Brass in Pocket (6 page)

“How long has the property been fenced off?” Greg asked.

“Just for a couple of days. It's been surveyed and
marked, with those plastic tags tied to stakes and plants and such, for months, but the construction company didn't put up fencing until they were ready to start digging.”

“Well, someone's been coming in here and leaving this stuff,” Greg said. “You don't get this sort of concentration by accident.”

“According to what I was told, the archeologist said she looked everything over and determined that they're all animal bones,” Officer Villanueva said. “Dogs, cats, mice, hamsters, pigs. The newest is a sheep.” She pointed, and Greg turned his light on a mostly intact sheep carcass. “No human remains at all.”

“That's good,” Greg said. “Because if there were human ones in there, she would have been seriously trashing our crime scene.”

“It's still a crime,” Riley said. Her voice was tight, and when Greg glanced over he saw that she was so tense that veins stood out on her neck like ropes. “I mean, sometimes I like animals more than people. I'd love to know who put these bones here.”

“I don't know if finding out is a big priority tonight, since we're a little shorthanded and we have actual dead humans to deal with,” Greg said, attempting to steer the conversation back to the business at hand. Riley was getting emotional about the crime scene. He had been one of the first CSIs at a horrific scene where dead fighting dogs had been dumped, but those bodies had been fresher than these, their fur still intact in most cases. And there had been a woman's body close by, which had redirected his focus. Still, he didn't like the idea of animal
bones piled up out here in the middle of the desert any more than Riley did. “But we're here, so I guess it can't hurt to look around a bit.”

“One more thing,” Officer Villanueva said. She toed a coffee can, its opening covered by a tight-fitting plastic top. “The archeologist found these in among the bones. That's when she decided to call the police.”

Greg put his kit down, took out a pair of latex gloves, and tugged them on over his hands. Covered up, he opened the coffee can and looked inside. As soon as he shook it, he knew what it contained, and a quick peek confirmed his guess.

He wished the archeologist had left them where she'd found them instead of picking them up. It would be hard to get a conviction based on such a compromised crime scene, if it came to that. He might have to interview the archeologist, and he would definitely want to know if she had taken pictures of the scene before she poked around in the bones.

“Bullets,” he said. “Looks like forty-fives, mostly, but a couple of twenty-twos as well. Eight of them.”

“A hunter wouldn't shoot animals and then bury them,” Riley said. “And a hunter wouldn't shoot dogs and cats and hamsters and sheep, either.”

“This was no hunter,” Greg agreed. “Get some photos, Riley. Officer, can I get to that sheep without walking on the other bones?”

The depression was a little more than eight feet across, and almost three deep. Officer Villanueva led him around to the far side while Riley circled the pit snapping pictures, her flash strobing the night.
There, most of its bulk hidden from the front by the pile of bones, white against white, was the corpse of a recently killed sheep, its wool painted in spots with dried blood that resembled rust stains. While he looked it over, Riley put the camera away and beamed her light down into the pit.

“Greg?” Riley had sunk to her knees by the edge of the depression. She had gloved up too, and she held a bone in the air, lighting it with her flashlight. “I've got tool marks here. They look like knife marks to me. Cuts are deep enough to scrape bone.”

“Great,” Greg said. “Does this mean we've got a sicko who likes to kill animals? Because that
is
a crime.”

He went toward the sheep, his gut churning unpleasantly with every step. He didn't expect to like what he found.

The sheep had been dead for a week or so, Greg speculated, but no more than that. Its flesh was loose and just starting to cave in under the coils of wool. Further investigation could reveal precisely how long it had been dead—that was the sort of thing Grissom was good at; he could look at the insects crawling around on and inside it and pinpoint a time of death within hours, under most circumstances. Greg had yet to amass the experience to do that.

“I have a dog skull here with a bullet hole in it,” Riley announced. “Execution-style, back of the head.”

Greg didn't answer. The sheep appeared to be the biggest animal in the pit by a wide margin. The smell of its decomposing flesh and filthy, bloody
wool was cloying, almost gagging him, and he found himself breathing through his mouth. The wool twitched with activity. Maggots, probably. He tried not to think about those as he reached for it. The animal was on its side, legs toward him, head curled in toward its chest, where most of the blood was gathered.

He had a bad feeling about that.

“It's a ewe,” he said.

“It's a you?” Riley echoed. “What do you mean, it's a me?”

“E-w-e. A female… never mind.” Why was he such easy prey for her? Because he didn't expect such a pretty woman to be such a smart-ass? Not like he hadn't known plenty of pretty smart-asses in his life. Humor was how Riley dealt with tense situations, though, and if he had to be the target this time, so be it. But he couldn't allow it to distract him.
Focus, Greg. Look at the throat
. He took a handful of wool and tilted the head back. It moved easily.
Too easy
.

When he exposed the neck, he knew why.

An opening gaped there, like a black-rimmed smile, the flesh curling away from the gap.

Greg made a choking noise and released it.

Someone had slit the ewe's throat.

That didn't happen in nature. Not that way. Not that clean a cut.

A knife had made that slice.

Bullets, knives, cut marks. Animals of varying sizes and descriptions, all killed and then left here.

What kind of person would do something like this?

From the look on Riley's face, her jaw tight and trembling, her lips almost vanished in a thin white line, her eyes gleaming in the reflected glow of her flashlight, he knew he wouldn't want to be that person if she found him.

But he couldn't help hoping that she did find him.

N
ICK
S
TOKES HAD OBTAINED
a warrant to search Deke Freeson's office. There wasn't, as it turned out, much of anyone to object to such a search. Freeson had once been married and had a son, but he and his wife had been divorced for years, and she and their son had both died during Hurricane Katrina, when they were trapped in an apartment building that collapsed on them.

From what little Nick knew about Freeson's private life, tragedy seemed to buzz around him the way flies did around feces. Nick was surprised the man could still get dates, particularly from some of the beautiful women he had been seen with, considering his lady friends had a history of developing terrible diseases, running into immovable objects while driving fast cars, or otherwise becoming former lady friends in various, usually painful ways. He had been the subject of an investigation once, when someone had noticed that very pattern—Nick
remembered that Jim Brass had handled the case, in fact—but it had turned out that Deke Freeson was simply a very unlucky guy.

Or, to be more precise, any woman who spent too much time with him was unlucky. Brass had told Nick once that he thought Freeson just attracted women on a downward spiral. He moved through Las Vegas's underbelly, and the people he met were rarely without serious problems. Freeson himself never seemed to suffer, except perhaps emotionally or psychically. He was healthy, had all his original body parts, and no more scars than the average guy. He had made it through the Gulf War and a career on the LVPD after that conflict, and then years as a private investigator, without once getting shot or stabbed or run over.

Until he had the misfortune to go to a room at the Rancho Center Motel.
That place should be razed
, Nick thought,
and the ground salted where it had stood
. An exorcism might not be out of order. Its continued existence was a blight on the city of Las Vegas, and didn't say much for humanity in general.

Freeson's office was small, a single room upstairs over a coffee shop on Charleston, with two desks and some filing cabinets crammed into it. It didn't even have a bathroom of its own, but shared one with several other office suites. The little room smelled like sweat and mildew. Freeson had a part-time assistant named Camille Blaise who had come over and opened the office for Nick. She was waiting in the hallway now, reading over the warrant Nick had handed her.

When she wasn't around, Freeson used a voicemail
system provided by the phone company, for which Nick knew he'd have to get the luds. Before he sent her into the hall, he'd had Blaise show him which desk was Freeson's and give him Freeson's computer password. There was a flat-screen monitor on the desk. Nick reached under the desk and turned on the computer. Once booted up, he scanned the files, but it looked like he used it mostly for e-mail and web browsing. That was a lot of what PIs did these days, hitting the online databases instead of doing old-fashioned footwork. It was no doubt quicker and more efficient, but Nick thought it eliminated some of the perceived glamour of the profession. It made a PI into just another keyboard jockey, like an accountant or a programmer.

According to Camille Blaise, Freeson kept all of his records on paper, not on the hard drive. He stuffed his receivables and payables in file folders, except for the most recent ones—piles of credit card receipts and bills were tossed without organization of any kind into a desk drawer. Nick briefly wondered what exactly Camille did for him. She looked like the kind of assistant someone hired at a strip club after a few too many margaritas. Freeson had a week-at-a-glance calendar in his top desk drawer where he jotted notes and appointments—coded ones, it appeared, in most cases, but Nick didn't see any notes written in a female hand. Nick guessed Freeson met clients downstairs in the coffee shop rather than letting them into his office, which would hardly inspire confidence, whether or not his assistant was around.

Like Catherine, Nick had heard that Freeson was
a pretty good detective. Which meant he didn't keep his place this way because he couldn't afford anything better. Nick's interpretation was that he just didn't care about the trappings—the nice office, the presentable staff, the latest high-tech gadget or accounting system. Deke Freeson wanted to focus on the work, on solving his clients' problems, and anything that didn't contribute directly to that wasn't important to him. Nick couldn't fault that. He liked his work area more organized, but if he had chosen to be a private detective, he figured he'd be much the same way about an office—he wouldn't care if it was impressive to clients, he would just want it to be functional so he could do the work.

Urgency gnawed at him. Psychoanalyzing the dead man wasn't his job. Finding the possibly live woman who was missing—that was his job now, and he had to give up trying to figure out Freeson and keep looking for Antoinette O'Brady. He rifled through the filing cabinets but couldn't find any files with the name
O'Brady
on them, Antoinette or otherwise. He looked through the calendar entries, trying to find an entry that he could decipher as her name or initials. No luck.

He went to the door, opened it. Camille was sitting on the floor, still studying the warrant as if it contained every fact she would ever need to know. “Ms. Blaise, can you come in here please?” he asked.

She snapped her gum and nodded.

She looked nineteen or twenty. Dark eyes popped out of her pale, skinny face, framed by limp,
dark brown hair. She wore too much mascara, smudged by tears that might well have been the genuine article, and her lipstick was a bright red that made Nick think of Hollywood starlets from eras gone by. He didn't know if the clothes she was wearing were typical work clothes or not, but her white cotton tank top was almost too loose to confine her small breasts, and her pants, clinging desperately to skinny hips, could have been torn off by a strong wind. When she moved, there was a liquid quality to her motion, as if she had been poured rather than grown.

“Yeah?”

“I need some information about Deke.”

“Yeah?”

No wonder she's part time
, Nick thought.
If she worked full time she'd drive anyone crazy
. “I can't really make heads or tails of his filing system.”

“You and me both.”

“So you didn't do any of his filing?”

“He never wanted me to touch that stuff. Or his, you know, money stuff.”

“You mean like accounting?”

“Right, that.”

“What exactly did you do for him?”

“Exactly?” She held Nick's gaze, but there was the slightest lowering of her eyelids. She probably thought it made her look sexy. Maybe it worked on some men.

“Of a professional nature, I mean.”

“Oh, that.” She pressed a fingertip to the corner of her mouth, as if there was an on-off button
hidden there. “I answered his phone. I handled his correspondence—you know, dumping his junk mail, prioritizing the important stuff. He was teaching me to use some of the online databases so I could help with public records searches and things like that. And if he needed a map or a book or something like that, I would get those for him.”

Nick had to admit he was surprised by her answer. “What if I wanted to know what cases he was working on now? How could I find out?”

“He keeps his files in the cabinets, alphabetically. He's good at that. Kept, whatever.”

“Is there any chronological cross-reference? I couldn't find the name I was looking for in there.”