PART FOUR
Robbins returned slowly back to the autopsy lab. He pressed against the doors with the body of a dead vagrant from the morning CSI staff ahead of him and instead found he had living company. A very attractive red haired physician of some sort was dissecting Sadler's remains on the table by him.
"Excuse me, what are you doing here?" He asked.
"Federal agent Dana Scully," The lovely lady revealed her experience through her handling of his tools. "I hope you don't mind, but I made myself to home."
"I see that."
"I notice you tested Sadler's blood for agents." Scully answered. "How about his heart?"
"Normal." He flashed her his copy of his report. "It was still beating while he was fighting for air."
"But he wasn't getting air." Scully revealed with a non-committal look at the bearded coroner. "He was breathing in topsoil." She turned with a bowl of material removed from Sadler and weighed it on a scale. "About five point eight ounces of it in total not counting stones, below the surface debris and portions of bone."
"Bone?"
"He was pulled down head first into the grave of one Isaiah Laurence, a lawman from 1937 buried in the grave under him." Scully gasped and looked the body of Sadler over again. "No stress on the legs of the victim, but obvious stress on the underarms and upper body. No trace of ropes, tools or epithelials though. He was pulled underground."
"By what?" Robbins challenged the notion that any young man could be jerked underground. "Ghosts?"
"Why would you use that word?" Scully snapped off her gloves and tossed them before removing her glasses.
"Since I have been living in Las Vegas," Robbins looked over the vagrant brought in for him to examine. "I have heard repeating ghost stories from all over the strip. All the hotels have at least one about phantom guests or restless employees. The cemetery is no exemption. Officers check on inexplicable lights there all the time." He beamed hoping he had spooked her. Instead, she just folded her arms and narrowed her eyes trying to explain him.
"However," Robbins continued. "I'm a man of science. I've never heard a story that I felt couldn't be explained with a modicum of logic and common sense."
"How does one get pulled underground?" Scully asked.
"Vicious gophers?"
Catherine Willows and Nick Stokes meanwhile arrived at the loading docks of a plain blue warehouse marked Guthrie Furniture, a local furniture outlet.
Beyond the halls of the police station, Catherine Willows wore sunglasses as a guard from the sun. Nick, however, took one last sip from his soft drink and left it in the floorboard of the car expecting the lack of direct sunlight would delay the heating of his beverage. A glance to Catherine and he then turned and arched his head up to the bold black letters above his head reading Guthrie Furniture. They furnished simple to extravagant furniture to most if not all the hotels in the greater Las Vegas area. The warehouse was five stories tall and tiered with levels of chair, disassembled lamps and tightly packaged ready to assemble table among every sort of gambling extravagance to be believed. Michael McKinnon loaded furniture on to trucks here with a forklift, but when two police scientists arrived to question him, he took it casual and aloof until he knew what he might or might not be in trouble with this time. If it wasn't his ex-wife, it was his brother. McKinnon's employer was used to police coming to talk to his more colorful employees, but it was a first with McKinnon. The routine was the same each time: give the possible troublemaker a long lunch and then hope the idiot was innocent so he could finish the job by five o'clock.
"Mr. McKinnon," Catherine led the interrogation. "You worked for three months last year at the Clark County Humane Society." She looked to McKinnon in his white tank top and blue jeans. His sandy blonde hair was cut military style, he had the traces of a shaved goatee with five o'clock shadow and his build was wiry. A tattoo on his left arm read, "Kill all the lawyers!" He sat down with lunch out of a white plastic grocery bag.
"Yeah," McKinnon was not allowed to drink alcohol on the job. He pulled out his soft drink and sandwiches before the two CSI agents. "I was let go because of a misunderstanding."
"Misunderstanding?" Nick spoke up. "You were fired because you were stealing supplies."
"Not really," McKinnon sipped his drink with a trace of a derogative smirk. "We had an overflow of pet food there. We couldn't use it up fast enough before the rats got to it; so, Corrine, she was the manager, she let us take what we could to keep the rat problem down."
"You had cats there." Catherine realized. "How could you have rats?"
"They don't go in the rooms with the cats." Mike replied. "They go in the room where the food is. It's a twenty-foot long storeroom there and the bags of food are stacked eight feet high from end to end on a concrete floor and we were constantly being donated more. No one donates cleaning supplies, but if their dogs don't eat something, we get it. Believe it or not, but dogs are just as finicky as cats and they don't eat what they don't like."
"You weren't fired for stealing food." Catherine read the account from Corrine Holloway, the manager. "You also took a computer and donations for a fund-raiser."
"I was lead to believe the computer was being tossed out and a newer model would be replacing it." McKinnon continued eating his lunch. "It was all just a major understanding."
"How much of an understanding was it when William Braddock caught you abusing the animals?" Nick asked.
"Is that what this is about?" McKinnon looked disgusted and rolled his eyes. "Look, people are continually confusing the shelter with the dog pound. The place was set up to find homes for strays and unwanted dogs, but people kept dumping us with puppies, puppies, puppies and more puppies of every size, shape and breed. The place didn't have that kind of space and no one wants a dog that's going to be bigger than they want when it grows up. No one wants puppies, but they don't bother neutering dogs. I just sort of lost it because we had twelve different litters at once and no cages left. You know, just when you think there isn't a dog owner left in this county… Bam! We get ten more. We kept getting them from out of the county and across the state line!"
"Did you have a beef with Braddock when he reported you for whipping a dog with a leash?" Nick asked.
"No," McKinnon answered. "He did me a favor getting me out of that job. You know, I had to be up at seven in the morning to have the dogs run clean when we opened at nine and there was fifty of them. Puppies are worse because they crap everywhere. Even in their food and water. Here, I don't have to be here till nine and no one cares what I look like when I get here because I don't have to deal with the public."
"When was the last time you saw Braddock?" Catherine asked.
"The last time I was at the shelter." McKinnon answered. "Look, if you want to know where he is, check with his girlfriend, Dena Short. She could drive him nuts."
"In what way?"
"Mind games…" McKinnon responded with a dramatic air. "She would make plans for him and not tell him. She made plans for him to help her move to a new apartment while he was working, and then came by the shelter and chewed him out for not showing up. You know, she was a fine-looking thing, but I wouldn't let a girl, no matter the rack she had, make me jump through no rings."
"Did she abuse him?" Catherine head a cell phone go off and turned to Nick. He stood and took the call as she continued interviewing McKinnon.
"She'd call him names…" McKinnon vaguely recalled screaming matches he had eavesdropped on from behind the long side hall looking out the side cages at the shelter. "I think she kind of controlled that relationship. Braddock was always taking about breaking it off with her."
"Catherine…" Nick called her.
"Just a minute…" Catherine stood and joined Nick in the hall outside the employee break room. Nick had more news, but she had better news. Standing before snack and soda machines, she paused took a breath and gained her composure. "Braddock might not just be missing. We might be looking at a murder. He's either on the run, or a victim."
"Greg got a match from the epithelials on the dresses from the basement." Nick lowered his voice realizing he had something that put the case on its side. "He matched DNA from them on known epithelials from the vic."
"He was a cross dresser?" Catherine realized.
"Straight out of the mind of Norman Bates."
"How much like Norman Bates?"