Brass in Pocket (3 page)

Nick would have to go wading after all. And in something far worse than stagnant pool water.

“Deke Freeson did take a shot,” Nick said when he came back into the room. “But his shot missed. It flew out the open door and struck a steel rail by the pool, causing a spark, which our witness saw and confused for a muzzle flash.”

“He's from Iowa,” Catherine said, knowing even as she spoke that it didn't explain anything. “Anyway, it didn't slow the shooter for long. He took another step or two into the room, and at closer range, shot Deke in the face.”

“Both of those rounds I collected were nine millimeter,” Nick said. “And the one I found by the pool was fifty caliber. Deke's trusty Desert Eagle.”

“So did the shooter snatch Antoinette O'Brady?” Catherine asked. She stretched, working out the kinks that set in from too much close examination of evidence.

“I don't think so.” Nick beckoned her into the bathroom. She suppressed a shudder as she walked in, imagining what a close examination of the room's every surface might reveal. “Look,” he said. “The bathroom window's open. There's blood transfer on the window frame. We know whoever was on the bed behind Freeson was covered in his blood. And not only is his car not in the parking lot, but there are no cars in the lot that were not identified as belonging to a guest or motel staff. I think Antoinette O'Brady got out the window and took Freeson's car.”

“So we need to post a Be on the Lookout.”

“Already done.”

She was impressed. While she had been examining bodily fluids, Nick had been busy too. “I found some hairs and fibers,” she said. “At a guess, I'd say the hairs came from five or six different people. I have short and dark, long and blond, short and bleached, and a couple of fragments that are hard to make out with the naked eye but look to be more of a light brown. Various fibers, mostly cotton or acrylic, I think. It looks like there are some used tissues in the wastebasket by the sink, but I haven't collected those yet. Friction ridge impressions—lots of smudges but a couple of good clear ones, including some palm prints on the headboard.”

“In the blood?”

“Under it. Oh, and look at this.”

“What?”

She pointed to a spot near the door. “Bits of oily black soil on the carpet. It's fresh.”

“Any guesses?”

“It could be a lot of things,” she said. “I'd rather find out for sure than make assumptions now.”

“You're the boss.”

“For the moment, anyway.”

“I live in the moment,” Nick said with a grin.

Catherine appreciated the gesture. Nick knew Gil Grissom was his real boss, and he looked up to Gil. In his early days at the crime lab, he had practically hero-worshipped the man. But Gil was gone, and chain of command meant he reported to her.

Catherine's crime lab family had been shrinking lately—as had her real family these past few years, for that matter. Professionally, she had lost Sara
Sidle, who had quit the lab and left town, and Warrick Brown, to a killer's bullets. In civilian life, her father and her ex-husband had both been murdered, and her daughter Lindsey was rapidly becoming a young woman who would need her mother less and less as each day passed.

Maybe the years were changing Catherine too, drawing out her maternal instincts and making her want to shelter people, to clutch those she cared about close to her. The urge not to be abandoned anymore was growing.

“Let's wrap this up and get out of here,” she said. “The sooner we get this stuff to the lab, the better I'll like it.”

“You and me both, Catherine.” Nick took a plastic evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from his field kit and started collecting the black soil she had pointed out. “You and me both.”

T
HE DRIVE TO THE
Desert View Airport in North Las Vegas would have been an incredible pain at rush hour, since the city's population boom had overwhelmed its highway system, but at quarter after nine at night it wasn't so bad. Greg Sanders drove one of the lab's Yukon SUVs, with Riley Adams riding shotgun. Catherine and Nick were stuck at the Rancho Center Motel, a fleabag that Greg was not at all sorry to miss out on.

From the brief report he'd been given, he wasn't too certain why they were bothering with this trip. The real reason they had gone was that Catherine had told them to, and when Catherine was in charge they obviously went where she said. What he wasn't entirely sure of was whether or not a crime had been committed at the airport. And determining that wasn't the job of the crime lab—that was right there in the name. They investigated
crime scenes, after the LVPD made the determination that there had, in fact, been a crime.

Apparently somebody was convinced, though, because they were rolling. Desert View was a small airfield, with a combination tower and administrative office building, some work sheds, an assortment of hangars, and a single runway lit by a series of low blue lights. Most of the buildings were of corrugated steel, but the tower/office complex was stucco or adobe, painted a pale green color. A uniformed cop met the Yukon at the entrance and directed them to the runway. “This is kind of cool, isn't it?” Greg said. “Driving on a runway where only airplanes get to go.”

“And service vehicles, and random pickup trucks,” Riley reminded him. “Just be sure you move before the next seven-forty-seven lands, Greg.”

“Seven-forty-sevens land—” Greg began. Which was just what she wanted. When she replaced Sara, it took him weeks to get used to her quirky sense of humor. Even now, when he was concentrating on something else—driving on a runway, for instance—she could catch him off guard. It wasn't like he didn't have a sense of humor. He'd been class clown for most of his school years, and liked to think he continued the tradition at the crime lab. But hers was—well, it was different. It seemed to come from dark, unexpected places inside her, and she had such a wry, deadpan delivery that it was almost always surprising.

The runway was paved, but just barely. After the pavement ran out, there was nothing but scrubby desert leading up into the hills. The lights of Las
Vegas glowed to the south, turning the night sky a sparkling gray color that always reminded him of frost riming the black paint of the rented Volvo wagon his Nana and Papa Olaf had used when he visited Norway with them as a child. Flaccid air socks showed how still the night air was.
A breeze would be nice
, Greg thought. It would cool down eventually—and fairly rapidly, once all the city's concrete and steel and the hard desert floor released the day's heat—but for the moment,
sweltering
was the word that came to mind.

Two more uniformed cops flanked a small private plane. “There we go,” he said, happy to change the subject from imaginary 747s. “That looks like our goal.”

“It does indeed,” Riley said. “Assuming our goal is a Piper Malibu Mirage, and those unis aren't just admiring it.”

“They have their backs to it,” Greg pointed out.

“Could be a cultural variation. You can never tell with cops.”

“You do know your planes,” Greg said, ignoring her other comments. That was, he had learned, the best way to deal with her. “Assuming you're right and you didn't just make that up.”

“My mother wanted one of those,” Riley said. Both of her parents were psychiatrists, Greg knew. Which meant a private plane that could cost a million bucks or so wasn't necessarily out of reach for them. “She had brochures, catalogs, DVDs. But my father thought they were dangerous.”

“Did she know how to fly?”

“No.”

“Then he might have been right.” He braked the SUV a dozen feet away from the plane. The uniformed officers started toward them. “And depending on what we find here, we might decide he definitely was.”

“Oh, there's no question about that. She isn't even a very good driver. If she got behind the controls of an airplane, I would go into an underground bunker until it was safe.”

As they introduced themselves to the uniformed officers and signed the security log, a couple of people hiked out from the shadows, apparently coming from the tower or a nearby hangar. One was a woman, tall and lean as a fencepost, with sandy blond hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore a blue workshirt open over a red T-shirt, grease-stained blue jeans, and black work boots. The man with her was equally slender. His hair was short and dark, graying at the temples but mostly hidden under a ball cap bearing the Garmin logo. He wiped his hands on his jeans and then offered his right to Greg. “Stan Johnston,” he said. His grip was crushing, his eyes deeply creased around the edges and terribly sad. “I can't say it's a pleasure, but thanks for coming, Detective.”

“We're not detectives, Mr. Johnston. We're with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I'm Greg Sanders, this is Riley Adams.” Stan Johnston looked confused. “There has been a crime committed, right?” Greg asked.

“I'm Patti Van Dyke,” the woman said in a throaty voice that made Greg think of whiskey and cigarettes. Neither of which seemed especially suited to aviation, but maybe she, like Riley's mother, remained
earthbound. “Would it help if we told you what happened?”

Greg caught Riley's glance. There was a smile lurking just behind her lips, but she was professional enough to hold it back. “That would help a lot,” she said.

“Well, that there Piper belongs to Jesse Dunwood,” Patti said.

“Where is Mr. Dunwood now?” Greg asked. “Is he here?”

“Well, he's inside it.”

“He's—”

“We figured there was no point in calling a bus,” one of the unis said. “Coroner's on the way but I guess they're a little backed up tonight.”

Every night
, Greg thought. Las Vegas's murder rate, like its traffic, had swollen along with its population. “The coroner?”

“Maybe you'd better take a look, sir.”

Greg and Riley walked toward the front of the aircraft until they could see inside through a side window.

The victim—Jesse Dunwood, according to the woman—was alone, sitting in the pilot's chair on the left side of the plane. He was a middle-aged white man, a little on the meaty side, with neatly cropped reddish-brown hair. His head was tilted back against his seat, his mouth hanging open, blue eyes wide and glassy. There was a slight flush to his skin, or else he might have been recently sunburned, but over a deep brown tan. He wore what looked like an expensive silk shirt, designer jeans, and loafers.

“That man is definitely dead,” Riley said.

“No sign of foul play, though,” Greg said. “That we can see from here, at least.”

“Could be natural causes,” Riley said. “Heart attack, stroke, something like that. But he's dead, no getting around that.”

“Why don't you finish telling us what happened, Ms. Van Dyke?” Greg asked.

“Well, Stan here was in the tower, not me. I mean, I was up there part of the time, but not the whole time. I'm more of a grease monkey.”

He had been hoping to hear the whole story from a single witness, but he had to take what he could get. “Okay, Mr. Johnston then. What happened?”

“Jesse went up for a sunset flight,” Stan said. “He likes to do that, or else night flights. Looks at the lights of Las Vegas—city's a lot prettier at night than during the day, he always says.”

“Can't argue with that,” Riley said.

“Sometimes he takes a lady up there, to show it off,” Stan continued.

“The same one?” Greg asked. “Or a different one each time?”

“Oh, different ones mostly,” Patti said. “Sometimes two or three at a time. The airplane has four seats.”

Other people, also airport employees from the looks of them, started to gather around. After Greg had the general outline down, he would have to separate them, because the detectives would want to interview them individually, without letting their versions of the story be shaped by what they had heard.

“Okay,” Greg said, trying to steer the conversation back to basics. “So he went for a flight. When was that?”

Stan looked at his watch. “Wheels up about seven-fifteen,” he said. “Landed just over an hour later, eight-twenty, eight-twenty-five or so. I can get you the exact times in the tower.”

“We'll need that,” Riley assured him.

“Then what happened?” Greg prodded.

“Then, nothing. He brought her in for a beautiful landing, as smooth as butter. The airplane taxied, slowed, and stopped. Jesse's been flying all his life—he used to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force. He could handle an aircraft like nobody's business.”

“But then he never got out of the plane,” Patti said. “That's when I thought maybe something was wrong. I went up to the tower and told Stan, ‘Hey, you think something's wrong with Jesse? He's just sitting there on the runway.'”

“There sure enough was something wrong,” one of the newcomers said. He was dressed in a janitor's gray coveralls, and although he looked short, Greg realized it was because his spine was bent almost in half and his left leg was enclosed in a steel brace. Straightened out, he would have been just over six feet tall. His hair was wispy and gray and his face was all edges and angles, with more than a day's stubble covering cheeks and chin, except where a puckered scar ran from the edge of his mouth to his right eye, like a fat white earthworm had settled onto his cheek to take a nap.

“Who are you?” Riley asked him.

“I'm Benny. Benny Kracsinski.”

“Benny's a night janitor,” a tall, heavyset African-American man said. He wore a striped dark blue jumpsuit that didn't quite hide the grease stains. Greg noted that his fingernails were extremely short, either bitten or seriously pared back. His shaved head gleamed in the light.

“Look, we'll get statements from all of you,” Greg said. “But I'd like to do it one at a time. Is there someplace that the rest of you could wait while we talk to Mr. Johnston here?”