Brass in Pocket Read Free Page B

saw and confused for a muzzle flash.”
    â€œHe’s from Iowa,” Catherine said, knowing even as she spoke that it didn’t explain anything. “Anyway, it didn’t slow the shooter for long. He took another step or two into the room, and at closer range, shot Deke in the face.”
    â€œBoth of those rounds I collected were nine millimeter,” Nick said. “And the one I found by the pool was fifty caliber. Deke’s trusty Desert Eagle.”
    â€œSo did the shooter snatch Antoinette O’Brady?” Catherine asked. She stretched, working out the kinks that set in from too much close examination of evidence.
    â€œI don’t think so.” Nick beckoned her into the bathroom. She suppressed a shudder as she walked in, imagining what a close examination of the room’s every surface might reveal. “Look,” he said. “The bathroom window’s open. There’s blood transfer on the window frame. We know whoever was on the bed behind Freeson was covered in his blood. And not only is his car not in the parking lot, but there are no cars in the lot that were not identified as belonging to a guest or motel staff. I think Antoinette O’Brady got out the window and took Freeson’s car.”
    â€œSo we need to post a Be on the Lookout.”
    â€œAlready done.”
    She was impressed. While she had been examining bodily fluids, Nick had been busy too. “I found some hairs and fibers,” she said. “At a guess, I’d say the hairs came from five or six different people. I have short and dark, long and blond, short and bleached, and a couple of fragments that are hard to make out with the naked eye but look to be more of a light brown. Various fibers, mostly cotton or acrylic, I think. It looks like there are some used tissues in the wastebasket by the sink, but I haven’t collected those yet. Friction ridge impressions—lots of smudges but a couple of good clear ones, including some palm prints on the headboard.”
    â€œIn the blood?”
    â€œUnder it. Oh, and look at this.”
    â€œWhat?”
    She pointed to a spot near the door. “Bits of oily black soil on the carpet. It’s fresh.”
    â€œAny guesses?”
    â€œIt could be a lot of things,” she said. “I’d rather find out for sure than make assumptions now.”
    â€œYou’re the boss.”
    â€œFor the moment, anyway.”
    â€œI live in the moment,” Nick said with a grin.
    Catherine appreciated the gesture. Nick knew Gil Grissom was his real boss, and he looked up to Gil. In his early days at the crime lab, he had practically hero-worshipped the man. But Gil was gone, and chain of command meant he reported to her.
    Catherine’s crime lab family had been shrinking lately—as had her real family these past few years, for that matter. Professionally, she had lost SaraSidle, who had quit the lab and left town, and Warrick Brown, to a killer’s bullets. In civilian life, her father and her ex-husband had both been murdered, and her daughter Lindsey was rapidly becoming a young woman who would need her mother less and less as each day passed.
    Maybe the years were changing Catherine too, drawing out her maternal instincts and making her want to shelter people, to clutch those she cared about close to her. The urge not to be abandoned anymore was growing.
    â€œLet’s wrap this up and get out of here,” she said. “The sooner we get this stuff to the lab, the better I’ll like it.”
    â€œYou and me both, Catherine.” Nick took a plastic evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from his field kit and started collecting the black soil she had pointed out. “You and me both.”

3
    T HE DRIVE TO THE Desert View Airport in North Las Vegas would have been an incredible pain at rush hour, since the city’s population boom had overwhelmed its highway system, but at quarter after nine at night it