Donn Cortez - The Killing Jar

Brass smiled. “Patience, Doctor. It isn’t Grissom who wants to talk to you-it’s me. You don’t have a problem with talking to a lowly police captain, do you?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Really? You seem a little jumpy.”

Khem made a visible effort to control himself. “How may I be of assistance?”

“Let’s see… I guess you can start with telling me where you were on the evening of the murder.”

“I-I was in my hotel room.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. The second thing you can help me with is, let’s see… oh, I know. You can stop lying to me.”

“What?”

“This is Vegas, Doctor, not the middle of the jungle. You sneak out of camp in the dead of night here, you get caught by security cameras. You left your room at around seven and didn’t come back until midnight. Where’d you go?”

“I… I went for a walk.”

“Sure. This is Vegas, after all. Things to do, places to go, twenty-four/seven. Get the urge to do a little gambling, maybe?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Where?”

“I… I don’t remember.”

“What a shame. Convenient, too, what with all the casinos having round-the-clock video surveillance. How’d you do?”

“I broke even.”

“Of course you did.” Brass shook his head. “Well, you’re about to lose big, Doctor. You may have managed to avoid a criminal record in Thailand, but that doesn’t mean you’re not in the system. This isn’t the first time you’ve gone out for a little stroll, is it?”

Charong’s face paled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. When you hit the big city after being in-country, Bangkok is your destination of choice. Certain neighborhoods in Bangkok. In fact, very specific clubs in certain neighborhoods.”

“You have the wrong man. Charong is a very common name-”

“I know exactly who I have, Doctor. You were arrested but not charged. Connections, or just a really good lawyer?” Brass held up a hand. “You know, don’t bother answering that-I don’t really care.”

Charong was visibly sweating now. You didn’t see that often in Vegas; it was too dry.

“Okay, you’ve told me your story,” said Brass. “Now it’s my turn to entertain you. Hope you don’t mind if I switch styles on you, but I’m more of a nonfiction guy.

“It started online. Maybe you were trolling on high school sites when a picture of a star quarterback caught your eye. Unfortunately, his Facebook page didn’t list middle-aged, male entomologists as one of his turn-ons, so you created a fake persona. You set up a rendezvous in a Vegas motel room to coincide with your visit-after all, what’s a convention without a little illicit sex? Knowing that you’d be something of a disappointment in person, you came prepared for your own creepy-crawly party.”

Charong swallowed. “Th at’s crazy. I didn’t bring any millipedes with me-ask the airline.”

“Oh, you didn’t bring them with you from Thailand -you got them here in the States. Wouldn’t have been that hard for someone with your background; you probably had a colleague in the Northwest mail them.”

“I didn’t! I didn’t do anything of the sort, and you can’t prove that I did!”

“Maybe I can’t,” said Brass. “But I’m not the one you should be worried about…”

“Well, the cat’s out of the bag now,” Nick said to Grissom.

They were watching Brass question Charong through a two-way mirror. “This is the next logical step,” said Grissom. “We had to treat them as suspects sooner or later. I’m just glad you found a viable reason to do so.”

Nick looked uncomfortable. “Yeah,” he said. “So… you think Charong’s our guy?”

“We’ll know more once we search his room. We’re just waiting for the judge to sign off on a warrant.”

“Right. Maybe we can close this one without putting your other colleagues through this.”

Grissom frowned. “Actually, Nick, I was hoping you and Riley could conduct the interviews with Soames, Quadros, and Vanderhoff. I’m having them brought in now.”

“Really? I mean, it might not even be necessary-”

“It’s necessary, Nick. Just because I know them doesn’t mean we treat them any differently. Brass suggested he conduct the interview with Doctor Charong because Charong seemed nervous around authority figures and Brass thought he could use that; I agreed.”

“So that’s why you want me and Riley to question the others? We’re scarier than you are?”

Grissom smiled. “‘There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.’ ”

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“Charles de Gaulle.”

Nick sighed. “Okay, mon generale . We’ll be your mystery men…”

“So, Nick,” Jake Soames said, “what do you say we hit the town after this? As a local, you must know the best places.”

Nick grinned despite himself. “Look, Mr. Soames-it really wouldn’t be appropriate for us to socialize. We’re both part of this investigation, but I’m afraid at the moment we’re on opposite sides of it.”

Soames chuckled. “I was wondering how long it would take… Guess you’ve got a few questions for me, eh? Want to know where I was and what I was doing on the night of, right?”

“You don’t seem terribly surprised.”

“Only thing I’m surprised at is how long it’s taken you to ask. The others might be a little naïve, but I lik e to think I’m a man of the world-of course we’re suspects! A boy gets killed with bugs while there’s a bloody swarm of insectophiles in town? Come on !”

“So can you account for your whereabouts?”

“Well, let’s see… I was in the hotel casino until half past eight; then I went to a club off the Strip called Bubble Bath. Amazing show they’ve got there… Feeling a bit peckish after that, got a steak dinner at this absolutely great diner, lots of chrome and neon-can’t remember the name, but I think I have a receipt somewhere, the waitress’ll remember me for sure… Met Grissom and Nathan for drinks, and then I felt the urge to play a little poker…”

The list went on for a while. Nick tried to keep a straight face, but it was fairly obvious Jake Soames not only had an alibi, it was one he was damned proud of.

Vegas, Nick thought. It was made for some people…

“So these photos are from Kanamu’s place?” Greg asked. He had them spread out over the surface of the layout table and was scrutinizing one in particular.

“Yeah,” said Catherine. “I’ve got Archie trying to decrypt his laptop right now. Didn’t find a cell phone. His place was pretty bare, actually-I got the feeling he didn’t spend a lot of time there.”

“Except for these,” said Greg, tapping a photo. It was a shot of the robot giraffe picture. “Clearly not part of the standard décor.”

“No. I’ve been trying to figure out where they were taken-I thought at first they might be part of a Cirque du Soleil performance, but they all look like outdoor shots.”

“That’s because they were taken in the middle of a desert. This shot of the temple, here? That’s not mist, it’s dust.”

“You recognize these?”

“Not these specifically, but the location? Absolutely. It’s the Black Rock Desert, about four hundred miles north of here. Black Rock City to the locals.”

“ Black Rock City? Greg, there’s nothing in that part of Nevada but alkali flats. It’s where people go to break land-speed records-there’s nothing to run into. It’s like the surface of the moon, minus the craters.”

“For most of the year, yes. But for one week, there’s a city of fifty thousand people, complete with streets, businesses-well, kind of-and lots and lots of this .” He tapped the photo again.