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  “Everybody that Got Hit was Shot

  from a Distance, Right?”

  Unable to figure out where Grissom was going with this, Sara took the ride. “That seems to be the consensus.”

  “Shot from the front,” Grissom said, gesturing to himself, “or side.”

  “Right. That was the line of fire.”

  “Mostly hit with nine-millimeter rounds, correct?”

  “Mostly, or something bigger. From the shell casings and bullets we’ve harvested, I think a couple of the shooters had .357s.”

  Nodding, Grissom said, “So, if we begin with everybody shot with nine mils or larger, and from a distance…how do we explain Nick Valpo being shot up close and personal…from behind…and with a small-caliber weapon?”

  Now she frowned in thought. “Somebody took advantage of the melee…and committed a murder in the middle of a gunfight?”

  “Yes,” Grissom said. “But not a murder, exactly.”

  “No?”

  His eyes tensed. “An execution.”

  Original novels in the CSI series:

  by Max Allan Collins

  CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

  Double Dealer

  Sin City

  Cold Burn

  Body of Evidence

  Grave Matters

  Binding Ties

  Killing Game

  Snake Eyes

  Serial (graphic novel)

  CSI: Miami

  Florida Getaway

  Heat Wave

  by Donn Cortez

  Cult Following

  Riptide

  by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  CSI: New York

  Dead of Winter

  Blood on the Sun

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  A Pocket Star Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Alliance Atlantis Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Alliance Atlantis and the stylized A design are trademarks of Alliance Atlantis Communications, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved.

  CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION and related marks are trademarks of CBS Broadcasting Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-2541-7

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-2541-6

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Author’s Note

  From the beginning, as an author of novels based on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, I have followed the lead of the gifted creative team behind the show. As such, these novels have tended to lag behind the continuity of the television series.

  This story takes place some time after the previous novel, Killing Game (2005), during the period when the CSI team had been split into two shifts…and just prior to the dramatic events that would bring this family of investigators back together.

  I would also like to acknowledge my assistant on this work, forensics researcher/co-plotter Matthew V. Clemens.

  Further acknowledgments appear at the conclusion of this novel.

  M.A.C.

  For the real CSIs of the LVMPD—

  who sparked the idea of this novel

  “It is completely unimportant.

  That is why it is so interesting.”

  —Agatha Christie’s HERCULE POIROT

  “There is nothing like

  first-hand evidence.”

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s SHERLOCK HOLMES

  “I knew it was a fight for life,

  and I drew in defense of my brothers

  and Doc Holliday.”

  —Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral inquest

  THE MYTH OF THE GOLD RUSH has captivated the world since America’s first post–Lewis and Clark westward move—when mountain men, prospectors, settlers, and gunfighters set out to explore a vast, unknown landscape in search of vast, unknown treasure.

  Over the passage of time, that concept has changed only slightly: the gold rush rushes on, but the destinations have shifted—instead of Sutter’s Mill or Deadwood or Tombstone, names like Romanov, The Sphere, or Platinum King await fortune-seekers.

  Yes, the rush is still on, and those who wish to strike it rich—as always—find a way to make their journeys. No longer do wagon trains bump and bounce over the Oregon Trail, nor do horses sprint over the Great Plains; modern-day prospectors arrive at McCarran by way of airlines. In the wilds of Vegas, riders on mustangs have been replaced by those in Mustangs—not to mention Cherokee and Wrangler Jeeps, Eldorado Caddies, and Dodge Durangos, today’s west echoing yesterday’s.

  Little has changed, however, about what the hopeful expect to find upon arriving in Las Vegas. Sin City—at least in the imaginations of travelers—still has more in common with the Old West towns of Deadwood and Tombstone than the chamber of commerce might care to admit. In their day, those wild and wooly boomtowns were regarded as wide open in a manner not unlike today’s Las Vegas. Sex, gambling, booze, and the day’s top entertainers could be found in both the notorious South Dakota mining camp and that infamous silver-mining boomtown in Arizona. And, no matter how family-friendly the chamber might paint it, a similar naughty playground awaits tourists in the Nevada desert…and not just in Vegas.

  Fifty miles down Highway 95, south of Las Vegas (but still in Clark County), planted in Piute Valley, rests Boot Hill, Nevada—a hamlet of 5,654 (prior to the event at the Four Kings Hotel & Casino, that is) with even more in common with the wild boomtowns of the Old West.

  Where Deadwood had Wild Bill Hickock and Tombstone boasted Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, Boot Hill traded on being the only western town in America to which all three of these gunfighters had, at one time or another, individually found their way. None stayed as long as six months, all traveling on to bigger and wilder adventures; but this bump in the desert road held a rare historical honor as the only place where every one of these Wild West superstars had stopped and stayed for a time and, before leaving the dusty gold camp, taken the trouble of reducing the population of Boot Hill while adding to the population of boot hill.

  Perhaps not the greatest thing to build a town’s reputation on—three famous gunfighters killing three unknown miscreants—but it had worked. Over the years, tourists had found their way to the off-the-beaten-path hamlet with its dubious place in the history of the Old West—guidebooks, unkindly if accurately, often referred to Boot Hill as “the poor man’s Tombstone.”

  In the late ’80s—1980s, that is—the tourist business had dried up, and Boot Hill found itself slinking toward a fate it had once narrowly avoided: becoming that commonplace historical footnote of the Old West, the ghost town. Boot Hill was shrinking by the day—at its peak, over ten thousand residents had made livings from the tourist and gambling trade. By 1991, the town’s six casinos had dwindled to two; the only businesses to survive: one grocery, two gas stations, a bank, three restaurants, and a lightbulb factory.

  Then the town invested municipal funds in the dot-com boom of the later ’90s, and things started to turn around. The city fathers took that money and reinvested it in drawing tourists back—a museum; monthly reenactments of their famous gunfights; statu
es of Earp, Holliday, and Hickock in the park; even a strip mall—creating a small oasis on the road to that mirage of wealth, Las Vegas.

  No one can yet say whether the incident at the Four Kings will prove a boon or deterrent to the future of Boot Hill, though certainly the poor man’s Tombstone has finally found its OK Corral gunfight. The crime scene investigators of the LVPD, however, are neither sociologists nor prognosticators, and the only history that interests them most is the recent history inherent in a crime scene.

  In Boot Hill, at the Four Kings, after the living are sorted from the dead, the CSIs’ job was to sift the sands of evidence not for gilt, but the guilty….

  1

  Friday, April 1, 2005, 3:58 P.M.

  HERE IT WAS APRIL FOOL’S DAY, and Vanessa Delware was still in Boot Hill—some joke.

  The petite, pretty brunette barely seemed old enough to enter the Four Kings Hotel & Casino, let alone be a seasoned dealer. Even with her shoulder-length hair tucked up in a businesslike bun, and black plastic-rimmed glasses that made her large blue eyes look even bigger, she might have been a high school kid, though she was in fact twenty-one, her tightly packed little body swimming in the white frilly shirt with red bow tie, and black tuxedo slacks.

  At least dealers didn’t have to wear the skimpy outfits the barmaids did, not that that stopped drunks from grabbing at her and making salacious remarks. If this were Vegas, that sort of thing wouldn’t have been tolerated. And anyway, Vegas promised a better class of groper.

  Yet, here she still was in Boot Hill, working second shift, just as she had been for most of the last year. But Vanessa had vowed long ago that she would get out of Boot Hill—growing up in a little bump in the road had been bad enough and contributed to the poor decision she’d made, putting out for a cute boy whose body piercings were many but whose prospects had been zero.

  Pregnant at twenty, local girl Vanessa had found herself abandoned by her boyfriend—ex-boyfriend, the loser—and barely tolerated by her mother, who’d had enough trouble making her own ends meet since divorcing her loser husband when Vanessa was fifteen. Cody Jacks, a family friend who worked part-time at the Four Kings, had pulled some strings and helped Vanessa get the job. The casino was glad to train her—a pretty young dealer was a nice draw (nicer draw than most card players otherwise got).

  She’d taken this small opportunity to heart and vowed to make her life as a single mother succeed.

  The plan had been formulated in the hospital. She and Cyndi, her infant daughter, would be in Vegas by next Thanksgiving…which became next Christmas, then Valentine’s Day, and now here it was April Fool’s Day and she was still tossing cards in Boot Hill, not in a glitzy casino along the Strip.

  Of course, working here, sort of apprenticing here, had been part of the plan (even a cute girl couldn’t walk in off the street and get hired in a top casino without credentials, without skills). But staying this long hadn’t been.

  Oh, she made decent money, really good tips some nights, but always there were bills and more bills (babies were expensive), and she just could not seem to get enough saved for her and Cyndi to make that mere fifty-mile move up the highway.

  She hated her situation; she felt stranded in the midst of her own life. Vegas was the promised land, so very close and yet always just out of reach….

  Usually around this time of day, the casino was empty, most tourists either having an early dinner or in their rooms resting before the night’s attack on the gaming tables. Around her blackjack station, bells tinkled, whistles blew, and the slots made their various obnoxious noises over the piped-in country-western music, the whoosh of the air-conditioning, and the chatter of the gamblers who were scattered around the casino’s convention center–size floor. The cacophony barely registered with Vanessa, who had long ago learned to tune it out. She concentrated on the cards…and the people.

  Unlike on most days at a slow time like this, Vanessa found herself with three gamblers seated at every other chair of the seven places at her table. To her left, a fortyish fat man in denim shorts and a souvenir T-shirt (“Go to Boot Hill and Live!”) constantly had to be reminded about the hand signals used in the game to aid security cameras in following the action. At center sat a younger guy, mid-thirties with a nice build and an okay face; beyond him, a busty middle-aged woman with weary features and dyed blond hair was clad in a beige sweater and tan skirt.

  All three were losing—only the guy in the center seemed to have any idea how to play—and they were all chain-smoking. Vanessa knew she shouldn’t be annoyed by that—heavy smokers were an occupational hazard—but why couldn’t they have plopped down across the aisle at Laura’s table? Laura smoked even more than they did!

  No, they had to gather around Vanessa’s table, constantly belching fumes in her direction; and what with the way they were losing, she had absolutely no tip to look forward to.

  Even if she was the dealer, Vanessa felt like the real loser, on a day like this….

  “Hit me,” the guy on the left said, hands on the table’s edge.

  “Sir…your hand signal?” she reminded him for what felt like the hundredth time (though the guy had been playing barely ten minutes).

  The guy gave her a “sorry” shrug, made the proper gesture, and she hit his fifteen with a queen and busted him out of another five dollars, which she swept away as if it had never existed.

  The younger center-seated guy offered up a sympathetic smile and tapped the table for a hit on his thirteen. She fed him a three, his smile got broader, then he tapped the table again and she busted his sixteen with a seven. His smile quickly disappeared, his body not far behind as he spun off the stool and stalked off.

  The weary woman down at the end took a drag on her cigarette and decided to stand on her fifteen after watching what had happened to her compatriots. Flipping her hand, Vanessa showed a seventeen and sucked up the chips from the woman, just as she had with the other two.

  Scanning the room slowly, she mindlessly dealt another round to the two losers. Even though she gave them an empty smile with each card, she was paying them only the barest attention now as her eyes caught a group across the casino, a regiment of leather-clad bikers emptying from the three elevators—the Predators.

  Here for the annual Boot Hill Biker Blowout, the Predators had been spending one week a year in town for as far back as Vanessa could remember. Many retailers had ceased to see the advantage of having several-hundred-plus rowdy bikers around, even if they were pumping money into the local economy. She’d on more than one occasion overheard some merchants bitching that the Biker Blowout was turning their “fair city” into Boot Hell.

  Hypocritical jerks, Vanessa thought. The city fathers gladly accepted the bikers’ money, only to constantly complain about the gangs and the sort of trouble they brought with them.

  “’Nother card, honey?” the bottle blonde asked, sighing smoke in Vanessa’s direction.

  “Sorry,” Vanessa said, and managed a smile and a card for each: the heavyset T-shirt guy a seven to go with his nine, the woman mumbling an obscenity as Vanessa dealt her a five to go with her eight.

  T-shirt Guy studied his hand for a long moment, said, “Stay,” then at the last minute remembered to wave his hand for the benefit of the camera.

  As she dropped the last card on the bottle blonde’s hand, Vanessa saw the group of maybe twenty Predators moving across the casino floor in her general direction. After a moment, the woman motioned for a hit and Vanessa dropped a queen on her hand and busted the woman out.

  The bottle blonde seemed just about to say something when the Predators started fanning out around the table. She and T-shirt Guy seemed to suddenly have somewhere else to be, and gathered up what was left of their chips and scurried away.

  With proprietary swaggers, the four Predators sat down at Vanessa’s table. The two in the middle she recognized as Nick Valpo—the Predator leader himself—and his second-in-command, Jake Hanson.

  Vanessa h
ad known guys like these all her life—hell, her baby’s father would have fit in with the Predators. And she didn’t mind them—really. One at a time, they could be fine. They could be nice.

  In groups, however, they could be…a handful. Particularly when they had eyes glistening with the dullness of drink.

  Of the half-dozen security men in the casino at this hour—late afternoon, fairly light security staffing, a few more in the video room—the only one Vanessa’s eyes sought out was Cody.

  A Boot Hill police officer, Cody Jacks moonlighted at the Four Kings, as did virtually every cop on the force. Cody was a big, tough, dependable bruiser whom she could count on to keep the peace.

  Finally, she spotted him over near the slots, his eyes glued to her table, even though he was mostly out of sight. He wore the silly red sport coat of the male floor employees—black slacks, white shirt with a black string tie. Already she felt comforted, knowing he was looking out for her.

  Tall, with lupine gray eyes, Jacks may not have been the hardbody he was twenty years ago (why hadn’t her mother married him?), but he still provided an imposing figure. Sure, his hair had grayed at the temples, and his waistband hung farther south than it used to.

  But Cody Jacks could still lay down the law; and that feeling calmed Vanessa.

  Not that she was really worried about Valpo, Hanson, or any of the other Predators, for that matter. All the years the Blowout had been going down, the motorcycle gang had never started any real trouble in either of Boot Hill’s casinos or any of its several saloons.

  Oh, yeah, of course, some fights here, some drunken partying there, a couple of broken slot machines; but stuff like that happened in a gambling town whether a motorcycle gang was around or not.

  Her concern—and no doubt Cody’s, too—was the Rusty Spokes, another motorcycle gang that had been regularly attending the Biker Blowout for the last couple of years.