GRISSOM KEPT WALKING. The thing about colony insects, he thought, was that their behavior mimicked intelligence.
Ants, for instance, displayed behaviors that were truly astonishing. They grew food, they kept “herds” of aphids that they milked for nectar, they formed symbiotic partnerships with other species. But a single colony ant was no more intelligent than a single cell in a complex organism; it was just following a set of simple behaviors that, when viewed in the context of the entire anthill, suggested the operation of a single mind.
But that was an illusion.
He’d wandered past the big theme hotels, the 5/8 scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, the artificial volcano, the pirate ships. He’d reached the part of the Strip that was still being developed-though that was true, in a way, of the whole thing all the time-and to his left he could see a huge lot with the angular structure of a half-built hotel sitting far back on the property. Next to the sidewalk, fully grown trees sprouted from huge wooden crates like the world’s b i ggest bonsai, waiting to be artistically placed. They might have to wait a long time; Grissom had read that the development was stalled, victim of the economic downturn. No laborers scaled the iron girders, no dirt-encrusted yellow vehicles powered their way around the lot.
Mimicry was one of the things insects excelled at. There were bugs that looked like twigs, bugs that looked like leaves, bugs that looked like other bugs. Sometimes mimicry was employed to hide in plain sight, providing cover for a predator or potential prey; sometimes it was used to imitate a creature who occupied a much more successful biological niche.
A double-decker bus drove past, an Elvis impersonator on the open upper level belting out “Viva Las Vegas” for the passengers and passersby. Grissom thought he was pretty good.
After the hotels came the chapels, several blocks offering various flavors of fast-food matrimony. You could pay a flat fee any time before midnight and get married within minutes-at a church, at a hotel, even at a golf course. For those in a real hurry, there was always the drive-through option-or, if you wanted something a little more elaborate, you could choose from almost as many themes as there were casinos themselves: Star Trek, gothic, fairy tale, pirate. Those who still worshipped Elvis could have their union blessed by an imitation of the real thing.
Industry, illusion, imitation; common threads that ran through the world of insects and that of Vegas. But were they ideals the Bug Killer aspired to or elements he despised?
After the chapels came the pawnshops and then downtown. Grissom had thought, more than once, that the progression said more about human nature than anything else Vegas had to offer. And while downtown was gritty-especially the homeless corridor around Main Street and Owens Avenue -downtown was also home to the Fremont Street Experience, five blocks of older casinos and hotels that had reinvented themselves by roofing over the entire stretch and using it as a screen for a high-tech projection system. To Grissom, it seemed like an example of the possibility of rebirth and renewal in the midst of decay.
But then, the same could be said for fly larvae in a corpse.
A person’s possessions always told a story. Nick had read his share; the first page was usually a search warrant. But if combing the contents of a house was like leafing through a novel, looking through Buffet Bob’s meager possessions was more like a short, disjointed poem about loss and failure. There was an old driver’s license, now long expired, that showed a grinning man in his twenties with the name Robert Ermine; an empty bottle of painkillers with the name ripped off the label; an application for social assistance from Albuquerque, New Mexico, that hadn’t been filled in.
A few tattered paperbacks seem to indicate an interest in science fiction, while a battered miniature chess set with three pieces made of cardboard showed a mind that had once been sharp. Nick didn’t know what to make of the mug, wrapped carefully in several layers of socks, that bore the motto ROOFERS DO IT ON TOP; it was immaculately clean, no coffee stains on the interior or exterior. There were no pictures of family or a partner, only a single photo of a black-and-white cat, once ripped in half and then carefully mended with Scotch tape.
They sorted through everything, but there was nothing to indicate where Robert Ermine had disappeared to. In the end, Nick agreed that the best thing to do was to confiscate it all; maybe a closer examination in the lab could tell them more.
Grissom stopped to rest on a public bench. There was a newspaper lying ther e, folded open to the crossword puzzle. Someone had abandoned it halfway done…
“An eleven-letter word for openhearted.”
“Mmm.” Sara paused, spreading jam on her last piece of toast. “Ventricular?”
“Ah. How about a nine-letter word for cosmically isolated, fifth letter’s a P?”
“Solipsist. Give me a hard one.” He put down the newspaper and raised his eyebrows. She grinned at him. “You know-one you couldn’t get on your own.”
“Are you suggesting I’m only asking you the easy ones?”
“I’m suggesting you don’t really need my help.”
“It depends,” he said, “on your definition of need.”
A car drove by, its windows down, bass-heavy music thumping out like the heartbeat of a Godzilloid monster. It jarred Grissom out of his reverie but not his mood; in fact, it reminded him of something else. Warrick had loved to listen to his music that loud.
Grissom wondered what either Warrick or Sara would have made of the current case. They would have worried about him, probably.
He sat for another few minutes, thinking. Then he got up and walked away.
He took the crossword with him.
The prints that Catherine lifted from the spatters of wax in the warehouse all came back a match to one person: Hal Kanamu, the vic. The hairs from the couch were a mix, but none of them were a match for Diego Molinez, Aaron Tyford, or Boz Melnyk.
“ Okay,” said Catherine. She and Greg stood on top of the metal gantry next to the volcano. “Coroner puts TOD at around three A.M. We know Kanamu was a night owl and that he liked to tinker with his pet project.”
Greg nodded. “So he’s here, he’s high, he’s messing around with the volcano. His partner-the guy who’s actually building the thing-isn’t here to stop him, so he can do whatever he wants.”
“Right. Now, though it was immersion in the wax that killed him, he was knocked unconscious first.”
“By a chunk of rock that came from Hawaii. Weapon of opportunity?”
Catherine frowned. “It’s possible they were planning on introducing obsidian to the exhibit to add to the realism-but why use obsidian from Hawaii when there’s a whole desert full of it practically next door?”
“I know. And if they were going to use obsidian, where is it? We’ve been all over this warehouse and haven’t found any.”
“Not in any large amounts, no. Maybe we need to focus on something smaller.”
“I see where you’re going. Obsidian’s basically a glass-you’re thinking maybe we can find a shard that broke off.”
She shrugged. “Worth a try. This is a big space with a lot of nooks and crannies-plenty of space for a piece of black glass to hide.”
“A piece of hot black glass, accordi ng to the doc. Which means whoever smacked Kanamu in the forehead was wearing gloves or has some nasty burns on his hands.”
“The wax system has built-in heaters, but that’s only to keep it warm enough to stay liquid-around a hundred and twelve degrees. Not nearly hot enough to burn flesh.”
“Meth addicts often use miniature butane torch lighters-they produce a hotter flame, burn the drug more efficiently.” Greg glanced around. “There’s a couple of handheld bottle torches here, as well as a welding rig. And the volcano is designed to shoot jets of flame from nozzles at the rim-any of them could have been used to heat the obsidian.”
“Let’s see what kind of prints we can get off them first. Then we go rock hunting.”
“Hey, Grissom,” said Brass. He put the remains of the sub sandwich he was eating on his desk and wiped his mouth with his other hand. “Where’ve you been?”
“Field research. I think I may have some insights into our killer’s methodology.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ve got news, too. Athena Jordanson just announced that she’s breaking her contract and moving to the Embassy Gold. They’re already planning her opening night-the publicity machine is shifting into high gear.”
“The Embassy Gold. Isn’t that the one that just opened a new restaurant?”
“Yeah, the Mile of Gourmet something or other. More like the Mile of Heartburn, if you ask me-”
“That’s his next target,” said Grissom. “Jim, we have to shut that restaurant down. Now.”
Brass stopped with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. He put it back down and sighed. “Great. You sure about this, Gil? Because the stink this will cause would make even Doc Robbins upchuck.”
“All of the killings so far have been intended to manipulate other events. Paul Fairwick’s killing was intended to make Athena Jordanson move to another location-just like a termite nest moving their queen when the colony is threatened. The Harribold killing sparked a school riot-I think he has something much larger planned this time.” Grissom shook his head. “This guy’s extremely organized. If he’s pushing Jordanson to switch to this hotel, it’s because he already has something set up and ready to go. We have evidence he’s producing an extremely powerful poison, possibly in large quantities.”
Grissom paused. “We have to shut down that hotel and search it.”
Like all cities, Vegas’s lifeblood was money. Casinos were the beating heart that kept that lifeblood flowing, and hotels were like lungs; they inhaled and exhaled tourists while separating them from their earnings like alveoli straining oxygen from air. And like lungs, they operated twenty-four hours a day-to stop was to die.
Grissom’s proposal to shut down the Embassy Gold was not met with enthusiasm.
The manager of the hotel talked to the mayor. The mayor talked to the police chief. The police chief talked to Brass-though, by that point, the term talked wasn’t really accurate.
Grissom refused to back down. If a disaster of the magnitude he feared did happen, he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, either-and the political fallout once the public discovered the authorities knew of the threat but hadn’t acted would destroy the political career of everybody involved. Everybody but the one who had tried to blow the whistle.
In the end, a compromise was reached. All food and beverage facilities-restaurants, bars, room service-would be suspended while Grissom’s team conducted their search. The hotel would continue to operate otherwise; neither room rental nor casino operations would be affected. It was far from an ideal solution, but it was the only one on the table.
And if the attack occurred anyway, fingers could now be pointed in Grissom’s direction. Even with his hands tied, it was still his responsibility to stop the Bug Killer. If Grissom failed, no one would care about technicali ties-only about the body count.
The hotel had three restaurants-including the Mile of Gourmet Grand-two nightclubs, and a poolside bar, in addition to the full-service bar in the casino itself. All of them closed down; the hotel’s official excuse was that a court-ordered inventory was being conducted as part of an ongoing fraud investigation. Everyone was very careful to not use the word contaminated in the same sentence as food or beverage.
Nick spearheaded the group checking the restaurants, while Riley oversaw those checking the bars. They pulled in the lab’s day shift to help with the workload, and Grissom gathered them all together in the main kitchen before they started.
“All right,” he said. “What we’re looking for is a very concentrated poison called homobatrachotoxin. Exposure to even tiny amounts can result in numbness of the extremities or sneezing, so be aware of any symptoms. It could be in any form-liquid, solid, possibly even aerosolized. Take samples of anything that the public is going to come into contact with or consume.”
And then they went to work.
Samples were taken from every open container. Unopened containers were inspected for tampering. Public common areas were searched top to bottom. Equipment for the preparation and handling of food or drink was dismantled and scrutinized-from the pressurized system that delivered carbonated soda to the ice machines on every floor. Walk-i n freezers were emptied and examined; industrial meat slicers were disassembled and swabbed.
They found nothing.
Catherine lifted prints from the butane bottles and the welding rig, while Greg crawled underneath the superstructure of the volcano to do the same for the propane tanks and surrounding hardware used to power Mount Pele ’s flame effects.
After that, they began to look for possible shards of obsidian, starting from each possible heat source and spiraling outward in a gridded search pattern. They used flashlights to highlight any possible glint of reflection, though both were aware the rock wouldn’t reflect at all unless the surface exposed to the beam was polished instead of rough.
It was time-consuming, painstaking work, much of it spent on hands and knees. “Hey,” said Greg. He was on the upper gantry, looking underneath a worktable. “You ever been to Hawaii?”
“Can’t say I have. You?”
“Nah. Seems a long way to go to get the same kind of heat we get in Vegas. It’s just… moister, I guess.”
“How about Burning Man? Ever been?”
“Not yet. I’ve done a lot of research online, been to a few local events, but I haven’t made it out to the festival itself yet.”
“So-what’s the attraction? I have a hard time thinking of you running around nake d in the desert.”
“It’s kind of hard to explain. I think the social engineering is the part I like the best.”
“You mean the gift economy?”
“That’s part of it. The festival’s been around since 1986-though they didn’t start going to the desert until 1990-and it’s always evolving. They put a lot of thought into changing people’s perceptions and behaviors; the gift economy is a good example of that, but they also emphasize environmentalism, community, and what they call ‘radical self-reliance.’ Basically, it means you need to come prepared to survive in a harsh desert climate for a week without counting on all the trappings of civilization we take for granted.”
“Like indoor plumbing?”
“Well, they do provide porta-potties. But there’s no garbage collection-everything you pack in you have to pack out. They encourage interactive art as much as possible. It’s not the kind of event where you go to just passively observe; you go to become part of it, to join in.”
Catherine picked up a small chunk of dark matter and examined it critically. “Sounds-kind of exhausting, actually.”
“It can be. Challenging, definitely. But hey-when’s the last time you went to a party with fifty thousand people and didn’t feel like they were all strangers?”
“I can’t remember the last time I went to one with fifty-”
“Hey. I think I’ve got someth ing.”
Catherine got to her feet. “Obsidian?”
“No, something else. I can see something inside the volcano superstructure-it looks like some kind of tool, stuck between the outer skin and a support strut. Must have fallen inside from up here.”
“Hang on-I’ll see if I can reach it from underneath.”
Catherine crawled under the raised base of the volcano. The interior was a maze of thick plastic and metal tubing, electric pumps and exposed wiring. She shone her flashlight upward until she saw Greg’s gloved hand waving through an opening, then followed where it pointed to. Something was wedged between a strut and the exterior wall.
“It’s too high to reach,” she said. “We’re going to need a ladder.”
“I think I saw one next to the loading dock.”
A few minutes later she was twenty feet above the ground, while Greg steadied the ladder from below. “Got it,” she said. “Looks like a pair of metal-cutting shears.”
She climbed down, handing it to Greg when she was on the bottom rung. “Looks like we might have blood,” she said.
Greg grinned. “I’ll get the luminol.”
Conrad Ecklie hadn’t been undersheriff for long, but he already had a firm grasp of the job’s internal politics. He leaned back in his chair, bright sunlight shining through the window behind him, and considered his former C SI colleague sitting in the chair in front of him.
“Gil, I really don’t know what to say,” he began. “It’s not like you to jump at ghosts.”
Grissom met his boss’s gaze squarely. Even when Ecklie had been day-shift supervisor of the lab, he’d always had his eye on bigger things; as undersheriff, he was on his way. Grissom didn’t care about Ecklie’s ambition one way or the other, but he knew just how bright that flame burned-Ecklie wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice one of his own if it meant saving his own career.
“I’m not,” said Grissom. “I still believe our suspect is planning an attack on the Embassy Gold.”
“The evidence says otherwise, Gil. You didn’t find anything at the hotel, and I know how thorough you are.”
“Not thorough enough. If I could conduct a room-by-room search-”
“Gil, the GCG has over seven hundred rooms. Even if the hotel agreed to evicting their paying customers, it would take forever; there’s no guarantee we could even stop any alleged attack in time.”
“We could try.”
Ecklie sighed. “Look, I’m on the same page with you about preventing loss of life. I just don’t see the same potential threat-so far, all you have is two isolated victims. Hardly the kind of massacre you seem to be expecting.”
“Plus the students injured in the riot and Gustav Janikov. This killer isn’t about one-on-one homicides, Conrad; he’s more interested in the butterfly effect. Kill a single target to trigger a much larger chaotic event.”
“So you say. What I see is something more along the lines of professional jealousy.”
“What?”
“The killer obviously shares some of your expertise in the field of entomology. He wants to make you look bad while making himself look good-the spider thing was clearly meant for you.” He paused. “How’s Al doing?”
“Fine. The hospital’s releasing him tomorrow.”
“Good. Gil, I think you’re off base on this. I agree that the Fairwick murder had a secondary reason, but it was to target you, not the Embassy Gold. It’s made you jumpy-hell, it’s made all of us jumpy. But let’s focus on specifics here, not wild theories.”
Grissom frowned. “Jumpy?”
“Nobody’s disputing your evidence, just your interpretation. If this Bug Killer does strike again, it’ll either be directly at you or possibly at someone close to you. I’m sorry, Gil, but you’re a hazard to be around right now. I’m assigning you round-the-clock protection for the next few days. If you’re right about the killer being either of your two fellow professionals, they’ll both be out of the countr y by then.”
“And out of our reach.” Grissom got to his feet. “Someone may be getting jumpy,” he said quietly, “but it isn’t me.”
“Mr. Wornow,” said Catherine. She smiled at the artist on the other side of the interview table, who didn’t smile back. “Or would you prefer Monkeyboy?”
“Bill is fine. Are you almost done with Mount Pele? ’Cause I really need to get back to work, and if you’ve shut down the pumps it’ll take forever to clear all the hardened wax out-”
Greg placed the clear evidence bag containing the shears on the table. Wornow stopped talking.
“A good craftsman always takes care of his tools,” said Greg. “But even a good craftsman drops one now and then. Especially if he’s doing something as nerve-wracking as cutting off his partner’s fingers.”
Bill swallowed. “That’s-that could belong to anybody-”
“Maybe so,” said Catherine. “But it’s got Hal Kanamu’s blood on it and your fingerprints. Plus, tool marks on the finger bones are a match to exemplars made with this particular pair of shears. So-whether it’s yours or not-you were the one who used it to de-digitize the body.”
Wornow stared dully at the bag. “I didn’t kill him. I swear. I got back from Portland really early, and I went to the warehouse to drop off some stuff I bought. I found Hal in the wax. The heaters were shut down, so it had cooled of f and semi-hardened. I… I didn’t know what to do.” Wornow put his head in his hands. “We worked so hard on that thing. We’d stay up all night, coming up with new ideas, trying all kinds of stuff… Yeah, Hal could be a pain, but he was committed, you know? He wasn’t going to give up on this, he was going to make it happen. And then we got into an argument over whether or not we should add color to the flames, and I took off. I should have known better…”
“We know you didn’t kill him,” said Greg. “But you did move the body.”
“What else could I do? If the cops found a dead drug addict inside the actual cone, I knew they’d confiscate it and take it apart. And without Hal’s money, how was I supposed to rebuild? I can’t even pay the rent on the damn warehouse.”
Catherine nodded. “So why remove the fingers of one hand?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t even notice until after I’d dropped the tin snips that the other hand was totally encased. I could have dug it out, but that would have made a huge mess… I just wrapped the whole thing in a tarp, dumped it in the back of my truck, and ran. Then when I went to look for the snips later, I couldn’t find them. It’s not like I do this every day, you know?”
“Well, you’re not going to be doing it again soon,” said Catherine. “Tampering with a body-while not as serious as murder-is still a crime. I don’ t think you or Mount Pele are making a pilgrimage to the desert this year.”