5

Conrad Ecklie was an extremely ambitious guy.

Catherine didn't have a problem with ambition. She had plenty of that herself. But she wasn't in his league, not in that regard.

When she had first known him, he was a day-shift supervisor at the Las Vegas Police Department Crime Lab, the counterpart to the job she held now as night-shift supervisor. She didn't know if he would move up from there or not, although she suspected he had his eyes on the commissioner's job. A guy like him, driven, she wouldn't put a run for the mayor's office past him one of these days, even if the lab was hardly a common stepping-stone to that position.

Gil Grissom hadn't used his supervisor's job as a rung on any career ladder. He had become night-shift supervisor and stayed in the position until he left. But there had been extenuating circumstances in his departure, most notably an unfinished relationship with former CSI Sara Sidle, which had driven Gil out of the lab and out of Las Vegas. Catherine didn't expect to leave the city, and as long as she lived there, she had to work, at least until she had put in enough years to get full retirement bennies. So there might come a day, she reasoned, when she would try to follow Ecklie's career path. At least to some extent. She'd had enough headaches in her life, especially as the single mother of a teenage daughter, to know she didn't ever want to be the mayor of Las Vegas. Talk about headaches…

So she accepted Ecklie at face value. That didn't mean she liked the guy. She just didn't judge his ambitions, the way Gil sometimes had.

No, any problem she had with Conrad Ecklie was because she often found him judgmental and sometimes brusque, even rude when it didn't seem to serve his goals but just allowed him to feel superior to those he barked at. And if his promotion out of the lab into the position of undersheriff still rankled sometimes, that was because the position was open only because its previous holder, Jeffrey McKeen, had murdered her friend and fellow CSI Warrick Brown. Warrick's death certainly wasn't Ecklie's fault; the whole affair just left a bad taste in her mouth, and there was something unseemly about benefiting from it, even by default.

Gil had often thought that Ecklie put his career ahead of his work. He hadn't complained about it much, because that wasn't the kind of man Gil was. But Catherine could read between the lines with Gil, and she knew how he felt. Still, Ecklie had been a damn good CSI once upon a time – even Gil admitted that – and Catherine liked to try to keep that in mind when she had to deal with him.

Especially when, as in this case, he was doing everything in his power to remind her who called the shots.

"People upstairs are very concerned about this case, Catherine," he said. "And you know as well as I do, when those people take an interest in a case, things can go ugly fast. If the crap rains down on me over this, you can expect showers coming down on you."

"Trust me, Conrad, I'm taking this very seriously."

"It's not simply a matter of serious," he said. He had called Catherine into his office, the better to impress her with how much bigger it was than hers. She could have had a big one if she had wanted – still not undersheriff big, but upon his departure, Gil's office had become available, and she was its presumed next occupant. But she hadn't felt right about taking it, was comfortable where she was, so the big space was now being shared by Nick and Greg and Gil's irradiated fetal pig. "It's a matter of keeping in mind the prominence of the Cameron family in Nevada politics."

"They're not in politics anymore," she said, knowing even as the words escaped her lips that it was the wrong thing to say. Politics didn't always refer to elected office.

"Helena Cameron is past her prime," Ecklie admitted. "But she has lived a long time, and she has a lot of friends. Her dead husband had a lot of friends. Some of those friends still inhabit the mayor's office and Carson City."

Nevada was a curious case, Catherine knew. The bulk of the money and political juice was in the southern tip, the knife blade around Las Vegas that stabbed down between California and Arizona. But the state capital was north in Carson City, almost all the way to Reno, and the governor and legislature still liked to believe they ran the show. By mentioning both places, Ecklie was covering all his bets.

"I understand."

"Bix was a popular guy here," Ecklie continued.

"I know. My father knew him."

"Everybody knew Bix Cameron. There are shoe-shine guys working in casinos who still tell stories about him. The thing is, his wife is popular, too. Maybe it's mostly reflected popularity, still shining off him, but that doesn't matter. She's been through enough. Nobody wants to see her hurt."

"Hurting her is the last thing I want to do." Catherine knew what Helena Cameron had gone through, and Ecklie understood she knew, so he didn't elaborate. When Helena 's husband and son had disappeared, a small amount of cocaine was found in Bix's abandoned car. It was widely believed that Bix had mob connections, however much he had tried to keep his businesses clean, and that the disappearances were mob-related. In those days in Las Vegas, only the mob dealt cocaine, so that clinched it for most people. Their bodies were believed to have been buried in the desert or else worked into the foundation of one of the huge newer casinos.

"That's good." Ecklie's smile wasn't a thing of great beauty, but it seemed sincere this time. "I'm glad to hear it. So whatever happened between her security guy, what's his name?"

"McCann."

"Yeah, him. Between McCann and this homeless guy, whatever went down there, Helena should be kept at arm's length."

"Got it."

"A very, very long arm."

"The long arm of the law," Catherine said.

"That's not the original meaning of the phrase, but it'll do for now."

"Understood, Conrad. You want me to keep her clear of it."

"Exactly."

Catherine hated what she had to say next. But "had to" means what it means, she thought. "Unless the evidence points at her."

Ecklie gave her a scowl. She imagined that particular expression had terrified a lot of suspects over the years. She almost felt like confessing to a crime just to get him to turn it off. "Catherine…"

"Conrad, the evidence leads where it leads. You know that. You also know I can't ignore what it tells me."

He sighed and wiped his high forehead with his hand. He looked a lot more human than he had a few seconds before. "I know."

"But I'll do what I can, within reason, to keep her clear of any fallout."

"That's the best I can ask, Catherine. Thanks."

From Ecklie's office, Catherine went down to the morgue to check on the autopsy of the man Drake McCann had shot. She didn't like referring to him as a "homeless guy" or even as John Doe. She wanted to put a real name to him, and the sooner she could do so, the better she would like it. Some cops preferred to use John Doe because it allowed them not to humanize the victims they had to deal with. It was, she thought, a defensive thing. A homicide detective could deal with dozens of deceased individuals in the course of a year, and it could be easier if they were just vics or DBs or John Does rather than Bills and Suzys and Toms.

But the crime lab and the morgue were the last people in line. If they didn't restore identities to these people, no one would. Sometimes that was as important to her as finding out who killed them in the first place.

"Good morning, Catherine," Doc Robbins said when she walked in. The morgue, as always, was bracingly cold, but his mood seemed as sunny as ever.