Shock Treatment (23 page)

“By calling someone else at the same time.” Archie pulled up Gonch's phone records, which were displayed in grid format upon his monitor. He pointed to a highlighted line on the screen. “Gonch was on the phone to another number at the same time that Jill Wooten received her scary mystery call.”

Catherine didn't recognize the number on the screen. “On the phone to whom?”

“Headlights,” Archie said. “It's a topless place.”

“So I've heard,” Catherine said. “Okay, we're going to need to verify that. See if anyone at the bar remembers taking Gonch's call. We have to make sure it was really him using his phone and not his girlfriend or someone else.”

“Maybe he was using two lines at once,” Greg suggested. He pantomimed holding a phone to each ear. “Or even two phones.”

“Unlikely,” Catherine said. “Who makes harassing calls to an ex while simultaneously on the phone to work?”

Greg wasn't ready to give up on his crazy theory just yet. “Someone who wants to set up an alibi?”

“For a crank phone call?” Catherine shook her head. “I've met Craig Gonch. Frankly, he didn't seem that clever.”

Nick moved on to the main event. “What about the voice analysis?”

“The news isn't exactly encouraging there either,” Archie warned them. Dispatching the phone records back to electronic limbo, he called up another program on his computer. A pair of spectrograms appeared on the monitor, one atop the other. Each horizontal display charted the speech samples' frequency and amplitude, producing a graphic representation that resembled an EKG or seismic readout. A thorough voice analysis entailed both a visual and aural comparison of two samples, recorded under as similar circumstances as logistically possible. In a match, two identical spectrograms could be superimposed on each other.

But not this time. The dual waveforms oscillated across the screen, visibly out of synch.

Catherine frowned. “Okay, I'm no expert here, but even I can see that our two samples don't remotely match each other.”

“That would be my conclusion as well,” Archie said. “Granted, the whisper effect introduces an extra margin of error, but, honestly, I don't think Gonch is your guy. And there's something else, too: the more I listen to it, the phonier the southern accent
in the original recording sounds. It's like someone's doing a bad impression of Gonch.”

“Really?” Catherine asked. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, for one thing, Gonch mispronounced ‘nuclear' when you took the sample. He said, ‘I'm going nuke-u-lar on you, baby,' like he was George Bush or something.” Archie did a pretty good imitation of Gonch's surly tone as well. “Okay, that's a very common mistake, but here's the thing: the mystery caller got it right.”

“So it wasn't Craig Gonch,” Catherine concluded. “But who?”

“Somebody who knew about Gonch's predilection for slasher movies?” Nick speculated. “Think about it. Jill has a stalker ex-boyfriend with a thing for horror films, she's on the receiving end of some scary phone calls,
and
she gets targeted for
Shock Treatment.
” He stepped back from the monitor. “Either that's a perfect storm of creepy coincidences, or someone knew exactly what they were doing.”

Catherine leaned toward the latter explanation. “Debra Lusky? She was Jill's ex-roommate. She would have known about Gonch, and she's the one who set Jill up to get shocked on the show.”

“Makes sense,” Greg said. “But why would she want to get Matt Novak killed? She didn't even know him.”

“As far as we know,” Catherine stressed. “Although I suppose it's possible she didn't care about Novak at all. Maybe she just wanted to get Jill in trouble.”

“That seems a bit extreme,” Nick said. “Why risk
killing an innocent person just to put your friend in a difficult legal position? And what would be her motive for tricking Jill into shooting someone anyway?”

Good question,
Catherine thought. Grissom had usually hedged away from speculating too much about motives, lest it compromise their scientific objectivity. He had believed that if you concentrated on the physical evidence, determined the where and the when and the how, the why would sort itself out eventually. Catherine had never quite agreed with him in that respect. In her experience, people rarely committed murder without a reason. Figuring out that reason, by calculating the human variables involved, was sometimes the best way to make sense of the evidence.

“You think maybe Debra and Jill planned this whole thing together?” Greg suggested. “That Jill was in on the scheme from the beginning?”

“That's possible, I suppose,” Catherine said. Jill had struck her as genuinely shook up the other night, right after the shooting, but maybe the struggling model was a better actress than anyone had realized. “But to what purpose? To frame her ex for some nasty calls?” Catherine found that hard to believe. “Sounds far-fetched to me.”

Greg shrugged. “Hey, after working this job, I'm not sure anything is too far-fetched anymore.”

He has a point,
Catherine thought. Just in the last few years alone, she and her team had run across a dead girl with three different blood types in her veins, a homicide at a sci-fi convention, a baked corpse with a dead racoon stuck to its face, human
ribs served up with barbecue sauce, a modern-day headhunter, and a psychopathic surgeon who liked to turn human organs into twisted pieces of art. After all that, was it really that hard to imagine that Jill and Debra had somehow staged this whole thing?

Maybe not?

“Perhaps they did it for the notoriety,” Greg theorized. “Have you seen the papers? Jill is all over them. She was an unemployed model, right? Assuming the death is ruled an accident, all this publicity could be the best thing that ever happened to her.”

Catherine thought it over. “You know, Debra did say she was hoping to boost Jill's career.”

“Well, she sure did that all right,” Nick said. “With a bang.”

Catherine felt that sphinx sneaking up on her again, bringing more riddles than answers. “Anyway, thanks for the assist, Archie.” She turned toward the door. “If nothing else, you've eliminated Craig Gonch as a suspect. Looks like he had nothing to do with this.”

“Hang on,” Archie said, calling them back. “I'm not done yet.”

“Is that so?” Catherine was encouraged by Archie's cocky tone. “Okay, don't keep us in suspense. Show us the goods.”

“Believe me, I saved the best for last.” He shut down the voice analysis program and opened up another file. “This is the data I downloaded from Matt Novak's flash drive. It took me a while to crack the encryption, but I think it was worth it.” He grinned
in anticipation. “Warning: some of this footage may not be appropriate for younger viewers.”

He wasn't kidding. Catherine's eyes widened at the X-rated action that started playing on the monitor. Photographed from above, a nude white male was grinding away at the woman beneath him, who, bizarrely enough, appeared to be wearing a rubber “Zombie Heat” mask, complete with molded maggots and glimpses of exposed bone. The shriveled green-gray skin stretched over the mask's skull-like visage contrasted with the smooth pink skin generously on display below the woman's neck as she pretended to snap at the man heaving atop her. There was no audio, but Catherine's imagination could easily provide a soundtrack of grunts and moans, with maybe a monstrous growl thrown in to go along with the Halloween mask. Distracted by the sheer weirdness of the scene, it took her a second to recognize the location.

“That's Roger Park's trailer.”

She recalled the miniature spy-camera she had found hidden above the TV producer's bed. Owing to the camera angle, the man's face could not be seen, but a familiar blond ponytail, not to mention the locale, gave her a pretty good idea of who was co-starring in this particular video. From the looks of things, Park's fetish for horror movies extended to his private life.

Talk about too hot for TV,
she thought.
Now if we can just get a good look at his face.

As if on cue, the couple rolled over in bed, so that the woman ended up on top. “Busted,” Catherine muttered as the camera caught the flushed, sweaty
features of Roger Park. It was the first time she had ever seen him without his Bluetooth on his ear. More than ever, she was glad that she had turned down that consulting gig.

“Who is that? Park?” Nick asked. He had yet to meet the producer.

“In living color,” Catherine said.

“Or unliving,” Greg quipped.

“I don't know,” Nick said. “They both look pretty animated to me.”

On the screen, the woman started inching down Park's body, heading south.

“Um,” Greg said. “If she wants to eat his brains, she's going in the wrong direction.”

Catherine begged to differ. “Not where most guys are concerned. Okay . . . I think we get the gist of it.”

Eventually, a CSI was going to have to review the footage in its entirety, but at the moment she was inclined to delegate that chore to someone else. As a criminalist in 21st century Las Vegas, she had already seen more than enough sex tapes to last a lifetime. Even if this one was slightly more outré than most.

“Okay, that was just freaky,” Nick said as Archie hit the Pause key, freezing the image on the screen. “And not in a good way.”

Greg shrugged, affecting a seen-it-all attitude. “I don't know. Some people like cosplay, you know?” He smirked at the screen.

“Way too much information,” Catherine said. She quickly turned the discussion back to the evidence. “What's the story, Archie? She ever take that mask off?”

“I'm afraid not,” he replied. “And, yeah, I
watched the whole thing, for which I deserve a day off.” He leaned back in his seat. “What do you think? Not exactly a smoking gun, but I thought you guys might be interested.”

“You thought right.” Catherine gazed at the frozen footage, which Matt Novak had been carrying on his keychain right up to the moment of his death. “Looks like prime blackmail material to me.”

Nick nodded in agreement. “Isn't Park married to some big-time Hollywood executive?”

“Tricia Grantley,” Catherine confirmed. She had looked up Park's A-list spouse after their last visit to his luxury trailer. “She heads the studio that bank-rolls his movies and TV shows.”

Nick pointed at the zombie girl. “You think that's her?”

“Not a chance.” Catherine had seen Park's wedding photo. “Ms. Grantley is a zaftig African-American woman.” She contemplated the masked white girl on the screen. “Wrong skin color. Wrong body type.”

“In that case,” Greg said, “does Park's wife know about his extramarital grave-robbing?”

“I doubt it,” Catherine replied. The
why
of Matt Novak's shooting seemed to be coming into focus at last. “No wonder Novak had been lording it around the set lately, and acting like he was a shoo-in to star in Park's new TV series. He figured he had Park wrapped around his finger.”

“Or dangling on his keychain, to be precise,” Nick added.

Greg grinned in amusement. “How's that for irony? He who lives by the hidden camera, gets
screwed by the hidden camera.” The producer's predicament was obvious to all concerned. “Park had a big problem.”

“Which definitely gives him an incentive to get Novak killed,” Catherine realized. “All he needed was the right scenario and a properly armed and jumpy patsy. Like Jill Wooten.”

“But why Jill?” Greg asked. “How did he find just the right unwitting accomplice for his scheme? Unless she was actually in on it all along?”

“That's what we need to find out,” Catherine said. She looked at the masked zombie girl again. “It might help if we knew who she was.”

Nick ran through the possibilities. “Jill Wooten? Debra Lusky? Some anonymous casting couch cutie?”

Catherine squinted at the screen. “I don't think that's Jill's body. She's taller and curvier. Hard to say for sure, though, what with the odd angles and all.”

Unfortunately, the rubber mask covered the top of the woman's head, including her hair. Catherine found herself wishing that the makeup in
Zombie Heat
hadn't been so extensive.

“What about Debra Lusky?” Nick asked.

“Possibly,” Catherine said. “The woman in the video seems to be about the right size and weight.” She thought back to her interview with Jill's former roommate, remembering a rather plain young woman who paled in comparison to her more glamorous friend. “Again, I can't be positive. Needless to say, Debra was wearing a good deal more clothing the night I met her, and she didn't have a naked producer on top of her at the time.” She tapped Archie
on the shoulder. “You see any tattoos? Scars? Any other distinguishing marks.”

“Not that I recall,” he said. “But I can go through the footage more carefully if you like. Try to zoom in on some of the better shots of her.”

“Thanks.” Catherine appreciated his initiative. “Take it frame-by-frame if you have to.” A question occurred to her. “Just how long is the footage anyway?”

“Approximately twelve minutes,” Archie sighed. “Give or take a bit of kinky role-playing.”

That was a lot of frames, she realized, and Archie probably had some other cases backed up. She made an executive decision. “Greg, you take over examining the footage.”

“Me?” His face fell. Greg looked less than enthused at the prospect of poring over the entire tape in mind-numbing detail. Not that she could blame him; twelve minutes of slow-motion, freeze-framed zombie sex sounded like a surefire recipe for eye-strain, not to mention a certain loss of appetite. “What did I ever do to you?”

Nick snickered and slapped Greg on the back. “Have fun, pal.”