left the back half of the vehicle empty. Most families would use that for storage, while Black had made it his own personal playroom for himself and young Kathy Dean. Here, Nick found several reddish hairs the same color and length as Kathy’s. In a storage compartment, he found a blanket that he thought Black might have used for his inside-the-car picnics. The ALS (Alternative Light Source) revealed a number of apparent body-fluid deposits on the blanket; but none of them were blood, so Nick set the blanket aside to take its many samples later.

  He was just finishing the front seat when Brass, Grissom, and Sara came in.

  “Progress?” Grissom asked.

  “Our most important product,” Nick said with a smile, and told his boss about the findings thus far, including more hairs in the passenger seat and its headrest, some of which seemed to belong to the husband, wife, and kids.

  “We’ll have to wait for the lab to know for sure,” Nick said. “But it looks like Kathy Dean spent a lot of time in the back of the Blacks’s SUV.”

  “Good job,” Grissom said. “There’s more for you to hear.”

  They sat down at a worktable at one side of the garage.

  Sara explained about the Lady Chatterley note and what she had found out from Shawna/Abeja the waitress.

  “You know, that D. H. Lawrence book,” Nick said, “that might be another link to Black.”

  Sara frowned. “How so?”

  But Grissom understood immediately: “Might be the kind of book an older man would share with a young lover.”

  Sara gave Grissom an odd look, then said, “Well, her tastes otherwise did seem to run to Stephen King…. As for that convenience store in Pahrump, where Kathy liked to leave her car? I went straight out there, from Habinero’s. Guy recycles his security tapes every three weeks.”

  “Kathy Dean’s been gone three months,” Nick said.

  “Yeah, but I brought all the tapes in, anyway. Gonna have Archie go over the beginnings and endings of the tapes.”

  Sara meant Archie Johnson, CSI’s resident computer/video whiz.

  Nick nodded. “Worth a shot—if we get lucky, Kathy and her mystery date may’ve survived the constant erasing.”

  Sara’s eyebrows lifted. “I’ve been trying to find this Janie Glover, who was supposed to have known the identity of ‘FB’. No luck so far. But I’m just getting started.”

  “What’s next?” Nick asked.

  Grissom held up a sheaf of papers. “Search warrant. While the lab works on all the trace and video evidence, we’re going to the Black home, and then the mortuary.”

  Nick said, with a forced smile, “Doesn’t that sound like a good time….”

  The nightshift crew had caught up with themselves: It was approaching midnight when their Tahoe drew up in front of Black’s brick fortress. Only one light shone in the living room, and the whole neighborhood was as quiet as Desert Palm Memorial Cemetery. Grissom and Nick followed Brass to the door, where the captain used the oversized brass knocker.

  A few moments later, a strained-looking Dustin Black opened the door and Brass handed him the warrant. The mortician now wore a green polo shirt and faded denim shorts and sandals with no socks.

  “A search warrant?” the mortician asked. “For my home?”

  “And your business,” Brass said.

  “You people haven’t done enough to ruin my life today?”

  Grissom said blandly, “Homicide investigations move quickly.”

  Brass asked, “Are your wife and children here, Mr. Black?”

  “Why no,” Black said with heavy sarcasm. “Thank you for asking! Cassie took the kids and went to a hotel. I followed your advice and told her everything, got it all off my chest, completely honest…and she walked out on me. Happy?”

  Ignoring that, Brass said, “I need you to step outside, please, while the investigators perform the search.”

  “Any way I can be of help,” Black said mockingly, and obeyed, while gesturing as if a gracious host for them to enter. “Oh…and by the way?…When this is over, I intend to sue your asses for ruining my life. Assuming you’re ever able to catch Kathy Dean’s real murderer, that is.”

  Brass turned to the mortician, face a cold polite mask. “Mr. Black, it isn’t our business to ruin anyone’s life, though sometimes in the pursuit of justice that does happen. But I might suggest that you had a hand in your own ‘ruination.’ ”

  “Is that right?”

  “We weren’t the ones having an affair with a teenage girl. We weren’t the ones who got her pregnant, and we’re sure as hell not the ones wasting the department’s time by lying about all of that from the beginning.”

  The mortician lapsed into brooding silence.

  Grissom, halfway in the door, turned and smiled at the two men and raised a finger, like a precocious student correcting a teacher. “Might have got her pregnant. We don’t have the DNA back yet…. Excuse me.”

  Inside, while Sara and Nick covered the rest of the house—Nick starting in back, Sara in front—Grissom headed upstairs where he began in the bathroom of the Blacks’ master suite.

  The bathroom was a modern affair with mirrors and glass and a massive glass-enclosed multiheaded shower that looked like a weapon in a science-fiction film. Grissom spent nearly an hour checking drawers, drains, the inside of the toilet tank, anywhere he might hope for evidence…finding nothing. He hadn’t expected to discover much in the bathroom, h
owever, and he’d been right—a thought that gave him no comfort as he moved into the equally opulent bedroom.

  The light green room was dominated by a wall-mounted plasma television and a bed about the size of Grissom’s first apartment. Modern art tastefully punctuated the walls over a long dresser and a narrow dressing table. The TV took one wall above an entertainment center whose bookshelves were home to a scattering of framed family photos. The final wall consisted of massive his-and-hers walk-in closets; these were larger than Grissom’s second apartment….

  The CSI supervisor spent nearly another hour going through the bedroom, the two closets interesting him the most. He went through the pockets of all of Black’s suits and jackets, the drawers that held his underwear and socks, and shoe boxes of both husband and wife. He found nothing.

  Grissom went on to do the rooms of the children, to no worthwhile end.

  Nick and Sara were just finishing up downstairs when Grissom joined them.

  “Anything?” he asked them.

  Sara said with a shrug, “Some of Kathy’s hairs in the living room…but that’s all I found.”

  “No gun in this house that I could find,” Nick said. “And we’ve looked everywhere.”

  “You ready to move on?” Grissom asked.

  “You mean, to the mortuary?” Nick grinned. “Ready but not anxious…oh, and we should do the wife’s car.”

  Grissom nodded. “It’s undoubtedly at the hotel with her and the kids. So let’s tackle Desert Haven next.”

  Outside, where Brass leaned against the brick and Dustin Black sat dejectedly on his front stoop, Grissom gave the captain a curt shake of his head as the CSIs marched past.

  “Didn’t find the gun, did you?” Black taunted. “Know why?…Because it’s not there! I told you, I didn’t kill that girl.”

  Brass asked, “Would you care to accompany us to the mortuary, Mr. Black?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Yes. You have keys for us, or shall we break the lock?”

  Scowling, the mortician got to his feet. “I’m coming, I’m coming….” Then he sighed heavily. “I, uh…don’t have a car. You impounded it, remember?”

  “We’d be delighted to have you ride with us.”

  “I just bet you would.”

  They all piled into the Tahoe, Nick driving, Black in the passenger seat, Brass and Grissom flanking Sara in the back. As they drove toward the mortuary, Grissom tried to smooth the waters some with the mortician. It was clear the man had gotten under Brass’s skin and the tension between the two threatened to get in the way.

  “I know you’re unhappy with us, Mr. Black,” Grissom said, “but you can understand why, at this point, you’re a suspect we have to seriously consider. If you’re innocent, your cooperation now will help clear you.”

  Black said nothing for a while. Then he sighed and nodded slowly. “I…I apologize for my behavior. Please understand…I’ve worked long and hard to keep Cassie happy, and to allow her to live in the manner she believes befits her. But the truth is, I haven’t loved my wife for years. And I’m not sure she ever loved me.”

  The others stayed quiet. The darkness of the vehicle had turned it into a kind of confessional.

  “That realization’s been as hard to deal with as getting caught cheating,” the mortician admitted. “Harder, really. I guess on some level I wanted Cassie to find out about the affair. But not like this, never like this…. Kathy was a wonderful girl. I had deep feelings for her, and she was an extremely affectionate young woman who felt trapped by her parents.”

  “Do you mind my asking,” Grissom said, “whether she told you about this pregnancy?”

  “She did. She wanted me to leave my wife and marry her.”

  This frank, unhesitating admission of motive shook even the unflappable Gil Grissom.

  “What,” Grissom asked, “were you going to do?”

  “I…I hadn’t made up my mind. I was honest with Kathy. I said I’d take care of her, of…the child…for sure. However she wanted to handle it. And the word ‘abortion’ was never uttered by either of us.”

  “I see,” Grissom said.

  “But I needed to do some soul-searching before I could decide whether the ramifications would…I have a standing in the community, after all…she was just a child…. Well, I was trying to think it through, work it through.”

  Eyes tight with thought, Grissom asked, “Is that why it took you two hours to take Kathy home that night, Mr. Black?”

  “Yes…yes. We did make love. I won’t deny it. In fact the memory of it is something I’ll treasure to my dying day. But we also talked. I wish…I wish…”

  “What did you wish, Mr. Black?”

  “I wish I’d told the girl I would leave Cassie and marry her, like she wanted me to. I don’t know why, but I…I have this feeling that if I had…she might be alive right now.”

  “Why do you feel that way?”

  “Doctor Grissom, it’s a feeling. ‘Why’ doesn’t come into it.”

  Grissom wondered if he was sitting in the company of an innocent man or sharing a ride with a killer who was also a brilliant actor. In his extensive career he had seen both, and right now he wouldn’t lay odds either way. Dustin Black was, after all, in the business of trying to make people feel comfortable at the most uncomfortable time of their lives, telling them what they needed to hear in a difficult time.

  Were Grissom and the others in that same category right now?

  If Black was guilty, though, the man was going to be great on the witness stand….

  They arrived at the mortuary and piled out. After Black unlocked the door, the little group moved into the darkened lobby. They waited as the mortician got the alarm shut off and the lights turned on. Once this had been done, Black and Brass went back outside to wait in the parking lot. The tension between the two men had lessened considerably.

  Grissom outlined the plan to Nick and Sara. “We’re going to take our time—we’ll start at the back, then move forward. We’ll do one room at a time, beginning with the garage.”

  Once there, Nick used his Maglite to find the light switch, revealing a garage three doors wide, the first bay open, a workbench against the near wall. The limo sat in the middle bay, the hearse in the far bay.

  Nick said, “Here’s something I thought I’d never hear myself say…”

  Grissom took the bait. “What, Nick?”

  “…I’ll take the hearse.”

  Grissom smiled. “And I’ll take the bench and work area. Sara, that leaves you the limo.”

  “Got it.”

  The toolbench was an afterthought constructed of plywood and two-by-fours, with several cardboard boxes stacked on one end. Overlooking the area was a pegboard with the typical screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, and other hand tools, and a shelf below held a locked steel toolbox.

  Grissom decided to start there.

  He hit the power button on the overhead door and walked around the building, instead of back through. He found Brass and Black at the front corner of the building, the mortician puffing nervously on a cigarette.

  Grissom gestured with a thumb. “There’s a toolbox under your workbench. Could you unlock it for us?”

  Black said, “That’s for Jimmy—he works on the cars. Keeps the good tools in there, locked up.”

  “Do you have a key?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to open that toolbox, then.”

  “Do what you have to,” the mortician said noncommittally.

  Grissom returned to the Tahoe, got his bolt cutters out of the back, and in the garage, popped the lock on the toolbox, finding exactly what Dustin Black had said he would—tools, good tools.

  Then Grissom went through the cardboard boxes on the workbench, three rows, three boxes each. Some contained clothes, others had chemicals, and the very middle box, the center square in the tic-tac-toe of cardboard, held several eight-ounce boxes of mortician’s wax and, on the bottom, something e
lse….

  “Gun!” Grissom called over his shoulder.

  In seconds, the other two were at his side.

  Nick snapped pictures and Sara opened an evidence bag as Grissom carefully picked up the .22 Smith & Wesson automatic handgun and dropped it in.

  “Shall we keep searching?” Nick asked.

  “Not right now,” Grissom said. “We’ll be back, but…not now.”

  They packed up their gear, closed and locked the garage doors, then met Brass and Black out front.

  “Mr. Black,” Grissom said, “you need to lock up. And you may need to make arrangements—you’re not going to be back for a while.”

  The mortician dropped his cigarette, his expression tinged with panic. “What? You didn’t find anything. You couldn’t find anything! There was nothing to—”

  Grissom held up the evidence bag and Nick shone his flashlight on the pistol inside. The light glinted off the metal, winking at Black.

  After Brass read Dustin Black his Miranda rights, the CSIs hung in the background as the captain accompanied Dustin Black to lock up the mortuary. The man was crying as Brass cuffed him and led him to the Tahoe.

  “I didn’t do this,” he kept saying. “That’s not my gun—I’ve never seen that thing before!”

  “Not the first time I’ve heard that song,” Brass said, and loaded him into the backseat.

  Nick was studying his boss. “Gris—you don’t believe him, do you?”

  “I don’t believe anybody, Nick. I believe evidence—and I’ve always been greedy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To paraphrase Oliver Twist—I’d like some more.”

  And the three CSIs joined the detective and the suspect in the Tahoe.

  10

  THE SMALLEST OF THE CSI WORK AREAS, the Questioned Documents Lab was about twelve by fifteen feet, dominated by a long plastic-covered, backlit table. Sweeping around this workstation on a wheeled desk chair, Jenny Northam—formerly an independent contractor, now full time with the department—rolled away from a job she was doing for Sara Sidle to come around to where materials for the Vivian Elliot case awaited.