“That’s it.”

Waltham sighed. He had a two-day growth of beard and a fifty-year growth of wrinkles, maybe sixty around the eyes. He sized Grissom up with the weary experience of a hundred wins and a thousand losses, then gave a rueful little laugh. “Tell you what, partner. Sit down and have a drink with me. You convince me you’re an honorable man, I’ll give you the hand. But if I’m gonna throw down my cards, I need to know the fella across the table from me; that’s fair, don’t you think?”

“Fine by me.”

They left the table, Waltham scooping up the few chips he had left, and walked across the casino to the bar. Waltham greeted the bartender by name and asked for the usual; Grissom had a beer.

“You’re not the kind of cop I’m used to,” said Waltham. He pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one with a silver Zippo embossed with a pair of dice.

“I’m a scientist, actually.”

“Yeah? That’s a strange thing to be in this city.”

“Is it?”

“Sure. Vegas is probably the most antiscientific place on the planet. This place feeds on hope, blind faith, and a complete denial of consequences. Don’t matter if you’re talking about sex, gambling, or entertainment; it’s all about how you feel in the moment, not about how you’ll feel later or what you should be thinking about right now. Even the shows-they’ll make you laugh or gasp, or turn you on. But none of ’em will make you think.”

“I know what you’re saying. But Vegas isn’t completely about feeling as opposed to thought; any good poker player will tell you that.”

“Any good poker player tends to wind up with my money in his pocket, so maybe you’re right.” Waltham took a long swig of his drink, something clear over ice with a slice of lime. “But that’ s the exception to the rule. You can walk down the Strip, cut through a casino, wander through a few miles of mall, and you know the one constant you’re gonna find? Music. The whole place is wired, speakers hidden in lampposts and fake rocks outside, everywhere inside. It’s like one big nightclub, and the tunes they’re pumping out are all about one thing: winning.” Waltham shook his head. “Old sixties standards, seventies disco, eighties hair-band anthems, nineties-and-up pop; it’s all put together to make you feel like you’re in the last twenty minutes of a movie, just about to kick the ass of the bad guy. Don’t stop believin’, ’cause the kid is hot tonight.”

Grissom drank some of his beer. He recognized when someone just needed to vent.

“Vegas has a special kind of despair built into it,” Waltham continued. “When you’ve lost it all, when you’re alone and broke and out of options… that’s when all those bright lights, all that upbeat music, all that glitter and promise just make you realize how far you’ve fallen.”

He was quiet for a moment then. Grissom realized that somewhere-not in the bar, but not far away-he could hear music. Something with a cheerful, danceable beat.

“Know what I like to do when I feel like that?” asked Waltham. “I find myself a fountain down on Las Vegas Boulevard. One of the big ones is best, outside Paris or Bellagio or Caesars. T he water’s always nice and clear, with lots of coins sparkling down at the bottom. But that’s not all that’s down there.” Waltham stubbed out the remains of his cigarette. “You know those guys who line parts of the Strip? Wear T-shirts that tell the tourists they can get a girl to their hotel room in twenty minutes? They’ve all got these stacks of business cards in their hands, with pictures of pretty girls wearing nothing but smiles and Photoshopped stars over their nipples. These guys offer them to everyone who walks by, and they snap a finger against the cards to get your attention. Snap. Snap. Snap. That’s the real soundtrack of Vegas. And after strolling past a line of these gentlemen-women, too, sometimes-I like to stop and stare down into one of those big, elaborate fountains that Vegas is so proud of. Because down there, among the coins, there’s always some of those cards. I stare down at them and the pretty women stare back. To me they look like drowned strippers, or maybe mermaids that have decided to turn tricks…”

Waltham turned on his bar stool to look at Grissom. “You have any idea what I’m talking about?”

Grissom considered the question carefully before answering. “In my job, I see death almost every night. I don’t just see pictures of those women-all too often, I see the women themselves. If you’re talking about the feeling you get when you see the consequences of death-not just the e nd of a life, but the end of all the potential of that life-then yes. I know exactly how that feels.”

Waltham finished his drink. “I’ll tell you who I sold the gun to,” he said. “What the hell. It’s a gamble either way, and I’ve been making bets my whole life. Little late to stop now.”

9

THE ADDRESS THAT Jill Leilani gave Catherine was for an old warehouse in a seedy industrial area west of the Strip. It was surrounded by chain-link fence with old newspapers and trash woven through it by the wind, illuminated by sodium-vapor lights that cast razor-edged shadows. The rolling steel doors at the loading dock were covered in graffiti, gang tags in neon-bright green and pink and yellow. A wheelless, overturned shopping cart guarded the front door like the skeleton of a robot turtle.

Catherine and Greg parked their Denali and got out. Music with heavy bass thumped from inside. “Sounds like someone’s home,” said Greg.

“Hope the door’s open,” said Catherine. “They’ll never hear us knocking over that.”

They tried anyway. After a moment of pounding, the music abruptly died. Footsteps slapped against concrete and the door swung open, revealing a chunky man with purple dreadlocks, dressed in p a i nt-spattered coveralls and plastic flip-flops. “Hey, about time-oh. You guys don’t have a pizza with you, do you?”

“Sorry,” said Catherine. “ Las Vegas Crime Lab. And you are?”

“Monkeyboy.”

Catherine’s eyebrows rose. “Try again.”

“Bill. Bill Wornow.”

“I’m Catherine Willows and this is Greg Sanders. Can we come in?”

“Sure, sure. What’s this all about?”

They stepped inside. “It’s about Hal Kanamu,” said Catherine. “We’re-”

She stopped. The warehouse was maybe half the size of a football field, and almost all of it was dominated by a single structure that rose from the middle of the floor to a good twenty feet high.

A volcano.

It was half-finished, its angled steel supports visible through a skin of heavy-gauge steel mesh, but the steam rising from the top and the red rivulets trickling over the edge of the cone left no doubt about what it would ultimately represent. About a third of the structure was covered in red and black roofing shingles, the kind w ith sediment embedded in tar.

“-investigating his death,” she finished.

“Oh, yeah, I heard about that,” said Wornow. “Tragic, really tragic. He was so pumped about Mount Pele, too.”

“ Mount Pele?” asked Greg. “That’s what we’re looking at, right?”

“Well, it will be when she’s finished,” said Wornow. He picked up a dirty rag from a table and started wiping his hands. “This was Hal’s dream. A fully functioning volcano out on the playa, complete with magma. Anybody can do fire and smoke; that’s easy. Getting the lava right, that’s the hard part.”

“Looks like you’re using wax,” said Greg.

“Yeah, that seems to work best. Adding paper ash to it to make it look more rock-like, but still tweaking the mix.”

One wall of the warehouse was lined with stacks and stacks of newspapers, tied in bundles with twine. “That’s a lot of dead trees,” said Catherine.

“Yeah, but I didn’t kill ’em. Just recycling the corpses, right? Hal was actually buying these from a recycler-I said we could probably dig up our own sources, get it for free, but he didn’t care about the cost. Just wanted to make sure we were up and running before August.”