Back in her room, seeking a little privacy and maybe even some rest, Sara pulled out her cell phone—it paid to keep trying. She flipped through the local White Pages, and tried the county sheriff, the New Paltz P.D., the state patrol, and even the phone company, all with the same lack of success.
On a whim, she punched in Catherine’s cell phone number. Surprisingly, the phone rang!…and Sara felt a little jolt shoot through her.
“Catherine Willows,” the familiar voice said, a nice clear, strong signal.
“Catherine! It’s Sara.”
“Well, hi, stranger. I see on the Weather Channel you’re getting some snow.”
“Are we. And you’re not going to believe what happened, here…"
“Yeah, well you’re not going to believe the case you missed out on. You may be the one hip deep in snow, but we’ve got the frozen—”
And the line went dead.
Sara quickly hit redial and another familiar voice—the robotic one—returned with the news that her call could not be completed and to please try again later.
Though Grissom and Constable Maher were, technically at least, nearby…just up that slope…Sara suddenly felt very alone.
Usually a person who didn’t mind a little seclusion, Sara Sidle found herself wishing she could speak to just one person beyond the world of Mumford Mountain Hotel. But, for now at least, that appeared impossible.
Heaving a sigh, Sara returned the phone to her purse, placed it on the nightstand and took a nap with the light on. In part this was because she didn’t want to fall too deeply asleep, with the two-hour stint of crime-scene duty ahead of her. But it was also because, for some inexpressible reason, she didn’t feel like being in the dark, right now.
Before they’d left the hotel, Cormier loaned Grissom a muffler, but as the two men trudged up the rocky slope through the snow—the hotel man again leading the way—the CSI kept the woolen scarf off his face. Cold or no cold, he had questions to ask.
Grissom had to work his voice up over the wind. “Mr. Cormier…"
“Call me Herm!”
“Herm, now that you’ve had some time—any idea who the victim was?”
“Be a long time,” Cormier said, “‘fore I forget that sight.”
They were taking the same circuitous route up the slope as they’d used getting down. Trodding behind the man, in the howling storm, Grissom had to strain to hear; but even without Mother Nature’s wintry distractions, he’d have had trouble catching the man’s words.
“The truth is,” Cormier went on, “that poor bastard’s body was just too badly burned for me to recognize! If that was my own brother, I don’t know that I could tell you.”
“I understand!” said Grissom, practically yelling to be heard over the wind. He picked up his pace and fell in alongside Cormier, but the old man was far more at ease with the weather and terrain, and Grissom really had to work to keep up. “How many of the staff are actually here?”
“Those I already told you about—Amy, Mrs. Duncan, the head cook, Jenny at the desk, Pearl and me.”
“Didn’t I see a waiter in the dining room?”
“Oh, Tony! Tony Dominguez. He’s one of our best workers, even if he is a little…” He bent his wrist.
“Gay?”
The hotel manager smirked humorlessly. “Let’s just say Tony ain’t the macho-est guy around. But he does a helluva good job for us.”
“Any other staffer you might’ve overlooked?”
They plodded along and the wind picked up in intensity for about a minute and a half. Just when Grissom was wondering if Cormier had either forgotten or ignored the question, the hotel man said, “Bobby! Bobby Chester made it in…. Lunchtime fry cook! He’s also Mrs. Duncan’s dinner-hour helper.”
Grissom did the tally: Cormier, his wife, Pearl, and five others. Seven.
The wind kicked back in and shrieked at them until Grissom was forced to cover his face and fall back behind Cormier and let any other questions wait. And he had plenty more, but the pitch of the path had turned more steeply upward and every lungful of air now came with some effort. For now, Grissom would concentrate on just getting up the hill again and reaching that snow-blanketed crime scene.
Finally, Cormier said, “This is it,” though Grissom would never have known it. Between the drifted snow and the darkness, they might well have been on the moon. Nor could the CSI see the constable, anywhere….
Cormier called out to the man, who yelled back: “Over here!”
They followed the Canadian’s voice and soon saw what he’d been up to while they’d been gone. Maher had carved himself a nook out of the snow at the base of a tree and hunkered down for the wait. The constable had apparently anticipated that even with Cormier guiding Grissom, it would take the Vegas CSI longer than two hours to get back up here; in fact, they were pushing three.
Not that that seemed to have bothered the Canadian. He had the bearing of a man who enjoyed the solitude of the woods and winter, and, of course, he’d had Cormier’s .30-06 if anything had tried to disturb his serenity.
“You kept busy!” Cormier said.
“Got to work just after you left,” the Canadian said. “Thought I better, eh, before the light faded too much!”
Cormier poured Maher a cup of steaming coffee from one of the thermoses while Grissom played a flashlight over the area. He immediately noticed changes that Maher had made at the crime scene. The tips of four sticks poked up out of the whiteness, indicating that impromptu stakes had been driven into the snow, forming a ten-by-twenty-foot square.
“You want to explain the sticks?” Grissom asked.
Maher grinned as he sipped the coffee. “Happy to! Thanks for the coffee, Mr. Cormier—I was starting to think you fellas forgot about me!”
“Sorry we took so long,” Grissom said, almost hollering over the wind. “The sticks?”
As Grissom pointed his flashlight at one of the stakes, now nearly buried in the snow, Maher explained, “I found two tiny tracks in the snow on either side of the body. Did you two see them?”
Grissom nodded. “Sara and I saw them, but I have no idea what they were.” He did not mention that Sara had taken photographs. “Misses, maybe.”
“That’s exactly what they were,” Maher said. “Missed shots.”
“And now they’re buried under all this snow.”
Maher smiled. “You pick things up fast, Dr. Grissom.”
Pursing his lips, Grissom said, “And somehow you’re going to use these sticks to find those bullets?”
The constable nodded. “Yes, sir. Soon as the snow stops.”
“How?”
“I’ll explain it when I do it. I was going to give a demonstration on that very thing this weekend…but I guess you and Ms. Sidle will be the only ones to see it.”
Grissom filled him in on the parking lot shoeprints.
“I’ll take a look at ‘em after I get warm,” Maher said. “Ms. Sidle going to be all right, pulling her shift, or should I come up early to relieve her?”
“Don’t come up here a minute early,” Grissom said, “or you’ll just be insulting her.”
“She’s a good man?”
“As tough and smart as any CSI anywhere. You try to baby her, she’ll only resent it.”
“Take your word for it.”
“She’ll probably deal with the cold better than me.”
Maher nodded. “I’ll relieve her after her full shift. In the meantime, here’s the rifle.” Maher handed the .30-06 over to Grissom.
“Any advice?”
“Yeah,” Maher said. “Don’t move around much. The more you move around, the more chance you’ll disturb evidence. I don’t mean to be insulting, Dr. Grissom, but snow is fragile. Right now, it’s our friend.”
“Preserving our evidence,” Grissom said.
“Exactly. But it won’t take much to turn it into a liability.”
Cormier handed Grissom the second thermos of coffee. “You’ll pr
obably be wanting this.”
Grissom nodded his thanks.
“Be my guest,” Maher said and pointed. Grissom’s flash followed, swinging around, and found the dugout next to the tree. “That’ll keep you out of the wind. Keep your face covered.”
“Got it.”
Cormier said, “I’ll be back in a couple of hours with Ms. Sidle. I’ll give you plenty of warning, now…so don’t you go pluggin’ us!”
“Just yell good and loud,” Grissom said. “Get your voice up over this wind!”
“No problem. But don’t you be trigger-happy.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Cormier, if I can’t see it, I won’t shoot at it.” He gave them a rueful smile that they probably couldn’t make out in the pitch darkness of the woods.
Several minutes later, Grissom was straining to see the departing pair; but they’d already disappeared into the snow. Depositing himself in Maher’s hideaway against the tree, Grissom eased down, his back against the bark, and did his best to relax.
Two hours wasn’t such a long span, a mere 120 minutes; still, Grissom knew that out here—where darkness meant black, and the neon-bright night of Vegas was almost a continent away—two hours could be a relative eternity. As snow continued to fall, Grissom, clutching both the rifle and the thermos of coffee, settled in.
If the snow would just stop around daybreak, they could get to work at this crime scene, and let Constable Maher demonstrate his bag of tricks. Grissom was always willing to learn something.
On the other hand, if Maher was a fraud, a killer in disguise, Grissom was more than willing to teach a lesson himself.
6
THE ONE THING LAS VEGAS DIDN’T NEED WAS MORE FLASHING lights. This town trying to dress itself up for Christmas, in the opinion of Captain Jim Brass, was an exercise in overkill. How did you decorate a city already adorned with millions of lightbulbs, a desert oasis that glowed like a three-billion ka-gigawatt Christmas tree all year round?
And yet they still tried. As he rolled by the Romanov Hotel and Casino in his police department Taurus, an elaborate flashing display spelled out Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah over flickering Nutcracker Suite images; and Santas and elves and reindeer, it seemed, danced Rockette-style on every casino’s electric marquee. Brass shuddered to think what Glitter Gulch would be like—neon Santa hats on the towering cowboy and cowgirl? The nightly overhead laser display with Sinatra singing “Luck Be a Lady” shifted to “Jingle Bells,” rolling dice traded in for mistletoe and holly?
The Taurus cut confidently through heavy evening traffic, Brass weaving in and out between rental cars with the gawking tourists and various vehicles bearing blasé locals headed to dinner or a movie, or homeward bound. Darkness had settled over Las Vegas, with the temperature once again falling precipitously toward the freezing mark. The cars with their headlights only added to the light show.
In the passenger seat, Nick Stokes lounged in his dark-brown sport shirt and lighter-brown chinos, looking dreamily out at the Strip. “Don’t you just love Christmastime in Vegas?”
“Yeah,” Brass said, “it’s nice to have the place livened up a little. You clock in early? If so, end of shift, you better clock out the same way—Mobley hasn’t approved this case for OT.”
“I know that. I didn’t clock in yet.” Nick beamed at Brass. “I’m your ‘Ride Along’ buddy.”
“You’re my what?”
A tiny smile traced the CSI’s square-jawed countenance. “You know how the sheriff has been encouraging citizens and police to have better interaction—through the Ride Along program?”
“Oh, please.”
“Now, Captain Brass—like any other interested citizen, I’m entitled to a police ‘Ride Along,’ long as I meet the criteria and sign the waiver.”
Brass just stared at his passenger, who finally pointed toward the windshield and said, “Jim—the road?”
The detective returned his attention to his driving and barely avoided clipping a minivan.
“And as a citizen,” Nick added, “I must say I expected the police to observe better highway safety procedures.”
“You’re pushing your luck,” Brass said, meaning with Sheriff Mobley.
“I’ve signed my waiver,” Nick said, plucking a folded-up piece of paper from the breast pocket of his sport shirt. “And I’ve met the criteria by being duly interviewed by a member of the LVMPD.”
“What member was that—Warrick Brown?”
“Your detective instincts never fail to impress, Captain. Yeah, Warrick interviewed me for the Ride Along program, and signed off. And I duly interviewed and approved him, too.”
The detective shook his head again, and couldn’t keep the smile from forming. “You guys are pushing it, I tell you.”
“Like you wouldn’t try this, if you had a case that needed the extra hours.”
Brass grinned over at Nick. “Maybe I’m disappointed I didn’t think of this scam first. But my guess is, before long, Mobley’ll clear the Missy Sherman case for overtime.”
Nick nodded. “Media attention.”
Brass nodded back. The missing housewife finally turning up had won Missy Sherman another fifteen minutes of headlines and TV news. That the body had been frozen, Brass and company had thus far managed to withhold—once that got out, the tabloid sensibilities of the media would really swing into high gear.
The detective got off Interstate 215 at Eastern Avenue and drove south to Hardin. After taking a left, Brass drove until he could turn back north on Goldhill Road. The house he eased to the curb in front of was a near mirror image of the Sherman place—similar stucco two-story mission-style but with the two-car garage on the right, and the roof tile more a dark brown. A black Lincoln Navigator and a pewter Toyota Camry sat in the driveway.
As they got out and Brass strolled around the Taurus, Nick asked, “You ever run into the likes of this before? Ice-cold trail, no evidence…"
At Nick’s side now, Brass said, “In the days before all the high-tech stuff kicked in, yeah. You’d catch a case that you just knew you’d never crack, ‘cause there was jack squat to go on.”
“But you’d hang in there, right?”
“Right. Months devoted to dead ends, and the end result—another folder for the cold case file. You guys and your toys…you find a hair on a gnat’s ass and match it to a pimple on a perp in Southeast Bumfuck, Idaho.”
Nick chuckled and admitted, “Sometimes it’s that easy. Only, this one doesn’t feel that way. I’m afraid I’ve got that nagging feeling that we’ll never crack this thing.”
They were at the porch, now.
Brass shook his head, placed a hand on the young CSI’s shoulder. “You’ll crack this one, Nick. It’s just…they can’t all be easy.”
Nick nodded, and smiled. “But it would be nice….”
The front door resembled the Shermans’ too, except not hunter green, rather a rich, dark brown. Brass used the horseshoe-shaped knocker, waited and then waited some more. The detective glanced at Nick, who glanced back and shrugged. Brass rang the bell, waited a few seconds and rang it again.
The door opened and the doorway filled with a large man, like a frame that could barely encompass a picture. Six-five easy, Brass thought, the guy was a muscular two-fifty; his head, just a little small for the massive build, like his growth had gone as far as it could when it got past his bull neck. His eyes were dark brown, his hair a close-cropped light brown with matching close-trimmed goatee. He wore black running shorts and an expensive black-and-white pullover sweater with the sleeves pushed halfway up his formidable forearms. His sandals cost more than Brass’s house payment.
Brass tapped the star-shaped badge on his breast sport-coat pocket and said, “Captain Brass, Las Vegas police. Mr. Mortenson? Brian Mortenson?”
The big man nodded, his expression somber. “This must be about Missy.” He shook his head. “How can I help?”
“We’d like to talk to you and your wife. Is she here?”
<
br /> “Well, she’s here, but this has got her very upset. Could we do this another time?”
“If you do want to help, sir, now is better. With you both home….”
“Do I need an attorney?” he asked.
Brass shrugged. “Do you?”
The big man in the doorway thought that over. Then he said, “You know, Regan and I already told that Detective Varga everything we know. It’s all on the record.”
Brass’s tone grew more businesslike. “It’s Detective Vega, and you were questioned in the context of a missing person case. This is a murder.”
He sighed heavily. “Don’t misunderstand, I want to help. We want to help. It’s just, I don’t want Regan any more upset than she already is.”
“I do understand that, Mr. Mortenson. May we come in?”
Mortenson stepped out of the way and let them into the foyer. “I talked to Alex today…. He’s shattered by this. It’s terrible. Awful.”
Like the Shermans’ foyer, this one had a Mexican tile floor, albeit in a lighter shade. A cherry table next to the stairway to the second floor was home to a large glass vase filled with fresh-cut yellow roses, the pale yellow plaster walls contrasting with the brightness of the flowers. An open archway led into a cozy living room decorated with a floral sofa and overstuffed chairs and two maple end tables. In front of the sofa sat a matching coffee table littered with several remotes and a few fashion, sports and fitness magazines.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Mortenson said, nodding toward the living room, his tone much less defensive now, “and I’ll fetch Regan. She’s upstairs in her office.”
Mortenson went up the stairs two at a time; he had the easy grace of a natural athlete, which not all brutes possessed. Brass led Nick through the archway into the living room, where they claimed the two chairs that framed the sofa, leaving it open for the Mortensons.
After only a minute or so, the couple entered the living room, the small woman leaning against her husband, one of his big arms around her. Regan Mortenson seemed frail beside her husband, her mane of long blonde hair hanging loose, partly obscuring her heart-shaped face. Tanned and fit, with long legs, Regan no doubt played a lot of tennis or golf. She wore denim shorts and a white tee shirt bearing a transfer that looked familiar to Brass (Nick recognized it as Picasso’s lithograph of Don Quixote), the words “Las Vegas Arts” in loose script below the transfer. Though she was in her mid-thirties, Regan had a college coed, California-girl air.
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