Nevada Rose Page 11

  “You took your car?”

  “Right.”

  “What kind’s that?”

  “I was driving my Jag,” Baker said. “A black XJ.”

  Warrick nodded. “Anything you feel I should know about what went on at the club?”

  Baker hesitated a moment. “I’m not sure,” he said. “That is, I don’t think there’s much that could help you. We were all just hitting the dance floor, laughing, having a good time.”

  “Could Rose have gone off with someone you didn’t know at any point?”

  Baker seemed a bit confused. “Gone off?”

  “To have a conversation, anything like that?” Warrick said. “Even for a few minutes?”

  “I doubt it. We had a private hall, drink service, our own disk jockey.” He shook his head. “I guess she might’ve left once or twice to see a friend who works at the place.”

  “Nova Stiles?”

  Baker nodded. “Nova, yeah,” he said. “You’ve met her?”

  Warrick noticed that Baker and Millar were both looking at him.

  “I spoke with some members of the club’s staff,” he said, keeping his response deliberately noncommittal.

  Baker nodded. He fiddled absently with his putter, holding the grip with one hand and the head with the other, rotating its shaft across his body. “Once Rose’s friend, always her friend,” he said. “I think the two of them used to be roommates or something. They stayed close afterward.”

  “You don’t sound like you socialized much with Nova.”

  Baker shook his head. “We don’t have much in common…she’s from a different time in Rose’s life,” he said without further elaboration. “Anyway, they might’ve talked for a while in one of the lounges.”

  “Do you remember when this was?”

  “I’d say around halfway through the party.”

  “And that would’ve been…?”

  “Around twelve, one o’clock, I suppose.”

  Which was consistent with Nova’s account, Warrick thought.

  “After she got back to you,” he said, “can you remember if anything about Rose’s behavior changed?”

  Another head shake from Baker. “No,” he said. “She acted the same all night.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Just upbeat…that’s the best I can put it.” Baker toyed with his club. “We were enjoying our friends’ company.”

  “And what time did the party end?”

  “I can’t say,” Baker said. “Wasn’t watching the clock.”

  “Can you take a rough guess?”

  “It was pretty late. Or early, depending how you look at it. Rose even joked about how the staff would leave before our crowd thinned out,” Baker said. “Don’t hold my feet to the fire, but I’d say it was four, five in the morning.”

  Which jived with the bouncer’s recollection, Warrick thought.

  He mentally reviewed everything Baker had told him thus far. “So you and Rose leave the club around daybreak,” he said. “What happens next?”

  Baker seemed about to reply when Millar once again thrust himself partially between them.

  “That’s about enough!” he said. “Mr. Brown, you do understand my client is trying to prepare for an important charitable event.”

  “Yes, I do,” Warrick said. “We should be through here in a minute.”

  “I sincerely hope so,” Millar said. “Mark volunteered to answer a few brief questions. If you’d advised that you planned a full-scale interrogation in this setting, I’d never have sanctioned—”

  “Vince, it’s okay.” Baker released one end of his putter and chopped a hand in the air, the muscles of his upper arm bulging against his shirtsleeve. “This is about Rose. Not me. And I want to do anything I can for her. Whatever it might be.” He turned to Warrick. “Your question was…?”

  “About what you and Rose did after leaving Club Random,” Warrick said.

  Baker was looking straight at him again. “There isn’t much to talk about,” he said. “I drove her home, then left.”

  “You didn’t stop in at all?”

  Baker shook his head. “I needed to get some sleep. My personal trainer comes over for a session every Sunday morning.”

  “So you dropped her off, said good night, drove away.”

  “Right,” Baker said. “I waited outside the place in my car till she was through her door.”

  Warrick gave him a puzzled glance. Besides thinking about the hairs found inside the place—hairs found on Rose’s body and bed, in fact—that just so happened to look a whole lot like those on Baker’s head, he was reflecting that if he’d had the chance to spend his birthday night with a gorgeous woman like Nevada Rose Demille, he wouldn’t only be hoping for plenty of exercise right there with her but might very well tell his personal trainer to wait until his next birthday until he pried himself away.

  If he’d had a personal trainer, that was.

  “Something wrong?” Baker said.

  “Not really,” Warrick said. “I’m just wondering why you couldn’t call to postpone the workout.”

  Baker shrugged as if the answer should have been obvious to him. “I might have if I’d known about the party ahead of time,” he said. “But like I told you, it was a surprise. I didn’t realize I’d forgot to call Kyle till I was halfway to Rose’s house.”

  “Kyle?” Warrick didn’t think he’d caught the name before.

  Baker paused a beat. “Right,” he said. “My trainer.”

  “Can you give me his full name?”

  Baker kept looking at him. “Kyle Gibbons,” he finally said.

  Warrick took a pad out of his pocket, flipped it open, scribbled a note inside. “Do you have a phone number for him?”

  That suddenly propelled Millar between him and Baker again. “Okay, that’s it, conversation over,” he said.

  Warrick stood with his pen and pad in hand. “I only had one or two more questions.”

  “Then they’ll have to wait for a more appropriate juncture,” Millar said. “I fail to see how Mark’s trainer is relevant here.”

  Warrick did not answer.

  “What’s going on?” Millar said. “I know the gossip press has been throwing Mark’s name around as if he’s a criminal, but since when are people tried on television? No one in the LVPD’s told me they suspect him of anything.”

  Warrick still did not answer.

  Millar shot darting glances left and right to make sure no one had wandered near the three of them.

  “I asked you what the hell is going on,” he said in a lowered voice.

  Baker stood half a step behind the attorney. “Vince, listen,” he said. “I don’t mind talking to him—”

  Millar shook his head. “No,” he said. “I won’t allow it. Not until Mr. Brown responds to my question.”

  Warrick sighed, figuring he’d might as well be up-front. “A gym bag was found on the lawn outside Rose Demille’s house,” he said. “It had your client’s name tag on it.”

  Baker was shaking his head. “No, that can’t be,” he said. “Not if it was—”

  “Say another word, Mark, and you’ll have to find another lawyer to represent you,” Millar interrupted. He glared at Warrick. “What sort of disgraceful ambush is this?”

  Warrick ignored the comment. He did not want to get into a game of back-and-forth recriminations.

  “There’s more besides the bag,” he said. “Transfer evidence was recovered at the scene. We’re going to request that Mr. Baker come into our lab for a medical exam.”

  “And if he chooses not to?”

  “We get a subpoena.”

  Millar continued to stare. He was openly incensed over what had been sprung on his client, and Warrick wasn’t altogether sure he blamed him.

  “Mark agreed to speak with you today because he wants to assist in finding whoever killed his lover. He hadn’t the slightest feeling you intended to conduct a surprise attack,” he said. “You’ll need
to issue a court order before we comply with any further requests.”

  Warrick took a deep inhalation. “That the bottom line?” he asked.

  “No.”

  This was from Baker, his huge frame looming over both Warrick and the attorney.

  They faced him at once.

  Millar said, “Mark, I have to warn you—”

  Baker silenced him with an adamant shake of his head. “Vince, you want to take a walk, I won’t stop you. But there’s some things I have to decide for myself,” he said. Then he once again turned his intense, coolly assaying gaze on the CSI. “I told you how I felt about Rose. And I wasn’t lying.”

  “I didn’t call anyone a liar,” Warrick said.

  “No…no, you didn’t.” Baker hesitated, his lips suddenly dry. “I lost one of my gym bags about a month back and thought I might have left it at Rose’s house. But when she couldn’t turn it up, I figured I must have misplaced the bag somewhere else and afterward forgot all about it.”

  Warrick thought about that. “You’re sure about when you lost it.”

  “Yeah,” Baker said. “Positive.”

  “Then how does it wind up on the lawn?” Warrick said. “It doesn’t make sense that nobody would’ve found it in all this time.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Baker said. His voice had become a hoarse rasp. “The same goes for my wanting to know what really happened…and not to some damned gym bag.” He paused, swallowed. “All I care about’s finding out what happened to Rose. I suppose there might’ve been an old boyfriend who had some kind of grudge, I don’t know. She never pretended she didn’t have a history. But I’ll do anything I can for her. Give you whatever you need.”

  Warrick saw Millar frown with consternation at being overruled and once again couldn’t knock him for it. He’d have done the same if their positions had been reversed…making him very glad they had not been.

  “I’d consider taking that physical without getting a judge involved, Mr. Baker,” he said. “The better we’re able to evaluate the evidence, the faster we can clear things up.”

  “Or compromise Mark undeservedly by misinterpreting what you see,” Millar said.

  Warrick looked at him for a moment and then turned to Baker. “Good luck with the tournament today. I hope it’s a success,” he said.

  Baker nodded, turning his golf club in his hands.

  “I never depended much on luck,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll refuse it when it comes.”

  “We’ll take the cutoff onto Blue Diamond Road,” said the deputy from behind the Cherokee’s steering wheel. His name was Todd Barrett, and he was on strict one-day loan from the Clark County Sheriff’s Department. “That’s maybe another couple miles ahead of us.”

  “How long till we reach the Belcher quarry from there?” Grissom asked.

  Barrett shrugged. Tanned, blond, and sinewy, he had a thin, chiseled face with sharply prominent cheekbones and wore a pair of mirrored Ray Ban aviator sunglasses.

  “Depends what kind of untidiness the flood left us to deal with,” he said, spurs of sunlight flashing off his shades. “Those BLM maps of yours say the camp’s on that hogback west of the village, pretty much across from Spring Mountains. It’s damn steep, and likely as not, whatever way your prospecting brothers used to get up there would’ve been washed out by water running down the slope.”

  “What are the odds we can find a track that’s passable?”

  “I’m not a betting man. But if I was, I’d say there’s bound to be some dirt roads and washes that aren’t blocked with debris.”

  Grissom was thinking Barrett at least sounded as if he knew the territory, an absolute plus considering that he was their guide for the day.

  They rolled along Highway 160, Grissom in the passenger seat beside the thirtyish deputy, Sara riding in back with a pair of loaded knapsacks. Geared up with shotgun racks, a dashboard computer, and a rooftop light bar, the 4x4 patrol Jeep bringing them out into the mountains, like Barrett, was a somewhat grudgingly provided loaner from the undermanned county cops.

  “At least we haven’t had to deal with much road work,” Sara said. She leaned forward, recalling the trip she and Gris had made to the Sunderland Trailer Court. “It looks like the water’s path might have run clear of this stretch.”

  “I’m not sure about it being that as much as the local pols knowing who butters their bread. You have a lot of major taxpayers building their homes around here these past few years, and you should’ve seen how fast the state crews got down to making their repairs after the rains.” Barrett glanced at her in the rearview. “Once upon a time, there was so little traffic this far out toward the valley, a boulder could have sat in the middle of the highway forever before anybody scared off the turkey vultures came to roost on it. But it’s so built-up nowadays we’re practically in the ’burbs…drive at rush hour, you might even hit an honest-to-God traffic jam.”

  Sara considered that. “I’m not sure whether it sounds like you prefer the boulders and turkey vultures or the taxpayers.”

  Barrett gave a small chuckle. “I like peace and quiet,” he said. “Never had to chase down one of those buzzards for speeding or a DUI violation.”

  Sara smiled at that and rested back in her seat.

  They rode on for a while in silence. Marked by a gas station and convenience store, the cutoff was just shy of two miles up the road, bearing out Barrett’s guesstimate—yet another check mark in his favor as far as Grissom was concerned.

  After turning onto Blue Diamond Road, the deputy went through an interchange outside a spread-out, busy-looking industrial park and, a little farther up, a large cactus nursery. A few miles beyond that, the desert dramatically reasserted itself—erasing all signs of civilization except strung-together utility poles, occasional cell-phone towers, and the paved blacktop under the Cherokee’s wheels as it rolled between the furrowed western face of the hogback to the right and, on the left, the sandstone peaks of the mountains biting raggedly into a cloudless azure sky.

  “Okay…I think we might be in business,” Barrett told Grissom after a bit. He was peering out the right side of the windshield.

  Grissom raised his eyes from the outspread map on his thighs, gave him a mildly puzzled glance. “We’re still pretty far south of the camp,” he said.

  “But not from what looks to be a clear track we can follow. Hang on.”

  The deputy abruptly swung onto the shoulder of the road, shifted into park, and nodded toward his glove box.

  “I’ve got a pair of binocs in there,” he said, opening his door. “Do me a favor and hand ’em to me—I want to show you something.”

  Outside the Cherokee with the CSIs a minute later, Barrett examined the mountainside through the glasses and then passed them to Grissom.

  “Take a peek,” he said. “There’s a heap of mesquite about thirty yards up to the left. I’m guessing the floodwaters carried them down the ridge.”

  Grissom raised the double lenses to his eyes and swung them along the trajectory of the deputy’s pointing finger.

  “Yeah,” he said, staring at the tumbled scrub trees. “I see it.”

  “Now, look about another ten, fifteen feet over in that same direction, and tell me what’s there.”

  Grissom did so and saw a shallow cut about fifteen feet wide that was apparently the product of natural erosive forces. But the parallel rows of corrugations imprinted in the dusty soil inside the cut, climbing toward the crest of the slope, were anything but natural in origin.

  “Tread marks,” he said. “Somebody’s been up to the camp since the storm.”

  Barrett grunted. “Told you we’d find our track,” he said.

  Grissom returned the binoculars to him. “If I was a gambling man, I wouldn’t bet against you,” he said.

  Barrett grinned. “C’mon along, folks,” he said, and spun back around toward the Cherokee, with Grissom and Sara following.

  Barrett managed to drive the
Cherokee about a hundred feet up the slope before another tumble of uprooted mesquite trees—this pile inside the wash and larger than the deadfall he and Grissom had spotted from the road shoulder below—barred him from making any further progress.

  The deputy jolted to a halt and killed the engine.

  “Hope you two have your hiking legs,” he said. “Because our wheels are gonna have to stay right here.”

  He exited the Jeep, and Grissom and Sara pushed out their doors a second afterward.

  Grissom went back and leaned in to get their knapsacks, passing one of them to Sara before he strapped on his own. Barrett, meanwhile, had gone around to raise the Cherokee’s hatch. From the cargo section, he took a coil of lightweight nylon rope, three trail belts, and the same number of yellow mining helmets.

  “These are for you,” he said, giving each of the criminalists a helmet and a belt. “You can clip the hard hats to your belts for now—no sense sweating in ’em while we’re out in the hot sun.”

  Grissom inspected his helmet before taking Barrett’s advice.

  “A dual-beam headlamp?” he said.

  “Got an ultraviolet light source in addition to the standard halogen bulb. In case we come across serological evidence,” Barrett replied. “Mostly what prospectors do on these slopes is open-pit quarrying. But from what you told me about those crabs or whatever being in your dead man’s mouth, I’m figuring your guys dug a mine goes deep into the hillside. Either that, or they found a cave that gave ’em access the underground vein system.”

  Grissom looked impressed. “You certainly come prepared,” he said.

  A large smile broke out under the deputy’s angular cheekbones. “What the hell else you gonna expect from a true-blue, red-blooded western boy?” he said.

  “Looks like this is our spot,” Sara told Barrett. “Somebody’s been busy around here.”

  As Grissom had gone inquisitively roaming off around an outcrop, she’d gotten her camera from her pack and crouched down to photograph a wide scattering of gravel near a roughly ten-foot-square quarry pit. It was one of a large number that had been hammered and chiseled into that part of the bare sandstone mountainside, giving it a pocked appearance reminiscent of a moonscape.