Body of Evidence ccsi-4

by Max Allan Collins

  Im midday traffic, it took a while to get there, even with Grissom giving Warrick carte blanche behind the wheel.

  The apartment complex-a sprawling series of three-story buildings near the corner of Green Valley Parkway and Pebble Road-had been the latest thing, twenty years ago. Now it was a weathered roost for those unable to manage a down payment on a house trailer.

  The manager-a middle-aged man with short, dark hair cut up over his ears and collar-looked to be ex-military; probably put in his twenty, Sara figured, retired and took the job of managing this place in trade for rent. The man seemed happy to see them-prospective renters, possibly-right up until Brass flashed his badge.

  The office was small and cramped, the air stale despite the best efforts of a window air conditioner about ten years past its prime. Howard Thomas-as he'd been announced by a scruffy brass nameplate on his forty-dollar do-it-yourself-kit desk-sat grumpily drumming his fingers on the desktop.

  "Let's make this short," he said. "I'm a busy man, and some of my tenants are allergic to police."

  "Perhaps," Brass said, "they can build up a tolerance, if we have a patrol car stop by here, on the hour. Maybe they'll feel a little safer."

  "You don't have to be unpleasant."

  "We need to talk to you about a couple of your ex-tenants."

  Thomas shrugged. "If you mean Candace Lewis, she was a model tenant-everybody liked her, everybody got along with her."

  None of them was surprised that the manager had skipped a step and gone straight to Candace Lewis-as big as the story was in the media, as important as the case had been, this manager had no doubt already answered more than his share of questions about the mayor's late personal assistant.

  But the manager explained anyway: "She's all you cops want to talk about. You and the TV and the papers and the FBI, you guys are sniffin' around here, every other day, seems like-and I can't get a decent renter to walk through the door."

  "I hear life's a bitch," Brass said. "Now, let's talk about another former tenant-David Benson."

  Thomas shrugged. "That's a new one. Who the hell is he?"

  Sara said, "Lived here for two years. Left about two years ago?"

  Grissom said, "That's four years, Mr. Thomas."

  "Hell if I know."

  Brass asked, "You keep records, don't you?"

  Thomas pointed at a file cabinet. "You don't expect me to take my time sorting through there, do you?"

  Sara was starting to understand why Grissom preferred insects to people.

  A lanky guy in his thirties strolled into the room; he wore threadbare jeans and a tan workshirt with the name Kevin stitched in an oval over a breast pocket.

  "Finished 4B," Kevin said, oblivious to the crowd in the tiny office.

  "What about the bum washer in building six?"

  "I don't wanna start that till after lunch."

  Thomas waved dismissively and "Kevin" slipped back out the door. After Grissom shot them a look, Sara and Warrick were on the guy's tail.

  The sun was high and hot, but a breeze from the west made it cooler out here than inside that stuffy office. Kevin strolled through the parking lot; he climbed into a red beater of a pickup, the box stacked full with plywood, two by fours, empty pop and beer cans, and some loose hand tools. He didn't start the pickup up, however; he was brownbagging it.

  And as he unwrapped a sandwich from what might have been an evidence bag, Sara came up on the driver's side, Warrick looping around to the passenger side.

  "Are you the maintenance engineer?" she asked, reaching for the most complimentary term she could muster. She gave him a nice smile.

  He had just taken a bite of his sandwich, and looked up-ready to give hell to whoever'd interrupted his alfrecso dining-but then apparently liked what he saw, including her gap-toothed smile. He nodded slowly, still chewing, closing his mouth while doing so, indicating chivalry wasn't dead.

  "Mind if I call you 'Kevin'?" she asked, gesturing to the name on his workshirt.

  He swallowed a bite, then grinned. "Call me anytime."

  Then the maintenance man seemed to sense Warrick, on the other side, and glanced at him with a frown. Warrick gave him a friendly nod.

  The maintenance man returned the nod, guardedly, then turned back to Sara. "So who are you guys? Saw you talkin' to Howard."

  She lifted the I.D. on its necklace. "Sara Sidle and that's Warrick Brown. We're with the crime lab? Can we talk to you while you eat?"

  If Warrick had been the one asking, the maintenance man might have said no; but Kevin seemed intent on keeping Sara happy. "Sure, if you don't spoil my lunch with some gross-out shit from the morgue or somethin'!"

  Kevin chortled at his own witticism and Sara managed a light laugh.

  "What do you guys wanna talk about?"

  "A couple of former tenants-Candace Lewis and David Benson."

  "She was a babe," he said. "He was a dork. Anything else?"

  Sara said, "Didn't they live next door to each other?"

  "That's right."

  "Did they get along?"

  He shrugged. "She was nice to him. Hell, she was nice to everybody. Real doll. But Benson, he followed her around like a lovesick puppy. Carried her laundry up and down to the laundry room. Brought her groceries in for her and stuff. I always thought it was so he could try to get a whiff of her panties, pardon my French, but she thought he was harmless."

  Sara frowned. "How do you know that, Kevin?"

  He shrugged. "You can just tell. You know, some dorks fall for anything a babe hands out."

  Warrick smiled a little, for Sara's benefit.

  Kevin was saying, "That nerd had the hots for her, big time. Man, I told her she should've got a restraining order against him, but she kept sayin' he was 'sweet.' "

  Reading between the lines, Sara said, "And she thought you were kind of…jealous?"

  He straightened in the pickup seat. "Hey, we weren't an item. But we talked, 'cause I'm the maintenance guy, I helped her out, fixed stuff."

  "And she was a nice person?"

  "Yeah! I mean, she knew she was a babe. Babes know when they're babes, know what effect they have on gullible guys. Right?"

  Sara didn't know how to answer that.

  "But she also seemed kinda…naive. Like she didn't know she was playin' with fire. A weirdo like Benson, leadin' him on, that's dangerous, man."

  Sara asked, "Did you ever talk about this with any other police, or possibly the FBI?"

  "That guy Culpepper?" He shook his head. "None of them ever asked about Benson-you're the first ones." His eyes tightened. "You think the tabloids'd go for this?"

  "They might," Sara said. "You could call them, if you don't mind Benson suing you."

  "I don't need that shit!"

  Warrick asked, "Would it be possible to see her old apartment?"

  "Can't. Somebody's living there now. You'd have to get their permission, and they ain't home."

  Sara asked, "What about Benson's old apartment?"

  "That I could show you. Tenant after him just moved out last week."

  The maintenance man finished his sandwich quickly and Sara kept an eye on the office door; but Grissom and Brass were still in there with the manager.

  She and Warrick followed Kevin two buildings over and up two flights of concrete stairs to the third floor. The maintenance man led them around the building to an apartment almost at the far end of the walkway.

  "Benson lived here," Kevin said, pointing to the door in front of them, "and she had the apartment on the end."

  Using his passkey, the maintenance man let them in. As promised, the apartment was vacant. Tan carpeting covered the floor except for tile floors in the kitchen and bathroom. All the walls were painted white, the kitchen/dining area, the living room, the two bedrooms and the bathroom, all painted that chunky white textured paint that showed hardly any wear.

  "Doesn't look too bad," Warrick said.

  Kevin shrugged. "Not now. Guy that lived
here last left it spotless. Even got his security deposit back."

  Picking up on the implication, Sara asked, "What about Benson? Not so spotless?"

  The maintenance man snorted. "You don't know how much time I spent in this dump, patching it up! Thomas charged that dork a couple hundred over the deposit."

  "Why?" Sara asked.

  "The asshole had holes drilled everywhere!"

  "Holes? What for?"

  "His goddamned shelves and video equipment."

  Warrick asked, "So he had a lot of video stuff?"

  "Yeah, he was really into it. See, he sold the shit, so he got it at cost. He put holes in the walls to support these metal shelves all over the place-the joint was lousy with them." He walked over to the wall and pointed to a couple of spots where there were obvious patches.

  The two CSIs both looked around the apartment and finally Warrick called the maintenance man over to the far wall of the dining area where a patch was on the wall, almost at ceiling level; the patch looked larger than the others.

  "Kevin, did Benson have shelves all the way up there? Be hard to reach."

  "Naw, below that. I don't know what the hell he was doin', drillin' holes so high."

  Sara felt something tense in her stomach. "Did you have to patch any holes in Candace's apartment, Kevin, when she moved out?"

  "Few nail holes from some pictures."

  Warrick said suddenly, "These shelves-Benson had lots of equipment, right? Or were the shelves mostly for videotapes?"

  "Videotapes."

  "Tapes, like big movies? Or homemade videos?"

  "Homemade, mostly. Just plain old VHS in black sleeves…They were everywhere, shelves full of 'em, boxes of 'em."

  A chill ran through Sara.

  "What's on the other side of this wall?" Warrick asked, gesturing to where the high hole had been drilled.

  "Other side?" The maintenance man stared at the wall, like Superman exercising his X-ray vision. "Lemme think…That would have been Candace's bathroom. Yeah-shower stall."

  11

  NEXT SHIFT, CATHERINE WILLOWS AND NICK STOKES SPENT most of their time working a murder on Marion Drive.

  A drunk had chased his wife down the street before finally catching and stabbing her to death at the edge of Stewart Place Park. It wasn't exactly a locked-room mystery-the man still at the scene, cursing his dead wife, covered in her blood when the responding officers had shown up.

  Nonetheless, a crime scene was a crime scene and required due and proper processing. Collecting the evidence from the murder site and all along the chase route back to the couple's house had made for long, tedious toil on an unseasonably warm (supposedly) spring night under the gently mocking soft-focus glow of streetlights.

  Now-the two CSIs sitting in the IHOP on the Strip-they were finally getting the chance to read the financial records of their child-porn suspects, over breakfast.

  Catherine had Janice Denard's payroll information in front of her, and Nick was proving his walk-and-chew-gum proficiency by alternating bites of pancake with reading Roxanne Scott's payroll history.

  They had picked up Newcombe-Gold's paperwork on the seven employees on whom they zeroed in, as well as the disk that Randle claimed to have been working on last Saturday, which they'd already turned over to Tomas Nunez.

  Nick-after taking a long pull on a glass of orange juice, not quite as tall as the nearby Stratosphere-nodded toward the file. "I told you advertising pays."

  "Wow," Catherine said, eyes wide as she took in Denard's yearly salary.

  "Roxanne Scott makes almost twice what a CSI3 makes."

  "Tell me about it. Ever think you made the wrong career choice, Nicky?"

  Nick grinned. "Like last night, dancing with that drunk?…Ahh, I wouldn't know what to do if I had real money."

  "Well, you probably wouldn't ever have anybody shooting at you on the job," she said, alluding to a case they'd worked together a while back. They had gone to a house to collect evidence and wound up ducking gunfire.

  "At least we know that's a possibility," Nick said with a shrug. "Most people who get shot at their workplace don't get a warning." He glanced down at Roxanne Scott's payroll record. "How many hours d'you suppose we'd have to work, to get a five-grand bonus?"

  Her brow furrowing, Catherine looked at Janice Denard's history again. "Five thousand?…When did Roxanne get that bonus?"

  "First of this month."

  "That's funny," Catherine said, and licked a muffin crumb off her finger before tracing a line on the sheet of paper in front of her. "That's when Janice Denard got a ten-thousand-dollar bonus."

  Nick frowned. "I thought these women had identical jobs."

  "So did I." She handed him the sheet of paper.

  He studied it for a moment and said, "Maybe Janice worked more hours or something."

  "Seniority?" Catherine offered, but she didn't like the feeling in her gut. She had worked with Grissom long enough to know she shouldn't always trust that feeling; and this case had already confirmed that tenet, in spades. Evidence, not intuition…

  But unconsciously allowing yourself to be impacted by bias was one thing, and heeding a gut instinct-developed over years and years of on-the-job experience and just plain living life in the real world-well, that was something else again.

  Nick was saying, "Could be the size of the bonus is discretionary, on the boss's part."

  "We better make sure to ask Ian Newcombe about that."

  "Or maybe Ruben Gold-we haven't even talked to him yet. When is head honcho number two due back in town?"

  Catherine shrugged. "Another good question for us to ask when we go back there."

  "Which will be…?"

  She glanced at her watch. "They're not even open for another forty-five minutes."

  "Do I detect another double shift coming on?"

  "See, Nicky? You are going to have real money. Let's go back and see how Nunez is coming along, and then head over to Newcombe-Gold."

  "It's a plan."

  Still encamped in the air-conditioned garage, Tomas Nunez sat hunkered at a keyboard and monitor, his hair slicked back like a black helmet. Today's black T-shirt touted a gringo girl group-the Donnas-and the lanky, biker-esque computer guru had already worked up some sweat stains, despite the coolness of the concrete bunker. His black jeans had blown a knee but were otherwise intact, while his eight-thousand-buck forensic computer whirred quietly on the floor next to him as he studied a series of images rolling hypnotically across his monitor.

  "Morning, Tomas," Catherine said, holding out a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam IHOP cup.

  "Morning, Catherine, and gracias." Nunez accepted the cup and took a long sip through the hole-in-the-lid.

  "Is it?" she asked. "A good day?"

  "We've had worse on this case," Nunez said, casting an eye toward Nick. "What, no donuts?"

  "Hey, treat us right," Nick said, "and I'll make a run."

  "You found something?" Catherine asked.

  "You could say that…. Have a seat. Have two."

  They drew up chairs, on the same side of him, with a good view of the monitor.

  "The laptop you brought in? Found a bunch more pictures…"

  The CSIs sat forward.

  "…the twelve you've seen and maybe a hundred sad little brothers and sisters."

  "So," Catherine said, with an eyebrow lift, "Gary Randle's back on the radar."

  "But we still don't have his prints anywhere on that laptop," Nick reminded her. "The whole thing's been wiped clean."

  "Nick, it was in his possession!"

  Nunez cut back in. "Chill, you two…let me give you a few more facts to chew on, before you jump to your next conclusion."

  "Ouch," Nick said.

  "I ran a search for angel12.jpg and found reference to that file in unallocated space. Guess where the reference indicated it'd been downloaded from?"

  "A kiddie porn website," Catherine said hopefully, "that you traced to Gary Randle?"


  "How about a website…in Russia."

  "Russia?" Catherine blurted.

  "Si. Since the Cold War ended, all kinds of crime has flourished in the former Soviet Union, as capitalism flowers in various interesting and often vile ways."

  "Less commentary," Nick said. "More data."

  "Fair enough. I was able to resolve the Internet address to an IP address using a Domain Name Server Resolver; then I traced the IP address using a Trace Route site on the net, which sends a PING message to the IP, and waits for a response. It'll then trace the route the PING takes to the destination server and show where the destination-or host server-is, for the IP address."

  "Soooooo," Nick said, "if we want the actual peddlers of this smut…"

  "…you'll be flying Aeroflot to Moscow, then hopping a train to East Armpit, Siberia."

  Catherine asked, "How does this help us?"

  "It helps you. Not directly, but it gives us something to hand over to the Feds."

  Processing the info aloud, Catherine said, "This means that Randle, or someone else at Newcombe-Gold, is not a child pornographer, rather a consumer of the product."

  Nick said, "I have to admit, I never really thought Randle had a camera and was taking photos…"

  "A guy in an ad agency," Catherine said, flaring, "with his skills and smarts? With his sexually deviant tastes? With a teenager daughter in the house? I thought he might be."

  "Till now."

  "Till now," she admitted. "So he's a user, not a dealer. Either way, it's still 'drugs.' "

  "If it's Randle."

  "If it's Randle," she granted.

  Nunez said, "Hey, kids-if you're through, I got a little something from that laptop to make you smile."

  Catherine said, "Don't tease me, Tomas."

  "No tease: I ran E-Script, which carved out the Internet history to an Excel spreadsheet, showing websites visited, along with the dates and time of each visit…and logged on user for each site."

  And, as the computer wizard had predicted, Catherine and Nick traded smiles.

  "That Russian website," Nunez was saying, "was last visited Friday at four o'clock P.M., local time. The logged-on user was Randyman."

  After glancing over at Nick, who seemed suitably impressed, she asked, "You got all that from the laptop?"

  Nunez nodded. "Like they say on the infomercials…but that's not all: the laptop had AOL software. I got O'Riley to get a search warrant for the subjects of the AOL logs-account history, billing history and website history, along with saved e-mails. The AOL logs matched the laptop's Internet history log, so that'll stand up. Anyway, I tried to access the website, but like a lot of these child porn sites, it's password protected."