Binding Ties

by Max Allan Collins

  This one was a skinny, blond kid with wide-set, wide-open blue eyes, more pretty than handsome. His orange jumpsuit was immaculately pressed and—even though his hands were cuffed before him—Rudy Orloff moved with an easy grace, almost dancerlike … floating on air.

  Without an invitation, Orloff sat opposite them at the picnic table.

  His smile showed even, white teeth. “I remember you,” he said to Brass. “But I don’t remember your name. You and those CSI showboats rousted me on some murder, couple years back.” Then he gazed at Damon, insolently. “You’re cute, but I don’t know you…. Not really fair, is it? You know who I am.”

  Brass and Damon both showed their IDs.

  “Must be important, trading Vegas for Ely,” Orloff said, “even for an afternoon. You may have noticed—this place is the devil’s armpit.”

  Brass said, “Rudy, we came all this way just to see you. Talk to you.”

  “What a great big goddamn honor! Now who do you think I killed that I didn’t kill?”

  “Your DNA,” Damon said, “was found at the scene of two murders.”

  Orloff didn’t miss a beat. “My DNA. What, hair? Skin?”

  Brass said, “Semen.”

  With an evil grin, Orloff said, “You boys are twisted, aren’t you?”

  “Heel, Sparky,” Brass said. “Your spunk showed up on the bodies of two men murdered in Vegas—last week.”

  The prisoner reared back; his smile was more confused than insolent, this time. “Say what?”

  Brass told him again.

  Orloff now seemed amused, if interested. “With me in stir for most of the last year, how do you suppose I managed to accomplish that? Prison library fax? Good aim?”

  Brass said, “We’ve already checked—you haven’t been released for a funeral, or on work release, or anything else. Your ass has not been outside the prison yard.”

  “You are a detective, Captain Brass. What’s your idea how it happened?”

  The detectives said nothing for a long moment, then Brass said, “We were hoping you might enlighten us.”

  “Why should I help you?”

  “I’ll talk to the warden and write up a report that oughta put some gold stars on your good-behavior chart.”

  “Well … that’s a start….”

  Damon said, “This guy we’re after is evil.”

  Orloff backed away, hands up like Al Jolson singing “Mammy.” “Wow, evil! There’s an oldie but goodie.”

  Brass said, “We’re talking a serial killer. Remember CASt?”

  “He’s making a comeback? And here I was hoping for a Seinfeld reunion.”

  Brass’s mouth smiled; his eyes didn’t. “Your come—how come?”

  Orloff shrugged. “All I know for sure is—I didn’t kill your two dead men. Beyond that, hell … I’d just be speculating.”

  “Please do,” Brass said.

  The wise remark seemed to strike Orloff as a compliment, and he sat forward, folding his hands, and in a conspiratorial, one-expert-to-another fashion, asked, “You’re sure it’s my DNA?”

  “CODIS matched it.”

  “Someone froze it, then.”

  “Gee, we hadn’t thought of that. Did you sell your sperm to a clinic?”

  “No. Or my blood, either, though there were times I tried. See, they make you pee in a cup, and I couldn’t piss the physical.”

  “So comes the question,” Brass said, “who would think freezing Rudy Orloff’s semen sounds like fun?”

  The kid sat back, not sullen—thinking.

  Brass tried to prime the pump: “Look, we know you’ve been inside for a while. What we don’t know is, when’s the last time you were in Vegas?”

  “Eighteen months ago, more or less. About right.”

  “You turned tricks. Anything kinky?”

  Orloff grunted a laugh. “What, guys paying guys for sex? What kink could ever come up in that situation?”

  “Anybody who … paid for … take out?”

  Orloff smiled, crossed his arms. “You mean a collector?”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  Again Orloff sat forward and while he was pretty, his grin wasn’t. “You name the bend, somebody out there’s made that way.”

  “I believe you. Back to Vegas …”

  The prisoner shrugged, resumed his leaning-back, folded-arms position. “I met a bunch of party people when I was there. But my memory’s cloudy. Maybe if there was something in it for me, the sun might come out.”

  Brass tapped Damon on the shoulder and they both rose.

  “What?”

  “We’re out of here,” Brass said.

  “What, you don’t want to haggle?” Orloff asked, brows beettled. He was damn near pouting. “I thought you came to play!”

  “We came to work,” Brass said. “Anyway, I don’t think you’ve got anything to sell.”

  “Sit down, sit down—don’t get all huffy. If I give you something, would it be worth something in return?”

  They sat.

  Brass asked, “Like what?”

  “Solitary confinement.”

  Damon asked, “You want solitary?”

  “Listen, I been working on good behavior. I’m in on attempted murder, not murder, guys. There’s light at the end of this tunnel, and helping you guys builds my file up, in a good way. But we get the TV here, we get the papers. If these animals find out I helped the heat … even if it is some messed-up serial killer—they’ll think it’s open season. I’ll never survive, if I don’t find a way out.”

  Brass nodded. “You give me something I can use, I’ll get you solitary.”

  “And while I’m in solitary, you get me transferred out of here, too.”

  Brass reared back. “Rudy—I don’t know if I can make that happen.”

  “There’s plenty of places cushier than this. I have trouble breathing this thin mountain air.”

  Brass wondered if Orloff had made some enemies in here that he was trying to evade; maybe that would be helpful to the cause….

  “I’ll do what I can,” Brass said.

  Orloff studied him for a long time. “I believe you. I choose to believe you. But remember, if you need me as a witness, I gotta be alive! Corpses can’t do shit on the witness stand.”

  “Understood.”

  “Okay. Okay, there were two guys. I don’t know either of their names.”

  “Oh, great start, Rudy,” Brass said.

  “Hey, we weren’t in the kind of place where you give names,” Orloff said. “At least not right ones. Or do you want me to tell you, go look for Smith and Jones? … Anyway, there were these two guys. One was older.”

  “How old?”

  Orloff shrugged. “Fifty maybe—that neighborhood.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Bald, glasses, dressed like he hadn’t been shopping since he saw Saturday Night Fever.”

  “Bald?”

  “Yeah, he had, you know … wispy stuff, but that was it. He wore lots of polyester. You know—nice jacket, who shot the couch?”

  “Okay,” Brass said. “He was a … collector?”

  “Yeah. He used to love to watch me strangle the chicken. He’d hold the cup for me to do it in, and then … he’d take it home. What he did with it in the privacy of his pad was not my concern—the C note he gave me was. The other guy did the same thing, only he got a little more … involved. Helped me.”

  Brass said, “Tell me about this other guy.”

  “Thirtyish, dark hair. I liked him—nice build, kind eyes.”

  “Color?”

  “Brown, I think. Kinda brown. You could dive in and get lost in those puppies.”

  “Scars or tattoos?”

  Orloff shook his head. “Not that I could see. Neither one got naked—this was a kind of voyeuristic deal, mostly. I whack, john watches, here’s your cup of fun, here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”

  Damon said, “These guys weren’t … together?”


  “No. They just had similar kinks. It’s … unusual, but not unheard of.”

  Brass thought, Just write in with your question to Ask Dr. Orloff in the next issue of Bizarre Pen Pals Monthly.

  Brass asked, “Anything else you can think of, Rudy?”

  “Two come catchers isn’t enough?”

  Brass stood, waved to the guard. Then to the prisoner he said, “I’ll get right on this—you’ll be in solitary within twenty-four hours. Thanks, Rudy—this is valuable.”

  Orloff, minus any attitude, said, “Thanks. You want to tell me what it was I said that helped?”

  “No.”

  They were back in the car before Damon finally asked. “I give up, what did he say?”

  Brass started the car and backed out of the parking spot. “The two guys he described could have been almost anyone.”

  “Yeah,” Damon said.

  “Or … the older one could be Perry Bell, minus the rug.”

  “The what?” Damon said, then he got it. “Damn! I’ve never seen Perry without that toup—I damn near forgot he was bald underneath.”

  “Yeah, well he may also be a killer underneath. I’m phoning ahead to Vegas to get a faxed photo of Bell shown to our little helper, Rudy Orloff. If he makes Perry Bell, we have our man … or anyway, our copycat.”

  SIX

  Catherine Willows and Nick Stokes had worked all night to track down Dallas Hanson, going from one dead address to another, until finally, in the light of day, they honed in on a homeless shelter in North Las Vegas.

  With Nick behind the wheel of the Tahoe, fighting hump-day morning rush hour, Catherine said, “Odd, isn’t it?”

  “What is?” Nick asked. He had a cup of fast-food coffee in one hand; they’d just had the kind of five-minute breakfast mother never made.

  “The way this job combines the mundane with the extraordinary.”

  “You are tired….”

  “No, really. I mean, are we cruising to another dead end, like Carlson? Or a confrontation with a homicidal maniac?”

  “I get your point,” he said. “But I really didn’t find that serial-killer shrine particularly mundane.”

  She laughed once. “Maybe I’m jaded, at that.”

  Nick sipped his coffee, eyes on the road, as he said, gently, “Is it hard? Knowing that right now your daughter’s getting ready for school, and you’re not there with her?”

  “For an unmarried guy with a little-black-book of a speed dial,” she said with an affectionate grin, “you’re deep, Mr. Stokes. Sensitive, even.”

  He flashed a Nicholson grin and gave her a Presleyesque “Thank you. Thank you vurry much….”

  “… The answer is yes.” She’d had to call from the fast-food joint to have the sitter cover with Lindsey. “One of these days … I gotta get on dayshift.”

  They rode in silence for a while, then Nick asked, “You really think we’re gonna find a serial killer at a homeless shelter?”

  “It does go against the grain.”

  “Now if his vics were homeless, transient types, that’d be different.”

  “Like Jack the Ripper,” Catherine said. “Or Cleveland’s Mad Butcher.”

  “But CASt’s M.O. is middle-to-upper-middle-class white males.”

  “I know, I know. But we check this one out—and we take no chances.”

  “No argument, Cath.”

  They both knew that many serial killers preferred the privacy of their own out-of-the-way residences for their specialized activities. And Dallas Hanson would have zero privacy at the Find Salvation Mission and Shelter.

  Then again, CASt wasn’t like most other serial killers. He operated within the residences of his victims. He didn’t pick up hitchhikers like Bundy did, or seduce young men into his home like Gacy had. Just because Hanson lived in a shelter didn’t mean he wasn’t a legitimate suspect.

  In fact, hiding among the anonymous unfortunates of a city made imminent sense, from a madman’s point of view….

  Catherine hoped the rest of the team—and she didn’t just mean her fellow CSIs, but Brass, Doc Robbins, and even Damon and the assorted detectives aiding the effort—were making some progress out there, on the current crimes. This case was spiraling out of control, and Sheriff Rory Atwater—a more savvy political beast than even former sheriff Brian Mobley—would be breathing down their necks every second.

  Although she respected the new sheriff, she couldn’t quite bring herself to like him—that might change, but she was put off by his style: He was a slicker politician than Mobley, who had bobbled his mayoral campaign badly. She had every reason to believe the new sheriff wouldn’t hesitate to leave the CSIs, Brass, and company hanging out to dry to better his own career.

  “You think we should go straight from here to the third guy?” Nick asked.

  Catherine shrugged. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But if Hanson’s a washout, we could think about going to see Dayton. We’re approved for overtime on this thing. Are you up to it?”

  “Up to it, up for it … you name it.”

  “Amazing what one cup of coffee can do for a strapping lad like you.”

  Nick just shrugged and grinned. But in a moment the grin had faded, as he said, “Do you really think we have a shot at solving a ten-, eleven-year-old series of murders? I mean, they do CASt on those unsolved-mystery-type shows. He’s on the list with Judge Crater and JonBenét.”

  She thought about that briefly, then said, “Yeah, I do think we have a real shot. We’re better equipped than Brass and Champlain were, when the original murders went down.”

  “Yeah, and lots of cold cases are getting cracked by new technology—but Cath, other than those DNA samples Champlain was smart enough to store, we got nothing but a cold, cold trail.”

  “I see your point, but then, remember, Nick, on the other hand—we’re very, very good.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah. Yeah, I almost forgot….”

  On Miller Avenue, Nick parked the Tahoe at the curb in front of a low-slung stucco, which was a single story but for the west end, where a second story rose into a church-like steeple; the one-story had a window with the bold black-outlined-red words FIND SALVATION MISSION AND SHELTER, and the two-story portion had room for a mural of an idealized praying Jesus, amateur enough to have been done by one of the mission’s tenants, sincere enough to give Catherine a momentary heart tug.

  They walked through the front door into what might have been the lobby of a rundown hotel: a scattering of overstuffed hand-me-down chairs and sofas around a large open room, tables covered with magazines so old they might have been collectible, in less dog-eared shape; the occasional Bible mingled with the mags. Sunshine slanted in, film noir-style, thanks to partly drawn blinds on the front window, providing light and shadow. Off to the right yawned a wide wooden staircase with oak railings that would be about the only thing worth salvaging if a wrecking ball were ever scheduled here.

  A thin, sixty-something silver-haired man, whose week-or-so-worth of stubble threatened to become a beard, was sunk deep in an armchair; immersed in the sports section of the morning paper, he wore a very faded, possibly original vintage Star Wars T-shirt and faded-to-white jeans, which were accidently in style, and apparently had not noticed their entry. Behind a hotel-like check-in desk, opposite the front door, a thin youngish woman with mousy brown hair and black-frame glasses looked up from a religious magazine she had been reading; her oval face, bearing no trace of makeup, was not unattractive. She wore a clean, crisp white men’s dress shirt and black slacks; her manner was professional, and the simple gold-cross necklace spoke volumes.

  “May I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

  Catherine had a necklace, too, and lifted the ID badge on its chain for the woman to get a better look. “Catherine Willows, Nick Stokes.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. “Crime Lab? Well, we haven’t had any crimes here in a long time. Haven’t reported anything … untoward.”

  “Normally
a detective would come around,” Catherine said, “but the department is stretched a little thin right now, and we’re on an important case.”

  “I see.” Her hands were folded, appropriately enough, in a prayerlike fashion. “Well, the mission’s policy is twofold. We of course help the authorities in any way we can. But we also respect the privacy and dignity of our guests.”

  “We’re not here to arrest anyone,” Catherine said. “We’re doing background work, following up on an old case that may have a bearing on a new one.”

  Nick shrugged, smiled his easy smile, and said, “We just want to chat with one of your guests. Fill in some blanks.”

  Catherine’s tap dance, and Nick’s charm, merged to do the trick.

  “Who would you like to chat with?”

  Catherine said, “Dallas Hanson.”

  The woman’s eyes flicked toward where the old-timer had been sitting with his sports page; however, when Catherine glanced back, the old man was gone.

  “Where did Obi-Wan Kenobi go?” Catherine asked Nick.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know—we had our backs to him. Maybe he transported outta here.”

  “Wrong show,” Catherine said. Turning back to the woman, she asked sternly, “Was that Dallas Hanson?”

  “Some of our guests have—”

  Catherine cut her off. “Privacy and dignity, I know. But this is a murder investigation. Was that him, or not?”

  The woman sucked in breath through her nostrils, and tried to stand firm as the authority figure in charge of this desk; but in three seconds, she had withered under Catherine’s stare. “No. No, that wasn’t him.”

  The CSIs moved away from the woman’s post.

  “Outside,” Catherine said to Nick, with a gesture toward the door. “If Obi-Wan’s warning someone in here, we might have an early checkout, out a window.”

  “What about those stairs?”

  “Mine.”

  Nick’s expression said he didn’t love her plan; but she was the senior officer, and he tore through the lobby and out the door.

  Catherine ran to the stairs, taking them two at a time, easing her head out when she got to the second floor.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but an open door about halfway down, on the left, the side of the hall whose rooms might have windows facing the back alley. Assuming this was the right room, Catherine hoped Nick was on his way around. Tough for one man to cover all four sides of a building….