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  Besides, Stevie had lots of personal connections.

  "Fine," Jensen answered.

  Weinberg said, "What're you doing after the ID, Rom?"

  "Figured I'd talk to Dr. Kalil. Find out how Newel died. See if she was skinned alive."

  "Good God, is that level of detail truly necessary? I know, I know." Patricia helped herself to another serving of omelet. "Yes, of course it is. Find out if the guy is a sadistic killer or just a closet pathologist. Anyone notice if the body had stab wounds or bullet holes?"

  "It was dark, Deluca," Jensen answered.

  And old Steve had been as sick as a dog.

  Poe said, "I couldn't tell, either. I'll ask Rukmani about it. It would be nice to know if we should be looking for shell casings or a discarded knife."

  "Could you tell if the murder occurred at the body drop?" Weinberg asked.

  "Didn't see a big pool of blood." Jensen paused. "For whatever that's worth. It was real windy last night."

  "The desert sand is a natural litterbox," Poe said. "Blood could have been soaked up by the surface grit and blown away."

  "And just as easily," Weinberg said, "if there was enough blood, it could have seeped down a couple of inches and spread out in the underlying clay bed. And there it may lie still."

  "So I'll root through the surface sand," Patricia said.

  Again, Poe drummed the tabletop with his fingers. He said, "Aren't we forgetting about someone?"

  "Lewiston," Patricia answered.

  "What do you want to do about him, Loo?"

  "Premature to question him."

  "He fucked her, sir."

  "Rom, she was a hooker. He is an eccentric billionaire who has probably fucked three-quarters of the girls in this city. When you figure how much fucking was going on, their lives were bound to intersect. It doesn't mean anything."

  "He's a link." Poe paused. "I could go to him with the angle that I'm asking for his help."

  "He isn't going to swallow that horseshit. Parkerboy won't give us squat without proper papers."

  "Loo, if Brittany's sugar daddy had been Joe Blow—"

  "Who says Lewiston was Brittany's sugar daddy? The girl was a whore. They're notorious liars. You're basing all of this on the word of one disgruntled boyfriend."

  "So let me ask Lewiston about it. Let him deny it."

  No one spoke.

  Weinberg relented. "All right. After you're done with the ID, and after you've finished with Dr. Kalil and the crime scene, then you can go attempt contact. But don't be disappointed if you come back empty-handed."

  Jensen smirked. "You just want an excuse to go to the Laredo. No-limit tables. One-deck shoes."

  Poe returned the evil grin with one of his own. But the accusation was true. Steve knew his number. Equally true, Poe knew Jensen's quirks…down to the eye color of his whores.

  Too bad neither really knew Alison.

  SEVEN

  "IF YOU'RE asking me about a smoking gun, I'm going to tell you no, nothing yet. These things take time, Romulus."

  Rukmani was talking through a white paper mouth and nose mask. Head down, she was peering into a sea of tissue and viscera, probing at something red and squishy with a metal instrument. An hour ago, Trent Minors had been vomiting over Brittany's face. Now the young girl had been literally reduced to flesh and bones.

  Again, Rukmani spoke…more like muttered. Poe could barely understand her. "Can you take a break?"

  "A break?"

  "Yes. Like a coffee break. Or a tea break?"

  She looked up, covered the dissected body with a tarp. "Is the smell bothering you?"

  "A little." Poe snapped his fingers as his eyes swept across the steel room of death. They eventually settled upon Rukmani, dressed in surgical blues. Wrapped up like an anoxic mummy. He said, "It's hard to talk in here."

  "C'mon." She untied her mask, snapped off her gloves. "But only for five minutes. I don't like to leave my bodies unattended."

  "Thanks." He kissed her cheek. She stank of formaldehyde.

  Together they boarded a two-person staff-only elevator.

  Staff only.

  As if a morgue would be teeming with visitors.

  They took the lift to the third floor. Her office was immediately to the right. About the size of a coffin, but it had a ceiling and a lockable door, and it was all her own. A standard-issue desk and a couple of chairs. A wall of bookshelves held medical tomes and pictures of her two grown children—twenty-five-year-old Shoba, a sophomore at Harvard Medical School, and twentyseven-year-old Michael, a resident in radiology at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis.

  Married in the old country, Rukmani had given birth to her son two weeks past her sixteenth birthday. The untimely death of her much older mercantile husband, a hidden cache of rainyday money, and a couple of American relatives had given her a new life in the States. In the States, she wasn't judged by her caste or her in-laws. In the States, she wasn't forced to avoid the sun to keep her Indian complexion as Anglo-light as possible. Probably the reason why she had moved to Vegas. At the moment, Ruki was nutmeg-brown.

  "Sit." All business. She said, "What specifically do you want to know?"

  "Bullet holes?"

  "Not yet."

  "Stab wounds?"

  "None so far."

  Poe felt ill. "She died while this monster was gouging out her eyeball?"

  "Not necessarily."

  Poe drummed on her desktop, waited.

  Rukmani said, "There are other ways to murder besides stabbing and shooting." She made an imaginary needle with her finger and stuck it in the crook of her arm.

  Poe said, "He OD'd her first?"

  "Or at least sedated her. That's my guess."

  "You found something in her veins."

  "Bloodwork hasn't come back yet." Rukmani pushed her glasses back on her nose, then put her hands over his to quiet his fidgeting. "You look tired. Did you sleep at all?"

  "An hour at my desk this morning. What about you?"

  "About four hours." A pause. "Come to my place tonight. I'll cook you dinner. If your face drops in the mulligatawny, I won't say a word."

  "Sounds wonderful, but I'm probably going to pull another all-nighter."

  "Romulus, you can't work effectively on an hour's sleep."

  She was right. He said, "Nothing happens in this town before dark. I'll grab a couple of hours of sleep before I go out again."

  Rukmani looked grave. "Why don't you live in a normal house?"

  "I like where I live. It's very quiet."

  "It doesn't have running water or electricity."

  "Modern conveniences are highly overrated."

  "At least get a box spring for the mattress."

  "I couldn't get it through the doorframe."

  "So get a bigger door, for godsakes."

  "Why are you pissed at me? You know I'd love to come for dinner, spend the night with you engaged in wild, passionate lovemaking. Do you think I'm working by choice? I'm paid to do a job. Just like you."

  "There's work," Rukmani said, "and there's work-obsessed."

  "Ain't that the pot calling the kettle black?"

  This time, Rukmani remained quiet.

  Poe thought: Maybe this is why she's so standoffish. She doesn't like my house. Or my hours. Still, she keeps the same hours. He steered the conversation back toward business. "Why do you think she was sedated while he was…you know…flaying her?"

  "The evenness of some of the gouge marks. Almost ruler-perfect parallel lines. If she had been awake, she would have been thrashing about, and the lines would have been squiggly."

  "What about if he bound her?"

  "Even so, she could have squirmed unless he had her head in a vise. Even with millimeters' worth of motion, there would have been waves or chinks in the lines. Some of the rakes were almost…surgical in their precision."

  "Someone from the medical profession?"

  "Possibly. Or someone who's very exacting."

&nb
sp; Poe made a sour face. "So she was either sedated or dead when he…attacked her."

  "There was evidence of fresh bleeding into the depressions. I'd say she was sedated. Very heavily sedated. Alive but unconscious. She probably never felt a thing." She gave him a weak smile. "Small comfort."

  He thought about her words. "That could say something about the killer."

  "Like what?"

  "He's a control freak. Wants her completely defenseless so he can do his thing. Doesn't want to leave anything up to chance."

  "Or maybe he has sensitive ears and doesn't like screaming."

  Poe nodded. "You may have something there."

  "Sensitive ears?"

  "He doesn't like to hear screaming because he doesn't do torture for torture's sake."

  "Just enjoys raking human flesh?" Rukmani shook her head. "I suppose a boy needs a hobby."

  Poe was talking as much to himself as to Rukmani. "He likes killing. He likes…dressing his victim in a certain fashion. But like a hunter with his prey. Hunters don't get their kicks out of torturing animals. They like clean, kill shots. One big bam and the animal keels over. The thrill is the hunt."

  "And the head on the wall afterward," Rukmani stated. "Something they can brag about. Maybe that's what she was. A trophy kill."

  "She wasn't dressed or displayed like a trophy kill." Poe paused. "Of course, I got to her after she'd been in a windstorm. Who knows what she looked like before?"

  Rukmani said, "I should be getting back."

  Poe said, "Do you have a fix as to what kind of instrument made the gouges?"

  "I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that."

  "Go on."

  "I've found flakes of metal lodged where it touched bone…consistent with a rake or some kind of tool. But I've also found bits of tooth enamel."

  "Consistent with biting."

  "No bite marks, Rom. More like…methodical tearing at the victim with the teeth." She looked away. "There was something very animalistic about this death. Like he was…eating her—"

  "Oh Christ!"

  "—or more like grazing."

  "This is truly nauseating."

  Rukmani scratched at her hair tucked under a scrub cap. "This has not been an easy autopsy. It's going to take a while before I come to anything definitive." She stood. "I've really got to go."

  Poe got up as well. "I can't entice you with a quick lunch at my place?"

  "Lunch?"

  "Well, lunch and munch."

  Rukmani laughed, hit his shoulder. "I'd love to, but I've got this corpse—"

  "Aha! Okay for you to refuse me, but—"

  "Rom, you leave a body exposed for more than a short period of time, it screws up every—"

  "When it's your ox that's being gored—" Poe stopped talking. "Why did I say that?"

  Rukmani smiled with fatigue. "My place, tomorrow night?"

  "It's a deal."

  "We are really too busy. We never see each other."

  "Guess that makes us a true ideal American couple."

  "If we're going to lapse into mindless treadmilling and burnout, we might as well get married."

  "Name a date."

  She waved him off, kissed his cheek. "Mind if I don't walk you out? Brittany Newel is calling my name."

  Poe snapped his fingers. "You actually think of her as Brittany Newel?"

  "You bet I do. She had a name in life. I'll be damned if I'll take it away in death."

  Day, night, it didn't matter, the bars in Vegas looked the same—dimly lit, smoky atmosphere, lots of tabletop slots and poker machines. The saloon at Casablanca sat in the center of the casino, a giant disk with tables and chairs rotating a full circle every hour. Usually lounges-in-the-round were reserved for places with a view. But the only vistas here were the gaming pits and rows of slots. Patricia knew that was the point. To entice the drinkers to leave and gamble.

  It had been one hell of an afternoon. Productive, though. She had been the first to find evidence—a spike-heeled shoe. More important, she had found the purse—an ecrumacramé thing about fifty yards from where Brittany had been dropped. Blended in perfectly with the sandy layer of Las Vegas desert. It contained her driver's license, two maxed-out credit cards, three hundred bucks, and several plastic cellophane packets of rock crystal cocaine.

  Superficially, it appeared that neither robbery nor drugs had been a motive. But she knew that the whole thing could have been a setup to deflect Homicide.

  Still, she had been proud of herself. Weinberg had congratulated her, slapped her back, then given her a list of bars to comb. Twenty of them.

  And here she was, feeling as gritty as unwashed spinach, as dirty as a desert rat. She sat at the countertop along with a couple of pickled stragglers waiting for fresh crowds of gamblers to come and liven the evening, her eyes observing the natural ebb and flow of the casino. Cocktail waitresses with big bonkers, wearing gauzy stuff, their flat stomachs with jewels in the navels. They walked two and fro—from casino to bar, from bar to casino.

  The bartender approached her. Aladdin he wasn't. Then again, she was no Jasmine. He was Samoan or Tongan or something that screamed Pacific Islander—an extra-extra-large with frizzy black hair. He wore black harem pants and a purple satin vest over a white see-through shirt. Sandals on his feet. His name tag said Nate.

  Wiping the countertop, smiling with white teeth. "'Lo."

  "Club soda," Patricia answered.

  It was now six-thirty. Two hours of scouring the bars for Brittany's last stand had produced sore feet and a half-dozen hits—servers who somewhat recognized Newel's face. Unfortunately, no one remembered seeing her yesterday.

  Casablanca was bar number twelve on the loo's hit list. She had consumed twenty—count 'em—twenty club sodas, which necessitated about a dozen trips to the bathroom. How she suffered for her art.

  Patricia took out her badge, showed it to Nate, who looked at it without flinching. Didn't even back away. She was encouraged. Maybe he'd talk without a cattle prod.

  "You want a twist with that, Officer?"

  "Detective. Homicide."

  His eyes blinked. "Would you like a twist, Detective?"

  "Lime."

  "You got it."

  His eyes yo-yoed up and down over her girth, then jumped to her left hand. Patricia smiled to herself. Two humping rhinos.

  Not that she was that bad.

  Not like after she had left the service—honorable discharge, of course. She had thought she had it together…everything under control. But putting on those civvies, walking out of the base, feeling so dirty and violated. Then seeing him with that evil smile, giving her his famous little wave.

  She had gone back to her apartment and had thrown up.

  She hadn't ever been a thin girl. But there was chunky and there was obese, and she had crossed over to the latter. Within two years, she had ballooned to 250 pounds. She had never really figured out why she had suddenly reversed her self-destructive gorging. Maybe she had been sick and tired of letting Homer get the last laugh.

  She had starved herself in order to pass the department physical, surviving on air and a can-do spirit. But as soon as she made detective, she had started eating again. Stuffing her face until she had been sure that no superior could possibly be interested in her.

  And no one had been. Never even a hint of sexual impropriety.

  Perversely enough, the guys had been nice. Supportive. Helpful. Even a pussy hound like Steve was always available to answer questions. Slowly, the pounds started melting. She plateaued at 175. Not bad for someone who was five-eight and bigboned.

  Then this whole army sexual harassment thing hit. And Homer had called her—all sweetness and light. Eating to calm her nerves, she gathered her strength, called him, then told him off in explicit terms. It felt good! Unfortunately, she was suddenly back over 200. After a steady diet she was down to 185—holding steady.

  Nate placed the club soda in front of her, along with a bowl of peanuts
and a bowl of chips. Patricia pushed the bowls aside, took out a picture of Brittany Newel, laid it on the countertop.

  Nate turned it around, studied it. "Yeah, I've seen her before."

  Surprised by his honesty, she took out her notebook. "When?"

  Nate shrugged. "Don't remember. Maybe a week ago. Maybe two weeks ago."