“Lava,” Greg said. “This guy was killed by his own personal volcano, in the middle of the Nevada desert.”

“Kind of looks that way, doesn’t it?” David said.

“But looks,” said Catherine, “can be deceiving.” She crouched down beside the slowly spreading ooze and stuck a gloved finger in it. She pulled it out again, then rubbed her finger and thumb together. “This isn’t lava-unless you’re talking about the lamp variety. It’s wax.”

“Right,” Greg said. “Only the stuff in the sun is running. I guess that black stuff isn’t hardened magma, either.”

“Pretty weird, huh?” David said. “Hiker found him. No obvious COD, but there’s a large contusion on his forehead.”

Catherine walked around the semicircular pool of wax, getting as close as she could to the body without walking on the wax itself. She bent down and studied the corpse while Greg began to take pictures. “I think you’re right about him being a Pacific Islander,” she said. “Could be a hotel worker.”

Greg nodded. “Yeah, there’s a big Hawaiian population in Vegas-some people even call it the ninth island. You know those ABC Stores you see in Vegas? Those are based out of Hawaii.”

Catherine examined the ground. “Guess they have a lot of experience with tourism… I’ve got some tire marks here. Looks like a truck, maybe an SUV. I’m thinking this is just a dump site.”

“Or,” Greg said, “the remains of a luau gone horribly wrong…”

2

GREG TOOK CASTS of the tire marks. He remembered the first time Warrick Brown had shown him how to do it.

“All right, that’s a good consistency,” Warrick had said. “You don’t want it too thin or it’ll crumble on you. And don’t use the same stuff you’d use for a shoe print-those come in two-pound bags, and you’ll wind up without enough coverage. You want a tire cast to be three feet long, minimum. Dental stone is best; don’t use plaster of paris. Takes about thirty minutes to set-don’t rush it. You want a cast with a high compressive strength, one that won’t fall apart on you when you clean it.”

“Okay, I got it. How strong is this stuff, anyway?”

“Nine thousand pounds per square inch, give or take.”

“Wow. That’s pretty strong.”

Warrick had given one of his wry smiles. “Just make sure you do it right the first time,” he said. “Worry about the strength of your evidence, not the materials you’re using. When you’re casting a track, you only get one shot.”

One shot.

Greg made sure he did it right.

They moved the body, wax and all, to the lab to be processed. Once it was there, Catheri ne checked it for prints but had no luck. “Too bad,” she said. “Wax holds a print really well. But before we can do anything else, we have to get all this wax off. Suggestions?”

Greg crossed his arms and studied the large, waxy mound in front of them. “Heat lamps?” he said. “We can raise the temperature just enough to melt the wax and then collect and process all the runoff.”

“Sounds good. Let’s make it happen.”

They positioned four large lamps over the body. “Kind of like an Easy-Bake Oven,” said Greg.

Catherine gave him an amused glance. “And how would you know about Easy-Bake Ovens? Shouldn’t you have been playing with Star Wars figures?”

“Hey, it was one of my first pieces of forensic equipment. You could bake more than cakes in it, you know.”

“I don’t think I want to, actually.”

It went fairly quickly. Before too long they could pry open the vic’s pockets; they didn’t find any ID but did get a crumpled receipt.

“It’s from the ABC Store on the Strip,” said Greg. “Looks like he bought some dried green mango at around two thirty this morning.”

“So he died sometime after that.” Catherine took off her lab coat and hung it up.

“Where are you going?” asked Greg.

“You can babys it the wax man while he melts. I’m going to go talk to whoever sold him the snack food.”

At first glance, the ABC Store looked like any other Vegas souvenir shop; lots of T-shirts, key chains, and baseball hats up front, most of them emblazoned with the Vegas logo or something related: dice, cards, even the name of a popular TV show set there. Catherine picked up a hat and checked the tag on the inside: MADE IN CHINA.

“Nothing like a genuine Las Vegas memento,” she muttered to herself.

Toward the back of the store, though, the merchandise underwent a definite shift. Suddenly she was surrounded by old-fashioned ham jerky, Maui-style potato chips, and more products featuring macadamia nuts than she’d known existed.

“Excuse me,” she said, walking up to the cashier. “I’m Catherine Willows, with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. Were you working last night?”

The clerk, a sleepy-looking woman with jet-black hair and dusky skin, nodded. “Still am, in fact. Day guy phoned in sick, so I’m pulling a double.”

“My condolences. Do you remember this guy? Came in around two thirty, bought some dried green mango?” She showed the woman a photo of the vic.

“Uh-huh. He seemed pretty wired, made me kind of nervous. Paid with a hundre d-dollar bill.”

“You know who he is? He ever been in here before?”

She shrugged. “Not that I can remember. He was a kanaka, fo’shua. Said he had to get some of that green mango ono. I told him get choke, we ain’t gonna run out-haole never buy ’em.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You no speak pidgin, brah?” She smiled. “Hawaiian slang. He was from the islands, you know? Had a craving for the mango-I told him we had plenty, the tourists never buy it.”

“Ah. You remember if he was on foot or in a vehicle?”

“Sorry, I didn’t notice.”

She talked to the clerk for a few more minutes but didn’t learn anything else. The woman said, “Aloha,” when Catherine left.

“As you can see,” Doc Robbins said to Catherine, “cause of death was asphyxiation.” The body of the Pacific Islander lay open on the autopsy table. Robbins had just cut into one of the lungs, revealing it was packed solid with red wax.

“Like an inside-out version of Madame Tussauds,” Catherine said. “He must have been completely immersed in the stuff.”

“I’d have to concur. I found it in his nose, his throat, even his ear canals-though those generate their own, of course.”

“We didn’ t find the fingers, but the cuts looked clean. Postmortem?”

“Definitely. The other hand-the one completely encased in wax-was intact, so we’ve still got prints.”

“The killer was probably trying to hide the vic’s identity but lacked either the time or the tools to dig through the wax and finish the job. How about the contusion on his forehead?”

“Not just a contusion-a burn. He was struck with something both hard and hot. I took a closer look and pulled this out of the subcutaneous layer.” Robbins handed her a small clear evidence vial.

Catherine took it and studied what it held: a small black sliver, no more than half an inch long. “I’ll get it to Trace. Any idea what it is?”

“Well, it seems to be a shard of mineral or metal, which doesn’t support my first guess.” He paused.

“And that would be?” Catherine prompted.

“A wick.”

Catherine rolled her eyes. “Somebody told you to switch from rock and roll to comedy, Doc?”

Robbins shrugged. “At least it wasn’t a pun. I found something else interesting when I X-rayed the body-take a look at this.” He limped over to the light box on the wall and pointed. “See this? He’s got a cyst growing on his spine-it’s called a syrinx.”

“Cancerous?”

“No, from the condition of the surrounding vertebrae I’d say it was caused by an injury, possibly a car accident or a fall. Not a recent one, though-from its size, I’d estimate the syrinx was between six and eight months old.”