CSI Mortal Wounds Read online

  Other than that, however, Grissom said nothing.

  Which always made Warrick very, very nervous.

  Culpepper was waiting in Grissom’s office, the FBI agent having helped himself to the chair behind the desk, his feet up on its corner. “Hey, buddy, how’re you doing?”

  Feeling his anger rising, Grissom breathed slowly and stayed calm. “Why, I’m just fine, Special Agent Culpepper—and how are you?”

  Brass came into the office, saw the FBI agent, and said, “Our government tax dollars at work.”

  Culpepper’s feet came off the desk and he sat up straight, but he said nothing for several endlessly long moments. At last, he said, “I hear you guys got something on the Deuce.”

  Grissom kept his face passive, though he wondered where Culpepper got his information. “You heard wrong.”

  “I’ve been waiting here for half an hour. Where were you, Grissom?”

  “Lunch. I don’t remember having an appointment with the FBI.”

  “I heard you were so dedicated, you don’t even find time for lunch.”

  “Today he did,” Brass said. “With me. We would have invited you, but you didn’t let us know you were coming.”

  Grissom said, “Was there a purpose to your visit, Culpepper, or are you just fishing?”

  The FBI agent’s smile was almost a sneer; he straightened his tie while he stalled to come up with an answer. “I stopped by to tell you that we heard the Deuce has left the area.”

  Grissom allowed his skepticism to show through a little. “If you think he’s gone, why are you still nosing around here?”

  “Just covering all the bases, buddy. Like you, this is my turf—keeping my fellow law enforcement professionals informed. You should know that.”

  “Covering your what?” Brass asked.

  Culpepper rose and came around the desk, stopping in the doorway. He beamed at Grissom. “Too bad you didn’t come up with anything, buddy. I figured if anybody would catch this guy, it would be you. They say you’re the number two crime lab in the country…not counting the FBI, of course.”

  “Yeah,” Brass said, “your lab’s got the reputation we’re all longing for.”

  Culpepper made a tsk-tsk in his cheek. “Must be hard not being number one.”

  “We try harder,” Grissom said.

  The FBI agent nodded. “You’ll need to. Good luck, gentlemen—keep the good thought.”

  And Culpepper was gone.

  “Damnit,” Brass said, leaning out into the hall, making sure the FBI agent wasn’t lingering. “How did he know?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t.”

  “Maybe he does.”

  Grissom shrugged. “You talked to the county clerk, the utilities, and I don’t know how many other agencies.”

  “He’s not helping us, is he? He’s watching us. Why?”

  “Easier than solving the case himself maybe—steps in and takes the credit.” Grissom shook his head, disgusted. “What a backward motivation for this line of work…. Until just now, I was tempted to give him the list of dates Warrick gave me.”

  “Of times Hyde’s been out of town this year?”

  “Yeah. See what unsolved murders or missing persons cases match up to those dates.”

  “Give me that list, and I’ll do what I can.”

  Grissom did.

  “You think the killer’s still active?” Brass asked.

  Grissom got back behind the desk, sitting. “We know he is—he shot Dingelmann. Maybe he stopped doing mob-related work and his contracts are with individuals now. That could be the reason he hasn’t turned up on the FBI’s radar in the last four years.”

  “Are you convinced Hyde is the Deuce?”

  “No. Too early. Hell of a lead, though. Warrick gets the MVP of the day.”

  On cue, Warrick appeared in the office doorway, Sara just behind him; Grissom waved them in.

  “The esteemed Agent Culpepper looks steamed,” Warrick said.

  “Good,” said Brass.

  “Saw him in the parking lot,” Sara said. “What did you say to him?”

  Eyes hooded, Brass said, “We just did our best to share as much with him as he shared with us.”

  Warrick said, “Bupkis, you mean.”

  “Oh, we didn’t give him that much,” Brass said.

  Shifting gears, Warrick fell into a chair across from Grissom, saying, “Something stinks about that video store.”

  “Besides cannabis?” Grissom asked innocently.

  Warrick and Sara smiled, avoiding their boss’s eyes.

  Brass picked up on the train of thought. “You’re referring to that horde of customers we saw in there today.”

  “Even for an off time,” Warrick said, “that was grim.”

  With a twinkle, Sara said, “And Patrick—who was very open, you know, to young people like us—admitted they don’t ever do a lot of business.”

  “Yet the four kids that work there,” Warrick said, “are pulling down decent money, and Barry Hyde doesn’t seem to care about the lack of cash flow.”

  “Money laundry?” Brass asked.

  Grissom ignored that, saying to the two CSIs, “Okay, let’s take Barry Hyde to the proctologist. Sara, I want you to look into his personal life.”

  “If he has one, I’ll find it.”

  “Photocopy these,” Brass said, handing her his field notebook, indicating the pages, “and get that back to me…. This is what we do know about Hyde, from the phone calls I made around.”

  She scanned the notes quickly. “Not much, so far.”

  “It’s a place to start,” Grissom said. “Find out more. Warrick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try coming at this through the business door.”

  “You got it.”

  Then Warrick and Sara went off on their respective missions, and Brass departed as well, leaving Grissom lost in thought, trying to figure out what the hell Culpepper was up to. For someone supposedly sharing information because both groups were looking to bring the same animal to justice, Culpepper hadn’t contributed a thing to their investigation—just a vague, unsubstantiated notion that the Deuce was no longer in the area.

  How long he’d been pondering this, Grissom didn’t know; but he was pulled out of it by a knock on his open door. He looked up to see Sara standing there.

  “You look confused,” he said.

  “I am confused.” She came in, plopped down across from him.

  “This Barry Hyde thing just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  “Weird how?”

  She shifted, tucked a foot under her. “Let’s take his college years, for example.”

  “Let’s.”

  She flashed a mischievous smile. “You can get a lot of stuff off the Internet these days, Grissom.”

  “So I hear. Some of it’s even legal.”

  “Legal enough—lots of records and stuff you can go through.”

  “Less how, more what,” he said, sitting forward. “Did you find Barry Hyde’s college records?”

  “Sort of,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Barry Hyde has a degree in English from the University of Idaho.”

  “Our Barry Hyde?”

  She nodded, going faster now, in her element. “Only thing is, I went to the University of Idaho website and they have no record of him.”

  “You mean they wouldn’t give you his records?”

  “No. I mean they have no record of his ever having been a student there.”

  “Maybe he didn’t graduate.”

  “You don’t have to graduate to get into the records, Grissom. He didn’t matriculate.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Oh yeah. Everything for the last five years is fine. Barry Hyde’s a sterling citizen. Bank loans paid on time, credit cards paid up, member of the Rotary, the Henderson Chamber of Commerce, the guy even pays his traffic tickets.”

  “Good for him.”

  “But before that? Hyde’s military record s
ays he was stationed overseas, but I found a medical file where he claimed to have never been out of the country. The whole thing’s nuts. Information either doesn’t check out, or is contradicted somewhere else. This guy’s past got dumped into a historical Cuisinart.”

  “Or maybe,” Grissom said, eyes tightening, “it came out of one.”

  14

  E xiting the break room with a cup of coffee, Catherine almost bumped into O’Riley, who was bounding up to her, a file folder in hand.

  “Well, hello,” she said.

  Grinning, O’Riley said eagerly, “I’ve got a buddy in LAPD. Tavo Alverez.”

  “Good for you, Sergeant.”

  “Good for all of us—he tracked down Joy Petty.”

  “Great! Walk with me…I’ve got to catch up with Nick…. ”

  O’Riley did. “Tavo stopped by the Petty woman’s place in Lakewood—she’s unemployed right now, but I guess she’s mostly a waitress. Unmarried, lives with a guy, a truck driver.”

  “Okay, she’s alive and well—but is she Joy Starr?”

  “Oh yeah, sure, she admitted that freely. Tavo said she seemed kinda proud of her days in ‘show business,’ once upon a time. Joy Starr, Monica Petty, Joy Petty—one gal.”

  Catherine stopped, their footsteps on the hard hallway floor like gunshots that trailed off. Her gaze locked with O’Riley’s less-than-alert sagacious stare. “Now that we’ve confirmed that, we need to have Joy Petty interviewed in more depth.”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I can work this through Tavo—he’s a good guy.”

  “Can you fly over there, or even drive?”

  “I think we’re better off usin’ Tavo. I mean, he’s willing, and he’s tops.”

  “Then get back in touch with him,” Catherine said, walking again, heading toward the lab where Nicky worked. “We need Joy Petty interviewed in detail about her relationship with Marge Kostichek.”

  “Okay, but Tavo phoned me from the site of a homicide, to give me that much. I mean, it is L.A.—they do have a crime of their own go down, sometimes.”

  “Stay on him, Sarge.”

  “Will do. Here.” He handed her the folder. “Background check on Gerry Hoskins.”

  “Good!”

  Another shrug. “Seems to be a right guy, got his own contracting business—you know, remodeling and stuff.”

  “Thanks, O’Riley. Fine job.”

  He smiled and headed off. Catherine caught up with Nick in the lab where he was already poring over the fingerprints.

  “What do we know?” she asked as she came up next to him.

  “It’s looking like Gerry Hoskins is in the clear.” Nick sat on a stool before a computer monitor whose screen displayed two fingerprints, one from Joy Starr’s note to Fortunato, the other from Hoskins’s fingerprint card. “This is not his print.”

  Catherine nodded and held up the file folder. “O’Riley just gave me this. Hoskins’s background check.”

  “What’s it say?”

  She opened the folder, gave its contents a quick scan, saying, “Carpenter, got his own business, lived in Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska till, seven years ago. Got divorced, moved here, been relatively successful, moved in with Annie Fortunato…” She did the math. “…five and a half years ago.”

  “Okay,” Nick said, “one down.”

  Catherine filled him in on what O’Riley had told her about Joy Petty.

  “An in-depth interview with her could really fill in some blanks,” Nick said.

  “We won’t know until O’Riley’s guy gets back, and that could be hours. For now, we stay at it.”

  The next print he brought up belonged to Annie Fortunato.

  “The wife’s prints don’t match the forged note, either,” Nick said.

  Silently, Catherine gave thanks; she had hoped that Annie Fortu-nato was innocent. Grissom could preach science, science, science all he wanted: these were still human beings they were dealing with.

  And the CSIs were human, too—even Grissom. Probably.

  “This print, though,” Nick said, bringing up a third one, “is a very definite match. Textbook.”

  Catherine leaned in. “The former owner of the strip club?”

  “Yeah—Marge Kostichek.” Nick’s smile was bittersweet; he shook his head. “I’m almost sorry—the salty old girl is a real character.”

  “Character or not,” Catherine said, studying the screen, “she wrote that note to Malachy Fortunato.”

  Nick’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think it really was written for Malachy to read, do you?”

  “No. Our friend Mr. Fortunato was probably tucked away under that trailer, by then—a fresher corpse than when we found him, but a corpse.”

  “But why would Marge sign Joy Starr’s name to a note like that? What motive would the old girl have for killing Fortunato?”

  “Having him killed,” Catherine reminded him. “Working strip clubs in a mobbed-up town like Vegas used to be, Marge might well have access to somebody like the Deuce.”

  Nick just sat there, absorbing it all; finally he said, “I think we need a search warrant.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Hopping off his stool, Nick asked, “We better round up O’Riley—seen him lately?”

  “Just,” Catherine said. “He’s probably back in the bullpen by now…. You get your field kit organized, and I’ll go tell Grissom what we’re up to—and see if he can’t find a judge to get us that warrant.”

  Ten minutes later, Catherine and Nick were moving quickly into the detectives’ bullpen. Two rows of desks lined the outer walls and another ran down the center, detectives in busted and battered swivel chairs behind gray metal desks about the color of Malachy Fortunato’s desiccated flesh. The skells, miscreants, and marks that made up their clientele sat in hard straightback metal chairs bolted to the floor, to prevent their use as weapons.

  O’Riley was nowhere to be seen; his desk—the third one from the back on the far wall—looked like an aircraft carrier. His in-out baskets served as the tower, his phone perched on the corner like a parked fighter, and the desk top was as clean as a deserted flight deck.

  Nick ran a finger over the surface and said, “I wonder if he does windows?”

  Catherine called to Sanchez, the detective at the desk behind O’Riley’s. “Where’s he hiding?”

  Without looking up from his one-finger typing, Sanchez said, “Do I look like his mother?”

  “Just around the eyes and when you smile.”

  The detective graced her with a sarcastic smirk and resumed his hunt-and-pecking.

  “Leave him a note,” Nick said to her. “And we’ll page him from the car.”

  There wasn’t so much as a Post-it on that spotless desk top. She turned to Sanchez. “You got a…”

  A small pad came flying at her and she caught it.

  “Thanks.” She wrote the Post-it, stuck in right on the phone, then, without looking, tossed the pad over Sanchez’s way, heading out of the bullpen with Nick on her heels. When driven by a sense of urgency like this, Catherine felt frustrated by the minutiae of daily existence.

  They were halfway to the suspect’s house when Catherine’s cell phone rang. “Willows,” she said.

  “It’s O’Riley. I got your page, and I got your note. I’m on my way. Somebody had to pick up the search warrant, y’know.”

  “Ah. You’re leaving the courthouse?”

  “Yeah, what am I…maybe five minutes behind you?”

  “Yep. You want us to wait for you, Sarge?”

  Nick stopped for a red light. “O’Riley?”

  She nodded.

  “Has he got the warrant?”

  She nodded again.

  “Tell him he better hurry if he wants to be there when we question her.”

  O’Riley’s voice said in her ear, “I heard that. You tell him to wait till I get there.”

  And O’Riley clicked off.

  Matter of factly, Catherine said to Nick, �
��He wants us to wait for him.”

  “Damn.”

  “It’s procedure, Nick. His job—not ours.”

  “But it’s our case…. ”

  As the light turned green and Nick eased the Tahoe into the intersection, he shook his head. Ahead of them the sun was just dipping below the horizon leaving behind a trail of purple and orange that danced against fluffy cumulus.

  “He wants us to wait for him,” Catherine repeated, not liking it any better than Nick, but accepting it.

  Nick shrugged elaborately. “I don’t see why. The old girl likes me. We’ll just chat with her until O’Riley shows. Loosen her up.”

  Catherine said nothing.

  Five minutes later, Nick pulled the Tahoe up in front of Marge Kostichek’s tiny paint-peeling bungalow. Darkness had all but consumed dusk, but no lights shone in the windows. For some nameless reason, Catherine felt a strange twinge in the pit of her stomach.

  Nick opened the door of the SUV and unbuckled his seatbelt.

  “Let’s wait for O’Riley,” she said reasonably. “How long can it take him to get here?”

  “Why wait?”

  “We should wait for O’Riley. We don’t have a warrant.”

  But then they were going up the walk, and were at the front door, where Nick knocked. He threw her one of those dazzlers. “It’ll be fine.”

  This is wrong, Catherine thought; she was the senior investigator on the unit—she should put her foot down. But the truth was, she was as anxious as Nick to follow this lead; and she knew that once O’Riley got here, she herself would take the investigative lead, anyway.

  So why this apprehension, these butterflies?

  No answer to Nick’s knock, so he tried again and called, “Ms. Kostichek? It’s Nick from the crime lab!”

  Through the curtained window, Catherine saw a figure move in the gloomy grayness, someone with something in his or her hand—was that shape…a gun?

  She shoved Nick off the porch to the left, her momentum carrying her with him just as a bullet exploded through the door and sailed off into the night. Another round made its small awful thunder and a second shot drilled through the door, at a lower trajectory, and spanged off the sidewalk.

  Catherine and Nick lay sprawled in the dead brown bushes to the left of the front door.