Binding Ties (9 page)

Nick asked, “No alibi?”

“He claimed he'd been passed out drunk in his room after his drink with Henry. No witnesses, of course.”

“He have a record?” Catherine asked.

“Minor,” Brass said. “Got caught up in a couple of barroom dustups back in Oklahoma and had done some county time here for a misdemeanor assault … but nothing to show CASt-like leanings.”

“How about DNA evidence?” Nick asked. “You had that semen at the scene….”

Brass shook his head. “We didn't get a match, but our methodology in those days wasn't where we are now.”

Catherine pressed: “What about Phillip Carlson?”

“That
guy was a stone freak, a gay basher. He'd pose as a hooker, then when he got his john alone, he'd beat the hell out of him and rob the guy.”

“Charming,” Nick said.

“Oh how we wanted it to be
that
asshole…. Hell, he even confessed. But then it turned out he was a chronic confessor, at least when it came to any murder that had any gay overtones. Shrink said Carlson was gay or bi himself, trying to repress
those tendencies, and the only thing he hated more than the average homosexual he victimized was himself.”

“Sounds like a strong candidate,” Catherine said.

“Sure,” Brass said. “Only he just wasn't in the right places at the right times … or I should say wrong places. He was at the Lucky Seven, too, caught him on video. Problem was—we had him on camera within an hour of the time George Kim was murdered. That made the schedule awfully tight for Carlson, Kim living way the hell and gone across the city from the Lucky Seven. It wasn't impossible Carlson could've made the trip, but highly unlikely.”

Nick asked, “Was Carlson clear on any of the others?”

“Same kind of deal with the Henry murder,” Brass said, exasperation and resignation melding in his tone. “He'd been seen downtown that day, but nowhere
near
the time of Henry's death … and when Henry was getting the life choked out of him, Carlson was at Lake Mead with witnesses.”

“Good witnesses?” Catherine asked.

Brass grunted a bitter chuckle. “Would you believe, biker gang?”

Nick smirked humorlessly and said, “Not ideal witnesses, but harder than hell to break down their stories, I bet.”

“You bet right, Nick—none of 'em budged. ‘Our code is our word!'”

“Oh-kay,” Catherine said, and slapped her thighs. “We'll start working it again.”

Brass seemed damn near on the edge of tears. “We worked that case hard, Vince and me—can't
believe
we missed anything …”

“I'm sure you guys did your best,” she said. “But times, and technology, have changed…. Did you guys happen to keep any of the semen?”

Brass brightened. “Hell! I forgot all about that. I mean, it has been a long time …”

“Spill,” Nick said.

Brass, reenergized, said, “Vince, thinkin' ahead, had it frozen, just in case. We were in early days with DNA, and we hoped the science would improve. Vince thought it would be best to be prepared, though—every unsolved murder case is an open file.”

“Good,” Catherine said. “Very good.”

Suddenly Brass was smiling. “You know, I hadn't thought about that in … I dunno, ten years, maybe. Yeah, check the evidence freezer! Should be there somewhere.”

They were just about to break up the confab on this high note when North Las Vegas detective Bill Damon came scowling into the conference room.

“What the hell?” he asked, the vague question directed at Brass.

“What the hell what, Bill?”

Damon came over to loom over the seated detective, then got right in the smaller man's face, saying,
“Atwater thinks me and my guys are leaking information to the media!”

Brass kept his calm, rising. “No, Bill—from what I understand, our sheriff doesn't know
where
the leak is coming from. Just that there is one.”

Sneering, Damon gestured to Nick and Catherine. “Well, I say it came from here—right here!”

Nick, teeth showing but not really smiling, said, “Well, it didn't, Bill—maybe the sheriff has it right.”

Brass gave the CSI a hard firm look that said the detective would handle this.

“Now look, Bill,” Brass said, his voice quiet, easy-going, “the sheriff's not accusing you, or anyone else in your department—
or
ours—of being the leak. He just wants to know who the leak is, at this point. Can you blame him? And, personally—I don't think it's you.”

Damon's body language shifted slightly, the detective somewhat appeased.

Catherine knew better than to mention that she had been the one to suspect Damon and Logan this morning, wondering herself if it wasn't one or both of them. The two NLVPD cops had seemed vaguely resentful of Brass absconding with their investigation.

Having gone to all of the trouble of working himself into a lather, Damon stayed angry enough to say, “And what about sharing information? I haven't heard anything from you people for, what? Three days?”

Brass held up a gentle palm. “I was just going to call you. The lab results have started coming back today, and we've got some info, finally.”

Nodding a little, finally satisfied (at least slightly), Damon said, “Good. Well, good…. So, so tell me.”

“I will,” Brass said, “in the car.”

Surprised, the younger detective parroted, “In the car?”

“Yeah—we're going to go talk to the TV reporter who called Sheriff Atwater, asking about CASt.”

Catherine could see the young cop was feeling better about where this was going.

“Which reporter?” Damon asked.

“Jill Ganine,” Brass said. “Over at KLAS?”

Everything seemed to have calmed down. Damon and Nick exchanged embarrassed smiles and sorrys, and Brass and the NLVPD detective had each taken a step toward the door when Grissom came back in, Greg Sanders trailing behind in that bright-eyed way of his.

The CSI supervisor, however, did not appear bright-eyed: His expression was grave, even troubled, as he looked down at a sheet of paper in his hand.

“Who died?” Catherine asked.

Grissom's voice was flat: “CODIS matched the semen from Marvin Sandred's back.”

Catherine shrugged a little. “And that's good news, right?”

“Normally I would say, yes. But CODIS says the DNA belongs to a guy named Rudy Orloff.”

Brass looked at Damon. “I know that name from somewhere—do you?”

Damon shook his head.

“I know that name,” Brass repeated.

Grissom said, “Says here Orloff's got a history of male prostitution.”

“Ooooh yeah,” Brass said. “I remember him. We pulled him in for questioning on the Pierce case, remember, Gil?
That
skinny little scumbag doesn't have the stomach to kill anybody, let alone—”

“Evidently,” Grissom said, “he developed the requisite stomach a year ago in Reno. He stabbed a john, nearly a fatal wound. Since then, he's been in Ely, doing life with the chance for parole for attempted murder.”

Catherine felt something like a stomach punch. “Our best suspect has been in a maximum-security prison? For the last year?”

Grissom waved the paper. “Actually, just for about the last two months—the Reno cops didn't catch him right away; then there was the trial, a quick appeal, and finally, he was taken to Ely. Where, presumably, he still was when Marvin Sandred was slain.”

They all looked at each other for a long, stunned second. If their best suspect was in prison, how had his semen ended up on the back of a murdered man in North Las Vegas?

Probably not great trajectory,
Catherine thought wryly.

“What next?” Brass said, his voice filled with
exhaustion and exasperation. “What the hell
next?”

Greg stepped forward with a weakly hopeful expression. “Maybe the epidermal cells will help us. Why don't I get back to work on them?”

“Why don't you, Greg?” Grissom said, without looking.

And Greg did.

Brass was shaking his head now, a vein throbbing in his forehead. Catherine was afraid he might stroke out right in front of them.

“It's hard to have the worst luck in Vegas,” the detective said, “but we're special—we did it. The semen at the scene comes from a guy in prison, the skin cells on the rope will probably end up belonging to Bugsy Siegel.”

Catherine was about to offer her own cynical comment, when her cell phone had the good sense to ring. As she withdrew it from her pocket, Nick's, Grissom's, Brass's, and Damon's cell phones all started chirping as well, a tiny technological chorale.

Suddenly thrust into the middle of six unsolved murders, over the course of a decade, Catherine Willows had only one thought as she punched the button on her phone, and it was even not her own voice, but that of Jim Brass, saying …

…
What the hell
next?

FOUR

T
he second murder did not require the full team's attention.

Catherine and Nick remained behind at CSI HQ, to get digging into the old cases. Grissom, Sara, and Warrick took the ride out to the suburb of Coronado Ranch.

Unlike the crime scene at the Sandred house, where he'd worked the front yard, Warrick Brown spent his time indoors. The house on Buried Treasure Court belonged to Enrique Diaz—the recently deceased Enrique Diaz, that is—a successful TV producer for the Tourist Channel, a cable television network dedicated to travel, with a particular bent toward its home base of Las Vegas, which lent itself to local production.

The house was well-to-do but not ostentatious, revealing success without rubbing your nose in it. Stucco with a tile roof (like every other house in the neighborhood), the Diaz home was a long, lean two-story with an immaculate lawn despite the water shortage.

While Brass and Damon went off to canvass the neighbors, Grissom, Sara, and Warrick worked the scene. Sara took the outside, Grissom the inside but for the living room, which Warrick concentrated upon—where the murder had gone down.

Warrick had seen the Sandred crime scene firsthand, despite working the lawn, and also knew intimately the photos from the first victim's house; so he saw at once that this crime looked strikingly similar—difference being the surroundings were decidedly more upscale than Sandred's seedy bungalow.

Twice the size of Sandred's front room, this one gave off a strong Mexican vibe—serapes of red, green, and yellow stripes tossed on the furniture, carefully casual; a potted cactus in a sunny corner looking healthy; family photos in funky rough-wood frames dotting the walls and end tables. A matching rough-wood crucifix above the front door seemed more decorative than religious, and the floor consisted of inlaid Mexican tile, a far cry from the cheap carpeting on which the previous victim had earned numerous rug burns during the course of dying. The south wall was mostly windows and—dark as the crime might be that the CSIs were investigating—the death site itself seemed to swim in sunlight.
A plasma television hung on one wall while a huge sofa, twin recliners, and a wing chair, all covered in the same beige leather, stood mute sentry over the corpse.

Centerstage, heavy-set Diaz—his dark curly hair held in place by wet-look hair product—lay nude, stomach-down, right hand outstretched, the index finger severed, the other hand tucked under his body. The murder weapon—a length of rope that Warrick estimated would measure a foot and a half or so—remained wound around the victim's neck, the reverse-eight noose pulled tight.

Again the killer had left a pool of semen on the victim's back above the buttocks. The producer's eyes bulged, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, as if mocking Warrick, an effect grotesquely heightened by the sloppily applied garish red lipstick.

And again, the lack of blood spatter made Warrick believe the vic's finger had been separated only after the heart had stopped beating.

The cooly objective Warrick allowed himself a moment of subjectivity, by way of a disgusted half-smirk. He'd worked a lot of murder scenes, but the various and sometimes bizarre ways people got themselves killed was not nearly as surprising as the way their killers chose to live….

While Diaz was Hispanic, he was extremely light-skinned and could easily have passed for Caucasian, though these surroundings indicated pride in heritage. White victims had been the original CASt's
preference, and Sandred had fit that bill as well; whether Diaz had been mistaken for Caucasian, or had simply been “close enough” for the killer, remained to be seen.

Maybe this was a copycat who hadn't picked up on that aspect of the original crimes, and who wasn't aware that most serial killers stayed with one ethnic group, usually their own….

Of course, that wasn't a hard and fast rule; homicidal maniacs had a way of making their own rules, and rewriting them as they went, on murderous whim. Still, anything as structured as the CASt murders, which seemed to follow some sick ritual within the perpetrator's psychology, indicated a deadly attention to detail that should prove helpful to crime scene analysis.

Certainly the similarities between this and the Sandred murder were striking, and Warrick had little doubt they were dealing with the same killer—either new or old CASt.

And, anyway, despite Grissom's surprising announcement of his own hunch that the killer was just getting started—which had already been born out by the body in this room—Warrick knew his supervisor would not tolerate assumptions, even in a situation like this. Warrick would follow the evidence to see where it led. Period.

Getting out his camera, Warrick started snapping pictures. He wasn't even through the first roll of film when Grissom seemed to materialize at his side.

“First pass,” the CSI supervisor said, “rest of the house looks clean.”