“Before or after we show her a movie?”
22
THE DEAD SNAKE wasn’t going anywhere.
Fully extended, it occupied a tray on the light table in the layout room. Color photos of the snake, including close-ups of its scarred hide, were mounted on the wall. Its abdomen had been stitched back up following the necropsy. Colored dyes had been employed to trace the depth and contours of the wounds. Leaning over the specimen, Ray gently double-checked the distance between the wounds with a caliper. Magnifying lenses were clipped over his regular reading classes. Concentration showed upon his face. The more he examined the scratches, the less he believed that they had been caused by another snake or a rough set of tongs.
“Spending some quality time with Coral?”
He looked up to see Sara enter the room. Like Ray, she had shown up early this afternoon to get a head start on the next round of their investigation. If they were lucky, maybe they could squeeze in dinner before their next shift officially began. “Coral?”
“Feels odd calling a snake ‘Jane Doe,’” she explained. “Coral seemed like a good nickname.”
“Except that the necropsy indicated that this snake was a male.” Sexing a snake was a tricky business, especially when it was alive, but dissection had cleared up that mystery. A full copy of the necropsy report was spread out on the table next to the specimen. Ray flicked the magnifying lenses up away from his eyes. “Doc Robbins evicted ‘Coral’ from the morgue. Says he needed the biers for human casualties.”
Sara nodded. “So where you keeping her . . . I mean, him?”
“The fridge in the break room,” he confessed. “So far, nobody has complained.” The snake was still cold to the touch. “Did you know some snake handlers refrigerate live snakes before displaying them? The cold makes them sluggish and easier to handle.”
Sara shot Ray a look. “Brian Yun has a fridge in his office.”
“Yes,” he said. “For his ‘private stash’ of Snapples. It would have been the perfect place to store Coral until everyone else went home. He could have brought it to work in a cooled thermos bottle or some other container.”
Fang Santana had picked Yun’s photo out of a line-up, identifying the assistant manager as the individual who had illegally obtained a coral snake from him. Santana was hardly a reliable witness, however, and a good defense attorney could easily make the case that his testimony had been coerced, so Vartann was reluctant to pick Yun up just yet. Questioning Yun now would only alert him that they were onto him. More conclusive proof was required to get a conviction.
“We need to tie this snake directly to Yun,” Sara said, thinking aloud. She walked over to the board and examined the photos. X-ray and fluoroscope images looked beneath the snake’s scaly hide. “Any progress?”
Ray grinned. “Maybe. The placement of these scratches, as well as their depth, suggest that they may have been made by extendable claws. I’m waiting for confirmation now.” He took out his cell phone and dialed the morgue. “Let me check on that.”
David Phillips picked up on the second ring. “Hi, Professor,” he greeted Ray. “I was just going to call you.”
“Did you get those results yet?” Ray asked.
“Yep,” David said. “And you were right on target. The tissue samples from the wounds tested positive for Bartonella.”
That was bad news for Brian Yun. Ray gave Sara an encouraging nod. “Thanks, David. I appreciate you getting right on that.”
“No problem, Prof,” the assistant coroner replied. “Hope this helps.”
“I’ll let you know.” Ray wrapped up the call, while Sara waited curiously. “That was David,” he informed her. “Coral was infected with Bartonella.”
The name drew a blank with her. She was a scientist, not an M.D. “Which is?”
“The bacteria responsible for cat scratch disease,” he explained. “Fairly common in the feline population.” Ray had treated more than a few cases of CSD over the years, mostly in small children. “The cats themselves are usually asymptomatic, but can pass the bacteria on via bites or scratches.”
Sara glanced at the scarred snake carcass. “Coral was scratched by a cat?”
“From the looks of things, he had a nasty tussle with a feline not long before he ended up in the spa.” Ray recalled a framed photo of a scowling Persian cat. “Brian Yun’s cat died recently.”
He didn’t need to spell it out for her. Sara grinned back at him.
“We’re going to need a warrant,” she said.
23
“TO BE HONEST, I’m not sure what I can tell you that you don’t already know,” Debra Lusky said. “This whole episode has been a nightmare, but I told you before how it happened.”
Brass and Catherine faced her across the glass-topped table in the interrogation suite. If Debra really had conspired against Jill Wooten, the intimidating environment might sweat the truth out of her. Or so he hoped.
“Just the same,” he said gravely, “we’d like to go over it one more time. Frankly, there are still some details that strike us as a little fishy.”
Debra squirmed nervously in her seat. Like Jill, she had dressed conservatively for her visit to the police station. A mustard pantsuit gave her a distinctly professional appearance, quite unlike the naked zombie girl in the video. “Like what?”
“Take the gun for instance,” Brass began. “As Jill’s former roommate, didn’t you know she had a gun?”
“That was over a year ago,” Debra protested, “back when she was having all that trouble with Craig. It was ancient history. Besides, how was I supposed to know that she would take a gun to a job interview? Seriously, who does that?”
“Jill, apparently.” Brass jotted down Debra’s response on a notepad. The session was being taped, of course, but he liked to keep his own records for easy reference. “So why didn’t you mention the gun, or Jill’s stalker ex-boyfriend, to the crew at Shock Treatment?”
“Like I said, that was ages ago. It didn’t even occur to me.” She sighed ruefully, a contrite expression on her face. “In retrospect, obviously, I should have remembered about the gun. I’m going to regret that till the day I die. But it honestly never crossed my mind. I didn’t even realize she still had the gun, let alone that she’d be carrying it around like that.”
“Too bad for Matt Novak,” Brass said.
“Trust me, I feel terrible about this.” She looked anxiously at Brass and Catherine. “Have you spoken to Jill? How is she holding up? I’ve tried to talk to her, but she’s not taking my calls.”
“Imagine that,” Brass said.
Debra bristled at his tone. “Look, I know I screwed up. There’s no need to rub it in. You can’t make me feel any worse than I already do.” She scooted her chair back. “If you’re just going to give me attitude, maybe I’m wasting my time here.”
“Let’s change the subject then,” Catherine said, before Debra could get up and leave. A laptop rested on the tabletop in front of her. She lifted its lid. “There’s something we’d like to show you.”
Debra eyed the computer apprehensively. “Is this the hidden-camera footage from that night? Because I’m not sure I want to see that again.” A shudder worked its way down her all-too-average frame. “Once was enough.”
“Nah,” Brass assured her. “This is something else. A different kind of candid camera.”
Catherine fired up the sex tape and rotated the laptop to face Debra. Brass couldn’t see the screen himself, but that didn’t matter. The CSIs had already shown him the video before. Right now he was more interested in watching Debra’s reaction.
Which was impressive. Her eyes widened in shock. The color drained from her face as her jaw dropped open. Was she just reacting to the explicit nature of the video, he wondered, or to something more?
It was hard to tell. He trusted his gut, but he had also been a cop long enough to know that people could always surprise you. A grieving widower could turn out to be a cold-blooded kille
r. A slimy creep could prove to be innocent. He was a detective, not a mind reader. He had been fooled before.
Still, in his expert opinion, Debra looked more alarmed than embarrassed by the tape. And was that a flicker of fear in her eyes?
Or guilt?
She watched for less than a minute before looking away. Averting her gaze, she reached out and closed the laptop so she couldn’t see the monitor anymore.
“I don’t understand,” she said, visibly shaken. A tremor rattled her voice. “Why would you show me that?”
Brass raised the screen back into the position. “Do you recognize the man in the video?”
Grimacing, she forced herself to watch some more of the tape. She strained to maintain a neutral expression. Her jaw looked tight enough to grind her teeth to gravel. “Is . . . is that Roger Park? From the TV show?”
“Got it the first time,” Catherine said. “How long have you known Mr. Park?”
“I don’t really know him at all,” Debra insisted. “We met once to plan the wax museum hoax, and then again the night of the shooting, but I don’t know anything about his . . . his personal life. Why should I? And what’s that got to do with anything?” Her eyes widened again. “Wait a second. You don’t think that’s Jill in the video, do you?”
“No,” Brass said. “Not Jill.”
A pointed look got his implication across.
“What? You think that’s me?” She sputtered in indignation. “You can’t be serious!” She leaned forward, trying to convince him. “Look, I applied for the show the same way everyone else does, by volunteering at their website. They got in touch with me, told me they were going to be filming several episodes in Vegas, and we took things from there.” She pointed at the erotic antics on the computer screen. “There was certainly nothing like that involved!”
Brass wasn’t sure he bought her show of offense. Debra’s pupils were dilated, a sure sign of dismay. She chewed nervously at her nails. Brass had interviewed a lot of guilty customers in this room. Debra looked like maybe she was on the verge of cracking.
He kept the pressure up. “What about Matt Novak? The man who died? Did you know him before that night?”
“No! Absolutely not.”
“Do you know why anyone would want him dead?”
“Of course not. Don’t you get it? It was an accident. A stupid, tragic accident.”
“Are you sure about that?” he pressed. “Or was the whole thing a set-up to get Novak killed?”
“That’s ridiculous,” she protested. “Why would I do something like that? I keep telling you, I didn’t know that actor . . . and I did not have sex with Roger Park.”
Catherine weighed in. “Okay, what about you and Jill? We understand that there have been some hard feelings between you two in the past. Maybe enough to want to get her into trouble?”
“Jill is my friend,” Debra insisted.
“That’s not the way she tells it,” Catherine said. “She says you were always jealous of her.”
Debra scoffed at the notion. “That was all in her head. Look, I like Jill, but she can be a little . . . volatile sometimes. Paranoid even.” Calming down a little, she settled back into her seat to explain her side of the story. “There was this one time, back before she and Craig broke up, when she got up from a nap and found Craig and I watching some old monster movie on TV. It was completely innocent, but she was convinced that we had been making out on the couch, that I was trying to steal her boyfriend or something.”
“And were you?” Catherine asked.
“Not at all. But that’s Jill for you. She can read too much into things sometimes. She has a tendency to overreact to the littlest things. Kind of high maintenance, if you know what I mean.” Debra looked to Brass for confirmation. “Remember how she came at me the other day, outside WaxWorkZ?”
“And yet,” Catherine persisted, “you thought it was a good idea to subject your volatile, high-maintenance friend to a little Shock Treatment?”
“Umm.” Flummoxed, the prolific writer found herself momentarily at a loss for words, as she struggled to come up with a plausible response. “That’s why I thought she would be the perfect victim for the show, that she was sure to have a big reaction for the camera. I figured it would be great television, but it was just for fun. Like I said the other day, I was even hoping that it would help her modeling career. Give her a little extra exposure.”
“Uh-huh,” Brass said skeptically. “And you weren’t trying to get back at her at all?”
“Not really.” Debra caught herself gnawing on her nails and yanked her hand away from her mouth. She seemed to be unraveling before their eyes. “And even if I did have a little bit of an ulterior motive, you think I actually wanted her to kill someone? I just wanted to scare her, that’s all. Maybe teach her a lesson about not jumping to conclusions. But it was just a stupid, practical joke. Why can’t you believe that?”
Catherine shrugged. “Help us out then.”
“How?”
A portable palm scanner rested on the table. Catherine turned it on. “I need your fingerprints, as well as samples of your voice and DNA.”
Debra regarded her warily. “Why do you need all that?”
“Just standard procedure,” Catherine lied.
Debra wasn’t convinced. She eyed the humming scanner like it was a trap waiting to snare her. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“We haven’t charged you with anything,” Brass pointed out. “Is there any reason we should?”
“No,” Debra said. “That’s what I keep telling you.”
“Okay.” Brass leaned back in his seat, not wanting to scare Debra off. “Then why do you need a lawyer?”
Again, Debra had no ready answer.
Catherine took her silence as consent. She checked to make sure the palm scanner was online. The sleek biometric device could capture Debra’s prints without any messy powders or inks. The crime lab had only been using electronic scanners for a few years now, but Catherine already considered them worth every penny she had pried out of the budget for them.
“Just place your right palm here,” she instructed.
Debra drew back her hand. “Wait. I need to think about this.”
“Nice poems, by the way,” Brass said casually.
The unexpected remark threw Debra off-balance, just as he had planned. “My poems?” She blinked in confusion, trying to keep up. Brass guessed that she had not been prepared for the topic of her bizarre literary efforts to come up. No doubt her brain was racing to figure out how much they knew about her various extracurricular passions—and where exactly her attempts at creative writing figured into the investigation. “Which poems?”
“Graveyard Tryst,” Catherine supplied. “Ode to a Demon Lover.” She placed Debra’s right hand on the scanner, palm down. The worried suspect was too distracted to make a fuss. “Hold still, please.”
Debra swallowed hard as the device scanned her palm. She looked as though she would have preferred to have been eaten alive by zombies.
“All right. Here they come.”
Catherine marveled at the miracles of wireless technology. Nick was miles away, checking Jill’s gun box for fingerprints, but she didn’t have to wait for him to drive back to the lab to get the results. An electronic chime confirmed that the prints had been beamed to her own computer. An image of a latent print appeared upon the monitor in front of her. She immediately ran them against the prints she had taken from Debra Lusky only hours ago. Labor-saving software zeroed in on corresponding arches, loops, and whorls.
“They’re a match,” she reported.
“How about that,” Brass said, unsurprised. He lounged in a chair in Catherine’s office. Several hours had passed since they had interrogated Debra at police headquarters. Moonlight and neon filtered through the window blinds. “Wonder how she’s going to explain that?”
The evidence was piling up against Debra, making her look like an accomplice to more than just a harmless TV
prank. Catherine made sure to save the results of the fingerprint comparison on to the hard drive. “Want to bet she peeked under Jill’s bed recently, to make sure Jill still had the gun? Maybe during a ‘friendly’ visit to Jill’s place?”
Catherine wondered if it was too late to confiscate the bed sheets from Park’s trailer. She wouldn’t be surprised if Debra’s DNA was all over them. She kicked herself for not grabbing the sheets during her earlier search, but, of course, that was before they had stumbled across the X-rated blackmail video. There had been no reason to pry into Park’s sex life before.
“Yeah. I’m liking Debra for this,” Brass agreed. “But what exactly have we got so far?” He ticked off the clues on his fingers. “Debra’s fingerprints on Jill’s gun box. Elastics at Park’s trailer. Old photos of Debra wearing braces. A masked woman in a sex tape. And a possible motive for Matt Novak’s murder.” He frowned. “A good lawyer could tear that apart.”
“Not exactly an iron-clad case,” Catherine admitted. “I ran Debra’s voice samples past Archie, and he’s pretty sure she didn’t make those scary phone calls either.”
“Too bad,” Brass said. “That would have made things easier.”
Catherine mentally ran through their list of suspects. “Maybe Park made the calls. He’s the one who cast Novak as the chainsaw maniac, and he’s who Novak may have been blackmailing.” She sipped coffee from a mug Lindsey had given her two birthdays ago. “The way I see it, getting rid of Novak was the main objective. Making Jill the patsy was probably an afterthought. An extra bonus as far as Debra was concerned.”
Brass nodded. “That would explain why Novak was glaring at the hidden camera when he died. He must have realized that Park had set him up to be shot.”
“No wonder he tried to give him the finger,” Catherine said. She would have felt like doing the same. “Now we just need to prove it.”
“What about those elastics?” Brass asked. “Any way to link them directly to Debra?”
Catherine shook her head. “Wendy did her best,” she said, referring to the night shift’s resident DNA tech, “but she says the DNA on the elastics was too badly degraded. Time and cleaning solutions had done a number on what fragments and base pairs she found, not that there was probably much to begin with. There’s no actual DNA in saliva, just trace amounts of epithelials from inside the mouth.”