Shock Treatment

  Park blanched at the prospect. Perspiration beaded on his forehead. “Look,” he began, over Chou’s protests, “I admit I had a thing with Debra. We met at the Zombie Heat premiere and, what can I say, we just clicked. There was this amazing chemistry between us. . . .”

  “You mean you both liked your sex good and creepy,” Catherine translated.

  Park glared at her. “That’s not a crime.”

  “So why didn’t you mention this to us before?” Brass asked.

  “It’s just like you said,” he answered. “We were trying to keep my wife from finding out, for all sorts of personal and professional reasons.” He wiped his sweaty brow with a silk handkerchief. “I had enough catastrophes to deal with after the shooting, and telling you about my affair with Debra was not going to bring Matt back. After all, it didn’t have anything to do with Matt’s death.”

  “Even though Novak died with a copy of the video on his person?” Brass was openly skeptical. “Here’s what I think happened. Your old drinking buddy somehow got hold of one of your kinky home movies. Maybe he lifted it off your computer. Or maybe you even showed it to him in a careless moment.”

  Stranger things had happened, Catherine mused, especially where Hollywood types were concerned. According to this movie she’d seen on cable once, Bob Crane, the one-time star of Hogan’s Heroes, had frequently taped himself having one night stands with groupies, then shared the videos with a long-time crony of his. Come to think of it, that had ended in murder too. . . .

  “But then,” Brass continued, “Novak decides to blackmail you into making him a star. So you decide to get rid of him in a convenient ‘accident.’ And, lucky for you, Debra knows just the right person to squeeze the trigger for you. Her old frenemy, Jill Wooten.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Park protested. “If I was in cahoots with Debra, why would I kill her, too?” He placed a hand over his heart, feigning grief. “Believe me, what we had was very special.”

  “Not special enough,” Catherine accused him. “Not once she started cracking under the pressure. We interrogated her roughly nine hours before she was murdered, and she was pretty stressed out by the end of the questioning, almost like she was on the verge of coming clean.” Catherine could see how it all played out. “I’m thinking she called you in a panic, probably on one of those disposable cell phones you harassed Jill with, and you realized you couldn’t depend on her silence anymore.”

  Brass picked up the narrative. “Of course, there was no time for anything tricky or elaborate this time. So you just arranged to meet her in the park . . . and shot her in the head when her back was turned.”

  Park started to object, but Chou cut him off. “You two missed your callings, you know that? You should have been screenwriters.” He scoffed at their theory. “It’s a colorful story, but it’s all just supposition. Prove it.”

  Catherine met his cocky smirk with one of her own. “We’re working on it.”

  “Is that all?” the lawyer demanded. “Are we done here?”

  “Just one more thing,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  Catherine took out her cell phone. “I’d like to hear your client say ‘nuclear.’”

  30

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND what I’m doing here,” Brian Yun complained. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  An interrogation room at police headquarters was probably the last place the soft-spoken assistant manager was used to spending Sunday night in. He had no police record; this was his first documented brush with the law. He fidgeted nervously in his seat, across the table from Ray and Sara. Vartann had been called away to investigate a drive-by shooting in Pahrump, but Ray figured they finally had enough evidence to pin the snake attack on Yun. A confession would wrap things up nicely.

  “Really?” he said skeptically. “Then perhaps you can explain how it is that we found coral snake venom in your cat’s remains. Venom identical, by the way, to that produced by the snake that bit Rita Segura.”

  Gas chromatography and the mass spectrometer had both confirmed that the venom samples were chemically identical. The toxicology reports rested in a folder in front of Ray, along with various photos and statements. Yun looked anxiously at the bulging folder, just like he was supposed to. He had to be wondering what else they knew.

  “Guess Fala didn’t like having a snake in the house,” Sara said. “What happened? Sometime when you weren’t looking, the cat got at the snake? Which then retaliated?”

  Once again, Ray pictured a moment of hissing, snarling chaos. “A tragic turn of events for Fala. I’m sure you were quite broken up about it, but not enough that you abandoned your plan to sneak the venomous snake into the vivarium at The Nile.”

  “Why would I do something like that?” Yun argued unconvincingly. He glanced over at the oneway mirror, as though worrying who else might be listening. “There must be some sort of mistake.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ray said. He opened the file and slid a photo across the table. The color glossy was an enhanced close-up of the bite marks on Fala’s moldering remains. Yun gagged at the photo and looked away. Afraid that he might throw up, Ray reclaimed the picture and tucked it back into the folder. He assumed he had made his point. “Fala was bitten by a snake. A coral snake.”

  Yun swallowed hard. “Maybe . . . maybe it was a different snake.” He groped for an alternative explanation. “She must have been bitten in the yard, when she was playing outside. I didn’t realize . . . I thought she had just died of natural causes.”

  “Unlikely,” Ray pronounced. “Coral snakes are not native to Nevada.”

  Yun’s hopes faded. “A rattler?” he suggested feebly.

  Ray shook his head. “Completely different kind of venom.”

  “There’s more,” Sara added. “We know you bought the snake from Fang Santana. He identified your photo. We can put you in a lineup if necessary, but why drag this out.” She ticked off the evidence on her fingers. “We know the snake was in your house. We know who you bought it from. All we need now is the why.”

  Ray offered Yun a sympathetic ear. “You never wanted to hurt Ms. Segura, did you? That wasn’t the plan. You were after your boss. She’s the one who was supposed to get bitten, wasn’t she?”

  “Of course!” Yun threw up his hands in surrender. “She always had her massage every Monday morning, just like clockwork. How was I supposed to know that Rita was going to show up and take her place? I wasn’t even there that morning to stop her. I came in late on purpose, so nobody would think I had anything to do with it.” Tears streamed down his face. “You have to believe me! I never wanted anybody else to get hurt!”

  “But why Madame Alexandra?” Sara asked. “What did she ever do to you?”

  Yun looked surprised by the question. “Are you serious? You’ve met her, haven’t you?” Bitterness curdled his face and voice. “She swans around, treating me like a servant, even though The Nile would fall apart without me. I do all the work, and she takes all the credit . . . and all the money. She should’ve made me her partner years ago, but I’m still just a doormat as far as she’s concerned.” He snapped his fingers while doing a cruel impression of his imperious boss. “‘Oh, Brian! Come here, Brian! Take care of this, won’t you, Brian?’”

  Obviously, he had been nursing a heavy-duty grudge for some time. “You could have just quit,” Sara observed.

  “And let her reap the rewards of my creativity?” he scoffed. “The success of the serpentine massages was the last straw. I told you before, that was all my idea. But did I even get a bonus or a cut of the profits? Of course not! Instead she acted like the whole notion sprang from her own deep spiritual wisdom, spouting off about the sublime healing properties of snakes.” He laughed harshly. “I pulled all that bullshit off the internet for her!”

  Sara still didn’t get it. “So you decided to kill her?”

  “No!” Yun exclaimed. “I just wanted to scare her, maybe make her sick for
a while. I looked it up: coral snake venom usually takes hours to take effect. I figured she’d make it to the emergency room in time . . . but not before she got a taste of her own medicine.”

  “I see.” Ray wasn’t sure if he believed that Yun expected Madame Alexandra to survive, but it didn’t really matter. Yun had shown a reckless disregard for human life; it would be up to the district attorney’s office if they wanted to press for attempted murder. “Well, you lucked out in one respect,” he informed Yun. “I just heard from the hospital. Rita Segura has finally regained consciousness and is breathing on her own again. She’s going to need plenty of observation and follow-up, but she’s expected to make a full recovery in time.”

  “Good thing,” Sara told Yun. “Otherwise, you might have been looking at a lethal injection of a different sort.”

  31

  “SO HOW DOES this work again?”

  Nick watched with interest as Mandy Webster set up her experiment. She placed the shell casing at the end of a short wooden wand. The rest of her apparatus was set up in a cardboard box lined with aluminum foil. A metal contact plate was wired to a 2,500-volt battery. Nearby a metal scoop, with a wooden handle, rested atop a tray of fine black powder.

  “It’s pretty ingenious,” Mandy enthused. “Ordinary fingerprinting techniques require some sort of sweaty residue to be left on the metal, but this British inventor, Dr. John Bond, has developed a technique that can sometimes retrieve prints even after they’ve been wiped or burned away. It’s based on the idea that the salt in the original fingerprints actually corrodes the metal underneath. That corrosion remains even after the sweaty prints are gone.”

  “And the sweatier the hands, the deeper the corrosion?” Nick remembered reading something about the process in a forensic journal.

  “Yep,” Mandy said. “Good thing most people tend to get a little nervous when they’re planning to murder someone.”

  She flicked a switch and placed the casing against the electrical terminal. The wooden wand kept her from being shocked herself, although she was also wearing rubber gloves just to be safe. “The corroded areas are too small to be seen by the naked eye, as in microns,” she continued, “but they pick up less of an electrical charge than the clean brass.”

  She scooped up a small quantity of the black powder and sprinkled it over the casing, rolling the 9mm cylinder across the electrode as she did so to make sure all its surfaces were exposed to the powder. “These are actually tiny ceramic beads, about a half a millimeter in diameter, coated with a very fine conducting powder. In theory, they should cling to the microscopic corrosion pattern left behind by the fingerprint.”

  Nick was impressed by how relatively low-tech the apparatus was, as opposed to some of the expensive DNA scanners that busted the crime lab’s budget. “You built this set-up yourself?”

  “You bet,” Mandy said proudly. “Not really that hard. The original inventor constructed his prototype out of cardboard, masking tape, and popsicle sticks.”

  “Ecklie’s going to love that,” Nick observed. The stingy undersheriff was forever complaining about the cost of keeping the lab’s hardware up-to-date.

  Mandy flicked off the current and held the cartridge up for inspection. Sure enough, inky black whorls and ridges stood out against the brass exterior of the casing. The uncorroded metal, which had held a stronger charge, gleamed by comparison.

  Mandy subjected the prints to her expert eye. “Probably a forefinger or thumb. From when the shooter loaded the gun.” She passed it over to Nick, so he could admire her results. “Now we just need to heat the casing to bake the powder in place and compare it against our exemplars.”

  Nick couldn’t wait to compare the fingerprint to Roger Park’s. The smarmy TV producer was possibly responsible for at least two deaths. It would be great to pin him to at least one of them.

  “Thanks, Mandy. You may have just cracked this case.”

  “Don’t thank me,” she said. “Thank our friends in Scotland Yard.”

  “Right.” Nick looked forward to reporting their success to Catherine and Greg. “What was the name of that inventor again?”

  Mandy took off her glasses and affected her best Sean Connery impression.

  “Bond. John Bond.”

  32

  TUMBLEWEEDS ROLLED DOWN the dusty streets of the abandoned ghost town. Moonlight shone down on ramshackle brick buildings that had been slowly falling apart for over a century. Cacti sprouted in the middle of the street. Desert weeds poked through gaps in dilapidated plank porches and sidewalks. Sagging roofs tempted gravity. Rusty chains were draped over askew hitching rails. A derelict dance hall leaned precariously to one side. Wooden shutters banged in the wind. A noose dangled from a hangman’s tree.

  An airborne figure came hurling through the swinging doors of an old saloon. He flew over the rotted timber porch to crash down hard on the baked dirt street, the impact of his landing raising a cloud of ochre dust. Torn modern clothing, better suited to a twenty-first century gangbanger than an old-time gunslinger, clashed with the decrepit western decor. A bloody stump protruded from a shredded sleeve, where the man’s left arm appeared to have been torn from its socket. Pain and fear contorted his sweaty face, which was now caked with grime. Blood spurted from his ghastly wound. He whimpered pathetically.

  A second figure stomped out of the saloon after his victim. The tattered remains of a blue LAPD uniform clung to his tall, bony frame. Merciless crimson orbs glared at the wretched gangster sprawled in the street. A skeletal hand clutched a severed arm like a police baton.

  “No! Keep back!”

  The panicked man reached beneath his scuffed leather jacket with his remaining hand and drew out a Beretta semiautomatic. The sharp report of the pistol sounded as he opened fire on the fearsome apparition stalking him. Bullet holes erupted across the creature’s moldering blue shirt, but no blood spewed from the wounds, only puffs of grave dust. A dry, sepulchral voice escaped a withered larynx.

  “Benny Salucci,” Officer Zombie addressed the fugitive. “You have the right to remain silent . . . forever.”

  The gangster screamed in mortal terror.

  “Cut!” Roger Park barked. “Great work, guys!”

  A full film crew was in place to shoot the scene, which was being shot on location in one of the many abandoned frontier mining towns within a day’s drive of Las Vegas. Mounted spotlights simulated moonlight. A wind machine churned up the atmosphere. Production trailers were parked discreetly out of view of the cameras. Tumbleweed wranglers scrambled to get the prop weeds back in place for the next take. No longer lurching like a dead man, Officer Zombie helped his “victim” get up off the ground.

  “You okay, Duane?” Park asked the stuntman.

  The dust-covered “gangster” gave him a thumbs-up with the hand that wasn’t hidden beneath the torn jacket. His terror-stricken expression gave way to a cocky grin. “No problem, chief.”

  “Cool,” Park said. “I think we need to do one more take, though.” He got up from a folding director’s chair. “This time I really want you to dial it up to eleven. I want to see sheer dread on your face and maybe even a trace of remorse. Salucci is guilty as hell and his sins have finally caught up with him.”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Catherine said, intruding on the conference. “Maybe you can give him some pointers on what it feels like.”

  “What the hell?” Park spun around to see Catherine and Brass striding toward him, with Nick and Greg lagging right behind them. His eyes bulged from their sockets. Angry veins stood out on his neck. “This is a closed set!”

  Brass held up a polished copper star. “Tell it to the badge.”

  “This is harassment,” Park objected, while the rest of the film crew milled about awkwardly, uncertain what to do. Park pulled out an expensive-looking smartphone. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

  “Tell him to meet you at the station.” Brass kicked a stray tumbleweed out of the way. “
Roger Park, you’re under arrest for the murder of Debra Lusky . . . and possibly Matt Novak.”

  The fingerprint on the shell casing had proved a perfect match for Park’s right thumb. Catherine wasn’t sure they’d ever be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the corrupt producer had conspired to get Novak killed; just pronouncing nuclear correctly wasn’t enough to make a conclusive voice analysis. But that was for the D.A. to decide. What with the blackmail tape, the evidence linking him to Debra, and his print on the bullet that had killed her, however, Catherine was pretty sure they had him on at least one count of first-degree murder.

  I can live with that, she thought.

  She stepped forward to confiscate the stuntman’s gun. They’d have to bring in all the firearms being used by the production. If they were lucky, maybe ballistics could match one of them to the weapon that had killed Debra. Not that they really needed it. She smirked at the noose dangling from a nearby tree branch. As far as she was concerned, they already had more than enough to hang Roger Park.

  Figuratively speaking, that is. Nevada had switched to lethal injection years ago.

  “This is insanity,” Park babbled. “I didn’t do anything.” Panicked eyes darted back and forth, looking in vain for a way out. The cast and crew backed away from their agitated boss, not wanting to get involved. Catherine spotted Bill Hamilton in the crowd, decked out as a dead rodeo clown. The zombie peeled off his latex mask. He didn’t look a thing like Matt Novak.

  She glanced around the set. A rubber arm, smeared with blatantly phony blood, lay forgotten in the dust. She shook her head.

  Two people died . . . for this?

  “Don’t even think about running,” Brass warned Park. He stepped around to cuff the producer’s hands behind his back. “There’s nothing but desert for miles around anyway.”