Shock Treatment (18 page)

Catherine chuckled. “Clearly you haven't subsidized enough orthodontists in your life. Those are dental elastics, to be worn with braces.” She remembered them well from Lindsey's adolescence. “Trust me, those things get everywhere. I'm still finding them behind the bathroom sink and under the couch.”

She had noticed a few elastics beneath the seat cushions in the trailer's reception area as well, but hadn't thought anything of it until now. “Funny, I don't remember seeing anyone with braces among the crew. And Park didn't mention any kids.”

“Maybe his shiny incisors got straightened at some point?” Greg suggested. “Along with the obvious plastic surgery.”

“Probably. Or maybe those elastics belonged to someone else.” She thought it over. “What the hell. Bag it.”

They didn't have a search warrant, but, in a pinch, she could always argue that the production trailer was part of the crime scene. It would be a stretch,
but the tiny elastic was a lot easier to confiscate than, say, the sheets. More important, Park had already given them permission to search the trailer.

“Okay.” Greg popped it into a small brown-paper bindle. “How come?”

Catherine shrugged. “Just covering the bases.”

A phone rang beneath her jacket. It wasn't the phone she was looking for, but she answered it anyway. Caller ID flashed B
RASS
.

“Excuse me,” she told Greg, stepping away to take the call. “Willows here. What you got, Jim?”

A short conversation later, she put away the phone.

“That was Brass,” she told Greg. “He's tracked down Craig Gonch's current address.”

Jill Wooten's stalker ex-boyfriend had a lot of explaining to do.

The sooner, the better.

“Y
OU EVER PERFORM
an autopsy on a snake before?”

“Necropsy,” Albert Robbins corrected Ray. “A postmortem examination of a human being is an autopsy. With an animal, it's a necropsy.”

“You're right,” Ray recalled. He blamed the lapse on loss of sleep. He and Sara had been working long hours working the snakebite case. “I stand corrected.”

Doc Robbins shrugged. Blue surgical scrubs protected the stout, middle-aged medical examiner from the inherent messiness of death. A metal crutch provided his prosthetic legs with additional support. His trim white beard gave him an avuncular appearance. “Just a semantic distinction. To answer your question, this is indeed a first. Although remind me to tell you sometime about the night a living rat burst from the abdomen of a drowning victim. Next to that, a dead snake is nothing.”

The euthanized coral snake was stretched out
atop the stainless steel operating table in the center of the morgue. Built to accommodate human cadavers, the table easily held the snake, which Ray estimated to be approximately twenty-four inches in length. Lidless eyes stared glassily into oblivion. The snake's round pupils were fixed and unmoving.

Robbins began the examination by dictating into a handheld digital recorder. “The specimen appears to be an adult coral snake, of the species
Micrurus tener
.” He clicked off the recorder long enough to fix Ray in his sights. “I believe I am looking at the cause of death.”

“Guilty as charged,” Ray confessed, at home in his own blue scrubs. With Hodges's assistance, he had put the snake down with a fatal injection of barbiturates. His voice held a tinge of regret. It was a shame that the animal had to be destroyed, but it had already nearly killed one person and there was no way they could have examined the snake without risking getting bitten themselves. Nobody at the crime lab was an experienced snake handler.

“Then what exactly are we looking for?” Robbins asked.

“Anything that can tell us where it came from, or who might have handled it recently.” Ray indicated the scratch marks on the snake's back. “What do you make of these?”

Robbins peered at the scratches beneath the bright overhead lights. Prompt refrigeration had left the snake's exterior well-preserved. He spoke again into his recorder. “Subject has four shallow lacerations on its dorsal region, ranging in length from one to two inches. The wounds are partially healed
over, indicating that they occurred perimortem. No indication of infection or necrosis. The wounds are parallel to each other, and approximately a quarter of an inch apart.” He clicked off the recorder. “Any chance it got these scratches when you captured it?”

“Possible,” Ray answered, “but unlikely. The Animal Control team seemed to know what they were doing, and Sara didn't report any similar injuries on any of the other snakes.” The rest of The Nile's serpentine masseuses were still residing in the garage. Ray made a mental note to inspect them for scratches, as well as to examine the tongs Sara had used to transport them. He doubted that he would find anything illuminating, however. Sara would have mentioned if one of the other snakes had been injured in her care.

He bent over the table to inspect the wounds. Even though the snake was well and truly dead, he found himself instinctively avoiding its fangs. The lacerations sliced diagonally across the snake's colored bands, leaving the torn scales ragged along their edges. “The parallel spacing makes me think either a claw or bite mark. Maybe it got into a fight with another snake?”

Coral snakes actually feed on smaller snakes. Maybe it had tried to make a meal of one of Madame Alexandra's nonvenomous specimens? According to his research, coral snakes were reclusive by nature. He wondered how one would react to being crowded in with serpents of other species.
It was probably already in a bad mood,
Ray thought,
before it was dropped onto Rita Segura.

“Hard to say,” Robbins said. “I'm a coroner, not a
vet, you know. I don't deal with a lot of snake-on-snake violence.” He sounded a trifle impatient. No doubt he had human victims to attend to. “Still, I'll take blood and venom samples, and have David do a full histological work-up. Could be good practice for him.”

Sara entered through a pair of swinging double doors, briefly letting some warmer air into the artificially cool environment of the morgue, which was typically kept at a crisp forty-five degrees. She had also changed into scrubs, as much to avoid contaminating the evidence as to protect herself from infection. “Just spoke with Heather Gilroy again,” she reported. “She claims she's never heard of J. T. Aldridge.”

The two CSIs had already compared notes on their respective interviews. If there was a connection between the jailed drug dealer and the woman who had actually placed the coral snake on Rita Segura, they had yet to find it. Ray had checked the inmate records before departing the penitentiary. J. T. Aldridge had not received any correspondence from Heather, nor visits from anyone matching her description.

Which doesn't mean they couldn't have used a go-between,
he reminded himself. “So what's your gut feeling about Heather?”

“Well you've actually met Heather. I haven't. I'm just trying to get a better sense of the players here. Do you like her for this?”

“Honestly, no,” Sara admitted. “I've been wrong before, of course. But I don't believe she sicced the coral snake on Rita on purpose. The fact that
she panicked and ran actually argues in her favor. I think she was genuinely shocked when Rita collapsed after that bite.”

“Unless she was simply surprised by how fast Rita reacted to the venom,” Ray speculated. “Coral snake venom often takes several hours to take effect. Heather may have figured she'd be nowhere around when Rita stopped breathing.”

He wondered if maybe Heather had designs on Rita's wealthy, older husband. Had the masseuse ever met Marshall Segura? Were they already involved? There was nothing to indicate a clandestine affair so far, but Heather wouldn't be the first ambitious golddigger to want to get a rich man's wife out of the way. He recalled a case last year when a real estate tycoon's mistress had tried to dispose of the missus by planting a bomb under the hood of her limo. The careless girlfriend had blown herself up instead.

“Maybe.” Sara sounded dubious. “But if Heather wasn't involved, that would imply that someone else introduced the coral snake to the vivarium, either by accident or design. Heather admitted that she was no snake expert. Overworked and under-trained, she might not have even noticed if there was an extra snake in the tank.”

“What about the prints on the vivarium?” Ray asked. “Anything suspicious?”

Sara shook her head. “That was a dead end. All I found were Heather's prints and some belonging to the other masseuses. None that shouldn't be there.” She watched as Doc Robbins placed the snake in the hanging scale he usually employed to weigh various
human organs. “Of course, it's possible that whoever added our friend here was wearing gloves.”

“And according to Brian Yun, the Cleopatra Room was usually kept unlocked.” Ray had noted the spa's lax security during his visit there. “It wouldn't have been too hard for someone else to smuggle a snake in there.”

“So what would the motive be?” Doc Robbins asked. He pulled his surgical mask into place before beginning his dissection of the snake. A gleaming scalpel deftly opened the specimen's abdomen, exposing its coelomic cavity. Bodily fluids spilled onto the table, which was equipped with a built-in drain. “Random terrorism, like the Tylenol poisonings?”

“Or one of Madame Alexandra's competitors,” Sara speculated, “trying to sabotage her business?”

Ray saw where she was going. He recalled that Rita Segura had arrived at The Nile without warning, taking Madame Alexandra's place in the Cleopatra Room.

“Maybe it didn't matter who got bitten, as long as
somebody
did.”

Or had the spa owner been the intended target all along?

“T
URN RIGHT AT
next intersection,”
a robotic voice instructed.
“One mile to destination.”

A GPS unit guided them toward Craig Gonch's reported address. Catherine had been on the job long enough that she remembered when they'd had only maps, directions, and their own knowledge of the city to find their way around Vegas. Having been born and raised in Sin City, she was pretty good at navigating its streets and back alleys, but she didn't mind an electronic backup once in a while. The sooner they reached a crime scene or witness, the better chance they had of solving the case. She had once taken a wrong turn on her way to a 409 outside Boulder City. By the time she'd figured out her mistake, a sudden downpour had washed away vital evidence.

They had never caught the killer.

Never again,
she thought, recalling the incident.
GPS is our friend.

She rode shotgun in Brass's unmarked Taurus. He had picked her up in front of WaxWorkZ not long after sunset. She felt bad about leaving Greg to finish up searching the TV trailers by himself, but she wanted to check out Craig Gonch for herself, to see if the alleged stalker was really the kind of guy who would anonymously threaten Jill Wooten over the phone. Her field kit rode in the back seat of the sedan. She wanted to get fingerprints from Gonch. Not to mention a voice sample.

“You have arrived at your destination.”

Gonch lived in a low-rent neighborhood only a few blocks away from “G-string Row,” a notorious stretch of strip joints and hot bed motels within sight of the Sahara. The apartment building where he reputedly hung his hat was basically a glorified motel as well, renting by the week. Two floors of apartments, their numbered front doors exposed to the elements, faced a trash-strewn parking lot. A yellowed plastic sign out front proudly advertised
COLOR TV
. Catherine guessed that it had been there since the Kennedy Administration, which was probably the last time anyone had fixed the potholes in the blacktop. The ice machine near the manager's office was out of order. Broken glass crunched beneath the Taurus's wheels.

Brass parked the car and switched off the GPS unit. “Looks like Gonch has fallen on hard times since he got bounced from his job at the gym.”

“You think?” Catherine said dryly.

She had been in worse neighborhoods, on a regular basis, but Gonch's current surroundings left a lot to be desired. Shifty-looking customers loitered
in the parking lot, but Catherine didn't see anyone fitting Gonch's description. A few of the locals scurried away at the sight of the unfamiliar Taurus, while others glared at the new arrivals with an interest that bordered on threatening. Catherine checked to make sure her sidearm was accessible. She liked to think that she wasn't nearly as trigger-happy as Jill Wooten, but if someone came at her with a chainsaw, all bets were off.

“I can see why you had trouble locating Gonch,” she commented. “I doubt anyone living here really has a permanent address.”

“Let's hope he hasn't relocated again,” Brass said. “Or we've visited this scenic location for nothing.”

He put away the GPS and locked it in the glove compartment. This was not the sort of milieu where you wanted to leave an expensive piece of electronics out in the open. They got out of the car and looked around. A chilly wind, blowing across the parking lot from a living, breathing collection of mug shots hanging out under a streetlight, smelled of both marijuana and tobacco. Everything about Brass must have screamed “cop,” since the party quickly dispersed into the night. Catherine wasn't sad to see them go. Unlike
Shock Treatment
, they didn't need an audience.

They took a short flight of steps up to the outdoor walkway connecting the top-level apartments. The paint on the wooden doors was peeling. Cigarette butts and used bubble gum were practically ground into the cement. Every other overhead lightbulb was flickering or needed to be replaced. Going from Roger Park's $1.9 million luxury trailer to this dump
was enough to give Catherine the bends. She was starting to think Greg got the better end of the deal.