Shock Treatment (27 page)

“Umm.” Flummoxed, the prolific writer found herself momentarily at a loss for words, as she struggled to come up with a plausible response. “That's why I thought she would be the perfect victim for the show, that she was sure to have a big reaction for the camera. I figured it would be great television, but it was just for fun. Like I said the other day, I was even hoping that it would help her modeling career. Give her a little extra exposure.”

“Uh-huh,” Brass said skeptically. “And you weren't trying to get back at her at all?”

“Not really.” Debra caught herself gnawing on her nails and yanked her hand away from her mouth. She seemed to be unraveling before their eyes. “And even if I did have a little bit of an ulterior motive, you think I actually wanted her to
kill
someone? I just wanted to scare her, that's all. Maybe teach her a lesson about not jumping to conclusions. But it was just a stupid, practical joke. Why can't you believe that?”

Catherine shrugged. “Help us out then.”

“How?”

A portable palm scanner rested on the table. Catherine turned it on. “I need your fingerprints, as well as samples of your voice and DNA.”

Debra regarded her warily. “Why do you need all that?”

“Just standard procedure,” Catherine lied.

Debra wasn't convinced. She eyed the humming scanner like it was a trap waiting to snare her. “Do I need a lawyer?”

“We haven't charged you with anything,” Brass pointed out. “Is there any reason we should?”

“No,” Debra said. “That's what I keep telling you.”

“Okay.” Brass leaned back in his seat, not wanting to scare Debra off. “Then why do you need a lawyer?”

Again, Debra had no ready answer.

Catherine took her silence as consent. She checked to make sure the palm scanner was online. The sleek biometric device could capture Debra's prints without any messy powders or inks. The crime lab had only been using electronic scanners for a few years now, but Catherine already considered them worth every penny she had pried out of the budget for them.

“Just place your right palm here,” she instructed.

Debra drew back her hand. “Wait. I need to think about this.”

“Nice poems, by the way,” Brass said casually.

The unexpected remark threw Debra off-balance, just as he had planned. “My poems?” She blinked in confusion, trying to keep up. Brass guessed that she had not been prepared for the topic of her bizarre literary efforts to come up. No doubt her brain was racing to figure out how much they knew about her various extracurricular passions—and where exactly
her attempts at creative writing figured into the investigation. “Which poems?”

“
Graveyard Tryst
,” Catherine supplied. “
Ode to a Demon Lover
.” She placed Debra's right hand on the scanner, palm down. The worried suspect was too distracted to make a fuss. “Hold still, please.”

Debra swallowed hard as the device scanned her palm. She looked as though she would have preferred to have been eaten alive by zombies.

“All right. Here they come.”

Catherine marveled at the miracles of wireless technology. Nick was miles away, checking Jill's gun box for fingerprints, but she didn't have to wait for him to drive back to the lab to get the results. An electronic chime confirmed that the prints had been beamed to her own computer. An image of a latent print appeared upon the monitor in front of her. She immediately ran them against the prints she had taken from Debra Lusky only hours ago. Labor-saving software zeroed in on corresponding arches, loops, and whorls.

“They're a match,” she reported.

“How about that,” Brass said, unsurprised. He lounged in a chair in Catherine's office. Several hours had passed since they had interrogated Debra at police headquarters. Moonlight and neon filtered through the window blinds. “Wonder how she's going to explain that?”

The evidence was piling up against Debra, making her look like an accomplice to more than just a harmless TV prank. Catherine made sure to save the results of the fingerprint comparison on to the
hard drive. “Want to bet she peeked under Jill's bed recently, to make sure Jill still had the gun? Maybe during a ‘friendly' visit to Jill's place?”

Catherine wondered if it was too late to confiscate the bed sheets from Park's trailer. She wouldn't be surprised if Debra's DNA was all over them. She kicked herself for not grabbing the sheets during her earlier search, but, of course, that was before they had stumbled across the X-rated blackmail video. There had been no reason to pry into Park's sex life before.

“Yeah. I'm liking Debra for this,” Brass agreed. “But what exactly have we got so far?” He ticked off the clues on his fingers. “Debra's fingerprints on Jill's gun box. Elastics at Park's trailer. Old photos of Debra wearing braces. A masked woman in a sex tape. And a possible motive for Matt Novak's murder.” He frowned. “A good lawyer could tear that apart.”

“Not exactly an iron-clad case,” Catherine admitted. “I ran Debra's voice samples past Archie, and he's pretty sure she didn't make those scary phone calls either.”

“Too bad,” Brass said. “That would have made things easier.”

Catherine mentally ran through their list of suspects. “Maybe Park made the calls. He's the one who cast Novak as the chainsaw maniac, and he's who Novak may have been blackmailing.” She sipped coffee from a mug Lindsey had given her two birthdays ago. “The way I see it, getting rid of Novak was the main objective. Making Jill the patsy was probably an afterthought. An extra bonus as far as Debra was concerned.”

Brass nodded. “That would explain why Novak was glaring at the hidden camera when he died. He must have realized that Park had set him up to be shot.”

“No wonder he tried to give him the finger,” Catherine said. She would have felt like doing the same. “Now we just need to prove it.”

“What about those elastics?” Brass asked. “Any way to link them directly to Debra?”

Catherine shook her head. “Wendy did her best,” she said, referring to the night shift's resident DNA tech, “but she says the DNA on the elastics was too badly degraded. Time and cleaning solutions had done a number on what fragments and base pairs she found, not that there was probably much to begin with. There's no actual DNA in saliva, just trace amounts of epithelials from inside the mouth.”

Brass was no scientist, but he understood that you needed a fairly complete sequence of DNA to make a reliable match. “Any idea how much time it would take for the DNA to decay that much?”

“Hard to say,” Catherine said. “There are too many unknown variables. Time, heat, moisture, bacteria, chemicals, etcetera. But the degree of degradation suggests that Park and Debra may have known each other for some time, maybe even long before this whole
Shock Treatment
stunt was conceived.”

“She wasn't wearing braces the night of the shooting,” Brass pointed out. “Wonder when she stopped wearing them?”

“That would help fill out the timeline,” Catherine said. “Assuming, of course, that those
were
Debra's elastics we found in Park's trailer—which we don't
know for sure.” Frustrated by their lack of conclusive proof, she pondered their next move. “You had Debra pretty rattled before. Maybe we should keep the heat on, see if we can get her to flip on Park?”

Brass mulled it over. “You think she's the weak link?”

“Maybe,” Catherine said. “I wonder if she fully grasps the legal consequences here. Even if she and Park didn't actually shoot Novak themselves, if it can be proven that they deliberately conspired to get him killed, that's first-degree murder. Perhaps somebody needs to explain that to her?”

“Could work,” Brass grunted, warming to the idea. “The fingerprints alone might be enough to make her crack.” A ringtone chimed and he fished his cell phone from his pocket. “Excuse me,” he said to Catherine as he took the call. “Brass here.”

She took advantage of the interruption to sort through the accumulated paperwork on her desk, which seemed to multiply faster than maggots on a corpse, but a sudden edge to Brass's voice caught her attention.

“What?!” he demanded of the person at the other end of the line. His expression darkened and he shot Catherine a glance that made it clear that she needed to hear this. “All right. I'm on my way.”

Catherine waited until he hung up. “What is it?”

“Change of plans,” he said grimly. “Looks like we won't be grilling Debra Lusky after all.”

“How come?”

“She was just found in Sunset Park. Shot in the head.”

S
UNSET
P
ARK HAD
been closed for hours.

The spacious public grounds usually went lights-out at eleven, but the streetlights around the tennis courts were already back on by the time Catherine and Brass met up with Nick and Greg at the crime scene, which was just a short hike away from the parking lot. Yellow tape cordoned off the vicinity. Uniformed officers stood guard. A frigid wind rustled through the palm trees. A paved footpath traversed browning swaths of lawn. Sunrise was only a few hours away, but the temperature was still too cold for comfort. A winter coat and wool cap helped Catherine hang onto her body warmth.

Unlike Debra Lusky, who was cooling rapidly.

Camera flashes strobed the night as Greg and Nick photographed the scene from multiple angles. David Phillips was already examining the body, which lay prone upon the walkway leading to the tennis courts. Her lifeless face, turned to one side,
stared blankly into oblivion. The dead woman had changed clothes since her interrogation several hours ago. A black hoodie, dark pants, and leather boots made it look like she had been considering a new career as a cat burglar. A dropped flashlight had rolled away from her limp fingers. A bullet wound at the back of her skull revealed that she had been shot from behind—a ragged exit wound in her forehead lined up with the smaller injury behind it. Frozen blood glistened in her hair. Debra's newly straightened teeth appeared intact, not that they were going to do her much good anymore. Nobody was going to see her smile at her funeral.

Catherine wondered if Jill Wooten would attend.

“A security guard stumbled onto the body while doing his rounds,” Nick explained. He and Greg had beaten Catherine and Brass to the scene by a few minutes. His frosty breath misted before his lips. “Apparently they've been having a problem with teenagers sneaking in after closing lately.”

David knelt by the body. “COD appears to be a single GSW to the head. Stippling on the scalp indicates that the weapon was fired at close range, from less than two feet away. She probably never saw it coming.”

“Time of death?” Catherine asked.

“Judging from lividity and body temperature, and taking into account that it's way too cold out tonight, I'm saying about three hours ago.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “So around one a.m., more or less.”

“Well after closing time, in other words.” Catherine found the time and location more than a little
suspicious. “Which begs the question: What exactly was she doing here at one in the morning?”

“We found her car in the parking lot,” Nick informed Catherine. “A green Subaru Forester.”

Catherine recalled seeing the Subaru when she arrived, parked alongside the various cop cars and the coroner's wagon. “Any other vehicles that didn't belong there?”

“Nope,” Nick said. “No security cameras either.”

Damn,
Catherine thought. Not that she was too surprised by the lack of cameras; from the looks of things, Debra had wanted to keep things on the down-low. They would have to impound the Subaru, of course, and hope that it contained some clue as to what had brought Debra here sometime after midnight. Chances were, the killer had exited in their own vehicle, or perhaps on foot.

She glanced around for any obvious tracks, but didn't see any. Not for the first time, she regretted that Vegas's arid climate cut down on the number of muddy footprints they found.
Then again,
she reflected,
we don't often have to worry about rain washing away our evidence.

“You think she was meeting someone?” Brass wondered aloud.

“That's what I figure.” Catherine couldn't think of any other reason for Debra to visit the park under the cover of dark. “And secretly.”

Brass pulled out his notepad. “Any signs of robbery?”

“Nope,” Nick said. “She still had her purse and car keys on her. Ditto for her watch and jewelry.”

“No evidence of sexual assault either,” David
added, after rolling the body over to conduct a more thorough exam. A trickle of blood streaked her forehead. Cloudy brown eyes gazed sightlessly up at the heavens. Pooled blood had settled on the right side of her face, creating a livid pink eclipse across her features. Her clothing appeared undisturbed.

“So this probably wasn't a random mugging,” Nick concluded. “Unless, I suppose, the shooter panicked and fled before looting the body.”

Catherine shook her head. “Unlikely. That would be one more freaky ‘coincidence' in a case that already has too many of those. No, this has something to do with Matt Novak's death. I'd bet a week's salary on it.”

Brass didn't disagree. “So who would want Debra dead?”

“Good question.” Catherine considered the possibilities, and an awful scenario popped into her head. “I hate to say it, but do you think maybe Jill did this? She was pretty upset at Debra—with good reason.”

“Oh, crap,” Brass muttered. She knew he felt sorry for Jill, who had probably been tricked into shooting a stranger. “I hope not.”

“Me, too.” Catherine couldn't rule out the theory, however. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the first time an innocent crime victim decided to take the law into their own hands, with tragic consequences. Jill could have just dug herself a very deep hole. “I mean, right in front of us, she
did
threaten to kill Debra. I thought she was just blowing off steam, but . . .”