Brass in Pocket (2 page)

She also didn't mind being in charge. She had kind of enjoyed it, in fact, when she had temporarily been swing shift supervisor. If she rather than Gil
had been the actual supervisor, the lab would be a different place, but primarily in small, cosmetic ways. Gil ran it well and she had few real complaints about his leadership. Still, she was an ambitious woman with ideas of her own and the drive to want to put them into action. But if Gil hadn't been out of town, she might not have had to go to the Rancho Center Motel, which was just the kind of hole that made her want to burn her clothes and scrub her skin down with steel wool when she was finished. On this hot night, with the overloaded window air conditioners dripping onto the sidewalk, the building itself seemed to be sweating. The parking lot held a peculiar reek all its own. And she hadn't even reached the DB yet.

That was still waiting for her inside Room 119. The door from the parking lot was open. Catherine and Nick Stokes had to pass under yellow crime scene tape and sign a log sheet to get to it… a far cry from the more exclusive spots around town, where the crowd control ropes were crushed velvet and the bouncers didn't wear uniforms and badges.

“Take a deep breath, Nicky,” she said outside the door. “Bad as it is out here, it'll be much worse in there.”

Nick raised an eyebrow and twitched his lips, the closest thing to a smile he could muster at the moment. He knew the score. Catherine didn't think the reminder would offend him, but she had to watch herself. She was nobody's mom but Lindsey's, and Lindsey didn't work at the Las Vegas Police Department's crime lab.

The motel room looked pretty much as she had
expected it to. She had been here before—this wasn't the joint's first homicide—and this wasn't the kind of place that spent a lot of money on regular remodels. A bed sat in the middle of the room, with a nightstand made of some woodlike substance next to it. A small dresser stood against the opposite wall, near the smashed-in door. Lying in the rubble, just inside, was the small black handheld battering ram, like the kind police used for hard entries, that had almost certainly done the smashing. There was a TV chained to a rack in one corner, six feet off the floor, and its remote was chained to the nightstand. The carpeting was of a mixture of colors chosen primarily for its ability to disguise vomit stains, and in the event of a fire would probably immediately turn into a poisonous gas. The walls were painted white, but on top of the paint was what looked like a year's worth of dust, giving it a flat gray appearance.

The foulest motel room's many sins faded in significance, however, when there was a body inside, and this one was no exception.

Assistant coroner David Phillips had already arrived. When Catherine entered the room, he looked up from the body, blinking behind his glasses. “Victim's been dead less than thirty minutes,” he said by way of greeting. “Obviously there's no rigor present yet. He took two bullets. First one through the left trapezius muscle; the second entered through the lower lip and exited through the top of the skull.” He tilted his head toward the ceiling, and Catherine saw the knot of blood, brains, and hair pasted there.

“Hello to you, too,” Catherine said.

“Oh, yeah, hi, Catherine. Nick.”

“Hey,” Nick said.

“So I'm guessing that's our COD?” Catherine asked. “The head shot, anyway?”

“That's my initial determination,” David said. “Vic is a thirty-six-year-old male. Wallet in his back jeans pocket, with a Nevada DL identifying him as—”

“Deke Freeson,” Catherine said. She had walked around the body far enough to see his face. What was left of it, anyway. In life it had been reasonably handsome—not as square-jawed as Nick Stokes, maybe, but with a good firm chin, full lips, a nose that jutted forward like it meant business but not so far it rounded the corner before the rest of him. Deke's eyes were his best feature, a brilliant blue that people remembered and remarked on long after even the most cursory meeting with him. She found herself oddly pleased that the bullet had missed them. His hair was sandy and spiked. She had, on more than one occasion, seen him out on the town with some showgirl or other. Had he ever asked, she might have dated him herself.

“Yeah, that's Deke,” Nick said.

“You both know him?” David asked. He seemed surprised.

“Everybody in Vegas knows Deke,” Nick said.

“I don't.”

“You run with the wrong crowd,” Catherine said. “Or maybe it's the right one, I don't know. He was a private detective. Strictly low budget, but he's a decent guy and a good investigator.”

“He was on the job, years ago,” Nick added. “Exmilitary, too. I think he was a Gulf War vet.”

“Well, there's a photocopied PI license in the wallet
too, which I was about to tell you. I guess that comes as no surprise, though.”

“Not at all,” Catherine said. She hadn't known Deke Freeson well, but like Nick had said, everybody in Las Vegas knew him. Every cop, at least. Every dead body was sad, but the sorrow sliced with a sharper edge when the victim was someone you knew.

“There's a gun here,” David said. “Close to his right hand. I think he was holding it when he fell.”

“Desert Eagle?” Nick asked. “Fifty caliber? Brushed chrome?”

“That's right.”

“Deke did love his firepower,” Catherine said. “You found a license for that too, right?”

“Yeah. Maybe it would be easier if you tell me what you don't know about this guy, and then I can try to fill in the blanks.”

“That should be obvious,” Catherine said.

“Obvious how?”

“What we don't know,” she said, “is who killed him.”

A
FTER THE PHOTOGRAPHS
were taken and David Phillips had completed his preliminary examination, what was left of Deke Freeson was taken away. Catherine and Nick were not so lucky.

Their task was to process the room, which naturally required them to remain inside it. The smell was horrific, blood and urine and sweat competing for dominance with less immediately identifiable stenches. The room contained more fluids than Catherine cared to think about. Her first pass through, she focused on semen; the blood was more or less apparent, and by locating and identifying semen, she would be less likely to stand or sit in it or to accidentally place a hand in it. Her hands were gloved in multiple layers of latex, so she could peel off any that became contaminated. But still… she had her limits of tolerance, and the Rancho Center Motel room seemed determined to test them all.

She started with a handheld UV light, under
which semen would often fluoresce. Holding the light, she moved in a careful pattern, sweeping the room to find each incidence. As expected, she found multiple specimens, none of them particularly fresh (and several, to her dismay, apparently having survived multiple launderings of the sheets and bedspread). Each spot had to be swabbed, and the swabs treated with alpha-naphthyl phosphate and Brentamine Fast Blue. More often than not, the swabs turned purple almost immediately, indicating positive results. All the spots were dry, which made collecting and bagging them easier, but given the sheer number of them in the room, it was still a long process. Each would have to be analyzed back at the lab, where DNA analysis would help determine who had been in the room. Given the age of the stains, she suspected they wouldn't factor into the investigation, but until she knew for certain when Deke Freeson had arrived at the room, and what he was doing there, she couldn't afford to discount any potential leads.

Nick, meanwhile, had been taking a more global approach. After collecting bullets from the ceiling and headboard, he rummaged through drawers and the closet and the single suitcase and purse found in the room. “The purse belongs to Antoinette O'Brady of Las Vegas,” he announced. “There's a wallet and cell phone still inside. Plenty of cash. She's fifty-six years old.” He showed Catherine the driver's license picture. Antoinette O'Brady looked young for her age and wore her long blond hair and makeup in ways that made her look like she was trying to come across as younger still.

“If she lives in town, what's she doing staying in a dump like this?” Catherine asked.

“And where is she now? Maybe she's the shooter, not a motel guest. The room was registered to Freeson. He checked in yesterday.”

“Which doesn't necessarily mean that one or both of them weren't here before that, either staying with someone else or registered under a different name. I doubt this place is too picky about checking ID. We'll have to look for any connections between them,” Catherine said. “What about that suitcase?”

“I'm pretty sure it's not Deke's,” Nick said. “Clothing and toiletries are consistent with the woman's height and weight, based on her license.”

“How old is the license?”

“Less than a year old.”

“Most people shave a few pounds off when they get a new license,” Catherine said. “But if it's that recent, chances are it's in the ballpark. And I've never heard of anyone bringing a suitcase on a hit.”

“Even if they did, they wouldn't unpack their toiletries in the bathroom,” Nick observed. “It looks like she expected to stay for a while. Few days, anyway.”

“A few days in this room might be enough to make me start shooting people too,” Catherine said. She had finished with fluids, and used tweezers to lift a hair from the carpet and drop it into a small plastic envelope. Like the semen and blood, it would go to the lab for analysis. Chances were good it would have nothing to do with Deke Freeson or
Antoinette O'Brady, but it had to be done. “What else do we have?”

“Well, blood,” Nick said.

“Obviously there's no shortage of that.”

“That's for sure.” He pointed at the bed. “High-velocity spatter here and on the headboard. More on the ceiling. Consistent with the two shots David described. I think the shooter came in the door—”

“Using the battering ram,” Catherine interrupted.

“—right. Smashed in the door, dropped the ram, and fired the first shot. It hit Freeson just below the collarbone. Freeson was standing in front of the bed—there's backspatter on the floor in front of his position—when the shooter came in and fired. Blood sprayed his feet and the floor there. Someone—presumably the shooter, since the transfer pattern doesn't match the shoes Freeson was wearing—stepped in it. The print is a sneaker print. Converse. And there's a void in the blood spatter on the bed.”

“I noticed that too. So Deke was trying to shield someone—maybe Antoinette O'Brady—who was on the bed when he got shot. She was hit by blood spatter.”

“Do you think Deke got off a shot?”

“Either that or just the sight of that big Desert Eagle made the shooter hesitate,” Nick said. “The difference in the angle between the two shots indicates a delay of at least a second or two—first shot from a bit of a distance, the second closer, and at an upward angle.”

“But if he did fire, where's his round? And a witness
said someone fired from near the pool. What's up with that?”

“That's right. I'll have a look around out there.”

“I'll be here,” Catherine said. “Probably still collecting hairs.”

Nick walked out to the pool area, stopping every few feet to look back toward the open door of the room. As long as there were no tall vehicles parked in front of the room, someone could have fired from around the pool. But why would they? And if there was someone else in the doorway, would they take the shot, knowing they might hit their partner or accomplice? He supposed the first shot could have been fired from there… but it didn't make sense to shoot at a closed door, and they hadn't found any sign of a bullet or bullet hole in the wreckage of the door. And no one would ram in the door and then run to the pool to shoot.

The pool smelled almost as bad as the room. Nick let himself in through an unlocked gate in the tall chain-link fence and walked around the concrete basin. At least a foot of trash coated the bottom, maybe more. He wondered if the motel had quit paying their Dumpster fees and intended to just use the pool instead.

He swept his flashlight's beam around but didn't spot any shell casings on the concrete surrounding the pool, or any other sign that someone had fired a weapon. He hoped he wouldn't have to go wading in the collected trash. But as he let his eye drift over the scene, taking in the fence and the view back toward
the motel building, he saw that one corner of the fence, where it connected to an upright and a top rail on the side nearest the building, had been broken loose.

He circled back around the pool to take a closer look. The fence was broken so cleanly that it might have been clipped. But there was a crease in the top rail, the steel slightly blackened.

Nick stood in front of it and looked toward the room. Right on line.

He was starting to think the witness had been wrong.
The guy didn't see a muzzle flash
, he realized with sudden certainty,
he saw a spark
. Nick could confirm his hunch with laser beams, since the distance was too great for trajectory rods, but it looked like a bullet fired at a slight upward angle from near the bed in Room 119 would gain just enough elevation to hit the top rail right where the fence was broken. The witness reported that he was already trying to leave, that the first loud noise—no doubt the battering ram taking down the door—had frightened him. Looking through a rearview as he was trying to get the hell out of there, in the dark, even a small spark might have seemed like a bright flash.

If the round had glanced off the rail, then it had to have gone somewhere.

Unfortunately, the most likely place was down in the pool. The bullet would have been slowed, redirected by the rail, and fallen in. He shone a flashlight along the wall and spotted what looked like a fresh chip in the pool wall, but the momentum had been slowed enough that the bullet hadn't become embedded there.