GREG TOOK CASTS of the tire marks. He remembered the first time Warrick Brown had shown him how to do it.
“All right, that’s a good consistency,” Warrick had said. “You don’t want it too thin or it’ll crumble on you. And don’t use the same stuff you’d use for a shoe print-those come in two-pound bags, and you’ll wind up without enough coverage. You want a tire cast to be three feet long, minimum. Dental stone is best; don’t use plaster of paris. Takes about thirty minutes to set-don’t rush it. You want a cast with a high compressive strength, one that won’t fall apart on you when you clean it.”
“Okay, I got it. How strong is this stuff, anyway?”
“Nine thousand pounds per square inch, give or take.”
“Wow. That’s pretty strong.”
Warrick had given one of his wry smiles. “Just make sure you do it right the first time,” he said. “Worry about the strength of your evidence, not the materials you’re using. When you’re casting a track, you only get one shot.”
One shot.
Greg made sure he did it right.
They moved the body, wax and all, to the lab to be processed. Once it was there, Catheri ne checked it for prints but had no luck. “Too bad,” she said. “Wax holds a print really well. But before we can do anything else, we have to get all this wax off. Suggestions?”
Greg crossed his arms and studied the large, waxy mound in front of them. “Heat lamps?” he said. “We can raise the temperature just enough to melt the wax and then collect and process all the runoff.”
“Sounds good. Let’s make it happen.”
They positioned four large lamps over the body. “Kind of like an Easy-Bake Oven,” said Greg.
Catherine gave him an amused glance. “And how would you know about Easy-Bake Ovens? Shouldn’t you have been playing with Star Wars figures?”
“Hey, it was one of my first pieces of forensic equipment. You could bake more than cakes in it, you know.”
“I don’t think I want to, actually.”
It went fairly quickly. Before too long they could pry open the vic’s pockets; they didn’t find any ID but did get a crumpled receipt.
“It’s from the ABC Store on the Strip,” said Greg. “Looks like he bought some dried green mango at around two thirty this morning.”
“So he died sometime after that.” Catherine took off her lab coat and hung it up.
“Where are you going?” asked Greg.
“You can babys it the wax man while he melts. I’m going to go talk to whoever sold him the snack food.”
At first glance, the ABC Store looked like any other Vegas souvenir shop; lots of T-shirts, key chains, and baseball hats up front, most of them emblazoned with the Vegas logo or something related: dice, cards, even the name of a popular TV show set there. Catherine picked up a hat and checked the tag on the inside: MADE IN CHINA.
“Nothing like a genuine Las Vegas memento,” she muttered to herself.
Toward the back of the store, though, the merchandise underwent a definite shift. Suddenly she was surrounded by old-fashioned ham jerky, Maui-style potato chips, and more products featuring macadamia nuts than she’d known existed.
“Excuse me,” she said, walking up to the cashier. “I’m Catherine Willows, with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. Were you working last night?”
The clerk, a sleepy-looking woman with jet-black hair and dusky skin, nodded. “Still am, in fact. Day guy phoned in sick, so I’m pulling a double.”
“My condolences. Do you remember this guy? Came in around two thirty, bought some dried green mango?” She showed the woman a photo of the vic.
“Uh-huh. He seemed pretty wired, made me kind of nervous. Paid with a hundre d-dollar bill.”
“You know who he is? He ever been in here before?”
She shrugged. “Not that I can remember. He was a kanaka, fo’shua. Said he had to get some of that green mango ono. I told him get choke, we ain’t gonna run out-haole never buy ’em.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You no speak pidgin, brah?” She smiled. “Hawaiian slang. He was from the islands, you know? Had a craving for the mango-I told him we had plenty, the tourists never buy it.”
“Ah. You remember if he was on foot or in a vehicle?”
“Sorry, I didn’t notice.”
She talked to the clerk for a few more minutes but didn’t learn anything else. The woman said, “Aloha,” when Catherine left.
“As you can see,” Doc Robbins said to Catherine, “cause of death was asphyxiation.” The body of the Pacific Islander lay open on the autopsy table. Robbins had just cut into one of the lungs, revealing it was packed solid with red wax.
“Like an inside-out version of Madame Tussauds,” Catherine said. “He must have been completely immersed in the stuff.”
“I’d have to concur. I found it in his nose, his throat, even his ear canals-though those generate their own, of course.”
“We didn’ t find the fingers, but the cuts looked clean. Postmortem?”
“Definitely. The other hand-the one completely encased in wax-was intact, so we’ve still got prints.”
“The killer was probably trying to hide the vic’s identity but lacked either the time or the tools to dig through the wax and finish the job. How about the contusion on his forehead?”
“Not just a contusion-a burn. He was struck with something both hard and hot. I took a closer look and pulled this out of the subcutaneous layer.” Robbins handed her a small clear evidence vial.
Catherine took it and studied what it held: a small black sliver, no more than half an inch long. “I’ll get it to Trace. Any idea what it is?”
“Well, it seems to be a shard of mineral or metal, which doesn’t support my first guess.” He paused.
“And that would be?” Catherine prompted.
“A wick.”
Catherine rolled her eyes. “Somebody told you to switch from rock and roll to comedy, Doc?”
Robbins shrugged. “At least it wasn’t a pun. I found something else interesting when I X-rayed the body-take a look at this.” He limped over to the light box on the wall and pointed. “See this? He’s got a cyst growing on his spine-it’s called a syrinx.”
“Cancerous?”
“No, from the condition of the surrounding vertebrae I’d say it was caused by an injury, possibly a car accident or a fall. Not a recent one, though-from its size, I’d estimate the syrinx was between six and eight months old.”
“What sort of symptoms would that produce?”
“It’s possible he wasn’t even aware of it. Many syrinxes generate no symptoms at all for months or even years; then they can produce pain, weakness, numbness, and sensory impairment-especially the ability to detect heat or cold with the extremities. Advanced cases can affect sweating, sexual function, and bowel and bladder control.”
“Sounds nasty.”
“Even… wick-ed?”
She sighed. “I’ll see you later, Doc.”
Greg ran the tire prints through the database. He’d found marks from both the front and rear tires, which gave him a wheelbase; that combined with the tread told him he was looking for a 1994 Ford F150 Supercab truck.
He caught up with Catherine in the hall outside the main lab and told her what he’d found.
“Well, I just got the tox screen,” she said. “Our vic was high on meth when he went to that great tiki bar in the sky. And Post found a shard of something stuck in his forehead. Looks like he took a smack to the noggin before going volcano diving.” She told Greg about the wax in the vic’s lungs.
“That’s a lot of wax,” he said. “What was this guy doing, running his own candle factory?”
“You might not be too far off. Wax is used in a number of industrial applications-especially in manufacturing.”
“And those waxes tend to have very specific formulations,” said Greg. “Find the formulation and we can find out what this was supposed to be used for-and hopefully where it came from. I’m on it.”
Catherine got an AFIS hit on the vic’s fingerprints almost immediately: Hal Kanamu. He’d been arrested for possession of methamphetamine two years ago in Honolulu, but his current driver’s license listed an address in Vegas. She jotted it down, then went to find David Hodges.
Hodges looked up from his microscope as she walked in. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re here about the shard found in Don Ho’s skull.”
“Hal Kanamu’s skull, actually. Can you tell me what it is?”
“Sure. What’s big and hot and likes to blow its top?”
She grinned despite herself. “It’s volcanic?”
“Yes, indeed. Nevada is littered with deposits of volcanic rock, due to its geologic history. You know how tectonic plates push against each other and create mountains in the middle? Our whole state is like that in reverse-we’re being pulled apart. That makes all kinds of interesting things rise to the surface, some of them volc anic. The black rocks of the Black Rock Desert are, in fact, obsidian-and so is this shard.”
Catherine nodded. “Any chance you could narrow its origin down a little further?”
Hodges knew how to smirk and chose that moment to prove it. “As a matter of fact, I think I can. Think of a volcano as a giant pot of chili; the ingredients are all the different kinds of minerals that are melting and mixing together. There are a lot of different kinds of chili in the world, but every cook has his or her own favorite recipe.”
“Analyze the ingredients and you can ID the chef?”
“Not only that, I may be able to tell you which batch this came from. Individual eruptions produce individual results.” Hodges got a dreamy look on his face. “I have very fond memories of a batch I produced in the fall of ’06. Fiery, but with a lovely creamy consistency.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You made… lava?”
“What? No, chili. I still have some frozen at home-I know fresh is best, but when you produce something of that quality it’s hard to let it go.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll talk to you later, Hodges.”
Catherine joined Greg in the lab. “Any luck on the wax?”
“Yes and no. I ran it through the GC mass spec, and here’s what came out.” He handed her several sheets of paper.
She scanned the o ne on top, then the next, and frowned. “This isn’t wax-this is soup.”
“I know. Wax comes in three basic varieties. I’ll give you… twenty-one tries to ID them.”
“Animal, mineral, and vegetable?”
“Exactly. Animal waxes come from bees and other insects, sheep wool, and the foreheads of sperm whales-hey, did you know that no one knows exactly why sperm whales are full of the stuff? Up to three tons per whale, and the best guess is that it helps them control their buoyancy. People used to think it was actually sperm, which is where the name comes from-”
“Greg.”
“Sorry. Vegetable wax comes from certain palms, Mexican shrubs, Japanese berries, African reeds, rice bran, and jojoba trees. Mineral waxes are derived from petrochemical sources like lignite. There are also synthetic waxes made from long-chain fatty acids, but I left those out because they spoiled the punch line.”
“And which of these did our fake lava contain?”
“Most of them. Well, not the sperm whale wax-that’s been mainly replaced by the jojoba tree-but a good eighty percent of the others are present. That doesn’t correspond to any industrial process I know of.”
“No, but it does remind me of something else,” said Catherine. “Not so much soup… as chili.”
Greg grinned and shook his head. “Oka y, I’ll go with the flow. Why chili?”
“Something Hodges said. Some cooks try to throw in every possible ingredient, and apparently Mother Nature’s one of them. Real lava is a mix of many different elements.”
“So our magma maker was trying to mimic the actual geologic process? When I was in school, we just used vinegar and baking soda.”
“Accuracy is clearly important to someone. How about the black flecks embedded in the wax?”
“Ash from charred paper. I found a couple of chunks that weren’t completely carbonized-they had a high lignin content.”
“Newsprint. Probably old newspapers or flyers.”
“Yeah, and almost impossible to trace. We’ll have better luck with the wax.”
“I guess we need to see how many local manufacturers use wax in their business-”
Greg offered her another sheet of paper before she could finish. “One step ahead. Cosmetics, industrial casting, waterproofing for cardboard boxes, food producers… and a whole lot more.”
Catherine scanned the new list with a frown. “Terrific. There’s even a ranch on here.”
“Yeah. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker-I’m just glad we don’t have to visit a whaling ship.”
There were times that Catherine appreciated being a CSI level 3. For one thin g, it meant that she could delegate canvassing the local wax-using industries to Greg, while she concentrated on Hal Kanamu’s apartment.
According to records she’d dug up, Kanamu had been briefly employed as a busboy when he first moved to Vegas six months ago. If he’d been employed by a hotel or casino since then, she couldn’t find any record of it. She didn’t know what he’d been doing, but the forwarding address the hotel gave her for his last paycheck surprised her: the Braun Suites, a set of luxury apartments often used by celebrities when they were in town. Catherine knew the hotel often comped those suites to high rollers.
Her CSI ID was enough for security to let her into the suite, and the fact that she was Sam Braun’s daughter didn’t hurt, either. Sam had been one of the Vegas giants, a casino owner renowned as much for his connections as his wealth; she hadn’t known him when she was growing up, but he’d done his best to connect with her before he died.
“Well, well, Mr. Kanamu,” she murmured to herself as she stepped inside. “Quite the upgrade in living accommodations. You must have been one hell of a busboy.”
The suite was large and opulent, with an impressive view of the Strip through a glass wall that ran the entire length of the main living area. A padded conversation pit in the middle of the room held a round gas fireplace in its center, a wet bar made entirely of chrome and Lucite gleamed to one side, and the fla t screen on the wall was the size of a garage door. It was on, too, cycling through a slide show; shots of Kanamu’s native Hawaii, it looked like. The brilliant greens and bright blues painted the room in vacation Technicolor, a more evolved version of motel neon.
The room was neat and clean; clearly the maid had been in recently. That was bad news as far as evidence went, but she knew from experience that the cleaning staff didn’t always get everything. Though the level of service at the Braun Suites was high, guests who stayed for extended periods often designated certain areas off-limits. No matter how nice the hotel, it was still a hotel-people needed to claim personal space in order to make it a home.
The suite’s bedroom featured a hot tub, king-size bed, and walk-in closet. It was just as clean as the living room but revealed more of Kanamu’s personality; rock-climbing gear was piled in a corner, an expensive camera sat on the nightstand, and Catherine was pretty sure the three poster-sized, framed photographs on the walls hadn’t been put there by the hotel.
She studied the closest picture. It had apparently been taken at night, and the subject was a robot giraffe with a huge fireball erupting from its mouth.
The next was of a woman wearing only an elaborate horned headdress, stilts so tall they extended past the bottom of the photo, and body paint accented with glitter; the artist had used an astronomy theme, swirling ga laxies and fiery comets chasing themselves across the woman’s body. She was framed against a perfect blue sky, no clouds or horizon visible.
The third was the outline of some sort of temple in the distance, rising out of a thick cloud of mist. In the foreground, a man wearing a gas mask and a huge pair of white angel wings stood with his arms extended.
She found what she was looking for in the walk-in closet, which Kanamu had turned into a small office. A desk at one end held a laptop, and a comfortable chair was parked in front of it.
She turned on the laptop and wasn’t surprised when it asked her for a password. Only one reason a man locks himself in a tiny room with no windows and a laptop: porn.
No wastepaper basket, though. She opened the top drawer of the desk, expecting Kleenex and a bottle of hand lotion-and found something else instead.
Plain Ridge High School in North Las Vegas enrolled just under three thousand students. It had slightly more male students than female; 40 percent of its student body was white, 12 percent black, 15 percent Asian, and 33 percent Hispanic. Its chess club regularly placed in the state finals, it had a drama department fond of producing all-Spanish versions of Shakespeare plays, and its sports program included socce r, volleyball, baseball, basketball, and bowling.
But none of those activities compared to football.
Plain Ridge High’s long-standing rivalry was with Carston High, located only a few blocks away. While the two schools competed in almost every possible arena, their most fervent battles were always on the gridiron. In past years, both schools had been subject to toilet papering, mascot stealing, trash-talking graffiti, and the occasional brawl due to the intense rivalry between the Plain Ridge Rockets and the Carston Enforcers. Blood had been spilled before, both on and off the field, and would be again.
But nobody at either school knew just how much.
Keenan Harribold had been their star player. Only hours after his death, graffiti was discovered sprayed on the exterior wall of Plain Ridge High’s gymnasium. It provoked anger from the students and concern from the faculty; while scrawled obscenities were nothing new, death threats were. The administration of both schools agreed to a meeting later that day to discuss the situation and decide what to do about it.
The news of Keenan Harribold’s death surfaced midmorning. It spread throughout Plain Ridge High like a shockwave, followed closely by a surge of rising fury.
Bad news always traveled faster than good. The students at Carston knew about the murder almost as soon as the ones at Plain Ridge did, and expressed shock, dismay, and a complete denial of responsibility. Despite their historic rivalry, there were still friendships that linked students at both schools; a flurry of cell phone calls as intense as any high-level diplomatic negotiations followed. They were not successful.
As a result, the retaliatory attack was anticipated, though not prepared for. Then again, the mob of students from Plain Ridge-around a thousand strong, a good 30 percent of the student body-was not highly organized, either.
But they were angry.
“It’s on,” Tyler Pullam said to Ryan Dill. The noon bell had just rung. “They’re on their way.” He’d just come from PE, and he’d brought a baseball bat with him. Alarms vibrated in the social web, but no one had informed any of the teachers; the social dynamics at work were primitive, violent, and instinctive. The colony was under attack.
Ryan and Tyler were two of the students who rushed outside as the mob approached; they were joined by hundreds others. People had grabbed bats, two-by-fours from the wood shop, tire irons; some of them had knives.
The two groups converged. War had begun.
Grissom was eating breakfast at a diner when the phrase “student at Plain Ridge High School ” caught his ear. He asked the waitress to turn up th e television and for another cup of tea.
“-bizarre twist to this tragedy,” the anchorwoman said. Her solemn face was replaced by a shot of a white concrete wall with a message spray-painted on it in bright crimson: HOW YOU GONNA WIN WITH A DEAD QUARTERBACK? “This graffiti was found on the wall of the Plain Ridge High School gymnasium, only hours before Keenan Harribold, the starting quarterback for the Plain Ridge Rockets, was found dead in a Las Vegas motel room. News quickly spread throughout the school, leading to an impromptu march at noon to nearby Carston High, Plain Ridge’s longtime rival in many areas, including football.”
Jittery amateur footage replaced the graffiti shot. It showed a horde of angry teenagers rampaging through the hallway of a school, tearing posters from walls, smashing glass, and attacking other students. Some carried baseball bats.
“The riot lasted half an hour and resulted in multiple injuries, including three knifings and one shooting. Eleven people are in the hospital this afternoon, three of them in serious condition, though no fatalities have been reported at this time. So far, the police have declined to give any details concerning Harribold’s death.”
Grissom finished his tea, paid the bill, and left.
Nick Stokes wasn’t crazy about bugs.
This had less to do with any sense of squeamishness than the fact that he’d once been buried alive by a psycho with a grudge against the Las Vegas Crime Lab. The crate he’d been buried in had been sealed up tight-but not tight enough to prevent it from being invaded by fire ants. Nightmares had woken him up for months afterward, his skin burning with phantom bites that had long since faded from his body. He wasn’t too fond of enclosed spaces after that, either.
The experience had marked him on a deeper level than just the physical, and now he found certain cases affected him, maybe more than they should. When he’d seen what had crawled out of that bag, he couldn’t help but imagine what the boy’s last moments had been like. Blind, suffocating, feeling the maddening tickle of a hundred legs crawling over your face and through your hair…
Grissom had known immediately that no one would choose to commit suicide in such a way, and so had Nick. The reason Nick was now searching Keenan Harribold’s bedroom wasn’t because he thought he’d find giant posters of millipedes on his wall and a pile of Insect Hill brochures on his bedside table; it was to try to glean some kind of clue about who would want to kill him.
The room was pretty typical for a teenage boy into sports: posters of girls in bikinis on the walls, a trophy on a bookshelf, an unmade bed, and piles of clothes on the floor. A sm all desk under the window held a stack of homework and a closed laptop.
Nick pulled out the wooden chair in front of the desk, sat down, and opened the laptop. It came to life immediately, still online.
“Looks like you weren’t too careful about security,” Nick murmured. “Let’s see what you were up to…”
A few minutes sorting through Keenan’s e-mails led Nick to something interesting: a message from someone named LW.
“Really looking forward to seeing you tonight,” Nick read out loud. “I hope you’re as hot in person as you are in your pictures.”
There were more messages stored, all of them telling the same story of an online seduction. There were pictures, too, of a young and pretty blonde standing outside different Vegas landmarks: the Bellagio fountains, the MGM Grand, the Luxor. There was nothing terribly racy in any of them, nothing to suggest that they were anything but genuine.
Nick knew better. Photos were easy to find and copy on the Net, and wholesome teenage girls didn’t lure you to a Vegas motel room and kill you with poisonous bugs. Usually.
He backtracked through the e-mails by date until he found their point of origin: a dating site. LW had her own page, with an extensive list of interests, hobbies, favorite movies, and music she liked. Nick found a page for Keenan Harribold, too; not surprisingly , his interests and LW’s synched up nicely.
The e-mails went back six weeks. So you stalked him online, Nick thought. Got into his head, designed the perfect lure. Took your time, didn’t overplay your hand. And when Keenan was confident you were the real thing, you set up a meeting.
Nick closed the laptop, unplugged it, and bagged it as evidence, even though he’d probably already learned all it had to tell him. The real trail didn’t begin at the laptop, or even in Keenan’s bedroom; it began in the vast electronic tangle of the Internet, where a predator had spun his own very specialized web designed to snare Keenan Harribold.
Grissom squinted at the program booklet while waiting for the next presentation to start. Most of the seats in the room were empty, the spotlight on the lectern at the front the brightest point in the room.
“Well,” said Vanderhoff, taking a seat next to Grissom, “how did things go?”
“Yes,” said Quadros, taking the seat on the other side. “Nathan has been telling me about you mysteriously disappearing in the middle of the night. Most intriguing.”
“It was… unusual,” Grissom admitted. “Though I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to comment further.”
“Why?” Quadros demanded. “We are all men of science. Surely you’re not afraid we’re going to steal your data?”
Vanderhoff shook his head. “Now, Roberto, you know that’s not fair. Mr. Grissom has to concern himself with legalities, not just peer review.”
“I do not see the problem,” said Quadros. “In São Paulo, scientific experts are often consulted by the police. Could you not take us into your confidence under the same conditions? I would be happy to sign any necessary document-and, of course, to offer my own expertise.” He frowned. “Unless, of course, you feel you need no assistance…”
Vanderhoff sighed. “Nathan, Nathan-must you make everything about your stubborn pride? Can’t you see-”
“Gentlemen,” Grissom interjected. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer. But at this stage of the case, the entomological aspect is fairly straightforward. If I needed help in a difficult classification or in analyzing data, you’d be the first people I’d turn to. I still may-and if that happens, I will ask you to sign forms promising not to share any sensitive information. Is that satisfactory?”
Quadros, somewhat mollified, said, “I suppose.”
Vanderhoff raised his eyebrows. “You still may? That sounds promising. Are you expecting more late-night excursions?”
“In Vegas?” said Grissom. “You can count on it.”
Jake Soames caught up with Grissom as he was leaving a slide show dealing with the effects of butterfly migration on bird populations. “Gil!”
Grissom stopped. “Hello, Jake. Enjoying the conference?”
“Haven’t seen a lot of it so far-too busy enjoying the town. Haven’t gotten a lot of sleep yet, if you know what I mean.” He winked.
“If you’re suffering from jet lag, I’d suggest melatonin. It’s quite effective, even in very small doses.”
Soames shook his head, then winced. “Ow. Shouldn’t do that again, or the bloody thing’ll come off. And how was your evening after you left?”
“Short. I visited a crime scene, then went to bed.”
“All in a night’s work, eh? Even when you’re not working. Was it worth the trip?”
“I suppose it was. Saw something I’ve never seen before, in any case.”
“Which you can’t tell me about, right?”
“Not in any detail, no.”
“I seem to always be arriving at the tail end of interesting conversations,” Khem Charong said. Today he wore a suit of dark gray with a black tie. “I must endeavor to improve my timing.”
“We were just talking about Gil’s late-night activities,” Soames said. “Got a phone call in the middle of our festivities, disappeared into the night. Seems the Vegas constables can’t do their job without him.”
Grissom did his best to smile. “It was more of a co urtesy call. The people I work with thought I’d appreciate certain… aspects of the case.”
“Oh? Such as?”
Grissom surrendered to the inevitable. “Millipedes. Harpaphe haydeniana were found at a crime scene.”
Charong tilted his head quizzically. “In a dry, desert climate like this? Very odd.”
“You understand that you can’t repeat that,” said Grissom. “It’s confidential information in an ongoing case.”
“I’ll be the soul of discretion,” said Charong.
“And I’ll keep my gob shut,” said Soames. “Until it’s time to pour some more beer down my throat, anyway. What do you say we go get a drink?”
Riley Adams inspected the spray-painted graffiti carefully. She’d already taken numerous photos, and now she scraped off a tiny sample into a collection vial.
The wall was right next to a concrete path, one well traveled in the daytime. There was no convenient security camera nearby or even a light source. No one had seen the vandal.
She sighed. Though she was sure the two sites were connected, the perpetrator had left even less evidence at this scene. All she had was a vague description, a phony name in a motel register, and a bag full of millipedes. Oh, and twenty dollars less in her pocket after she paid off Brass.
She tried to think it through. Kill a football star to start a riot? Maybe, but why use such an esoteric method? The crime had clearly been carefully planned-but was the quarterback the real victim or just a means to an end?
It seemed to her like a revenge killing-the horrific means of murder, the taunting message left behind. She doubted if the rivalry between the two schools really ran that deep-and if it did, there was more at work than sports teams competing.
No shortage of deep-seated hatreds in high school, she thought. And football players generate more than their share. Spurned girlfriends, bullied geeks, competitors for the same position… if Riley’s experience was any indication, Keenan Harribold probably had more enemies in his own school than at Carston High.
But how many of them could be into bugs?
She walked around the building and found the front entrance for the school. It was locked now, but she spotted someone moving around inside and knocked on the glass of the door. The custodian, a heavyset Hispanic man, let her in when she flashed her ID.
“Can you tell me where the science classrooms are, please?”
To her surprise, there was someone in one of them when she got there: a blond man in his thirties sat at the teacher’s desk, intent on a pile of papers in front of him.
“Working late?” asked Riley, standing in the doorway.
The man’s head jerked up in surprise. “ What? Oh, I’m sorry. You startled me.”
“I’m Riley Adams, with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I’m investigating the incident that happened earlier.” She walked into the room, looking around and noting details: models of molecules hung from the roof; large colorful posters of the periodic table and solar system were on the walls. In the corner, fluorescent light shone dimly from a glass terrarium with a sand-filled bottom, its only apparent occupant several plastic plants.
“I’m Colin Brady,” he said, getting to his feet. “I teach science here.”
“My favorite subject,” said Riley. “Looks like you’re catching up on your marking.”
“Trying to.” He paused. “I’m sorry, that sounded rude. I just meant I’m always trying to catch up-emphasis on the trying, as opposed to succeeding.” He smiled. Despite his thinning hair, he looked young for a teacher.
“Yeah, marking is always the worst. I still have bad memories of working as a TA in college.” She smiled back.
“How can I help you, uh… Detective?”
“Riley is fine. I was wondering if any of your students have ever shown a fascination with insects.”
“The first student that comes to mind is Lucas Yannick,” Brady said. “He’s the one who convinced me to get our emperor scorpion. I wasn’t sure at first-high scho ol kids and a poisonous creature are a bad combination-but he told me he’d take personal responsibility for any problems.”
“And have there been any?” asked Riley.
“There was one, yes. A few of the kids were horsing around and one of them decided to pick up the scorpion with a pair of forceps and wave it around, try to get the girls screaming. Lucas told him to drop it and when he didn’t, he punched the kid in the stomach.”
“I see. Who were the other kids who were involved?”
Brady leaned against his desk and crossed his arms. “Let me see… It was a while ago, so the details aren’t terribly sharp. I’m pretty sure it was a few of the guys on the football team.”
“Would that include Keenan Harribold?”
Brady stared at her for a second before answering. “No. No, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t involved.”
“What kind of student is Lucas otherwise?”
“Very bright. Not terribly social, but he has a small circle of friends he hangs around with.”
“Does he get picked on a lot?”
“Not in my classroom. But yeah, he’s the kind of kid who winds up being a target if he isn’t careful.”
Riley had a little game she liked to play in her head. She called it the WTAA game, and the rules were very simple: she counted how many questions she could ask a subject before she got the question “What’s t his all about?” or something similar. It didn’t matter if she’d started the interview with an explanation for why she was there-sooner or later, anyone trying to project an air of innocence asked it, as if being unable to see the obvious meant they were clearly incapable of any crime. It didn’t necessarily mean the person she was talking to had done anything wrong; it was simply an indicator that they were nervous, a common reaction to being questioned by an authority figure.
“I have to ask…,” Brady said.
“Yes?”
“Would you like to see our scorpion?”
She blinked. “Okay.”
He led her over to the terrarium. Crouched in one corner under one of the plastic plants was a huge black scorpion, its barbed tail curled over its back. It didn’t move at their approach; it was so still it could have been made of stone.
“Here’s what finally persuaded me,” said Brady. He hit a button on the top of the tank, turning off the fluorescent. “Get the lights, will you?”
Riley hesitated, then walked over to the switch beside the door and turned it off. A second later a small UV tube flickered to life in the roof of the terrarium-and suddenly, the black scorpion was no longer there.
It had been replaced by one that glowed an eerie electric blue, like the world’s most intricate neon sign. Only the tiniest twitch of its claws tol d Riley she was looking at a living thing-though it looked more like it belonged in a video game than a classroom.
She got closer and knelt down. “That’s pretty amazing,” she said.
“Yeah. Younger scorpions don’t do it, only adults.”
She straightened up. “I guess there are some things kids just aren’t ready for…”
As Nick expected, LW’s dating website page led nowhere. It was hosted by a server in the Philippines, one that wouldn’t give him access to its personal files. Not that it mattered-a cursory check of some of the information on LW’s page proved she was almost completely fictional. She didn’t go to the school she listed, the organizations she said she belonged to had never heard of her, and even the pictures of her looked suspiciously dated when examined closely-Nick spotted the corner of a billboard behind her in one and recognized it as having been from an ad campaign in Vegas at least five years ago. Keenan Harribold would have still been in elementary school.
“Hey, Grissom,” said Brass. “Am I interrupting?”
Grissom looked up from his untouched drink. “No, not at all,” he said.
Grissom, Nathan Vanderhoff, Jake Soames, and Roberto Quadros were sharing a booth in the hotel lounge. A mediocre comic had just left the stage to scattered applause and widespread indifference.
“Hi,” said Brass, smiling at each of them. “Captain Jim Brass.” He offered his hand and got an introduction from each of them in turn. “I hate to bother you, Gil,” said Brass. “I know you’re technically not on the job, but we could really use your help with this one. I mean, come on-this case is tailor-made for you. You’re our bug guy.”
Soames leaned forward, his eyes bright. “Actually, Captain Brass, at this table we’re all ‘bug guys.’ If Gilly is too busy to help, maybe we could.”
Brass glanced over at Grissom. “Gilly?”
Grissom gave him a warning look. “My team is perfectly capable of handling the case without me.”
“No offense, ‘Gilly,’” said Brass, “but your team, good as they are, just doesn’t have your expertise when it comes to things that scuttle around and hide under rocks. We need help on this one-I’m almost tempted to take your friend up on his offer.”
“And why not?” said Vanderhoff. “I’d also be happy to volunteer my services while I’m in town. Roberto, of course, is far too sophisticated for such an endeavor-”
“Shut up, Nathan. I’m just as interested as the rest of you.”
Grissom put up his hands. “All right, I surrender. I’m clearly in the minority here. Jim, if you’re that desperate, I suppose my colleagues-and I-are willing to offer our advice. But I warn all of you-forensics work isn’t as glamorous as you might imagine.”
“Fantastic,” said Brass. “Well, this turned out better than I could have hoped. I went out hunting one expert and bagged three.”
“Better make it four,” said Soames. “Khem will want in, too.”
“I’ll have the nondisclosure forms drawn up right away,” said Brass. “Grissom, can I grab you for a few moments? There’re a few details I’d like your take on right away.”
Grissom nodded and got up. “Excuse me.”
As they walked away, Brass muttered, “Think they bought it?”
“I guess we’ll see,” said Grissom.
Greg looked around nervously. The gun he gripped in his right hand wasn’t his own; it was an old-fashioned six-shot Colt, the kind of long-barrelled revolver Wild Bill Hickock or Wyatt Earp might have owned. It was fully loaded-but then, so was the gun of the man he was hunting.
He leaned against the weather-beaten wall, listening for the crunch of boots on gravel, and tried to get his breathing under control.
Remember your CSI training, Greggo. This guy might think he’s a killer, but you’ve got a fair bit of range time under your belt. Don’t get spooked.
A hard voice called out, “Hey! Kid! I’m getting tired of this. You know you don’t stand a chance-why don’t you just face me and get this over with?”
“If that’s the way you want it,” Greg called back. “Let’s see how good you are…”
Greg whirled a round the corner, gun held straight ahead of him, already aiming at where the voice had come from. He snapped off a quick shot-
Two bullets slammed into his chest. The first caught him in the breastbone, right over the heart; the second smacked into his shoulder.
As he collapsed, one thought flashed through his mind: This hurts a lot more than paintball…