Nevada Rose Page 14

  Grissom peered briefly through the microscope’s eyepieces and cranked the lens down to begin focusing.

  “When the Tahoe situation arose, Tuttle was enlisted to help determine the effects of milfoil on the lake’s ecosystem,” he said. “After he conducted his initial tests, he was surprised to discover that the plant was actually releasing al-lelopathic chemicals into the water.”

  Sara raised her eyebrows. “They’re deadly to other kinds of algae?”

  “Right,” Grissom said. “The toxic polyphenols are specifically gallic acid, pyrogallic acid, ellagic acid, and catechin, and it’s your blue and blue-green algae and diatoms that are most susceptible to them.” He tinkered some more with his microscope’s focus knobs. “John fought off a government committee’s plan to use herbicides to kill off the milfoil, arguing that it would open up an environmental Pandora’s box by eliminating indigenous plants and animals. Eventually, as the lesser of several evils, he introduced a species of beetle and also a crayfish that feed on the milfoil, knowing that would bring about their own ecological imbalances since they were also foreign life-forms. But—“

  Sara tapped Grissom’s arm to interrupt him.

  “Yes?” he said, glancing up from the scope to look at her.

  “The Belcher connection,” she said. “Please, please, pretty please.”

  Grissom cleared his throat. With his baby face, he looked a bit like a child who realized he’d broken a rule without having the slightest idea why it had been imposed on him. “In the process of carrying out his investigation, John took what wound up being a comprehensive inventory of the algae that naturally occur in Nevada’s water bodies,” he said. “The most prevalent species statewide was Pyramichlamys. It’s the type that overwhelmingly showed up in our water samples from Fairmark Lake.”

  Sara looked at him, remembering. “Greg collected them the day Belcher was found by those cleanup workers,” she said.

  Grissom moved away from the microscope, gesturing for Sara to take his place behind it.

  She lowered her head to study the slide he had mounted on the stage.

  “Is the algae on this slide from one of Greg’s samples?” she asked.

  “No,” Grissom said. “You’re looking at a culture of Stichococcus bacillaris. An entirely different species of algae from the scrapings you removed from Belcher’s hands and face.”

  She grunted. “Would it usually be found in the lake?”

  “Almost never,” he said. “It’s a form of cave algae, rare throughout Nevada, and I collected it from the stone around the drip pool.” He paused. “According to John, it’s among the few that can thrive in very minimal light levels…say, the amount that might enter through an adit.”

  Sara raised her eyes from the microscope and saw Grissom holding out another slide.

  “Here,” he said. “Have a look.”

  She placed the second specimen slide under the microscope’s objective lenses…and instantly realized the culture she was studying was indistinguishable from the sample on the slide she’d just removed.

  Sara turned toward Grissom, a look of comprehension dawning across her features.

  “Belcher’s body didn’t pick up its coating of algae in Fairmark Lake,” she said. “This pretty well goes to show it grew and spread on him in the drip pool.”

  “Pretty well,” Grissom agreed.

  “But how do you think he got from one place to the other? Do you really believe it’s possible the floodwaters could have washed him all the way down into the lake?”

  “Possible…yes,” Grissom said. “As for the question of how possible it might be, that’s one I don’t have enough information to answer.”

  “You have an idea where to get hold of it?”

  He gave her one of his enigmatic smiles. “Maybe we can start a few doors down the hall,” he said.

  “Warrick!”

  He had barely left Catherine’s office when he heard Grissom call his name, and he turned to see Gris hustling in his direction.

  He waited in the corridor a few steps outside Cath’s door.

  “You’re here early,” Grissom said, catching up.

  Warrick looked at him. He was thinking that Gris, being the night-shift supervisor, was out and about even earlier than Catherine and himself, relatively speaking.

  “Déjà vu,” he muttered, scratching his ear.

  “Paramnesia,” Grissom said.

  “What?” Warrick said.

  “I heard you say ‘déjà vu,’” Grissom said.

  Warrick kept looking at him. “Right,” he said.

  “People tend to give a preternatural or mystical significance to the phenomenon,” Grissom said. “But the nineteenth-century psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin used the term paramnesia essentially to explain it as a brain hiccup.”

  “Oh.”

  Grissom rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Kraepelin never received the same historical prominence as Freud. In fact, they were dismissive of each other. Probably because Kraepelin took a hard scientific view of psychiatric disorders and aberrations…saw virtually all of them as pathologies with biological causes, as opposed to Freud’s philosophical constructions, which tended to strike a more popular chord. Scientists hadn’t developed the medical tools at the time to examine and map brain functions adequately—”

  “Boss…”

  Grissom looked at him and cleared his throat. “I simply tend to prefer the term—”

  “Paramnesia,” Warrick finished.

  “Correct.”

  Warrick didn’t say anything. Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto, let’s call the whole thing off, he thought, certain the brothers Gershwin must have been having a morning a whole lot like his when they’d written their song.

  “So,” he said finally, “Kraepelin’s theories aside…”

  “I need you to help me out with something,” Grissom said.

  Warrick looked at him. “Now? Catherine and I were about to look into some things about Nevada Rose—”

  “You mean the case involving the dead woman,” Grissom said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “As opposed to the Nevada Rose,” Grissom said. “Which is the gemstone connected to the Green Man investigation.”

  Warrick felt a sudden throb in both temples. “Right,” he said, thinking he’d definitely have to find an aspirin or three to chew on once they were through with their conversation. “So, which do you want me to give you an assist with?”

  Grissom, for his part, was forging right ahead. “The Green Man–slash–Nevada Rose case,” he said. “It shouldn’t take long. Greg has already compiled the necessary geographic charts and tables, including satellite images of the terrain, photo reference of the cave’s interior dimensions and features, and other variables.”

  “What terrain are you talking about,” Warrick asked. “What cave?”

  Grissom’s eyes narrowed. “Have you been listening to me at all?” he said.

  Warrick took a breath. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Because you seem inattentive.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I’d call it that.” Forget crunching on aspirin, Warrick was about ready for something significantly stronger. “It’s just that you could say I’m up to my ears in another case here. With Catherine. And I was about to make a phone call to arrange for us to—”

  “Come on.”

  Grissom clamped a hand on his elbow and practically spun him around in a full circle.

  “Hey!” Warrick flinched. “Where you taking me?”

  “Over to Greg, where else?” Grissom said, dragging him along the hall. “The sooner the two of you get to work on this, the faster Catherine can have you back.”

  “Dum–dum–dum–deedee–deedee–dee…” Greg Sanders hummed, seated in front of a computer monitor the approximate size of the Australian continent.

  As Warrick took the chair next to him, spinning it around to sit with his legs straddling the backrest, he recognized the tune coming out of his mout
h as the Kermit the Frog ode to being green that had seemingly sunk its hooks into the soft brain tissues of everyone at the criminalistics lab.

  Warrick waited a second for Sanders to acknowledge his presence. When, not the smallest bit to his surprise, it didn’t happen, he frowned and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Are you gonna let me know exactly what we’re doing in front of this computer, or am I supposed to read your mind?” he said.

  Greg’s fingers kept flying over his keyboard. “I thought the boss already explained it to you,” he said.

  “Well, he didn’t,” Warrick said. “Except for mentioning some charts—”

  “Bureau of Land Management charts of the Spring Mountains, Red Rock Canyon, and Hum-boldt-Toiyabe National Forest, right.” Greg paused in his tapping. “You want the problem in a nutshell?”

  “Think that’s what I was asking.”

  Greg sighed. “We start with an unidentified dead body floating with the swans in Fairmark Lake,” he said.

  “Green Man,” Warrick said.

  “Whom we are later able to identify to a fair degree of certainty as a gem hunter named Adam Belcher,” Greg said. “Though I actually prefer the name Green Man, for what that’s worth.”

  Warrick looked at him with pointed impatience. “I don’t have all day, man.”

  “Okay, okay,” Greg said. “Cutting right ahead to this morning, we follow dedicated and heroic criminalists Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle, along with some local-yokel deputy…into a cave up in the mountains near Blue Diamond, at a site where Adam ‘Green Man’ Belcher and his brother staked a prospecting claim.”

  “They find any evidence Belcher was killed there?”

  Greg shrugged. “You’d have to ask them,” he said. “What they did find was evidence—strong evidence—that Belcher was dumped in a drip pool inside the cave.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The evidence.”

  “I thought you didn’t have time to hear the full story from me.”

  “I don’t,” Warrick said. “If I don’t have to.”

  “In my humble view, it isn’t necessary,” Greg said. “But if you do want it, I’d refer you to the Sidle slide show, which I believe is even now being screened down the hall in the photo analysis lab.”

  “Look, I’m just trying to figure out what I’m doing here.”

  “And I was just getting around to it,” Greg said somewhat curtly. He blew air through his mouth. “Some of the evidence—a portion only of significance to you and me in terms of setting up our specifically assigned problem—is that the pool was brimming over with a species of amphipod that only thrives in our local Nevada caves.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A rare type belonging to the same ugly little white species that deposited a slimy glopping cluster of eggs in Belcher’s mouth.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A type that’s incapable of surviving—and that certainly wouldn’t be stimulated into egg-laying behavior—outside a sunless underground environment.”

  Warrick looked at him. “So you’re saying that Grissom and Sara think the dead man’s body became a host for the eggs in the drip pool and then somehow got transported down the mountainside—”

  “Washed.”

  “Huh?”

  “Got washed down the mountainside,” Greg said.

  “Okay, right, washed down the mountainside into the man-made lake.”

  Greg nodded. “Based on that and other evidence we don’t need to worry about right now, what they postulate is that Green Man’s—that is, Belcher’s—watery voyage occurred during the flood a couple of weeks back,” he said. “The thing we do have to concern ourselves with is determining whether that hypothesis can be proven out. And short of re-creating the flood, a tall order unless you happen to be really good at doing a rain dance, the only option we have is to generate a computer sim.”

  Warrick thoughtfully scratched his stubbled chin. “So that’s what Grissom’s charts and sat relief maps are about.”

  “There you go,” Greg said. “Our task at hand.”

  Warrick sat there considering that a moment.

  “What kind of software you using?” he said, and tipped his head toward the computer monitor.

  Greg gave him a half-smile. “Thought you would never ask,” he said. “A couple days ago, Nick and I were working with Profiler.”

  “The chromatography–facial ID software.”

  “Right,” Greg said. “That’s what we used to help get a positive make on Belcher in the first place. And it got me wondering about the possibility of another type of fusion software. Something that might combine the CG applications movie studios use for realistic special effects like tidal waves, whirlpools, and plain old stormy seas with the kind of software developers use to figure out drainage for construction projects nowadays.”

  Warrick looked at him. “Don’t even try to sell me on the idea that you developed a program in—what—like two or three days?”

  “Have to be honest,” Greg said. “I knew a friend of mine at MIT was already screwing around with a prototypical version. Just wasn’t sure how far along he’d gotten with it. So I gave him a call and asked.”

  “And?”

  Greg patted the top of his computer. “I’ve got the program installed in here,” he said. “We’re locked and loaded.”

  Warrick was quiet a few seconds. “The movement of liquid’s a seriously complex process,” he said. “It’s gonna be impacted by all kinds of forces. There’s gravity, for one thing.”

  “And friction, for another,” Greg said, thinking along with him.

  “Plus landscape features, fluctuations in the speed and direction of the wind…”

  “The amount and force of the rain that was hitting it as it surged…”

  “Any kind of natural and artificial boundaries or barriers it might have come up against…”

  “Or overflowed…”

  “Like dams and storm conduits, to name a couple, not to mention everything from homes to the cars in front of them…”

  “Even the composition, texture, aridity, and porosity of the soil and other material it might have passed over…”

  “Or picked up while it was rushing downhill,” Warrick said. “And say we manage to plot the course of the water. Tough enough, right? Next, we’d have to factor in how the dead man’s body would interact with it—and with other aspects of the path it traveled.”

  “Definitely poses another set of hydrodynamic problems,” Greg replied.

  “A whole ’nother set,” Warrick said. “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth.”

  “Something tells me that ain’t the great musical poetess Nina Tyford,” Greg said.

  “Nope.”

  “Or even Jerry Garcia.”

  Warrick smiled thinly and turned toward the computer screen. “C’mon on, boy genius,” he said. “We better get our science-fair project cooking.”

  8

  “HERE SHE COMES,” Catherine said.

  “So far, so good,” Warrick said.

  “It better be—we’ve been here forever,” Catherine said.

  Warrick glanced at his wristwatch, thinking it was maybe closer to an hour, but he caught her drift. It had damn near felt like an eternity since they had planted themselves near the Vegas Hilton’s main entrance across Paradise Road from the seven-hundred-foot aerial thrust of Vista Tower. Though standing there among the pushing, shoving concentration of tourists outside the hotel had put them at a fairly direct and inconspicuous vantage for observing the condo development’s vehicle gate, it was no fun at all.

  His eyes attentive behind a pair of sunglasses, Warrick watched the silver Mercedes-Benz roadster pass them on its way to the gate. The rear vanity plate read “Bodyspa.” Behind the steering wheel was Eleanor Samuels.

  The Be
nz turned up the drive and paused at the security gate as it swung inward on an electronic command. After a moment, Eleanor drove through onto a paved drive and stopped again. A valet appeared from the high-rise, went around to her door, and opened it to help her out.

  Wearing a black mid-length skirt and matching heels, she took some shopping bags from the back of the car and carried them into the building.

  “I’m surprised she didn’t have the valet bring ’em up to her once he parks the Benz,” Warrick said.

  Catherine smiled. “Those bags are from Saks Fifth Avenue,” she said.

  “So?”

  “So it’s hard to separate a girl from her goodies,” Catherine said. “If they were groceries, he’d be loaded down like a pack mule.”

  Warrick made a face. “Stupid me,” he said. “Goes to show why I’m divorced.”

  Catherine smiled again and was quiet for a second or two. “We should give Eleanor a chance to settle in,” she said. “Kick off her shoes, fix a martini, turn on the stereo, and sink into the couch.”

  Warrick nodded, and they waited some more among the fizzy, kinetic swarm of tourists.

  After about ten minutes, they crossed Paradise and turned in the opposite direction from the tower’s vehicle gate, heading toward the walk-in entrance. A front path led up to it between parallel lanes of palm trees, and an alert uniformed doorman stood inside a wide, bright, glossy-floored vestibule.

  He watched the CSIs cautiously as they approached. “Can I help you?”

  Catherine displayed her identification to the guy at the door. As he looked it over, Warrick glanced up to see a bank of remotely operated video cameras. Besides the doorman, he knew there would be a guard—or guards—keeping watch on the entry from a security station elsewhere in the building.

  “How do I know this isn’t a counterfeit?” the doorman said, still examining Catherine’s badge.

  She shrugged. “You can take our word for it,” she said. “Or make a call to check us out if you feel like wasting time.”

  “Or ask one of your security boys.”