Binding Ties (11 page)

Catherine frowned.
“What's
not what it looks like?”

“Nothing …” Again, Carlson glanced toward the corridor, then grinned up at the CSIs, nervously. “I just got diarrhea of the mouth, is all…. There's no cure for that.”

Nick gave Catherine a look and she nodded.

While Catherine stayed in the living room with Carlson, Nick—gun drawn in his right hand, Mini Maglite in his left—moved down the dark hallway, sweeping the flash back and forth.

Three doors.

Open ones on the left and right, and one closed one on the left side at the end.

Nick quickly checked the two open ones—bathroom on the left, a bedroom on the right, both filthy, both empty, of people anyway; Nick had a hunch Grissom could find plenty of bugs in both to make friends with. The last door, however, was locked.

“You got a key you want to give us, Mr. Carlson?” Nick called. “Hate to have to kick this in.”

Seconds later, Catherine's voice pinged off the plaster walls: “He's got the key. And he's sharing it!”

Nick went back for the thing and glared at Carlson. “Why didn't you just give it to me? You don't get points for making this harder.”

Staring at the floor, mouth hanging open, Carlson said nothing.

At the bedroom door, unsure what awaited behind it, Nick palmed his flashlight, the light extending between his index and middle fingers as he used his thumb and index finger to hold the key in his left hand and unlock the door. In his right hand, the gun came up as he swung the door in and stepped into the darkened bedroom.

Heavy drapes covered a window on the left wall,
shadows dancing as Nick's Mini Mag swept over the room.

But for the beam of light, nothing moved.

He flipped the switch on the wall and another overhead dead-bug repository/light came on. The pistol slipped to his side and dangled there as Nick's amazed gaze arced around the room.

Newspaper articles, magazine articles, photos, and drawings covered the walls and even the ceiling, all sharing a common theme, in the way a teenage girl might devote her entire bedroom to some pop star. Only there was no bed, and this wasn't a shrine to a singing star or film actor …

…
this was the Church of CASt.

A small dark wood table in the center served as an altar for the holy book—
CASt Fear,
the Perry Bell and David Paquette paperback about CASt; several scrapbooks were stacked on the table, as well. Ropes tied into reverse-eight nooses hung from the ceiling in varying heights.

When Nick came back into the living room, Catherine was standing near the hallway, eager for a report. Nick's wide eyes spoke volumes.

Carlson sat on the sofa, with the dejected expression of a thirteen-year-old whose parents had just found his porn stash.

“So, Mr. Carlson,” Nick said cheerfully. “This effort you made to straighten yourself out—was that before or after you opened up the serial killer museum?”

Carlson sprang up, bolted toward the door.

Catherine whirled and Nick reacted right away, but still it was too late: Carlson had made it outside.

Nick took the lead, Catherine right behind him, as they chased the shirtless eternal hippie along the concrete walkway. The skinny figure took the stairs two at a time but by the time he made ground level, Nick was closing the distance. Carlson perhaps took speed, but he didn't have it: What the suspect had was the wind of an inveterate dope smoker, and with each step, Nick drew nearer.

Carlson had just made it across the parking lot when Nick hit him with a solid tackle.

Nick pulled down his prey, the two of them rolling across the sidewalk and into Baltimore Avenue, the pavement biting into the flesh of Nick's hands and elbows, but he hung on.

Catherine was right there, ready to deal with traffic, but the pair had wound up, fittingly enough for the suspect, in the gutter.

“Aw, maaan,” Carlson moaned, under Nick, the suspect's stubbly face dripping blood where it had connected with the concrete. “Not cool! Not cool!”

“Resisting arrest,” Nick said, “is not so hot, either, dude.”

“I'm not under arrest! Am I…?”

“Oh yeah.”

Nick heard a siren wail and he realized his partner had a cell phone in hand; she'd already called in backup, and a patrol car, luckily, had been nearby.
The officers showed up moments later and loaded a hang-dog Carlson into the back.

“That's what I get for praying,” Nick said gloomily.

Catherine frowned in amusement. “How so?”

“I asked the Supreme Being to spare us from that apartment turning out to be a crime scene. Now, while Carlson spends the afternoon cooling his jets in an air-conditioned cell, we'll be combing every square inch of his hellhole apartment.”

“Maybe God has a sense of humor,” Catherine said, laughing a little.

They were walking back toward the building.

“Oh God has a sense of humor, all right,” Nick said. “Trouble is, seems about the same as Grissom's….”

And they returned to the apartment, to photograph, process, and dismantle the shrine to CASt; as they did so, they would try to figure out if Carlson had actually constructed a temple to himself….

Sara Sidle knocked on the frame of Gil Grissom's open office door.

The CSI supervisor sat behind his desk, glasses perched on his nose as he slowly scanned a page in a file. He looked up and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” she said.

She strolled in, dropped an evidence bag containing the Las Vegas
Banner
magnetic key onto his desk and flopped into the chair across from him.

“Prints?” he asked.

“Couple of partials, but nothing that pops up on AFIS.”

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System had been helpful to them on numerous cases, but the system contained only prints of bad guys that had been caught.

“So it's not easy,” he said. “Are we surprised?”

She shook her head. “What's next?”

“I'll call Brass. Maybe we can identify the key through the newspaper.”

“Really think the
Banner
big boys will make every employee who has one show it to us?”

Grissom considered that for a moment. “If it wasn't the
Banner
or some other media outlet, maybe. My guess is they won't do anything until they talk to their lawyers.”

“And the lawyers will say?”

“That it's a Fourth Amendment issue,” Grissom answered, “even though it really isn't.”

“Kill all the lawyers.”

Grissom said, “Actually, that quote's always taken out of context. In
Henry VI,
Shakespeare was in reality implying that lawyers are valuable to—”

“Fine, right. But the
Banner
's lawyers won't cooperate.”

“No.”

“And we'll try anyway.”

“Yes.”

An hour later, sitting in the office of
Banner
publisher James Holowell, with Grissom and Brass, Sara
heard Holowell make the same argument, minus the typically Grissom-esque interpretation of the Bard of Avon.

A big window in the publisher's office overlooked a bustling warren of reporters' desks. Holowell's office was leanly furnished, a large mahogany desk taking up more than its fair share of space, the top neat but not bare, a computer monitor sitting at an angle on one corner. The evidence bag containing the magnetic key sat in the middle of the blotter like a three-dimensional ink stain.

Grissom, Brass, and Sara sat in three chairs fanned around the desk, opposite Holowell, a barrel-chested African-American with a bald (or possibly shaved) head and tortoise-shell glasses. He wore a gray dress shirt, the cuffs rolled up one turn and a blue-and-silver Frank Lloyd Wright-patterned tie.

Thus far he had been pleasant, professional, and not very helpful.

“How many employees have these?” Brass asked, pointing to the bagged key on the publisher's desk.

Holowell shrugged. “I wouldn't really know.”

“Who would?” Grissom asked.

“I don't really know that, either.”

“Could you find out?”

“I suppose I could.”

Brass asked, “Will you?”

“Not this second, but of course I'll look into it. I have every intention of helping you, within the parameters of my responsibility to this paper.”

In other words,
Sara thought,
no.

Grissom, who'd been studying the publisher, asked, “Approximately how many magnetic
Banner
keys are out there?”

“Maybe twenty,” Holowell said. “Perhaps thirty.”

That sounded low to Sara. Even at that, the
Banner
—the city's third largest daily paper—had a couple hundred employees, and now at least ten percent of them were possible suspects.

“Only twenty to thirty?” Brass asked. “Best guesstimate, who would they likely be dispersed to?”

“Myself, of course, all the editors and reporters,” Holowell said with a shrug. “And a couple of supervisors in the press room.”

They thanked Holowell for his time and rose; handshakes had already been passed around on entry, and no one bothered to repeat the ritual.

Grissom picked up and pocketed the evidence bag off the publisher's desk, then the two CSIs and the detective stepped out into the reporters' bullpen. The bustle and mild roar of the newsroom gave them a peculiar privacy.

Sara turned to Grissom and Brass. “How about, 'Kill all the reporters?”'

“Shakespeare was silent on that subject,” Grissom said.

Sara said to the detective, “Are we in a better place than we were
before
that interview?”

Brass said, “Hell, I don't know.”

“Of course we are,” Grissom said. “Two steps forward,
one step back, is still one step forward. When we arrived we had a pool of two hundred suspects who might have a card. Now, if the publisher can be taken at his word, we're down to thirty or less. And we may be able to get a list of names.”

Sara made a face. “But the card could have been
stolen.
…”

Grissom nodded. “If in that case we can determine from whom it was stolen, we're at an advantage—we have a starting point.”

“Okay,” Sara said, seeing it.

“What we do know,” Brass said, getting on board, “is … again, taking Holowell at his word … that about eighty-five to ninety percent of the employees
don't
have keys.”

Grissom smiled. “Exactly, Jim … Sara, information is our currency, you know that. The account grows little by little, one tiny piece at a time. But it grows.”

With a sucking-lemon expression, Brass said, “Sounds like my savings account.”

The trio had moved only a short distance when David Paquette popped out of a side office that bordered the bullpen. He wore a blue shirt and blue-and-gold striped tie, sleeves rolled more than once; he seemed both more harried and less pristine than his publisher, the fluorescent lighting bouncing off his own balding pate.

“What brings the LVPD to the enemy camp?” he asked, kidding on the square.

“Appointment with Mr. Holowell,” Grissom said.

Paquette waved for them to follow him back into his office, a third the size of Holowell's, barely bigger than a cubicle, his desk was a boxy metal job with a much smaller monitor and piles of papers.

After shutting the door, their host did not get behind the desk, nor did he invite his guests to sit down; they stood in a loose huddle.

“What did you see James about?” Paquette asked. His tone had a sense of betrayal in it.

“What do you think?” Brass said. “Police business.”

Paquette snorted. “Who do you think you're tryin' to hose here? I
know
there was another murder!” He pointed an accusing finger at them, each getting a turn. “And do I hear one peep out of you guys about it? No—you aren't talking to me
or
Bell, or Brower for that matter. Did we have a deal or not?”

Grissom's forehead was tensed; this was his version of a frown. “What makes you think there's been another CASt killing?”

Paquette grunted a deep humorless laugh. “I didn't say I
thought
there was another murder, I said I
know
there was. What, are you so self-important and self-deluded, you imagine I don't have other sources in the LVPD?”

Grissom offered what may have seemed to Paquette a non sequitur: “David, do you have your keycard on you?”

“What?”

“Your
Banner
keycard.”

Paquette stuffed a hand in his pants pocket, fished for a few seconds, and indeed withdrew a keycard.

“What's your interest in this?” the editor asked.

Grissom pulled the evidence bag out of his pocket but kept the contents tightly wrapped in his fist. “If I show you this piece of evidence, I need an assurance.”

“What the hell
kind
of assurance?”

“That our arrangement is still intact and in force. You run nothing in the
Banner
till we give you the all clear.”

“After you held out on me? What a load of—”

“Hear me out,” Grissom said, evidence still concealed in his grasp. “This is something only my lab knows about—it won't be in any of the other media. And it's of particular importance to your paper.”

Paquette's natural newsman inquisitiveness took over. “I'm listening.”

Grissom knew he had the editor, but he tightened the screws: “And we still have a deal, agreed?”

Paquette was shaking his head, but he said, “Agreed.”

Letting the bag unfurl like a flag, Grissom revealed the keycard, its Las Vegas
Banner
label plainly visible to the editor.

“Yes, there has been another murder, as you know,” Grissom said. “But what you—and none of the media knows—is the victim had this item clutched in his hand.”