THE ADDRESS THAT Jill Leilani gave Catherine was for an old warehouse in a seedy industrial area west of the Strip. It was surrounded by chain-link fence with old newspapers and trash woven through it by the wind, illuminated by sodium-vapor lights that cast razor-edged shadows. The rolling steel doors at the loading dock were covered in graffiti, gang tags in neon-bright green and pink and yellow. A wheelless, overturned shopping cart guarded the front door like the skeleton of a robot turtle.
Catherine and Greg parked their Denali and got out. Music with heavy bass thumped from inside. “Sounds like someone’s home,” said Greg.
“Hope the door’s open,” said Catherine. “They’ll never hear us knocking over that.”
They tried anyway. After a moment of pounding, the music abruptly died. Footsteps slapped against concrete and the door swung open, revealing a chunky man with purple dreadlocks, dressed in p a i nt-spattered coveralls and plastic flip-flops. “Hey, about time-oh. You guys don’t have a pizza with you, do you?”
“Sorry,” said Catherine. “ Las Vegas Crime Lab. And you are?”
“Monkeyboy.”
Catherine’s eyebrows rose. “Try again.”
“Bill. Bill Wornow.”
“I’m Catherine Willows and this is Greg Sanders. Can we come in?”
“Sure, sure. What’s this all about?”
They stepped inside. “It’s about Hal Kanamu,” said Catherine. “We’re-”
She stopped. The warehouse was maybe half the size of a football field, and almost all of it was dominated by a single structure that rose from the middle of the floor to a good twenty feet high.
A volcano.
It was half-finished, its angled steel supports visible through a skin of heavy-gauge steel mesh, but the steam rising from the top and the red rivulets trickling over the edge of the cone left no doubt about what it would ultimately represent. About a third of the structure was covered in red and black roofing shingles, the kind w ith sediment embedded in tar.
“-investigating his death,” she finished.
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that,” said Wornow. “Tragic, really tragic. He was so pumped about Mount Pele, too.”
“ Mount Pele?” asked Greg. “That’s what we’re looking at, right?”
“Well, it will be when she’s finished,” said Wornow. He picked up a dirty rag from a table and started wiping his hands. “This was Hal’s dream. A fully functioning volcano out on the playa, complete with magma. Anybody can do fire and smoke; that’s easy. Getting the lava right, that’s the hard part.”
“Looks like you’re using wax,” said Greg.
“Yeah, that seems to work best. Adding paper ash to it to make it look more rock-like, but still tweaking the mix.”
One wall of the warehouse was lined with stacks and stacks of newspapers, tied in bundles with twine. “That’s a lot of dead trees,” said Catherine.
“Yeah, but I didn’t kill ’em. Just recycling the corpses, right? Hal was actually buying these from a recycler-I said we could probably dig up our own sources, get it for free, but he didn’t care about the cost. Just wanted to make sure we were up and running before August.”
“For Burning Man,” said Greg. “Yo u were actually going to take this whole thing out to Black Rock?”
Wornow tossed the rag back on the table. “Still am. Totally modular, you know? Heavy-duty pumps to move the wax, built-in subsurface generator to power the pumps and lighting system, propane jets for heat and flame-and the whole structure will come apart and go back together in a day. Mount Pele is going to kick ass. I’m just sorry Kahuna Man isn’t going to be there to see it.”
“You’re not worried about paying for all this?” asked Catherine. “August is still a long way away, and, well…”
“Hal’s dead? Don’t worry about it. Most of the stuff’s already paid for, and I’m seeing about getting a grant from the Black Rock Arts Council for the rest. We’ll get her there one way or another.”
A metal gantry stood beside the volcano, topped by a metal platform that extended out to the edge of the cone. The platform was large enough for a folding chair, a card table, and several pieces of equipment-a welding torch with tanks, a grinder, a mobile tool cabinet on wheels chained to the railing. There was no railing on the side next to the cone, presumably to give better access to the volcano itself.
“Quite the project,” said Catherine. “You build this yourself, or did Hal help?”
“Oh, he liked to be involved. It was his vision, after all. But he wasn’t an artist or an engineer, so he mainly stuck to helping out with grunt work.”
“Grunt worke r and financier,” said Greg. “Kind of a strange combination.”
Wornow walked over to a beat-up fridge against the wall and pulled it open. “I guess. You guys want a beer?”
“We’re working, thanks,” said Greg. “When was the last time you saw Hal?”
“Not for a couple days. I was out of town, picking up some supplies in Portland. Got back the day after Hal turned up dead.”
“Can you prove that?” asked Greg.
“I don’t know. Do I have to?”
“You might,” said Catherine. “What kind of vehicle do you drive?”
“I don’t. I borrowed an old friend’s truck.”
“Would that be a ’94 Ford F150?” asked Greg.
“I don’t know. It’s a Ford; I don’t know the year or model.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“I just know him by his Burner name-Cricket. He just left on a road trip- Seattle, I think, I’m not sure.”
“With his truck, of course,” said Greg. “You mind if we take a sample of this wax?”
Wornow didn’t say anything for a moment.
“We can get a search warrant if we have to,” said Catherine.
“No, that’s-I don’t understand. I mean, you don’t think I had anything to do with Hal’s death, right?”
“Should we?” asked Greg.
“No! Jesus, I just assumed he ODed. I mean, everyone knew he was using, that stuff’ll kill you sooner or later-”
“Didn’t stop you from hanging out with him,” said Greg.
“Hey, it wasn’t li ke he was dangerous or anything.”
“But he was rich,” said Catherine.
“Okay, yeah, he was paying for the volcano. Making art costs money, you know? He wants to spend his cash on supporting creativity, what’s wrong with that?”
Catherine put down her CSI kit on a table and opened it. “Nothing. But any time two or more people come together to build something, there are always creative differences. That happen here?”
Wornow shook his head vehemently. “No. I mean, yeah, we didn’t agree on everything, but that’s natural, right? It never turned into any kind of serious disagreement. We kicked around a bunch of different ideas before we came up with Mount Pele, and then we were totally committed. Same artistic vision, I’m telling you. Hal was always coming up with crazy ideas and stuff, trying to make it better, but I kept him reined in. He listened to me, he trusted my judgment.”
Catherine gazed up at the metal gantry. “I don’t know. Riding herd on a guy smoking ice all day long? Sounds pretty close to impossible to me.”
“Frustrating, too,” said Greg. “I mean, you’re the artist, right? You do this for a living. If Pele here is the star, you’re the director. Hal would have been more like a producer-he controlled the purse strings, which meant you had to spend half your time listening to every crazy, stoned idea he had and the other half explaining why they wouldn’t work. Doesn’t leave a lot of time to create.”
“Okay, okay. You’re right about the drugs. He was waaaay out of control. That was one of the reasons I drove up to Portland, just to get away from him for a while. But if you’re looking for someone responsible for his death, you don’t have to go any farther than the guys he was getting his drugs from. I only met them once, but they were hard-core, man. Put a bullet in your head for just looking at ’em wrong.”
“One of these guys named Boz?” asked Catherine. “Or maybe Diego and Aaron?”
“Yeah, that’s them. Me, I’m just a welder with delusions of grandeur, man. I make stuff, I don’t kill people.”
Catherine picked up an evidence vial from her kit. “Then you won’t mind if we take a sample of this wax?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead.”
“I sold the gun to a guy named Gus,” Richard Waltham told Grissom. “Don’t ask me what his last name is, ’cause I don’t know. Gus is a pretty sketchy guy-got himself a pretty bad cocaine habit, and he prefers needles to smoking it or putting it up his nose. Used to hang around this place, but I haven’t seen him in here in a while; I got the impression the phrase ‘no fixed address’ could be used to describe his usual living situation.”
“How long ago was this?” asked Grissom.
“Six weeks or so, I guess. He’d acquired a little spending cash and a little more paranoia; since I was short on both, we worked out a trade.”
Grissom nodded. “Any idea where his windfall came from?”
Waltham thought about it for a moment. “Couldn’t say for sure, but I got the feeling it had something to do with drugs. Could be he was working as a mule, taking stuff across from Mexico-whatever he was doing, it was making him nervous. With good reason, maybe; like I said, I haven’t seen him around in a while.”
“Can you tell me anything else about this Gus-height, weight, approximate age?”
“’Bout five-ten, I suppose. Kinda thin. Long, greasy brown hair, scruffy beard the same color. Kinda Eastern European looking, if you know what I mean. I’d say he was in his fifties, but who knows? The street can add twenty years to your face, and not the easy kind.”
“Distinguishing marks, tattoos?”
“Nothing I noticed, but I never took a steam bath with the guy.”
There was no database for plastic bottles, so Riley was forced to do her research in a more roundabout way. She started by searching online for any kind of link to insects and found plenty to look through; spiders and scorpions were a popular theme for brands of hot sauce, energy drinks, and various types of alcohol.
She finally got a match with an energy drink called Parading Mantis, produced in Illinois. She printed a list of distributors in Vegas, mostly mom-and-pop corner stores, and hit the street.
Riley had no problem with legwork. She’d been a street cop before moving to Vegas, and she didn’t think she’d ever want to completely give up the field for the lab; as much as she enjoyed the intellectual challenge of solving a case by analyzing data, there was still a certain charge she got from being out in the world, collecting that data.
She did, however, have a problem with being sidelined.
She hoped that wasn’t happening. She hadn’t worked with Grissom for long, but he didn’t seem like the type to play favorites; she thought she’d been given the grunt work because she was the new kid, not because Grissom didn’t like her-and that was a pattern that probably went all the way back to the Stone Age and the first rookie to be picked to clean up the cave and throw out the old mastodon bones.
Regardless, she would do what she always did-her best. Approval from authority figures had never mattered much to Riley, but getting the job done did.
Grissom returned to the lab and pondered what he’d learned from Richard Waltham-and then pulled all the autopsy reports on apparent OD cases for the last two months.
Tox screens were done on all of them as a matter of course, but the process wasn’t foolproof; many poisons didn’t show up unless you were looking for them specifically, and there was no reason to keep looking once you found a toxin that matched the physical evidence.
Not unless the toxin you found didn’t kill your subject.
Grissom studied the reports carefully. He thought he found what he was searching for in the case of Gustav Janikov, a fifty-six-year-old man with no fixed address. Janikov had been found in an alley at the northeastern edge of Vegas three weeks ago, dead of an apparent cocaine overdose. A needle was found nearby containing a mixture of cocaine and water, with traces of blood that were a match to Janikov. The condition of the body and surrounding area suggested violent convulsions had taken place before death, and the mouth had been filled with saliva.
But the concentration of drugs in the bloodstream was wrong.
It was high, but not high enough to be lethal-not in a long-term addict who had developed a tolerance, and the number of ol d needle tracks on the body confirmed that Janikov was exactly that. While it was possible that Janikov’s body had simply given up the ghost after years of abuse, Grissom didn’t think so. There was something else at work.
Nick traced the thread back to a medical supply company called Willifer Surgical Providers, the only company in Nevada that carried it. They dealt mainly with hospitals but had a few clients who were dental surgeons; the chitin-based thread was infection resistant, which was important in a high-microbe environment like the human mouth.
Hospitals tended to have pretty good security. If the thread had been stolen, Nick was willing to bet it had probably been lifted from one of the dental surgeons. He did some checking and discovered that one, McKay Oral Health, had reported a burglary five weeks ago. Very little was taken, but suture supplies were one of the things listed as missing on the police report.
“Time for a trip to the dentist,” Nick murmured.
Gustav Janikov’s body had been disposed of, but his personal effects had remained unclaimed. They were spread out over the surface of the light table in front of Grissom now, the last pathetic remains of a life that had crashed and burned. A pair of stained and worn pants, a dirty T-shirt, a ripped ja cket held together with duct tape and safety pins.
The boots, though, were in surprisingly good condition. They were leather, ex-military, the heels and soles hardly worn, the laces practically new. Grissom looked inside, found the remains of a price tag still stuck near the top; they were from an army and navy surplus store in Vegas, one Grissom was familiar with. The stains on the clothes were many, and Grissom used surgical scissors to cut a small swatch from every one. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but it was possible that one of the stains held a higher concentration of whatever killed Gustav Janikov.
The samples went to Trace. Grissom went to the mall.
McKay Oral Health Offices was flanked on one side by an all-night convenience store and the other by a pawnshop. In another city this might have looked seedy, but in Vegas pawnshops and late-night stores were almost as common as casinos and wedding chapels.
The front door was locked, but there was a buzzer. Nick pressed it and was rewarded a minute later with the door opening.
And was greeted by a puppet.
“Hi there!” the puppet said. It was dressed like a dentist, in an old-fashioned white smock that buttoned up the front to one side. It had frizzy blue hair and gleaming white teeth, and peeked around the corner of the door. “Welcome to McKay Oral Health!”
“Uh, thanks. Is Doctor McKay in?”
A middle-aged man in white shirtsleeve s and suspenders stepped out from behind the door, the puppet cradled in one arm. “Sorry,” he said with a wide smile. “Can’t resist doing that from time to time. I once had a five-minute conversation with a guy who was selling aluminum siding.”
“I’m Nick Stokes, with the Vegas Crime Lab.” Nick smiled back. “I’m following up on the break-in you had five weeks ago.”
McKay stepped back. “Come in, come in. I was just doing a little rehearsing.”
Nick stepped inside and glanced around. The waiting room was tiny, only a single chair and a small desk with a computer on it. The standard diplomas and certificates hung on the wall, but the largest space was given over to a framed, glassed-in poster that showed a beaming Dr. McKay in a red tuxedo, with the puppet perched on his lap. DOC AND CHOMPERS, LIVE AT THE MIRADO ROOM! the lettering underneath read.
“Chompers, huh?” said Nick.
Chompers nodded. “I’m a star!” he said. McKay’s lips hardly moved at all. “This guy’s just my assistant. When I get a decent entourage he’s H-I-S-T-O… R…” He stopped.
“Y?” said Nick.
“Because he always forgets my damn coffee!” the puppet snapped.
Nick laughed. “I’m a little confused. I thought you were a surgeon, not a performer.”
McKay shrugged. “Who says I can’t be both? Dental surgery pays well enough that I don’t have to do it full-time, and I always got a kick out of ventriloquism. I made the puppet to calm down kids who were worried about having their teeth worked on, to show them exactly what I was going to do, and-well, things kinda snowballed. I’m not exactly a superstar, but I do a few shows here and there and enjoy myself.”
“Well, this is the town for that. So you’re not here all the time?”
“No, only a couple of days a week. I have a part-time receptionist, but she’s not in today.” McKay took the puppet off, set it down on the chair. “So, what brings you here today? You catch the guys?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m actually investigating another case, one I think might be related to the burglary at your office. I’ve read the police report, but would you mind going over it with me?”
“No, not at all. Let’s see… I was here by myself. I wasn’t operating that day, I was just doing a little office work. I heard the buzzer and went to the door. No Chompers, though.”
“And that’s when you first saw the suspect?”
“Yes. Older gentleman, in his fifties or sixties, quite thin. He said he wanted to talk to me about his granddaughter and possibly doing some sort of prese ntation for her school-it was a little vague, but I didn’t have any reason to be suspicious. He asked if he could come in out of the heat and maybe have a glass of water. I said sure.”
“Okay. What happened then?”
“There was this big commotion outside-lots of swearing and threats, and then this body smacks into my door. Cracked the glass but didn’t break it. I rush out to see what’s going on, and I see these two-street people, I guess, going at it right outside. I didn’t want to get involved, but I also didn’t want to be calling an ambulance when one of them went through a plate-glass window. I try to get them to calm down, and they just keep yelling at each other-something about how one of them stole the other one’s shoes. I forget all about the old guy in the office, until I hear the alarm on the fire door inside go off. I rush back in, but the old guy’s gone. I put two and two together, and sure enough the two that were fighting have disappeared, too.”
“Doesn’t sound like they took much, though.”
McKay shook his head. “Wasn’t much to take. Some painkillers, a topical anaesthetic I use for sensitive gums, and some surgical thread. I have no idea why they would even bother with the thread.”
“I might. You gave a pretty good description to the responding officer, but I was wondering if there were any details you might have remembered, anything unusual you might h ave noticed or realized since then.”
McKay paused, then said, “Actually, there is. I want to show you something.”
He led Nick halfway down a short hall to a room marked SUPPLIES and used a key to open the door. “I never used to keep this locked, but now I do,” he said. Inside, two walls were stocked floor-to-ceiling with supplies that ranged from boxes of gauze to needles. “The suture supplies are kept on the top shelf. I didn’t even notice some were gone until I did a complete inventory after the robbery. The thing is, I usually have to use a step stool to reach them, and it wasn’t in the supply room that day-I was using it in the surgery, down the hall. The thief would have had a hard time reaching it-and why would he go to all that trouble for sutures, anyway?”
“I’m thinking that’s what he actually came here to get,” said Nick. “But you’re right, he wouldn’t have been able to reach. Unless…”
Nick took out his flashlight. The supply room was dimly lit by a single low-wattage bulb, and the far corners were hard to see. He shone the light on the surface of a back shelf, right next to the wall and about three feet off the floor. There, barely visible, was a dusty footprint.
“… he gave himself a little boost,” said Nick. “Looks like a military boot to me.”
The army and navy surplus store was painted almost entirely in camouflage colors, which wasn’t really that wise a choice; half their stock simply disappeared into the background, giving the odd feeling that you were in a store crammed with nothing. That was far from true, though: locked glass cases displayed weaponry ranging from jackknives to bayonets, while World War II-era gasmasks goggled at customers from behind the counter. Racks of clothing ran in rows to the back of the store, everything from heavy-duty peacoats to lightweight jungle fatigues.
“Excuse me,” said Grissom to the clerk behind the counter.
He was young, probably still in his teens, with a shaved head and a shadow of a mustache. He wore a faded combat jacket that was too big for him and was reading an old copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine.
“Help you?”
“Yes, I was wondering if you remember this man.” Grissom showed him a picture of Gustav Janikov. “I believe he bought a pair of boots here.”
“Yeah, I know him-that’s Gus. He lives on the street, but I guess this is his neighborhood because I always see him around. Came in a few weeks ago, said he’d come into a little extra cash. Wanted something to keep his feet warm and dry, something that would last.”
“I see. Would you happen to know anything else about him-where he slept, other people he talked to?”
The clerk frowned. “I don’t really follow what those guys do. Gave him a good deal, though-guy who pounds the pavement as much as he does needs some decent footwear. Haven’t seen him around la tely.”
“You won’t,” said Grissom.
“Grissom, you never fail to impress me,” said Hodges. “I followed your instructions and ran the samples, checking specifically for any type of insect-related poison. I was thinking maybe a pesticide, an organophosphate or neonicotinoid-but no. So I moved on to actual bugs, venom from black widow or brown recluse spiders-that came up dry, too. But-like you-I never disappoint.” He produced a printout with a flourish and a triumphant smile.
Grissom took it without comment and quickly scanned its contents. “Homobatrachotoxin?” he said.
“Indeed. A steroidal alkaloid that’s ten times more powerful than puffer fish poison and usually found in the skin of poison dart frogs. But what, you say, does a poison from a Costa Rican amphibian have to do with insects-”
“Phyllobates doesn’t produce the poison itself,” said Grissom. “Members of the genus aren’t poisonous when raised in captivity. It’s thought that they process the toxin out of the environment-probably something they eat.”
Hodges’s smile faded a little. “Well, of course you’d know that. The most likely contender is the Melyrid beetle, which is loaded with the stuff.”
“True, but they probably don’t manufacture it either-the likely culprit is thought to be even farther down the food chain. And a little farther up from the frogs are the Ifrita and the hooded Pitohui-both birds that eat Melyrid beetles and process the poison into their feathers.”
“Making them the, uh, only poisonous birds in the world,” said Hodges, clearly derailed. “But it looks like you’re already well aware of that.”
Grissom gave Hodges a small smile. “Good work, Hodges.