“Hey. I think I’ve got someth ing.”

Catherine got to her feet. “Obsidian?”

“No, something else. I can see something inside the volcano superstructure-it looks like some kind of tool, stuck between the outer skin and a support strut. Must have fallen inside from up here.”

“Hang on-I’ll see if I can reach it from underneath.”

Catherine crawled under the raised base of the volcano. The interior was a maze of thick plastic and metal tubing, electric pumps and exposed wiring. She shone her flashlight upward until she saw Greg’s gloved hand waving through an opening, then followed where it pointed to. Something was wedged between a strut and the exterior wall.

“It’s too high to reach,” she said. “We’re going to need a ladder.”

“I think I saw one next to the loading dock.”

A few minutes later she was twenty feet above the ground, while Greg steadied the ladder from below. “Got it,” she said. “Looks like a pair of metal-cutting shears.”

She climbed down, handing it to Greg when she was on the bottom rung. “Looks like we might have blood,” she said.

Greg grinned. “I’ll get the luminol.”

Conrad Ecklie hadn’t been undersheriff for long, but he already had a firm grasp of the job’s internal politics. He leaned back in his chair, bright sunlight shining through the window behind him, and considered his former C SI colleague sitting in the chair in front of him.

“Gil, I really don’t know what to say,” he began. “It’s not like you to jump at ghosts.”

Grissom met his boss’s gaze squarely. Even when Ecklie had been day-shift supervisor of the lab, he’d always had his eye on bigger things; as undersheriff, he was on his way. Grissom didn’t care about Ecklie’s ambition one way or the other, but he knew just how bright that flame burned-Ecklie wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice one of his own if it meant saving his own career.

“I’m not,” said Grissom. “I still believe our suspect is planning an attack on the Embassy Gold.”

“The evidence says otherwise, Gil. You didn’t find anything at the hotel, and I know how thorough you are.”

“Not thorough enough. If I could conduct a room-by-room search-”

“Gil, the GCG has over seven hundred rooms. Even if the hotel agreed to evicting their paying customers, it would take forever; there’s no guarantee we could even stop any alleged attack in time.”

“We could try.”

Ecklie sighed. “Look, I’m on the same page with you about preventing loss of life. I just don’t see the same potential threat-so far, all you have is two isolated victims. Hardly the kind of massacre you seem to be expecting.”

“Plus the students injured in the riot and Gustav Janikov. This killer isn’t about one-on-one homicides, Conrad; he’s more interested in the butterfly effect. Kill a single target to trigger a much larger chaotic event.”

“So you say. What I see is something more along the lines of professional jealousy.”

“What?”

“The killer obviously shares some of your expertise in the field of entomology. He wants to make you look bad while making himself look good-the spider thing was clearly meant for you.” He paused. “How’s Al doing?”

“Fine. The hospital’s releasing him tomorrow.”

“Good. Gil, I think you’re off base on this. I agree that the Fairwick murder had a secondary reason, but it was to target you, not the Embassy Gold. It’s made you jumpy-hell, it’s made all of us jumpy. But let’s focus on specifics here, not wild theories.”

Grissom frowned. “Jumpy?”

“Nobody’s disputing your evidence, just your interpretation. If this Bug Killer does strike again, it’ll either be directly at you or possibly at someone close to you. I’m sorry, Gil, but you’re a hazard to be around right now. I’m assigning you round-the-clock protection for the next few days. If you’re right about the killer being either of your two fellow professionals, they’ll both be out of the countr y by then.”

“And out of our reach.” Grissom got to his feet. “Someone may be getting jumpy,” he said quietly, “but it isn’t me.”

“Mr. Wornow,” said Catherine. She smiled at the artist on the other side of the interview table, who didn’t smile back. “Or would you prefer Monkeyboy?”

“Bill is fine. Are you almost done with Mount Pele? ’Cause I really need to get back to work, and if you’ve shut down the pumps it’ll take forever to clear all the hardened wax out-”

Greg placed the clear evidence bag containing the shears on the table. Wornow stopped talking.

“A good craftsman always takes care of his tools,” said Greg. “But even a good craftsman drops one now and then. Especially if he’s doing something as nerve-wracking as cutting off his partner’s fingers.”

Bill swallowed. “That’s-that could belong to anybody-”

“Maybe so,” said Catherine. “But it’s got Hal Kanamu’s blood on it and your fingerprints. Plus, tool marks on the finger bones are a match to exemplars made with this particular pair of shears. So-whether it’s yours or not-you were the one who used it to de-digitize the body.”

Wornow stared dully at the bag. “I didn’t kill him. I swear. I got back from Portland really early, and I went to the warehouse to drop off some stuff I bought. I found Hal in the wax. The heaters were shut down, so it had cooled of f and semi-hardened. I… I didn’t know what to do.” Wornow put his head in his hands. “We worked so hard on that thing. We’d stay up all night, coming up with new ideas, trying all kinds of stuff… Yeah, Hal could be a pain, but he was committed, you know? He wasn’t going to give up on this, he was going to make it happen. And then we got into an argument over whether or not we should add color to the flames, and I took off. I should have known better…”

“We know you didn’t kill him,” said Greg. “But you did move the body.”

“What else could I do? If the cops found a dead drug addict inside the actual cone, I knew they’d confiscate it and take it apart. And without Hal’s money, how was I supposed to rebuild? I can’t even pay the rent on the damn warehouse.”

Catherine nodded. “So why remove the fingers of one hand?”

“I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t even notice until after I’d dropped the tin snips that the other hand was totally encased. I could have dug it out, but that would have made a huge mess… I just wrapped the whole thing in a tarp, dumped it in the back of my truck, and ran. Then when I went to look for the snips later, I couldn’t find them. It’s not like I do this every day, you know?”

“Well, you’re not going to be doing it again soon,” said Catherine. “Tampering with a body-while not as serious as murder-is still a crime. I don’ t think you or Mount Pele are making a pilgrimage to the desert this year.”

12

EDVIN BONIFAK HAD RUN the Valentino Motel for twenty-seven years. He had seen a lot of people come and go; newlywed couples, newly divorced singles, prostitutes, alcoholics, salesmen, wiseguys, drug dealers, professional poker players, amateur magicians, lounge singers, tourists from everywhere from Japan to Jamaica. The only question he was ever interested in asking any of them was how they were going to pay, and sometimes when. Other than that, he didn’t care what they did in the privacy of their own rooms-more than once, he’d wished someone would be careless enough to burn the place down. So far, nobody had.

But hey, it was a new day. Maybe he’d get lucky.

The man in room 217 was no odder or stranger than the rest. He’d paid for a week in advance, and that week was now up. Edvin, who at sixty-four was getting around with the help of a cane, was on his way to remind Mr. Lance Wheeler that it was now after two P.M., and if he planned on staying any longer he was going to have to pony up for another day.