Greg used the same path. Near the body, the smells of the dead man's soiled clothing and his profound body odor were stifling, joined as they were by the metallic tang of blood and the sour-sweet smell of death. Standing as close as he could, Greg noted the details of the man's appearance. He was a Caucasian man, with matted brown hair and a beard shot through with a few strands of silver. He was about five-nine or -ten, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. A bit of a belly but not much of one. Homeless people generally didn't have to worry about keeping their weight down, and what food they could afford was usually high in empty calories, low in nutritional value. Greg would have been astonished if the dead man wasn't homeless.
He peeled back an eyelid, revealing a bloodshot brown eye. His shirt was torn and bloodstained in two spots, both entry wounds. Greg was sure that if he turned the man over, he would find exit wounds on his back, unless both rounds had stayed inside him. He hadn't seen any bullets or indications of where the rounds had ended up, but once he determined that they had passed through the man – as the amount of blood pooled beneath him indicated – he would have to widen the crime-scene perimeter and look for those.
Greg couldn't get a good read on the man's age, because of the effect of constant exposure to the Nevada sun. The man's mouth was open a little, and his teeth were in terrible shape. Closer examination might reveal some fillings or other dental work, which could help identify him, but those would have been done in his younger days, since he had clearly not been to a dentist in recent years.
Officer Vernon watched from outside the tape line. 'Anybody check him for ID?' Greg asked.
'No, sir, not yet.'
'Okay, thanks.' That was something, at least. It was hard to go through a dead body's pockets without shifting the body around. Now that he had documented the scene as well as possible, he could take that chance.
He started with the jacket pockets. By the time he reached the pants, he had pulled out dozens of scraps of paper, most of them written on and scribbled over so many times that nothing on them was legible at a glance. He was just starting on the pants pockets when another vehicle pulled up, the coroner's van. David Phillips shut off the headlights and got out, pushing his black-framed glasses up on his nose. 'Sorry I'm late,' he said. 'I was on another call.'
'No problem,' Greg said. 'I'm just looking for some ID.'
'All that paper and no wallet?'
'Not yet. None of it's money, either. Looks like this guy was big on taking notes, though.'
'I guess.'
'Hey, David, can you get my camera out of the Yukon? I thought I was done, but I want to take some pictures of all these paper scraps.'
David nodded and went to the SUV. When he returned with the camera, Greg showed him the path to follow to the body. 'I can take over now, if you want,' David said.
'I'm done with him,' Greg said. 'He's all yours.' He took the camera and snapped some photographs of the papers he had removed from the man's pockets. Those and a stub of pencil were all he had found. The John Doe hadn't been carrying so much as a nickel, much less a handy driver's license or passport. Had the night air not been absolutely still, Greg would have worried about wind snatching the scraps away. Had it not been April in Las Vegas, he might have worried about rain. Those were both major concerns with outdoor crime scenes; neither seemed likely to be an issue tonight.
'Thanks,' David said. 'At a glance, I'd say we know the cause of death. That second shot must have gone straight to the heart. Nice big pool of blood, too.'
'Nice,' Greg replied.
'From a forensic perspective, I mean.' David knelt by the body and drew up the shirt a little so he could see the dead man's back. 'Some lividity present,' he said. Blood – that which hadn't flowed out through the exit wounds – had been drawn down by gravity and darkened the skin on the side that faced the ground. David touched the dark area, and the skin paled. 'Still blanching.'
'The security guy here admits to the shooting,' Greg said. 'Says it happened around midnight.'
David glanced at his wristwatch. 'One forty-two now. Seems about right. I'll take his temperature.'
Greg didn't feel compelled to watch that procedure. He started walking the scene, using a strip pattern – almost like mowing a lawn, starting at one end and walking to the far end, then moving over a step and returning in the direction he had just come from. There were various patterns that could be used, but some were better suited to multiple investigators, and since Catherine seemed to have been waylaid at the command post, he was on his own.
Anyway, he had already determined that there wasn't much to be found. In the bright floodlights, he would have noticed the glint of shell casings. A thought occurred to him, and he called Officer Vernon over. 'Do you know what kind of gun the security guard used?'
'I think it was a Colt,' Vernon said.
'Automatic? Revolver?'
'Sorry, sir. Thirty-eight revolver.'
'Okay, thanks.' No shell casings, then – they would stay in the cylinder until they were emptied out. Judging from the story as he had heard it, he wouldn't expect to find much trace evidence anyway. According to Vernon, McCann and the dead man had never actually come into physical contact. You didn't have to get very close to shoot a man in the heart with a.38. The Locard Exchange Principle could still come into play – one of McCann's fingerprints could be on one of the bullets that had killed the man, for instance, and if McCann had come close to the body, even after the shooting, he might have traces of the man's blood on his shoes. But he had the feeling, right out of the gate, that this wasn't a case that would turn on hair or fiber evidence or a mysterious fluid or anything like that.
No, it was probably every bit as straightforward as it appeared to be.
In a way, that would be a relief. These days, it seemed every case he worked was more complicated than the last. Juries were becoming more sophisticated, too, more aware of what crime-scene investigation could accomplish, and the more they knew about it, the more they wanted to see. Greg had heard of open-and-shut cases – a liquor-store robbery, for one, in which the perpetrator had been caught two blocks away downing the six-pack he had taken along with forty-two bucks from the till – in which the jury complained to the judge that there was no DNA evidence presented, and without DNA, how could they know for certain that the defendant was guilty? Never mind the surveillance video, the eyewitnesses, and the fingerprint evidence, juries these days wanted science.
So if this turned out to be a justifiable homicide, an honest man protecting his employer and her property from danger, that would be just dandy. Not every case had to test his forensic skills and challenge his imagination. Or so he wanted to believe.
'I should get back down there and help Greg,' Catherine said. She had finished swabbing McCann's hands, and she had taken and bagged his windbreaker, in case there was GSR on the sleeves, and his shoes, in case he had stepped in blood. In his socks and short sleeves, he looked like someone caught off guard by a fire alarm.
'Greg's fine,' Sam Vega said quietly. 'There are more people here I'd like you to meet.'
'You're the detective.'
'I know that. But I also know you have a good eye for detail, and I don't want to miss anything.'
The grunt work was the stuff that had drawn her to forensic science to begin with – collecting and analyzing evidence, employing the cold hard facts of the physical world to put criminals in jail and let the innocent go free. But Sam's point was valid, and in truth, she was more than a little curious about the other folks the police had cooling their heels outside this luxurious home.
Sam led her to a wrought-iron table, painted white, where two men sat waiting for the police to talk to them. A sleepy-eyed uniformed cop stood watch over them, biting on the ends of his mustache hairs as if that was the only thing keeping him awake. Sam went through the introductions, -resenting Catherine to Craig Stilton and Dustin Gottlieb.
'I'm Mrs. Cameron's financial adviser,' Stilton said. Everything about him was round – his pale, mostly bald head, his tortoiseshell glasses and the cheeks propping them up, his physique. 'Well, the whole family's, really.'
