Binding Ties (18 page)

He fights, but it's no use. There's no air. His chest burns, aches as his lungs battle for every last molecule of oxygen.

Then there is none, every fiber of his being on fire. Slowly, surprisingly, the pain begins to subside, the burning eases and a warm thick liquid blackness covers him. Bell is floating now in this thick black sea, the warmth calming him as it ebbs and flows each second, becoming elongated, enjoyable as he relents. The blackness is not just outside him now, it has entered him and Bell floats away, trouble and pain gone forever.

Everything gone forever.

Sara joined them. Her eyes tensed as she took it all in. “This … looks the same but different.”

Still kneeling near the body, Grissom looked up, pleased with her, and said, “Yes.”

“We'll need to pull his phone records,” Brass said, a stray thought coming to him.

Grissom nodded. “We may be able to figure out whether the killer forced him to make the call to his daughter, cancelling his trip, or if he really did cancel to work on the story.”

“Maybe the story was working on him.”

Standing, Grissom said, “The killer spent a considerable time with Bell, to do this kind of damage. Once Al gives us time of death, we can cross-check it to the phone records and see how close the call to his daughter came to the attack.”

“That was my thought.”

Grissom said to Sara, “Check his bedroom—see if he was packing.”

“Okay. Then … fingerprints?”

Nodding, Grissom said, “Anything on the first floor the killer might have touched—banister coming down these stairs, for example.”

“I'll try the front door, too.”

“Tell Carrack and Damon to stay put,” he said, “and not to touch anything else. Let's not contaminate the crime scene any more than we already have.”

Brass was on his cell phone again, making the call to David Paquette.

The editor picked up on the second ring.

“David, Jim Brass. I'm sending a car to pick you up.”

“Why in the world?”

“We're placing you in protective custody as a material witness.”

“The hell you are! I've got a paper to put out.”

“This is a serious matter, David. Overrides any work concerns.”

“Give me one good reason why.”

“Perry Bell's dead.”

Paquette said nothing, but halting breathing told
Brass just how hard the news had hit the editor … unless that was a pose.

“Another CASt victim,” Brass said.

“Oh, my lord in heaven …”

For a moment Brass wondered if Paquette had started to cry. The editor and Bell had been friends, collaborators. And the murder related directly to the project they had done together that had put them both on the map.

Brass said, “Look, Dave—don't give the officers any trouble; let them take you into custody. We can protect you. And maybe you can help us.”

“Oh … okay.”

“It's going to be all right.”

“I … I don't think so, Jim. We're … we're supposed to cover the news. Not … not
be
the news.”

“Well, cooperate with us and we'll keep you out of the headlines.”

Brass broke the connection.

“You do really think he did this?” Grissom asked.

Shaking his head, Brass said, “His reaction has me wondering—I think he was weeping, Gil.”

“They were friends.”

“What do I think? I think I'm not going to think anything from now on about this goddamned case, until you tell me to.”

“Thinking is allowed. It's the guesswork we need to steer clear of.”

Brass's cell phone rang.

He answered; it was Sergeant O'Riley. He listened, thanked the sergeant, and said to Grissom, “Just got word that Orloff at Ely State Prison says the photo of Bell we faxed over is
not
one of the two ‘collectors' he dealt with…. Sounds like he wasn't the copycat….”

“Give us some time to work the crime scene,” Grissom said. “We'll get something.”

Even for Vegas, their luck was lousy.

Everywhere they turned, the CASt case threw them a curve. Somehow, the killer was getting to them across the years—a madman who had stopped his vicious spree when Nick Stokes was still in college—had somehow found a way to travel through time to thwart their investigation today.

After their washout visit with Dallas Hanson at the mission, Nick and Catherine had stopped back at the lab long enough to drop off Hanson's swab and get the DNA test going. Nick believed it would turn out the same as Phillip Carlson's had—no match—but the job was about evidence, not belief.

Now, they were headed out on Blue Diamond Road toward Pahrump and the Sundown Continuing Care Facility. A sister facility of Sunny Day in Henderson—where Warrick and Catherine had recently stopped an angel-of-death killer—Sundown was more of a lockdown facility than its sibling across the valley.

Behind the wheel, Nick asked, “So what have we missed?”

“Nothing that I can think of,” Catherine said. She went silent, and actually did think; then she added, “We've worked the evidence. Possible Brass and Champlain were on only wrong trails, years ago, and the real CASt isn't on the original suspect list.”

“Yeah, but Brass and Champlain are first-rate guys—”

“Sure they are. But we've done it before, too—can happen easy enough, you start believing your theories before the evidence is in.”

“Happens,” Nick admitted. “But if CASt isn't one of these three suspects, then what have we contributed?”

“We've ruled them out,” Catherine said. “That's important, too.”

Nick's nod was grudging.

Following Amargosa Road out into the Last Chance Range, Nick couldn't help but mirthlessly smile at the hospital's location.
“Last chance” is right,
he thought. Most of the patients at Sundown were dangerous either to themselves or others, and consequently spent most of their time under complete lockdown—served meals in rooms that were really cells, only getting out for exercise once a day, one-at-a-time, in a tiny yard to walk laps for fifteen minutes.

Nick pulled into the parking lot, home to maybe a dozen cars, most of which were parked at the far end, near the employees' entrance of the wide, one-story building. The facility was larger than it seemed from the front. This Nick knew, having once flown over in a helicopter, getting a view of the huge pentagon; and on a previous visit, Nick had seen the interior of the building, which had gone on forever, with endless wings, like something out of a bizarre bad dream.

If you weren't mentally ill when you came here, it would be easy to get with the program….

They climbed down from the SUV and walked toward the front entrance.

“When I have my breakdown,” Catherine said, “promise to shoot me if they send me here.”

“No problem—same in my case?”

“Deal,” she said.

The glass double doors were chicken-wire woven. Nick tried to open one and it didn't budge.

Catherine pointed to a sign on the door that read:
PLEASE USE SPEAKERBOX TO REQUEST ENTRY
.

Nick said to her, “Okay, so your attention to detail is better than mine.”

Catherine went to the box next to the door and pushed the button.

Several moments dragged by, and Catherine was frowning at Nick, as if asking for permission to try again, when a female voice asked, “May I help you?”

“Catherine Willows and Nick Stokes to see Dr. Jennifer Royer. We're from the LVPD Crime Lab.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No. But I left a message on her machine.”

“… Just a moment.”

Another long pause followed, Nick and Catherine looking at each other, wondering if they had been ditched.

Finally, the woman's voice came back over the speaker: “I'll buzz you in. Please have your credentials ready.”

The buzz that followed reminded Nick of the handshake gag you could buy at various casino magic shops. He opened the door for Catherine and they passed through. Behind him, Nick heard the thunk of an electronic lock.

“And we
asked
to come in here?” Nick said.

A wide-eyed Catherine said, “This is not a happy place….”

The lobby was clean, walls a soft mint green, floors a lighter green tile, with the only decorative touch a starkly framed architectural drawing of the facility itself.

A thick patina of sadness seemed to cover everything, like emotional dust; despite the double glass doors letting sunshine seep in through the wire-mesh, the lobby remained shrouded in faint gray light, in part due to fluorescent tubes under discolored plastic tiles in the ceiling. A darker green sofa and a few matching unpadded chairs were scattered against the far walls, with a low-slung table littered with
Psychology Today
magazines. The scent of pine
cleaner clung to the air, doing little to dissipate an aroma of sickness and death that seemed to emanate from the walls, the air ducts, even the furnishings.

These impressions were subjective to say the least, but Nick could see from Catherine's quietly appalled expression that she shared them.

She confirmed this by whispering to him: “You're not a guest here, not even a resident—you're a hostage.”

A heavyset woman in white was framed in the reception window. She had bottle red hair and a hard, dark glow about her, as if her displeasure with her lot in life had turned radioactive.

“May I help you?” she asked. It seemed more a warning than an invitation.

This was the intercom voice.

Catherine said, “We're the LVPD personnel to see Dr. Jennifer Royer?”

They stepped forward and held out the IDs on the necklaces.

The reception nurse leaned forward, read them. Looked up, blandly skeptical. “Do you have anything else?”

Dutifully, they showed the gatekeeper their wallet IDs, as well.

She gave them a smile that seemed to say,
Congratulations for meeting the admission standards, but don't get cocky: You still have to get
out….

Or maybe Nick was just feeling a little paranoid.

“Down the hall on the left,” the nurse said, not looking at them any more, “third door.”

The third door on the left was open and Nick knocked on the frame.

A woman of about forty, her red hair—not from a bottle, short but not mannish—looked up, seated behind a desk cluttered with files. She apparently did not avail herself of the Vegas sunshine much, though with her fair Irish complexion, that might have been self-protection. She had a narrow face with a long straight nose, blue almond-shaped eyes and a wide mouth—unusual but attractive features, the intelligence behind them apparent.

“Ah,” she said, her voice carrying the hint of a Southern accent, “you're the Crime Lab people. I got your message, but haven't had the chance to return it. Glad you went ahead and came out anyway…. Sit, sit.”

Two metal-frame chairs were waiting opposite the desk, and the CSIs took them.

The office was small and neat, except for the desktop, indicative of a perpetually busy occupant. The desk itself was metal as were the two file cabinets that ran along the left wall. The doctor's chair looked comfortable but not overly so. Nothing elaborate at Sundown—but sufficient. And not one thing more….

“I'm Catherine Willows and this is Nick Stokes.”

The woman smiled and it seemed genuine, one professional to another. She had small, straight,
white teeth. “I'm Dr. Jennifer Royer, the head doctor…. You can fill in your own joke.”

“We'd like to talk to one of your patients,” Catherine said.

“Congratulations,” the doctor said, with just a faint trace of amusement. “That makes you part of an elite group.”

Catherine frowned. “Excuse me?”

Dr. Royer's smile pursed. “The patients housed at Sundown generally don't receive visitors of any kind, not even from the LVPD.”

“How about family?” Nick asked.

“That varies from case to case,” Royer said. She sighed, and shook her head; her dry good humor was clearly her way of dealing with this depressing place. “Patients are sent here for diverse reasons, at least in the sense that there are countless but myriad ways the words are written down. But in reality? There's really only one reason our patients are within these walls: Someone, or perhaps everyone, wants them locked up.”

“Warehoused,” Catherine said.

The doctor—her frankness refreshing if surprising—nodded and said, “Exactly—shoved out of sight.”

“But once they're here, you try to help them.”

Royer's smile froze—it was almost a grimace now. “We try.”

Nick asked, “How's your success rate?”

With a self-deprecating shrug, the doctor said,
“We prefer not to share that information—this is, after all, a private facility.”

Nick exchanged glances with Catherine—a success rate so low, it wasn't available to the public?

Catherine said, “Surely a significant percentage of your patients leave, and return to a normal life.”

“Some do. Most of them go out in a way that I'm sure your crime lab is familiar with … Now how exactly may I be of help to Las Vegas law enforcement?”

Shifting in the hard chair, Catherine said, “As we indicated, we'd like to talk to one of your patients.”

“Which one?”

“Jerome Dayton.”

Dr. Royer didn't hesitate. “No Jerome Dayton here.”

Catherine winced, perhaps thinking she'd mis-heard. “I'm … sorry?”

Shaking her head now, Dr. Royer said, “No one here by that name.”

Nick said, “You're absolutely sure of that?”

“I should be—I'm the attending physician for every patient at Sundown.”

Catherine glanced at Nick, who could see his partner was getting irritated. To Royer she said, “We had information Dayton was a patient here.”