“The wax system has built-in heaters, but that’s only to keep it warm enough to stay liquid-around a hundred and twelve degrees. Not nearly hot enough to burn flesh.”

“Meth addicts often use miniature butane torch lighters-they produce a hotter flame, burn the drug more efficiently.” Greg glanced around. “There’s a couple of handheld bottle torches here, as well as a welding rig. And the volcano is designed to shoot jets of flame from nozzles at the rim-any of them could have been used to heat the obsidian.”

“Let’s see what kind of prints we can get off them first. Then we go rock hunting.”

“Hey, Grissom,” said Brass. He put the remains of the sub sandwich he was eating on his desk and wiped his mouth with his other hand. “Where’ve you been?”

“Field research. I think I may have some insights into our killer’s methodology.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ve got news, too. Athena Jordanson just announced that she’s breaking her contract and moving to the Embassy Gold. They’re already planning her opening night-the publicity machine is shifting into high gear.”

“The Embassy Gold. Isn’t that the one that just opened a new restaurant?”

“Yeah, the Mile of Gourmet something or other. More like the Mile of Heartburn, if you ask me-”

“That’s his next target,” said Grissom. “Jim, we have to shut that restaurant down. Now.”

Brass stopped with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. He put it back down and sighed. “Great. You sure about this, Gil? Because the stink this will cause would make even Doc Robbins upchuck.”

“All of the killings so far have been intended to manipulate other events. Paul Fairwick’s killing was intended to make Athena Jordanson move to another location-just like a termite nest moving their queen when the colony is threatened. The Harribold killing sparked a school riot-I think he has something much larger planned this time.” Grissom shook his head. “This guy’s extremely organized. If he’s pushing Jordanson to switch to this hotel, it’s because he already has something set up and ready to go. We have evidence he’s producing an extremely powerful poison, possibly in large quantities.”

Grissom paused. “We have to shut down that hotel and search it.”

Like all cities, Vegas’s lifeblood was money. Casinos were the beating heart that kept that lifeblood flowing, and hotels were like lungs; they inhaled and exhaled tourists while separating them from their earnings like alveoli straining oxygen from air. And like lungs, they operated twenty-four hours a day-to stop was to die.

Grissom’s proposal to shut down the Embassy Gold was not met with enthusiasm.

The manager of the hotel talked to the mayor. The mayor talked to the police chief. The police chief talked to Brass-though, by that point, the term talked wasn’t really accurate.

Grissom refused to back down. If a disaster of the magnitude he feared did happen, he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, either-and the political fallout once the public discovered the authorities knew of the threat but hadn’t acted would destroy the political career of everybody involved. Everybody but the one who had tried to blow the whistle.

In the end, a compromise was reached. All food and beverage facilities-restaurants, bars, room service-would be suspended while Grissom’s team conducted their search. The hotel would continue to operate otherwise; neither room rental nor casino operations would be affected. It was far from an ideal solution, but it was the only one on the table.

And if the attack occurred anyway, fingers could now be pointed in Grissom’s direction. Even with his hands tied, it was still his responsibility to stop the Bug Killer. If Grissom failed, no one would care about technicali ties-only about the body count.

The hotel had three restaurants-including the Mile of Gourmet Grand-two nightclubs, and a poolside bar, in addition to the full-service bar in the casino itself. All of them closed down; the hotel’s official excuse was that a court-ordered inventory was being conducted as part of an ongoing fraud investigation. Everyone was very careful to not use the word contaminated in the same sentence as food or beverage.

Nick spearheaded the group checking the restaurants, while Riley oversaw those checking the bars. They pulled in the lab’s day shift to help with the workload, and Grissom gathered them all together in the main kitchen before they started.

“All right,” he said. “What we’re looking for is a very concentrated poison called homobatrachotoxin. Exposure to even tiny amounts can result in numbness of the extremities or sneezing, so be aware of any symptoms. It could be in any form-liquid, solid, possibly even aerosolized. Take samples of anything that the public is going to come into contact with or consume.”

And then they went to work.

Samples were taken from every open container. Unopened containers were inspected for tampering. Public common areas were searched top to bottom. Equipment for the preparation and handling of food or drink was dismantled and scrutinized-from the pressurized system that delivered carbonated soda to the ice machines on every floor. Walk-i n freezers were emptied and examined; industrial meat slicers were disassembled and swabbed.

They found nothing.

Catherine lifted prints from the butane bottles and the welding rig, while Greg crawled underneath the superstructure of the volcano to do the same for the propane tanks and surrounding hardware used to power Mount Pele ’s flame effects.

After that, they began to look for possible shards of obsidian, starting from each possible heat source and spiraling outward in a gridded search pattern. They used flashlights to highlight any possible glint of reflection, though both were aware the rock wouldn’t reflect at all unless the surface exposed to the beam was polished instead of rough.

It was time-consuming, painstaking work, much of it spent on hands and knees. “Hey,” said Greg. He was on the upper gantry, looking underneath a worktable. “You ever been to Hawaii?”

“Can’t say I have. You?”

“Nah. Seems a long way to go to get the same kind of heat we get in Vegas. It’s just… moister, I guess.”

“How about Burning Man? Ever been?”

“Not yet. I’ve done a lot of research online, been to a few local events, but I haven’t made it out to the festival itself yet.”

“So-what’s the attraction? I have a hard time thinking of you running around nake d in the desert.”

“It’s kind of hard to explain. I think the social engineering is the part I like the best.”

“You mean the gift economy?”

“That’s part of it. The festival’s been around since 1986-though they didn’t start going to the desert until 1990-and it’s always evolving. They put a lot of thought into changing people’s perceptions and behaviors; the gift economy is a good example of that, but they also emphasize environmentalism, community, and what they call ‘radical self-reliance.’ Basically, it means you need to come prepared to survive in a harsh desert climate for a week without counting on all the trappings of civilization we take for granted.”

“Like indoor plumbing?”

“Well, they do provide porta-potties. But there’s no garbage collection-everything you pack in you have to pack out. They encourage interactive art as much as possible. It’s not the kind of event where you go to just passively observe; you go to become part of it, to join in.”

Catherine picked up a small chunk of dark matter and examined it critically. “Sounds-kind of exhausting, actually.”

“It can be. Challenging, definitely. But hey-when’s the last time you went to a party with fifty thousand people and didn’t feel like they were all strangers?”

“I can’t remember the last time I went to one with fifty-”