palm out, the universal signal for
But this guy didn't clue in. He took another awkward step forward, then another. The smell of him closed around McCann's throat like the fingers of a strong hand. 'I won't warn you again.'
The guy said something else, his words so slurred that McCann couldn't make them out, and he shoved his right hand deep into the pocket of his shabby blazer. In the unrelenting wash of the flood-lights, the shape in that pocket looked threatening.
As promised, McCann didn't bother with another warning. His job was to protect Mrs. Cameron and her property. Since he didn't hear sirens yet, and Willy hadn't arrived to provide backup, he squeezed the trigger, and the.38 in his hand boomed.
The shot tore into the man's left side. He staggered back, pulling his right hand out of the pocket with something clutched in it. McCann fired once more, twitching the barrel just a little. The second shot hit the man dead center, and he crumpled and went down.
McCann let him lie there for a few moments, until he stopped moving. There was, in fact, something clutched in the man's fist, but it wasn't a weapon after all. It was a slip of paper.
McCann heard sirens now. He crouched beside the guy, used the barrel of his gun to nudge the hand enough to see what the paper was. It was maybe five inches square, torn from something else, maybe a menu. Most of it was covered in penciled writing, every bit as unreadable as the man's spoken words had been impossible to decipher. But on top of the pencil were other words, written with black ink in what looked like a woman's hand. A couple of words stood out, and some numbers, and McCann realized he was looking at directions to the estate and the combination code for the front gate.
Someone had
He pocketed his weapon and backed away, taking deep breaths once he got past the nimbus of stink surrounding the dead man. The cops would be there in seconds, and he didn't want to be crouching there with a gun in his hand when they came. The shooting was justified, but guns made people nervous.
Especially cops. Especially when there was a dead man involved.
Lights angled up the drive, headlights and blue and red rooftop flashers. McCann raised his arms above his head and waited.
'Nice place,' Greg Sanders observed.
'Vegas royalty,' Catherine Willows said. She was driving a Las Vegas Police Department Yukon up a winding driveway in Seven Hills, south of the city. The property had been landscaped to within an inch of its life. 'You can't touch this neighborhood for less than a couple million.'
'And this estate really belonged to Bix Cameron?'
'The one and only.' Bix Cameron had been a casino tycoon, one of the city's prime builders back in the 1950s. Catherine's father, Sam Braun, had known him, and she had met Bix once or twice. She remembered a tall, fit man with close-cropped silver hair and a friendly twinkle in his eye, who always clasped her father's hands with both of his, then went down on one knee to greet her father's daughter.
'What's it been, like ten years since he went missing?'
'Around that.' Greg was fascinated by the city's criminal history, and Bix Cameron's disappearance – what everyone assumed to be his murder – fit into that, even though, in life, Bix had been believed to be on the straight and narrow. Still, in those days, one could hardly build a casino without cutting the mob in, and Bix had built several. The assumption, when he had disappeared a decade ago, was that he had wound up crosswise with one of those criminal elements. Greg could have talked about the old-time gangsters for days if Catherine had let him. But the Cameron home loomed before them, looking like a palatial Italian villa, with walls of a pale mustard color and an undulating terra-cotta tiled roof, and Catherine wanted to focus on the job at hand. She had seen pictures of similar homes clinging to the hills around Lake Como. Lights blazed throughout this one, casting a glow down on the long driveway and the hundreds of roses arrayed on broad steps flanking the house. She brought the vehicle to a halt in front of a strip of yellow crime-scene tape, beside a couple of patrol cars and an EMS van.
She turned off the engine and stepped out. The fragrance of the rose garden hit her first, the April days warm enough to bring out the blooms, and though the nights were still cool enough for her light leather jacket, they no longer dipped below freezing.
Two steps farther up the drive, the smell of spilled blood and an unbathed human's dying moments replaced it. She preferred the roses, but not enough to quit her job and take up landscaping.
Greg stopped beside her, a camera in his hands. On the ground inside the yellow tape was a man, his arms outspread, legs together and slightly folded.
A pool of blood darkened the pavement beneath him. 'Guess we found our vic,' she said.
'I guess we did. And so did the chalk fairy.'
Catherine looked again and saw a thin white line inscribed around the body. 'Great.'
They had passed one uniformed officer at the gate, there to keep the press out and allow official vehicles in, and signed in on his crime-scene log. Another one approached them now. 'You the CSIs?'
'I'm Supervisor Willows,' Catherine answered. 'This is CSI Sanders.'
'Cool.' The uni addressed Catherine. His name was Vernon, according to the tag on his chest. He was African-American, mid-twenties, a weight lifter judging from the way his arms and chest swelled against his clothing. 'Detective Vega wanted me to send you up to the command post when you arrived.' He tilted his head up the driveway. She saw people milling around near the house. 'He's there with the witnesses and the perpetrator.'
'We already have a suspect?' Catherine asked.
'Security man for the family. Claims it was a righteous kill.'
'I don't think that's his decision to make, but it would make our lives easier.' She glanced at Greg. 'You want to start taking pictures while I meet the suspect?'
'You got it.'
Catherine went around the taped-off scene and up the hill, carrying the steel box containing her crime-scene kit. The command post was nothing more than a blank stretch of pavement beside the house, established to give the various cops someplace to congregate that wouldn't compromise the crime scene. Staggered around were a couple of obvious civilians, recognizable by the shell-shocked look in their eyes, with uniformed cops either talking softly to them or just standing by, keeping them separated. As always seemed to happen these days, there were cops standing around talking quietly into cell phones. She wondered who they were all talking to. Girlfriends? Reporters? Bookies? It was anybody's guess.
Sam Vega, solid and dark, stood with a burly, red-faced man in a windbreaker and jeans and another man, short, balding, and bespectacled, who could only be a lawyer. He wore a thousand-dollar suit and Bruno Magli shoes with a professional shine on them, and he had an imperious air about him, as if despite his physical stature, he was used to looking down at other people from on high – metaphorically speaking, at least. But when he wanted to, Sam could glower like nobody's business, and the lawyer almost seemed to be wilting in his presence.
'Catherine,' Sam said, breaking into a smile at her approach. 'Glad you're here. This is Drake McCann, head of security for the Cameron estate. He used to be on the job, back in Detroit. Marvin Coatsworth here is Helena Cameron's attorney. Mr. Coatsworth, Mr. McCann, Supervisor Willows is the crime lab's night-shift supervisor. She'll be in charge of the crime-scene investigation.'
'Supervisor,' Coatsworth said, shaking her hand with such brisk efficiency that Catherine wondered if he billed by the millisecond. He hadn't paid for that suit by being generous with his time.
'Good to meet you,' McCann said. He offered his hand and a smile. Catherine happily took both; genuine courtesy from a shooting suspect was a rarity. She had met plenty of murderers, and for the most part, they were human scum, not people she would want to shake hands with. This man wasn't like that. 'Wish the circumstances were different.'
'I'm sure. Can you tell me what happened? I know you've already told Sam.'
McCann looked to Vega, but the detective encouraged him to tell the story again in his own words. Coatsworth nodded his approval, and McCann launched into his tale. By now, he had surely told it enough times to winnow it
