Shock Treatment

  Her voice trailed off as it sunk in that Debra was never going to have another chance to make amends. Brass wondered if Jill would feel better or worse if she knew that her friend had possibly tricked her into killing Matt Novak for her.

  “That’s not for me to say,” he told her. He was a detective, not a priest.

  “I don’t suppose you own another gun?” Catherine asked. “Maybe a 9 millimeter automatic.”

  “Not a chance,” Jill insisted. “I’m done with guns . . . for good.” She leaned across the table. Damp emerald eyes implored Brass and Catherine. “Please, you’ve got to believe me. I was pissed off at Debra. I still am. No way was I ever going to forgive her for what she put me through. But I didn’t want her dead.”

  “That’s not what you said the last time we talked,” Catherine reminded her. She took out a handheld digital recorder, which was already keyed up to just the right moment. She hit Play and Jill’s angry voice, taped only yesterday, emanated from the recorder:

  “Oh, my God, that bitch! She knew I had the gun, but she still set me up for that show! I’m going to kill her!”

  Jill blanched at her words. “No, you don’t understand! That was just crazy talk. I didn’t mean it!”

  “I want to believe that,” Brass said sincerely. “But we’re going to need a bit more proof.”

  Jill appeared desperate to clear herself. “Like what?”

  “Give me your hands.” Catherine prepared to test Jill’s hands for gunshot residue. “And please roll up your sleeves.”

  She swabbed Jill’s hands and lower arms, concentrating on the palms and the webbing between the thumb and trigger finger. She then inserted the swab into a small plastic cube. A plunger button broke open a glass vial inside the cube, releasing diphenylamine, a chemical reagent that would react to the presence of any particles that might have clung to Jill’s skin. A positive result would turn the swab blue.

  It did not change color.

  “Negative,” Catherine announced.

  “See,” Jill said, vindicated, at least in her own mind. “I told you, I didn’t kill Debra.”

  Brass was relieved by the results of the test, even though he knew that it wasn’t conclusive proof that Jill was innocent. At least four hours had passed since the murder, plenty of time for Jill to wash the GSR from her hands. And the instant hands-on test was only the first step in eliminating her as a suspect. Her clothing would also have to undergo chemical and microscopic analysis back at the lab. But at least the GSR test had not caught her red-handed.

  There’s still a good chance she’s not our shooter.

  “We’ll need a sample of your hair as well,” Catherine said. “Plus, whatever clothes you were wearing tonight.”

  “Geez,” Jill complained. “You’re going to end up with my entire wardrobe before this mess is over.” She shrugged in resignation. “Whatever. You’re not going to find anything.”

  No longer afraid of being arrested, she sank back into her chair. The enormity of Debra’s fate seemed to creep up on her again. She sniffled and wiped her eyes. “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to kill her . . . besides me, that is.” She looked to Brass for answers. “If it wasn’t me, then who?”

  He was asking himself the same thing.

  “We’re working on that.”

  25

  “FOR ME?” MANDY Webster quipped. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Very funny.” Catherine carried the bagged shell casing into the fingerprint lab and placed it down on Mandy’s desk. “Think of it as employment security.”

  Mandy was seated in front of a stack of freshly processed print cards, eyeballing them through a magnifying glass. The younger woman had been the night shift’s number-one fingerprint tech for over a decade now. Tortoiseshell glasses, a lab coat, and a no-nonsense haircut gave the appearance of a serious professional scientist, an impression only occasionally belied by her wry sense of humor. Catherine figured if anyone could locate a latent print on the brass casing, it would be Mandy.

  “As if I really need to worry about the crime rate dropping around here.” Mandy put down the magnifying glass to inspect Catherine’s latest offering. “So what do we have here?”

  “A shell casing I found near the scene of the homicide in Sunset Park. It may have something to do with the Shock Treatment case as well.” Closer examination had confirmed that the brass had come from a 9mm automatic, probably a Glock. “As usual, any fingerprints appear to have been vaporized when the bullet was fired.”

  “Naturally. Organic oils and salts are not going to survive being blasted from a gun. Hence, no latent prints.” She gave Catherine a puzzled look. “So why bring this bad boy to me?”

  Catherine jogged Mandy’s memory. “Weren’t you telling me about some new technique you’d read about? One that could conceivably retrieve a fingerprint even after the bullet was fired?”

  “Right!” Mandy’s eyes lit up behind her glasses. “The British method. I’ve been wanting to try that.”

  “Well, here’s your chance,” Catherine said. “Without a gun, we need to link the bullet to the suspect.”

  The slug itself had been badly deformed by its collision with the tree trunk, as well as its passage through Debra’s skull. Although its weight and composition had verified that it was a standard 9mm Parabellum bullet, any further ballistic evidence was unlikely, even if Catherine had a suspect firearm to try to match it to. Which she didn’t.

  “This suspect have sweaty hands, by any chance?” Mandy asked. “That will increase our odds of success.”

  Catherine remembered shaking Roger Park’s greasy palm. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

  “Good to hear.” Mandy sounded enthused by the task at hand. “I like a challenge, but every little bit helps.” She gingerly inspected the casing. “Me, of course, I would have just worn gloves when I loaded the gun.”

  Catherine arched an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

  “Don’t give me that look,” Mandy said, not at all contrite. “I have to think about something when AFIS is running slow—nobody can work on homicides forty-plus hours a week without developing very definite opinions on the best ways to knock someone off.” She peered over the rims of her glasses at Catherine. “Like you’ve never plotted the perfect murder in your head?”

  “Only when Ecklie is on my case,” Catherine confessed.

  “That often, then,” Mandy said. Her point made, she turned her attention back to the casing, shoving her stack of print cards aside. “All right. Let me see what I can do.”

  “Thanks!” Catherine said. “Do me a favor and don’t carry out any of your diabolical plans before you get around to it.”

  Mandy smirked back at her. “No promises.”

  Debra Lusky’s apartment was located in the basement of a refurbished town house in the University District. The landlady helpfully let Greg and Nick onto the premises once they explained the circumstances. The morning sun had already dispelled last night’s frigid cold. Greg wasn’t sure he even needed his windbreaker.

  “In the park?” the older woman echoed. Helen Yost was a retired nurse who occupied the floor above Debra’s basement digs. The petite, gray-haired senior citizen reminded Greg of his Nana Olaf. “What in heaven’s name was she doing there?”

  “We’re still looking into that,” Greg divulged. While Nick made his way downstairs, Greg lingered in the ground-floor foyer to question Mrs. Yost, in hopes that she could provide some insight into Debra’s recent activities. “Did she live alone?”

  “As far as I know,” Yost said. “I don’t pry into my tenants’ personal lives. Long as they pay the rent, and don’t set the place on fire, I don’t care what they get up to. No pets, though. I’m allergic.”

  He mentally filed that factoid away, relieved that he and Nick would not be running into any orphaned four-leggers this morning. A zealous watch-dog, or even a freaked-out kitty, could seriously complicate a search of a domicile. He ha
d the scars to prove it.

  “Did you see Ms. Lusky yesterday?” he asked. Their timeline had her leaving police headquarters late in the afternoon. Now they needed to fill in the blanks between her interrogation and her death in the park approximately nine hours later. “Maybe in the evening?”

  “Afraid not,” Yost said. “I turned in early. Slept like the dead.” She caught what she was saying and placed a hand to her lips. “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Greg handed her a card. “If you remember anything, please give us a call.”

  “All right, young man.”

  She started to follow him downstairs, but he held up his hand. “We can take it from here, ma’am. Thanks for your cooperation.”

  Visibly disappointed, she retreated up the steps. He lugged his field kit into the basement apartment, where Nick was already doing a preliminary walk-through. Greg was careful not to disturb anything. Even though the apartment was not a crime scene, it might contain evidence that could point to Debra Lusky’s killer—or perhaps her involvement in Matt Novak’s death.

  Nick looked up as Greg entered. “The old lady tell you anything?”

  “Not really.” Greg put down his field kit in the entry. “She’s not exactly the proverbial nosy landlady, too bad for us. Apparently, Debra lived alone, though.”

  “Looks like it,” Nick confirmed. “This place is definitely smaller than the apartment she used to share with Jill Wooten.” He opened a closet door. “No men’s coats in sight.”

  Greg looked around. The cluttered basement was pretty basic in its layout: a smallish TV room with an attached kitchenette took up most of the space. Open doors led to a single bedroom, bathroom, and home office. Judging from the lack of housecleaning, Debra had not been expecting company. “I don’t suppose you stumbled onto a rubber zombie mask yet?”

  “We should be so lucky.” Nick grinned at Greg from the bedroom door. “So how was the rest of that video?”

  “Don’t ask,” Greg said. After perusing the sex tape frame-by-frame, he was glad to be back in the field again. “I’ll never be able to watch a zombie movie the same way again, I can tell you that.”

  Nick had a chuckle at Greg’s expense. “I’ll take your word for it. You discover anything useful?”

  “Just that hidden cameras catch some pretty un-flattering angles sometimes.” He grimaced at the unappetizing images burned into his brain. “No convenient tattoos, scars, or identifying marks . . . although I did manage to calculate Zombie Girl’s height with relation to the bed and headboard. She’s shorter than Jill Wooten, but has approximately the same build as Debra Lusky.”

  “Along with several thousand other women in Vegas alone,” Nick observed. “And that’s assuming the trailer was here in Nevada when that encounter was filmed, which might not be the case. For all we know, Park hooked up with Zombie Girl at another location in a different city.”

  “True enough.” Greg didn’t want to think that he had wasted his time poring over the sex tape, but that was the nature of the job sometimes. You had to go down some blind alleys, and bump into plenty of dead ends, before you found the right path. He glanced around the apartment. “Here’s hoping this place is more informative.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Nick said. His gloved hands sliced up the apartment with decisive chopping motions, like a quarterback calling a play. “I’ll take the bed and bathroom. You check out the living room and office. First one done gets the kitchen.”

  “Aye, aye. So what exactly are we looking for?”

  Nick disappeared into the bedroom. “Anything that might connect Debra to Roger Park,” he called out. “Or explain what she was doing in the park last night.”

  “Both would be good,” Greg said. “Or is that hoping for too much?”

  Nick’s voice escaped the open doorway. “Probably.”

  Yeah, Greg thought. It’s never that easy.

  He pulled on his gloves and got to work, starting with the living room, where a dark velvet couch faced a modestly sized entertainment center. Newspapers and magazines were piled haphazardly on a wicker coffee table in front of the couch. Greg noticed that many of the periodicals were folded open to articles on the Shock Treatment shooting, almost as though Debra had planned to start a scrapbook.

  “HAS REALITY TV GONE TOO FAR?” asked an editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. A bikini-clad Jill Wooten occupied the cover of a supermarket tabloid that billed her as “The Deadly Beauty at the Heart of the TV Chainsaw Massacre.” Somebody, Greg noted, had drawn an angry black “X” over Jill’s face. A Magic Marker lay on the coffee table next to the newspapers. Debra’s fingerprints were probably all over it.

  Okay, he thought. No bad blood there.

  He turned his attention to the couch. A thought occurred to him and he lifted a seat cushion to expose some loose change, a misplaced pencil, the TV remote . . . and a tiny rubber band just like the ones he’d found scattered around Roger Park’s trailer.

  “Found another elastic,” he called to Nick.

  “Me, too,” Nick shouted back. “Under the dresser.”

  Granted, they’d already known that Debra used to wear braces, but Greg felt like they were on the right track. In his experience, there was often a tipping point in an investigation when, after the usual false starts and slow progress, things finally started to come together in a big way. Were they reaching that point in this case?

  He wanted to think so.

  The rest of the living room proved less revelatory. To Greg’s disappointment, there was no obvious evidence that Roger Park, or anyone else, had visited lately. Debra obviously hadn’t straightened up for a while, but, given all the recent drama in her life, that was to be expected. Several episodes of Shock Treatment were recorded on her DVR, but, again, that was hardly a smoking gun. He had actually recorded some of the same episodes himself.

  He moved on to the office, which looked like it had once been a smaller guest bedroom. Overstuffed bookshelves sagged under the weight of numerous hardcovers and paperbacks. A rolling office chair was parked in front of a computer desk. Cables connected a newish PC to a laser printer under the desk. A beat-up file cabinet occupied one corner. Post-Its, index cards, and yellow legal pads littered the work area. Paperwork was pinned to a bulletin board. A bronze trophy, in the shape of a crescent moon, occupied a position of honor atop the file cabinet. A shredder was perched atop a plastic waste bucket. All in all, a pretty standard home office.

  Eventually, the computer would have to be packed up and carted off to the lab, so they could conduct a thorough forensic examination of Debra’s emails and web searches. Greg began, however, by scanning the titles on her bookshelves. An aspiring author himself, whose magnum opus on the hidden history of Las Vegas was still seeking an enthusiastic publisher, he was always interested in checking out other people’s libraries.

  You are what you read, he thought. Or so Amazon tells us.

  His curious gaze glided over the usual reference works you’d expect to find in a writer’s office: dictionaries, thesauri, a couple of atlases and almanacs, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Strunk & White, and so on. His survey paused on what appeared to be an entire shelf devoted to a single author, one “D. L. Dakota.” The name didn’t ring any bells, but Debra was clearly a fan. She had multiple copies of Dakota’s books, which appeared to be paperback romances with a supernatural bent. He pulled out a pristine copy of one novel, Immortal Passion, whose spine looked like it had never been cracked. The cover depicted a lithe young woman wearing tight leather pants and a laced corset, silhouetted against a luminous full moon, which was partially obscured by stormy black clouds. Bright red eyes gazed hungrily from the shadowy depths of the cloud. An embossed metallic-gold starburst proudly billed the author as a past winner of the “Moonsong Award for Best Undead Romance.”

  Wait a second, he thought. Turning away from the shelf, he took a closer look at the trophy on the file cabinet. An inscrip
tion on the base read:

  BEST UNDEAD ROMANCE

  2008

  KISSES AND CURSES

  D. L. DAKOTA

  Greg put two and two together. He glanced back at all the D. L. Dakota paperbacks on display. That’s not a collection, he realized. That’s a brag shelf.

  “Hey, Nick!” he hollered. “Come check this out.”

  The other CSI responded quickly. He strolled into the office, holding up a plastic baggie containing yet another elastic. “Look what I found behind the bathroom door.”

  Greg shrugged, well over the orthodontic evidence already. He sorted through the papers on Debra’s desk, uncovering a partial manuscript beneath the general clutter. Red pencil marks indicated that it was a work-in-progress. He hastily perused the title page, then thrust it at Nick. “Get a load of this.”

  “What’ve you got?” Nick read the first page aloud. “‘Zombie Heat: The Thin Gray Line’.”

  Greg spelled it out for him. “It’s a script for the new TV show. By D. L. Dakota.”

  Nick gave him a puzzled look. “Who is?”

  “Debra Lusky’s pen name,” Greg explained. “Or so it appears.” He showed Nick the bulging brag shelf. “Looks like she wrote paranormal romances under a pseudonym.”

  “Paranormal romances?” Nick asked, clearly unfamiliar with the genre. Greg couldn’t recall ever seeing Nick reading a novel for pleasure. Just non-fiction and history.

  “You know,” he said. “Boy gets girl. Vampire gets werewolf. Witch gets sexy hot guy.”

  Nick got the picture. “Zombie gets TV producer?”

  “Bingo.” Greg handed Immortal Kisses to Nick. “Not quite a zombie mask, but definitely working the same graveyard vibe.”

  Nick nodded, making the same connection. “And the Zombie Heat script sure implies another link to Park. Maybe he promised her a TV sale in exchange for her help getting rid of Novak?”