Binding Ties (25 page)

Sara opened the door to the garage and hit the light switch with the heel of her latexed palm—a fingerprint-preserving habit of hers.

Two cars were parked within: a new late-model white Lexus; and an older blue Dodge so filthy it was a wonder no prankish finger had written
WASH ME
in the grime. She and Nick moved carefully through, looking behind boxes and under a tool bench, making sure no one was hiding.

Finally Nick knelt to peer under the Dodge.

“Oil leak, all right,” he said.

He rose and opened the passenger door, called back, “Keys in dash,” then flicked the glove compartment open. He pulled out the registration and read aloud: “Mark Brower.”

Sara pushed the talk button on her radio. “Garage clear. We have Brower's car, a very dirty Dodge.”

Brass nodded when he heard Sara's voice come over the radio.

He checked over his shoulder, to see if Grissom had followed him into the family room, which he had; then Brass moved to the door at the back, grabbed a breath, hefted his pistol, and turned the knob.

Warrick and Carrack had gone down the hall, passing the door to the garage, taking a right into the bedroom that had been visible through the shared fireplace.

No one was in here, at least on first look.

This was obviously the master bedroom, and the stark white decorating theme persisted with a dresser, bureau, and four-poster bed.

Carrack checked the walk-in closet while Warrick entered another huge bathroom. Didn't take him long to find a pink-tinged wash cloth in the shower stall. Even without lab results, the CSI knew he was looking at a blood stain.

“Warrick!” Carrack called from the walk-in closet.

At the patrolman's side, Warrick followed Carrack's pointing finger to a pile of clothes next to the hamper: jeans with several dark spots on the legs and a blue T-shirt with a dark splotch on the front, which also appeared to be blood.

Into his walkie, Carrack said, “Bedroom clear.”

Following up, Warrick said into his radio, “Gris—we have blood-stained clothing up here. Copy that?”

“Copy,”
came Grissom's voice.

In the basement, following Warrick's news of blood-stained clothing, Brass switched off his walkie-talkie.

Much as he liked keeping the flow of information alive between teams, he did not want the cross-talk giving away his and Grissom's position.

Beyond the family room, he found himself in a bedroom.

But not just a bedroom, and not another room in this largely featureless house, painting itself an innocent white.

“Gil,” Brass said. “You're gonna love this….”

The “bedroom” was more like a dungeon; oh, there was indeed a bed in it, a simple black bed with black silk sheets, centered in the middle of the room; but there were no windows in here, and as both men got out their flashlights and flicked them on, the darkness of the room was only heightened by illumination.

The walls were painted a flat black; the carpet was black indoor-outdoor. Shackles hung from the ceiling at the four corners of the bed, and an amazing array of rough-trade instruments hung on the wall to the left, the tools of a sadist's workshop. Though the blackness made them difficult to discern, knobs gave away doors at left and right on the wall opposite.

Brass felt Grissom move up beside him.

“Door number one,” Brass whispered, “or door number two?”

“Lady or the tiger?” the CSI supervisor replied with a terrible little smile.

But Brass never had to choose.

The door at left opened and a blood-drenched Jerry Dayton stepped into the room. Nude except for a flimsy pair of jockeys, the young man froze when he saw the pistols leveled at him, then raised his left hand against the glare of the flashlights.

His right hand remained behind his slightly turned body.

“Show me your hands, Jerry,” Brass said tightly.

“Lower the light,” Dayton countered. “I can't see a damn thing!”

Neither flashlight moved.

“Show me your goddamn
hands,”
Brass said, taking a half-step toward his suspect.

The hand came up, but as it did, Dayton flung something …

… something warm and mushy that struck Brass in the cheek, the detective firing, the sound like a thunderclap in the enclosed space, Dayton ducking to his left, the object he'd tossed flopping to the floor.

Grissom's beam found what had hit his friend in the face, putting a small spotlight on a severed human forefinger that seemed to point back at the CSI; its ragged bloody end leeched red.

At the same time, Brass's beam caught Dayton darting through the door on the right, leaving it open.

Brass yelled, “Freeze!”

But the suspect was gone.

“Dayton is yours,” Grissom said, and slipped past him to go in the lefthand door.

Alone now, Brass shone the flashlight through the ajar door at right, then went after the suspect.

Even before the blood-streaked, near-naked figure had emerged into the black room, Gil Grissom had heard someone moaning.

Though his weapon was in hand, Grissom hadn't fired when Dayton literally flipped a finger at Brass, the CSI hesitating for fear of striking his friend, who flinched into his line of fire.

“Grissom! Grissom!” The voice was Sara's in the walkie-talkie. “We heard a shot—are you all right? What's going on?”

“Stay put,” Grissom said into the walkie. “Brass is in pursuit of Dayton—keep all possible exits blocked!”

He clicked off.

Grissom's ears still rang from the gun as he moved out of the black bedroom, but he could make out the moaning, despite his compromised hearing.

This room was not black.

It was red.

Bare cement walls, floor, and ceiling—some pipes exposed above but blending into the overall mono-color scheme—had been painted out by a bright glossy red. The only light was a red bulb, stuck in a high socket on the left wall and, like every other room in this house, had another door at the far end. In the center of the crimson chamber—above a drain in the floor, cloaked in shadow but not clothing—Mark Brower hung from a noose just tight enough to keep him from moving, but not constrictive enough to kill him.

His hands were behind him, obviously bound but by what Grissom could not yet see. Blood poured from behind Brower to pool almost invisibly on the scarlet floor, and even Gil Grissom needed no further
evidence to know that the finger flung at Brass had been unwillingly contributed by Mark Brower, mouth agape in some sort of bawling that Grissom saw but could not quite hear with his ringing ears.

His eyes wild with fear, and pleading with his potential rescuer, Brower managed, “Help me,” but the words came to Grissom only as a faint, far off whisper, though the CSI's lip-reading skills made the cry crystal clear.

The red chamber was empty but for Brower, but Grissom didn't know whether Dayton's dive through that other door might not bring him back here around through a back way. As such, he didn't want to holster his weapon; but he had to help Brower, even if the common palmar digital artery was too small for the copycat to exsanguinate.

With any major trauma, however, the victim might go into shock, and Brower was definitely bound (so to speak) to injure or kill himself, if he didn't quit bouncing around with the noose around his neck….

Switching his gun to his left hand, Grissom withdrew a pocket knife, got it open, and started to cut the rope just over Brower's head. The entire time, the CASt copycat kept moaning, “Help me, help me,” like the human-headed fly in the old horror movie, and that was about how distant it sounded to Grissom, with his gunshot-ravaged hearing.

But the longer the CSI worked on the rope, the more the gunshot echo dissipated and the ringing in
his ears dissipated too, Brower's appeals growing louder and more intense.

“Quiet,” Grissom said, his own voice not much above a whisper. “We don't know where he is.”

“You got a goddamn gun, Grissom!” Brower said, his features distorted with hysteria and pain. “Get me the hell out of here!”

Grissom kept at it and when he finally cut the last strand, Brower dropped to the floor, rolling into a fetal position.

“Gris!” came Warrick's voice from the walkie-talkie. “Please report! Do you need assistance?”

He pocketed his knife and pulled the walkie off his belt. “I have Brower down here. He's alive but short a finger.”

“I'm coming down with Carrack and Jalisco—”

“No,” Grissom interrupted, voice was low but emphatic. “Stay upstairs—it's dark down here, might wind up shooting each other. Set up a perimeter around the house, watch doors, windows, any possible exit. Brass remains in pursuit of Dayton, who is naked and bloody … and possibly armed and dangerous.”

Nick came on then. “Gris, you sure you—”

“No,” Grissom said, and shut off his radio.

Though the handcuffs served as a temporary tourniquet, Grissom thought it best to get direct pressure on Brower's wound. After returning his walkie-talkie to his belt, the CSI withdrew a standard handcuff key, and released the man … despite his
own desire to leave him cuffed, and save time at the inevitable arrest.

“Sit up,” Grissom said.

Brower just lay there, whimpering—
probably,
Grissom thought,
much as Sandred and Diaz had, when this creature exercised his performance art upon them, at their expense….

With more urgency, Grissom said, “Sit
up.”

“Help me …”

Grissom did not want to touch Brower, who was, after all, evidence.

So it was not entirely a lack of compassion for the copycat that prompted Grissom to say, “No.”

Reluctantly, Brower managed to sit up by himself. Grissom handed the man a handkerchief.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Brower asked numbly.

Grissom said, “Apply direct pressure to your finger.”

“What
finger? That maniac
cut off
my goddamn finger!”

“Apply direct pressure to the wound … and stay here.”

Still agitated, Brower asked, “Where the hell else would I go?”

“Well, if it's upstairs, you'll probably be mistaken for Dayton and shot.” Which would be a nice irony, considering that was who Brower had homicidally imitated.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he whimpered.

“To jail, you are,” Grissom said.

Grissom moved to the back door of the room, listened intently, hoped it was the last room in this fun house, and reached for the knob.

Following Dayton, Brass—his flashlight beam leading the way—plunged into darkness.

He wanted to move faster, sure that Dayton was getting away; but he also knew others were posted upstairs, and that a little caution might go a long way toward keeping himself alive, if Dayton happened to be lying in wait somewhere….

The detective swept the area with his beam.

Some kind of storage room—empty cartons stacked, shelves all around with smaller unmarked boxes; but no suspect.

Brass crossed the space, and found—yes—another damn door … open.

Doing his best to move silently, Brass eased through and swept the light over a workroom with bench, to his left; along the other walls, tools on pegboard, a drill press, a table saw, and a smaller bench with both a grinder and a vise. Beyond the bench on the left, at the far end of the room, naturally, waited yet another door. Smell of sawdust in his nostrils, Brass was almost past the bench when he felt a blow against his left leg, just below and to side of the knee, and then a blinding pain.

The gun and flashlight both fell from his hands, his weapon clattering to the floor somewhere at
right, the flash bouncing off something before hitting the floor and spinning to a stop, the light now pointed at him.

He looked down at the knife sticking out of his pants leg, a dark circle spreading in the gray slacks. He started to lose his balance, but before he went down, Dayton rolled out from under the workbench and came up with a head butt that sent Brass tumbling backward, starbursts in his eyes, and he crashed into something hard, then fell to the floor.

He was trying to get back on his feet when a click preceded stark but limited illumination.

Very nearby, Dayton—red spattered on his face like he'd been eating barbecue, sloppily, eyes showing white all around, his wolfish white teeth exposed in an animal snarl—stood at the workbench, having just flipped on a switch for a single work light.

Brass had been looked at with displeasure by many a perp in his time, but never with such complete contempt and hatred.

“You—you meddling imbecile son of a bitch … you petty little civil servant scum of the earth … you've screwed my life over for the
last goddamn time!”

Dayton lurched over and grabbed the handle of the knife and yanked it out of the detective's leg, like a demented dentist extracting a tooth.

Feeling white hot pain from head to toes, Brass nonetheless kicked with his good leg at the red-streaked naked figure, sending the killer sprawling
back, and giving himself time to at least get to one knee before Dayton charged him again.

And when the attack came, Brass crouched low as Dayton raised the knife high.

When the blade arced down, Brass threw himself forward and left, the knife grazing his sportcoat and sending Dayton off balance, just as Brass smashed into the killer's knee with his shoulder.

Brass heard the satisfying crunch as Dayton's knee gave way and the killer toppled, twisting as he went. Then with a jungle cry, Dayton lunged at Brass, and the two of them rolled on the floor, fighting over the one knife they had between them.

Again Grissom found himself in a darkened room and flipped on the flashlight.

This room was small, rather like a fruit cellar, and indeed a set of shelves against the wall on the left recalled such a cubicle. Of the five shelves, three contained books and magazines and scrapbooks, including various editions of
CASt Fear,
including the recent one self-published by Perry Bell; Grissom allowed himself an educated guess that the other books and magazines contained chapters or articles about the murders, and the scrapbooks CASt clippings.