He had never expected, when he first became a CSI, that he would spend a day doing something like this. Especially a day after he had already pulled a night shift. Walking around the city following old handwritten directions wasn't something they taught in school. But you did what the job demanded. The task of the moment set the agenda. If you tried to tailor the job to your preferences, you burned out fast.
He parked the Yukon and got out, carrying the directions in one hand and a backpack, which contained water and survival gear, in the other. He had known there would be some desert travel and prepared for it, wearing hiking boots, a T-shirt with a long-sleeved cotton shirt over it, and a ball cap. He didn't look much like a CSI, but at least he wouldn't perish in the wilderness. And his cap had the word "Forensics" printed across the front, so he had that going for him.
Warm Springs Road ended at Fort Apache. He doubted the road had extended that far back in Troy Cameron's time – at least, when he had described this route. Most of the houses Greg had passed had been newer than ten years old – the bulldozer stuff Cameron had mentioned. But Cameron did say that he walked for a long way in a straight line, away from the afternoon sun. That meant he was walking toward the east, and Greg, backtracking his way, had been driving into the west.
From this point on, all of the descriptions were of desert scenery. Fortunately, Cameron hadn't used a lot of plants as landmarks, instead picking rocks that reminded him of animals or places, the shapes of individual hills, and in one case a cloud formation. Greg figured that one wouldn't be too helpful.
He moved slowly into the wilderness, looking for a rock like a sheep's back, which was how Troy had described it. He guessed that would mean it had a woolly texture to it, maybe lots of lumps that would look like tight curls. It was, according to Cameron, on the side of a steep hill, and it was where he had turned toward the road.
Greg scanned the hills rising before him. They were dotted with desert scrub: low yellow-blossomed rabbitbrush, spindly ocotillo, bright green creosote, mesquite bushes with thorns like stilettos. One slope was particularly steep, although farther from the road than Greg expected, and high up on it was something that might have been a sheep rock. He made his way to it, tramping across soft din and then hard, bare rock. On the way up the slope, he leaned forward, into the hillside, for balance. A walking stick might have been a good idea – the last thing he wanted to do around here was grab the local plants for support, since most of them had barbs or thorns, daggers waiting to impale the unwary palm. He also kept an eye out for rattlesnakes. It was a little early in the year for them, but he didn't want to happen across one that didn't own a calendar.
When he got to the rock he had his eye on, not only was the upper surface oddly bumpy, but there was a broad main section and then a slightly offset smaller section on a top corner that, if he squinted a little, looked like a sheep's head.
Almost every time he began to despair, to think that whatever Cameron had observed ten years ago no longer existed, he came upon something that did. Cameron might have suffered brain damage if that bullet in the head predated the directions he wrote out, or he might have been a little off all along. But he had a good eye for permanence – for all of the landmarks that were long gone, such as the "laundrymat," there were others, such as the sheep rock and the half-moon, that were still around and not that hard to find.
After the sheep rock, he was looking for "the white cliffs of Dover." Las Vegas was a long way from the real Dover, a city facing onto the English Channel. Ferries and hovercraft from the European continent docked there, making Dover England's busiest passenger port, and Greg knew that even people who had never been there were familiar with its white cliffs.
The folded hills grew progressively steeper and rockier, beyond the sheep-shaped rock, so Greg assumed he was looking for a sheer cliff face, pale in color. He turned the indicated way – really, the opposite of the indicated way, since he was still working in reverse – and started off, eyeing the hillsides.
Tiny flies buzzed around his head – Grissom could probably have identified them from the sound alone, but as far as Greg was concerned, they were just airborne nuisances, nothing more – and he had to perfect a double-handed swat to keep them from just circling his head, avoiding first one hand and then the other.
He hiked for fifteen minutes before he rounded a bend and saw it – a high cliff, almost directly perpendicular to the desert floor, with a light yellowish cast to the exposed surface. Greg probably would have made the Dover connection even if he hadn't been looking for it.
He was walking toward the cliff, less than thirty yards away from it, when he saw the footprints.
The prints had been made by hiking boots, small but new, the tread still so sharp it cut deep, clear grooves in the dirt. And they were headed straight toward the white cliffs of Dover.
This was wide-open land, and there could have been a perfectly innocent explanation for them. Some nature lover out for a stroll on a spring afternoon. In another month or so, the weather would make it more difficult to do so, but desert rats loved these conditions, warm and bright.
Still, the direction they were headed made Greg wary. He kept hiking in toward the cliffs, but he made sure to watch ahead and to check his back trail, as well as looking at his directions and searching for the next landmark.
Believing in perfectly innocent explanations rather than expecting the worst was a good way to find himself faceup on Doc Robbins's slab.
18
Nick had been reluctant to let someone else drive the department's vehicle. But he had been even more reluctant to leave the crime scene, and Brass hadn't objected to the idea. The cop who took the keys returned in twenty-five minutes with the Yukon, bearing no obvious new dents or scrapes, so Nick was glad Aguirre had been willing to send him. Those twenty-five minutes could have been crucial at the scene.
Nick was under no illusions that the work he did there would ever wind up in a courtroom. The scene was way too compromised for that. And he was far out of his jurisdiction.
But crime-scene investigation had different purposes at different times. For the most part, it was meant to seal a conviction, to help a prosecuting attorney present an ironclad case to a jury. But it could also help point the finger at the right suspect in the first place. That was what Nick was trying to do now – to see if he could figure out who had shot up Meoqui Torres's house. As a corollary to that, because he believed the two cases were somehow connected, he wanted to learn if that information pointed back at whoever had killed Roland Domingo. If one led to the other, it would more than justify the time and effort he spent there.
The police who had arrived just before Brass and Aguirre left – and the EMS team that followed almost twenty minutes later – destroyed most of what little was left of the crime scene. The cops swarmed the porch, went into the house, stood around outside talking and smoking, trying to re-create the incident. They helped the remaining wounded, stabilizing them until the paramedics showed up, which Nick was glad of. But in their haste, they trampled what should have been evidence. The paramedics were worse; at least the cops recognized that they should have been more careful. And Nick didn't blame them for being anxious about the victims. He saw tears in the eyes of some as they tended to people who might have been brothers, cousins, or close friends.