“Sure it is. I’ve got a detailed review right here.” She tapped the sheet on the table in front of her. “Not a very good one, either-most of the people involved gave you zero out of five stars. Or, more accurately, seven out of ten years.”
He shrugged. “Live and learn. I’m still alive, so I guess I’m doing something right.”
“Changing your approach?”
“Absolutely. Look, Kanamu was high most of the time and paranoid all the time. He knew who I was, what I’ve done. You really think he’d be alone in a room with me and Diego and a big pile of cash? Forget it. He was always talking about all this Hawaiian folklore crap and that big party out in the desert-that was what he was into. He had all the money he wanted; he didn’t care about making more.”
“Unlike you.”
Aaron spread his arms wide. “Hey. It’s the American dream.”
Greg Sanders loved science, even as a kid. He loved it the way some kids love comic books or video games or TV shows; to him, it was a window into another world, one that seemed infinitely more interesting than the one he lived in. To him, science and imagination went hand in hand, one just as full of possibilities as the other. The Norwegian myths and legends his grandparents told him fed his imagination growing up, and he loved the show The X-Files; it combined science and fantasy in a way he found irresistible. It was too bad that mix wasn’t available in real life…
And then he heard about Burning Man.
The festival attracted much more than the partying maniacs portrayed by the mass media. Engineers of every stripe were not only common but necessary: you didn’t build a city of fifty thousand people in the course of a week without serious planning and execution, especially not in the middle of a desert. Structures in Black Rock City ranged from people sleeping in pup tents anchored to the playa with two-and-a-half-foot lengths of rebar to pyramids that towered five stories high. And those were just the buildings; the art was the truly impressive part.
A fifteen-story-high tangle of yellow wooden beams, made of a hundred miles of wood and shaped like a distorted wave. Two full-size oil tankers bent around each other and stood on end like mechanical caterpillars swing dancing. Temples of intricately carved wooden filigree like the skeletons of cathedrals. The largest flame cannon ever built, shaped like an oil derrick and fueled by two thousand gallons of propane and nine hundred gallons of jet fuel…
Maybe this year he’d actually go, instead of just staring at pictures on the web. But despite his fondness for the place, Bu rning Man was a place of extremes; one of those extremes could easily be murder.
He got online, made a few inquiries. The electronic presence of the Burner community was huge; they were one of the first groups to embrace the Internet. Greg had heard one person describe the festival as a physical extrusion of cyberspace into the real world-all the theme camps were like live versions of websites. Free, interactive, and limited only by imagination.
There was a bar that hosted Burner events in Vegas, and one of those gatherings was happening tonight. The purpose of these events was usually twofold, the first being simply to try to re-create that sense of freedom and connection that the festival itself fostered.
The second was more pragmatic: fund-raising. Burning Man, despite its ban on commerce, wasn’t cheap. Admission to the event was upward of three hundred dollars, and even though you might not spend a dime for a week you still had to invest in all the resources necessary to travel to and spend seven days in the desert.
That was only the bare minimum, though. Theme camps could spend tens of thousands of dollars bringing their vision to life, and that amount went up by a factor of ten when it came to some of the big art installations.
Greg had never actually made it out to the playa, but it was time to talk to a few people who had.
Doc Robbins was in the groove.
He was listening to the Doors on his new iPod-a birthday present from his youngest child-and nodding along as he got ready for the next autopsy. “Riders on the Storm,” one of the great oldies, with Jim Morrison not so much singing as chanting a dire description of imminent doom and killers with toads in their brains. It was a dark piece to listen to in a morgue, but that just added to its power. Robbins was kind of sorry Morrison had died in Paris instead of Vegas; this town seemed far more suited to the singer’s dramatic lifestyle and death than any place in France.
And Robbins would have loved to add Jim’s picture to his collection.
Never mind that Robbins was only nineteen and still in medical school when Jim died. Robbins figured that if Vegas could keep Elvis alive until he was forty-two, it could have done the same for the Lizard King. Which meant Morrison would have survived until ’85-still a number of years before Robbins hit town, but maybe he would have been here visiting, even here to catch Morrison performing at Caesars or the MGM Grand. Jim could have collapsed onstage, ODing right before everyone’s eyes, and Robbins would have responded to the call of “Is there a doctor in the house?” by leaping to the rescue…
By the time the fantasy played itself out in his mind , the song was nearly over and he and Mr. Mojo Risin’ were jamming together at the Copa. He smiled to himself, had Jim expire mid-poetic rant, and got down to work.
“Body is that of a young African-American male, approximately midthirties,” he said, enunciating clearly for the recording. “Cause of death appears to be a single gunshot wound to the anterior portion of the skull.”
And now for the interesting stuff. “There’s a twelve-inch-long incision from the navel to the base of the breastbone that’s been sewn up with green thread. Lack of a vital reaction along the edges of the wound indicates it was made postmortem. I’m cutting the thread and will send it to Trace for analysis.”
He did so, using a scalpel to sever the crude stitches and a forceps to pluck out the strands, placing them in an evidence bag. He’d seen bodies with these sorts of postmortem cuts before-usually on drug mules who had died when one of the heroin- or cocaine-stuffed balloons they’d swallowed had burst. Whoever had hired them to carry the drugs in the first place would simply extract their product from the body’s intestinal tract, slicing open layers of flesh like a bubble-wrapped FedEx package.
He had to admit, though, this was the first one he’d seen that had been resealed.
“It appears that a small white plastic cylinder, three to four inches in diameter and approximately six inches in length , has been inserted in the abdominal cavity. One end of the cylinder has a much thinner, transparent tube feeding into another incision in the esophagus. Opening the mouth-no sign of the tube’s end. It looks as if it’s been fed all the way into the sinus.
“The other end of the cylinder appears to be open. Taking a closer look…”
Doc Robbins was not a squeamish man. Years of experience in dealing with corpses in states that ranged from dismembered to liquefied had given him a strong stomach; nevertheless, there were still certain things that unnerved him.
In particular, he hated rats.
He dealt with their leavings often-he could spot rat predation on a body with a glance, even tell you how big a specimen had been gnawing on the remains from the size of the tooth marks. He’d found rat droppings on and in corpses many times. But all that was simply physical evidence-it didn’t affect him the way the sight of one of the filthy, evil rodents themselves did. Loathsome, disease-ridden, foul vermin, each and every one…
What leapt out of the cylinder and sank its fangs into Doc Robbins’s hand wasn’t a rat.
The Thunderbolt Lounge was old-school Vegas. Pictures on the wall behind the massive bar showed the celebrities who had frequented the bar in the past: the Rat Pack, Jerry Lewis, Rita Hayworth, Jimmy Durante. One framed picture hung in an odd spot, near the ceiling, and was no more than a clear pane of glass in a wooden frame; it was there to show off the two bullet holes in the wall behind it, put there during a dispute between Maximillian “Maxy” Fratoni and Joey “One Roll” Lido in 1956.