Sin City

by Max Allan Collins

  The television in the living room was smaller than a Yugo—barely; next to it, stacks of electronic equipment thumbed their noses at Brass, who knew what little of it was. A large comfy-looking white leather couch dominated the center of the room with chairs set at angles facing the television on either side. Thick white pile carpeting squished beneath the detective’s feet, the type that particles of evidence could hide themselves away in; still, Brass knew there was little hope of finding any evidence in here, which (he also knew) was why he’d drawn this room in the first place.

  In the bedroom, on the nightstand, Grissom found an ashtray full of smoked joints and, in a drawer of the nightstand, a large resealable plastic bag full of grass. As he went through the closet, Grissom began to realize he wasn’t going to find anything to help him in here. He had hopes for the bathroom, but found nothing there, either. To his surprise, luminol showed no blood in the tub…or the sink….

  In the kitchen, Nick found some blood in the drain, as if someone had washed it off their hands. And luminol showed a few spots of blood in the sink. He took samples of all of it, but found nothing else.

  “You’re gonna wanna see this!” Warrick called from the basement.

  They trooped downstairs, an eager Grissom in the lead. The windowless room was illuminated by a single bulb dangling from the ceiling, Psycho-style. In the far corner, a shower head was attached to the wall, feeding a drain in the floor a few feet away. Though a curtain rod made a square enclosure, the shower curtain was long gone, bits of it still entangled in the metal rings of the rod.

  The latter detail struck Grissom as possibly significant.

  Next to the shower, a large sink was mounted on the wall, with a toilet along the same wall beyond that, no walls around any of the fixtures.

  With the others looking on, a calm but focused Warrick said, “I sprayed the shower, the floor, the sink and the toilet with luminol.”

  No one said anything as the lanky CSI turned on the UV light. Nor did they speak when the entire room seemed to supernaturally fluoresce before them, freezing even these seasoned investigators into shock.

  Shaking his head, Brass finally said, “Oh, my God…”

  His expression grim, Grissom hung his head, the vision of it playing before his closed eyes.

  Pierce has a key to the house. He comes down here, into this cement dungeon, with the body of his wife. He places her in the shower like the lump of flesh she’s become, and goes back upstairs for his chain saw. Soon, he returns, and fires it up….

  Trying to keep the mess to a minimum, he begins a one man assembly line, cutting off a piece of his dead wife, then cutting off part of the shower curtain—with scissors?—and wraps it up like a piece of meat from the grocery store. Then he puts the pieces in garbage bags, taking care to weight down each bag—rocks? sink weights?—before he ties it off.

  All the time he’s doing this, Pierce has no emotional response to the fact that he’s chopping up his wife. It’s a job—nothing more. He has had so many bodies stretched out before him on his massage tables that the human body has no surprises for him—bones, muscles, fat, his fingers know them all so well.

  If anything, he takes a grim satisfaction that he’s obliterating Lynn’s identity, this new identity, this born-again prude who replaced the woman he married. It somehow isn’t enough to just kill her—she had been so concerned with spiritual matters, so obsessed with the heavenly world beyond this one, well, he would just relieve her of that cumbersome suit of flesh, removing it from existence: no body, no Lynn.

  He also relishes outsmarting the police. If they somehow do come after him, and he is cornered, he will blame that squalid little dope dealer.

  “Sadler did it,” he will say. “Drug deal went bad for him, and he was desperate for cash—and I owed him money, and couldn’t pay up.”

  But Sadler was in jail, when your wife disappeared, the cops would say.

  “That’s what Sadler thought you would think,” he says. “The perfect alibi—but he had one of his ‘homeys’ do it for him.”

  And of course the police will believe him—in Pierce’s mind, who wouldn’t take the word of an upstanding white citizen over that of some black drug dealer?

  But even dead, Lynn proves to be a pain in the ass—she pisses him off one last time, when he tries to slice through the pelvis, and the saw jams up in the bone, dragging the intestines out as he pulls the saw free. He feels foolish, for a moment, supposed expert at anatomy that he is.

  But the moment passes, and before very long, he’s finally finished down here. He cleans up the blood, making a thorough job of it, convinced he’s left no traces for investigators to find. He loads up his SUV with his chain saw and his bags of “meat,” hauls the saw and the bags over to Sadler’s boat in the nearby storage shed, takes the boat out under the cover of darkness, onto Lake Mead, and rides around the rest of the night, dropping bags—and a chain saw, and maybe a gun—over the side.

  The only thing Pierce misses is that one of the bags has a pinhole leak, dripping blood in the fishbox, on the deck, and on the gunnel before he finally gets it over the side. His subsequent thorough cleaning of the boat cannot remove these blood trails; but he does not know that.

  Nor does the anatomy “expert” foresee the pelvic piece, still filled with gas, breaking free from its weighted bag, starting for the surface only to be caught up in the anchor chain of the Fish and Wildlife worker, Jim Tilson.

  All Owen Pierce knows is that he has one last thing to do: he must turn himself into a distraught husband unable to find his runaway wife.

  Grissom wondered where the body had been when they were in the house that first night. Had Pierce already brought his wife’s remains here? And where had Lynn’s car been during all of this?

  He asked Warrick, “You got pictures and scrapings?”

  “Doing it now,” Warrick said.

  “Nick,” Grissom said, “you help him in here. Also, check upstairs for scissors Pierce might have cut the curtain with. Take a sample of what’s left of those curtains, too.”

  “On it,” Nick said.

  “Jim,” Grissom said, “you want to come with me?”

  “Where to?” Brass asked.

  “Outside—one more thing I want to check.”

  Around behind the house, invisible from the street, sat a small clapboard shed of a garage, barely big enough for a car and a few tools. It had two old swing-out wooden doors held together with a chain and padlock.

  “You have the key for this?” Grissom asked.

  Using the key ring Sadler had provided, Brass tried one key after another until, on the fifth attempt, the lock gave. Each of them grabbed a door and tugged. Slowly, rusty hinges protesting, the doors swung open.

  No car occupied the dirt floor and only a few tools hung on the wall around the place; seemed Sadler wasn’t much of a handyman. In the far corner sat a rusted garbage can. Striding over to the dented receptacle, Grissom poured flashlight light down into it. Shiny glints winked back at him. “I think I just found the driver’s-side window of Lynn Pierce’s car.”

  “Anything else?” Brass asked as he joined Grissom at the trash can.

  Bending over, Grissom withdrew a wadded-up piece of paper, which he carefully smoothed out in a latexed palm. “Receipt for a replacement window for a ’ninety-five Avalon.” Grissom flashed a smile at the detective. “Paid cash at a U-Pull-a-Part junkyard.”

  Brass wasn’t smiling, though, when he said, “You think he’ll have cute answers for all of this?”

  “Why don’t we call on him, and see?”

  14

  AT THE START OF SHIFT, SARA SIDLE FELT SHE HAD drawn the short straw—Catherine was on her way to Showgirl World to serve the warrant on the dressing room, while Detective Conroy was heading back to Dream Dolls to reinterview Belinda Bountiful and the other strippers—again. That left Sara to supervise the lab work at HQ, in particular following up on anything Greg Sanders might have come up with. Wi
th Grissom, Warrick, and Nick all tied up with the Lynn Pierce case, she felt like a ghost haunting the blue-tinged halls of CSI.

  In particular, she hoped to take care of one frustrating detail. They had been trying to track down the Dream Dolls private-dance cubicle carpeting ever since Jenna Patrick’s body had been found. Ty Kapelos provided Sergeant O’Riley with the name of the cut-rate retailer who sold it to him. O’Riley’d been having difficulty getting in touch with the retailer, a guy named Monty Wayne, who ran a small discount business in the older part of downtown.

  “Guy’s been on vacation,” O’Riley told Sara yesterday, “and his only other employee is this secretary whose English ain’t so hot.”

  But this evening, upon getting to work, Sara found, on her computer monitor screen, a Post-it from O’Riley saying Wayne was back from his vacation. Even better, the retailer had provided his home number, saying it was okay to call up till midnight.

  Sitting behind her desk and punching in the numbers, Sara tried to fight the feeling that she was spinning her wheels while everyone else on the CSI team was doing something really productive, not to mention more interesting. The phone rang twice before it was picked up.

  “Wayne residence,” a rough-edged male voice intoned.

  “Mr. Wayne?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Sara Sidle, Las Vegas P.D. criminalistics. You spoke to Sergeant O’Riley, earlier?”

  The voice brightened. “Ms. Sidle, yes…been expecting your call. How can I be of help to the police?”

  “Sergeant O’Riley spoke to you about this carpeting in the back of Dream Dolls—”

  But Wayne was all over that, wall to wall: “Oh yeah, I remember that shit. And it was shit—that Kapelos character got it cheap because I could barely give the stuff away.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Came from this manufacturer in South Carolina—Denton, South Carolina. I used to buy a lot of stuff from them, but they been slipping. I took these two rolls as a sample.”

  “Would you know if anybody else locally carries it?”

  “Hell, I doubt it. I happen to know I was their only Vegas client, even in their heyday. And now, hardly anybody buys from Denton anymore…might say they’re hanging on by a thread.”

  He seemed to be waiting for her to laugh; so Sara forced a chuckle, and said, “Please go on, Mr. Wayne.”

  “I doubt if there’s any more of that cut-rate crap in the state, let alone the city.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Wayne. Would you have the Denton manufacturer’s number?”

  “I already gave it to that Sgt. O’Riley, and I don’t have it at home. Why don’t you check with him? He and I went over pretty much the same ground.”

  Probably including the “hanging by a thread” gag, she thought; but she said, “Well, thank you, Mr. Wayne, you’ve been very cooperative,” which was true.

  He said it was his pleasure and they said good-bye and Sara hung up, quickly dialing O’Riley’s desk; she got the message machine so she tried his cell, catching him in his car on his way to the aftermath of a convenience store robbery.

  “Yeah, I talked to Goldenweave in Denton,” O’Riley said. “They didn’t sell that carpet to anybody else in Vegas, or even in the southwest. Is that helpful?”

  “Could be,” she said, thinking about it, the carpet suddenly seeming to Sara like the fabric version of DNA.

  Finally feeling a little spring in her step, she bounced over to Greg Sanders in his lab, but found him sitting in a chair by a countertop, not working on anything, not even goofing off with a soft drink or video game or anything…just sort of sitting morosely.

  “I was kind of hoping you might have something for me,” Sara said from the doorway.

  But the spiky-haired lab rat just sat there, as if he hadn’t heard her.

  She waited for a moment, then said, “Greg? Hello?”

  He didn’t move.

  Finally, she went to him, placing a hand on a shoulder of his blue smock. “Greg, what is it?”

  Shaking his head, he looked at her. “This stripper case of yours…I hate it.”

  “You hate it.”

  “Can you believe that? A case involving exotic dancers, and I’m longing for a decomposing corpse or maybe another skinned gorilla.”

  Sara pulled up a chair and sat beside him. “Be specific.”

  His sigh lifted his whole body and set it down hard. “Okay—you bring me enough raw evidence to fill a warehouse, and yet I get nothing from the prime suspect, but a ton of stuff from all the coworkers. I mean, they’ve all been in that room…but Lipton? Never. And there’s enough DNA in that cubicle to start an entirely new species, only none of it belongs to him.”

  “What about the roommate?”

  Greg turned to look at her, eyes narrowing. “Yeah, I was gonna ask about her.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, first understand that there’s carpet fibers on the clothes of all those Dream Dolls dancers—any of them, all of them could’ve been in that private dance cubicle at any time.”

  “We knew that. What’s that got to do with the roommate? Tera Jameson?”

  Greg offered her a palm, to accompany the only halfway interesting information he had: “She’s got the carpet fibers on her stuff too.”

  “Hmmm. She’s our other good suspect.”

  Greg brightened. “She is?”

  “Yes…but she used to work at Dream Dolls, herself.”

  “Oh. Her DNA’s in the mix, too, by the way.”

  “Could be the same reason. You get anything from the mattress or the sex toy?”

  Another sigh. “Doing that next. I believe this is the first time you’ve brought me a vibrator.”

  She smiled a little but, heading for the door, said only, “Don’t go there, Greg.”

  Sanders managed his own little smile, before his expression turned serious as he returned to his work.

  Sara, on her way to the office, had the nagging feeling she’d missed something, that the puzzle pieces were all before her now, and she wasn’t quite putting them together.

  Detective Erin Conroy and Pat Hensley sat on metal folding chairs in the dressing room at Dream Dolls, a few of the dancers in various stages of undress milling about, applying expensive makeup and cheap perfume. Pat’s alter ego, Belinda Bountiful, didn’t go on for another half hour, and she was relaxing, enjoying a cup of coffee; so was Conroy, keeping it casual, not even taking notes.

  Her back to the dressing table, almost plain without makeup, the garishly redheaded Hensley wore a low-cut lime top that shared much of her ample cleavage with the world; her jeans were funkily frayed and form-fitting, and she was barefoot, her toenails blood red. But it was the Dolly Partonesque cleavage that kept attracting Conroy’s attention.

  Catching this, Belinda said good-naturedly, “If you got it, honey, flaunt it. I paid good money for these and I intend to get a whole lotta mileage out of ’em.”

  The refreshing bluntness of that made Conroy laugh. Then she said, “We were talking about Tera Jameson.”

  “Right. What else can I tell you?”

  “Is Tera’s sexual preference widely known in your circles?”

  Hensley shrugged. “She don’t advertise it, but she doesn’t hide it, neither.”

  “What about Jenna?”

  Hensley sipped her coffee. “She didn’t advertise it.”

  “That she was a lesbian?”

  “No. Anyway, like I told that other female dick, the other day—Jenna liked both flavors.”

  “She was bisexual, you mean.”

  “Yeah, I said that before. What are you getting at?”

  Conroy chose her words carefully. “Another friend of hers claims Jenna was strictly straight.”

  Hensley smirked. “Couldn’t have been somebody who knew Jenna very well.”

  Conroy sat forward conspiratorially. “What if I told you it was Tera Jameson herself who made that claim?”

  “I don’
t care if Oprah told you: it’s a crock. Tera’s lying. Why, I have no idea.”

  “Were Tera and Jenna having an affair?”

  “Well, they did have one…”

  “Right up to the time of Jenna’s murder?”

  “No—it was over months ago. They still roomed together, but Jenna told me, in no uncertain terms, that she and Tera were history. Still friends! But history.”

  “Because of Ray Lipton.”

  Hensley nodded. “Jenna fell hard for the guy…. You mind if I start putting on my makeup?”

  “Not at all.”

  Hensley turned her back to the detective, began applying her makeup, and talking to Conroy in the mirror. “I can see why Tera didn’t like Ray, though.”

  “Because he stole Jenna away?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess, but…”

  “Because he was a hothead?”

  “That, too—though Lipton was mostly talk. I saw him do stuff like grab Jenna, by the wrists, y’know? But never hit her or anything.”

  Conroy kept trying. “What else didn’t Tera like about Ray Lipton?”

  “He looked down on Tera…he was very, what’s the word? Provincial in his thinking. To him, it was perversion, girls with girls.”

  In the dressing room mirror, Pat Hensley was turning into the garishly attractive Belinda Bountiful. Conroy asked, “Pat…Belinda—this is important. Are you sure Jenna and Tera were involved, romantically? Sexually?”

  A laugh bubbled out of the stripper. “Oh, yeah—I know for a fact!”

  “Are you saying…”

  Now the stripper turned and looked at the detective dead on. “Don’t spread this around, okay? I got a husband, and two kids. But I work in a kinda bizarre line of business, you might have noticed, and I don’t always see things, or do things that…conventional society would put their stamp of approval on.”

  Knowing the answer, Conroy asked, “How do you know Tera and Jenna were involved, Belinda?”

  And Pat was Belinda now, when she said, “’Cause one horny drunken afternoon, girlfriend, I let the two of ’em make a Belinda Bountiful sandwich…that’s how I know.”

  Taking a long swig from her coffee, Detective Erin Conroy smiled.