Binding Ties

'Okay. Okay, there were two guys. I don't know either of their names.'

'Oh, great start, Rudy,' Brass said.

'Hey, we weren't in the kind of place where you give names,' Orloff said. 'At least not right ones. Or do you want me to tell you, go look for Smith and Jones?…Anyway, there were these two guys. One was older.'

'How old?'

Orloff shrugged. 'Fifty maybe-that neighborhood.'

'What did he look like?'

'Bald, glasses, dressed like he hadn't been shopping since he saw Saturday Night Fever.'

'Bald?'

'Yeah, he had, you know…wispy stuff, but that was it. He wore lots of polyester. You know-nice jacket, who shot the couch?'

'Okay,' Brass said. 'He was a…collector?'

'Yeah. He used to love to watch me strangle the chicken. He'd hold the cup for me to do it in, and then…he'd take it home. What he did with it in the privacy of his pad was not my concern-the C note he gave me was. The other guy did the same thing, only he got a little more…involved. Helped me.'

Brass said, 'Tell me about this other guy.'

'Thirtyish, dark hair. I liked him-nice build, kind eyes.'

'Color?'

'Brown, I think. Kinda brown. You could dive in and get lost in those puppies.'

'Scars or tattoos?'

Orloff shook his head. 'Not that I could see. Neither one got naked-this was a kind of voyeuristic deal, mostly. I whack, john watches, here's your cup of fun, here's your hat, what's your hurry?'

Damon said, 'These guys weren't…together?'

'No. They just had similar kinks. It's…unusual, but not unheard of.'

Brass thought, Just write in with your question to Ask Dr. Orloff in the next issue of Bizarre Pen Pals Monthly.

Brass asked, 'Anything else you can think of, Rudy?'

'Two come catchers isn't enough?'

Brass stood, waved to the guard. Then to the prisoner he said, 'I'll get right on this-you'll be in solitary within twenty-four hours. Thanks, Rudy-this is valuable.'

Orloff, minus any attitude, said, 'Thanks. You want to tell me what it was I said that helped?'

'No.'

They were back in the car before Damon finally asked. 'I give up, what did he say?'

Brass started the car and backed out of the parking spot. 'The two guys he described could have been almost anyone.'

'Yeah,' Damon said.

'Or…the older one could be Perry Bell, minus the rug.'

'The what?' Damon said, then he got it. 'Damn! I've never seen Perry without that toup-I damn near forgot he was bald underneath.'

'Yeah, well he may also be a killer underneath. I'm phoning ahead to Vegas to get a faxed photo of Bell shown to our little helper, Rudy Orloff. If he makes Perry Bell, we have our man…or anyway, our copycat.'

Six

C atherine Willows and Nick Stokes had worked all night to track down Dallas Hanson, going from one dead address to another, until finally, in the light of day, they honed in on a homeless shelter in North Las Vegas.

With Nick behind the wheel of the Tahoe, fighting hump-day morning rush hour, Catherine said, 'Odd, isn't it?'

'What is?' Nick asked. He had a cup of fast-food coffee in one hand; they'd just had the kind of five-minute breakfast mother never made.

'The way this job combines the mundane with the extraordinary.'

'You are tired….'

'No, really. I mean, are we cruising to another dead end, like Carlson? Or a confrontation with a homicidal maniac?'

'I get your point,' he said. 'But I really didn't find that serial-killer shrine particularly mundane.'

She laughed once. 'Maybe I'm jaded, at that.'

Nick sipped his coffee, eyes on the road, as he said, gently, 'Is it hard? Knowing that right now your daughter's getting ready for school, and you're not there with her?'

'For an unmarried guy with a little-black-book of a speed dial,' she said with an affectionate grin, 'you're deep, Mr. Stokes. Sensitive, even.'

He flashed a Nicholson grin and gave her a Presleyesque 'Thank you. Thank you vurry much….'

'…The answer is yes.' She'd had to call from the fast-food joint to have the sitter cover with Lindsey. 'One of these days…I gotta get on dayshift.'

They rode in silence for a while, then Nick asked, 'You really think we're gonna find a serial killer at a homeless shelter?'

'It does go against the grain.'

'Now if his vics were homeless, transient types, that'd be different.'

'Like Jack the Ripper,' Catherine said. 'Or Cleveland's Mad Butcher.'

'But CASt's M.O. is middle-to-upper-middle-class white males.'

'I know, I know. But we check this one out-and we take no chances.'

'No argument, Cath.'

They both knew that many serial killers preferred the privacy of their own out-of-the-way residences for their specialized activities. And Dallas Hanson would have zero privacy at the Find Salvation Mission and Shelter.

Then again, CASt wasn't like most other serial killers. He operated within the residences of his victims. He didn't pick up hitchhikers like Bundy did, or seduce young men into his home like Gacy had. Just because Hanson lived in a shelter didn't mean he wasn't a legitimate suspect.

In fact, hiding among the anonymous unfortunates of a city made imminent sense, from a madman's point of view….

Catherine hoped the rest of the team-and she didn't just mean her fellow CSIs, but Brass, Doc Robbins, and even Damon and the assorted detectives aiding the effort-were making some progress out there, on the current crimes. This case was spiraling out of control, and Sheriff Rory Atwater-a more savvy political beast than even former sheriff Brian Mobley-would be breathing down their necks every second.

Although she respected the new sheriff, she couldn't quite bring herself to like him-that might change, but she was put off by his style: He was a slicker politician than Mobley, who had bobbled his mayoral campaign badly. She had every reason to believe the new sheriff wouldn't hesitate to leave the CSIs, Brass, and company hanging out to dry to better his own career.

'You think we should go straight from here to the third guy?' Nick asked.

Catherine shrugged. 'Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But if Hanson's a washout, we could think about going to see Dayton. We're approved for overtime on this thing. Are you up to it?'

'Up to it, up for it…you name it.'

'Amazing what one cup of coffee can do for a strapping lad like you.'

Nick just shrugged and grinned. But in a moment the grin had faded, as he said, 'Do you really think we have a shot at solving a ten-, eleven-year-old series of murders? I mean, they do CASt on those unsolved-mystery-type shows. He's on the list with Judge Crater and JonBenet.'

She thought about that briefly, then said, 'Yeah, I do think we have a real shot. We're better equipped than Brass and Champlain were, when the original murders went down.'

'Yeah, and lots of cold cases are getting cracked by new technology-but Cath, other than those DNA samples Champlain was smart enough to store, we got nothing but a cold, cold trail.'