The contact number L.W. Smith had left with the Pet Cave turned out to be a dead end; it was for a throwaway cell phone that had been used exactly once.
So Grissom went for a walk.
Las Vegas Boulevard, more commonly known as the Strip, was the backbone of Vegas. It stretched from the southern extremes of the city to the northern edge of downtown, and every block held its own character and history. Grissom was familiar with each one.
As he walked, he tried to see the city through the killer’s eyes.
This was not LW’s home. He was a tourist, just like the hundreds of thousands who flocked here every year. But how did he view Vegas? Was it a modern Xanadu, a high-tech playground that everyone could share, or a twenty-first-century Sodom or Gomorrah, an artificial abomination in the middle of a desert?
The killer was here because Grissom was here. Grissom was well-known in the relatively small overlap between entomology and law enforcement circles; if Grissom could be said to be famous for anything, it was using his scientific knowledge-of insects, among other things-to give the Vegas Crime Lab one of the highest case-clearance rates in the nation. As an embarrassing story in the Las Vegas Globe had said about him some years ago, he “used bugs to put bad guys behind bars.”
The Bug Killer had obviously seen that as a challenge, but Grissom didn’t think his life was in danger-not yet. The killer wanted to beat Grissom at his own game, on an intellectual level; even the spider trap had been more of a test than an assassination attempt.
But as Grissom knew from personal experience, Vegas was impossible to ignore. The sensuality, the spectacle, the timeless siren environment of the casinos; it had an effect on people, even those who tried to resist. Sometimes, the resistance affected you just as strongly as the place itself.
He thought about Richard Waltham and his take on Vegas. Waltham was a Vegas survivor, someone who’d been around the block a few times and managed to hang on. If he kept going the way he was, the city would eventually kill him, but so far it hadn’t.
So far, he’d been lucky.
Grissom didn’t think the Bug Killer viewed Vegas as either Xanadu or Sodom. He thought he saw it in insect terms-a cluster of termite columns, perhaps. Termites were the skyscraper architects of the insect world, some species constructing mounds that could reach as high as thirty feet; they boasted an elaborate cooling system that regulated their temperature as efficiently as any hotel air-conditioning system. Mounds could contain millions of individuals and more than one queen; some even provided their own buffet by cultivating and feeding on a certain type of fungus.
Grissom stopped to watch an extremely drunk college-age boy throwing up in a parking lot. He appeared to have bypassed the buffet in favor of tacos.
What bothered Grissom more than anything was the homobatrachotoxin. A chemical fifteen times more lethal than cyanide, in a town where the most popular form of dining was essentially a shared trough. If the Bug Killer decided he wanted to graduate from single homicides to mass murder, he could do so with nothing more than an eye-dropper and a little careful sleight of hand.
Termites had something else in common with Vegas: just like the Strip that ran north/south, a species known as the compass termite always built its wedge-shaped mounds with the long axis oriented north/south.
But maybe termites were the wrong analogy. Ants, bees, and wasps were colony insects, too, and displayed a bewildering variety of adaptations and social behaviors. It wasn’t just a question of whom the Bug Killer would target next; it was what sort of point he was trying to make.
Nick and Riley canvassed several more spots, and though the information the y gathered was thin and somewhat contradictory, a pattern did begin to emerge. Around a half-dozen homeless people-including the two they were looking for and Gustav Janikov-had disappeared off the street around a month ago. Only Janikov had been seen since, and only briefly.
Rumors abounded: that they’d been kidnapped by a cult, that they’d been rounded up as part of a secret government plan, that they’d been killed and buried in the desert by a gang.
Nick and Riley retired to the diner where the CSIs sometimes ate breakfast to discuss the case over coffee. Riley slid into the booth, pulled off her baseball cap, and tossed it next to her with a sigh.
“Two coffees, please,” Nick told the waitress. “Thanks.”
“Well, what do you think?” asked Riley. “Are we chasing ghosts?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, yeah, the two guys we’re looking for could be dead, but the homeless population might actually be down half a dozen. What’s your gut say?”
She frowned. “Despite the high number of crazies, junkies, and thieves, people on the street tend to look out for one another. I can’t say much for the theories I’ve heard, but I’m starting to believe those people are actually missing.”
“Would fit with your theory about a labor force. Once you’ve lured them into working for you, it probably makes more sense to keep them lock ed up than risk one of them talking.”
“Yeah, which doesn’t say much for their chance of drawing unemployment once the job’s finished.”
The coffee arrived. Nick changed his mind and ordered a Danish as well.
“Janikov was probably his right-hand man,” said Riley. “He had enough freedom to spend a little of his hard-earned cash. The killer trusted him to come back, gave him the job of obtaining the surgical thread.”
“True. If we had a residence to toss, we might be able to come up with where the hypothetical factory is-but that’s kinda hard to do when the people we’re chasing are homeless.”
“Maybe not. Even homeless people need to sleep somewhere-and some places are less transient than others.”
Nick took a long sip of his coffee. “You’re thinking Silver Hills?”
“If any of our missing subjects were crashing there, could be their stuff is still around.”
“After a month? Doubtful-but I guess we don’t have anything to lose.”
They finished their coffee, paid up, and left.
Silver Hills was downtown, just off Main Street and alongside Woodlawn Cemetery. An iron fence marked the boundary of the graveyard; the sidewalk that ran parallel to it held around two dozen dome-shaped nylon tents in a single row. Men sat cross-legged in the doorways or stood around at the edge of the street, some drinkin g beer from cans.
Nick and Riley approached the first person they saw, a woman offloading flats of bottled water from the bed of a truck to the sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” said Riley. “I was wondering-”
The woman whirled around. She was short, Latino, and wearing a T-shirt that read COMMUNITY OUTREACH. “You want to arrest me? Go ahead!”
Nick gave her what he hoped was a disarming smile. “No, no, we’re not going to arrest you-”
“I see-you’ll just give me a ticket then, eh? Some more money the mayor can flush down the toilet while these people suffer from dehydration!”
“Calm down, ma’am,” said Riley. “We don’t care if you’re giving the homeless water-”
“Really? Did someone repeal that damn law and forget to tell me?”
Riley gave Nick a puzzled frown, and he gave her a look of embarrassed admission in return.
“No, ma’am,” he said, “I’m afraid that law’s still in effect. But while it’s technically still illegal to distribute food or water to the indigent, I personally don’t see any such infraction going on. And neither does my partner. Right?”
Riley blinked. “Uh, no, of course not. We’re more interested in trying to locate certain individuals who have gone missing.”
She glared at them, but her voice was slightly less hostile. “Why? You going to throw them in jail because you caught them sleeping in a park?”
“No, ma’am,” said Nick. “We’re actually worried that they may have come to harm.”