Blood Quantum

down to the bare bones. 'Guy came in the front gate. Apparently, he had the combination code written down on a piece of paper. But take a look at him – he's a real case, let me tell you. Homeless at best, maybe mentally ill. Probably. He came at me angry, shouting something I couldn't understand, and ignored all my commands to stop. Finally, he reached in his pocket. I thought I saw the outline of a weapon, and after warning him, I fired twice. Put him down, and that's that.'

'We've already got the weapon,' Sam added. 'It's a registered thirty-eight revolver.'

'You mind if I swab you for gunshot residue?' Catherine asked.

'I already told you I shot him.'

'It's a formality.' The truth was, she had seen too many cases in which one person tried to take the rap for someone else. A GSR test would show whether or not he had fired a gun. His prints on the weapon would connect him to that particular gun, and ballistic analysis of the barrel and the markings on the round would link the gun to the bullets inside the dead man. Even in a case that might have been a legitimately defensive killing, she wanted to make sure the dots were connected.

She spotted Coatsworth nodding again, out of the corner of her eye. For a lawyer, he hadn't said much. Maybe he billed by the word, too, and was trying to give Mrs. Cameron a deal. Then again, she was reputedly one of the richest women in Las Vegas, so maybe he just didn't have anything to say at the moment.

'Fine, whatever,' McCann said.

Catherine took a couple of cotton swab sticks from her kit. 'You shoot with your right?'

'Yeah.' McCann held that hand out.

'Were you wearing gloves?'

'No gloves.'

She ran the swab across the back of his index finger, his thumb, and the web connecting the two, then capped that swab and did the same on his left hand. Lead, antimony, and barium were generally deposited on the hand, and sometimes on clothes, by the blowback that occurred when a weapon was fired. Revolvers tended to leak more of those materials than other weapons, and less than an hour had passed since the shooting, so the test should be fairly conclusive. All three substances also occurred in nature and could come from other sources, so the test wasn't absolutely positive, but it was a strong indicator.

Few things were a hundred percent definitive in criminal investigations. The best she could hope for was to develop a preponderance of evidence showing one person's guilt, and that's what she meant to do. The fact that McCann had already confessed to the shooting, and the additional fact that he might never even be charged for it, didn't change that.

'Thank you,' she said, putting the swabs carefully back into the kit. She glanced down the drive-way, to where Greg was taking pictures of the body. 'Do we know who the deceased is?'

'Yeah,' McCann said. 'He's a skell. A nutbag. Did you get a whiff of him? Look at that guy. I hate to say he got what he deserved, but -'

'Then don't,' Catherine interrupted. 'When I look at him, all I see is a John Doe who caught one more bad break in what was probably a long series of them. Everybody deserves his own name – we need to find his out and give it back to him.'

'Maybe he just wanted a look at how the other half lives,' Sam suggested.

'Yeah,' Catherine said. 'But instead he found out how his half dies.'

2

'Were you the first on the scene?' Greg asked.

The uni named Vernon was young, round-cheeked, and sturdy, with an all-business air that seemed contradicted by his casual way of speaking. 'Yes, sir, me and my partner. We were in the area when we got the 420 call. Another car came in right behind us, though.'

'Where are your partner and the other cops?'

'Gebhart's the one you saw down at the front gate. He's my partner. The other ones are staffing the command post.'

'Who touched the body?'

Vernon 's gaze swept across the paramedics sitting in their van, as if they had nowhere better to be. Even CSIs had the occasional – very occasional – quiet shift, so anything was possible. 'Shooter claims he didn't touch him. These guys showed up a couple of minutes after us. Gebhart checked the stiff's pulse, two fingers on the neck, so you'll find his prints. He told EMS that the guy was dead, but they wanted to check it out themselves. I told them not to move the body, but they might have shifted it some.'

Greg jotted down a note in a spiral notebook he carried. 'They should know better. Who drew the chalk outline?'

'Gebhart did that.'

'Is he a rookie?'

'Pretty much, yeah. Couple months on patrol, not many homicides.'

'But you know better?'

'I was talking to the suspect, Mr. McCann. When I turned around again, Gebhart's there drawing the outline. I told him to stop, but he was pretty much already done.'

'If this goes to court, those crime-scene photos I just took will be inadmissible,' Greg pointed out. 'The chalk outline shows that the body's been tampered with.'

'Sorry about that,' Gebhart said. 'But Mr. McCann confessed, right? He's head of security here, he told us. I don't see the state filing charges here, do you?'

'It's not my job to know what the state might do. Or yours. It's our job to control the scene and to investigate it.'

Vernon 's eyes were downcast. 'I know, I screwed up.'

'Let's hope it doesn't become a problem.'

Greg had taken plenty of photos, showing the approaches from the gate and from the house, photos of the body where it lay – in spite of the chalk outline that he knew would render those photos inadmissible – photos of McCann, and wide shots of the entire scene from every angle. Some of them would never be presented as evidence but would help in reconstructing the scene if necessary and would nudge the memory of the detectives running the investigation. The pictures of the body were still good for that, if nothing else. But he wished that cops who rode patrol had never watched TV shows or movies, because they picked up a lot of bad ideas. He'd heard about a cop who had jumped into his cruiser and tried to drive, letting the wind close his car door, because he had seen it done in a Starsky and Hutch episode on DVD. He had ended up falling out of the vehicle and watching from the ground as it plowed into a garbage truck.

His photos finished, Greg had put the camera away and made a simple sketch of the crime scene in his notebook, showing the placement of the body, the driveway, and the house, noting landmarks such as the rose garden and the property wall. He hadn't had a chance to speak directly to McCann, but Vernon showed him where McCann had claimed to be standing, giving him a quick rundown of the security man's story as he did, and Greg marked that location down with a note reminding himself that it was unconfirmed. He agreed with Vernon that McCann would probably never spend a day in court over this – a licensed security guard shooting an apparently homeless intruder – but that conclusion would have been more cut and dried had the intruder had a weapon. So far, he had seen no evidence to indicate that he did.

Then he turned his fuller attention to the body. The square area defined by the crime-scene tape was mostly empty – no shell casings, no cigarette butts, little of the stray bits of matter that crime-scene investigators had to collect and try to account for, even though most of the time they turned out not to be even remotely associated with the crime. That wasn't something they could know in advance, though, so they bagged and tagged all of it and did the hard part of weeding it out later. This area, though, appeared to have been regularly maintained by what Greg assumed was a full-time staff of groundskeepers, so the pavement was clean and dry except right around the body itself, where blood glinted wetly in the floodlights.

Vernon showed him the route that he, Gebhart, and the EMTs had used to get close to the dead man, and