“Dangerous stuff,” said Nick. “What’s the lethal dose, five hundred micrograms?”

“One hundred,” said Grissom. “Around the equivalent of two grains of table salt. If our Bug Killer is attem pting to produce this poison in quantity, we have an extremely serious problem.”

“Hey, Monkeyboy,” said Catherine, taking a seat across the table in the interview room. “Guess what? The sample of wax we took from your warehouse was just full of stuff: industrial effluents, food-grade shellac, perfume, metals…”

Monkeyboy, aka William Wornow, looked distinctly uneasy. “Well, that’s because of where I get it. All over the place. I mean, I scavenge from Dumpsters, industrial waste sites, wherever I can get access. None of it’s stolen, I swear.”

“Oh, I believe you. The thing is, you’ve mixed up a particularly distinctive batch for your fake volcano, and it just happens to be an exact match for the wax we found hardening in Hal Kanamu’s lungs.”

“What?”

She smiled. “Yeah. And since that’s what actually killed him, your whole art project is now officially a murder weapon. Afraid you’re going to be skipping your trip to Black Rock City this year.”

“Whoa!” He held up both hands, clearly frightened. “Maybe Hal did die in that volcano, but I had nothing to do with it. I was out of town!”

“Maybe. You better hope you can prove that, because until you do you’re our prime suspect. And we’re going to be taking a very, very close look at Mount Pele…”

Dale Southford looked up from his newspaper when Grissom walked into the Pet Cave. “Hello, Mr. Grissom. Back to pick up your order?”

“Afraid not, Dale. I’ve got another question for you. Ever have someone ask you about Melyrid beetles?”

The chubby man looked surprised. To one side of the counter, a cocker spaniel puppy gave a mournful little howl that ended in a much more upbeat yip. “Funny you should ask. Had a guy call a couple months back asking about the very same thing. Said he was a researcher, needed a large representative sample. I got in touch with a guy I know in New Guinea.”

“Did he want live samples or dead ones?”

“Both. I asked him how many he wanted, and he said at least a hundred had to be alive.”

“And dead?”

Southford shrugged. “He said he’d take as many as I could get. Turned out to be around a thousand.”

A thousand beetles. Grissom knew they could produce about ten micrograms of HBTX each, which meant ten beetles’ worth could kill a human being. A thousand was enough for a hundred fatalities.

But it was the live ones that bothered him the most. If the Bug Killer established a successful breeding program, he could process a hundred times that.

“What was his name?” asked Grissom.

“Just a sec.” Southford turned to his computer. “Ah, here it is. L. W. Smith. No address, just a contact number. Paid in cash.”

“What did he look like?”

“Well, I don’t think he picked them up himself-pretty sure the guy that dropped off the cash and took the beetles was homeless. He told me he was just running an errand for a friend.”

“Thanks for coming in again,” said Nick, shaking McKay’s hand.

“Glad to help,” said the oral surgeon. “I don’t know how much use I’ll be this time, either, though. None of the faces in all those mug shots jumped out at me a month ago, and I doubt if my memory’s gotten any better.”

“We’ll see,” said Nick. “You might surprise yourself.”

He led the surgeon from the front counter to the AV lab. Archie nodded at both of them. “Hey, Nick. This our witness?”

Nick introduced the two. “Doc, Archie here is gonna take you through a new program we just got. Hopefully, it’ll help us ID the two guys you saw fighting.”

“So he’s an artist?”

Archie grinned. “Yes, I am-but my area of expertise is software as opposed to pen and ink. I’m going to be using a program called EvoFIT to come up with a facial composite of our suspects.”

He had McKay sit down in front of a workstation. “Okay, here’s how this works. Some studies have shown that regular sketches done by police artists only have a success rate of around ten percent. That has nothing to do with t he skill of the artist; it’s just how our brains work. In the process of trying to remember the features of someone, we wind up changing them-the image that’s finally produced is something the subject has actually been building as opposed to recalling. Going feature by feature, the way the old Identi-Kit worked, just reinforced that.”

Nick nodded. “This program works on a different principle. Caricature.”

“What, like those sidewalk artists do?”

“Not exactly,” said Archie. “It starts with seventy-two images. You pick the six that you think have the closest resemblance to the person you saw, and it uses those six to generate another seventy-two. We do that a third time, and you pick a final six. Those are blended into one, which we fine-tune.”

“The cool thing,” said Nick, “is that these aren’t static images. They gradually morph from one face to another, exaggerating features as they go. This concentrates attention, which is supposed to trigger flashes of memory-you don’t so much remember the face as recognize it. The inventor claims it bumps up the success rate by up to twenty percent.”

“Caricature police sketches,” said McKay with a smile. “Well, considering that I’m a ventriloquist dentist, I can’t really criticize. Only in Vegas, huh?”

“No w this,” said Greg, “is a crime scene.”

He and Catherine stood at the foot of Mount Pele. It was glowing a brilliant crimson from the cone, the wax-based lava releasing the occasional blorp of heated air.

“Yeah, but we still don’t have a suspect,” said Catherine. “Not since security footage from that gas station in Oregon cleared Wornow. No way he could have gotten to Vegas in time to kill Kanamu.”

“Maybe not. But the truck he was driving-you know, the one his mysterious friend lent him and then drove off into the sunset with?-looked a lot like a 1994 Ford F150 Supercab.”

“True,” Catherine admitted. “Since we can’t find the truck, we can’t compare the treads to what we found in the desert-but we can take a close look at where Kanamu probably died. Right here.”

“Mind if I take the volcano?”

“It’s all yours, lava boy. I’ll tackle the rest of the warehouse.”

There was a small bathroom in the corner; Catherine started there. She found cleaning supplies under the sink, but the dust on them told her they hadn’t been used in some time. She lifted prints from the sink and the toilet.

There was a lounging area next to the loading dock, with a couch, a few ratty armchairs, a microwave, and a refrigerator. The fridge contained nothing but beer, soda, and a few frostbitten TV dinners in the freezer. She located a few good hairs on the couch with root tags, and a number of fibers. The depths of the couch turned up nothing but lint.

Bits of wax spatter were on almost every surface; she guessed they must have had more than one uncontrolled eruption. That worked in her favor, because wax was notoriously hard to remove-and held a fingerprint incredibly well. It looked as if someone had even turned it into a game at one point, pressing a digit into every wax droplet before it fully hardened to leave a perfect print behind. She carefully photographed each one before lifting it.

Catherine remembered a term from her research into Hawaiian mythology: Pele’s tears. They were elongated bits of hardened lava, spatter from the lifeblood of a volcano. She was looking at a man-made approximation of the same thing-but not all the spatter was random.

There was a large, roughly circular pattern at the base of the volcano. Streaks of wax led from there to the loading dock door. “I’ve got a drag trail,” she called out. “Looks like the body was moved, fake magma and all, from here to the loading bay.”