Binding Ties (15 page)

“Color?”

“Brown, I think. Kinda brown. You could dive in and get lost in those puppies.”

“Scars or tattoos?”

Orloff shook his head. “Not that I could see. Neither one got naked—this was a kind of voyeuristic deal, mostly. I whack, john watches, here's your cup of fun, here's your hat, what's your hurry?”

Damon said, “These guys weren't … together?”

“No. They just had similar kinks. It's … unusual, but not unheard of.”

Brass thought,
Just write in with your question to
Ask Dr. Orloff
in the next issue of
Bizarre Pen Pals Monthly.

Brass asked, “Anything else you can think of, Rudy?”

“Two come catchers isn't enough?”

Brass stood, waved to the guard. Then to the prisoner he said, “I'll get right on this—you'll be in solitary within twenty-four hours. Thanks, Rudy—this is valuable.”

Orloff, minus any attitude, said, “Thanks. You want to tell me what it was I said that helped?”

“No.”

They were back in the car before Damon finally asked. “I give up, what
did
he say?”

Brass started the car and backed out of the parking spot. “The two guys he described could have been almost anyone.”

“Yeah,” Damon said.

“Or … the older one could be Perry Bell, minus the rug.”

“The what?” Damon said, then he got it. “Damn! I've never
seen
Perry without that toup—I damn near forgot he was bald underneath.”

“Yeah, well he may also be a killer underneath. I'm phoning ahead to Vegas to get a faxed photo of Bell shown to our little helper, Rudy Orloff. If he makes Perry Bell, we have our man … or anyway, our copycat.”

SIX

C
atherine Willows and Nick Stokes had worked all night to track down Dallas Hanson, going from one dead address to another, until finally, in the light of day, they honed in on a homeless shelter in North Las Vegas.

With Nick behind the wheel of the Tahoe, fighting hump-day morning rush hour, Catherine said, “Odd, isn't it?”

“What is?” Nick asked. He had a cup of fast-food coffee in one hand; they'd just had the kind of five-minute breakfast mother never made.

“The way this job combines the mundane with the extraordinary.”

“You
are
tired….”

“No, really. I mean, are we cruising to another dead end, like Carlson? Or a confrontation with a homicidal maniac?”

“I get your point,” he said. “But I really didn't find that serial-killer shrine particularly mundane.”

She laughed once. “Maybe I'm jaded, at that.”

Nick sipped his coffee, eyes on the road, as he said, gently, “Is it hard? Knowing that right now your daughter's getting ready for school, and you're not there with her?”

“For an unmarried guy with a little-black-book of a speed dial,” she said with an affectionate grin, “you're deep, Mr. Stokes. Sensitive, even.”

He flashed a Nicholson grin and gave her a Presleyesque “Thank you. Thank you vurry much….”

“… The answer is yes.” She'd had to call from the fast-food joint to have the sitter cover with Lindsey. “One of these days … I gotta get on dayshift.”

They rode in silence for a while, then Nick asked, “You really think we're gonna find a serial killer at a homeless shelter?”

“It does go against the grain.”

“Now if his vics were homeless, transient types, that'd be different.”

“Like Jack the Ripper,” Catherine said. “Or Cleveland's Mad Butcher.”

“But CASt's M.O. is middle-to-upper-middle-class white males.”

“I know, I know. But we check this one out—and we take no chances.”

“No argument, Cath.”

They both knew that many serial killers preferred
the privacy of their own out-of-the-way residences for their specialized activities. And Dallas Hanson would have zero privacy at the Find Salvation Mission and Shelter.

Then again, CASt wasn't like most other serial killers. He operated within the residences of his victims. He didn't pick up hitchhikers like Bundy did, or seduce young men into his home like Gacy had. Just because Hanson lived in a shelter didn't mean he wasn't a legitimate suspect.

In fact, hiding among the anonymous unfortunates of a city made imminent sense, from a madman's point of view….

Catherine hoped the rest of the team—and she didn't just mean her fellow CSIs, but Brass, Doc Robbins, and even Damon and the assorted detectives aiding the effort—were making some progress out there, on the current crimes. This case was spiraling out of control, and Sheriff Rory Atwater—a more savvy political beast than even former sheriff Brian Mobley—would be breathing down their necks every second.

Although she respected the new sheriff, she couldn't quite bring herself to like him—that might change, but she was put off by his style: He was a slicker politician than Mobley, who had bobbled his mayoral campaign badly. She had every reason to believe the new sheriff wouldn't hesitate to leave the CSIs, Brass, and company hanging out to dry to better his own career.

“You think we should go straight from here to the third guy?” Nick asked.

Catherine shrugged. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But if Hanson's a washout, we could think about going to see Dayton. We're approved for overtime on this thing. Are you up to it?”

“Up to it, up for it … you name it.”

“Amazing what one cup of coffee can do for a strapping lad like you.”

Nick just shrugged and grinned. But in a moment the grin had faded, as he said, “Do you really think we have a shot at solving a ten-, eleven-year-old series of murders? I mean, they do CASt on those unsolved-mystery-type shows. He's on the list with Judge Crater and JonBenét.”

She thought about that briefly, then said, “Yeah, I do think we have a real shot. We're better equipped than Brass and Champlain were, when the original murders went down.”

“Yeah, and lots of cold cases are getting cracked by new technology—but Cath, other than those DNA samples Champlain was smart enough to store, we got nothing but a cold, cold trail.”

“I see your point, but then, remember, Nick, on the other hand—we're very, very good.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. Yeah, I almost forgot….”

On Miller Avenue, Nick parked the Tahoe at the curb in front of a low-slung stucco, which was a single story but for the west end, where a second story rose into a church-like steeple; the one-story
had a window with the bold black-outlined-red words
FIND SALVATION MISSION AND SHELTER
, and the two-story portion had room for a mural of an idealized praying Jesus, amateur enough to have been done by one of the mission's tenants, sincere enough to give Catherine a momentary heart tug.

They walked through the front door into what might have been the lobby of a rundown hotel: a scattering of overstuffed hand-me-down chairs and sofas around a large open room, tables covered with magazines so old they might have been collectible, in less dog-eared shape; the occasional Bible mingled with the mags. Sunshine slanted in, film noir-style, thanks to partly drawn blinds on the front window, providing light and shadow. Off to the right yawned a wide wooden staircase with oak railings that would be about the only thing worth salvaging if a wrecking ball were ever scheduled here.

A thin, sixty-something silver-haired man, whose week-or-so-worth of stubble threatened to become a beard, was sunk deep in an armchair; immersed in the sports section of the morning paper, he wore a very faded, possibly original vintage
Star Wars
T-shirt and faded-to-white jeans, which were accidently in style, and apparently had not noticed their entry. Behind a hotel-like check-in desk, opposite the front door, a thin youngish woman with mousy brown hair and black-frame glasses looked up from a religious
magazine she had been reading; her oval face, bearing no trace of makeup, was not unattractive. She wore a clean, crisp white men's dress shirt and black slacks; her manner was professional, and the simple gold-cross necklace spoke volumes.

“May I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

Catherine had a necklace, too, and lifted the ID badge on its chain for the woman to get a better look. “Catherine Willows, Nick Stokes.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “Crime Lab? Well, we haven't had any crimes here in a long time. Haven't reported anything … untoward.”

“Normally a detective would come around,” Catherine said, “but the department is stretched a little thin right now, and we're on an important case.”

“I see.” Her hands were folded, appropriately enough, in a prayerlike fashion. “Well, the mission's policy is twofold. We of course help the authorities in any way we can. But we also respect the privacy and dignity of our guests.”

“We're not here to arrest anyone,” Catherine said. “We're doing background work, following up on an old case that may have a bearing on a new one.”

Nick shrugged, smiled his easy smile, and said, “We just want to chat with one of your guests. Fill in some blanks.”

Catherine's tap dance, and Nick's charm, merged to do the trick.

“Who would you like to chat with?”

Catherine said, “Dallas Hanson.”

The woman's eyes flicked toward where the old-timer had been sitting with his sports page; however, when Catherine glanced back, the old man was gone.

“Where did Obi-Wan Kenobi go?” Catherine asked Nick.

He shrugged. “I don't know—we had our backs to him. Maybe he transported outta here.”

“Wrong show,” Catherine said. Turning back to the woman, she asked sternly, “Was that Dallas Hanson?”

“Some of our guests have—”

Catherine cut her off. “Privacy and dignity, I know. But this is a murder investigation. Was that him, or not?”

The woman sucked in breath through her nostrils, and tried to stand firm as the authority figure in charge of this desk; but in three seconds, she had withered under Catherine's stare. “No. No, that wasn't him.”

The CSIs moved away from the woman's post.

“Outside,” Catherine said to Nick, with a gesture toward the door. “If Obi-Wan's warning someone in here, we might have an early checkout, out a window.”

“What about those stairs?”

“Mine.”

Nick's expression said he didn't love her plan; but
she was the senior officer, and he tore through the lobby and out the door.

Catherine ran to the stairs, taking them two at a time, easing her head out when she got to the second floor.

Nothing.

Nothing but an open door about halfway down, on the left, the side of the hall whose rooms might have windows facing the back alley. Assuming this was the right room, Catherine hoped Nick was on his way around. Tough for one man to cover all four sides of a building….

She let the heel of her hand slide down until it touched the butt of her pistol, reassuring herself of its presence. Then she started down the corridor, the pungent smell of disinfectant tweaking her nostrils.

At the open door she ducked in and found the silver-haired near-codger from the lobby hovering over another man, who lay in the cot along the lefthand wall in the cell-like room. A small, square, endlessly scuffed wooden table and two mismatched kitchen chairs were by the only window, and a squat bureau took up a fair piece of the righthand wall.

To the man in the bed, the silver-haired man said, “You
sure
this is what you want, Dal?”

The bedridden man must have nodded, because the silver-haired man shrugged and said, “Your call, buddy,” and stepped aside.

That gave Catherine her first look at the sunken-cheeked scarecrow on the cot. His hair was graying too, if less rapidly than his friend, and he had shaved recently, maybe even yesterday. But his skin was as gray as his hair, and his eyes were a plea for mercy—not from Catherine, but God.

“Dallas Hanson?” Catherine asked.

The man on the cot nodded. It took some effort.

“I'd like to talk to you.”

He had sunken cheeks, high cheekbones, and a prominent forehead that made his narrow face look like a skewed metal framework full of sharp angles with skin thinly stretched over it.

“Pretty woman like you?” he said pleasantly, his voice surprisingly deep. “Sure. Don't get much company of your … caliber.”

He looked small and bony beneath the blankets.

She got her radio out and pushed a button and said, “Nick, our man's not running. We're in …” She looked at the door, which was white and recently painted; a plastic card in a slot said: 218. She told Nick.

Nick said he was on his way.

She glanced at the silver-haired man, who looked embarrassed. “Gonna help your friend take the back way out, huh?”

“No law against stopping by a buddy's room,” the old guy said, his voice midrange, quavery. “Or is this a fascist state already?”

“This is a murder investigation. Do you really think standing in its way is a good idea?”

He didn't answer, just put his head down, eyes not meeting hers, and started for the door.

As he passed, Catherine said, “A lot of people could have gotten hurt because of you.”

The man paused, then looked at her; his eyes were bloodshot, rheumy. “Everybody in here, lady, is hurting already. You got a badge and real nice clothes. We got each other.”

Catherine began to say something, then thought about what the woman at the desk had said about the privacy and dignity of the “guests”; and said nothing as the old boy, chin on his chest, walked out.

“Don't blame Bruce,” Hanson said. He had worked himself up on his elbows, and he had a yellow smile going. “Most of us have had trouble with the law at one time or another—we kind of watch out for each other.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”