office.' He held up a plastic evidence bag with a pile of letters inside. 'Letters from Petty to Marge Kostichek-which he obviously stole from Kostichek's.'
Brass gave Grissom a hard look. 'I hope the LAPD catches up with the Petty woman-or that she really knows how to run away and start over. If Hyde has any friends in L.A., we could be looking for another body.'
Grissom asked the movers to wait outside, which they did. Then-with the exception of Catherine, who wasn't finished out in the garage-Grissom gathered everyone around him in the foyer and explained the video store encounter with Culpepper.
'Prick,' said Warrick.
'You're saying he just made Hyde disappear,' Sara said.
'After we talked to Hyde last night,' Grissom said, 'that was it. Hyde made a call, and they whisked him out of town. He didn't even stop back at home, for fear he'd run into us.'
Brass said, 'And now they'll start him over, somewhere.'
Sara looked dazed. 'How can they do that?'
Brass smiled, wearily. 'The feds play by their own rules. They don't give two shits about ours.'
'So, that's it?' Nick asked, truly pissed. 'We bust our butts, and the FBI pulls the rug out from under us? It's just . . . over?'
'I know Gil wants to pursue this,' Brass said, 'that's my desire, too. But maybe we have to face facts-we've been screwed over by people who were supposed to be our allies. How do we fight Uncle Sam?'
'Let's back up,' Grissom said. 'Before we march on Washington, let's review what we have, other than a lot of circumstantial evidence. If Barry Hyde walked into this house, we could arrest him-but could we convict him?'
'We could now,' Catherine said.
Everyone turned to see her standing in the doorway to the attached garage. An evidence bag dangled from her right hand, inside of which was tucked a 1930's vintage Colt .25 automatic.
Brass felt a smile spreading. 'Is that what I think it is?'
'It's not a water pistol. And, if the boss will allow me to make an educated guess, I'm predicting the barrel on this baby will match the bullets we took from Marge Kostichek. And the primer markings on shell casings found at all three murders should tie Mr. Barry Hyde up in one big bloody bow.'
Astounded but pleased, Grissom took the bagged weapon, asking her, 'Where did you find it?'
'I'll show you.'
Catherine led the way into the garage. She stopped in front of a fuse box on the back wall, while the others gathered around her in a semicircle. The gray metal box looked like every other fuse box in the world, with conduit running out the top, disappearing inside the false ceiling of the attic above.
'I noted a fuse box in the basement,' she said. 'So I wondered why he would have a fuse box in the garage, when there's no heavy duty tools and only two one-hundred-ten outlets.'
'Nice catch,' Grissom said.
She opened the little gray door, revealing no breakers, no fuses, no anything except the end of the hollow conduit. With her hands in their latex gloves, she removed the gun from the evidence bag to carefully slip it inside the conduit, to demonstrate where she had found it; then just as carefully rebagged the evidence.
Sara, grinning, shaking her head, said, 'Almost your classic 'hide it in plain sight.' '
'And the feds lifted him out of this life so fast,' Warrick said, 'he didn't have to take his favorite toy with him.'
'We should look for the black ninja outfit,' Sara said. 'He obviously made a quick stop here after he killed Marge Kostichek, before going back to the video store.'
Everyone was smiling now, proud of Catherine, proud of themselves. That left it to Brass to bring them back to reality.
'Okay,' Brass said, 'so we have the evidence. But we still don't have Barry Hyde. He's in the FBI's loving arms, helping them bring the really big bad guys down.'
'Please,' Sara said, making a face. 'I may want to eat again, someday.'
Grissom did not seem put off by Brass's little speech. 'Let's get back to work. Sara's right, let's look for those clothes. . . . We've got a killer to catch.'
'But Brass said this was over,' Nick said.
'We need to gather our evidence,' Grissom said, calmly, 'analyze it, prepare it for use in Hyde's eventual prosecution. And, of course, Sara's going to play the major role.'
'I am?' she asked, bewildered.
'Don't be modest,' Grissom said, with a tiny enigmatic smile. 'Let's finish up here, guys-then we'll go back and I'll tell you how we're going to nail Barry's hide to our non-federal wall.'
19
BEFITTING THE BITTER DECEMBER WEATHER, THE FEDERAL Courthouse in Kansas City might have been fashioned from ice by some geometrically minded sculptor, not an architect working in glass and steel. The interior of the structure, however well-heated, remained similarly cold and sterile. No straight-back wooden chairs for the jury boxes in this building, rather padded swivel chairs and personalized video monitors-though the latter were seldom used, as lawyers so frequently arranged plea bargains before trials began. The justice meted out here seemed to contain no compassion, no humanity, also no punishment in some cases-just judgments as icy as the steel and glass of a structure that seemed a monument to bureaucracy . . . and expediency.
In a courtroom on the second floor, Gil Grissom-in a dark jacket over a gray shirt with black tie, a gray topcoat in his lap-sat in the back row, his eyes on the three-sided frame screen whose white cheesecloth concealed the witness box. Another set of screens blocked any glimpse of the witness's entrance by way of the judge's chambers. Onlookers took up only a third of the gallery.
The twelve jurors-evenly divided between men and women-sat blankly, though the unease of several was obvious; one individual looked as if he'd rather be in a dentist's chair. Behind the bench, the judge was moving his head from left to right, and front to back, apparently trying to work a kink out of his neck.
At the prosecutor's desk a wisp of a woman in a gray power-suit sat next to a bullish federal prosecutor. At the defense table, a nationally known attorney-at least as well-known as the late Philip Dingelmann, whose murder had finally hit CNN, the day the owner of A-to-Z Video disappeared-wore a gray suit worthy of a sales rack at Sears. He had the wild long hair of an ex-hippie, the tangled strands now all gray; he was a character-the kind of lawyer Geraldo loved to book.
Right now he was sucking on a pencil like it was a filterless Pall Mall, speaking in quiet tones to his client. The lawyer had made his bones defending pot farmers and kids charged with felony possession. When the drug of choice shifted to cocaine and the cartels moved in, the attorney had changed-and grown-with the times.
Back here in the cheap seats, Grissom could see only the lawyer's profile, and that of his client, Eric Summers, whose black hair, with its hint of gray, was tied in a short ponytail, his face angular, clean-shaven, with a sharp, prominent chin. Despite his conservative dark suit and tie, this defendant in a major RICO case looked more like a middle-aged rock star, and why not? His forays into the distribution of controlled substances, escort-service prostitution and big-time dot-com scams-the local papers referred to him as 'a reputed leader among the so-called new breed of K.C. gangsters'-had allowed him to enjoy a rock-star lifestyle.
Up front, just behind the prosecutor's table, a blond head bobbed up, in conferral with the female prosecutor. Grissom leaned forward, to get a better view-Culpepper, all right.
The witness was escorted in, shadows playing behind the cheesecloth curtain-probably a federal marshal back there, with him-and then the witness took the chair of honor. The bailiff, on the other side of the screen, swore the witness in, referring to him only as 'Mr. X.'
Grissom sat forward, not breathing, not blinking, focused solely on the two words that would now be spoken-the words he had shown up to hear, the sound that would make worthwhile his CSI unit finding time for this case, over these last six months, despite whatever demands other crimes might make. It might even justify the overtime Sara Sidle had maxed out on. . . .
And the witness promised to tell the truth, and nothing but, in the traditional fashion: 'I do.'
Grissom smiled.
The voice was an arrogant voice, self-satisfied . . . the distinctive voice of Barry Hyde.
