Nevada Rose Page 18

  But Mark was almost forty, and baseball years were like goddamned dog years. Half the kids he faced whenever he climbed up on the mound were thinking they were going to knock the old guy’s fastball way out of the stadium and then get back into the clubhouse and text their friends back home that they’d launched one off the legendary Fireball Baker. But they learned. They learned how he’d gotten where he was. Learned what made him who he was and still allowed him to perform at a certain level, compete with guys practically young enough to be his kids.

  There was the work. The training regime. Sure, Gibbons set the goals and could keep pace. But beat him?

  Mark was the professional athlete. The perennial all-star. He’d been a winner his entire life. Had busted his tail to stay a winner.

  Gibbons was ten years younger than Mark but had never once felt he had what it took to be anything like him.

  He sipped his Courvoisier and found himself back on that damned gossip channel. Entertainment 24. Your fucking ’round-the-clock ghoul fest. Tune in any hour of the night or day and see people eaten alive by smiling hosts and pop-psych talking heads waiting for the next celebrity sex scandal, child-custody suit, DUI incident, check-in or checkout from a detox center—or if they got really lucky, a fatal overdose.

  When it came to dead celebrities, nothing topped a murder, though. They could bundle together a whole lot of juicy material with a murder. The rumors, allegations, investigations, arrest footage, and trial coverage. The so-called friends coming out of the woodwork with their personal recollections. With the resources at their disposal, it was endless. They could roll over every stone, pull up video footage going back decades. Here’s the suspect in his party days. Here’s the victim looking sexy. Here they are together, the beautiful couple in happier times.

  Murder was the whole lively package for them.

  Those cannibals.

  Those grinning cannibals.

  They’d cornered Mark tonight, gotten exactly what they wanted. He had decided to handle things the way he always did, straight up, no compromises. Walk on into that police laboratory and take the tests they wanted him to take. Poke him, prod him, stick their DNA swabs in his mouth, take fingerprints, his blood, make him piss into a cup—whatever they wanted. He’d said he would look them in their eyes and answer all their questions with their video cameras running, give them a written statement, stick his initials on every page, every sentence of every page.

  Almost forty years old, and Mark could still throw a fastball that lit up the radar guns, blow it right past those swaggering young kids who thought they could make their bones off him, wind up on a highlight reel. There I am, Mom, that’s me blasting one of Mark Baker’s heaters three hundred feet over the outfield wall. That’s me you see beating the best.

  But Mark refused to be beaten. The reporters for the newspapers, magazines, and Web sites would write about his conditioning, his dedication to routine. That was what Gibbons had helped with.

  Except it was his will that made him what he was.

  His will and his guts.

  They were the ingredients you couldn’t get from workouts. You either had them or you didn’t.

  Mark Baker told Gibbons he had never backed down from anything or anyone in his life and was not going to start now. As if Gibbons had needed to hear it from him. As if he didn’t know him well enough after all these years together. As if he’d even think he could change his mind about it. Right afterward, Mark had called Dave Millar and told him to meet him over at the police headquarters, that he was driving in right away. And when Millar started screaming at him about it, he’d told the lawyer he could either go along with the program or walk away, but he wasn’t changing his mind. He was leaving the house in ten minutes, see you later or not.

  Listening to the phone call, Gibbons had accepted that his going in was a foregone conclusion. He knew Baker better than anyone and had gotten behind his decision right away.

  Mark Baker hadn’t killed Nevada Rose Demille. Couldn’t possibly have killed her.

  The question was…could he prove his innocence without giving up the one thing he would rather spend his life behind bars than reveal?

  Gibbons’s doubts had been eating away at him even before he put on the TV and saw that those people with their cameras had been camped out, waiting outside in the parking lot of the crime lab.

  Those cannibals, those fucking human piranha.

  They’d swarmed him the minute he got out of his car, gotten right in his face, chased him to the building. It was as if he’d had to push through a bristling jungle of cameras and microphones with those fuzzy goddamned windscreens.

  And now here it was on national television, on Entertainment 24, the footage delivered and edited and framed with recaps from the ghouls even before prime time. Here it was in crisp high definition, Mark Baker being swarmed by the fucking flesh eaters for everyone to hang back and watch in the comfort of their living rooms. There wasn’t much, maybe two or three minutes, but the flesh eaters had spliced it together twenty different ways so they could show it again and again and again.

  “Fireball, are you able to confirm Rose Demille’s maid found a gym bag on the lawn…?”

  “…that you’ve been issued a subpoena by the district attorney…?”

  “…decided to confess…?”

  “…sadomasochistic strangulation…?”

  “…are ready to plead to a lesser charge in exchange for…?”

  Though he wished he’d thought of it earlier, Gibbons had gotten the idea to call ahead and notify the police that Mark was on his way. So they could come out and escort him into the place, let him hang on to some little remaining bit of his of privacy and dignity. The reporters had worked out some kind of arrangement with the cops, or the city, or whatever, that allowed them to lurk in ambush out there in the parking lot, but entering the premises was another story. Once the cops came and assembled around Mark to bring him into the building, the flesh eaters and their mikes and camera lenses had gotten boxed out.

  But still…still, they’d gotten what they needed for their nightly programming loop. They always managed to sink their fangs in for one or two painful, bloody bites.

  Always.

  Gibbons set his drink down and massaged his brow. He couldn’t watch any more of it. He needed to get out, work off some tension, maybe run some laps. Vegas…if you didn’t mind the heat, you always had the weather on your side.

  The odds, though, were something else, and Gibbons was afraid—scared out of his wits, in fact—that they were piling up on Mark Baker by the minute.

  Piling up high and deep enough to bury him forever.

  Surrounded by tall piles of overstuffed cartons and other loose odds and ends removed from the Belcher trailer homes, Sara Sidle stood in the crime lab’s evidence storage room looking beleaguered and thinking she would desperately need to corral some obedient junior tech—at least one—to help log all the junk in.

  Her preoccupation with the repetitive but exacting work had helped her shake off the downer she’d been thrown into watching Gloria Belcher’s uncontrolled flare-up of cuckooness. It was Grissom, too. Gris always somehow dispelled the gluey darkness when it threatened to suck her under. But the work—the nuts and bolts of it—that was always good for her. It took her mind off the past, allowed her to concentrate on what was pressing and tangible.

  She had already spent the better part of two hours getting a very significant head start with what were likely the key evidentiary items. These included Charlie and Gloria’s work boots (made of premium leather, of course), the quarrying tools from Charlie’s double-wide, and various articles of clothing from both trailers. But Gloria Belcher had made it impossible to be picky as far as conducting the seizure. With two of the cops who’d accompanied Sara and Grissom to the Sunderland Trailer Court busy just keeping her from bouncing off the walls, it was unanimously decided to grab whatever stood even a remote chance of having some forensic investigative value�
��which had translated into everything in sight that wasn’t nailed down.

  And so here Sara was, all alone in the temporary storage room, really figuring she would need to scare up a tech. Even with help, she guessed it was a sure thing the sorting, bagging, and tagging would take all night. Practical remedy for her funk or not, she did not intend to be at it until she was old and gray. Maybe, Sara thought, she would nab somebody from among the large group roaming around the building in starstruck efforts to catch glimpses of the famous baseball hero involved in Catherine and Warrick’s burking case. It would serve those whippersnappers right.

  Sara was turning toward the door when her cell phone vibrated in her blazer’s inside pocket. She saw that the call, a blocked number, had been forwarded from her office line.

  This was not anything she deemed worthy of a second thought. Sara kept her call-forwarding option engaged whenever she was out of the office. Furthermore, the majority of LVPD employees, from law-enforcement personnel to clerks, were understandably—some would say obsessively—wary of having their numbers get out to strangers and therefore blocked the caller-ID feature as a general practice. When your job description involved constant interaction with hardened criminals and crazies of every ilk, you tended to be very cautious about releasing your personal information.

  She flipped open the phone and raised it to her ear.

  “Hi,” she said. “This is Sara…”

  “You told me to call,” said a voice at the other end.

  She instantly recognized it, and felt the skin prickle at the back of her neck. “Charlie?”

  “I’m in my truck,” he said.

  “In your truck where?”

  “You asked me to call,” he said. “So I am.”

  She felt her stomach knot. That was not an answer to her question. His disjointedness troubled her.

  She tried again. “Charlie…where are you?”

  “I told you.” His voice was trembling. “I’m in the truck. On my cell.”

  Calm, Sara thought. Stay calm. Charlie sounded agitated. It would do no good at all if he picked up anything similar in her.

  “Where are you going?” she said, wishing she had time to patch Grissom into this call. Positive Grissom could handle him. That he would know exactly what to say. But she did not have time, she was on her own. It was up to her to know what to do here.

  And then a thought struck her. Rammed into her brain so absolutely that she almost slapped her forehead, wondering how it hadn’t come to her sooner.

  “Are you heading over here, Charlie?” she said. “Are you coming to see me?”

  “Yeah. I got the address. It’s on that card. The one you stuck in my hand.”

  All right, Sara thought. All right, we’re making progress.

  “Charlie, I’m very glad to hear it,” she said. “I’m right here waiting for you—”

  “I killed my brother,” Charlie said, cutting her off.

  Sara took a deep breath. How to respond to that? How?

  “Charlie, listen to me. You’ll have to tell me all this when we’re together. You can stay on the phone now, keep talking to me right now, because I’m here for you and want to make sure I understand everything you say. But for me to help you…I need you here with me.”

  A sound escaped him, a kind of choked-off whimper. “It was all about that gemstone,” he said. “The Nevada Rose. But it wasn’t all my fault. Part of the blame was his. You got to put some of it on him.”

  Sara was silent. She didn’t want to interrupt. Let him have his space.

  “Me and Adam, we was gonna to sell it to that Smithsonian museum in Washington,” Charlie said. “I didn’t want to. I thought there was other ways we could get more for it. But we got sick of arguin’ back and forth about it. Sicker of bein’ broke. And so I told my brother to go ahead an’ do it…to go ahead an’ cut the deal.”

  “And is that what you did?”

  Silence.

  “Charlie…”

  “It was gonna be a fifty-fifty split,” he said in a breaking voice. “That’s what we agreed to. Half for me, half for him. That sounds fair, don’t it, Miss Sidle?”

  Long, deep breath, she thought. Innnnnn…then out. “Yes, Charlie,” she said. “It sounds fair.”

  “So then, why would anybody want to change it?”

  “Is that what happened, Charlie?”

  He didn’t say anything. Sara waited. Nothing.

  “Charlie, go on…”

  More nothing. No…not nothing. He was weeping now. Weeping outright into the phone.

  She suddenly became terrified she would lose him. “I’m still listening, Charlie. Tell me what happened.”

  “It got changed,” he said with a hitching sob. “Right before the people from the museum came to pick up the stone, it got changed. Adam…he…he showed up while I was at our mine camp, wanting to make the percentage sixty-forty. His favor. An’ you can figure what happened.”

  Sara wasn’t sure how to reply. She did not want to put words in his mouth, do anything to color his admission.

  “What happened, Charlie?” she decided to say after a moment. “Tell me what happened at the camp.”

  “We got into a fight. A goddam brawl’s what it was. Adam hit his head—must’ve been on a rock, I don’t know—and then the next thing…next thing, he ain’t breathin’. Adam’s dead, an’ I don’t know what to do…and I drug him in that pool where the rain comes through the adit. I drug my brother in that stinking, filthy pool to rot—“

  Charlie broke off, crying harder now.

  Sara wondered how he could possibly drive in that state. She was thinking he was going to pieces on her, was bound get into some kind of accident on the road if he didn’t somehow pull out of it.

  “Charlie, I…look, how far are you from me right now?”

  “Few minutes,” he rasped. “Five, ten.”

  “Good, Charlie. That’s really great.”

  “You gonna wait for me, right?”

  “I promised you I would, Charlie. I’m not going anywhere till I see you—”

  There was momentary dead air on the phone. Sara prayed to a God she’d never trusted that it wasn’t a drop-off.

  “Charlie, you there?”

  More of that dull no-sound.

  “Charlie—”

  And then he was back. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What?”

  Another burst of sobs. And then a horrendous semi-articulate moan: “Sorryyeeeeahhhhhhh.”

  “Charlie!”

  The line went silent again. Stayed silent.

  Sara’s heart pounded against her rib cage.

  The call hadn’t dropped off that first time. How the hell could she have made such a dumb mistake?

  When you get an incoming call-waiting beep at your end of the line, it gives the person at the other end a flat silence. Exactly the sort she had gotten.

  Charlie had heard the beep, taken another call, and put her on hold. That was what had happened, Sara was sure of it. Just as she had a gut certainty about who had phoned him.

  She went running out of the room as fast as her feet would carry her.

  Sara went racing into Grissom’s office less than a minute later, grateful to find him there. Winded but too adrenaline-hyped to sit down, she paced in front of his desk and recapped her exchange with Charlie Belcher.

  Grissom was quiet for a while as she finished, his expression thoughtful as he looked at her through his eyeglasses.

  “Do you believe his confession?” he asked.

  “It runs contrary to whatever evidence we’ve got,” Sara said breathlessly. “The only shoeprints we have got going to that drip pool are Gloria’s.”

  “You’ve compared the photos from inside the cave with her boots?”

  “First thing when we got back here from the trailer court…before I even thought about logging in the other evidence.”

  “And?”

  “The size and sole patterns are a precise
match.”

  Grissom thought another moment. “Charlie didn’t say anything to you about using a cart or wheelbarrow?”

  “No,” Sara said. “He said he dragged him. Not once but twice.”

  Grissom pushed his glasses down the bridge of his nose. Then up again. “Charlie’s a large man,” he said. “What would you estimate he weighs, two hundred, two hundred and fifty pounds?”

  Sara nodded. “He wouldn’t have needed to wheel Adam to the pool,” she said. “Not those few feet from where the footprints start in that recess.”

  “But it looks like he was wheeled.”

  “Right.”

  “Not dragged.”

  “Right.”

  “Which is more likely how Gloria would have moved him, being about half Charlie’s size.”

  “I know Charlie was lying to me,” Sara said. “And I think he was covering up for his mother.”

  “To protect her.”

  “Yeah.”

  Grissom’s eyebrows drew together. “So,” he said, “why did he abruptly end his phone call to you? And more important…where is he?”

  Sara paced the room with her hands behind her back. Two steps left, two right, two left again, as Grissom watched her intently.

  Then she suddenly stopped and stood looking at him across the middle of his desk.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “I’ve got an all-points out on the pickup I saw at the trailer court. But I think we’d better head back over there.”

  Grissom rose from his desk without questioning her. Socrates might have frowned. But it showed why he had won Sara’s heart. “I’ll put somebody at the front door just in case Belcher shows. And get some uniforms to come with us,” he said.

  It was almost ten o’clock at night as Warrick stood leaning against the wall a few feet down the corridor from Catherine’s office, arms crossed, waiting for her to get off the phone with a detective in New York City who had pledged to expedite her procurement of death records for Eleanor Samuels’s first husband—and Layton Samuels’s former partner—Dr. Carl Melvoy. According to the obit Warrick had pulled up on the electronic newspaper archive, Melvoy had lived and died on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.