by Ken Goddard
Humming to himself, Nick slowly approached the left side of the truck, placed the pointer-tip in the exact center of the white photo-locator dot marked “1,” moved the top of the pole around in the air—keeping the pointer-tip firmly centered on the locator dot—until the Pocket PC confirmed that both rotating lasers had been detected.
“What’s he doing?” Phillips asked Grissom, curious because he’d never seen any of the CSIs use this particular array of locator equipment at a crime scene.
“The pointer-tip and the receiver on the opposite ends of that pole, and the position of the two rotating lasers establish an interlinked pair of invisible triangles with one common side—the pole itself—that gives us an extremely accurate, three-dimensional position of that pointer-tip relative to the top of that stake Nick pounded into the ground. That’s now our zero-zero-zero reference point,” Grissom explained, happy as usual to provide a bit more scientific detail than his questioner really wanted.
“But what if the top of the pole moves?” Phillips asked, clearly confused.
“It really doesn’t matter; in fact, we would expect it to move,” Catherine said. “As long as the pointer-tip remains in the exact same location, the receiver at the top of the pole can move freely around to any location where it can pick up a signal from both lasers. No matter where it moves to, the pole itself will form new—but still cross-linked—pairs of triangles with one common side that the receiver will use to calculate the position of the pointer-tip. And as long as that receiver continues to receive a signal from both lasers, it’ll continue to transmit the exact same to Nick’s Pocket PC.”
“Wow. Cool,” Phillips whispered, and then blinked in confusion again. “But why do you need to do that?”
“We need to figure out exactly where that truck was located, three-dimensionally, every time one of our shooters pulled the trigger on their firearm,” Grissom said. “And if we can do that, we may be able to figure out the sequence of who shot when, and what they hit, and—most important—if that particular shot was justified.”
“You can really do that?” Phillips was clearly impressed.
“No, Warrick can do that, using his crime scene reconstruction programs, once he enters all of our digital-locator, photo, and laser-scanner data sets,” Grissom replied. “Of course, it would be a lot easier for him and Nick to work all those details out if the surface that the truck and the shooters were on had actually been a flat plane; but as you can see”—Grissom gestured in the direction of the irregular landscape—“it wasn’t…and isn’t.”
“And it would be a lot easier to do if the tires hadn’t instantly deflated—significantly altering the three-dimensional position of the truck—when each of them got hit, but they did,” Sara pointed out.
“And it would be even easier still if we could quickly distinguish each twelve-pellet shotgun pattern from the others where they overlap, helping us to determine distances; but that’s going to take Greg quite a while to figure out,” Grissom finished.
“Me?”The young CSI looked taken aback.
“An experience I can assure you you’ll never forget,” Catherine promised with a smile.
“And while Greg is doing that,” Grissom went on, as if Greg and Catherine hadn’t spoken, “we’ve got our work cut out for us. Sara will test-fire all of the weapons. Catherine will collect a grid-set of trace evidence swabs from the entire vehicle. Warrick’s going to take a set of photos of the truck from all sides, and Nick is using the new cherry picker and laser scanner mounted on his van to create a set of 3-D images of the entire scene. I’m going to be collecting—”
The crackle of the radio in Brass’s hand interrupted Grissom.
“Air One to Brass.”
“This is Brass, go ahead.”
“Hate to tell you this, guys, but it looks like we’ve got more bodies up here.”
Brass, Phillips, his morgue tech, and the six CSIs all turned their heads westward and stared up at the top of the Sheep Range, where both visibly blinking helicopters were now circling.
A look of dismay and frustration crossed Grissom’s face as he held out his hand to Brass. “May I?”
Brass handed Grissom the radio.
“CSI Grissom to Air One. Did you say ‘bodies,’ as in plural?”
“Yes, sir, that’s correct,”the LVPD helicopter pilot responded quickly.“Do you want us to come pick you guys up?”
“Yes,” Grissom spoke into the radio mike as he and Brass and the other CSIs all met one another’s gaze. “Please come get us, right now.” Grissom looked around at the complex scene that was going to take his entire team several hours to reconstruct. Or at least that had been the plan. Things had just gotten a lot more complicated…again.
6
“CAN YOU SEE THEM?” the pilot asked, keeping a wary eye on the surrounding mountain ledges and crags as he maintained the LVPD Search and Rescue helicopter in a stable position. It was hovering one hundred feet over the clearing below while Grissom—wearing one of the communications-system-connected passenger helmets and sitting in the copilot’s seat—peered through the shielded eyepieces of the thermal viewer.
“Yes, I can,” Grissom answered. “Only one of them doesn’t look all that human.”
“Might be a deer or a sheep,” the pilot responded. “You see a lot of wildlife in these mountains: deer, big-horned sheep, coyotes, even a cougar every now and then.”
“Cougar?” Jim Brass’s eyes opened widely.
“Don’t worry, you hardly ever run across the big cats this high up, especially at this time of the year,” the pilot said reassuringly.
Brass eyed the helicopter pilot suspiciously, and then spoke to Grissom through his passenger helmet mike. “Gil, does this guy sound like an expert in cougar behavior to you?”
“Not what I’d necessarily call an ‘expert,’ but you don’t have to be a scientist to make useful observations,” Grissom pointed out with a grimaced smile, much preferring to take his chances with the resident wildlife on the ground than stay up much longer in the intermittently bouncing and vibrating aircraft. He wasn’t real fond of helicopters, and was already beginning to feel airsick.
“You guys ready to go down and take a closer look?” the pilot asked.
“You think you can set us down safely in that clearing?” Brass asked, all too aware of how close they already were to several million tons of very solid granite. “It doesn’t look like you’ve got a lot of room to maneuver in there.”
“Don’t you worry, Captain, I’ll get you both on the ground in one piece, one way or another. But I might have to drop you off a little distance away, or out on a ledge, or maybe even rope you down, if we can’t find a big enough open space,” the chopper pilot added.
“Great,” Brass growled. “Give the damned cougars more time to see us coming.”
“Don’t worry, Jim,” Grissom counseled, grateful for the distraction from his queasy stomach, “I’m sure they all know we’re here by now.”
Brass muttered something unintelligible.
Two minutes later, the pilot gently set the skids of the McDonnell Douglas MD500 helicopter down onto the widest surface they could find on the rocky clearing—about fifty yards from the point where the two bodies had appeared in the thermal scanner. There were several large boulders nearby, so he kept the rumbling airship in tight control, maintaining a steady flow of rotating power—but no lift—to the blades while Grissom and Brass scrambled out of their crew and cabin doors respectively, keeping their heads low as they ran to a safe position.
The pilot then waited while his search systems operator quickly hopped out of the backseat and returned to her normal front-seat station before he recontacted the two investigators on their portable radios.
“I’ll put us back over the scene area at one hundred feet, and keep things lit up with the searchlight, while the DEA chopper makes a wider search with the thermal scope,” the pilot said as he slowly and carefully brought the agile aircraft b
ack up into the thin, cold air. “Let me know if we’re getting too close with the downdraft.”
“Will do,” Brass said absentmindedly as he drew his semiautomatic pistol and nervously swept the nearby rocks with his flashlight.
“He was right, you know,” Grissom said as he picked up his heavy CSI case and then used his own flashlight to start working his way toward the distant bodies. “It really is a little late in the season for cougars to be this high up in the mountains, especially when they could be down in the foothills where it’s a lot warmer and there are plenty of rabbits and deer to eat.”
“Yeah, but there’s always that one oddball who refuses to go along with the conventional thinking,” Brass retorted, keeping the pistol out and ready in one gloved hand, continuing to sweep the surrounding area with his flashlight as he followed in Grissom’s unsteady footsteps. “You ought to appreciate that more than most.”
“Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?”
“Um, no, probably not,” Brass conceded as he slowly made a three-hundred-sixty degree turn with his body and the flashlight beam, searching intently for the first sign of a stalking wildcat.
Four long minutes later, Grissom and Brass finally stood on opposite sides of an expensively outfitted obese human body sprawled facedown on a rocky ledge. The LVPD helicopter overhead provided a considerable amount of light on the scene, but the high-energy search beam also produced dark and concealing shadows.
Given the constantly shifting light situation, the two kept their flashlights on as they examined the coagulated blood on the ground around the upper portion of the body and the expensively silenced, night-vision-scoped, blood-splattered hunting rifle lying in the rocks a few feet away.
“Interesting,” Brass said noncommittally as he watched Grissom kneel down and use a pressurized can to outline the positions of the body and the rifle with broad strokes of bright green iridescent paint.
“Let me guess,” Grissom said, getting back up and placing the spray can back in his jacket. “You’re thinking this guy might have been armed with some kind of auto-firing weapon, and got off a couple of bursts before some other guy armed with the silenced rifle shot him, switched weapons, and took off down the mountain…which would explain the shots the UCs heard, and the driver taking off in the big SUV right after the campsite shooting?”
“Iwas thinking that until I saw all the blood splattered on and around that rifle,” Brass admitted. “It all looks like the same splatter pattern to me, but I’m not the expert.”
“It does look like one distinct splatter pattern,” Grissom agreed, “which would certainly eliminate the possibility of a weapon switch if the blood came from the victim at the time of impact. But that seems a little odd, because you’d expect a somewhat distant splattering like that to come from a fully expanded bullet tearing through an exit wound, and not from a bullet making an entry wound through a thick down jacket that would tend to hold the blood splattering in.”
Grissom moved the focus of his flashlight beam across the rocky ground in a slow arc around the entire body, and then repeated the action once more at a three-foot radius from the body.
“All of that assumes, of course,” he went on, “that this guy was shot, and not stabbed or cut, and that the bullet is still in the body. But if he was shot with an auto-firing weapon, I’d certainly expect to see a lot more blood splattering around here…and I don’t.”
“So we’re talking at least one other shooter up here, armed with a single-shot-capable pistol or rifle, which might include our subject in the truck?”
“That’s certainly a possibly,” Grissom said. “Are you thinking our victim here could be Ricardo Paz Lamos, instead of the fellow in the truck?”
“If the two deaths are related, that might help explain a few things down below,” Brass acknowledged, “but from my perspective, and without a positive ID, to me this guy here doesn’t look Hispanic. If anything, I’d say his visible features are more Mediterranean…maybe even Italian.”
“And he doesn’t look much like a drug dealer either,” Grissom added. “Although I don’t suppose there’s a generally accepted dress code.”
“Probably not for drug dealers,” Brass agreed, “but you’d be surprised how much money some people are willing to spend on their hunting gear.”
“Including nightscopes and silencers? That doesn’t sound very sporting…or legal.”
“It’s neither, but I don’t really think you’d be concerned about such minor details if you were wandering around the mountains in the middle of winter, and the middle of the night, searching for the Nevada hunting version of the Holy Grail.”
“The Holy Grail?” Grissom’s forehead frowned in confusion.
“Desert Bighorns,” Brass clarified. “They’re rapidly heading toward extinction, so the really dedicated trophy hunters—the ones who are going to do whatever it takes to get their Grand Slam before the possibility no longer exists—might be willing to go all-out in terms of equipment…not to mention unfair advantages.”
Grissom nodded in understanding as he squatted down to examine the body and rifle more closely. “Such as state-of-the-art night-vision gear, a precision-machined silencer, fancy winter boots, cammo-covered down jacket and pants, and what looks like a very expensive hunting rifle that appears to be silver-engraved with the initials…”
Grissom focused his flashlight beam on the rifle’s glistening receiver, blinked in surprise, and then looked back up at Brass with a bemused expression on his face, “…E.T.”
“That’s just…weird,” Brass said with an odd catch to his voice as he went back to scanning the surrounding area with his flashlight.
Grissom stood up and let his own flashlight beam sweep slowly back and forth between the rifle and the facedown body. “You know, thiscould make for a very interesting breakfast presentation at the next American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting,” he said thoughtfully as he opened up his CSI kit and began to assemble his digital camera.
“Abreakfast blood-and-gore show? You guys still do that at your meetings?” Brass asked as he reflexively reholstered his pistol, his mind clearly elsewhere now.
“Actually, the breakfast seminars are a long-standing tradition,” Grissom acknowledged. “It’s an honor, of sorts, to be selected as a presenter.”
“I’m sure.”
“I’d really have to work at coming up with something suitable,” Grissom went on, ignoring Brass. “And the more photos the better, of course,” he added as he knelt down, took a close-up photo of the rifle engraving, and then made a couple of quick adjustments to the strobe.
Brass started walking purposefully toward the center of the clearing, using his flashlight beam properly now to scan the area in front of his boots for items of evidence. Then he kept on walking.
Grissom stood up and started to follow him across the clearing, curious as to what had distracted his ex-boss from the threat of stalking cougars. He had taken only a few steps when he suddenly remembered that more photos were always better than fewer.
In one smooth and seemingly instinctive movement, Grissom stopped, made a one-eighty-degree turn, triggered a quick overall photograph of the general area where the body and rifle lay sprawled, and then turned back and hurried to catch up with Brass.
Stunned by the events of the past ten minutes, Viktor Mialkovsky remained motionless under the protective cover of the drooping juniper, the surrounding rocks and boulders, and his camouflaged thermal blanket, watching the two men through the crosshaired and still-flickering screen of his nightscope walk past him—no more than twenty yards away at one point—toward the center of the clearing where he had spent so much time adjusting things to be just so.
Mialkovsky was finding it difficult to believe his eyes, much less his ears.
It didn’t help that his retinas were still trying to recover from the blinding flash of green light that had briefly flared in his night-vision goggles and seared his eyes, an effect crea
ted by Grissom’s sudden decision to turn around and take that single-scene photograph with a very powerful strobe. The directly aligned and unexpected burst of intense white light had instantly overwhelmed the extremely sensitive photoreceptors in the goggles Mialkovsky had been wearing, and the rifle scope he’d been about to raise to his eyes, receptors which had been specifically designed to work with tiny amounts of illumination. He was extremely fortunate that his night-vision gear had survived the unexpected assault. In his experience, earlier generations of the “star-scopes” abused in that manner had almost always flared out into permanently useless hunks of machined aluminum and glass, leaving their operators blind and vulnerable in the starlit darkness.
That was something Mialkovsky knew he could not afford at this point. A blind descent down his icy last-ditch escape route in complete darkness, and during what promised to be a fearsome winter storm, wouldn’t be just difficult.
It would be suicide.
But you were the one who made that comment at the breakfast seminar, Grissom: that luck doesn’t always work against the criminal,Mialkovsky remembered with a tight smile.Which is ironic, because of all the Metro CSIs who could have possibly stepped out of that helicopter, it just had to be you. Why would I have ever thought otherwise?
But, in point of fact, it was the timing of the events during the last half hour that Mialkovsky found truly ironic.
The sudden arrival of the LVPD helicopter directly over the clearing, and the subsequent arrival of the much-wider-sweeping Black Hawk, had nailed him in place just as he was about to effect his escape. So he’d had no choice but to sit and watch and listen as Grissom and his companion performed their cursory examination of his target’s body.
And it was Grissom’s comment about the longstanding tradition of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences’ bite-mark breakfasts that had nearly caused Mialkovsky to laugh out loud, and thereby reveal his presence to the two distracted and unsuspecting investigators, who undoubtedly thought they were alone on this five-thousand-foot mountain clearing.
