Grissom slipped on the gloves. They were made of industrial rubber, more suited to chemical spills than inch-long fangs, but they should provide some protection. “I’ll be fine.”
He opened the door cautiously, slippe d inside, and closed it behind him.
The body of Paul Fairwick lay on the autopsy table. Robbins must have grabbed at the overhead light as he fell, because it was tilted up at a crazy angle, throwing odd shadows across the room.
What Grissom hadn’t told David was that the Brazilian wandering spider was listed in the Guinness World Records Book as the most venomous spider on the planet. Its venom contained a neurotoxin known as Tx2-9, an ion-channel inhibitor that caused profuse sweating, vomiting, and tachycardia. The venom also contained a high amount of serotonin, producing intense pain that could range from local to radiating throughout the body. The spider itself didn’t weave a web and wait for its prey to come to it; it was a nocturnal hunter, moving through the jungle night in search of something to kill and eat. It was incredibly fast and agile and wouldn’t hesitate to attack if it felt threatened.
Grissom scanned the base of the room first. The spider would most likely have found refuge under something low, but it would be attracted to anyplace warm. He got down on his hands and knees, putting the jar down beside him, and peered under the row of shelves along one wall.
He hoped Robbins would be all right. While most victims of the genus Phoneutria survived, two types were most at risk: children and the elderly. Whil e Al Robbins was only fifty-seven, he had a pacemaker-and when the spider’s venom did kill, it was through pulmonary edema. More worrisome was the fact that Doc Robbins had two prosthetic legs, meaning a much lower body mass for the venom to be distributed through; that was thought to be the factor that killed children who had been bitten.
He took a flashlight out of his pocket and shone it under the shelf. The Brazilian wandering spider had eight eyes, two of them quite large; Grissom knew they would reflect light well.
No spider. He stood up and turned in a slow circle, looking for movement. Nothing.
It would look for a heat source, but the autopsy room was kept cold. Perhaps he should just wait and let the chill slow it down?
No. Better to trap it now, before it hid itself away in some unreachable nook or cranny.
And then he saw Doc Robbins’s laptop sitting on the stainless steel counter. It would be radiating heat, but the spider would have no way to get up there; the stainless steel legs would be too smooth for it to climb, as would the tiled wall it was attached to. The laptop, though, had a power cord trailing down the side… and the transformer in the power adapter would be just as warm and a lot more accessible.
He put the flashlight in his mouth, held the open jar in one hand and the lid in the other. He crouched down, peering around the edge of the counter at the plug near the floor. There was no spider… but a thin line of web glinted in the beam of the light. A strand that led upward, paralleling the power cord itself.
Grissom turned his head. Eight eyes gleamed from behind the open laptop, on the same level as his own-and no more than two feet away.
The spider leapt at his face-but Grissom was quicker.
He brought the open jar up just in time and the arachnid landed inside. He slapped the lid on a split second later, the spider already frantically trying to get out.
He examined it critically as it tried to strike at him through the transparent plastic. “Lovely,” he murmured.
“Grissom?” David called from the other side of the door. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, David. You can come in now.”
The door cracked open. “I just got off the phone with the hospital. Doc’s in a lot of pain, but they think he’s going to be all right.”
“Where did this come from?” asked Grissom.
“I have no idea.”
Grissom put the jar down and approached the body on the autopsy table. He noticed the cylinder with the tube attached to it immediately. “I don’t believe it…”
“It came from in there?”
“It appears so. This tube was inserted up and into the sinus cavity to provide air, while the body itself would have kept the spider warm. Once discovered, its natural inclination would be to attack.”
David blinked. “That’s in sane.”
“No, it makes perfect sense.” Grissom paused. “To an entomologist…”
Neither Aaron Tyford nor Diego Molinez would admit to any involvement in Hal Kanamu’s death, dealing methamphetamine, or manufacturing it-and Catherine hadn’t expected them to. The evidence seemed to point to some kind of drug deal gone wrong, and she thought if she could locate the drugs she’d be one step closer to solving the riddle of Kanamu’s death.
They had to be making the meth somewhere. The problem was that there was no shortage of places to do so in and around Vegas. Trailers or rural properties were often used because of their isolation, but meth labs had also been found in upscale condos and suburban homes. Even hotel and motel rooms were being used, the “cooks” leaving behind all sorts of toxic chemicals once they were done. One of the biggest tip-offs of a meth lab was the foul smell it tended to exude, but Catherine hadn’t noticed any such odor on Tyford or Molinez; that suggested they had extremely good ventilation, but maybe they’d just been careful about showering and changing their clothes.
She went through their records carefully. Neither owned any property, at least not under his own name. Molinez had spent a lot of time incarcerated and still had to report to a parole officer on a regular basis.
The proof of Boz Melnyk’s exposure to a meth precursor was enough to get a search warrant for his residence, anyway. Maybe it would lead to something more incriminating.
Boz Melnyk lived in a run-down house in north Vegas. It clearly wasn’t where he cooked meth-no burn pits in the yard, no oxidation on the aluminum window frames-but it was still a sty. Catherine shook her head as she picked her way through the trash-strewn living room, the floor littered with fast food wrappers, old newspapers, stacks of porn magazines, and empty beer cans. The bedroom was just as bad and the kitchen was worse; roaches skittered away from the beam of her flashlight, hiding under overturned dirty dishes with a film of mold growing on them.
There was an attached garage but no car. Instead, she found plastic crates of two-liter soda bottles stacked three high along one wall, many with mismatched caps. Each was full of a yellow liquid, and she knew even before she opened one and took a whiff what she would find.
“Well, well,” she murmured to herself. “Mr. Melnyk’s a tinkle tweaker.”
Catherine was never amazed at just how far an addict was willing to go t o get a hit of their favorite drug. This particular method, while more high-tech, wasn’t new; desperate alcoholics sometimes saved their own urine and drank it the morning after, essentially running it through the same system twice to strain out any remaining alcohol. Tweakers did much the same thing, saving their own urine and then adding acetone, lye, or paint thinner to filter and separate out the chemicals they were after. A gallon of urine produced around half a gram of meth-of noticeably poorer quality, but still enough to get the user high.
She looked around but didn’t find any of the filtering agents. He must take it to the lab for that; thisis just for collection and storage. Which means these crates have presumably been to the lab and back.
She replaced the bottle, then knelt down and examined the crates themselves. There were bits of brownish matter stuck to the underside of several; they had their own distinctive odor, one she recognized. That narrows it down, but I’m going to need more information than my nose can give me.
She scraped a sample into an evidence vial. The next step was up to Hodges.