Donn Cortez - The Killing Jar

“You’re lucky you don’t glow in the dark,” said Catherine. “Guess you left the chemistry to Boz, huh? Moving product is probably more your line.”

“You’re crazy, lady. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There are three things essential to any business, Aaron. You need someone to do the work, you need someone to sell what you’re offering, and you need the capital to get started in the first place. Everything else is details.”

“If you say so.”

“You and Diego had the business plan. Boz had the skills, you had the contacts-all you needed was the cash to get started. Which is where Hal Kanamu came in.”

“Hey, I barely knew the guy.”

“But you wanted to know him better. You wanted to be more than just party buddies-you wanted his respect. ”

He leaned forward, his jaw clenching before he spoke. “Listen- everybody respects me. You know someone who doesn’t, give me his number and I’ll pay him a little visit.”

“Sorry, I don’t give my number out on a first interrogation. And what you’re talking about isn’t respect, it’s fear-fine for intimidating business rivals, but not so good for someone you want as an investor. What happened, did Kanamu get cold feet, decide to back out at the last moment? Or did you just get impatient, decide to kill him and take the money?”

He studied her for a moment, and then a cold smile spread across his face. “You want to know what happened? Nothing. Maybe I did float a business idea his way, and maybe he was too stupid to see how sweet a deal it was. But since you seem to know so much about business, let me ask you this: how many investors do you think an entrepreneur is going to attract if he starts killing everyone that says no?”

He shifted in his seat, leaning back and throwing an arm over the back of the chair. “Maybe that’s what a small-timer would do, grab t he cash and run. But that’s not my style.”

“Sure it is. I’ve got a detailed review right here.” She tapped the sheet on the table in front of her. “Not a very good one, either-most of the people involved gave you zero out of five stars. Or, more accurately, seven out of ten years.”

He shrugged. “Live and learn. I’m still alive, so I guess I’m doing something right.”

“Changing your approach?”

“Absolutely. Look, Kanamu was high most of the time and paranoid all the time. He knew who I was, what I’ve done. You really think he’d be alone in a room with me and Diego and a big pile of cash? Forget it. He was always talking about all this Hawaiian folklore crap and that big party out in the desert-that was what he was into. He had all the money he wanted; he didn’t care about making more.”

“Unlike you.”

Aaron spread his arms wide. “Hey. It’s the American dream.”

Greg Sanders loved science, even as a kid. He loved it the way some kids love comic books or video games or TV shows; to him, it was a window into another world, one that seemed infinitely more interesting than the one he lived in. To him, science and imagination went hand in hand, one just as full of possibilities as the other. The Norwegian myths and legends his grandparents told him fed his imagination growing up, and he loved the show The X-Files; it combined science and fantasy in a way he found irresistible. It was too bad that mix wasn’t available in real life…

And then he heard about Burning Man.

The festival attracted much more than the partying maniacs portrayed by the mass media. Engineers of every stripe were not only common but necessary: you didn’t build a city of fifty thousand people in the course of a week without serious planning and execution, especially not in the middle of a desert. Structures in Black Rock City ranged from people sleeping in pup tents anchored to the playa with two-and-a-half-foot lengths of rebar to pyramids that towered five stories high. And those were just the buildings; the art was the truly impressive part.

A fifteen-story-high tangle of yellow wooden beams, made of a hundred miles of wood and shaped like a distorted wave. Two full-size oil tankers bent around each other and stood on end like mechanical caterpillars swing dancing. Temples of intricately carved wooden filigree like the skeletons of cathedrals. The largest flame cannon ever built, shaped like an oil derrick and fueled by two thousand gallons of propane and nine hundred gallons of jet fuel…

Maybe this year he’d actually go, instead of just staring at pictures on the web. But despite his fondness for the place, Bu rning Man was a place of extremes; one of those extremes could easily be murder.

He got online, made a few inquiries. The electronic presence of the Burner community was huge; they were one of the first groups to embrace the Internet. Greg had heard one person describe the festival as a physical extrusion of cyberspace into the real world-all the theme camps were like live versions of websites. Free, interactive, and limited only by imagination.

There was a bar that hosted Burner events in Vegas, and one of those gatherings was happening tonight. The purpose of these events was usually twofold, the first being simply to try to re-create that sense of freedom and connection that the festival itself fostered.

The second was more pragmatic: fund-raising. Burning Man, despite its ban on commerce, wasn’t cheap. Admission to the event was upward of three hundred dollars, and even though you might not spend a dime for a week you still had to invest in all the resources necessary to travel to and spend seven days in the desert.

That was only the bare minimum, though. Theme camps could spend tens of thousands of dollars bringing their vision to life, and that amount went up by a factor of ten when it came to some of the big art installations.

Greg had never actually made it out to the playa, but it was time to talk to a few people who had.

Doc Robbins was in the groove.

He was listening to the Doors on his new iPod-a birthday present from his youngest child-and nodding along as he got ready for the next autopsy. “Riders on the Storm,” one of the great oldies, with Jim Morrison not so much singing as chanting a dire description of imminent doom and killers with toads in their brains. It was a dark piece to listen to in a morgue, but that just added to its power. Robbins was kind of sorry Morrison had died in Paris instead of Vegas; this town seemed far more suited to the singer’s dramatic lifestyle and death than any place in France.

And Robbins would have loved to add Jim’s picture to his collection.

Never mind that Robbins was only nineteen and still in medical school when Jim died. Robbins figured that if Vegas could keep Elvis alive until he was forty-two, it could have done the same for the Lizard King. Which meant Morrison would have survived until ’85-still a number of years before Robbins hit town, but maybe he would have been here visiting, even here to catch Morrison performing at Caesars or the MGM Grand. Jim could have collapsed onstage, ODing right before everyone’s eyes, and Robbins would have responded to the call of “Is there a doctor in the house?” by leaping to the rescue…

By the time the fantasy played itself out in his mind , the song was nearly over and he and Mr. Mojo Risin’ were jamming together at the Copa. He smiled to himself, had Jim expire mid-poetic rant, and got down to work.

“Body is that of a young African-American male, approximately midthirties,” he said, enunciating clearly for the recording. “Cause of death appears to be a single gunshot wound to the anterior portion of the skull.”

And now for the interesting stuff. “There’s a twelve-inch-long incision from the navel to the base of the breastbone that’s been sewn up with green thread. Lack of a vital reaction along the edges of the wound indicates it was made postmortem. I’m cutting the thread and will send it to Trace for analysis.”