Greg had scaled the gantry and was crouched on top. “Yeah, it’s pretty visible from up here.” He reached out and grabbed a thick chain dangling from a pulley. “I’ve got tr ansfer on this chain-it’s probably how the body was moved from up here to down there.”

“There was an awful lot of wax around the body,” said Catherine. “It must have at least semi-hardened before the body was yanked out.”

“And it would have cooled from the top down. Since we found the vic’s body with his head exposed, that means he was upside down in the volcano’s cone, with his head in the wax that was still hot.”

“Greg, what shape is the wax reservoir up there? Can you tell?”

“Just a sec.” He ducked his head into an uncovered section of the volcano like a mechanic disappearing under the hood of a car, then popped back up an instant later. “It’s an inverted cone, wider at the top than the base. So when our vic was pulled loose, he would have had a roughly volcano-shaped wax plug around his body, with his head exposed.”

“Just how we found him.” She sighed. “Now all we have to do is figure out how he got there.”

“So these are the composites the EvoFIT program produced?” asked Riley. She and Nick talked as they walked across the parking lot. The sheet Nick had just handed her showed a man with long, scraggly blond hair, a wide nose and chin, and blue eyes.

“Yeah, here’s the other one.” She took the second paper and studied it; it showed an olive-skinned man with a short, dark beard and wavy black hair.

“How accurate do you think these are ?” she asked him. “I mean, this is unproven technology.”

“Better than nothing. We showed him mug shots first-anyone busted in the last year who listed no fixed address on the arrest report-but came up dry. Just because someone’s on the street doesn’t mean they’re in the system.”

“You do know there are over eleven thousand homeless people in the city, right?”

Nick unlocked the Denali and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I know. So the sooner we get going, the better.”

They started at Huntridge Circle Park, sandwiched between the north and south lanes of Maryland Parkway. Though technically closed, it still attracted many of those with no other place to go, and most of the park’s benches were being used as makeshift beds.

They made the rounds, showing the pictures to anyone who would talk to them, trying for a positive ID. A one-legged man in a long, tattered coat and a baseball cap told them he thought one of them lived on the banks of the Flamingo Wash, one of the creeks that drained the city’s runoff into Lake Mead. His name, the man said, pointing to the picture, was Buffet Bob-so called because of his habit of sneaking into buffets and cramming as much food as he could i nto his pockets.

At the wash, they had less luck. Camping overnight was prohibited, and the encampment had recently been cleared out. They tried Molasky Family Park next, another spot where the homeless congregated; there, several of the people they talked to agreed that the picture looked a lot like Buffet Bob. The other one, several of them said, resembled a Latino man named Zippo who often drank with Bob.

“Yeah, that’s them,” said a black man in his sixties without a tooth in his mouth. “Bob and Zippo, you always see ’em around together. Not for a while, though.”

“When was the last time you saw them?” asked Riley.

The toothless man shook his head. “Musta been at least a month ago. Mebbe more. They ain’t the only ones, either.”

Nick frowned. “Hold on. You say they disappeared a month ago-and so did some others? Who?”

“Lessee. Big Johnny, ain’t seen him around since then. Old Gus-”

“Gus Janikov?” asked Riley.

“Don’t know his last name,” the man said testily. “Don’t interrupt. Who else… oh, and I guess I ain’t seen Paintcan in a while, neither. Course, he could just be in jail.”

Riley gave Nick a skeptical glance. “So could any of them.”

“Don’t think so,” said the old man. “Ain’t nobody seen ’em or heard nothing. Ask around.”

“We will,” said Nick. “Thanks.”

The contact number L.W. Smith had left with the Pet Cave turned out to be a dead end; it was for a throwaway cell phone that had been used exactly once.

So Grissom went for a walk.

Las Vegas Boulevard, more commonly known as the Strip, was the backbone of Vegas. It stretched from the southern extremes of the city to the northern edge of downtown, and every block held its own character and history. Grissom was familiar with each one.

As he walked, he tried to see the city through the killer’s eyes.

This was not LW’s home. He was a tourist, just like the hundreds of thousands who flocked here every year. But how did he view Vegas? Was it a modern Xanadu, a high-tech playground that everyone could share, or a twenty-first-century Sodom or Gomorrah, an artificial abomination in the middle of a desert?

The killer was here because Grissom was here. Grissom was well-known in the relatively small overlap between entomology and law enforcement circles; if Grissom could be said to be famous for anything, it was using his scientific knowledge-of insects, among other things-to give the Vegas Crime Lab one of the highest case-clearance rates in the nation. As an embarrassing story in the Las Vegas Globe had said about him some years ago, he “used bugs to put bad guys behind bars.”

The Bug Killer had obviously seen that as a challenge, but Grissom didn’t think his life was in danger-not yet. The killer wanted to beat Grissom at his own game, on an intellectual level; even the spider trap had been more of a test than an assassination attempt.

But as Grissom knew from personal experience, Vegas was impossible to ignore. The sensuality, the spectacle, the timeless siren environment of the casinos; it had an effect on people, even those who tried to resist. Sometimes, the resistance affected you just as strongly as the place itself.

He thought about Richard Waltham and his take on Vegas. Waltham was a Vegas survivor, someone who’d been around the block a few times and managed to hang on. If he kept going the way he was, the city would eventually kill him, but so far it hadn’t.

So far, he’d been lucky.

Grissom didn’t think the Bug Killer viewed Vegas as either Xanadu or Sodom. He thought he saw it in insect terms-a cluster of termite columns, perhaps. Termites were the skyscraper architects of the insect world, some species constructing mounds that could reach as high as thirty feet; they boasted an elaborate cooling system that regulated their temperature as efficiently as any hotel air-conditioning system. Mounds could contain millions of individuals and more than one queen; some even provided their own buffet by cultivating and feeding on a certain type of fungus.

Grissom stopped to watch an extremely drunk college-age boy throwing up in a parking lot. He appeared to have bypassed the buffet in favor of tacos.

What bothered Grissom more than anything was the homobatrachotoxin. A chemical fifteen times more lethal than cyanide, in a town where the most popular form of dining was essentially a shared trough. If the Bug Killer decided he wanted to graduate from single homicides to mass murder, he could do so with nothing more than an eye-dropper and a little careful sleight of hand.

Termites had something else in common with Vegas: just like the Strip that ran north/south, a species known as the compass termite always built its wedge-shaped mounds with the long axis oriented north/south.

But maybe termites were the wrong analogy. Ants, bees, and wasps were colony insects, too, and displayed a bewildering variety of adaptations and social behaviors. It wasn’t just a question of whom the Bug Killer would target next; it was what sort of point he was trying to make.