Sin City

husband unable to find his runaway wife.

Grissom wondered where the body had been when they were in the house that first night. Had Pierce already brought his wife's remains here? And where had Lynn's car been during all of this?

He asked Warrick, 'You got pictures and scrapings?'

'Doing it now,' Warrick said.

'Nick,' Grissom said, 'you help him in here. Also, check upstairs for scissors Pierce might have cut the curtain with. Take a sample of what's left of those curtains, too.'

'On it,' Nick said.

'Jim,' Grissom said, 'you want to come with me?'

'Where to?' Brass asked.

'Outside-one more thing I want to check.'

Around behind the house, invisible from the street, sat a small clapboard shed of a garage, barely big enough for a car and a few tools. It had two old swing-out wooden doors held together with a chain and padlock.

'You have the key for this?' Grissom asked.

Using the key ring Sadler had provided, Brass tried one key after another until, on the fifth attempt, the lock gave. Each of them grabbed a door and tugged. Slowly, rusty hinges protesting, the doors swung open.

No car occupied the dirt floor and only a few tools hung on the wall around the place; seemed Sadler wasn't much of a handyman. In the far corner sat a rusted garbage can. Striding over to the dented receptacle, Grissom poured flashlight light down into it. Shiny glints winked back at him. 'I think I just found the driver's-side window of Lynn Pierce's car.'

'Anything else?' Brass asked as he joined Grissom at the trash can.

Bending over, Grissom withdrew a wadded-up piece of paper, which he carefully smoothed out in a latexed palm. 'Receipt for a replacement window for a 'ninety-five Avalon.' Grissom flashed a smile at the detective. 'Paid cash at a U-Pull-a-Part junkyard.'

Brass wasn't smiling, though, when he said, 'You think he'll have cute answers for all of this?'

'Why don't we call on him, and see?'

14

AT THE START OF SHIFT, SARA SIDLE FELT SHE HAD drawn the short straw-Catherine was on her way to Showgirl World to serve the warrant on the dressing room, while Detective Conroy was heading back to Dream Dolls to reinterview Belinda Bountiful and the other strippers-again. That left Sara to supervise the lab work at HQ, in particular following up on anything Greg Sanders might have come up with. With Grissom, Warrick, and Nick all tied up with the Lynn Pierce case, she felt like a ghost haunting the blue-tinged halls of CSI.

In particular, she hoped to take care of one frustrating detail. They had been trying to track down the Dream Dolls private-dance cubicle carpeting ever since Jenna Patrick's body had been found. Ty Kapelos provided Sergeant O'Riley with the name of the cut-rate retailer who sold it to him. O'Riley'd been having difficulty getting in touch with the retailer, a guy named Monty Wayne, who ran a small discount business in the older part of downtown.

'Guy's been on vacation,' O'Riley told Sara yesterday, 'and his only other employee is this secretary whose English ain't so hot.'

But this evening, upon getting to work, Sara found, on her computer monitor screen, a Post-it from O'Riley saying Wayne was back from his vacation. Even better, the retailer had provided his home number, saying it was okay to call up till midnight.

Sitting behind her desk and punching in the numbers, Sara tried to fight the feeling that she was spinning her wheels while everyone else on the CSI team was doing something really productive, not to mention more interesting. The phone rang twice before it was picked up.

'Wayne residence,' a rough-edged male voice intoned.

'Mr. Wayne?'

'Yes.'

'This is Sara Sidle, Las Vegas P.D. criminalistics. You spoke to Sergeant O'Riley, earlier?'

The voice brightened. 'Ms. Sidle, yes…been expecting your call. How can I be of help to the police?'

'Sergeant O'Riley spoke to you about this carpeting in the back of Dream Dolls-'

But Wayne was all over that, wall to wall: 'Oh yeah, I remember that shit. And it was shit-that Kapelos character got it cheap because I could barely give the stuff away.'

'Why is that?'

'Came from this manufacturer in South Carolina-Denton, South Carolina. I used to buy a lot of stuff from them, but they been slipping. I took these two rolls as a sample.'

'Would you know if anybody else locally carries it?'

'Hell, I doubt it. I happen to know I was their only Vegas client, even in their heyday. And now, hardly anybody buys from Denton anymore…might say they're hanging on by a thread.'

He seemed to be waiting for her to laugh; so Sara forced a chuckle, and said, 'Please go on, Mr. Wayne.'

'I doubt if there's any more of that cut-rate crap in the state, let alone the city.'

'Thanks, Mr. Wayne. Would you have the Denton manufacturer's number?'

'I already gave it to that Sgt. O'Riley, and I don't have it at home. Why don't you check with him? He and I went over pretty much the same ground.'

Probably including the 'hanging by a thread' gag, she thought; but she said, 'Well, thank you, Mr. Wayne, you've been very cooperative,' which was true.

He said it was his pleasure and they said good-bye and Sara hung up, quickly dialing O'Riley's desk; she got the message machine so she tried his cell, catching him in his car on his way to the aftermath of a convenience store robbery.

'Yeah, I talked to Goldenweave in Denton,' O'Riley said. 'They didn't sell that carpet to anybody else in Vegas, or even in the southwest. Is that helpful?'

'Could be,' she said, thinking about it, the carpet suddenly seeming to Sara like the fabric version of DNA.

Finally feeling a little spring in her step, she bounced over to Greg Sanders in his lab, but found him sitting in a chair by a countertop, not working on anything, not even goofing off with a soft drink or video game or anything… just sort of sitting morosely.

'I was kind of hoping you might have something for me,' Sara said from the doorway.

But the spiky-haired lab rat just sat there, as if he hadn't heard her.

She waited for a moment, then said, 'Greg? Hello?'

He didn't move.

Finally, she went to him, placing a hand on a shoulder of his blue smock. 'Greg, what is it?'

Shaking his head, he looked at her. 'This stripper case of yours…I hate it.'

'You hate it.'

'Can you believe that? A case involving exotic dancers, and I'm longing for a decomposing corpse or maybe another skinned gorilla.'

Sara pulled up a chair and sat beside him. 'Be specific.'

His sigh lifted his whole body and set it down hard. 'Okay-you bring me enough raw evidence to fill a warehouse, and yet I get nothing from the prime suspect, but a ton of stuff from all the coworkers. I mean, they've all been in that room…but Lipton? Never. And there's enough DNA in that cubicle to start an entirely new species, only none of it belongs to him.'

'What about the roommate?'

Greg turned to look at her, eyes narrowing. 'Yeah, I was gonna ask about her.'

'Why's that?'

'Well, first understand that there's carpet fibers on the clothes of all those Dream Dolls dancers-any of them, all of them could've been in that private dance cubicle at any time.'

'We knew that. What's that got to do with the roommate? Tera Jameson?'