Brass in Pocket Read online

  “I spend more time with dead people than live ones,” she said.

  “Who got dead?”

  “Tiffany, for one. If you’re Halden Robles.”

  “I am. Who’s Tiffany?”

  “Your dog?”

  “Oh.” He grinned. “Come on, you’re really here about a dog?”

  “I am.”

  “That was like five years ago. Don’t tell me you’re actually investigating dog kidnappings now.”

  “No, Mr. Robles. Only when they might be associated with some other crime.”

  “You know how close people get to their dogs? That was me and Tiffany. She was like my kid. Or, I don’t know, my sister, only without the mouth my sister’s got on her. I loved that dog, man.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” The words, so familiar to Catherine that they flowed from her mouth almost without conscious consideration, seemed odd in this context. Not quite right, but not quite wrong, either.

  “Thanks. So what’s this all about? The same person who snatched Tiffany take another dog?”

  “Maybe several of them, Mr. Robles. Do you have any idea who took her?”

  He pawed his open shirt aside and scratched his chest. “I lived in Las Vegas then. Way on the edge of town. Not like this place, the houses were farther apart. Neighbors weren’t all up in each other’s business all the time. Tiffany would bark her head off if anybody came around my house. I guess there were some strange people in the area.” He chuckled. “They probably would have said the same thing about me.”

  “Any who still stand out in your memory?”

  “There was this one guy who kept adding onto his house with sheets of corrugated steel or plywood or whatever he could find dumped someplace. He used to practice target shooting in his yard, painted a Confederate flag on one of his walls. He wrote letters to the newspapers about the dangers of illegal immigration—this is before it was sexy, you know? Drove this jacked-up truck he painted in a camouflage design. And he always slowed down when he went by my place, giving me the dick-eye, like maybe I was smuggling Mexicans in or something.”

  “Charming. You remember his name?”

  Robles wrinkled his forehead. “No. Bill something… some plain name, I don’t know.”

  “Did he ever specifically threaten you or the dog?”

  “No. But if he could have shot me with his eyes, I’d have been dead a long time ago.”

  “Does anybody else come to mind?”

  “There was a kid who used to deliver pizza who always looked at Tiffany. He didn’t want to play with her, just stared at her. Skinny white kid, always a little nervous, like he was maybe afraid of her. Little girl from down the road liked to play with the dog, but I didn’t want her to because I wanted to keep Tiffany a little wild, you know? So she’d bark at intruders and whatnot. Most people left us alone, and that was the way I liked it.”

  “I don’t suppose you remember either of their names?”

  “The girl… her name was Maryluz something. I’m not so good with last names, I guess. Pizza kid… I don’t know, it was a long time ago. Donnie, Dougie, something like that maybe. I’d tell you to check with the pizza place but they went out of business before I even moved away. Area’s grown a lot since then, there’s probably all kinds of chain places going in.”

  “Probably so,” Catherine agreed. “Do you know for sure that somebody took the dog? She didn’t just run away?”

  “She wouldn’t have done that. She used to sit in the yard for hours. No fence, nothing. She would stay there all day and all night if I wanted. No way she would have just taken off.” He narrowed his eyes, looking at Catherine as if something had just occurred to him. “If you’re here, does that mean you found her? Or you found her tags or something? She was legal, straight up.”

  “We found some… remains, I’m afraid. Some hairs that survived, probably because they were buried in a dry area, and we were able to identify Tiffany from that.”

  Robles shook his head. “Hairs? And you came out here for that?”

  “Like I said, it’s part of a bigger case. But I really can’t talk about that.” She handed Robles her card. “Thanks for talking to me, Mr. Robles. I’m sorry I bothered you at this hour, and very sorry about your dog, but I appreciate your cooperation.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Some beautiful cop knocks on my door in the middle of the night, it’s easier to take if she’s not trying to jam me up over something.”

  “I imagine it is. Please call me right away if you think of anyone else who might have wanted to hurt Tiffany, Mr. Robles.”

  He flicked the corner of the business card. “I will, don’t worry.”

  “Good night, then.”

  “’Night.”

  He didn’t close his door. He stood there, looking at Catherine. Finally, she turned away and went back to her vehicle. Unless he had a sudden flash of memory, this wouldn’t help her find Melinda Spence.

  Suddenly, getting back to the lab took on greater urgency than ever.

  “Greg?”

  He almost dropped the plastic tubing, so startled was he by the officer’s voice. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Rosen’s in the interview room for you.”

  “Rosen?”

  “Airport guy?”

  Greg remembered. Riley had collected some long red hairs in the material that she had vacuumed from the airplane cockpit—her speculation was that Jesse Dunwood had yanked out a hank of them while the nameless redhead was performing one of those acts that he liked having done to him while flying. There had been plenty of follicular bulbs still attached, from which Wendy had been able to get nuclear DNA, and from that she had identified the legitimate owner of those hairs as one Martina Rosen, the manager of an independent Las Vegas coffee shop. Greg had asked to have her husband, a financial analyst named Fred Rosen, brought in for questioning, since he, not his wife, had threatened Dunwood’s life.

  Now it looked as if he would be doing that questioning himself, since just about everyone else who could do it was off on some other case, and all he was doing was cutting plastic tubing.

  He was thrilled to have a distraction from that chore, important as it might be. He picked up the growing Dunwood file, went into the interview room, opened the door, and saw a lean, curly-haired man in wire-rimmed glasses sitting behind the table. The man’s shirtsleeves were pushed up over freckled, muscular forearms. He looked like a tennis player, with that stringy leanness that hours on the court brought.

  “You’re Fred Rosen?”

  “That’s right. Should I have my attorney here?”

  “That’s your call, Mr. Rosen.” Greg sat down across from him and put the file on the table. “You haven’t been arrested or charged with a crime, so I haven’t read you a Miranda warning. But of course you’re entitled to an attorney if you want one.”

  “Maybe you should tell me what this is all about,” Rosen said. “And tshen I’ll decide.”

  “That’s fine. My name’s Greg Sanders. I’m a level-three crime scene investigator with the Las Vegas Police Department’s crime lab, which is where we are.”

  “I’m aware of that, Mr. Sanders. I’m not stupid.”

  “I’m sure you’re not.”

  “I appreciate the introduction, but you haven’t addressed my question. What am I doing here?”

  Greg refused to let him lead the conversation. “Your wife is Martina Rosen?”

  Rosen scowled. As he had declared, he wasn’t stupid. He could see what Greg was doing, and he was smart enough to know he had to go along with it. But he was perfectly willing to show that he didn’t like it. “That’s right.”

  “She has long red hair?”

  “I don’t know if it’s long. A little past her shoulders, I guess.”

  “Her DNA is in the CODIS database.”

  “If you say so.” He glared at Greg for a moment, then peered at the mirror as if trying to see who was behind it. He sighed and knuckled his eyes under his gl
asses. “She was raped, all right? Ten, eleven years ago now. DNA samples were taken from her as evidence, so I imagine that’s what’s in the database.”

  “Probably so,” Greg said. He already knew that, but he wanted to get Rosen talking about anything but Jesse Dunwood. A painful subject was even better, because if it tweaked Rosen’s emotions, the truth would be easier to reach. “I’m sorry I had to bring that up. Is your wife at home now?”

  “Of course. She’s home in bed, like any sane person would be.”

  “And you pretty much always know where she is at any given time.” Greg felt a little sleazy, going there. But if Rosen had killed Jesse Dunwood because of his wife’s affair with the pilot, he had to find out, and he couldn’t do that by dancing around the topic indefinitely.

  “Of course I do. She’s my wife.”

  “Some people lose track of their spouses from time to time. Some spouses don’t like being on a short leash.”

  If Rosen had been a wild animal, Greg would have worried about being bitten. “I don’t see how my marital life is any of your business. The fact that she was raped doesn’t make her some kind of a tramp, you know.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Rosen. But in a homicide investigation, our job is to follow the facts. The fact is that your wife had an affair with a man named Jesse Dunwood, isn’t it? A pilot? Didn’t you assault him recently, at the Desert View Airport after he took her up for a night flight?”

  “Okay, yeah. She’s not the most faithful wife in the world. So what? I followed her one night, and I saw her come out of the plane with that creep and I decked him. End of story. If you already know all the answers, why do you bother asking questions?”

  “I didn’t say I know all the answers—but I know enough to understand when you’re being evasive. And I have to tell you, in your present circumstances, evasive isn’t the way you want to come across.”

  Rosen shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “Wait… now you’re talking about a murder? Maybe it is time to call my attorney.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “What is it going to take to convince you I had nothing to do with whatever this is all about?”

  Since they didn’t know precisely when Dunwood’s plane had been sabotaged—only that he had last flown it four days before his final flight—it would be hard to pin down a specific time to ask Rosen about. The tube could have been planted any time during those four days. Greg could check under the man’s nails for grease from the engine, but that could have been washed out over several days. Instead, he took a different tack. “What do you know about airplanes?”

  “Fasten your seat belt, don’t tamper with lavatory smoke detectors, in the unlikely event of a water landing your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device. Don’t count on a meal anymore, you’re lucky if the peanuts are free. And if there’s a gremlin on the wing, don’t shoot it from inside the plane. That’s pretty much it.”

  Rosen’s sense of humor was encouraging, showing that he wasn’t too anxious. That could imply innocence. On the flip side, it could mean he was a conscienceless murderer. “Do you carry a knife of any kind?”

  “I work in a bank, what do I need a knife for? I mean, there’s one of those dinky Swiss Army jobs on my key chain. Not much more than a letter opener, really. I do use the toothpick attachment sometimes.”

  “Do you mind if I take a look at it?”

  Rosen fished a bunch of keys from his pocket and tossed them on the table with a clatter. “Knock yourself out.”

  Greg picked up the keys, isolated the little red knife, and opened its biggest blade, which was barely an inch and a half long. It would cut eighth-inch plastic tubing, though.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  “Wait, you’re taking my keys?” Rosen asked.

  “I don’t need the keys, just the knife. You want to take it off the ring?”

  “No, go ahead and take it all.” Rosen crossed his arms over his chest and dropped his chin. Funny how a grown man can look like such a little boy sometimes, Greg thought.

  Greg carried the keys back to the layout room, where he had left his tubing samples and tools. He made a couple of cuts and took a picture of the knife. Then he took it back to the interview room, bringing with him the uniformed officer who had been waiting outside. Rosen was sitting where Greg had left him, still pouting.

  “Thanks,” Greg said, handing back the keys. “You can go now.”

  “I can go?”

  “Yes. The officer will take you home.”

  “So we’re done?”

  Greg didn’t think Fred Rosen had killed Jesse Dunwood. He could have been wrong, but the guy didn’t strike him as a murderer. He was upset but not afraid; he seemed genuinely put out that he’d been hauled in, offended that he might be accused of such an act. If the knife cuts matched up to the actual tube, Greg would have to rethink his position, but for the moment he had no reason to hold Rosen. “We’re done for now. Don’t make any vacation plans just yet.”

  “I don’t take vacations,” Rosen said. “I work.”

  And that, my friend, Greg thought, just might be one of the reasons your wife takes night flights with other men.

  22

  “I’M SURPRISED THE SECURITY people at the Palermo didn’t catch this,” Archie Johnson said. He had summoned Catherine to his A/V lab, and she had hurried down to see what he’d turned up. He was running through the video footage from the Palermo’s surveillance cameras that Glenn had burned for Catherine.

  “Me too,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like they don’t have good equipment.”

  “The best money can buy. And when you’re talking casino surveillance, I mean a lot of money. Those guys have too much on the line to cut costs there, either in equipment or training. But there can be human error, same as anywhere else.”

  “We can’t afford any human error tonight, Archie.”

  “That’s why you’ve got me. Look, there’s Me-linda.” He pointed out an attractive young woman on the screen. She was curvy, just this side of voluptuous. She wore, as her father had said, a silk top and jeans. And sensible shoes, albeit leather ones with a little bit of flair to them. She was walking out of the Palermo’s buffet restaurant with other members of her family. Catherine recognized her father, hand-in-hand with a woman who looked enough like Melinda to be her mother. A time stamp in the lower-right corner of the screen said 19:42:11.

  “Okay,” Catherine said. “This must be the last time her family saw her, when she left the restaurant. That’s what her father said.”

  “Right. It took a lot of guesswork at first, but I’ve managed to edit together a reel that shows where she was when. I had to figure out where I thought she might go as she moved from camera to camera, and then widen my search if I didn’t find her in one camera’s field of view. A couple of times she managed to get completely out of view, and then I had to widen even more, but she always turned up again. I used facial recognition to search for her those times.”

  “You’re right—that’s nothing the Palermo shouldn’t have been able to do.”

  “Yeah, if they’d been willing to spend the time. But here’s where it gets trickier,” Archie said. “She played the quarter slots for a while, then went up to her room. They don’t have cameras on the guest floors, though we can see her on the elevator, and getting off on twelve. That’s where her room is, twelve-fourteen. The Spence family is spread out over three floors: ten, eleven, and twelve. She shares a room with one of her cousins.”

  Catherine watched the events Archie described unfold on the video. The time stamp said 20:19:51 when she left the elevator. The screen went black for an instant, and then she got on a different elevator, wearing different clothes—a loose sweater, blue jeans, and sneakers. The time was 20:28:17.

  “She changed clothes.”

  “A lot of people aren’t used to how cold the air- conditioning is in the casinos,” Archie said. “They wear something a little more rev
ealing, and then realize they’re freezing their… whatevers off, and they go change.”

  “That shouldn’t cause facial recognition software to fail, though.”

  “It didn’t. Here’s where it failed.” He fast-forwarded through Melinda’s journey through the casino, back to the quarter slot machines, and a twenty-five-minute stretch of her playing there. Then she got up, crossed from the field of view of one camera, and emerged into that of another. But this camera only caught her from behind as she went into a casino bar, sat down facing the bartender, and ordered a drink.

  “She never showed her face to the camera,” Catherine observed.

  “That’s right. That’s where my zone method beat out their FR. I was watching for her to enter another zone, and when she finally did, I was ready. If I’d been relying on the FR software, I still wouldn’t have her.”

  “Which you could do because you’re you, and you’re not also watching for card cheats and scam artists and hookers and thieves.”

  “That’s right.” Archie hit fast forward again. “So she sits in the bar, sipping her drink for about twenty minutes.” He returned the footage to regular speed. “And then this guy shows up.”

  A skinny young white man came into the bar, eyed the clientele, and then picked the stool next to Melinda Spence. He said something to her, and she turned to greet him, offering almost enough of her face to the camera for the facial recognition software to pick her up. The man was about her age, maybe a couple of years younger. He wore a porkpie hat, dark glasses, a white T-shirt under a black blazer, and skinny black jeans. He kept his face away from the camera, maybe deliberately, and the hat and sunglasses helped.

  “They stay there for a half hour,” Archie said, fast-forwarding again. “But at twenty-four minutes…” He slowed the footage, slower than real time. “Okay, watch his hand.”