“Okay, okay. You’re right about the drugs. He was waaaay out of control. That was one of the reasons I drove up to Portland, just to get away from him for a while. But if you’re looking for someone responsible for his death, you don’t have to go any farther than the guys he was getting his drugs from. I only met them once, but they were hard-core, man. Put a bullet in your head for just looking at ’em wrong.”
“One of these guys named Boz?” asked Catherine. “Or maybe Diego and Aaron?”
“Yeah, that’s them. Me, I’m just a welder with delusions of grandeur, man. I make stuff, I don’t kill people.”
Catherine picked up an evidence vial from her kit. “Then you won’t mind if we take a sample of this wax?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead.”
“I sold the gun to a guy named Gus,” Richard Waltham told Grissom. “Don’t ask me what his last name is, ’cause I don’t know. Gus is a pretty sketchy guy-got himself a pretty bad cocaine habit, and he prefers needles to smoking it or putting it up his nose. Used to hang around this place, but I haven’t seen him in here in a while; I got the impression the phrase ‘no fixed address’ could be used to describe his usual living situation.”
“How long ago was this?” asked Grissom.
“Six weeks or so, I guess. He’d acquired a little spending cash and a little more paranoia; since I was short on both, we worked out a trade.”
Grissom nodded. “Any idea where his windfall came from?”
Waltham thought about it for a moment. “Couldn’t say for sure, but I got the feeling it had something to do with drugs. Could be he was working as a mule, taking stuff across from Mexico-whatever he was doing, it was making him nervous. With good reason, maybe; like I said, I haven’t seen him around in a while.”
“Can you tell me anything else about this Gus-height, weight, approximate age?”
“’Bout five-ten, I suppose. Kinda thin. Long, greasy brown hair, scruffy beard the same color. Kinda Eastern European looking, if you know what I mean. I’d say he was in his fifties, but who knows? The street can add twenty years to your face, and not the easy kind.”
“Distinguishing marks, tattoos?”
“Nothing I noticed, but I never took a steam bath with the guy.”
There was no database for plastic bottles, so Riley was forced to do her research in a more roundabout way. She started by searching online for any kind of link to insects and found plenty to look through; spiders and scorpions were a popular theme for brands of hot sauce, energy drinks, and various types of alcohol.
She finally got a match with an energy drink called Parading Mantis, produced in Illinois. She printed a list of distributors in Vegas, mostly mom-and-pop corner stores, and hit the street.
Riley had no problem with legwork. She’d been a street cop before moving to Vegas, and she didn’t think she’d ever want to completely give up the field for the lab; as much as she enjoyed the intellectual challenge of solving a case by analyzing data, there was still a certain charge she got from being out in the world, collecting that data.
She did, however, have a problem with being sidelined.
She hoped that wasn’t happening. She hadn’t worked with Grissom for long, but he didn’t seem like the type to play favorites; she thought she’d been given the grunt work because she was the new kid, not because Grissom didn’t like her-and that was a pattern that probably went all the way back to the Stone Age and the first rookie to be picked to clean up the cave and throw out the old mastodon bones.
Regardless, she would do what she always did-her best. Approval from authority figures had never mattered much to Riley, but getting the job done did.
Grissom returned to the lab and pondered what he’d learned from Richard Waltham-and then pulled all the autopsy reports on apparent OD cases for the last two months.
Tox screens were done on all of them as a matter of course, but the process wasn’t foolproof; many poisons didn’t show up unless you were looking for them specifically, and there was no reason to keep looking once you found a toxin that matched the physical evidence.
Not unless the toxin you found didn’t kill your subject.
Grissom studied the reports carefully. He thought he found what he was searching for in the case of Gustav Janikov, a fifty-six-year-old man with no fixed address. Janikov had been found in an alley at the northeastern edge of Vegas three weeks ago, dead of an apparent cocaine overdose. A needle was found nearby containing a mixture of cocaine and water, with traces of blood that were a match to Janikov. The condition of the body and surrounding area suggested violent convulsions had taken place before death, and the mouth had been filled with saliva.
But the concentration of drugs in the bloodstream was wrong.
It was high, but not high enough to be lethal-not in a long-term addict who had developed a tolerance, and the number of ol d needle tracks on the body confirmed that Janikov was exactly that. While it was possible that Janikov’s body had simply given up the ghost after years of abuse, Grissom didn’t think so. There was something else at work.
Nick traced the thread back to a medical supply company called Willifer Surgical Providers, the only company in Nevada that carried it. They dealt mainly with hospitals but had a few clients who were dental surgeons; the chitin-based thread was infection resistant, which was important in a high-microbe environment like the human mouth.
Hospitals tended to have pretty good security. If the thread had been stolen, Nick was willing to bet it had probably been lifted from one of the dental surgeons. He did some checking and discovered that one, McKay Oral Health, had reported a burglary five weeks ago. Very little was taken, but suture supplies were one of the things listed as missing on the police report.
“Time for a trip to the dentist,” Nick murmured.
Gustav Janikov’s body had been disposed of, but his personal effects had remained unclaimed. They were spread out over the surface of the light table in front of Grissom now, the last pathetic remains of a life that had crashed and burned. A pair of stained and worn pants, a dirty T-shirt, a ripped ja cket held together with duct tape and safety pins.
The boots, though, were in surprisingly good condition. They were leather, ex-military, the heels and soles hardly worn, the laces practically new. Grissom looked inside, found the remains of a price tag still stuck near the top; they were from an army and navy surplus store in Vegas, one Grissom was familiar with. The stains on the clothes were many, and Grissom used surgical scissors to cut a small swatch from every one. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but it was possible that one of the stains held a higher concentration of whatever killed Gustav Janikov.
The samples went to Trace. Grissom went to the mall.
McKay Oral Health Offices was flanked on one side by an all-night convenience store and the other by a pawnshop. In another city this might have looked seedy, but in Vegas pawnshops and late-night stores were almost as common as casinos and wedding chapels.
The front door was locked, but there was a buzzer. Nick pressed it and was rewarded a minute later with the door opening.
And was greeted by a puppet.
“Hi there!” the puppet said. It was dressed like a dentist, in an old-fashioned white smock that buttoned up the front to one side. It had frizzy blue hair and gleaming white teeth, and peeked around the corner of the door. “Welcome to McKay Oral Health!”
“Uh, thanks. Is Doctor McKay in?”
A middle-aged man in white shirtsleeve s and suspenders stepped out from behind the door, the puppet cradled in one arm. “Sorry,” he said with a wide smile. “Can’t resist doing that from time to time. I once had a five-minute conversation with a guy who was selling aluminum siding.”