“What sort of symptoms would that produce?”

“It’s possible he wasn’t even aware of it. Many syrinxes generate no symptoms at all for months or even years; then they can produce pain, weakness, numbness, and sensory impairment-especially the ability to detect heat or cold with the extremities. Advanced cases can affect sweating, sexual function, and bowel and bladder control.”

“Sounds nasty.”

“Even… wick-ed?”

She sighed. “I’ll see you later, Doc.”

Greg ran the tire prints through the database. He’d found marks from both the front and rear tires, which gave him a wheelbase; that combined with the tread told him he was looking for a 1994 Ford F150 Supercab truck.

He caught up with Catherine in the hall outside the main lab and told her what he’d found.

“Well, I just got the tox screen,” she said. “Our vic was high on meth when he went to that great tiki bar in the sky. And Post found a shard of something stuck in his forehead. Looks like he took a smack to the noggin before going volcano diving.” She told Greg about the wax in the vic’s lungs.

“That’s a lot of wax,” he said. “What was this guy doing, running his own candle factory?”

“You might not be too far off. Wax is used in a number of industrial applications-especially in manufacturing.”

“And those waxes tend to have very specific formulations,” said Greg. “Find the formulation and we can find out what this was supposed to be used for-and hopefully where it came from. I’m on it.”

Catherine got an AFIS hit on the vic’s fingerprints almost immediately: Hal Kanamu. He’d been arrested for possession of methamphetamine two years ago in Honolulu, but his current driver’s license listed an address in Vegas. She jotted it down, then went to find David Hodges.

Hodges looked up from his microscope as she walked in. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re here about the shard found in Don Ho’s skull.”

“Hal Kanamu’s skull, actually. Can you tell me what it is?”

“Sure. What’s big and hot and likes to blow its top?”

She grinned despite herself. “It’s volcanic?”

“Yes, indeed. Nevada is littered with deposits of volcanic rock, due to its geologic history. You know how tectonic plates push against each other and create mountains in the middle? Our whole state is like that in reverse-we’re being pulled apart. That makes all kinds of interesting things rise to the surface, some of them volc anic. The black rocks of the Black Rock Desert are, in fact, obsidian-and so is this shard.”

Catherine nodded. “Any chance you could narrow its origin down a little further?”

Hodges knew how to smirk and chose that moment to prove it. “As a matter of fact, I think I can. Think of a volcano as a giant pot of chili; the ingredients are all the different kinds of minerals that are melting and mixing together. There are a lot of different kinds of chili in the world, but every cook has his or her own favorite recipe.”

“Analyze the ingredients and you can ID the chef?”

“Not only that, I may be able to tell you which batch this came from. Individual eruptions produce individual results.” Hodges got a dreamy look on his face. “I have very fond memories of a batch I produced in the fall of ’06. Fiery, but with a lovely creamy consistency.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You made… lava?”

“What? No, chili. I still have some frozen at home-I know fresh is best, but when you produce something of that quality it’s hard to let it go.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll talk to you later, Hodges.”

Catherine joined Greg in the lab. “Any luck on the wax?”

“Yes and no. I ran it through the GC mass spec, and here’s what came out.” He handed her several sheets of paper.

She scanned the o ne on top, then the next, and frowned. “This isn’t wax-this is soup.”

“I know. Wax comes in three basic varieties. I’ll give you… twenty-one tries to ID them.”

“Animal, mineral, and vegetable?”

“Exactly. Animal waxes come from bees and other insects, sheep wool, and the foreheads of sperm whales-hey, did you know that no one knows exactly why sperm whales are full of the stuff? Up to three tons per whale, and the best guess is that it helps them control their buoyancy. People used to think it was actually sperm, which is where the name comes from-”

“Greg.”

“Sorry. Vegetable wax comes from certain palms, Mexican shrubs, Japanese berries, African reeds, rice bran, and jojoba trees. Mineral waxes are derived from petrochemical sources like lignite. There are also synthetic waxes made from long-chain fatty acids, but I left those out because they spoiled the punch line.”

“And which of these did our fake lava contain?”

“Most of them. Well, not the sperm whale wax-that’s been mainly replaced by the jojoba tree-but a good eighty percent of the others are present. That doesn’t correspond to any industrial process I know of.”

“No, but it does remind me of something else,” said Catherine. “Not so much soup… as chili.”

Greg grinned and shook his head. “Oka y, I’ll go with the flow. Why chili?”

“Something Hodges said. Some cooks try to throw in every possible ingredient, and apparently Mother Nature’s one of them. Real lava is a mix of many different elements.”

“So our magma maker was trying to mimic the actual geologic process? When I was in school, we just used vinegar and baking soda.”

“Accuracy is clearly important to someone. How about the black flecks embedded in the wax?”

“Ash from charred paper. I found a couple of chunks that weren’t completely carbonized-they had a high lignin content.”

“Newsprint. Probably old newspapers or flyers.”

“Yeah, and almost impossible to trace. We’ll have better luck with the wax.”

“I guess we need to see how many local manufacturers use wax in their business-”

Greg offered her another sheet of paper before she could finish. “One step ahead. Cosmetics, industrial casting, waterproofing for cardboard boxes, food producers… and a whole lot more.”

Catherine scanned the new list with a frown. “Terrific. There’s even a ranch on here.”

“Yeah. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker-I’m just glad we don’t have to visit a whaling ship.”

There were times that Catherine appreciated being a CSI level 3. For one thin g, it meant that she could delegate canvassing the local wax-using industries to Greg, while she concentrated on Hal Kanamu’s apartment.

According to records she’d dug up, Kanamu had been briefly employed as a busboy when he first moved to Vegas six months ago. If he’d been employed by a hotel or casino since then, she couldn’t find any record of it. She didn’t know what he’d been doing, but the forwarding address the hotel gave her for his last paycheck surprised her: the Braun Suites, a set of luxury apartments often used by celebrities when they were in town. Catherine knew the hotel often comped those suites to high rollers.

Her CSI ID was enough for security to let her into the suite, and the fact that she was Sam Braun’s daughter didn’t hurt, either. Sam had been one of the Vegas giants, a casino owner renowned as much for his connections as his wealth; she hadn’t known him when she was growing up, but he’d done his best to connect with her before he died.

“Well, well, Mr. Kanamu,” she murmured to herself as she stepped inside. “Quite the upgrade in living accommodations. You must have been one hell of a busboy.”

The suite was large and opulent, with an impressive view of the Strip through a glass wall that ran the entire length of the main living area. A padded conversation pit in the middle of the room held a round gas fireplace in its center, a wet bar made entirely of chrome and Lucite gleamed to one side, and the fla t screen on the wall was the size of a garage door. It was on, too, cycling through a slide show; shots of Kanamu’s native Hawaii, it looked like. The brilliant greens and bright blues painted the room in vacation Technicolor, a more evolved version of motel neon.