“Didn’t figure you for the squeamish types.” LaReue looked them over appraisingly. “Guess you couldn’t be, considering your profession.”
He led them into the barn. Hanging plastic sheets kept in the damp atmosphere, which was generated by an industrial strength humidifier chugging away in one corner. Well-constructed wooden shelves supported rows of snake cages with sliding glass doors. Each shelf held three to four cages, depending on the size of their inhabitants. Shredded newspaper lined the floors of the cages. Electric heating pads controlled the temperature. An incubator occupied another corner; snake eggs, neatly arranged in open plastic boxes, could be glimpsed through a glass plate in the door. A refrigerator possibly held supplies of antivenin. Ray was impressed at how clean, organized, and well-maintained the set-up was, almost like the crime lab.
A sizable variety of snakes was on display as well. Scanning the shelves, Ray identified rattlers, mambas, boa constrictors, pythons, kingsnakes, water snakes, racers, and even an Indian cobra. The sheer diversity of colors, sizes, and markings rivaled the garish carpets favored by Vegas casinos, and were much more pleasing to the eye. Ray would have liked to have browsed the display at leisure.
“Nice collection,” he said, impressed.
“Thanks,” LaReue replied. “Can’t stock every breed of snake. That would take a space the size of a jet hangar. But I’ve got most of the popular varieties.”
“Including coral snakes?” Sara asked.
“A few,” he admitted. “But the snake that bit that rich lady wasn’t one of mine.”
Sara didn’t take his word for it. “How do you know that?”
“Check the inventory,” he challenged her. He ambled over to a counter and pulled out a drawer. Inside was a tray of dead white mice. He took out the tray and walked over to the first wall of cages. “There should be a record of every snake I delivered to The Nile. None of them hot.”
“We did that,” Ray divulged. He and Sara had compared Hodges’s inventory of the confiscated snakes against the purchase orders Brian Yun had provided. They had matched up perfectly—except for one anomaly. “There was an extra snake in The Nile’s vivarium. A western coral snake.”
“Well, it didn’t come from me,” LaReue insisted. He slid open the glass door on the first cage and casually tossed a lifeless mouse carcass inside. Not waiting to see if the cage’s cold-blooded occupant accepted the offering, he closed the door and moved onto the next case. “All my coral snakes are accounted for.”
“Are you sure of that?” Sara asked, playing devil’s advocate. “All these snakes wriggling around. Couldn’t an extra snake end up in a shipment by mistake?”
LaReue shook his head. “No way.” He nodded at a separate set of shelves farther down the wall. Ray noted that the doors on those cages were equipped with showcase locks for extra security. “I keep the hot snakes in their own section, safely locked up. Don’t see how a coral snake could have snuck in with the kingsnakes, unless it had taken lessons from Houdini. And, believe me, when I’m handling the hot snakes, I pay close attention to what I’m doing.”
Ray could believe it. “Ever been bitten?”
“You bet.” LaReue put the tray down on top of the incubator and peeled off his left glove. The top half of his index finger was missing. “Got sloppy with a Mojave rattler once. Had to watch my finger rot away to the joint.” He pulled the glove back on. “Won’t make that mistake again.”
He went back to feeding the snakes. A hungry green boa eagerly swallowed the mouse, which gradually made its way down the snake’s digestive tract. You could track its progress by the lump it formed beneath the boa’s hide. Ray was grateful that LaReue didn’t provide his merchandise with live food. The CSI had a strong stomach, as LaReue had surmised, but that would have been a little disquieting, as he suspected Sara would agree. “Where do you get the mice?”
“I have my own breeding colony in the back room,” LaReue explained. “All perfectly humane.” He left the boa to finish digesting its meal. “’Course, not every species eats rodents. I feed mealworms and crickets to the insectivorous breeds, and goldfish to the water snakes.”
“And other snakes to the corals?” Ray asked.
“Yep. Little blind snakes, mostly. With maybe a shovel-nosed snake once in a while, just for variety.”
LaReue definitely seemed to know his snakes. It was hard to imagine that he could have shipped The Nile a coral snake by accident. “We’re going to need to review your records,” Ray said nonetheless. “To make certain there are no discrepancies.”
“Knock yourself out.” LaReue didn’t ask for a warrant. “I’ll xerox everything after I finish up here. But I can tell you now, you’re not going to find anything out of order. I run a tight ship.”
“So it appears.” Ray considered another possibility. “Suppose one did want to get a coral snake, possibly under the table? Are there any less reputable snake dealers out there?”
For the first time, LaReue looked uncomfortable. He turned his back on the CSIs, the better to concentrate on feeding his snakes. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know,” LaReue said tersely. “You tell me.”
“I think what my colleague is saying,” Ray said, “it’s that you strike us as a man who is very familiar with his field. Hard to imagine that you wouldn’t know who the other players are.”
LaReue shrugged, his back still to his visitors. “I mind my own business.”
“Mr. LaReue,” Ray said firmly, “I’m going to ask you to put that tray down and give us your full attention.” They had tried being polite, but LaReue was clearly playing his cards close to his vest. Ray’s voice took on a sterner tone, the same one he had once used when lecturing to an inattentive classroom. “We really need to get some answers here.”
The snake dealer turned around slowly. Irritation showed upon his grizzled face. “Look, I’m trying to be cooperative.” He placed the tray down on a nearby counter, perhaps a little harder than necessary. The dead mice bounced upon the metal. “I want to get this cleared up as much as anyone. My reputation’s on the line.”
“Then don’t hold out on us now,” Sara advised him. “Or maybe your name might end up leaked to the press. Not exactly good publicity for your business . . . especially if Ms. Segura doesn’t survive.”
The last Ray had heard, the snakebite victim had yet to regain consciousness. Artificial means were still being employed to keep her breathing.
LaReue’s face hardened. “You threatening me?”
“Who, me?” Sara professed innocence. “I’m just saying that the longer this case drags on, the harder it’s going to be to keep your name out of this.”
Ray tried a softer approach. “All we want is to find out where that hot snake came from. You said it yourself: incidents like this reflect badly on your industry. If there’s a bad apple, you owe it to yourself to expose him.”
A long minute passed as LaReue mulled the matter over. Ray wondered what was behind the man’s reticence. Professional loyalty to a fellow dealer, or fear of retribution?
Who was he protecting? And why?
“All right,” LaReue said finally. “There is this one guy. I have no idea if he has anything to do with this whole mess, but if you were looking to get your hands on a hot snake, without leaving any sort of paper trail behind, he’s the guy you’d want to talk to.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Ray thought. “What’s his name?”
“Fang,” the snake dealer said. “Fang Santana.” He frowned, like he already regretted spilling the beans. “Just don’t tell him I sent you.”
19
“GEE,” ARCHIE SAID. “Guess I should have sold tickets.”
Catherine chuckled dryly. “You know us, we’re suckers for a good spectrographic voice analysis.”
The CSIs crowded into the dimly lit A/V lab. Catherine stood directly behind Archie’s
workstation, while Nick and Greg looked over her shoulder. Glowing sonograms coursed across the lab tech’s monitor.
“Seriously,” she added. “The media is breathing down our necks on this case, which means Ecklie is, too.” She suppressed a yawn; this was her second double shift in a row. “Anything you can do to throw some light on the particulars would make all our lives easier.”
Another day had passed since she and Brass had interrogated Craig Gonch. She had managed to squeeze in a few hours of sleep this afternoon only to find Conrad Ecklie waiting for her when she reported back to work in the evening. His new responsibilities as undersheriff had not mellowed her prickly, autocratic boss; if anything, he was even more concerned with politics and public relations than before. Still, she conceded, at least he wasn’t a murderous S.O.B. like the previous undersheriff. The one who had killed Warrick.
Ecklie only wanted results, not blood. As he had made abundantly clear.
“Where are we on the Matt Novak case?” he had demanded, barging into her office without asking. As ever, his saturnine features were less than supportive. A dark, conservative suit made him look more like an undertaker than a crime scene investigator. “Everybody from CNN to Access Hollywood is demanding an update, and City Hall wants to know if we’re going to press charges.”
“Tell them to increase our budget,” Catherine had said. “You know we’ve been short-handed since Riley left. And Sara and Ray are tied up with another case.”
“Yes, I heard. The snake thing.” He plopped down into a chair. “Look, Catherine, I don’t need to remind you that the city has put a lot of time and effort into encouraging movie and TV crews to shoot in Vegas. It’s good for the economy and for tourism. So I really need to know: is this going to get ugly or not?”
She gestured at the bulging file on her desk. “We’re making progress.”
A veteran criminalist himself, Ecklie knew just how little that empty phrase could mean. “That’s not good enough,” he said. “We can’t keep the press and Hollywood hanging. You need to wrap this up, one way or another.”
“You want it fast,” she asked, “or do you want the truth?”
“I want the truth . . . fast.” Rising to his feet, he shook his head in disappointment. “You know, Catherine, I always thought you had a better grasp on how the system really worked than your predecessor. Right now, though, you’re reminding me an awful lot of Grissom.”
Catherine shrugged. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Don’t,” he said curtly. “Get me an answer, ASAP.”
“Understood,” Archie said, bringing her back to the present. “I just hope you’re expectations aren’t too high. Voice analysis is not an exact science. There are no sure things, especially not if the caller is making an effort to disguise his voice.”
“Caveats duly noted,” she said. “What have you got for us?”
“Well, first off, Craig Gonch may have an alibi.”
“Huh,” she reacted. “How do you have an alibi for a phone call?”
“By calling someone else at the same time.” Archie pulled up Gonch’s phone records, which were displayed in grid format upon his monitor. He pointed to a highlighted line on the screen. “Gonch was on the phone to another number at the same time that Jill Wooten received her scary mystery call.”
Catherine didn’t recognize the number on the screen. “On the phone to whom?”
“Headlights,” Archie said. “It’s a topless place.”
“So I’ve heard,” Catherine said. “Okay, we’re going to need to verify that. See if anyone at the bar remembers taking Gonch’s call. We have to make sure it was really him using his phone and not his girlfriend or someone else.”
“Maybe he was using two lines at once,” Greg suggested. He pantomimed holding a phone to each ear. “Or even two phones.”
“Unlikely,” Catherine said. “Who makes harassing calls to an ex while simultaneously on the phone to work?”
Greg wasn’t ready to give up on his crazy theory just yet. “Someone who wants to set up an alibi?”
“For a crank phone call?” Catherine shook her head. “I’ve met Craig Gonch. Frankly, he didn’t seem that clever.”
Nick moved on to the main event. “What about the voice analysis?”
“The news isn’t exactly encouraging there either,” Archie warned them. Dispatching the phone records back to electronic limbo, he called up another program on his computer. A pair of spectrograms appeared on the monitor, one atop the other. Each horizontal display charted the speech samples’ frequency and amplitude, producing a graphic representation that resembled an EKG or seismic readout. A thorough voice analysis entailed both a visual and aural comparison of two samples, recorded under as similar circumstances as logistically possible. In a match, two identical spectrograms could be superimposed on each other.
But not this time. The dual waveforms oscillated across the screen, visibly out of synch.
Catherine frowned. “Okay, I’m no expert here, but even I can see that our two samples don’t remotely match each other.”
“That would be my conclusion as well,” Archie said. “Granted, the whisper effect introduces an extra margin of error, but, honestly, I don’t think Gonch is your guy. And there’s something else, too: the more I listen to it, the phonier the southern accent in the original recording sounds. It’s like someone’s doing a bad impression of Gonch.”
“Really?” Catherine asked. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, for one thing, Gonch mispronounced ‘nuclear’ when you took the sample. He said, ‘I’m going nuke-u-lar on you, baby,’ like he was George Bush or something.” Archie did a pretty good imitation of Gonch’s surly tone as well. “Okay, that’s a very common mistake, but here’s the thing: the mystery caller got it right.”
“So it wasn’t Craig Gonch,” Catherine concluded. “But who?”
“Somebody who knew about Gonch’s predilection for slasher movies?” Nick speculated. “Think about it. Jill has a stalker ex-boyfriend with a thing for horror films, she’s on the receiving end of some scary phone calls, and she gets targeted for Shock Treatment.” He stepped back from the monitor. “Either that’s a perfect storm of creepy coincidences, or someone knew exactly what they were doing.”
Catherine leaned toward the latter explanation. “Debra Lusky? She was Jill’s ex-roommate. She would have known about Gonch, and she’s the one who set Jill up to get shocked on the show.”
“Makes sense,” Greg said. “But why would she want to get Matt Novak killed? She didn’t even know him.”
“As far as we know,” Catherine stressed. “Although I suppose it’s possible she didn’t care about Novak at all. Maybe she just wanted to get Jill in trouble.”
“That seems a bit extreme,” Nick said. “Why risk killing an innocent person just to put your friend in a difficult legal position? And what would be her motive for tricking Jill into shooting someone anyway?”
Good question, Catherine thought. Grissom had usually hedged away from speculating too much about motives, lest it compromise their scientific objectivity. He had believed that if you concentrated on the physical evidence, determined the where and the when and the how, the why would sort itself out eventually. Catherine had never quite agreed with him in that respect. In her experience, people rarely committed murder without a reason. Figuring out that reason, by calculating the human variables involved, was sometimes the best way to make sense of the evidence.
“You think maybe Debra and Jill planned this whole thing together?” Greg suggested. “That Jill was in on the scheme from the beginning?”
“That’s possible, I suppose,” Catherine said. Jill had struck her as genuinely shook up the other night, right after the shooting, but maybe the struggling model was a better actress than anyone had realized. “But to what purpose? To frame her ex for some nasty calls?” Catherine found that hard to believe. “Sounds far-fetched to me.”
Greg shr
ugged. “Hey, after working this job, I’m not sure anything is too far-fetched anymore.”
He has a point, Catherine thought. Just in the last few years alone, she and her team had run across a dead girl with three different blood types in her veins, a homicide at a sci-fi convention, a baked corpse with a dead racoon stuck to its face, human ribs served up with barbecue sauce, a modern-day headhunter, and a psychopathic surgeon who liked to turn human organs into twisted pieces of art. After all that, was it really that hard to imagine that Jill and Debra had somehow staged this whole thing?
Maybe not?
“Perhaps they did it for the notoriety,” Greg theorized. “Have you seen the papers? Jill is all over them. She was an unemployed model, right? Assuming the death is ruled an accident, all this publicity could be the best thing that ever happened to her.”
Catherine thought it over. “You know, Debra did say she was hoping to boost Jill’s career.”
“Well, she sure did that all right,” Nick said. “With a bang.”
Catherine felt that sphinx sneaking up on her again, bringing more riddles than answers. “Anyway, thanks for the assist, Archie.” She turned toward the door. “If nothing else, you’ve eliminated Craig Gonch as a suspect. Looks like he had nothing to do with this.”
“Hang on,” Archie said, calling them back. “I’m not done yet.”
“Is that so?” Catherine was encouraged by Archie’s cocky tone. “Okay, don’t keep us in suspense. Show us the goods.”
“Believe me, I saved the best for last.” He shut down the voice analysis program and opened up another file. “This is the data I downloaded from Matt Novak’s flash drive. It took me a while to crack the encryption, but I think it was worth it.” He grinned in anticipation. “Warning: some of this footage may not be appropriate for younger viewers.”
He wasn’t kidding. Catherine’s eyes widened at the X-rated action that started playing on the monitor. Photographed from above, a nude white male was grinding away at the woman beneath him, who, bizarrely enough, appeared to be wearing a rubber “Zombie Heat” mask, complete with molded maggots and glimpses of exposed bone. The shriveled green-gray skin stretched over the mask’s skull-like visage contrasted with the smooth pink skin generously on display below the woman’s neck as she pretended to snap at the man heaving atop her. There was no audio, but Catherine’s imagination could easily provide a soundtrack of grunts and moans, with maybe a monstrous growl thrown in to go along with the Halloween mask. Distracted by the sheer weirdness of the scene, it took her a second to recognize the location.