Trying to keep the mess to a minimum, he begins a one man assembly line, cutting off a piece of his dead wife, then cutting off part of the shower curtain-with scissors?-and wraps it up like a piece of meat from the grocery store. Then he puts the pieces in garbage bags, taking care to weight down each bag-rocks? sink weights?-before he ties it off.
All the time he's doing this, Pierce has no emotional response to the fact that he's chopping up his wife. It's a job-nothing more. He has had so many bodies stretched out before him on his massage tables that the human body has no surprises for him-bones, muscles, fat, his fingers know them all so well.
If anything, he takes a grim satisfaction that he's obliterating Lynn's identity, this new identity, this born-again prude who replaced the woman he married. It somehow isn't enough to just kill her-she had been so concerned with spiritual matters, so obsessed with the heavenly world beyond this one, well, he would just relieve her of that cumbersome suit of flesh, removing it from existence: no body, no Lynn.
He also relishes outsmarting the police. If they somehow do come after him, and he is cornered, he will blame that squalid little dope dealer.
"Sadler did it," he will say. "Drug deal went bad for him, and he was desperate for cash-and I owed him money, and couldn't pay up."
But Sadler was in jail, when your wife disappeared, the cops would say.
"That's what Sadler thought you would think," he says. "The perfect alibi-but he had one of his 'homeys' do it for him."
And of course the police will believe him-in Pierce's mind, who wouldn't take the word of an upstanding white citizen over that of some black drug dealer?
But even dead, Lynn proves to be a pain in the ass-she pisses him off one last time, when he tries to slice through the pelvis, and the saw jams up in the bone, dragging the intestines out as he pulls the saw free. He feels foolish, for a moment, supposed expert at anatomy that he is.
But the moment passes, and before very long, he's finally finished down here. He cleans up the blood, making a thorough job of it, convinced he's left no traces for investigators to find. He loads up his SUV with his chain saw and his bags of "meat," hauls the saw and the bags over to Sadler's boat in the nearby storage shed, takes the boat out under the cover of darkness, onto Lake Mead, and rides around the rest of the night, dropping bags-and a chain saw, and maybe a gun-over the side.
The only thing Pierce misses is that one of the bags has a pinhole leak, dripping blood in the fishbox, on the deck, and on the gunnel before he finally gets it over the side. His subsequent thorough cleaning of the boat cannot remove these blood trails; but he does not know that.
Nor does the anatomy "expert" foresee the pelvic piece, still filled with gas, breaking free from its weighted bag, starting for the surface only to be caught up in the anchor chain of the Fish and Wildlife worker, Jim Tilson.
All Owen Pierce knows is that he has one last thing to do: he must turn himself into a distraught husband unable to find his runaway wife.
Grissom wondered where the body had been when they were in the house that first night. Had Pierce already brought his wife's remains here? And where had Lynn's car been during all of this?
He asked Warrick, "You got pictures and scrapings?"
"Doing it now," Warrick said.
"Nick," Grissom said, "you help him in here. Also, check upstairs for scissors Pierce might have cut the curtain with. Take a sample of what's left of those curtains, too."
"On it," Nick said.
"Jim," Grissom said, "you want to come with me?"
"Where to?" Brass asked.
"Outside-one more thing I want to check."
Around behind the house, invisible from the street, sat a small clapboard shed of a garage, barely big enough for a car and a few tools. It had two old swing-out wooden doors held together with a chain and padlock.
"You have the key for this?" Grissom asked.
Using the key ring Sadler had provided, Brass tried one key after another until, on the fifth attempt, the lock gave. Each of them grabbed a door and tugged. Slowly, rusty hinges protesting, the doors swung open.
No car occupied the dirt floor and only a few tools hung on the wall around the place; seemed Sadler wasn't much of a handyman. In the far corner sat a rusted garbage can. Striding over to the dented receptacle, Grissom poured flashlight light down into it. Shiny glints winked back at him. "I think I just found the driver's-side window of Lynn Pierce's car."
"Anything else?" Brass asked as he joined Grissom at the trash can.
Bending over, Grissom withdrew a wadded-up piece of paper, which he carefully smoothed out in a latexed palm. "Receipt for a replacement window for a 'ninety-five Avalon." Grissom flashed a smile at the detective. "Paid cash at a U-Pull-a-Part junkyard."
Brass wasn't smiling, though, when he said, "You think he'll have cute answers for all of this?"
"Why don't we call on him, and see?"
14
AT THE START OF SHIFT, SARA SIDLE FELT SHE HAD drawn the short straw-Catherine was on her way to Showgirl World to serve the warrant on the dressing room, while Detective Conroy was heading back to Dream Dolls to reinterview Belinda Bountiful and the other strippers-again. That left Sara to supervise the lab work at HQ, in particular following up on anything Greg Sanders might have come up with. With Grissom, Warrick, and Nick all tied up with the Lynn Pierce case, she felt like a ghost haunting the blue-tinged halls of CSI.
In particular, she hoped to take care of one frustrating detail. They had been trying to track down the Dream Dolls private-dance cubicle carpeting ever since Jenna Patrick's body had been found. Ty Kapelos provided Sergeant O'Riley with the name of the cut-rate retailer who sold it to him. O'Riley'd been having difficulty getting in touch with the retailer, a guy named Monty Wayne, who ran a small discount business in the older part of downtown.
"Guy's been on vacation," O'Riley told Sara yesterday, "and his only other employee is this secretary whose English ain't so hot."
But this evening, upon getting to work, Sara found, on her computer monitor screen, a Post-it from O'Riley saying Wayne was back from his vacation. Even better, the retailer had provided his home number, saying it was okay to call up till midnight.
Sitting behind her desk and punching in the numbers, Sara tried to fight the feeling that she was spinning her wheels while everyone else on the CSI team was doing something really productive, not to mention more interesting. The phone rang twice before it was picked up.
"Wayne residence," a rough-edged male voice intoned.
"Mr. Wayne?"
"Yes."
"This is Sara Sidle, Las Vegas P.D. criminalistics. You spoke to Sergeant O'Riley, earlier?"
The voice brightened. "Ms. Sidle, yes…been expecting your call. How can I be of help to the police?"
"Sergeant O'Riley spoke to you about this carpeting in the back of Dream Dolls-"
But Wayne was all over that, wall to walclass="underline" "Oh yeah, I remember that shit. And it was shit-that Kapelos character got it cheap because I could barely give the stuff away."
"Why is that?"
"Came from this manufacturer in South Carolina-Denton, South Carolina. I used to buy a lot of stuff from them, but they been slipping. I took these two rolls as a sample."
"Would you know if anybody else locally carries it?"