Catherine wondered why. The more she heard, the more she was starting to think there was something fishy about this “accident.” The red flag was that menacing phone call Jill had received right before her bogus interview, the one that had convinced her to bring a gun to WaxWorkZ. Grissom had taught her to take “coincidences” like that with a mega-sized grain of salt. Her gut told her that someone had possibly orchestrated the shooting. But if it was a set-up, who was the target?
Novak or Jill . . . or both?
“About your shirt?” she asked. “That’s not real blood, is it?”
Hamilton glanced down at his front and laughed. “No way. Just a little stage dressing.”
Knew it, she thought.
Too bad the rest of this case wasn’t as obvious.
9
“SNAKE EXPRESS,” SARA called out. “Coming through.”
Clerks and lab techs darted out of the way as she wheeled the vivarium down the sterile, aquamarine walls of the crime lab. The sealed glass container and its serpentine occupants rested atop a wheeled metal gurney. A borrowed set of tongs lay beside the vivarium. The tangle of snakes attracted a wide variety of reactions, ranging from acute fascination to shocked revulsion. Wendy Simms, the night shift’s current DNA specialist, came away from her test tubes and cultures to watch the snakes roll past the glass walls of her laboratory. Henry Andrews, the toxicology expert, on the other hand, took one look at the gurney coming toward him and retreated back into his lab with unseemly haste. Sara found his reaction vaguely ironic, considering his speciality. Then again, she thought, who knows more about how dangerous snake venom is than a toxicologist?
“And where exactly are you going with that?” David Hodges asked her. The trace specialist emerged from his lab. His ID badge was pinned to the lapel of his blue lab jacket. His lank brown hair was combed away from his forehead; Sara had once caught him applying dye to some gray streaks. As usual, he exuded an aura of self-satisfied snarkiness.
“The garage,” Sara answered. “Unless maybe there’s room in your lab?”
“I think not.” He leaned over to inspect her scaly cargo. An indignant kingsnake hissed at him, proving it to be an excellent judge of character, as far as Sara was concerned; Hodges had a tendency to get on people’s nerves. He tapped the glass. “Suspects, witnesses, or evidence?”
“All of the above, maybe.” Sara looked up and down the bustling corridor. As far as she could tell, Ray had not gotten back from the hospital yet and the other CSIs all seemed to be out on calls. No surprise there; she imagined the Shock Treatment case was keeping Catherine and the guys busy. That left her on her own with the snakes, unless . . . She sized up Hodges, who seemed to be her best option at the moment. “Want to lend a hand with my friends here?”
“By all means.” Hodges hurried ahead to open the door to the garage, which was located across the hall from the layout room. He puffed out his skinny little chest. “As I’m sure Grissom has told you, my usefulness extends far beyond the elusive subtleties of trace evidence.” He cast her a sideways glance. “Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to ask: how is Gil doing?”
Sara suppressed a smile. Hodges’s man crush on her husband was enough to make a less secure woman jealous. “He’s fine,” she answered honestly. “Holding down the fort in Paris.”
Gil was lecturing at the Sorbonne, while they waited for a crucial research grant to come through. Their long-distance marriage puzzled some people, but was working for them so far. Sara was happier now, and more at peace, than she had ever been before. When she had first left the crime lab, a few years ago, it had been because all the violent death and tragedy had finally become too much for her; it had started to feel like her whole world revolved around bloodshed and homicide. These days, however, she found the grisly realities of the job easier to cope with now that she had a life outside the crime lab. A ring of pale skin on her fourth finger marked where her wedding band usually was. She never wore the ring at work, for both practical and emotional reasons. Besides the difficulties of pulling latex gloves over it, she didn’t want her wedding band immersed in the viscera of a mutilated corpse. It belonged to her other life. With Gil.
It’s all about maintaining a proper balance, she thought, between the job and everything else. She wondered if Hodges realized that. Did he have a life, or even, God forbid, a girl waiting for him at home?
Probably not, she guessed.
“Good to know,” he said, sounding slightly disappointed. No doubt he had been hoping for a fuller report on his idol’s continental activities. “Give him my regards the next time you talk to him.”
“I’ll do that,” she lied. In fact, she and Gil spoke on the phone most every day, often for hours at a time. Oddly enough, the subject of David Hodges seldom came up.
“After you.” He held open the door as she wheeled the gurney into the garage. The cavernous space, which was fitted better than most machine shops, was as good a place as any to store the snakes for the duration. It was secure, it was out of the way, and it was adequately heated and ventilated. She glanced around the garage, which held several workbenches, tool lockers, a transparent fuming chamber, decapitated mannequins (leftover from a vicious axe murder a few weeks ago), a fleet of impounded Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and, dominating the scene, a partially disassembled speedboat that had been fished from the bottom of Lake Mead. The boat, she knew, was linked to a quadruple homicide day shift had been working on for a week now. The choppers belonged to a biker gang suspected of torching a local bowling alley. Miscellaneous other artifacts and pieces of equipment were scattered around the room. An industrial-sized fan kept the atmosphere free of toxic fumes. In general, the garage housed the largest, most cumbersome pieces of evidence in need of processing. It was also the ideal location for the CSIs’ bigger and messier experiments.
God help us, she thought, if any of the snakes get loose. The cluttered garage offered a profusion of nooks and crannies to hide in. We’d never find them all again. . . .
All the more reason to be careful with this living evidence. She and Hodges cleared off the top of a sturdy workbench, then each gripped one end of the vivarium with both hands. Sara did her best to ignore the agitated motions of the snakes, which hissed and snapped merely a few inches away from her face. Only a thin pane of glass separated her from the reptiles’ fangs. A thick black milk snake glared at her. A forked tongue flicked at the glass.
“Ready?” she asked Hodges. “On my count, one, two . . . three!”
Grunting in effort, they heaved the vivarium off the gurney. The rectangular case, and its sinuous contents, was just as heavy as it looked, and the frantic activity of the snakes caused its center of gravity to shift erratically. Back at the spa, she had let Brookston and her partner load the vivarium into the Denali. Now it was up to her and Hodges to safely transfer the case to the counter. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if they dropped it.
“You ever see that movie?” Hodges asked her, struggling to maintain his grip. “Snakes on a Plane”?
“At the moment, I’m more worried about snakes in a lab.” Her muscles bulged, and she was grateful for every hour she had spent in the gym. The case tilted to one side, sending the snakes sliding over each other. “Let’s save the movie chat for later.”
“Fair enough.”
Miraculously, they managed to heft the vivarium onto the counter without spilling the snakes all over the floor. Wiping her brow, Sara stepped back to admire the fruits of their labor. She had to admit that she could never have lifted the whole thing on her own.
“Thanks,” she said sincerely. Despite his quirks, Hodges often came through when it counted; she recalled that he had once saved Nick’s life by figuring out that a buried coffin had been explosively booby-trapped. “So I guess you’re not freaked out by snakes?”
“Hardly,” he said, preening. “As a mammal, I make it a point not to cower before life-forms over whom I have a distinct evolutiona
ry advantage. After all, if Commander Artemus Bishop can outwit the Serpent Empire of Saurian-Five, why should I be intimidated by a crate of squamous Ophidia.”
“Saurian-Five?” Sara assumed that was some sort of Astro Quest reference. Hodges’s devotion to that old cult television show was no secret around the lab; he had even been on hand to investigate a murder at a sci-fi convention once. Sara had seen a couple of episodes, but didn’t quite get the appeal. “Well, in this case, the Serpent Empire definitely struck back.”
Hodges regarded the snakes with renewed interest. He leaned up against the counter, his arms crossed atop his chest. “How so?”
She quickly brought him up to speed regarding the alleged snake attack at The Nile. “The challenge now is to figure out which of these wriggly willies is our biter.”
The sheer number and variety of the enclosed snakes was daunting. She peered through the glass walls of the vivarium at over a dozen intertwined snakes, boasting all sorts of exotic colors and markings. It was like watching the world’s most sinuous kaleidoscope. For all we know, she thought, there could be more than one venomous snake in that tangle.
Hodges inspected their suspects from a couple of angles. “I suppose a line-up is out of the question?”
“Not really an option,” she agreed. “Even if our vic wasn’t still in a coma and unable to identify her attacker.” It was a shame that they hadn’t been able to interview the missing masseuse yet; Heather Gilroy might know exactly which snake bit Rita Segura. “Ray thought the culprit was probably a coral snake.”
“A reasonable supposition,” Hodges said magnanimously, as though his own verdict was the final word. “The good professor is no Gil Grissom—who is?—but I’ve been impressed by his deductive acumen.” He stroked his chin. “As I recall, there’s a handy, if somewhat folksy, mnemonic device for distinguishing coral snakes from their less hazardous imitators. ‘Red on black, friend of Jack; red on yellow, kill a fellow.’”
Sara was familiar with the rhyme. It referred to the sequence of the colored bands on the snake’s hide. If a narrow yellow band touched a red band, the snake was best avoided.
“Actually, that’s not one hundred percent accurate.” She had used her smartphone to do a web search on the topic back at the spa. “There are species of coral snakes outside North America that break that rule. But, yes, it’s fairly reliable here in the States.”
“Of course,” Hodges insisted a trifle defensively. “That’s what I meant.”
Sure you did, Sara thought. She squinted through the glass, looking for the right sequence of red and yellow bands. This was easier said than done; not only were there too many snakes to keep track of, but the tangled reptiles refused to keep still. It was often hard to tell where one snake ended and another began.
“I hate to say it,” she concluded, “but I think we’re going to have to sort through them one snake at a time.” She gave Hodges an appraising look. “You up for that mission, Commander Bishop?”
“One by one?” Hodges looked less than enthused. His gaze swung toward the exit, as though he was having second thoughts about volunteering to help Sara out with the snakes. He started to back toward the door. “Actually, now that I think of it, there are these unidentified fiber samples that I really need to log in. . . .”
Sara played her trump card. “I’ll be sure to tell Grissom just how invaluable you were.”
“Really?” His mood perked up. “On second thought, I suppose those fibers aren’t going anywhere.”
Sucker, Sara thought. “Exactly. I’m sure they can wait a little while longer.”
Halting his furtive retreat, Hodges considered the task at hand. He walked over to a cyanoacrylate fuming box located on a table nearby. The aquarium-sized case could be filled with Super Glue vapors to bring latent fingerprints into view. “You know, our reptilian adversaries might be a little easier to examine if we send them to the gas chamber first.”
“Hodges!” A lifelong animal lover, Sara was appalled by the idea. “You can’t be serious.”
Granted, although she had avoided thinking about it until now, they would probably have to euthanize the guilty snake once it was identified; that was standard procedure for dangerous animals that had demonstrably caused serious harm to human beings. Plus, they would need to subject the offending serpent to a complete postmortem, including an examination of its bite radius. But she was loathe to exterminate the whole batch just for convenience’s sake.
“It was just a suggestion,” Hodges said hurriedly, anxious to deflect Sara’s wrath. He scooted away from the fuming box. “But I suppose we can always do things the hard way.”
“More like the humane way,” she clarified. “How would you like it if someone put you down just because one of your relatives bit someone?”
“Well, when you put it that way.” He joined her by the vivarium. “Although, sadly, I can think of a few branches of my family tree where that’s not such an unlikely scenario.”
Tell me about it, Sara reflected ruefully. Her own turbulent family history was something she had spent years running away from. She pushed the painful memories aside in order to focus on the challenge before them. “We’re going to need at least two more containers,” she assessed. “Let’s get this reptile rodeo under way.”
It took several minutes to scrounge up two clear plastic bins. Sara punched holes in the lids to ventilate them and lined the bottoms with shredded faxes and lab reports. She set the bins up on opposite ends of the vivarium. One for the dangerous snakes, she thought, and one for the innocent bystanders. She lifted the snake tongs, which she had borrowed from Tina Brewster, the Animal Control officer, from the edge of the gurney. The library in the break room had provided a hardcover guide to the snakes of North America. Color inserts provided plenty of visual reference for comparisons. Sara recognized the book. Grissom had donated it to the lab years ago. He had his own copy in Paris.
She offered the tongs to Hodges. “Care to do the honors?”
“Do I look like a snake wrangler to you?” Claiming a spiral notebook and pencil instead, he sat down on a stool at least a yard away from the snake-infested vivarium. “I think I’ll just take inventory of our suspects.”
“Suit yourself.” Sara put on a pair of thick protective gloves, for safety’s sake. Coral snakes had relatively short fangs; they had difficulty biting through heavy clothing. Too bad Rita Segura was naked, she thought. Sara approached the vivarium with the tongs, which could be operated with one hand, and slid open the lid with the other. “Keep an eye out for any slithery escape artists, okay?”
“I’m on the look-out,” he promised.
“You’d better be.”
She had to stand on a box to reach down into the seething mass of snakes. Deciding to start with an obviously harmless specimen, she gently used the tongs to grip a large king snake, with alternating black and gray bands, about a third of the way down its body; according to her research, you didn’t want to apply the tongs to the snake’s head or neck. Being careful not to squeeze too hard, she lifted the snake out of the case and took hold of its tail with her free hand as she had seen Brookston do. The helpful Animal Control officer had referred to the technique as “tailing” the snake. In theory, there was less chance of injuring the animal’s spine if you supported it at both ends. Not at all slippery, the tail was easy to hold on to even with the gloves.
That’s what makes this job interesting, she thought. You learn something new every day.
Somewhat awkwardly, she swung the snake over to one of the empty containers and dropped it inside. Keeping one eye on the transplanted serpent, she consulted the guidebook to make sure she knew what she had just handled. A color photo of a banded, bluish-gray serpent basking on a rock confirmed that it had indeed been an unmistakable specimen of Lampropeltis alterna.
“Gray-banded kingsnake,” she called out.
Hodges jotted it down in his notebook. “Check.”
Slowly, methodically
, and more than a little gingerly, she transferred snake after snake to the “harmless” bin. The tongs were clumsy to use at first, but she soon got the hang of it. A portable clock/radio, tuned to a classical music station, helped to steady her nerves. She carefully identified each specimen as she added it to the holding tank.
“Albino corn snake.”
“Check.”
“Common garter snake.”
“Check.”
“Mexican milk snake.”
“Check.”
Five snakes in, she hit pay dirt. A long red snake, with black and yellow bands, showed up amid the remaining serpents. Its blunt head and black snout matched the illustrations in the guidebook. Narrow yellow bands separated the broader red and black bands. Hodges’s rhyme echoed in her brain.
“Red on yellow, kill a fellow . . .”
Her pulse quickened. “All right. I think we have our perp.” She held her breath as, with an extra degree of caution, she fished the scaly suspect out of the vivarium and held it out for Hodges’s inspection. “This look like a coral snake to you?”
“Whoa!” Hodges recoiled from the dangling snake, practically tumbling off his stool in his haste to get away from Sara’s captive. He clutched his chest. “Not so close, okay?”
“You sure?” Sara teased. She reached out and firmly gripped the snake behind the head with her free hand, taking care to keep its jaws pointed away from her. Coral snake venom, she had learned, was twice as powerful as a rattler’s. A loud popping noise, issuing from the snake’s cloaca, indicated that it was upset. In nature, the snake made the noise to scare away predators. She offered Hodges a closer look at their suspect. “She’s a real beauty.”
“I can see it just fine from here, thank you.” He hopped off the stool, retreating with the guidebook to a safe distance. “It does appear to be a coral snake.” He kept a wary eye on the snake while comparing it to the photos. “The Texan coral snake, Micrurus tener, to be exact. Not native to Nevada, I might add.”