Nevada Rose Page 6

  “Before or after you snookered it away from one of them?”

  Warrick gave her a sideways look. “You up to anything else besides trouble while I mingled with the beautiful people?” he said.

  “Listing the names and addresses of the poshest unisex hair salons in Vegas.” She took a sheet of paper out of her blazer pocket. “I have about a dozen we’ll need to hit tomorrow…check out whether they use Oro products.”

  “The fun and games never end around here, huh?”

  Catherine unfolded the list and glanced over it. “If you ever have a makeover emergency—say, after getting a last-minute invite to a hora party—you’ll be glad to find most of them conveniently sprinkled around our splendid downtown area,” she said. “In no particular order, there’s the Spring Green Spa, the Palmay over at Mandalay Bay, Javanica on West Flamingo…”

  “Sounds exotic.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Javanica,” Warrick said. “The name.”

  “Uh-huh. I won’t forget.” She cracked a smile and looked back down at the sheet of paper in her hand. “Okay, let’s see…we also have the Red Noir Salon, which isn’t located on Paradise Road but across from the golf club. Then we’ve got Niki Rusellia’s on South Decatur, Orianna’s on—”

  “Hold it.” Warrick straightened, wound a finger counterclockwise in the air. “Give me the next-to-last one again.”

  “Niki Ruselli—”

  “That’s the spa where Rose Demille and Nova Stiles first met each other.”

  Catherine snapped her eyes up from the list. “You wondering if Rose might’ve introduced the Fireball to her chic longtime hairdresser?” she said.

  Warrick drained what was left of his coffee.

  “Either that, or I’m looking for somewhere I can have my natural Oro-ed out,” he said, emphatically smacking the empty cup down on the table.

  It was almost midnight before Sara’s periodic check of her in box yielded a response from the Pakistani mining supply seller, though its sender was a Y. Sahid at LexInternational.com, rather than the Mapadi address to which she’d sent her e-mail six hours before.

  Slouched in front of her computer with a chocolate bar and a cola, she opened the message. It began:

  Dear CSI Ms. Sara,

  I am this afternoon in receipt of your inquiry about the leather tool belt and leather boots. These are consisting of two main items in our line of premium quality leather pouch belts, leather boots, leather bags, leather jackets, and other leather mining accessories. As you may know, we are one of the world’s leading manufacturers of premium leather pouch belts, leather boots, leather bags, leather…

  Sara rubbed the premium leather out of her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, and skipped down a paragraph:

  Our understanding is that you wish for the names and addresses of our customers in the United States. Regretfully we must inform you they cannot be provided. It is our policy not to be sharing names and addresses of our customers with third parties.

  Your interest in us is appreciated. Please do not hesitate with further inquiries about our premium leather products. You may also register for our free company alerts. Wholesale discounts are offered for large orders.

  Thank you,

  Yassir Sahid, Leather Exports International,

  Karachi, Pakistan

  Cursing inventively through her teeth, Sara grabbed the telephone and punched in the international number in the e-mail. After a brief wait, a male voice answered in English.

  “Hello, Leather Exports International, how may I assist you?”

  She plunged ahead by introducing herself as a member of the LVPD criminalistics unit, explaining that she’d tried contacting the company earlier, and informing him that she was looking at a seemingly irrelevant e-mailed response from someone named Yassir Sahid.

  “This is Yassir speaking, Ms. Sara,” said the guy at the other end of the line. “I apologize for any previous confusion. May I have your customer reference number, please?”

  She frowned. “I don’t have one. I’m with the Las Vegas police.”

  “Yes, thank you. But we will need a customer reference number to review your shipping order.”

  “I just told you, I don’t have a reference number. Or a shipping order. Did you bother reading my e-mail before you answered it?”

  “Yes, Ms. Sara. And we sincerely regret the prior difficulties you experienced. So, please…do I understand that you have no reference number?”

  “That’s right. I—”

  “Thank you. I am now going to assign you a number. It may be used if you are disconnected or need assistance with this order in the future.”

  Sara pouched her cheeks and blew out a long stream of air. “Maybe we should start over,” she said. “I’m with the police. I haven’t placed an order with your company.”

  “Yes, thank you. But your file must be given a reference number before we proceed, Ms. Sara.”

  “That’s Ms. Sidle.”

  “I’m sorry. Ms. Sidle, yes?”

  “Right.”

  “And for our records, how shall I spell your first and last names?”

  “They’re already spelled out in my e-mail.”

  “One moment, please.” There was tapping on a keyboard. “I have pulled up your e-mail and can see your full name here, thank you. It is Sara Sidle.”

  “Right,” she said, thinking what a wonderful thing it was to have him confirm it for her.

  “That would be first name S-a-r-a…”

  “Right.”

  “And second name S-i-d-l-e.”

  “Right.”

  “Just another moment…” More tapping. “Your correct name is now entered into the system with your reference number. Do you have a pencil and paper so you can write the number down?”

  She sighed. “For the last time, I’m calling on police business. And I want to talk to a person who can give me some information.”

  “Yes, Ms. Sara. But we do have to follow a certain procedure. After you write down your reference number, I will be able to assist…”

  “Sidle. And I don’t—do not—want a reference number.”

  “Excuse me, please?”

  Sara closed her eyes, rubbed them again. “Look,” she said, “I’ve asked for a list of people who bought a specific type of tool belt and boots from your company. Either you provide it, or I’m going to call the United States Customs Office and ask that they review your employer’s compliance with international trade rules and regulations. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. And I hope you understand this, too. If they find even a minor—and I mean minor—trade violation, your boss is going to know it all happened because you refused to cooperate with me over the phone. Is that clear enough?”

  “Yes, thank you—”

  “Then I suggest you get that information,” Sara said. “Right away, thank you.”

  After a brief search through headquarters, Sara found Grissom sitting over his chessboard in the break room, a white pawn in his hand.

  “How’s it going?” she said from the entryway.

  He glanced up at her. “Catherine’s been moving my pieces around.”

  “Again?”

  “It’s never-ending.”

  “Why don’t you tell her to cut it out?”

  Grissom’s brows knitted. “Because then she’d know I’m on to her,” he said, sounding as if that should have been readily apparent.

  Sara gave him one of those I quit looks, turned toward the snack machine, and inserted a couple of singles into the bill feeder. It dispensed her second Three Musketeers bar of the night along with some jangling coins.

  “You remember when candy bars cost less than a buck?” she said, counting her change.

  “I remember when people had to pick cocoa beans off trees to make their own bars.”

  She smiled, sat down beside him, and affectionately rubbed his shirtsleeve.

  “I got in touch with Yas
sir Sahid of Leather Exports International,” she said. “Manufacturer of premium leather pouch belts, leather boots, leather bags, and leather blah, blah, blah.”

  His face was mildly questioning. “Sounds as if you got an earful.”

  “An earful, a headache…and a list of customers in America who bought belts and boots identical to Green Man’s.”

  “Any of them local?”

  Sara pulled a notepad from a pocket of her simple brown blazer and flipped it open. “Last year, a guy named Chuck Belcher with a Barfield mailing address got two belts and three pairs of the boots,” she said. “In fact, he special-ordered one pair in a woman’s size.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. The address doesn’t seem currently valid…it’s in a trailer court,” Sara said. “I’ll have to call the post office tomorrow and see if there’s a forwarding location.” She gave him a look. “Want to know what else is interesting?”

  “Shoot.”

  “I followed Hodges’s lead, scarily enough, and checked the online registry of prospecting claims with the Nevada Department of Minerals.”

  Grissom’s face suddenly lit up. “And you found one under Belcher’s name in the database?”

  “A beryllium mine filed jointly by Charles and Adam Belcher,” she said. “They got their approval two years ago. And the site’s right in the Spring Mountains.”

  Grissom sat quietly staring at the chess piece in his fingers. “Better put in your call to the Mineralological Society first thing tomorrow morning,” he finally said. “If they can lasso an expert mineralogist to consult on short notice, then I’d like you to fly right on down there. Don’t worry about a reimbursement; I’ll get the expense tab okayed.”

  Sara poked her tongue against her cheek. “Will that include a car-rental allowance?”

  “It’s a ten-minute drive from the airport to the university,” Grissom said. “The Washoe County sheriff owes me a favor. He’ll send a man out to give you a lift.”

  “Any other budget tips I should bear in mind?”

  “Make sure you book an economy flight.”

  She sighed and took a gooey bite of her candy bar. “Reno, here I come,” she said.

  “It’s not that easy being green…”

  Nick Stokes entered the morgue room to find Greg standing just inside the doorway. His arms folded across his chest, he was singing in a barely audible undertone as he watched Robbins go about his work.

  “What in God’s name is going on here?” Nick said in a hushed voice.

  Greg glanced over his shoulder at him. “Doc Robbins is taking a CT scan of the Fairmark Lakes floater,” he said.

  Across the room, the ME had wheeled his mobile computerized tomography unit toward the multitier cold chambers occupying an entire wall of the autopsy room.

  “I wasn’t talking about the doc,” Nick whispered. “I meant, what was that sick croaking noise I heard from you?”

  Greg looked at him. “Is this about making me the butt of your good ol’ Texas boy humor?”

  “No,” Nick deadpanned. “I wanted to know about the croaking. So I could help if you were in pain or something.”

  Greg looked at him some more. “You watch Sesame Street when you were a kid?”

  “Of course. Everybody watched Sesame Street when they were kids.”

  “Then, you ought to know that Kermit song.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’? The song popped into my head after the floater was dredged out of the lake.”

  “That so?”

  “Right. The reason being that the floater’s green. And now I can’t get the melody out of my head. Or the lyrics. Which is funny, because I didn’t even realize they’d stuck with me.”

  “Life sure is strange, ain’t it, bro?”

  Greg looked injured but didn’t comment. Guardedly optimistic that he was all sung out, Nick looked back across the room at Doc Robbins. He had pulled the floater’s body out of the cold case on its stainless-steel rack, then pushed the doughnut-shaped CT tube around its head.

  Greg glanced over at him. “You check out the MRI soft-tissue data for Green Man?”

  “I’ve already imported it into Profiler,” Nick said. “We’re set to go once we add this tomography.”

  Greg nodded tightly and stood watching Doc Robbins adjust his lead apron over his chest, turn on the machine, and wait as the scanner began to rotate. Ten seconds and a single revolution would produce sixty-four X-ray slices of the dead man’s cranium.

  Nick turned to him. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get ready to put our model together at my workstation.”

  “Why not use my computer?”

  Nick gave him a long look. “Because mine’s in a singing-free zone,” he finally said.

  The computer application, dubbed Profiler, was a fusion of advanced CT imaging and facial-recognition software. It had been developed to create high-accuracy models of faces that were distorted by crimes and accidents, their soft tissues often eaten, rotted, burned, or stripped down to the chalk-white underlying bone.

  As Doc Robbins’s scanning apparatus had made a rapid turn around the floater’s head, its images were routed to Nick Stokes’s workstation via instantaneous wireless transfer. Now Nick opened Profiler, accessed the fresh-from-the-morgue uploads, sat back, and watched the program run its gamut of automated iterations.

  The first step was a multiplanar reconstruction of the CT slices into a full view of the dead man’s skull—his cranial orbit and facial bones detailed down to their foramina, sutures, and processes. Seated in front of the large flat-panel display, Greg and Nick waited as their model took shape, the CT slices stacking up into an image with three-dimensional volume and contours.

  The next step excited Greg—a flythrough of the virtual skull’s inner and outer features to examine its structural integrity. His hand cupped over a trackball mouse, he navigated his way across the nasal bridge, went in through an eye socket, cruised behind the zygomatic, lachrymal, and sphenoid bones, then flew out the nose cavity to circle the temporal bones and swoop back in between the maxilla and mandible. Going deep into the mouth, its rows of teeth surrounding him like rock formations in an underground cavern, he dove down to the base of the skull, and up again, and finally exited through an auditory meatus.

  “Whee,” he said. “I’m jazzed.”

  Nick smiled a little. “Enough fun and games, Rocketman,” he said. “Better do our mapping.”

  A click of Nick’s mouse launched Profiler’s third-phase synthesis of its facial image. Connecting lines instantly began to form between nodal points on the skull, plotting a grid around the CT reconstruction.

  Within seconds, the wire-frame topology was complete.

  “Perfectamundo,” Greg said. He looked at Nick. “Got Green Man’s hard tissues down. Now for our meat and gristle.”

  He closed the tomographic image file, leaving only the wire-frame on-screen—a proxy skull on which the software would generate its digital face.

  Step four was adding the skin and its embedded muscles. Gathered from the MRI scans and computer-adjusted for postmortem deformations, the soft-tissue values were drawn from anatomical and forensic data sets and would be further refined as Profiler built up the facial model. Being dependent on the CSIs’ existing knowledge about Green Man’s condition—and how he came to that condition—the forensic data had a large number of undetermineds and was the reason their model could never be totally accurate. But they had input enough for the approximation to produce an identifiable likeness.

  Or so Greg and Nick hoped.

  They watched as the musculodermal bands were pasted onto the wire frame one by one. The masseters. The inner and outer frontalis muscles. The wide ring of the orbicularis oris around the mouth…

  The fifth and last step was layering on the model’s skin surface. Greg stuck to basic Caucasian textural and color elements, then blended in some darker skin tones based on l
ikely tanning. If the guy had been a prospector, as Sara and Grissom believed, it seemed reasonable to assume he’d have been exposed to the sun’s effects.

  And that was that. Twenty minutes after they’d sat down at the workstation, the CSIs had a photo simulation of a blunt-featured man with large, fleshy cheeks, a thick nose, and a small, round, recessed chin.

  Greg studied the printout and scratched behind his ear.

  “Dude’s mug isn’t real handsome,” he said. “In fact, I’d honestly have to say he’s kinda ugly.”

  Stokes plucked the photosim from his hand, shaking his head. “I guess it’s not easy being green,” he said.

  “Knock, knock,” Greg said, standing in Grissom’s doorway.

  Grissom looked up from his desk, his pen suspended over the requisition form he’d been filling out.

  “What is it, Greg?” he said.

  Greg came into the office with the Profiler visualization. “Our gnarly friend’s no longer a Green Man without a face,” he said, passing it across to Grissom. “Courtesy of modern computer technology.”

  Grissom examined the picture a moment, rubbing his thumb over the cleft in his chin that Sara—oddly, in his opinion—was always finding some reason to compliment.

  “‘The worst of faces still is human,’” he said.

  “Sesame Street?” Greg asked.

  Grissom leveled a placid stare at him through his glasses. “Johann Casper Lavater,” he replied.

  4

  SARA SHOT OFF the tarmac at McCarran at one-thirty in the afternoon, landed at Reno-Tahoe about ninety minutes later, and was met by a pleasant and alacritous sheriff’s deputy named Vasquez.

  “My car’s out in short-term parking,” he said, nodding his chin at her saddlebag briefcase. “Want me to carry that for you, ma’am?”

  Sara smiled. Ma’am. Was it her imagination, or did he really look about fourteen years old?

  “S’all right, thanks.” She started out of the terminal. “It doesn’t weigh much of anything.”

  The Aldren College campus was a brief stint north of the airport on US-395, followed by another on I-80 and then a drive of a maybe a mile on local streets toward the main entrance on Center Street. Vasquez went past the gate in his cruiser, hung two quick rights, and pulled into a meter parking lot.