Kapelos shook his head. "Nope; but I was in the back, in the office, most of the time. Ask the girls, or maybe Worm."
"The DJ?"
"Yeah. He knows Lipton. Anyway, I've seen 'em sit and chew the fat, before."
"Thanks for the coffee," Catherine said, and had a final sip.
The CSI was starting away when Kapelos said, "She was a nice girl, Cath-like you. Might a got out a the business one day…. Do me a favor?"
"Try to."
"Catch the son of a bitch?"
She grinned at him. "That's why they pay me the medium-sized bucks."
Catherine crossed the room to the opposite corner where the DJ was just pulling on his jacket. "You speak to a detective yet?"
He shook his head. Worm was maybe twenty-five, his black satin jacket bearing a Gibson guitar logo on the left breast. He wore black jeans, Reeboks, and a black T-shirt with a Music Go Round logo stenciled across the front. "That lady cop, she told me to wait around for her."
Catherine nodded. "Detective Conroy. Shouldn't be long. As soon as she's done in the dressing room, she'll be out here."
"It's all right," he said, with a good-natured shrug. "I've got nothin' better to do anyway. Still on the clock."
"So they call you Worm?"
He flashed an easy smile. "Name's Chris Ermey. Why they call me Worm's a long story-let's just say it involves a tequila bottle."
"I'll take your word for it," Catherine said, with a little smile. "Ty mentioned you know a guy named Ray Lipton."
"Yeah, sure, I know Ray."
"See him in here tonight?"
Worm thought about that for a long moment. "I might have."
Catherine cocked an eyebrow. "Might have?"
"Gets pretty smoky in here, but I thought I saw him, across the room-see, Ray usually wears that one jacket of his."
She nodded, letting him tell it in his own way, his own time.
"It's kinda like a letter jacket, 'cept it's denim with, like, tan cotton sleeves. Has the name of his company-Lipton Construction? On the back."
"And you saw him tonight."
"I saw a jacket like that, across the bar tonight-near the private dancer rooms? Guy had a cap on and dark glasses, coulda been Ray-only I think he had a beard."
"Does Ray have a beard?"
"When I first met him he did. Then he didn't. And I haven't seen him for a while, so he coulda grown it back. Hell, come to think of it, it probably was Ray. He hated Jenna working here, y'know."
"Thanks, Mr. Ermey," Catherine said.
"Am I done now?"
"No-I was just getting a little background. The detective will be with you soon, and go over all of this again."
The DJ nodded, said, "Fine with me, still on the clock," plopped on a chair, fished a pack of cigarettes out of somewhere and lit up.
Catherine went back down the hall, where she found Sara packing up the last of their gear. Conroy, moving briskly, came down the hall from the dressing room end.
"Get anything?" Catherine asked.
"Her boyfriend seems prime." She glanced at her notepad. "One Ray Lipton-lot of the girls mentioned him. Said he had an attitude about Jenna dancing here."
"Yeah, I heard that story too," Catherine said, and quickly filled the detective in on what Ty had told her.
"Doin' my job again, Catherine?" Conroy asked, kidding.
"I figured Ty might open up to me," Catherine said, lifting her shoulders and putting them down again. "For old time's sake."
"Well, evidently the Patrick woman lived with another dancer, a…" Conroy checked her notes.
"…Tera Jameson. They say Jameson used to work here, too, but took a job at another club, Showgirl World, about three months ago."
"Movin' on up," Catherine said.
"I'm going to talk to the DJ," Conroy said, "then follow up with Kapelos-half an hour, I'll be done here."
"We're wrapping up now," Sara said.
"If I can find Ray Lipton tonight," Conroy said, moving off, "I'll be bringing him in for questioning-you two want a piece?"
Sara and Catherine traded looks, then both gave Conroy nods.
Catherine said, "Let us know when you get back to HQ. In the meantime, we'll run our findings over to the lab and get the DNA tests started."
The two CSIs had the SUV loaded up when Sara remembered the videotapes; Catherine went back inside to talk to Ty Kapelos one last time.
"Ty," Catherine said, "we're going to need tonight's security tapes."
Kapelos was seated on a bar stool now, on the customer side of the counter; he was smoking the stubby remains of a foul cigar. "No problem, Cath. Got 'em in back."
Five minutes later he handed her a grocery bag brimming with videotapes.
Her eyebrows rose. "These are all from tonight?"
"Yeah, sure," Ty said, as he swept his hand around the bar, a king gesturing to his kingdom. "Eight cameras-can't be too careful, in this business. One over the door, one on each corner of the stage, two behind the bar, and that one at the end of the hallway. Seems like every other asshole who walks in the place is lookin' to sue me over some goddamn thing or another. Tapes don't lie."
"Thanks, Ty," Catherine said, arms filled with the bag, the heft of it reassuring. "We'll get these back to you."
"Keep 'em till ten years from Christmas," he said, "if it'll help get that son of a bitch."
Catherine glanced around, to make sure no one was looking, and gave the bar owner a kiss on the stubbly cheek.
Then-once again-she was out of there.
4
ARTHUR AND MILLIE BLAIR LIVED IN AN ANONYMOUS, cookie-cutter white-frame two-story with a well-tended barely sloping lawn on a quiet street in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood not far from the UNLV campus, where Mr. Blair worked. The effect of the Lynn Pierce disappearance on the Blairs was at once apparent, when Brass and Grissom rolled up in the unmarked car: every light in the house was on, lighting the grounds like a prison yard.
To Brass, the Blairs seemed like nice people, salt-of-the-earth church-goers who kept to themselves mostly, worked hard, saved money, raised their only son the best way they knew how. Then, one day, their lives had changed forever-just because of who they were acquainted with.
Happened every day. Somebody had to live next door to JonBenet and her parents; someone had to take the apartment next to Jeffrey Dahmer; John Wayne Gacy had next door neighbors on his quiet street; O.J.'s wife Nicole had girl friends close to her.
Lynn Pierce was Millie's friend, Arthur's too, and had trusted them with the tape that might now be the only link to what Brass still hoped was just a missing persons case, and not a murder. Even though the disappearance was in no way the fault of this nice couple, Brass could see the guilt there on their faces.
He could tell they felt they should know where she'd gone, even though they couldn't possibly have that information. Like most people caught up in a tragedy, the Blairs battled the feeling that somehow, some way, they should have done something, anything, to prevent this terrible situation…and they hadn't.
Yes, they could have come to the authorities with the tape right after Lynn brought it to them; but the Pierce woman had asked them to hold onto it for her. They couldn't have realized she might have anticipated her own murder, and was leaving a smoking gun behind, to identify her killer.
Only right now Brass did not have a murder-just a missing person. Nonetheless, he had brought Gil Grissom along, since at present the criminalist and his people were the only ones really, truly looking for Lynn Pierce.
The couple sat on their tasteful beige couch across from Brass and Grissom. Mr. Blair was in the white shirt, striped tie and gray slacks he'd probably worn to work that day. Nervously, the man pushed his dark-rimmed glasses back up his nose, so thick-lensed they exaggerated his eyes-to comic effect in other circumstances. Next to him, his wife Millie had on black slacks and a black-and-white striped silk blouse-dignified attire, vaguely suggesting mourning. She kept her arms crossed in front of her, clutched to herself, as if they could somehow keep out the problems that now faced them.