Binding Ties (2 page)

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Dedication

For Terri and Rod—nicely bound.

I would like to acknowledge my assistant on this
work, forensics researcher/co-plotter
Matthew V. Clemens.

Further acknowledgments appear at the conclusion
of this novel.

M.A.C.

“A sound thinker gives equal consideration to the probable and the improbable.”

—R. Austin Freeman's DR. JOHN THORNDYKE

“Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.”

—Rex Stout's NERO WOLFE

Like a cold harsh mountain wind wailing down across the Nevada desert, panic swept through Marvin Sandred.

Awake again finally, his first realization was of his utter helplessness, a figure behind him, straddling his ass—literally—and a rope looped around his neck, pulling back, choking. Chills shook Marvin's body, making the noose chafe harder, and he felt it tighten more and more with each passing second.

Arms flailing, Marvin tried to control and even out his breathing. He did not have the time or frame of mind to take stock of his situation; still, he knew he was home, in the livingroom of his small North Las Vegas house—on the floor, on his stomach, his bones aching, his lungs burning, his assailant sitting astride his backside, as the noose slowly squeezed against his windpipe, and no matter how hard he worked to avoid it, his breaths could only come in short, sucking gulps. The room reeked of his sweat and the rope seemed to be squeezing his bladder as much as his throat.

Somehow, the worst thing of all, the most extreme indignity, was his nakedness—his clothes had been stripped from him, and he battled the urge to piss himself. Cold yet sweating, hands swimming limply in the air, fighting suffocation even as he wondered if he should just go ahead and free his bladder to remove the only pain within his control, Marvin Sandred was experiencing the reality behind the abstraction.

This was terror.

Terror—that word so bandied about on the news every day—was not an abstraction, but a very real emotional and physical state. Sheer terror—pain and helplessness and fear and despair and, worst of all, hope. He was still alive. He'd gotten into this somehow, and he could still get out. He might still survive….

Not so long ago, Marvin had responded to the doorbell, finding a well-dressed man in a black suit standing before the peephole, clean-cut enough to be a Jehovah's Witness or Mormon missionary, only those guys travelled in pairs and the man on Marvin's doorstep had been alone.

Marvin had long since learned that there is much in this life that the individual cannot control. But a man remained king of his castle, however shabby, and invasions by phone solicitors and door-knocking salesmen were indignities he did not have to suffer. Didn't he have a
NO SOLICITING
sign on his goddamned door?

Marvin saw the bland individual on his doorstep as representing every intrusion, every invasion of his precious privacy, and an indignant Marvin Sandred had opened the
door wide, to tear this guy a new orifice and send him on his fucking way, only not a word had emerged from Marvin's mouth before things went wrong, horribly, terribly … wrong.

Whether he had been drugged or punched or hit with a tire iron, he did not know, perhaps never would know. Right now, all he knew for sure was that he lay naked on the floor, the rough carpeting irritating his nipples and his ample belly and his genitals, even as the noose closed ever tighter around his throat. He stopped flailing and tried to get at the rope, but couldn't get his fingers beneath the damn loop….

Even though his attacker was behind and above him, Marvin kept his eyes pinched shut. On waking, finding himself under attack, that had been his first instinct—if he didn't open his eyes, he reasoned, he wouldn't see his antagonist's face.

If he did not get a good look at the man, the attacker might let him live—the intruder might be a burglar who would leave Marvin unconscious on the floor to be found later. Two facts that Marvin did not grasp made the point moot: Had he opened his eyes, sweat would have poured into them, impairing his vision; and his attacker's ride-'em-cowboy position made him impossible for Marvin to see, anyway.

The attacker controlled the situation so utterly, Marvin knew that the decision of his life or death belonged to the man in the black suit.

One tiny hope glimmered in Marvin's mind….

He knew that a letter opener lay on the nearby coffee table, under the morning paper and a stack of bills, if only
he could reach it. Eyes still squeezed shut, Marvin pawed helplessly in that direction, with his left hand, but his arm felt heavy, like trying to lift a refrigerator, not his own limb.

The attacker slapped the arm down, and Marvin couldn't find the strength to raise it again….

As it got harder and harder to breathe, and surviving became more and more abstract, a thought jumped into his mind, between panic-stricken plans to somehow get loose: That thought was how stupid he had been to move to Las Vegas in the first place.

Then his wife Annie popped into his mind: her pretty, smiling face, the way she had looked at him so often, before she left him last year.

Though these thoughts lasted only a few seconds, they were profound: Marvin realized he still missed his ex-wife, and wished he'd been smart enough to stay in Eau Claire and try to patch things up with her, instead of throwing away his entire life to move to the city of dreams….

He'd been an idiot. He still was an idiot. He knew as much, even with the breath being sucked out of him for what was probably the last time … a goddamned idiot, cashing in his retirement, driving away Annie, looking for a new life….

Marvin Sandred, at the brink of death, did not have the time or luxury of acquiring a longer, more mature view of his life and where it had gone awry. Lots of people had come to this city of dreams, from Bugsy Siegel to Howard Hughes, from Liberace to Penn and Teller. Formerly an assistant plant manager at Eau Claire Steelworks, Marvin Sandred had been one of hundreds of thousands of dreamers
who'd migrated to the neon oasis, not just to visit, but to live.

Marvin's dream was modest, comparatively speaking, if typically unrealistic of Vegas dreamers. Just as Annie was entering menopause, Marvin's midlife crisis kicked in, and the forty-six-year-old had felt life slipping through his fingers, opportunities and dreams betrayed by a lifetime of doing “the right thing.” Marvin had started watching poker on ESPN, and then played it on the Internet, till his wife put her foot down just when he was starting to win a little; so he'd practiced on a ten-buck computer game and did very well indeed, so well that he finally decided to come to Las Vegas to play poker professionally.

His retirement settlement gave Marvin just enough money to get to Vegas and put a down payment on this little bungalow; he'd hoped his wife—they were childless—would view this as a fresh start. Actually, she saw it as a dead-end. The rest of his money he had used to fund his fantasy of becoming the next Amarillo Slim or Doyle Brunson.

The dream had indeed gone quickly south, his poker skills faring far better against his computer game than real people. After two tournaments, Sandred got a day job in the sales department of a welding equipment company. The dream began its slow death from that point on, his meager earnings winding down the spiraling hole of Texas Hold-'em, casino-style….

Still, Marvin had never given up, and his sick-gambler's optimism stayed with him, right up to where his dream was swallowed by this full-fledged nightmare, the attacker applying even more pressure now….

Marvin felt his head grow heavy, the weight of it trying to sag to the floor, the rope around his neck keeping his skull up, but a certain bobbing motion making his forehead occasionally brush the rough rug. Colored lights burst behind his eyelids in a tiny fireworks show, and for just a moment he was downtown in Glitter Gulch with the overhead display of Sinatra singing, “Luck be a lady,” and Marvin's arms were rubbery things and tears mingled with sweat as his dream dissolved and his mind was filled with a nightmare that would end not with waking, but rather with going to sleep.

Forever.

And as the colored lights subsided and blackness fell across, Marvin Sandred saw Annie in his mind, smiling sadly, shaking her head, saying, as she had when she left, “Don't you know, Marvin? One person's dream is another's nightmare?”

ONE

T
he North Las Vegas neighborhood was slowly making the transition from cozy to shabby. A 420 on the radio, this homicide call—which on the Strip would be treated like a presidential assassination, every squad car rolling in with lights strobing and siren blaring—had generated only one North Las Vegas PD squad, which sat parked out front of the house as quietly as if this was the officer's home …

… and not a crime scene.

Which was what brought LVPD Crime Scene Investigation supervisor Gil Grissom to this declining residential area, and not for the first time—wasn't a habit yet, but calls in these environs were definitely on the upswing.

Seasoned veteran Grissom descended on this troubled neighborhood like the angel of death, albeit a casually attired one, such a study in black was he: sunglasses, Polo shirt, slacks, shoes. Gray was invading the dark curly hair, however, intruding as well into a beard he'd grown to save himself time, only to find trimming the thing was its own burden. He'd thought of shaving the damn thing off, at least twenty times, but that much of an expenditure of time he wasn't ready to invest.

Gil Grissom's life was his work, and his work was death.

Nick Stokes, behind the wheel, parked the black CSI Tahoe behind the NLVPD cruiser; after him, Warrick Brown pulled in a second Tahoe. Grissom and Stokes had ridden in the lead vehicle while Warrick shared his with fellow CSIs, Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle.

Muscular, former college jock Nick had dark hair cut close and an easy smile that belied how seriously he took his job. The heroic-jawed CSI wore jeans and a T-shirt with the LVPD badge embroidered over the left breast.

Green-eyed, African-American Warrick was tall and slender, and his expression seemed serious most of the time, though wry twists of humor did come through. In his untucked brown T-shirt and khaki slacks, the loose-limbed Warrick seemed more relaxed than Nick, but Grissom knew both young men were tightly wired, in a good way, excellent analysts and dedicated hard workers.

Even more intense than her two male teammates, Sara Sidle wore her dark hair to her shoulders and preferred comfortable clothes like today's tan T-shirt and brown slacks. Still, she was as striking in her way as Catherine Willows, a redhead with the chiseled features of a model and the slenderly curvaceous body of a dancer. Wearing an aqua tank top and navy slacks, Catherine still more closely resembled the exotic performer she had been to the crack scientist she'd become.

Though they worked the graveyard shift, Grissom's team—thanks to manpower shortages this week—was currently working overtime to help cover dayshift court appearances and vacations. Normally, these CSIs would have showed up at a crime scene in the middle of the night, but with the OT, they found themselves arriving at this one with the summer sun already high in a cloudless blue sky, the heat dry but not oppressive, tourist friendly.

Pulling off his sunglasses, Grissom studied the bungalow: tiny and, particularly for this neighborhood, still in decent repair. The dirt yard was small and bisected by a crumbling sidewalk that passed a steel flagpole on its way to the open front door. Two flags hung limp on the windless day, an American flag at the top and a Green Bay Packers one beneath it, while a short gravel driveway ran up the far side of the house, a dark blue early nineties Chevy parked in the middle.

Even though homes surrounded the bungalow all along the block, to Grissom, the house looked lonely, somehow. Heat shimmered off the pavement outside this house; but sadness shimmered off the house itself.

As Grissom hopped down from the Tahoe, his peripheral vision caught an unmarked Ford pulling up on the other side of the street. He paused to glance back and see the detective getting out, a lanky six-three in an ill-fitting gray suit—Bill Damon. The detective was still in his late twenties, having been with the North Las Vegas PD for five or six years, now deep into his first year as a detective. Though his pants always seemed an inch or so too short, and his jacket seemed large enough for a man twice his size, Damon fit the job nicely—if still unseasoned as a detective, this was a good cop, with his heart in the right place.

While more than a hundred thousand souls made North Las Vegas their home—and had their own police department—the Las Vegas crime scene analysts served all of Clark County, which meant occasionally the CSIs worked with detectives from departments other than their own. Grissom had run into Damon on a couple of cases before, but always as the secondary detective, never the primary.

As the detective crossed the street, he held out his hand to Grissom—long, slender fingers with big, knobby knuckles.