by Leslie Wolfe
“Um, I’m not sure how that got there,” he replied, taking a step back and running his hand over his goatee a couple of times. He was distancing himself, and his face and nose tickled under the attack of increased blood flow, a direct consequence of lying.
Our Mr. Deason was definitely hiding something. But what?
He stood a few feet away from us, his back straight and his face immobile, forcing himself to project calm and composure, while he was visibly riled up by something.
I stared intently at him until he lowered his eyes, just to make him aware I knew he was hiding something. Then I turned to Holt and grabbed his arm, turning our backs to the nosy Mr. Deason.
“I want to question him,” I whispered. “Did you see his reaction when he saw that chip? The man knows something and is not willing to share. I don’t think these chips are that common.”
“Yeah, no kidding. But my question is why would a str—um, dancer who just made half a million dollars, continue to perform as if nothing happened?” Holt asked. “That’s more than enough money to put her through school and last her until she could graduate and get a decent job.”
His question brought up a valid point, just as important as finding out what that money actually paid for. She might have been a good dancer, but no one is that good to be worth a half-a-million-dollar tip. And, why didn’t she step down and walk away?
I looked around, trying to put myself in her high-heeled shoes. What would I have done? Let’s assume a man, who’s visibly terrifying me, came and shoved half a mil down my bra, then said something presumably nasty and walked away. Why would I still be there, when all my instincts told me to get the hell out? There could be one simple explanation: I didn’t know I could afford to do that yet.
“Mr. Deason,” I called, “please switch the lights to typical business mode.”
He frowned, confused. With some people, if I didn’t use the exact terminology that they expected to hear, they couldn’t understand one iota, nor were they willing to make the extra effort and think.
I refrained from letting out a long sigh of frustration. “When you’re open for business, what lights are typically on? It seemed much darker on the video.”
He didn’t bother to reply; he walked with offended dignity to the wall by the door and opened a switchbox hidden behind the lush paneling. He touched a few buttons, and the white light dimmed and veered toward yellow. The colorful club lights came on, some fixed, some dynamic yet immobile in the absence of music to synchronize with. Deason understood my next request before I had a chance to voice it and turned on the music. The lights started moving with the rhythm, flickering, dancing, occasionally blinding me when my eyes caught one of the numerous laser glimmers projecting fast-moving, geometric shapes on the walls.
“Perfect,” I said. “Now, could we please have someone bring us a few chips of various denominations? We wouldn’t dream of bothering you personally with this menial request,” I added seriously, unable to refrain from poking a needle dipped in sarcasm at the man’s overinflated ego.
Holt turned his head away to hide his grin.
“Sure,” Deason replied, with a look of infinite disdain in his beady eyes, then disappeared for a few moments.
“What are you thinking?” Holt asked.
I looked at the chip, already sealed in a transparent evidence pouch. “Just testing a hunch,” I replied.
Deason walked back in carrying a tray filled with assorted chips and laid it on a blackjack table. I picked one of each denomination and set them face up under the colorful lights, then set the half-million one next to them. In the dim kaleidoscope of moving lights, I couldn’t tell the difference between the light-purple and white, one-thousand-dollar chip, and the dark-purple and white, five-hundred-thousand-dollar chip.
I pushed the two similar chips toward Holt. “There’s your answer. That’s why Crystal didn’t walk away.”
17
Postmortem
Anne thanked the chief pathologist at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada for lending her two fully equipped rooms in his lab and sat on a stool the moment the man left the room. She refrained from letting out a sign of relief; if she breathed shallowly, her cracked ribs didn’t hurt much at all.
For anyone in her condition, she would’ve prescribed at least one week of bed rest, but she couldn’t afford that luxury, not after someone had killed Erika and blown up the morgue in what seemed to have been an attempt to thwart the investigation into Crystal Tillman’s murder.
She had work to do. There would be time to lick her wounds later, after the killer was behind bars.
The van, bringing whatever could be salvaged from the morgue fire, was still a few minutes out. She picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.
“Crime Lab, this is Shawn speaking,” a man’s voice announced.
“This is Dr. St. Clair,” she said, her throat a little raspy. She still suffered from the smoke inhalation.
“Ah, our own warrior coroner,” he greeted her, his words making her smile. Was that what they called her? “What can I do for you, Doc?” he asked.
“Just a heads-up, please be extra careful with how you use the blood in the Tillman case tox screens, in case we might need to run more tests. What you have on hand right now is all the blood we have left.”
“We figured that much,” the technician replied coldly, the earlier friendliness gone from his voice. “We have enough for several iterations. Anything else?”
“No, that’s it,” Anne replied, wondering what in her polite request had caused the young technician to go ice-cold on her. He must’ve felt insulted she needed to say what he already knew, after the news of the morgue explosion had propagated throughout the Vegas law enforcement community. Maybe he was offended by her thoroughness; if that was the case, tough luck. She couldn’t afford any slipups.
The Clark County coroner’s van pulled up at the door and her technicians started unloading what they’d salvaged from the rubble. Within the hour, she had Crystal’s charred remains laid on an exam table, her organs and tissue samples in specimen jars filled with formalin neatly labeled and placed on shelves inside the refrigerator, and all the evidence they could recover, stored in individual pouches stacked in the refrigerated chest by the door.
She was ready to resume her duties.
While her two assistants laid out the instruments and equipment she typically used with silent efficiency, she put on a protective gown and goggles and approached Crystal’s body.
First, she walked around the table slowly, paying attention to every detail she could see. Then she slipped on a new pair of gloves and grabbed a scalpel from the instrument tray.
The explosion and the subsequent fire-extinguishing efforts had done massive damage to her remains, and looking at her corpse brought back unwanted memories from Afghanistan, from a time when another charred body had landed on her examination table with the goal of establishing the man’s identity: was he the most-wanted terrorist they’d been hunting for?
Under dim lights and with the thunder of artillery fire not that far away, she’d examined the badly burned body and had concluded he was the man they’d been looking for. And she’d made a costly mistake. In the absence of DNA forensics, dental records, and all the modern paraphernalia conveniently placed at the discretion of Western medical examiners, she’d failed to ascertain that the man lying on her table was not that terrorist, but his brother. That unpreventable error cost her unit two precious lives, two Marines whose deaths weighed terribly on her conscience. Hence, the young Johns Hopkins graduate and honorably discharged Marine and doctor, who could’ve had her choice of glamorous residency programs with prestigious medical institutions, had chosen to spend her life atoning for that one fateful night; she became Clark County’s youngest coroner.
But this time, she knew better. Every word that was going on her autopsy report would have to be verified time and again, and everything science and technology had
to offer would be utilized in the service of finding justice for Crystal and Erika. This time she would be sure, and she would be right.
With the help of an assistant she’d beckoned silently, she turned Crystal’s body face down and resumed her examination. During the blaze, the thick, metallic exam table had shielded her body from the flames in several places. Gesturing for specimen jars, she started collecting tissue samples from all the areas where charring had occurred superficially or not at all. Crystal’s lower back and buttocks. A small area around the nape of her neck that had been protected by the head rest. The back of her thighs and calves. A small area on the back of her left arm, right above the elbow.
She pulled out of refrigeration the specimen jars containing Crystal’s organs floating in formalin. Careful, taking her time with each organ, she examined them thoroughly, then collected tissue samples she put in smaller jars, ready for tox screening. As soon as she had the toxin that had killed Crystal identified, testing all those specimens for that particular toxin’s concentration would give some indication as to how the poison had been delivered into Crystal’s bloodstream. Had she ingested it? Had she been injected with it?
Anne closed the last of the specimen jars and put the one containing Crystal’s heart back into the refrigerator. It was a healthy heart, one that should’ve pounded strongly, exhilarated by love, thrilled to be alive, not sit on a cold shelf waiting for answers. But that healthy, anatomically perfect heart had told Anne she’d been correct in guessing Crystal had been poisoned; there wasn’t a single finding to support the theory that Crystal’s death had been a natural occurrence.
She stared at the jars for a long moment, hesitant to close the refrigerator door. For some reason, Anne’s ghosts still haunted her. Was she forgetting something? If Crystal had been poisoned with something powerful enough and quick enough to stop her heart in mid-dance, how did she become exposed to that toxin?
She finally closed the door to the cold storage box, getting ready to go over her notes once again, when the wheels of a gurney reminded her she had another autopsy to do, this one even more painful.
Her assistants wheeled in Erika’s corpse sealed in a black body bag and looked at her for direction. Not a word was spoken; it was as if disrupting the cold silence of the morgue would somehow offend the two girls who waited for her to bring them justice.
She pointed toward the empty exam table and proceeded to remove her tainted gloves and gown she’d used in the previous examination. She scrubbed her hands vigorously at the sink, as if preparing to perform surgery and splashed some cold water on her face. She patted her eyes gently, thankful for the water droplets that hid her tears.
She unzipped the body bag slowly and opened it, revealing Erika’s pale, bluish features. With trembling fingers, Anne moved a strand of hair off her face, tucking it behind her ear as she would with a child. “I’m so sorry, Erika,” she whispered.
She turned on the powerful exam lights above the table and pressed the pedal that started recording her voice notes. She was ready to begin.
18
Entangled Leads
I carried the chip, sealed in its plastic evidence pouch like a trophy, feeling more confident about our chances to untangle the web of leads and lies that surrounded Crystal’s untimely death. We headed straight to the Crime Lab from there, and as we peeled away from the Scala’s curved driveway I started to notice my partner’s increasingly sullen mood. Whatever I said, he acknowledged monosyllabically or with a grunted interjection, enough to tell me he’d heard me, but had nothing to say.
Something was eating at him and I had no idea what it was, which strangely reminded me that almost two days had already passed from the week Steenstra had given me to provide the evidence that would put an end to Holt’s career. What the hell was I going to do about that?
One thing I could do, given more time: I could reopen, unofficially of course, the case that ended with the cocaine bust where seven kilos were seized but only six made it to the evidence locker. Given more time… Most people involved in that case were already behind bars, a couple were dead, and several more had fled the country. One of them had to have taken that kilo, if Holt was indeed innocent. But, unless I found the real perp bang to rights holding the missing cocaine and offered them both on the sacred, bloodthirsty altar of internal investigations, come next Monday, I’d be out of a job. Duffers, all those incompetent, stupid people, didn’t leave me any other options.
Maybe I should do the only thing I should’ve done a long time ago.
Ask Holt about it.
As soon as we dropped the chip with the Crime Lab, I would ask him straight up, with the honesty and openness he deserved. Until then, I wanted to know what was eating at him.
“Funny how we have so many leads in this case,” I started casually.
“Uh-huh,” he muttered, keeping his eyes on the road.
“We have this mysterious, rich man, who must’ve paid her for a reason,” I said, holding my thumb in the air to keep count. “Then there’s Roxanne, who might be hiding something,” I added, raising another finger, “these two casino schmucks, Deason and Farley, who are definitely not telling the truth, whatever secret Crystal’s sister wants to unveil, and then there’s Crystal’s boyfriend.”
“Him, yeah,” Holt replied, the frown on his forehead not relenting.
“Is he your favorite lead?”
“Uh-huh, they’re usually the ones who do this kind of deed.”
“What, kill?”
“Uh-huh.”
I studied him for a moment and noticed the tension line in his jaw, the slightly raised shoulders, another sign of nervous tension, and the strong grip he had on the steering wheel, white-knuckled. Something was going on.
“Okay, partner, spill it. What’s up with you?”
He shot me a quick glance, then focused on the thick traffic. “Nothing. Why?”
“You’re not your usual self, that’s why.”
I gave him a few moments, in case he decided to talk to me, but he didn’t. He pulled into the parking lot at the precinct and I sighed, reluctantly letting the subject go.
“We’re here,” he announced, as if I couldn’t see for myself. It was his way of answering my question without really answering it, a polite way to say he refused to tell me what was on his mind.
I touched his sleeve, holding him back. “Listen, whatever it is, I have your back, all right?”
He looked straight at me for a moment, a loaded gaze filled with a mix of emotions. Then he looked away and muttered, “Uh-huh, thanks.”
I found myself standing, riveted to the middle of the parking lot, frozen in place by a single, troubling thought. Was he using again? Bollocks, Holt… This is so not the time to relapse, I thought, knowing that the IAB could ask for a urine test at any time.
He’d walked ahead, and he was almost at the door when he stopped and turned toward me. “Are you coming?”
I rushed to catch up and we shared a silent ride on the elevator up to the Crime Lab level. We signed the chain of evidence paperwork and handed over the chip, the same stunned glances thrown among the lab technicians as Holt and I had exchanged earlier. Probably, none of them had seen one of those before, but I knew that if there was any DNA, fingerprints, or traces of poison on that chip they would find it and let us know.
The next stop was Fletcher’s desk, who met us with a high-five without getting off his chair. The empty cup of the earlier Frappuccino had been all but licked clean, and he was working on a sweaty Coke bottle now. The man mainstreamed sugar and caffeine, and he could pull it off without adding any pounds around his waist. Wasn’t life fair, like that? I couldn’t even remember the last time a sugary dessert made it on my menu; if I so much as looked at a cookie I could feel my waist line growing a few fractions of an inch, and I liked myself the way I was. Who needed sugar, after all? But I couldn’t keep myself from envying Fletcher’s metabolism, just a little bit.
“We got i
t,” I announced happily. “Now we need to find that boyfriend of hers. Any way you could identify him? Track that helo? Phone records maybe?”
Holt leaned against a nearby desk, visibly distracted.
“Nope, I already tried the phone,” Fletcher replied. “The only number that was calling Crystal frequently came from a burn phone.”
“Smart bastard,” I muttered. Those married men getting into affairs with young girls had a world of technology to keep them at a safe distance from trouble, making our job more and more difficult with each hurdle we had to go through to identify them.
“But I think I solved the mystery,” Fletcher announced proudly.
I smiled, inviting him to tell us already.
“Roxanne’s statement mentioned he’s rich and somewhat famous, and his name is Ellis. Well, turns out there’s only one rich, filthy rich by the way, and somewhat famous man named Ellis in the entire state of Nevada.”
He touched a few buttons and displayed the photo of a charming, thirty-eight-year-old man. He seemed familiar, but, just like with the man who’d given Crystal the chip, I couldn’t place him.
“I give you Ellis MacPherson, no priors, clean as a whistle. As a diamond-encrusted gold whistle, I might add. He’s the husband of Celeste Bennett MacPherson, of Bene—”
“BeneFoods?” I reacted, recognizing the name that was commonly referred to as Nevada’s royal family. Celeste Bennett’s ancestors had started a grocery chain in 1939 that was now worth several billion dollars, with thousands of stores across the country.
“Yup, none other,” Fletcher replied. “This man could be the helicopter owner. It fits.”
“How is he famous?” I asked. “I remember reading about them in People magazine; isn’t he some kind of musician?” Roxanne had said that too.
“He’s a cellist,” Fletcher replied, shooting Holt an intrigued look, picking up on the detective’s distracted mind. “He plays with the Las Vegas Philharmonic, but also has his own shows on the Strip. He’s darn good, they say.”
