Grave Matters

by Max Allan Collins

  “Before long, Nurse Fairmont,” Catherine said pleasantly, “you’ll be taking your own brand of medicine.”

  A tiny frown indicated for the first time that the woman was listening…also, that she didn’t understand this remark.

  So Catherine clarified: “I mean, you’re a master of lethal injection yourself…right?”

  The cold eyes registered something—not much, just a tightening—and what happened next was so fast, Catherine’s memory could only report back a blur….

  The prisoner raised the hand of her wounded arm and snatched the scissors from the doctor’s tray, looped her arm around his neck, and brought his head down against her chest, the closed points of the scissors resting against his throat, the metal gleaming and winking against the dark flesh, dimpling it, drawing a pearl of glistening blood. The young physician looked more startled than scared at first.

  Rene Fairmont’s eyes were hard, feral, glittering things in a face whose prettiness was lost in an animal snarl, as she held the doctor to her breast as if he were some oversized helpless child.

  To Catherine she snapped, “Handcuff keys, bitch—now!”

  The CSI looked at the fearless prisoner and the frightened doctor, and she drew the nine millimeter from her hip and placed the nose of its barrel against the forehead of the prisoner, whose reaction seemed more indignant than shocked.

  Wearing the coldest expression she could muster, Catherine said, “Ask the doctor—when I fire this gun your motor responses will stop and he will be in no danger….”

  “You think I’m kidding?”

  “You think I am? Drop the scissors…bitch.”

  The suspect did so.

  The doctor, relief not yet washing away his alarm, backed away. Vega, hearing the commotion, swam through the curtains and now stood with his own weapon trained on the again catatonic Rene Fairmont.

  “Take over for a moment, Sam,” Catherine said. “This just became a crime scene—and I need to take a couple pictures and bag those scissors.”

  Vega, usually unflappable, seemed very much flapped at the moment; but he said, “No problem, Catherine.”

  Catherine slipped on latex gloves and collected the scissors, then walked the shell-shocked doctor outside the cubicle.

  She spoke reassuringly to the physician—with her own best bedside manner—explaining they’d need a statement from him. In moments, he seemed all right, and they were able to discuss the transfer of the prisoner to the high-security ward of the Clark County jail—a move the doctor would be all too happy to help facilitate.

  Half an hour later, Catherine left the hospital thinking about the over-a-dozen people (at least) who had died at this pretty monster’s hands; but the hell of it was, despite two hostage takings, Catherine still didn’t know if she had enough evidence to prosecute Rene Fairmont for even one of the murders.

  Oh, they could keep the angel of mercy off the streets, and out of the nursing-home wards, all right; but a lot of people, alive and dead, deserved to see Rene Fairmont’s spree of murder resolved, every evil act cleared up.

  Catherine would go back to HQ and start sifting through everything again. What had already been a very long shift promised to get much, much longer. Still—stopping a serial killer would make being tired at the end of a long day really, really worth it….

  Nick Stokes was not anywhere he would ever have hoped to find himself.

  Grissom and Brass had returned to HQ with Jimmy Doyle; Sara was back in the lab working with Tomas Nunez, matching the iPod files to Kathy Dean’s computer; and Nick had been left to deal with the evidence at Desert Haven.

  So here Nick was, alone in a mortuary in the middle of the night….

  In the garage, he photographed the boxes Jimmy Doyle had been rummaging through. The photos, and Doyle’s fingerprints, would provide a compelling circumstantial case that the young man had expected to find the .22 automatic he’d stowed away.

  Then, in the hallway, Nick fingerprinted the concrete vault Doyle had used as an improvised weapon to attack Captain Brass. This, too, Nick photographed, then wheeled back inside the workroom, which was essentially a warehouse for coffins and vaults.

  About the size of the garage at CSI, the chamber had metal shelving, five high, lining three of its four walls—the bottom two devoted to the large concrete and metal vaults, the top three home to numerous coffins of varied styles in metal or wood, the metal ones running to gray, blue, and even the occasional pink, the wood ones mostly oak.

  In the center of the room, looming above and attached to metal rails, hung a crane very similar to the one in the CSI garage. A tall, wheeled staircase stood to one side of the crane, to help workers attach the device to the needed coffin. On the floor, in the middle of the room, was a row of three tables, each about the size of a human being.

  Staging area, Nick thought.

  An embalmed body would be put on the table while a particular casket was readied; then the body would be placed inside the coffin, the details arranged, after which the coffin would be wheeled to the appropriate viewing room for the service.

  At Desert Haven, death was an assembly-line business—so much so, bodies moving in and out with such matter-of-fact haste, that two bodies…actually coffins…had been switched, one disappearing completely, and no one even noticed.

  Nick glanced back at the concrete vault he’d pushed into the room—the only one in the chamber on a wheeled cart; he wondered if this vault had already been out for some particular purpose of the funeral home…or could Doyle have been doing something with it, when the good guys interrupted?

  After all, the kid wouldn’t have had time to go get the vault, load it up, and roll it out to serve as a battering ram—the assistant mortician had been surprised by Brass’s entrance, and simply responded with what was handy.

  Nick’s curiosity got the best of him, and he went to the trouble of attaching the crane on either side of the lip of the vault lid. When he pushed the button, the crane lifted not just the lid…but the entire vault!

  Meaning: The vault was sealed.

  This struck Nick as peculiar, and he got on his cell to Sara.

  “It’s me,” he told her. “Are Grissom and Brass in interviewing Doyle?”

  “Not yet. Doyle’s in holding; Brass is still getting his ribs taped, and probably trying to talk the doctors into letting him go back to work…. Having fun by yourself at the mortuary in the middle of the night?”

  “Oh it’s swell. If anybody comes up behind me and says ‘boo,’ I’ll just shoot them is all…. Listen, Sara—I’ve run into what Grissom likes to call an anomaly.”

  “Which is?”

  He told her about the sealed vault.

  Sara said, “I don’t know enough about the funeral-home business to say whether that’s unusual or not. Why don’t you ask Dustin Black?”

  “Good idea. He still there?”

  “No—Grissom shook him loose an hour ago. Guy looked whipped when he left.”

  “That’s no surprise. You got his home phone number?”

  “I can get it for you,” she said, and did.

  Nick broke the connection and made another call.

  The machine came on, and a cheerful Cassie Black’s greeting—from a day or so (or a lifetime) ago—was followed by the familiar beep.

  “Mr. Black—it’s Nick Stokes, from the crime lab. If you’re still awake, please pick up—we need your help.”

  A weary-sounding Black came on the line and said, “I really don’t know why I don’t just ignore you people, at this stage.”

  “Possibly because the future of your business hinges on us cleaning this matter up,” Nick said, “and clearing you.”

  “Good point. What do you want?”

  “I really am sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering…why would there be a sealed vault at your mortuary?”

  “There wouldn’t be.”

  “That’s what I thought. Wouldn’t a sealed vault have gone directly to the ce
metery?”

  “Yes—are you sure it’s sealed?”

  “I have had some experience with sealed vaults before—for instance, I was one of the team that opened Rita Bennett’s coffin and found Kathy Dean instead.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed. Then: “We have no sealed vaults in storage. That would be pointless.”

  “Well, could the lid be stuck on so tight that the entire vault could be craned up, without dislodging it?”

  “That’s doubtful.”

  “Sir, right now your place of business is a crime scene. If you’d like to help make it just a business again—”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The line clicked dead.

  Appropriately enough.

  Just as Catherine had expected—had hoped—the evidence quickly began piling up against Rene Fairmont.

  Handwriting expert Jenny Northam matched the forgery practice sheet from Rene’s wastebasket to the signature on the Sunny Day sign-in sheet. Catherine had already confirmed that a cab had gone from Rene’s house to pick up “Mabel” and take her to Sunny Day; hair from the backseat of the taxi matched a wig Warrick had taken into custody.

  Though the modus operandi was different in the poisonings of Derek Fairmont and Gary Masters, the poison itself had been the same. And prussic acid had turned up a third time when Rene held that syringe to the throat of the woman in the bank parking lot—the recurrence of the poison making circumstantial but compelling evidence. If Catherine could match the batches of prussic acid from Masters and the syringe she’d confiscated at Rene’s arrest, the case would be practically airtight.

  A canvassing of the other businesses at the strip mall where Masters kept his office had, thanks to Sergeant O’Riley, turned up three photo identifications of Rene Fairmont; in-person ID’s would likely follow. The only dead-end had been computer expert Tomas Nunez’s failure to tie Rene to any of the e-mails on Vivian’s PC.

  But with the prisoner’s fingerprints, Catherine was able to make a match through AFIS, and the results were as satisfying as they were unsurprising and, frankly, tragic: Under various names, in several states, Rene Fairmont was wanted for murder. Her fifteen-year career in continuing care had been a ruse to help her bilk money out of the patients she was hired to help; once she had an estate earmarked for one of her “charities,” she killed the victim.

  A study of those cases revealed a very clear line of bogus charities and dead-drops stretching from Florida to Vegas. Rene had been planning to leave here and make her way back east. Though a sociopath, the angel of mercy had the ability to portray a compassionate, caring person who entered the lives of a succession of older, lonely, needy people; for fifteen years, she had fooled not only her victims, but law enforcement agencies and nursing homes and God only knew who else…

  …and the arrest Catherine, Warrick, and Vega had made appeared to be the only time Rene had ever come close to getting caught.

  Her fingerprints had ended up in AFIS only because she had been printed at several of the care centers she had worked in. Only after she had disappeared from a town, and what she’d been up to had been perceived after the fact, were her prints posted. And despite the short but impressive list of jurisdictions looking for Rene, Catherine could only wonder how many other victims had gone unrecognized as such.

  To Rene’s credit, she’d never gone for the big score. She had kept her cons relatively small, flying just under the radar of the authorities, making every murder look like a plausible death. At the first sign that she’d drawn any attention to herself, Rene would make tracks (but not leave any).

  Catherine and Warrick compared notes and consolidated their evidence. Convinced that all the ducks were in a row, Catherine returned to the ER, where the transfer to the jail hospital was pending.

  Rene Fairmont had a small private room in the ER now, with two uniforms on the outside and another inside, sharing space with Vega and Rene herself, who was in a hospital smock with both hands handcuffed to the bed rails.

  Catherine entered, and Rene’s blank stare gave no indication she had even noticed.

  Vega met Catherine and they confabbed at the foot of the bed and spoke as if the angel of mercy weren’t present.

  “She’s been a good girl,” Vega said. “Hasn’t taken anybody hostage since you left…and hasn’t said a word, either.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re calling her by the wrong name, Sam. You’re using Rene Fairmont.” Catherine turned toward the prisoner and gestured. “Meet Rene Delillo.”

  Rene’s eyes tightened. Though the woman’s face remained otherwise blank, the animal behind the mask somehow made its presence known to Catherine.

  “Rene Delillo, huh?” Vega said matter of factly.

  “That’s the name she’s wanted under in Las Cruces, New Mexico, anyway.”

  The prisoner stared at Catherine and her lips parted slightly in an expression that was at once a smile and a sneer.

  “Or,” Catherine said, “you could call her Judith Rene—the name she’s wanted under in Baton Rouge; and there’s two or three more. Unless she tells us, we may never know her real name, or how she got started in this interesting line of work.”

  Rene continued to fix her gaze on the CSI, but petulance had crept into her defiant glare.

  “That is,” Catherine went on, “if she even remembers her name anymore.”

  That one must have struck a nerve, but the only reward for Catherine was a single trickle of tear down Rene’s cheek.

  Catherine moved alongside the bed. She looked at the prisoner but spoke to Vega. “You know, Sam, I really didn’t think Rene here was capable of feeling anything for anybody—a bad seed, born without compassion. But I was wrong.”

  Rene’s lip was trembling now; another tear rolled down a lovely cheek.

  “She does feel something,” Catherine said, “…for herself.”

  In the interview room at CSI HQ, tears were streaming down another killer’s face.

  Jimmy Doyle—seated across from Brass and Grissom, with Sara Sidle hovering in the background—hadn’t been nearly as hard to crack as the detective’s ribs. Once they got Doyle in the interview room, he’d started bawling like a kid who wanted his mommy.

  “I…I didn’t mean to,” Doyle said.

  He’d been offered the opportunity to call an attorney, but hadn’t acted upon it.

  Right now Doyle was just a scared kid, but a kid of age, and Brass intended to keep him scared. “Didn’t mean to, Jimmy? What, did you accidentally shoot her in the back of the head?”

  Doyle grasped at the tissues from the box that Sara had provided him; he struggled to gain control. “I mean, I didn’t…didn’t want to.”

  “She asked you to do it, then,” Brass said, mocking. “It was a kind of suicide…a mercy killing.”

  “Stop it! Stop it! It wasn’t that way at all….”

  “What way was it, Jimmy?”

  “You didn’t know her…how she could be…how she could wrap a guy around her little finger. If you knew, you’d get it—you’d know this was all her fault.”

  The detective fought the urge to come out of the chair and…

  Sara asked, quietly, almost gently, “How was it her fault, Jimmy?”

  He swallowed snot; his face glistened with tears. “She was going to ruin everything. Everything I worked for.”

  Calm again, Brass asked, “Ruin it how?”

  Though his hands were cuffed, Doyle’s fingers tapped out a nervous rhythm on the table. “I’m not a rich kid. I didn’t have no…any silver spoon. But in high school, Mr. Black gave me a job. I lived with my mom, my dad’s off in…somewhere. Mr. Black, he’s been like a father to me.”

  Brass thought, He was like a father to Kathy Dean, too.

  The boy was saying: “Not easy to get help at a funeral home. Not just any kid can take it, you know. I had the stomach for it. I had the talent. Mr. Black saw it in me, and I took the work, and he paid my way to school, and I’m hi
s top assistant now. I went around a lot of guys, way older than me, landing that spot. You know how successful Desert Haven is? A few years, and I could be rich…respectable.”

  “How did Kathy get in the way of that?”

  “Kathy said she was pregnant. She…she wanted to know if I was willing to marry her.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her yes! Sure! Of course, I’d do the right thing.”

  Sara asked, “Why did you do the wrong thing instead, Jimmy?”

  His head hung; tears dripped onto the table, tiny rain. “You don’t understand…Mr. Black, him and his wife…they’re very, very straight. Very, very conservative. If they found out I had to get married, that I knocked some girl up…Mr. Black, he’d fire me! I’d lose everything! Including…including his respect.”

  The words hung in the room. The two CSIs and the detective exchanged now-I’ve-heard-everything glances.

  “I…I couldn’t let that selfish little slut ruin everything. I told her to get an abortion. We could still get married and have kids down the road—just not now! She ruined her life, not me! She said she was using birth control! She was a liar!”

  Grissom said, “She said you were the father of her baby?”

  “Yes! Yes, yes…of course.”

  “Why did you believe her?”

  “Huh?”

  Grissom shrugged. “She was a liar. Why believe her?”

  The slick-faced boy looked from face to face; when he landed on Sara, she spoke.

  “It wasn’t your baby, Jimmy,” Sara said.

  “What?”

  “She was pregnant, but not with your child.”

  The boy’s eyes froze into marbles; the tears had stopped.

  Grissom said, “Dustin Black was the father.”

  “No…no, that’s impossible. Not Mr. Black! And Kathy wouldn’t even’ve told me she was pregnant, unless I was the father and she wanted me to marry her…right?”