“Pencil crayons,” said Hodges. “I was working on the color scheme. I was originally going to go with something that went with your eyes, but then I realized nobody’d be able to see your eyes anyway…”
“Do I even want to know?” said Wendy.
“It’s still in the planning stages,” said Hodges. “But maybe I need a female perspective; fashion isn’t really my thing. Tell me what you think-but sign these first.” He handed each of them a piece of paper.
“What’s this?” asked Riley, scanning it.
“A nondisclosure agreement. Standard boilerplate, just says you won’t talk to anyone else about what I’m going to show you.”
Wendy rolled her eyes, pulled out a pen, and signed it. R iley shrugged and did the same.
“Okay,” said Hodges. “Now, give me your gut- level first impression of both of these.” He held up two large sheets of paper in front of him. “I’m calling the one on the left Trudy Transfer and the one on the right Buddy Bloodspatter.”
Wendy blinked. Riley frowned.
“Trudy seems like she’d be cold,” said Wendy. “Even though she’s covered in… What is all that stuff? It looks as if she was practicing Dumpster diving in a bikini.”
“Well, it’s all kinds of things. Paper, fabric, bodily fluids-”
“And why’s her head so big?”
“Because it’s made out of foam rubber. It’ll be lightweight, with oversize eyes and a biiiiig smile. Very anime-just in case our new owners are Japanese.”
Wendy crumpled the NDA into a little ball and threw it at him. “For the last time, Hodges-the lab isn’t being sold. Don’t you have real work to do?”
“Actually,” said Riley, “I kind of like the other one. What’s that big necklace he’s wearing, though?”
“DNA,” said Hodges. “I know, I know. But you try drawing a double helix and making it both accurate and artistic.”
“Got a result on those fibers for you,” said Wendy.
Riley looked up from the file she’d been scrolling through. “Yeah? What is it?”
“If you were a cat, you wouldn’t have to ask . ”
“Catnip?”
“Not quite. It’s Teucrium marum, a plant commonly known as cat thyme. Some cats react to it the same way they do catnip.”
“Where’s it grow?”
“Well, it’s native to Spain and the western Mediterranean but does well in dry, sandy soil with a lot of sun-so it wouldn’t be hard to grow it here. Maybe your guy’s a cat lover.”
Riley frowned. “Maybe.”
She sat and thought about it after Wendy left. Somehow, she couldn’t see the Bug Killer cozying up to a purring tabby-it didn’t fit his modus operandi at all. So what was the connection?
She turned back to the file she’d been reading. It was the arrest record of Robert Ermine, who it seemed hadn’t been entirely successful in his career as Buffet Bob. In fact, he’d been arrested five times and barred from at least a dozen places.
She wondered how the Bug Killer had chosen him. Had he trolled the homeless corridor, looking for subjects who fit a particular profile, or had he viewed his workers as interchangeable drones? Had all of his choices worked out, or had there been rejects? If there had been, some of them might still have valuable information.
Riley had always had good instincts as a street cop. Right now, t hey were telling her that someone out there had talked to the mysterious LW and could be persuaded to talk to her.
She printed out a picture of Roberto Quadros and headed downtown.
Riley talked to half a dozen homeless men and women before she found one who seemed to recognize the photo of Quadros.
“Do I know him?” the man with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders said. He was somewhere in his thirties, missing one of his front teeth, and very dirty; his beard was gathered into a kind of chin ponytail, bound by what seemed like dozens of rubber bands. “I don’t know. Who knows anyone? I don’t know you. You don’t know you. I don’t know me.”
“Okay, you don’t know him,” said Riley. “But have you seen him?”
Rubber Band Man thought about it. “Yes. I have seen him. Not that picture-no, I’ve never seen that picture before-but I have seen that man, the one in the picture. Yes.”
“Uh-huh. When?” Riley’s hopes stayed firmly in the basement; she doubted she’d get anything approaching reality from this particular subject.
“Fifty-one days ago. It was a Tuesday. I like Tuesdays and sometimes give them their own name. That was Humphrey Tuesday, and it was very friendly.”
She did some quick calculation in her head. Fifty-one days ago had, in fact, been a Tuesday-Humphrey or not. Maybe R ubber Band Man was more credible than she’d thought. “Did you talk to him?”
“Yes.” The man stared at her without blinking.
“What about?”
“He wanted me to work for him. He noticed me counting the bottles I’d collected and said I was very focused. He liked that.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I already had a job. I pointed at the bottles. He said he understood.”
“Did he say anything else?”
The man tugged the blanket tighter around his shoulders. “He said he’d give me food. Place to stay, too. That was when I knew there was something wrong with him.”
A chill went through Riley. “What was wrong with him?”
“Eyes. Cold, cold eyes. Didn’t see me, no, didn’t see me at all. Like he was looking at a bug.”
“Did he tell you anything about the job? Where it was, what you’d be doing?”
“Farming. Said we’d be farming. Making plants happy. Making happy plants. I told him no thank you, I have my bottles, and today’s name is Humphrey. Other people went with him. Buffet Bob went. He never came back.”
“No. No, he didn’t.”
“I liked Bob. He gave me food. More people used to give me food, but now they don’t. Or water. Water is life, but you can’t give it to people like me, because we’re dying. I’m thi rsty. All the time.”
Riley hadn’t quite acclimated to the dry air of Nevada, either; she always tried to keep some water handy. She took the bottle she had with her out of her bag and handed it to the man. “Here.”
“You can’t do that,” the man said. “You’re the law. You’re breaking yourself.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. Take it, please. You won’t get in trouble.”
The man did. “This is not a Tuesday, but it is a happy day anyway. I think I will call it Hortense.”
“Works for me,” said Riley.
“Cat thyme?” Grissom asked.
“That’s what we found,” said Nick. He tapped a few keys, calling up a picture on the monitor. “Don’t know what it means, though. It’s not indigenous, it’s not a commercial crop-you can get it easily enough from nurseries, but it’s not so rare that a purchase would stand out. I’ve made some phone calls to local greenhouses and importers, but no one seems to have ordered any in large quantities.”
“If he’s growing it himself, it’s to hide his trail. It also suggests a fairly large facility.”
“Yeah, but why? Is he planning on getting every cat in the city stoned? I just don’t get it.”
Grissom stared at the picture of the plant on the screen. “Have Hodges run a chemical an alysis of the plant sample. There’s something we’re missing.”
“Will do.”
“Where’s Riley?”
“She said something about conducting a few more interviews in the homeless corridor, showing a picture of Quadros around. Thinks someone may have seen or overheard him recruiting his workforce.”
“That’s good thinking.”
Nick grinned. “I’ll tell her you said that.”
Riley ended up talking to the Rubber Band Man-who eventually volunteered that his name was Orson-for quite a while. His mind, while fractured, still housed a pretty good memory-a memory that worked mainly on whatever Orson considered important, but one that worked nonetheless.