The room was neat and clean; clearly the maid had been in recently. That was bad news as far as evidence went, but she knew from experience that the cleaning staff didn’t always get everything. Though the level of service at the Braun Suites was high, guests who stayed for extended periods often designated certain areas off-limits. No matter how nice the hotel, it was still a hotel-people needed to claim personal space in order to make it a home.
The suite’s bedroom featured a hot tub, king-size bed, and walk-in closet. It was just as clean as the living room but revealed more of Kanamu’s personality; rock-climbing gear was piled in a corner, an expensive camera sat on the nightstand, and Catherine was pretty sure the three poster-sized, framed photographs on the walls hadn’t been put there by the hotel.
She studied the closest picture. It had apparently been taken at night, and the subject was a robot giraffe with a huge fireball erupting from its mouth.
The next was of a woman wearing only an elaborate horned headdress, stilts so tall they extended past the bottom of the photo, and body paint accented with glitter; the artist had used an astronomy theme, swirling ga laxies and fiery comets chasing themselves across the woman’s body. She was framed against a perfect blue sky, no clouds or horizon visible.
The third was the outline of some sort of temple in the distance, rising out of a thick cloud of mist. In the foreground, a man wearing a gas mask and a huge pair of white angel wings stood with his arms extended.
She found what she was looking for in the walk-in closet, which Kanamu had turned into a small office. A desk at one end held a laptop, and a comfortable chair was parked in front of it.
She turned on the laptop and wasn’t surprised when it asked her for a password. Only one reason a man locks himself in a tiny room with no windows and a laptop: porn.
No wastepaper basket, though. She opened the top drawer of the desk, expecting Kleenex and a bottle of hand lotion-and found something else instead.
Plain Ridge High School in North Las Vegas enrolled just under three thousand students. It had slightly more male students than female; 40 percent of its student body was white, 12 percent black, 15 percent Asian, and 33 percent Hispanic. Its chess club regularly placed in the state finals, it had a drama department fond of producing all-Spanish versions of Shakespeare plays, and its sports program included socce r, volleyball, baseball, basketball, and bowling.
But none of those activities compared to football.
Plain Ridge High’s long-standing rivalry was with Carston High, located only a few blocks away. While the two schools competed in almost every possible arena, their most fervent battles were always on the gridiron. In past years, both schools had been subject to toilet papering, mascot stealing, trash-talking graffiti, and the occasional brawl due to the intense rivalry between the Plain Ridge Rockets and the Carston Enforcers. Blood had been spilled before, both on and off the field, and would be again.
But nobody at either school knew just how much.
Keenan Harribold had been their star player. Only hours after his death, graffiti was discovered sprayed on the exterior wall of Plain Ridge High’s gymnasium. It provoked anger from the students and concern from the faculty; while scrawled obscenities were nothing new, death threats were. The administration of both schools agreed to a meeting later that day to discuss the situation and decide what to do about it.
The news of Keenan Harribold’s death surfaced midmorning. It spread throughout Plain Ridge High like a shockwave, followed closely by a surge of rising fury.
Bad news always traveled faster than good. The students at Carston knew about the murder almost as soon as the ones at Plain Ridge did, and expressed shock, dismay, and a complete denial of responsibility. Despite their historic rivalry, there were still friendships that linked students at both schools; a flurry of cell phone calls as intense as any high-level diplomatic negotiations followed. They were not successful.
As a result, the retaliatory attack was anticipated, though not prepared for. Then again, the mob of students from Plain Ridge-around a thousand strong, a good 30 percent of the student body-was not highly organized, either.
But they were angry.
“It’s on,” Tyler Pullam said to Ryan Dill. The noon bell had just rung. “They’re on their way.” He’d just come from PE, and he’d brought a baseball bat with him. Alarms vibrated in the social web, but no one had informed any of the teachers; the social dynamics at work were primitive, violent, and instinctive. The colony was under attack.
Ryan and Tyler were two of the students who rushed outside as the mob approached; they were joined by hundreds others. People had grabbed bats, two-by-fours from the wood shop, tire irons; some of them had knives.
The two groups converged. War had begun.
Grissom was eating breakfast at a diner when the phrase “student at Plain Ridge High School ” caught his ear. He asked the waitress to turn up th e television and for another cup of tea.
“-bizarre twist to this tragedy,” the anchorwoman said. Her solemn face was replaced by a shot of a white concrete wall with a message spray-painted on it in bright crimson: HOW YOU GONNA WIN WITH A DEAD QUARTERBACK? “This graffiti was found on the wall of the Plain Ridge High School gymnasium, only hours before Keenan Harribold, the starting quarterback for the Plain Ridge Rockets, was found dead in a Las Vegas motel room. News quickly spread throughout the school, leading to an impromptu march at noon to nearby Carston High, Plain Ridge’s longtime rival in many areas, including football.”
Jittery amateur footage replaced the graffiti shot. It showed a horde of angry teenagers rampaging through the hallway of a school, tearing posters from walls, smashing glass, and attacking other students. Some carried baseball bats.
“The riot lasted half an hour and resulted in multiple injuries, including three knifings and one shooting. Eleven people are in the hospital this afternoon, three of them in serious condition, though no fatalities have been reported at this time. So far, the police have declined to give any details concerning Harribold’s death.”
Grissom finished his tea, paid the bill, and left.
Nick Stokes wasn’t crazy about bugs.
This had less to do with any sense of squeamishness than the fact that he’d once been buried alive by a psycho with a grudge against the Las Vegas Crime Lab. The crate he’d been buried in had been sealed up tight-but not tight enough to prevent it from being invaded by fire ants. Nightmares had woken him up for months afterward, his skin burning with phantom bites that had long since faded from his body. He wasn’t too fond of enclosed spaces after that, either.
The experience had marked him on a deeper level than just the physical, and now he found certain cases affected him, maybe more than they should. When he’d seen what had crawled out of that bag, he couldn’t help but imagine what the boy’s last moments had been like. Blind, suffocating, feeling the maddening tickle of a hundred legs crawling over your face and through your hair…
Grissom had known immediately that no one would choose to commit suicide in such a way, and so had Nick. The reason Nick was now searching Keenan Harribold’s bedroom wasn’t because he thought he’d find giant posters of millipedes on his wall and a pile of Insect Hill brochures on his bedside table; it was to try to glean some kind of clue about who would want to kill him.
The room was pretty typical for a teenage boy into sports: posters of girls in bikinis on the walls, a trophy on a bookshelf, an unmade bed, and piles of clothes on the floor. A sm all desk under the window held a stack of homework and a closed laptop.