Nick,
I am respecting the request of your attorney and have agreed to refer all questions and requests for comment to her office. I know Grissom has had a call from the DA in Texas informing him that all department inquiries must go through channels. We think he is losing the fight with the urge to call in favors, and I reminded him of your father's stated wish that we stay away from the case.
That said, I want you to know how difficult it is to do nothing, to trust that you know what you are doing. Not because I doubt you- you have proven to me in our years of friendship to be a smart, resourceful individual with bottomless reserves of compassion and loyalty.
Like Grissom tells us, "Timendi causa est nescire."
When you need us, call. We are here.
Sara Sidle
Las Vegas,
Nevada
- - -
Six years earlier. Oaklawn neighborhood, Dallas, Texas
"Freeze, police!" The young cop, Nick Stokes, held his flashlight steady but there was the slightest waver of fear and excitement in his voice. In front of him, his partner was slowly advancing on the two young men who had been breaking into the parked Pontiac.
"Raise your hands over your heads, boys," she said, edging around to one side to keep her partner's line of sight clear. As she came abreast of the two men, she saw a dull gleam of metal and body language that was wrong, very wrong. Just as she pulled her own weapon, she heard Nick shout, "Gun!"
Very quickly, the shorter of the two men turned towards her, his weapon swinging up. His companion turned the opposite way and started to reach into his belt. She fired, two shots, at the shorter man. The 9mm slugs entered through his sternum and under his clavicle. Both bullets tumbled upon hitting bone.
A tumbling bullet releases huge amounts of kinetic energy into the flesh of the target, creating a process known as hydrostatic shock. An overpressure wave tears like a tsunami through the soft tissues, causing injury akin to being stuck by a sledgehammer. The young man was dead before his body could fall the meter and a half to the pavement.
"Freeze, freeze! Don't move!" Nick was screaming and advancing towards the taller man who had spun away to the ground. He had his own pistol out
"Oh my god, oh Jesus, oh my god," the taller man was repeating over and over. Nick could see the spreading stain where the man had wet himself. There was already a puddle of blood stretching lazily towards the man from his fallen partner.
"Sanchez, you okay?" Nick yelled over his shoulder, reaching with one hand to grab his cuffs as he kept his Glock trained on the suspect. "Sanchez, talk to me, are you okay?"
"Yeah," something in her voice made Nick snap a quick look in her direction. She was standing over the body of the shorter man, who from this distance was obviously no older than 18 or 20. In his hand, he held a bent piece of flexible spring steel with a duct tape handle on one end. It was a slimjim, used for popping locks on automobiles, not at all unlike the one Stokes kept in the back of his truck for emergencies.
"Where's his weapon, Sanchez?" Stokes asked, cuffing the young man who had been reaching into his belt. From his hands, Nick took a wallet, which he must have pulled from his belt as he turned. The guy couldn't be more than 18, and was probably a lanky sixteen or seventeen.
"He… I don't see it," she said dully. "It must have slid under the car."
"Oh my god, you shot Deandre! You fucking shot him, oh Christ." The cuffed man was sobbing. Nick checked his wallet for ID.
"Okay, Marcellus, tell us what the hell you guys were doing, ok?"
"I locked my keys, man, and Deandre said he could open it for me. Is he alive? Call 911, man, you gotta call 911." He grew more agitated. "Deandre! Hold on, cuz! We gonna get you some help. What the fuck is happening?"
Sanchez looked into the car, and saw a set of keys dangling from the ignition. There was no sign of a gun, and there was a high school jacket on the back seat with the name "Marcellus" clearly visible over the letter for track.
"Oh, shit," Sanchez breathed softly.
- - -
Home of Catherine Willows, Las Vegas, Nevada
The doorbell startled her, and she jerked guiltily. Her daughter, who had been reading a magazine on the couch, laughed at her nervousness.
"Mom, you look so busted!" She tried to see what her mom had in her hands that she was so secretive about. Her mother folded the envelope and tossed it into her briefcase.
"Lindsey, could you get that?" Catherine nodded towards the door as she locked her briefcase and slid it under the table. She had a small office in her bedroom, but despite the larger floor plan made possible when she accepted Sam Braun's money, neither Catherine nor Lindsey had quite broken the habit of living full time in the front room as they had in their previous apartment.
Lindsey tossed her magazine aside and bounced up and over to the door.
"You are so not fun any more, mom," she said, opening the door.
Warrick Brown, wearing a thin black leather jacket over his blood red shirt, cocked an eyebrow at Catherine as he entered.
"Yeah, mom, when are you going to start being fun again?"
"Don't you start, Warrick." Catherine gave him a weary smile. She had agreed to go hear an old friend of his play piano tonight, but time had gotten away from her.
She grabbed her jacket and kissed Lindsey goodbye. It was still early afternoon and she expected to be home right after dinner. Her mother had promised to drop by with Chinese food and check on Lindsey for her later.
A few minutes after they left, Lindsey was sitting at the table, looking through her mom's briefcase, a bent wire close at hand to lock it again when she was finished. Her father had taught her a few things they didn't teach at her fancy new prep school. She wanted to see what had been nagging at her mom since she got home that morning.
She opened the letter.
"Miss Catherine Willows,"
"My office has been instructed to notify you that, in the event of the death of Nicholas Brendan Stokes, we are to provide you with a key to open the container left by him in your possession. Alternately, you may request us, at our expense, to collect the container and hold it until the conditions specified by Mr. Stokes or his estate. Please contact us within forty eight hours if you wish us to collect the container left to you by Mr. Stokes."
"Sincerely, Mr. Leslie Cummings, Esq."
"Baranduyn, Cummings and Baranduyn, LLC."
- - -
Outside "The Gypsy Tea Room" Club, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
The detective sat in the back seat of the Cadillac Escalade, watching through the tinted windows as the club across the street began to fill up. Deep Ellum had been an artistic and musical enclave in Dallas for generations. In the '20s legendary blues man Blind Lemon Jefferson had been discovered here. Over the last 20 years, Deep Ellum had seen a transformation from bohemian enclave to skater punk hangout to fringe eclectic scene, but there were always clubs, always house bands and white collar kids blowing off steam along side more authentic dangerous bad boys.
The Escalade belonged to one of the latter, a young man named Martin Hinojosa, who had put a truly spectacular juvie record behind him and stayed ostensibly clean through the first four years of his majority. A clean record and one season of minor league baseball in the Rockies farm system did not, however, explain a fully pimped-out Cadillac being driven by a 22-year old kid.
The detective looked on the floor of the back seat and noticed Martin's baseball bat. That bat had once driven a line drive double of a spring training pitch by Curt Schilling. It had also broken the knees of more than one potential informant at the behest of the detective.
The driver's door opened, and a stocky, powerfully built young man slid behind the wheel. He was only slightly thicker around the middle than he had been when he played every day, but there was something around his eyes that told an experienced observer that Martin Hinojosa was going to get soft, some day.
The detective leaned forward and spoke softly into Martin's ear.
"Nick Stokes is still alive."
Martin jumped and twisted, banging his funny bone on the leather covering the doorsill and nearly flinging his keys into the back seat. He was still breathing hard and trying to regain his composure when he saw the detective, and shook his head.
"Jesus, you trying to scare me to death?" Martin looked around, flexing his fingers to stop the sting from his elbow. Away from the street lamps and under the percussive sound of amplified conjunto music coming from the club, he was pretty sure no one could see or hear him talking to the detective.
"Not exactly," said the detective. The .22 semiautomatic pistol, slid between the seat and seat rest, produced almost no visible flash and only two muted "pop" sounds as the detective murdered Hinojosa.
The detective reached forward quickly and grabbed Hinojosa by the shoulder with one strong, latex-gloved hand, sliding the body down and away from the wheel. No sense in letting his body fall against the horn and ruin a stealthy transaction.
Peeling off the gloves and dropping them along with the pistol on the back seat, the detective slipped calmly out of the Escalade and circled the club on foot, heading for the DART station at Elm and Good-Latimer. There was a bus that would lead to the light rail Red Line, and so out to the suburbs.
It is possible to lift prints or even DNA-bearing epithelial cells from inside discarded latex gloves. Before boarding the bright yellow and white bus, the detective removed a second, inner pair of latex gloves, and dropped them casually in a public trashcan. In a few minutes the bus arrived at the train station.
The train was on time, and before midnight the detective was home in the North Dallas suburb of Plano, watching the local news on TiVo with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other. The discovery of Hinojosa's body was the number-three story, with a bullet.
- - -
Cell 1886, Huntsville, Texas
Otto Schillinger stood beside the bunk in his cell, reading information from a manila folder. His eyes, ice blue peering out from basset hound folds, tracked slowly along the photocopied pages in the folder.
The folder lay open on the upper bunk, and Otto read each page carefully before turning to the next. His current cellmate, a bitch named Riley, lay on the floor next to the immaculately made up lower bunk. Riley slowly cleaned Otto's shoes with long, slow licks of his broad flat tongue.
Otto stood with a self-disciplined posture that informed his spare frame with authority disproportionate to his average size. He looked up when his latest lieutenant, an albino body builder named Petersen, ducked his cropped head into the cell.
"Yes?" Otto continued to read.
"Stokes is here, Otto. Should I send him in?" Petersen was too tentative. He knew he had only advanced to serve Otto because Hammacker was lying in the infirmary, minus some important hardware. Otto knew he needed to either break Petersen soon, or else set him some task to elevate the boy to a man's position in the Brotherhood.
"Just a moment." Otto looked thoughtfully at the last page, and closed the folder on the Dallas Police Department confidential personnel records of Nicholas B, Stokes.
Otto nodded to Petersen. "Send him to me."
Nick entered a moment later, his face impassive as he noted Riley performing his chore. He looked to Otto, his hands at his sides.
"You suggested I come to see you, sir?" Nick's voice was nervous, but not unusually so. Otto made people more than a little on edge.
"First of all, no one calls me sir. White men, good Aryan men like yourself, are my brothers, and call me Otto. As for the niggers and the kikes and spics and mongrel trash that fill this miserable place, what they call me isn't really important, is it?"
"No, sir… Otto."
"You were a cop, Stokes." The camaraderie of brotherhood did not work in both directions. Hammacker, Petersen, Stokes. He wondered if Stokes was bright enough to pick up on that. His records indicated high intelligence but average grades.
"I was. A long time ago."
"Then you went to Vegas and were a cop again, Stokes."
Nick blinked, and smiled tentatively. "A criminalist. I worked in a lab, fingerprints, DNA, that kind of thing."
"You carried a badge and a gun, stokes. Don't bullshit me, or this will take a long time. I have all the time in the world. You might not." Otto turned and picked up the closed file, kicking Riley in the face as he did so. Riley scooted on his haunches across the floor, keeping his cheek pressed to the floor. Once Otto returned his attention to Stokes, Riley resumed his endless labor.
"And about six years ago, you got a notation in your jacket from DPD. You killed a negro boy." It wasn't a question.
"If I did, Otto, he needed killing." Nick stood a little straighter.
"Good answer." Otto put his hands on his hips and pursed his pale lips as he regarded Stokes. "So tell me why you're here."
Nick shrugged. "You know that. You know everything that happens here."
Otto squinted dangerously. "Humor me."
"Some cases, back when I was a cop in Dallas, might not have stood up. Especially against Latinos and niggers." The word came easily to him. "I made sure they did."
"Evidence tampering, intimidating witnesses?" Otto knew that this was the core of the case against Stokes, despite the seals on the Grand Jury accounts.
"Whatever it took." Nick shrugged, and idly scratched behind his ear where the tattoo was still visible under the stubble growing out. "It's not like they were white people."
"I see. But your partner is out there, and you're in here. She didn't know?"
Nick's face grew stony, and Otto could tell he was chewing old bile.
"She was a woman, a Latina, and sleeping with the watch commander. I was expendable, and my daddy had used up all his favors."
"Burying the shooting- of the nigger boy," Otto said shrewdly. He'd wondered why Judge Stokes hadn't pulled more strings. Looks like the bastard had cut loose his own son. That might work to Otto's favor, if he could find a way to play on it.
"Something like that," Nick admitted sadly.
"Well, Stokes, we might have some use for you yet. Tell Petersen to introduce you around." Otto's expression clearly told Stokes that he was dismissed.
"Thank you, Otto. I hope I can be valuable to you in some way."
Stokes left, and Otto turned to regard Riley, who grinned both nervously and toothlessly up at him.
"Oh for Christ's sake, bitch, put on some clothes and go get me some more cigarettes."