Brass in Pocket (21 page)

“And that sounds like motive,” Catherine said. “Revenge best served cold, and all that.”

“I think it's even more complicated than that,” Greg said. “Think about it. Benny's career is shot. I don't know what kinds of jobs he held in the meantime, but probably nothing terribly lucrative or glamorous, considering he wound up a night janitor at a little airport in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, Jesse Dunwood has an honorable Air Force career as a fighter pilot. That was the future Benny dreamed of. After that, Jesse goes into business for himself, makes a lot of money, goes night flying over Las Vegas with a succession of beautiful women. Maybe—and this might be the worst part, the hardest sting—he doesn't even recognize Benny Kracsinski. If he had ever acknowledged the relationship publicly, the others would have told us about it. But as far as anybody there knew, Benny and Jesse only knew each other from the airport.”

“That's definitely enough to bring him in for questioning, Greg. Good job. Do you want to be there?”

“Is there anything going on with the Melinda Spence disappearance?”

“We're working it,” Catherine told him. “But there's nothing concrete yet.”

“Okay, then,” Greg said. “I guess I'll go to the airport.”

Greg had barely left Catherine's office when Wendy came in. The revolving door again.
It's a miracle Gil ever gets into the field
.

“I've got something,” Wendy said. She was practically bouncing with excitement, or as close to bouncing as Wendy ever got at work.

“Something on what?”

“Something on that sheep. Or off it, rather.”

“Excuse me?”

“Touch DNA. I swabbed the sheep's… not armpits, but whatever you want to call them, and got some microscopic epithelials. The last person who handled her without gloves on was a man named Dawson Upson.”

“That's good to know,” Catherine said, her heart beginning to race. Halden Robles had identified the pizza delivery kid who was interested in his dog as Donnie or Dougie, she remembered. “Tell me more. Who is Dawson Upson?”

“He's a twenty-two-year-old Caucasian male. He's a lifelong Las Vegas resident, except for the last four years when he was going to college back in Boston. He graduated in June, though, and he's back in town, living with his mother, Vera Upson. He's not currently employed. His major was history, so there probably aren't a lot of jobs in Vegas suited to him. And get this—Mom's house is less than two miles from the Empire Casino construction site.”

“Are you trying out for detective, Wendy?”

“I guess I got a little carried away. Touch DNA is still pretty experimental, so when I actually got a result I took it a couple of steps further.”

“There's nothing wrong with taking initiative.”

“I'm glad you feel that way.” Wendy proffered a photo printed from the LVPD's database. “This is his driver's license picture.”

Catherine took the sheet of paper and alarm bells started ringing in her head.

Dawson Upson was the guy who had drugged Melinda Spence and taken her out of the Palermo.

“Okay, I have to call Sam Vega,” she said. She felt a surge of almost maternal pride at Wendy's discovery. Wendy was pretty, with a good body; in this city, a few wrong decisions might have pushed her down Catherine's original path instead of her current one. Wendy had even acted in a low-budget horror movie once, so a career on one sort of stage or another hadn't been out of the question. Catherine was glad she had chosen forensic science instead, because she showed a lot of promise. “How did Upson's DNA happen to be in the system?”

“It was evidence in a domestic violence case. His father beat him and his mother. The father claimed Dawson hurt himself falling down a flight of stairs, but investigators found his blood on a fireplace poker. The father killed himself rather than go to prison.”

“That's definitely rough on the kid,” Catherine said. She was sympathetic toward victims of abuse—but only to a point. “It's no excuse for turning into a murderer, but it's hard anyway. Thanks, Wendy.” She reached for the phone to call Sam.

“There is one more thing, Catherine.”

“What is it?”

Wendy hitched herself up, seeming to grow a couple of inches taller.
Pride
, Catherine thought. She was glad to see it. “I did a quick scan through the newspaper archives of Boston papers, from while Upson was in school there. During that time, six young women were abducted in the area. Some of them were released right away, unhurt, but a couple were tortured with knives and razor blades before
being released. None of them were killed, and no suspect was ever apprehended. The last incident was in April, and nothing matching that pattern has turned up since then.”

“Because he was studying for finals?”

“That's possible. And then he came back to Las Vegas.”

“And now he has Melinda Spence. Great work, Wendy. I'm going to have this guy picked up fast.”

N
ICK AND
R
ILEY WERE
on their way back to the lab when Catherine called. They were both still steamed about having to let Victor Whendt go, but they couldn't come up with a legitimate reason to hold him. Riley reminded herself that she was a CSI, not a detective. She wasn't supposed to play hunches. She found evidence and followed its trail.

Catherine had called Nick, but he was driving and Catherine wanted to relay a street address. He handed the phone to Riley.

“I need you to make a detour,” Catherine said.

“Where to?”

“We've identified a suspect in the Melinda Spence disappearance.”

A thrill coursed through Riley's body. That was the case that had started with the discovery of the animal burial pit. Saving Melinda's life was of primary importance, but if in the doing of it they could
also bring in whoever had killed those poor animals, so much the better. “Who is it?” she asked.

“A man named Dawson Upson—I guess not much more than a boy, really. He lives with his mom a couple of miles from the Empire Casino site. He just came back from four years of college in Boston—”

“Which would explain the time gap in the animal corpses!” Riley interrupted. “Sorry.”

“That's right,” Catherine said. “He may have abducted and tortured some women in Boston. And he's a physical match for the person we have on video taking Melinda out of the Palermo. I have a feeling this is our guy.”

“Good. Where do you want us to go?”

Catherine read off an address, which Riley wrote down in a notebook she kept in her pocket. Low tech, but it worked. “Vega's on his way, and so is backup,” Catherine told her. “But I don't want to waste a second. You're not too far from Dawson Upson's house. And chances are he doesn't take his victims there, since his mother lives there, too. I need you to get over there now. If he's there, we need him in handcuffs. If he's not, process his room. Work the whole house if you need to. There's a warrant in the works, and it'll get there soon. If there's any clue as to where Upson would have taken Melinda, I want it found.”

“We're on it, Catherine,” Riley said. She filled Nick in, then brought up a route correction on the vehicle's GPS unit. He put his foot down and the SUV shot through the dark Nevada night toward the northeast side.

Established neighborhoods fell away behind them as they entered new development territory, surrounding the Empire Casino construction site. A few of the developments had been here for ten or twenty years, but they had been built with plenty of open desert between them. Now most of that desert had been filled in by more houses, constructed with a sameness that Riley found depressing. Watching out the window, she saw what seemed like an endless progression of signs advertising new housing projects and one brown stucco wall after another after another—some of them tan, occasionally an olive or a dun, but all within the same general palette and built in similar styles.

Every now and then they passed patches of undisturbed desert, or at least desert that appeared, to her relative newcomer's eye, to be pristine. Small forests of creosote bushes shot past the window, stands of cottonwoods and mesquites and other trees she couldn't identify but had admired elsewhere in daylight, sparse and scrubby, with profuse blooms somewhere between pink and magenta. Occasionally the headlights swept over shaggy yuccas or barbed chollas. “It's a long way from here to the Strip,” she said.

“Not too bad when there's no traffic.”

“I meant metaphorically. Out here you still feel like you're in the desert. On the Strip, you could be anywhere. I mean, nowhere but Las Vegas—but Las Vegas could be set down in the middle of Tokyo or New York or on the moon. It's something apart from its surroundings.”

“I guess,” Nick said. “To me it's all Vegas. Desert
and heat and lights and noise and greed—it's all one and the same. Vegas is as different as can be from where I grew up in Dallas, but I guess it's kind of worked its way under my skin. You can't remove any one element, because then it wouldn't be the same place anymore.”

“But as all the desert gets eaten up by new construction, doesn't that throw it out of balance anyway?”

“Yeah, it might. The one constant here is change, though, so if there wasn't continual growth it still wouldn't be the same.”

“I guess,” Riley said. “Okay, left turn up here.”

Nick slowed the SUV and turned left into one of the older developments, meaning it had probably been there since the 1980s. Hidden spotlights beamed toward the fronds of mature palm trees, set into a patch of thick green grass that could only exist in the desert thanks to an abundance of cheap water. From everything she had heard about Las Vegas's future, that kind of thing was on its way out. Citizens could already be fined for watering a lawn during the day, or for hosing off a driveway.

From the other direction, multiple headlights split the night. “Here comes the cavalry,” Nick said.

The approaching vehicles turned into the development. Nick pulled over and let them pass, two squad cars and one unmarked, racing toward the Upson house. They followed taillights the rest of the way, and by the time they had gathered their field kits, officers in assault gear had fanned out around the house. Sam Vega and a couple of officers approached the front door, all clad in Kevlar vests. The
Upson house, a single-story ranch, had a xeriscaped yard, raw dirt and rocks with some native plants scattered sparsely across it. Better for the environment than a lawn, plus housing a single mother with her teenage son away at college, it would be easier to maintain. The windows were dark, the house silent.

Riley and Nick stood back to let the police do their thing. Vega watched one of the uniforms pound on the front door. “LVPD!” the cop shouted. “Open up!”

A light flicked on at the end of the house. Moments later, a woman came to the door, clutching a cotton robe at her chest. She was in her mid-forties, Riley guessed, with short red hair that had spiked off everywhere while she slept. Her eyes were puffy. “What is it?” she demanded. “What's going on?”

“Las Vegas Police Department, ma'am,” Vega said, stepping forward and displaying his badge. “Are you Vera Upson? Dawson Upson's mother?”

“Yes, that's right. Yes, I am. What—”

“Is your son home?”

“Of course. I mean… I assume he is. He should be.”

Assuming,
Riley thought.
Never a good idea, especially when your son might be a monster
. “Do you mind if we check?” Vega asked. His manner was calming, which considering she could see heavily armed police officers surrounding her house, must have been intended to put her at as much ease as was possible.

“I… I have trouble sleeping. I took a pill. He was still up when I went to bed, but it's late now, so—”

“We'll just have a look, ma'am,” Vega said. “It's very important.”

“Do you have a… what's it called? A warrant?”

“Do you have something to hide?” Vega asked. “There's a warrant on the way, but we'd like to be allowed inside. A young woman's life might be in danger.”

“I don't… what are you talking about? I don't understand what you're saying.”

“I'm asking you to step back from the doorway and let us in, Mrs. Upson. If you cooperate, it'll be better all around.”

“But, a woman's life? Do I need a lawyer?”

“Honestly?” Vega said. “It might not be a bad idea. Now if you don't mind…”

“Fine!” Mrs. Upson waved them in. “Go ahead. He's probably sound asleep in his room. You know how boys are.”

“We'll find out,” Vega said. “Which one's his room?”

She pointed down the hall. “Third door,” she said. She was awake now. She looked shell-shocked.

As soon as she moved out of the doorway, cops flooded into her house. Riley and Nick waited outside. Banging doors and shouts of “Clear!” rang from the house.

A few minutes later, Sam Vega emerged, shaking his head. Vera Upson trailed him out the door. “The kid's not here,” Vega said.

“I… I just don't know where he could be. He's not some wild thing, not like some other boys.”

“Do you take pills to sleep every night?” Vega asked her.

“Like I told you, I have trouble sleeping.”

“Do you have any idea where he goes at night while you're unconscious? What he does?”

“Apparently not,” Mrs. Upson said. There was a hint of indignation in her voice. “I don't think I like your tone.”

“I apologize, ma'am,” Vega said. “We're just trying to find someone. It's very important.”

“This woman you mentioned? I'm sure she's not here.”

“It doesn't appear that she is. Does Dawson have someplace that he likes to go? When he's not here?”