Heavy footsteps sounded behind the door, the floor groaned, and Nick was afraid for an instant that the whole structure would tip over. Then the door swung open. "Yeah?"

"Hey, Calvin," Aguirre said, at a level just this side of a shout. "You doing okay?"

"Fine," Calvin said. He was a big guy, six-five or six-six, almost as broad as the whole doorway. Compared with him, even Richie Aguirre looked petite. He eyed the Las Vegas police through eyes narrowed with naked suspicion. "What do you want?"

"These guys are cops from the city," Aguirre replied. "They have some questions for you."

"I'm Captain Jim Brass, LVPD," Brass said. "Did you kill Robert Domingo?"

"Huh?" Calvin asked.

Brass repeated the question, louder. Calvin Tom cocked his big head toward Brass, then answered him with a sorrowful expression. "I wish I did."

"That right?"

'Yeah. I hate that bastard."

"But you didn't kill him?"

"I just said no, didn't I?"

"That's right, you did. You ever been to his house in the city?"

"I didn't know he had one."

"Where were you last night? Say, from midnight to two a.m.?"

"I was drunk," Tom said. He hadn't had to ponder the question for long.

"Drunk?"

Calvin Tom tugged at the hairs of his left eye brow, already so thin it almost appeared plucked. His cheeks and chin were so smooth that Nick wondered if he had to shave more than twice a week. "I got some drinks at a bar in the city. On the way home, I got sleepy, so I pulled over by the road. That's why my truck isn't here.'

"I'm not following. Why isn't your truck here?" Brass asked.

"A cop brought me home."

Brass met Aguirre's gaze. "Okay, Mr. Tom. Thanks for your time." He turned away from the door and started back toward the Jeep.

"Thanks, Calvin," Aguirre said. "You stay out of trouble now."

"Okay." Calvin Tom slammed his door hard enough to rock the trailer.

"That's it?" Nick asked angrily as they climbed back into the Jeep. "'You didn't do it, did you?' That's how a captain does things?"

"Did you get a load of his feet, Nicky?" Brass asked.

Nick was almost embarrassed to answer. "I, uh, I was still kind of stunned by the rest of him."

"I'm talking Shaquille O'Neal feet. You could raft across Lake Mead in one of his shoes. The footprints you found at the house were, what, eight and a half?"

"Yeah," Nick said. "But that doesn't mean -"

"Sometimes you gotta go with your gut," Brass said. "Mine tells me that if that guy wanted to kill Domingo, he would have squeezed him between his paws until he popped. He wouldn't hit him with something like a cigarette lighter."

"You're probably right about that," Aguirre said. He started the engine and backed away, watching for the dogs the whole time so he didn't run into them. "I remember this one football game when we were in high school. Calvin accidentally made an interception. Nobody passed to him, because he just wasn't that good, but he happened to be standing between the other quarterback and his receiver, and he was like this wall. The ball just fell against him, and he got his hands on it. He started for the end zone, and by the time he got there, I think there were six or seven guys hanging off him. They looked like Christmas ornaments on a tree."

"Still…" Nick said. "Can you check on his story? About a cop bringing him home?"

"Sure." Aguirre said. "Nothing to it. I figured maybe that's what happened when we got there and I didn't see his truck."

"That happens a lot around here?"

"Yeah, once in a while. We don't mind giving people a ride if it's not too busy. Calvin's a big man, but when it comes to drinking, he's a lightweight."

"Tell you what. Nick," Brass said. "If we turn up some physical evidence connecting Calvin to the scene, we can come back here and pick him up. It's not like the guy can hide, right? I think you can see him from space."

13

Because the paper scraps found in the John Doe's pockets and tent were so numerous, Catherine had called in forensic document examiner Professor Rambar to assist Ronnie Litra, the lab's night-shift Questioned Documents tech, along with the day-shift tech, to try to find out if anything in all of those pieces of paper pointed to the dead man's identity.

The review hadn't been completed yet – Catherine thought it could take days, if not weeks – but progress had been made, and now Rambar had come to Catherine's office to summarize their findings so far. Rambar was a distinguished-looking gentleman, with thinning gray hair, a goatee, and thin glasses. He sat with his spine erect, right leg crossing the left at the knee, his fingers interlaced on his lap. Greg was there as well, leaning against a tiling cabinet, listening intently.

"I appreciate you coming in on such short notice," Catherine began.

"I'm just happy that I was available," Rambar said. "I wouldn't have wanted to miss this for anything."

"That good?"

"That… let's just say interesting. It's not every day one comes across such a trove of documents. All in all, these appear to illuminate what seems to be a very disturbed man."

"Disturbed how?" Catherine asked.

"That's a question for a psycholinguistics expert, which I can't profess to be," Rambar replied. "You could feed these documents – or a transcription of them, anyway, since it would never be able to read them as they are – into a computer and no doubt learn much more about the man who wrote them. I'm afraid I can't tell you a whole lot about him; I can only address the documents themselves."

Greg knew that in the trade, a note jotted on a crushed toilet-paper tube was still considered a document, but even so, it sounded odd to his ears to hear those bits of random paper described that way. They looked more like trash than documents – the word seemed to give them more importance than they deserved. But then again, maybe not – maybe somewhere in them was the clue that would crack the case. He'd had to find them, photograph them, and bag them in huge plastic trash bags, and he was glad that interpreting them was someone else's responsibility.

"I understand," Catherine said. "What can you tell us about them?"

"First, and perhaps most significant, virtually all of them were written by the same person. Over a period of years but definitely the same hand. I checked overall form, line features, format, to the extent that I could, and the consistency is undeniable. There are changes, of course – most handwriting changes a little, month to month and year to year. But there are also enough markers that don't change that we can tell when the same author writes two separate notes even a decade apart.

"It was harder to get a sense of content, because the sentences themselves are often disjointed, or portions are missing, torn off, or what have you. Plus, as you know, much of it was obliterated by overwriting, even charring in many cases. Still, I can tell you that the author is a male, most likely older than twenty and younger than forty. As I said, the notes themselves were written over time, so I can't narrow down the age range much more than that."

"How can you read the writing that's covered by other writing or burned?" Greg had seen it done, but he still marveled at the fact that seemingly impossible-to-read text could be deciphered.

"We can't always," Rambar admitted. "Sometimes the best we can do is to establish that something has been altered or removed. Erasure through scraping or actually eliminating layers of paper will leave rough patches, and if someone tries writing over those patches with ink, the ink will usually spread more than it would have on the original paper. Chemical erasures leave stains that can be elected through infrared luminescence, oblique lighting, and so on.