After the sheep rock, he was looking for "the white cliffs of Dover." Las Vegas was a long way from the real Dover, a city facing onto the English Channel. Ferries and hovercraft from the European continent docked there, making Dover England's busiest passenger port, and Greg knew that even people who had never been there were familiar with its white cliffs.
The folded hills grew progressively steeper and rockier, beyond the sheep-shaped rock, so Greg assumed he was looking for a sheer cliff face, pale in color. He turned the indicated way – really, the opposite of the indicated way, since he was still working in reverse – and started off, eyeing the hillsides.
Tiny flies buzzed around his head – Grissom could probably have identified them from the sound alone, but as far as Greg was concerned, they were just airborne nuisances, nothing more – and he had to perfect a double-handed swat to keep them from just circling his head, avoiding first one hand and then the other.
He hiked for fifteen minutes before he rounded a bend and saw it – a high cliff, almost directly perpendicular to the desert floor, with a light yellowish cast to the exposed surface. Greg probably would have made the Dover connection even if he hadn't been looking for it.
He was walking toward the cliff, less than thirty yards away from it, when he saw the footprints.
The prints had been made by hiking boots, small but new, the tread still so sharp it cut deep, clear grooves in the dirt. And they were headed straight toward the white cliffs of Dover.
This was wide-open land, and there could have been a perfectly innocent explanation for them. Some nature lover out for a stroll on a spring afternoon. In another month or so, the weather would make it more difficult to do so, but desert rats loved these conditions, warm and bright.
Still, the direction they were headed made Greg wary. He kept hiking in toward the cliffs, but he made sure to watch ahead and to check his back trail, as well as looking at his directions and searching for the next landmark.
Believing in perfectly innocent explanations rather than expecting the worst was a good way to find himself faceup on Doc Robbins's slab.
18
Nick had been reluctant to let someone else drive the department's vehicle. But he had been even more reluctant to leave the crime scene, and Brass hadn't objected to the idea. The cop who took the keys returned in twenty-five minutes with the Yukon, bearing no obvious new dents or scrapes, so Nick was glad Aguirre had been willing to send him. Those twenty-five minutes could have been crucial at the scene.
Nick was under no illusions that the work he did there would ever wind up in a courtroom. The scene was way too compromised for that. And he was far out of his jurisdiction.
But crime-scene investigation had different purposes at different times. For the most part, it was meant to seal a conviction, to help a prosecuting attorney present an ironclad case to a jury. But it could also help point the finger at the right suspect in the first place. That was what Nick was trying to do now – to see if he could figure out who had shot up Meoqui Torres's house. As a corollary to that, because he believed the two cases were somehow connected, he wanted to learn if that information pointed back at whoever had killed Roland Domingo. If one led to the other, it would more than justify the time and effort he spent there.
The police who had arrived just before Brass and Aguirre left – and the EMS team that followed almost twenty minutes later – destroyed most of what little was left of the crime scene. The cops swarmed the porch, went into the house, stood around outside talking and smoking, trying to re-create the incident. They helped the remaining wounded, stabilizing them until the paramedics showed up, which Nick was glad of. But in their haste, they trampled what should have been evidence. The paramedics were worse; at least the cops recognized that they should have been more careful. And Nick didn't blame them for being anxious about the victims. He saw tears in the eyes of some as they tended to people who might have been brothers, cousins, or close friends.
By the lime the paramedics came, Nick had retreated to the street. It was paved in front of Torres's house, and someone had scraped his tires against the curb and left rubber in the street as he peeled out. After setting rulers next to the tread marks for scale, Nick photographed them. He had shot some pictures of the porch, too, but mostly just so he would remember the layout. The photos would have no standing in court at all, after everybody had moved around so much. Then he flaked some rubber bits off the curb into a plastic evidence bag, in case he had occasion later to match it to actual tires.
In his experience, most people underestimated how truly unique a tire mark was. They thought if someone took an impression of their tires from a crime scene, all a suspect would have to do was point out how many similar tires were purchased in any given year. But Nick could point to all of the different variables in a tire track, the grooves and ribs, the sipes and lugs and slots, and show how an individual tire print was almost as good as a fingerprint at singling out a specific vehicle. He actually enjoyed being in court on those occasions, watching the faces of suspects when their certainty of exoneration turned into terror of certain conviction.
As long as he was out in the road, he also took pictures of brass shell casings, ejected from the automatic weapons as they were fired out the window. One of the shooters had used 9 mm ammo, standard fare for urban thugs, but the other had been firing.50-caliber cartridges. That made Nick nervous, because that shooter was armed for war. He collected the casings, bagging each one individually and labeling each bag, just as he would if the evidence was intended for his own crime lab. The shell casings would have rifling marks that could be compared with any weapons recovered later, and they might carry fingerprints.
When he had gathered all of the evidence he could get in the street, he turned his attention back to the porch. The paramedics had taken away all of the gunshot victims, and there were only a couple of tribal cops left behind. They paid little attention to Nick, interacting with him only occasionally and for the most part letting him do his work.
Something about the shooting of Meoqui Torres bothered him, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. When he had arrived with Brass and Aguirre, Torres had been lying on the floorboards, and it had seemed cut and dried. But he had learned not to disregard his instincts in cases like this. He stood on the porch again, eyeing the scene, re-creating in his mind what he believed had happened.
Torres had been leaning against the wall, shooting the breeze with his buddies, talking about Domingo's death, most likely, and how it would affect the tribe. Maybe Torres had even been sitting on the porch – not in one of the chairs but on the floor, back against the wall or cross-legged – and he stood up when that pickup truck came to a stop at the curb. Perhaps he recognized the truck, knew that the men in it weren't friendly. Either way, when the shooting started, that's where he was, standing there just beside the window. One of the first rounds struck him in the thigh. That had been one of those big.50-caliber rounds. Reeling from that shot, Torres had turned away from the street, and the next bullet, one of the nine-mils, caught him in the shoulder. He had fallen then, hitting his head against the corner of the windowsill.
Nick realized what wasn't sitting right with him.
He had found Torres on the ground a foot or so from that window. The wall behind the porch was pockmarked with bullet holes, but he couldn't see any that corresponded directly to Torres's shoulder wound. The window was open, and more rounds had gone inside, but Torres had been too close to the wall and too far from the window for the shot that hit his shoulder to have flown through that.