Sin City

by Max Allan Collins

“Anybody been near here?” Warrick asked.

  The uniformed man, a fair-haired, weathered pro in his forties, shook his head; his nameplate read JENKINS. “Airport security, making the rounds, recognized the car from our wants list and matched the plate, then gave us a call.”

  “Good catch,” Warrick said.

  Officer Jenkins nodded. “They’ve been making more frequent visits out here ever since September eleventh. Security guy stayed by the car until I got here, but he never got out of his Jeep.”

  “Good,” Warrick said.

  “You take a look?” Nick asked.

  “Yeah,” Jenkins said. “Walked around it once, cut it a wide swath, though—looks locked. Didn’t touch shit. Didn’t smell anything foul comin’ from the trunk area, so I just got back in the squad and waited for you.”

  “Not your first time at the rodeo,” Warrick said. “Thanks.”

  Jenkins liked that. “You fellas need me to stick around?”

  “Naw,” Warrick said.

  Nick asked, “You call for a tow truck?”

  Jenkins shook his head. “Should I have?”

  “Naw, that’s cool,” Warrick said. “We’ll get it.”

  “All right then,” Jenkins said, and let out some air. “I’m gone.”

  “Thanks again,” Nick called after him.

  The officer waved but never turned back. He climbed into the cruiser, fired it up and rolled away—Nick’s guess was the officer’s shift was also long since over and the guy had likely logged more than his own share of overtime.

  Warrick used his cell phone to call for a truck. The parking lot was well lighted and, at first, they didn’t need their Maglites for their work, which they began by photographing the car from every angle. Then they dusted the handles, the hood and the trunk for prints.

  “Wipe marks on the handles,” Nick said.

  Warrick smirked humorlessly. “Trunk too.”

  “Kinda makes you think maybe it wasn’t Mrs. Pierce who parked it here.”

  “Don’t let Grissom catch you at that.”

  Nick frowned. “At what?”

  “Thinking.”

  Nick grinned, and Warrick motioned for them to go back to the Tahoe, and wait, which they did.

  “You know, if you’re in the trunk of a car,” Nick said, “you’re doing one of two things.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You’re a corpse waiting to get dumped, or you’re sneakin’ into a drive-in movie.”

  Warrick smiled a little. “They still got drive-in movies in Texas?”

  “Last time I was home, they did.”

  It took forty-five minutes for the flatbed truck to arrive and another three or four for Warrick to stop Nick from bitching out the driver for taking so long. In under ten minutes, the driver—a civil servant in coveralls impervious to Nick’s complaints—had hooked up the car and dragged it onto the bed.

  “Well, that was quick,” Nick admitted to the guy.

  “You made my night,” the driver said with no sincerity whatsoever, and disappeared into it.

  Once they had the car out of the way, the pair of CSIs got out their flashlights and searched the parking space carefully, even getting down on their hands and knees—but found nothing. Satisfied they hadn’t overlooked anything, they drove back to the CSI garage to take a more careful look at the car.

  After putting on coveralls, they entered the bay where the Avalon sat like a museum exhibit. Fluorescent lights gave the car a bleached, almost ghostly cast. Warrick used a slim-jim to undo the lock.

  “Twelve seconds,” Nick said with a chuckle. “Man, you’re slippin’.”

  “Want me to lock it back up, and give you a shot?”

  Waving his hands in surrender, Nick said, “No, no, that’s okay—if I showed you up, you’d lose the will to live.”

  “Yeah, well I’m just hangin’ on as it is,” Warrick harumphed, and opened the door. He dusted the driver’s door handle, the armrest, the steering wheel and the gear shift. Nick did the passenger side handle, armrest, and the glove compartment. Again, they noticed that the car had been wiped.

  “Somebody’s hiding something,” Warrick said.

  “Usually are,” Nick nodded, “or we wouldn’t be involved—we’re just going to have to look harder.”

  “Yeah, well I better start looking with my eyes open, then,” Warrick said. He stared down at the armrest of the open driver’s door. “You see that funky power-window button?”

  Nick glanced down at the passenger arm rest. “Yeah, it’s got that weird…lip, in the front.”

  “So…how do you suppose one would go about raising the window?”

  Nick frowned—was this a trick question? “Well, ‘one’ would put his finger under the lip…and pull up.”

  “Which should leave the clever team of criminalists with…what?”

  Nick smiled, wide. “A fingerprint on the underside…”

  “Very good, class.”

  So Warrick printed the underside of the power-window button…and got a partial. He got another partial off the back of the gear shift lever, and Nick lifted a pretty good print off the passenger-side window button. The prints would go into the computer as soon as they finished with the rest of the vehicle. They would also need to take Owen Pierce’s prints, of course, and daughter Lori’s.

  “You got a preference over the trunk,” Nick asked, “or the interior?”

  Warrick shrugged. “Whichever.”

  “I’ll take the trunk.”

  “Go for it, drive-in boy,” Warrick said dryly, and opened the passenger-side door. Sinking to his knees, next to the car, he shone his Maglite on the floor and started going over the carpeting, inch by inch. After his inspection he would vacuum the floor as well; but for now, he just wanted to see the car, up close and personal.

  The two CSIs worked in church-like silence, each focused on his particular task. Nothing on the passenger-side floor, nothing in the glove compartment, nothing wedged into the seat. Warrick looked in the cup holders, in the console storage area, even ejected the plastic sleeve of the CD player and found nothing.

  Moving around to the rear of the vehicle, Warrick stopped for a moment. “Anything?”

  Nick was bent over the trunk, his face buried under the spare tire. “Nothing—you?”

  “Zip squared. Somebody’s cleaned this car within an inch of its life. It’s like it just came off the showroom floor. It’s got everything but the new car smell.”

  Nick beamed at him, mockingly. “I know where you can get a little spray can that’ll provide that, if you want.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “So we keep lookin’?”

  “Keep looking,” world-weary Warrick said, and moved to the driver’s side of the car.

  As he went to lean in, the beam of his flashlight swept over the headrest and…something glinted.

  It was there, then it was gone—like the car had winked. Warrick frowned. The Avalon had tan cloth seats…what could’ve glinted?

  He swept the flashlight over the headrest a couple of times, but nothing showed up. The car did not wink at him. He leaned in, inspected the headrest, saw nothing. He raised the Maglite so that the beam shone straight down. Leaning in closer, he looked at the seam that ran across the top of the headrest. Then he saw it…

  …gleaming up at him: a tiny piece of glass.

  After photographing the mini-shard at rest, Warrick tweezered the fragment free. He carefully studied it for a moment, but its miniscule size kept its origin a secret.

  After bagging his prize, Warrick went back to the seam. Moving slowly, a stitch at a time, he found first one blonde hair, then another. Both hairs, like those on the brush already in evidence, could easily belong to Lynn Pierce Then he found another hair—shorter, darker.

  Bingo, he thought.

  He stored all three hairs in separate baggies and went back inside the Avalon for one last look at that helpful headrest—first the side on the righ
t, then the top, and finally down the left side, nearest the door. He shone the light at the underside of the headrest and picked up on a tiny spot on one of the stitches, about the size of a period. His experience told him the answer to a question he didn’t bother to ask.

  “Found it!” he yelled, but his voice remained cool.

  “All right,” Nick said, coming around from the back. “Found what?”

  “Blood.”

  Nick leaned in. “Where?”

  Warrick showed him.

  “I think we have a crime scene,” Nick said.

  Warrick said, “I think we have a crime scene.”

  They got a photo of the blood speck, after which Warrick carefully scraped the tiny dot into an evidence bag.

  Grissom strolled in and looked through the open driver’s door. “Clean car.”

  “Too clean,” Nick said.

  “And yet not clean enough,” Warrick said.

  “Give,” Grissom said.

  They explained what they had found so far.

  “What’s next?”

  “Luminol,” Warrick answered, shrugging as if to say, What else?

  “If there’s one spot of blood in that car,” Grissom said, nodding, “there’s probably more.”

  When they sprayed the luminol on, any other blood would fluoresce. No matter how carefully the car had been cleaned, blood would glow blue-green at even one part per million.

  “Before you hit that interior with luminol,” Grissom said, “are you otherwise through in there? Anything else you found? Noticed?”

  Nick could sense they were being sucker-punched, but nonetheless he shrugged and said, “No, that’s it.”

  Warrick, though, said, “Why, Gris? You got something?”

  Grissom leaned inside the car for a look of his own; his eyes were everywhere. “How tall was Lynn Pierce?”

  Nick thought that over. “Five-four?”

  “That’s right,” Grissom said, withdrawing himself from the vehicle. “And if she was five-four and drove her car to the airport and left it parked there…why is the driver’s seat all the way back?”

  Nick and Warrick traded how-the-hell-does-he-do-it looks.

  Grissom asked, “Or did you move the seat, Warrick? Going over the interior?”

  Warrick shook his head.

  Grissom turned to Nick, asking pleasantly, “You?”

  Another head shake.

  Grissom looked at Warrick. “Thoughts?”

  Warrick sighed to his toes, holding up his hands in admission of frailty. “I’ll fingerprint the power-seat button…then we hit the interior with luminol.”

  “Smart thinking,” Grissom said, then he turned and left.

  “I hate him,” Nick said, admiringly.

  “Yeah,” Warrick said. “He’s good.”

  The power-seat button stuck out from the side of the seat like a tiny shiny peanut. Warrick dusted it…and found out it too had been wiped.

  “This is starting to piss me off,” Warrick said as he reached for the luminol. “Every time we get hold of something, it grins and gets away.”

  Warrick started at the floor and worked his way up, spraying the luminol on the driver’s-side floor mat, the seat, and then the headrest. Instantly, the surfaces became dotted with bluish green pinpoints.

  “Nick,” Warrick said, “you gotta see this.”

  Nick peered in from the passenger side. “Uh oh…I don’t think Lynn Pierce caught her flight.”

  Gravely, Warrick shook his head. “Flew apart, maybe….” He sprayed luminol over the backseat and the passenger side, but all the blood seemed to be concentrated in the driver’s seat. “Let’s get the seat covers off, and see what’s underneath.”

  The two used utility knives and, whenever possible, followed seams, to cause as little damage as possible, preserving the seat covers. Nick climbed in the back and attacked the driver’s seat from the passenger side, while Warrick knelt on the floor next to the car and started cutting the edges on his side. In short order they had the covers off the seat, the back and the headrest.

  Then they were staring in disbelief at the foam rubber cushions. Dark stains spread ominously from the headrest down the back to a low spot on the back edge of the seat.

  Finally Nick said, “Somebody got shot in the head…would be my guess.”

  “Educated guess,” Warrick said, eyebrows lifted. “Damn…. Let’s find out if it was Lynn Pierce.”

  “We got hairbrush hairs,” Nick said. “But DNA testing is going to take a while.”

  “Then the sooner we get the ball rolling with Greg, the better…. After that, let’s talk to Gris—but I think I already know what he’s going to say.”

  Warrick shot Polaroid photos of the interior while Nick took a small scraping from the seat to use in a DNA test. After stopping by Greg Sanders in his lab, they called on Grissom, who was buried in paperwork in his office.

  They explained their findings and showed him the photos of the blood-spattered seat. Grissom stared at the photos long enough to make Nick uneasy.

  Finally Grissom said, “All right…first thing, line up one of the day shift interns to start calling the glass companies in town.”

  Warrick nodded. “To see if anybody’s replaced the driver’s side window of a white ’95 Avalon in the last few days.”

  Nick, nodding, too, said, “On it.”

  Grissom studied one of the photos again. “It’s probable that fragment of glass you found came out of the original window.”

  “Yeah, that’s our take on it,” Warrick said.

  “But we need to know, don’t we?” Grissom tossed the grisly photo on his desk and his grin was a horrible thing. “And now we get a search warrant and go over the Pierce house again. Only this time…we do it right.”

  Nick tilted his head. “But we don’t have enough to arrest Pierce—do we?”

  The CSI supervisor considered that for a long moment. Then, he rattled off his mental findings, clinically: “There’s the tape where he threatened to cut up his wife and there’s blood in the car, but there’s no body, no weapon, no DNA match for a while—I don’t think we can even speculate on a motive, yet.”

  “In a bad marriage,” Warrick said, “you won’t have to look very hard.”

  “But we haven’t looked yet,” Grissom reminded them. “And the DA isn’t going to want to even talk to us, if we don’t find something better than what we have now.”

  “That’s a crime scene,” Nick said, frustrated. “Broken glass, blood spatter…”

  Warrick was nodding, punctuating his colleague’s points. “Nick’s right, Gris.”

  Grissom said, “I’ll go along with you on that, Nick—that’s a crime scene…but what’s the crime? Who’s the victim? Isn’t it also possible that the short dark hair and the fingerprints belong to a victim who isn’t Lynn Pierce?”

  Warrick rolled his eyes and asked, “Who else could it be?”

  “Or maybe it’s not a victim at all. Maybe it’s the daughter—maybe she or her mom had a nosebleed.”

  “Ah, man,” Nick groused, “you don’t believe that!”

  “I don’t believe anything yet, Nick. The evidence will show us the way—we just need more of it.”

  Warrick leaned a hand on the desk. “Odds are the blood is Mrs. Pierce’s, Gris. I mean, we can’t find her, she doesn’t seem to be using any of her credit cards or her phone card—the blood’s in her car…”

  “The odds say it’s her,” Grissom agreed. “But we don’t play the odds. We put all our money on science…. Now, we start with the Pierce house again and find out the truth. You two go on out there. I’ll call Brass and meet you there—we don’t have enough for an arrest…yet…but I know just the judge to give us a search warrant.”

  An hour later, as dawn was breaking, Captain Jim Brass parked his Taurus behind the black Tahoe in the Pierces’ driveway. “I don’t see your people,” Brass said.

  “Maybe they’re already inside,” Grissom sa
id.

  “Without a warrant.”

  Grissom gestured with open palms. “Maybe—Pierce has cooperated so far.”

  “I don’t like him—he’s an arrogant prick.”

  “You have some evidence, Jim, that led you to that conclusion?”

  The detective gave the criminalist a tired smile and pointed to his own gut. “Yeah, this—it’s my prick detector.”

  Grissom’s smile was skeptical. “A judge and jury may want more.”

  Brass summoned half a smirk. “That’s what’s wrong with our judicial system.”

  The two men climbed out of the car and walked up the sidewalk to the front door. Grissom was about to ring the bell when Warrick pulled the door open.

  “He let us in,” Warrick whispered, stepping out onto the stoop. “He didn’t even bitch about getting woken up.”

  Grissom asked, also sotto voce, “What have you told him?”

  “Nada,” Warrick said, doing the umpire “you’re out” gesture. “Not even that we found the car. Just that his wife was officially missing now, and we needed to step up the investigation…apologized for the early hour.”

  Brass was impressed. “Nice work, Brown.”

  Warrick ignored the compliment, saying to Grissom, “You can give him the warrant, though—he’s in the living room.”

  His voice still low, Grissom asked, “Find anything?”

  “No…. Either this guy is really good, or there’s nothing to find.”

  “Stick with it.”

  Warrick headed in and disappeared down the hall to the left, as Grissom and Brass walked into the living room where Owen Pierce stood in fresh blue jeans and tasseled loafers, a blue Polo shirt open at the neck; he was unshaven, and sipping a cup of coffee.

  “Morning,” Pierce said. “Can I get you guys some coffee?”

  “No thanks,” Brass said, though the smell of it was tempting. He handed Pierce the warrant, who accepted it without looking at it.

  “May I ask why you believe you need a search warrant?” He seemed more hurt than indignant. “Haven’t I made my home available to you, in every way?”

  Brass gave Grissom a look and the CSI supervisor stepped forward. “We’ve located your wife’s car, Mr. Pierce.”

  “You…the Avalon, you mean?” He sounded genuinely surprised, his expression hopeful.