They sorted through everything, but there was nothing to indicate where Robert Ermine had disappeared to. In the end, Nick agreed that the best thing to do was to confiscate it all; maybe a closer examination in the lab could tell them more.
Grissom stopped to rest on a public bench. There was a newspaper lying ther e, folded open to the crossword puzzle. Someone had abandoned it halfway done…
“An eleven-letter word for openhearted.”
“Mmm.” Sara paused, spreading jam on her last piece of toast. “Ventricular?”
“Ah. How about a nine-letter word for cosmically isolated, fifth letter’s a P?”
“Solipsist. Give me a hard one.” He put down the newspaper and raised his eyebrows. She grinned at him. “You know-one you couldn’t get on your own.”
“Are you suggesting I’m only asking you the easy ones?”
“I’m suggesting you don’t really need my help.”
“It depends,” he said, “on your definition of need.”
A car drove by, its windows down, bass-heavy music thumping out like the heartbeat of a Godzilloid monster. It jarred Grissom out of his reverie but not his mood; in fact, it reminded him of something else. Warrick had loved to listen to his music that loud.
Grissom wondered what either Warrick or Sara would have made of the current case. They would have worried about him, probably.
He sat for another few minutes, thinking. Then he got up and walked away.
He took the crossword with him.
The prints that Catherine lifted from the spatters of wax in the warehouse all came back a match to one person: Hal Kanamu, the vic. The hairs from the couch were a mix, but none of them were a match for Diego Molinez, Aaron Tyford, or Boz Melnyk.
“ Okay,” said Catherine. She and Greg stood on top of the metal gantry next to the volcano. “Coroner puts TOD at around three A.M. We know Kanamu was a night owl and that he liked to tinker with his pet project.”
Greg nodded. “So he’s here, he’s high, he’s messing around with the volcano. His partner-the guy who’s actually building the thing-isn’t here to stop him, so he can do whatever he wants.”
“Right. Now, though it was immersion in the wax that killed him, he was knocked unconscious first.”
“By a chunk of rock that came from Hawaii. Weapon of opportunity?”
Catherine frowned. “It’s possible they were planning on introducing obsidian to the exhibit to add to the realism-but why use obsidian from Hawaii when there’s a whole desert full of it practically next door?”
“I know. And if they were going to use obsidian, where is it? We’ve been all over this warehouse and haven’t found any.”
“Not in any large amounts, no. Maybe we need to focus on something smaller.”
“I see where you’re going. Obsidian’s basically a glass-you’re thinking maybe we can find a shard that broke off.”
She shrugged. “Worth a try. This is a big space with a lot of nooks and crannies-plenty of space for a piece of black glass to hide.”
“A piece of hot black glass, accordi ng to the doc. Which means whoever smacked Kanamu in the forehead was wearing gloves or has some nasty burns on his hands.”
“The wax system has built-in heaters, but that’s only to keep it warm enough to stay liquid-around a hundred and twelve degrees. Not nearly hot enough to burn flesh.”
“Meth addicts often use miniature butane torch lighters-they produce a hotter flame, burn the drug more efficiently.” Greg glanced around. “There’s a couple of handheld bottle torches here, as well as a welding rig. And the volcano is designed to shoot jets of flame from nozzles at the rim-any of them could have been used to heat the obsidian.”
“Let’s see what kind of prints we can get off them first. Then we go rock hunting.”
“Hey, Grissom,” said Brass. He put the remains of the sub sandwich he was eating on his desk and wiped his mouth with his other hand. “Where’ve you been?”
“Field research. I think I may have some insights into our killer’s methodology.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ve got news, too. Athena Jordanson just announced that she’s breaking her contract and moving to the Embassy Gold. They’re already planning her opening night-the publicity machine is shifting into high gear.”
“The Embassy Gold. Isn’t that the one that just opened a new restaurant?”
“Yeah, the Mile of Gourmet something or other. More like the Mile of Heartburn, if you ask me-”
“That’s his next target,” said Grissom. “Jim, we have to shut that restaurant down. Now.”
Brass stopped with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. He put it back down and sighed. “Great. You sure about this, Gil? Because the stink this will cause would make even Doc Robbins upchuck.”
“All of the killings so far have been intended to manipulate other events. Paul Fairwick’s killing was intended to make Athena Jordanson move to another location-just like a termite nest moving their queen when the colony is threatened. The Harribold killing sparked a school riot-I think he has something much larger planned this time.” Grissom shook his head. “This guy’s extremely organized. If he’s pushing Jordanson to switch to this hotel, it’s because he already has something set up and ready to go. We have evidence he’s producing an extremely powerful poison, possibly in large quantities.”
Grissom paused. “We have to shut down that hotel and search it.”
Like all cities, Vegas’s lifeblood was money. Casinos were the beating heart that kept that lifeblood flowing, and hotels were like lungs; they inhaled and exhaled tourists while separating them from their earnings like alveoli straining oxygen from air. And like lungs, they operated twenty-four hours a day-to stop was to die.
Grissom’s proposal to shut down the Embassy Gold was not met with enthusiasm.
The manager of the hotel talked to the mayor. The mayor talked to the police chief. The police chief talked to Brass-though, by that point, the term talked wasn’t really accurate.
Grissom refused to back down. If a disaster of the magnitude he feared did happen, he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, either-and the political fallout once the public discovered the authorities knew of the threat but hadn’t acted would destroy the political career of everybody involved. Everybody but the one who had tried to blow the whistle.
In the end, a compromise was reached. All food and beverage facilities-restaurants, bars, room service-would be suspended while Grissom’s team conducted their search. The hotel would continue to operate otherwise; neither room rental nor casino operations would be affected. It was far from an ideal solution, but it was the only one on the table.
And if the attack occurred anyway, fingers could now be pointed in Grissom’s direction. Even with his hands tied, it was still his responsibility to stop the Bug Killer. If Grissom failed, no one would care about technicali ties-only about the body count.
The hotel had three restaurants-including the Mile of Gourmet Grand-two nightclubs, and a poolside bar, in addition to the full-service bar in the casino itself. All of them closed down; the hotel’s official excuse was that a court-ordered inventory was being conducted as part of an ongoing fraud investigation. Everyone was very careful to not use the word contaminated in the same sentence as food or beverage.
Nick spearheaded the group checking the restaurants, while Riley oversaw those checking the bars. They pulled in the lab’s day shift to help with the workload, and Grissom gathered them all together in the main kitchen before they started.