GRISSOM COMPARED THE boot print Nick had lifted from McKay’s supply-room shelf to the one he’d taken from Gustav Janikov’s boots, then placed it back on the light table. “We have a match. Good work, Nick.”
“Thanks. But with Janikov dead and buried, he can’t tell us who told him to steal that thread.”
“The same person who gave him enough money to buy Richard Waltham’s gun and obtained it either before or after Janikov overdosed.”
Riley strode in. “Sorry I’m late. I’ve been all over town trying to source that bottle, but there are just too many places that carry it. The stamp that would have told us the batch number and expiration date was on the part of the bottle that was cut off-I narrowed it down to brand, but that was it.”
“It was a long shot,” Grissom admitted. “But you can never tell when you might get lucky.”
They brought her up to speed. “So Janikov got the gun from Waltham but was dead bef o r e it was used on Paul Fairwick,” she said. “The killer could have gotten it from his body.”
“Possible,” said Grissom. “Janikov was clearly being paid to work for the killer-he was sent specifically to obtain the surgical thread.”
Nick nodded. “He might have been killed for refusing to follow orders. Maybe he was supposed to shoot Fairwick himself but wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think so,” said Grissom. “The killer’s plans are intricate; I don’t think he’d leave such an important element to someone else. In fact, Janikov’s involvement doesn’t really fit with the pattern the killer’s established thus far.”
“Maybe it does,” said Riley. “Janikov wasn’t the only person involved in the robbery. There were the two transients who staged the fight.”
“Easy enough to do,” said Nick. “Janikov probably paid them off with drugs or booze.”
“Unless our killer has more than one person on his payroll,” said Riley. “He’s imitating insect b ehaviors, right? Well, colony insects send out workers to obtain supplies.”
Grissom looked thoughtful. “True. Which would imply a nest or hive location-as well as a larger scale of operations. Even given his obsession with insects, he wouldn’t acquire his own drones unless he needed them. But what for?”
“Bees go out and collect pollen,” said Nick. “Maybe he’s got his people doing something similar.”
“No,” said Riley. Both Grissom and Nick turned to look at her. “I know what this reminds me of. Large-scale cocaine processing labs need a significant workforce. They’re sealed in a building and guarded by soldiers.”
“Not collecting pollen,” said Grissom. “Making honey. Ants do much the same thing, but with slave labor-drones kidnapped from other colonies are imprinted chemically and put to work.”
“So our serial is a drug lord, too?” said Nick.
“Whatever he’s producing,” said Grissom, “I don’t think profit’s his motive. In fact, if he is processing large amounts of a particular chemical, I very much doubt it’s one anyone would take willingly.” He paused. “In fact, it might be the very same thing that killed Gustav Janikov.” He told them about the homobatrachotoxin.
“Dangerous stuff,” said Nick. “What’s the lethal dose, five hundred micrograms?”
“One hundred,” said Grissom. “Around the equivalent of two grains of table salt. If our Bug Killer is attem pting to produce this poison in quantity, we have an extremely serious problem.”
“Hey, Monkeyboy,” said Catherine, taking a seat across the table in the interview room. “Guess what? The sample of wax we took from your warehouse was just full of stuff: industrial effluents, food-grade shellac, perfume, metals…”
Monkeyboy, aka William Wornow, looked distinctly uneasy. “Well, that’s because of where I get it. All over the place. I mean, I scavenge from Dumpsters, industrial waste sites, wherever I can get access. None of it’s stolen, I swear.”
“Oh, I believe you. The thing is, you’ve mixed up a particularly distinctive batch for your fake volcano, and it just happens to be an exact match for the wax we found hardening in Hal Kanamu’s lungs.”
“What?”
She smiled. “Yeah. And since that’s what actually killed him, your whole art project is now officially a murder weapon. Afraid you’re going to be skipping your trip to Black Rock City this year.”
“Whoa!” He held up both hands, clearly frightened. “Maybe Hal did die in that volcano, but I had nothing to do with it. I was out of town!”
“Maybe. You better hope you can prove that, because until you do you’re our prime suspect. And we’re going to be taking a very, very close look at Mount Pele…”
Dale Southford looked up from his newspaper when Grissom walked into the Pet Cave. “Hello, Mr. Grissom. Back to pick up your order?”
“Afraid not, Dale. I’ve got another question for you. Ever have someone ask you about Melyrid beetles?”
The chubby man looked surprised. To one side of the counter, a cocker spaniel puppy gave a mournful little howl that ended in a much more upbeat yip. “Funny you should ask. Had a guy call a couple months back asking about the very same thing. Said he was a researcher, needed a large representative sample. I got in touch with a guy I know in New Guinea.”
“Did he want live samples or dead ones?”
“Both. I asked him how many he wanted, and he said at least a hundred had to be alive.”
“And dead?”
Southford shrugged. “He said he’d take as many as I could get. Turned out to be around a thousand.”
A thousand beetles. Grissom knew they could produce about ten micrograms of HBTX each, which meant ten beetles’ worth could kill a human being. A thousand was enough for a hundred fatalities.
But it was the live ones that bothered him the most. If the Bug Killer established a successful breeding program, he could process a hundred times that.
“What was his name?” asked Grissom.
“Just a sec.” Southford turned to his computer. “Ah, here it is. L. W. Smith. No address, just a contact number. Paid in cash.”
“What did he look like?”
“Well, I don’t think he picked them up himself-pretty sure the guy that dropped off the cash and took the beetles was homeless. He told me he was just running an errand for a friend.”
“Thanks for coming in again,” said Nick, shaking McKay’s hand.
“Glad to help,” said the oral surgeon. “I don’t know how much use I’ll be this time, either, though. None of the faces in all those mug shots jumped out at me a month ago, and I doubt if my memory’s gotten any better.”
“We’ll see,” said Nick. “You might surprise yourself.”
He led the surgeon from the front counter to the AV lab. Archie nodded at both of them. “Hey, Nick. This our witness?”
Nick introduced the two. “Doc, Archie here is gonna take you through a new program we just got. Hopefully, it’ll help us ID the two guys you saw fighting.”
“So he’s an artist?”
Archie grinned. “Yes, I am-but my area of expertise is software as opposed to pen and ink. I’m going to be using a program called EvoFIT to come up with a facial composite of our suspects.”
He had McKay sit down in front of a workstation. “Okay, here’s how this works. Some studies have shown that regular sketches done by police artists only have a success rate of around ten percent. That has nothing to do with t he skill of the artist; it’s just how our brains work. In the process of trying to remember the features of someone, we wind up changing them-the image that’s finally produced is something the subject has actually been building as opposed to recalling. Going feature by feature, the way the old Identi-Kit worked, just reinforced that.”
Nick nodded. “This program works on a different principle. Caricature.”
“What, like those sidewalk artists do?”
“Not exactly,” said Archie. “It starts with seventy-two images. You pick the six that you think have the closest resemblance to the person you saw, and it uses those six to generate another seventy-two. We do that a third time, and you pick a final six. Those are blended into one, which we fine-tune.”
“The cool thing,” said Nick, “is that these aren’t static images. They gradually morph from one face to another, exaggerating features as they go. This concentrates attention, which is supposed to trigger flashes of memory-you don’t so much remember the face as recognize it. The inventor claims it bumps up the success rate by up to twenty percent.”
“Caricature police sketches,” said McKay with a smile. “Well, considering that I’m a ventriloquist dentist, I can’t really criticize. Only in Vegas, huh?”
“No w this,” said Greg, “is a crime scene.”
He and Catherine stood at the foot of Mount Pele. It was glowing a brilliant crimson from the cone, the wax-based lava releasing the occasional blorp of heated air.
“Yeah, but we still don’t have a suspect,” said Catherine. “Not since security footage from that gas station in Oregon cleared Wornow. No way he could have gotten to Vegas in time to kill Kanamu.”
“Maybe not. But the truck he was driving-you know, the one his mysterious friend lent him and then drove off into the sunset with?-looked a lot like a 1994 Ford F150 Supercab.”
“True,” Catherine admitted. “Since we can’t find the truck, we can’t compare the treads to what we found in the desert-but we can take a close look at where Kanamu probably died. Right here.”
“Mind if I take the volcano?”
“It’s all yours, lava boy. I’ll tackle the rest of the warehouse.”
There was a small bathroom in the corner; Catherine started there. She found cleaning supplies under the sink, but the dust on them told her they hadn’t been used in some time. She lifted prints from the sink and the toilet.
There was a lounging area next to the loading dock, with a couch, a few ratty armchairs, a microwave, and a refrigerator. The fridge contained nothing but beer, soda, and a few frostbitten TV dinners in the freezer. She located a few good hairs on the couch with root tags, and a number of fibers. The depths of the couch turned up nothing but lint.
Bits of wax spatter were on almost every surface; she guessed they must have had more than one uncontrolled eruption. That worked in her favor, because wax was notoriously hard to remove-and held a fingerprint incredibly well. It looked as if someone had even turned it into a game at one point, pressing a digit into every wax droplet before it fully hardened to leave a perfect print behind. She carefully photographed each one before lifting it.
Catherine remembered a term from her research into Hawaiian mythology: Pele’s tears. They were elongated bits of hardened lava, spatter from the lifeblood of a volcano. She was looking at a man-made approximation of the same thing-but not all the spatter was random.
There was a large, roughly circular pattern at the base of the volcano. Streaks of wax led from there to the loading dock door. “I’ve got a drag trail,” she called out. “Looks like the body was moved, fake magma and all, from here to the loading bay.”
Greg had scaled the gantry and was crouched on top. “Yeah, it’s pretty visible from up here.” He reached out and grabbed a thick chain dangling from a pulley. “I’ve got tr ansfer on this chain-it’s probably how the body was moved from up here to down there.”
“There was an awful lot of wax around the body,” said Catherine. “It must have at least semi-hardened before the body was yanked out.”
“And it would have cooled from the top down. Since we found the vic’s body with his head exposed, that means he was upside down in the volcano’s cone, with his head in the wax that was still hot.”
“Greg, what shape is the wax reservoir up there? Can you tell?”
“Just a sec.” He ducked his head into an uncovered section of the volcano like a mechanic disappearing under the hood of a car, then popped back up an instant later. “It’s an inverted cone, wider at the top than the base. So when our vic was pulled loose, he would have had a roughly volcano-shaped wax plug around his body, with his head exposed.”
“Just how we found him.” She sighed. “Now all we have to do is figure out how he got there.”
“So these are the composites the EvoFIT program produced?” asked Riley. She and Nick talked as they walked across the parking lot. The sheet Nick had just handed her showed a man with long, scraggly blond hair, a wide nose and chin, and blue eyes.
“Yeah, here’s the other one.” She took the second paper and studied it; it showed an olive-skinned man with a short, dark beard and wavy black hair.
“How accurate do you think these are ?” she asked him. “I mean, this is unproven technology.”
“Better than nothing. We showed him mug shots first-anyone busted in the last year who listed no fixed address on the arrest report-but came up dry. Just because someone’s on the street doesn’t mean they’re in the system.”
“You do know there are over eleven thousand homeless people in the city, right?”
Nick unlocked the Denali and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I know. So the sooner we get going, the better.”
They started at Huntridge Circle Park, sandwiched between the north and south lanes of Maryland Parkway. Though technically closed, it still attracted many of those with no other place to go, and most of the park’s benches were being used as makeshift beds.
They made the rounds, showing the pictures to anyone who would talk to them, trying for a positive ID. A one-legged man in a long, tattered coat and a baseball cap told them he thought one of them lived on the banks of the Flamingo Wash, one of the creeks that drained the city’s runoff into Lake Mead. His name, the man said, pointing to the picture, was Buffet Bob-so called because of his habit of sneaking into buffets and cramming as much food as he could i nto his pockets.
At the wash, they had less luck. Camping overnight was prohibited, and the encampment had recently been cleared out. They tried Molasky Family Park next, another spot where the homeless congregated; there, several of the people they talked to agreed that the picture looked a lot like Buffet Bob. The other one, several of them said, resembled a Latino man named Zippo who often drank with Bob.
“Yeah, that’s them,” said a black man in his sixties without a tooth in his mouth. “Bob and Zippo, you always see ’em around together. Not for a while, though.”
“When was the last time you saw them?” asked Riley.
The toothless man shook his head. “Musta been at least a month ago. Mebbe more. They ain’t the only ones, either.”
Nick frowned. “Hold on. You say they disappeared a month ago-and so did some others? Who?”
“Lessee. Big Johnny, ain’t seen him around since then. Old Gus-”
“Gus Janikov?” asked Riley.
“Don’t know his last name,” the man said testily. “Don’t interrupt. Who else… oh, and I guess I ain’t seen Paintcan in a while, neither. Course, he could just be in jail.”
Riley gave Nick a skeptical glance. “So could any of them.”
“Don’t think so,” said the old man. “Ain’t nobody seen ’em or heard nothing. Ask around.”
“We will,” said Nick. “Thanks.”
The contact number L.W. Smith had left with the Pet Cave turned out to be a dead end; it was for a throwaway cell phone that had been used exactly once.
So Grissom went for a walk.
Las Vegas Boulevard, more commonly known as the Strip, was the backbone of Vegas. It stretched from the southern extremes of the city to the northern edge of downtown, and every block held its own character and history. Grissom was familiar with each one.
As he walked, he tried to see the city through the killer’s eyes.
This was not LW’s home. He was a tourist, just like the hundreds of thousands who flocked here every year. But how did he view Vegas? Was it a modern Xanadu, a high-tech playground that everyone could share, or a twenty-first-century Sodom or Gomorrah, an artificial abomination in the middle of a desert?
The killer was here because Grissom was here. Grissom was well-known in the relatively small overlap between entomology and law enforcement circles; if Grissom could be said to be famous for anything, it was using his scientific knowledge-of insects, among other things-to give the Vegas Crime Lab one of the highest case-clearance rates in the nation. As an embarrassing story in the Las Vegas Globe had said about him some years ago, he “used bugs to put bad guys behind bars.”
The Bug Killer had obviously seen that as a challenge, but Grissom didn’t think his life was in danger-not yet. The killer wanted to beat Grissom at his own game, on an intellectual level; even the spider trap had been more of a test than an assassination attempt.
But as Grissom knew from personal experience, Vegas was impossible to ignore. The sensuality, the spectacle, the timeless siren environment of the casinos; it had an effect on people, even those who tried to resist. Sometimes, the resistance affected you just as strongly as the place itself.
He thought about Richard Waltham and his take on Vegas. Waltham was a Vegas survivor, someone who’d been around the block a few times and managed to hang on. If he kept going the way he was, the city would eventually kill him, but so far it hadn’t.
So far, he’d been lucky.
Grissom didn’t think the Bug Killer viewed Vegas as either Xanadu or Sodom. He thought he saw it in insect terms-a cluster of termite columns, perhaps. Termites were the skyscraper architects of the insect world, some species constructing mounds that could reach as high as thirty feet; they boasted an elaborate cooling system that regulated their temperature as efficiently as any hotel air-conditioning system. Mounds could contain millions of individuals and more than one queen; some even provided their own buffet by cultivating and feeding on a certain type of fungus.
Grissom stopped to watch an extremely drunk college-age boy throwing up in a parking lot. He appeared to have bypassed the buffet in favor of tacos.
What bothered Grissom more than anything was the homobatrachotoxin. A chemical fifteen times more lethal than cyanide, in a town where the most popular form of dining was essentially a shared trough. If the Bug Killer decided he wanted to graduate from single homicides to mass murder, he could do so with nothing more than an eye-dropper and a little careful sleight of hand.
Termites had something else in common with Vegas: just like the Strip that ran north/south, a species known as the compass termite always built its wedge-shaped mounds with the long axis oriented north/south.
But maybe termites were the wrong analogy. Ants, bees, and wasps were colony insects, too, and displayed a bewildering variety of adaptations and social behaviors. It wasn’t just a question of whom the Bug Killer would target next; it was what sort of point he was trying to make.
Nick and Riley canvassed several more spots, and though the information the y gathered was thin and somewhat contradictory, a pattern did begin to emerge. Around a half-dozen homeless people-including the two they were looking for and Gustav Janikov-had disappeared off the street around a month ago. Only Janikov had been seen since, and only briefly.
Rumors abounded: that they’d been kidnapped by a cult, that they’d been rounded up as part of a secret government plan, that they’d been killed and buried in the desert by a gang.
Nick and Riley retired to the diner where the CSIs sometimes ate breakfast to discuss the case over coffee. Riley slid into the booth, pulled off her baseball cap, and tossed it next to her with a sigh.
“Two coffees, please,” Nick told the waitress. “Thanks.”
“Well, what do you think?” asked Riley. “Are we chasing ghosts?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, yeah, the two guys we’re looking for could be dead, but the homeless population might actually be down half a dozen. What’s your gut say?”
She frowned. “Despite the high number of crazies, junkies, and thieves, people on the street tend to look out for one another. I can’t say much for the theories I’ve heard, but I’m starting to believe those people are actually missing.”
“Would fit with your theory about a labor force. Once you’ve lured them into working for you, it probably makes more sense to keep them lock ed up than risk one of them talking.”
“Yeah, which doesn’t say much for their chance of drawing unemployment once the job’s finished.”
The coffee arrived. Nick changed his mind and ordered a Danish as well.
“Janikov was probably his right-hand man,” said Riley. “He had enough freedom to spend a little of his hard-earned cash. The killer trusted him to come back, gave him the job of obtaining the surgical thread.”
“True. If we had a residence to toss, we might be able to come up with where the hypothetical factory is-but that’s kinda hard to do when the people we’re chasing are homeless.”
“Maybe not. Even homeless people need to sleep somewhere-and some places are less transient than others.”
Nick took a long sip of his coffee. “You’re thinking Silver Hills?”
“If any of our missing subjects were crashing there, could be their stuff is still around.”
“After a month? Doubtful-but I guess we don’t have anything to lose.”
They finished their coffee, paid up, and left.
Silver Hills was downtown, just off Main Street and alongside Woodlawn Cemetery. An iron fence marked the boundary of the graveyard; the sidewalk that ran parallel to it held around two dozen dome-shaped nylon tents in a single row. Men sat cross-legged in the doorways or stood around at the edge of the street, some drinkin g beer from cans.
Nick and Riley approached the first person they saw, a woman offloading flats of bottled water from the bed of a truck to the sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” said Riley. “I was wondering-”
The woman whirled around. She was short, Latino, and wearing a T-shirt that read COMMUNITY OUTREACH. “You want to arrest me? Go ahead!”
Nick gave her what he hoped was a disarming smile. “No, no, we’re not going to arrest you-”
“I see-you’ll just give me a ticket then, eh? Some more money the mayor can flush down the toilet while these people suffer from dehydration!”
“Calm down, ma’am,” said Riley. “We don’t care if you’re giving the homeless water-”
“Really? Did someone repeal that damn law and forget to tell me?”
Riley gave Nick a puzzled frown, and he gave her a look of embarrassed admission in return.
“No, ma’am,” he said, “I’m afraid that law’s still in effect. But while it’s technically still illegal to distribute food or water to the indigent, I personally don’t see any such infraction going on. And neither does my partner. Right?”
Riley blinked. “Uh, no, of course not. We’re more interested in trying to locate certain individuals who have gone missing.”
She glared at them, but her voice was slightly less hostile. “Why? You going to throw them in jail because you caught them sleeping in a park?”
“No, ma’am,” said Nick. “We’re actually worried that they may have come to harm.”
That appeared to mollify her. “You have a picture?”
Riley handed her the composites. “We understand these two go by the names Buffet Bob and Zippo.”
The woman nodded as soon as she saw the picture. “Mmm-hmm. That’s Bob, all right. I’ve seen this other one hanging around with him, but I don’t know him by name. Some of them, they’re leery about giving you any personal information at all, even when you’re trying to help them.” Her glare returned. “I can’t imagine why.”
Riley nodded. “We’re also looking for Paintcan and Big Johnny.”
“There’re a couple Big Johnnys. Paintcan was a regular. Haven’t seen him around in over a month-same for Bob and his friend.”
“Did any of them camp here?” asked Nick.
“Bob did. That’s his tent, the blue one second from the end. Or it used to be, anyway; someone else might be living there now.”
They thanked her and moved on. The tent she’d pointed out was zipped up, but a young man sat in front of it on the remains of a torn sofa cushion. A brindled pit bull lazed beside him, tongue lolling in the heat.
“Hi,” said Nick. “I’m Nick Stokes, Vegas Crime Lab. You staying in this tent?”
The young man looked up, h is eyes hidden by cheap plastic sunglasses. A tattooed skull wept inky tears down his right cheek. “No, man. This is Buffet Bob’s crib. I’m just looking after it, you know?”
“That a full-time job?” asked Riley.
“Nah, we take turns. Figure he’ll turn up sooner or later, you know?”
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate it,” said Nick.
“Hey, Bob’s a good guy. Any time he had food, he’d share. Long as you’re not picky-this one time, he had a plastic bag full of hot shrimp stuffed in his pants. Sure were tasty, though.”
“I’ll bet,” said Riley. “Look, nobody’s seen Bob in over a month. We’re trying to find him-not because he’s in trouble, but because we think something may have happened to him. So we’re going to have to look through his things.”
“I don’t know. Don’t you, like, need a warrant or something?”
“This is a sidewalk, not an apartment building,” said Riley. “Public property.”
The pit bull seemed to notice them for the first time. It raised its blocky, muscular head and growled.
“Take it easy,” said Nick. “I understand you’re just looking out for Bob’s best interests. I get that. But like I said, we’re not here to bust him for anything-we’re just trying to find out what happened to him. Whatever’s in that tent could help. What do you think is more important-guarding Bob’s stuff or making sure he’s okay?”
The tattooed man thought about it, stroking the pit bull’s head. “I guess,” he said at last. “But if you find anything illegal, it’s not mine, right?”
“How could it be?” asked Riley. “You’re going to be sitting way over there.” She pointed at the opposite end of the row of tents.
After the man and his dog had left, Nick crouched down and unzipped the tent. The smell that wafted out was musty and unclean, but the aroma of a little dirty laundry ranked way below decomp on a CSI scale of stink.
The tent held a sleeping bag, an overturned cardboard box used as a makeshift table, and several bulging garbage bags stuffed with clothes and personal items.
“What do you think?” said Riley. “Take it all back to the lab, sort through it there?”
“If we have to. I’d rather take a quick look now, see what we come up with. This place may not be much, but it’s where someone lives; how would you feel if the police stopped by and confiscated your home and everything in it?”
Riley shook her head. “Like my life was broken and I’d better fix it. What was that about it being illegal to give food or water to the homeless?”
“Yeah, I know. Law passed in 2006. Some people thought it was ‘encouraging’ the homeless as opposed to helping them.”
“Wow. Pretty hard-line.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a hard town.”