Far from the glittering lights and 24/7 spectacle of the Strip, the Las Vegas Crime Lab's team of investigators is gearing up for a rough night ahead.... A brutal shooting at a cheap motel may be business as usual for CSIs Catherine Willows and Nick Stokes, but as they process the crime scene and quickly identify the victim as a noted local private investigator, nothing could prepare them for the shock of finding physical evidence belonging to none other than Detective Jim Brass.... Meanwhile, CSIs Greg Sanders and Riley Adams are called to a nearby airport where they must face the ultimate locked room mystery: how a pilot flying solo in a small private plane wound up murdered while miles above the ground....
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Brass in Pocket
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1
THE BULLETPROOF WINDOW was his first clue.
It shouldn't have been, but Brent McCurdy was beat. He had driven most of the way from Denver, snatching a couple of quick naps while his wife Charlene took her turn behind the wheel. They only had a week's vacation, and they wanted to spend that week in Las Vegas, playing slots and craps, watching shows and having fun...not staring at the highway between Vegas and Des Moines. So they powered through, Des Moines to Denver in one stretch and there to Vegas in the next, and by the time they reached the Rancho Center Motel at eight-forty that Friday night, Brent was stick-a-fork-in-it done.
A VACANCY sign burned in pink neon, like the legs of a flamingo set afire from within, but the motel office was dark, the door locked. Brent pressed his hands to the glass and stared inside. The place had a threadbare carpet with so many cigarette burns they looked like part of the pattern, and a scarred Formica counter with a big analog clock on the wall behind it. Had there been anyone inside, that person would have looked out and seen a man who was barely describable, of average height and average weight, with the slightest paunch swelling his dark blue polo shirt. His hair was brown, not long but not exceedingly short. His eyes were brown and unremarkable. In the eleventh grade, Brent's history teacher had recommended that he consider a career in the FBI, because he was a person who could blend in. He had decided against it, and now he managed a chain sporting goods store back in Iowa, and sometimes -- but only rarely -- regretted that decision.
Brent noticed a window built into the wall, almost like a drive-up window in a fast food joint, that could be accessed from behind the counter. He left the door and walked over to that window, finding thick, bulletproof plastic, scratched and fogged with age, with a little slot at the bottom to shove money or a credit card under and a small metal grate to speak through. A faint light glowed through the window, coming from a hallway he could barely make out. Looking through the Plexiglas was like trying to see through a blizzard. He'd had that experience a few times, which was why he had scheduled his vacation days for summertime. Driving in whiteout conditions didn't make for a relaxing beginning or end of a trip.
Finding the window tipped him off to the various signals that hadn't registered at first. Those had been, in fact, broken liquor bottles crunching under his feet as he walked from his parking place. Those had been used condoms and an empty syringe mixed in with greasy burger wrappers and lipstick-stained cigarette butts up against the curb. And those women he had barely noticed, coming out of a room at the end of the building? Well, back home he didn't see a lot of women in sparkly, low-cut spandex tops and skirts so short they could almost have qualified as belts, swaying with practiced near steadiness on four-inch heels, but that didn't mean he had never seen hookers before. Once in a while on the streets of Des Moines, but on TV, mostly. He had pay cable, after all. He should have known at a glance what they were.
He looked back toward his Ford Escape, a vehicle that had never before seemed so aptly named. Charlene and the kids were still inside, waiting, every bit as tired as he was, if not more so. They just wanted to get checked in and put their heads down on comfortable pillows. Brent had yet to inspect the pillows so he couldn't have testified to their comfort, but there was a young guy emerging into the hot July night from a room five doors down from that bulletproof window, and he wore an expression of such rapturous bliss that Brent guessed he was either high or he had just gone through a profound religious experience.
The Rancho Center Motel didn't seem to lend itself to the latter.
He should have done more thorough online research. The location had been convenient to both the Strip and Fremont Street, and the price was definitely right. But this joint was no family motel. The pool, surrounded by a chain-link fence out in the middle of the parking lot, didn't even have water in it.
He could tell by a shadow on an inside wall that someone was coming down the interior hallway, toward the bulletproof window. Brent didn't want to have a face-to-face conversation with anyone who worked here. He didn't even care about getting his deposit back. He could call and cancel the reservation later, and he would only lose one night's rent. All he wanted was to flee this dump and find another room somewhere in the city -- a room at a place in which he wouldn't feel that his life and the lives of his family members were in danger at every moment.
He turned away from the oncoming shadow and hurried to the Escape. When he opened the door, the dome light came on and Charlene blinked at him and raised a hand to her cheek. "Is everything okay, honey?"
"Nothing's okay," he said. "We're going somewhere else."
"Somewhere else? You mean a different motel? Why?"
"Because this place is awful," he said. Brent Junior and Carnie were sitting up in back, sleepy-eyed but awake, so he didn't want to go into a lot of detail. There was no sense terrifying the kids on their first night in Las Vegas.
"But I wanna go to bed!" Carnie cried. She was only four and hadn't been looking forward to the trip anyway, except for the promise of a swimming pool at the motel. She shook a stuffed lion at him with animal ferocity. "I'm tired!"
"We're all tired, Carnie." Brent closed his door and clicked his seat belt into place. "We'll find a better place. It won't take long."
"But we have reservations here," Charlene said. "What if there's a convention in town or something and we can't find another place?"
"There's always a convention in Las Vegas, Charlene, but there are something like a million hotel rooms in the city. I read that somewhere." He was probably exaggerating, but there were a lot of them. He had read the precise number, but if he was any good with numbers he probably wouldn't be making his living with bats and balls and racquets and shoes. "We'll drive around all night if we have to, but we're not staying here."
"Aren't most of them more expensive than this one? That's what you said, right? This one was a bargain?"
He put the vehicle in reverse and backed out of the space. "So we'll skip the shows, or cut back on meals. I don't care. This place -- "
Brent Junior had been about to register an objection of his own, his six-year-old whine already gathering steam, when a loud bang sounded from behind them and silenced the boy. Brent thought it was the sound of a door being slammed. He shoved the SUV into drive and stepped on the gas. The engine's growl nearly drowned out screams from the motel. But then he heard shouting and a sharp report, louder than the first bang, and saw a bright spark near the pool that must have been a muzzle flash.
"Somebody's shooting!" he shouted. "Call nine-one-one!"
Charlene was already pawing her phone from her purse as the vehicle surged from the parking lot, cutting the angle wrong and bouncing off the curb with two wheels. Brent didn't care.
He just wanted to get gone, while he still could.
"Catherine's in charge."
Those had been Gil Grissom's last words before leaving the lab for the airport. He was flying off to Washington, D.C., where he would be a featured speaker at a symposium on forensic entomology, after which he would testify before a congressional committee about the necessity of public financing for small city crime labs. As it was, most rural, small town, and small city police forces sent their caseloads to the big city labs, which were already backed up with their own big city crime. The additional workload slowed everything down, a vicious circle that left felonies unsolved and criminals on the streets. Gil would be more comfortable talking about the insects that frequented dead bodies, but his testimony before Congress would be sincere and convincing, and Catherine Willows couldn't help feeling a tickle of associational pride at the knowledge that her boss was helping to make a difference on a national level.
She also didn't mind being in charge. She had kind of enjoyed it, in fact, when she had temporarily been swing shift supervisor. If she rather than Gil had been the actual supervisor, the lab would be a different place, but primarily in small, cosmetic ways. Gil ran it well and she had few real complaints about his leadership. Still, she was an ambitious woman with ideas of her own and the drive to want to put them into action. But if Gil hadn't been out of town, she might not have had to go to the Rancho Center Motel, which was just the kind of hole that made her want to burn her clothes and scrub her skin down with steel wool when she was finished. On this hot night, with the overloaded window air conditioners dripping onto the sidewalk, the building itself seemed to be sweating. The parking lot held a peculiar reek all its own. And she hadn't even reached the DB yet.
That was still waiting for her inside Room 119. The door from the parking lot was open. Catherine and Nick Stokes had to pass under yellow crime scene tape and sign a log sheet to get to it...a far cry from the more exclusive spots around town, where the crowd control ropes were crushed velvet and the bouncers didn't wear uniforms and badges.
"Take a deep breath, Nicky," she said outside the door. "Bad as it is out here, it'll be much worse in there."
Nick raised an eyebrow and twitched his lips, the closest thing to a smile he could muster at the moment. He knew the score. Catherine didn't think the reminder would offend him, but she had to watch herself. She was nobody's mom but Lindsey's, and Lindsey didn't work at the Las Vegas Police Department's crime lab.
The motel room looked pretty much as she had expected it to. She had been here before -- this wasn't the joint's first homicide -- and this wasn't the kind of place that spent a lot of money on regular remodels. A bed sat in the middle of the room, wi...
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More About the Author
Jeffrey J. Mariotte is the multiple award-winning author of more than forty-five novels, including original supernatural thrillers Cold Black Hearts, River Runs Red and Missing White Girl, horror epic The Slab, thriller The Devil's Bait, and the Stoker-Award nominated teen horror quartet Dark Vengeance, as well as books set in the universes of Supernatural, CSI, Spider-Man, Superman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Conan, 30 Days of Night, and more. He is also the author of more comic books than he has time to count, including the horror graphic novel Zombie Cop, the original Western series Desperadoes (some of which have been nominated for Stoker and International Horror Guild awards) and the bestselling Presidential Material: Barack Obama. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers, Western Writers of America, and the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. With his wife, Maryelizabeth Hart, and partner Terry Gilman, he co-owns Mysterious Galaxy, a bookstore specializing in science fiction, fantasy, mystery and horror. He lives on the Flying M Ranch in the American southwest with his family and pets in a home filled with books, music, toys, and other examples of American pop culture. More information than you would ever want to know about him is at jeffmariotte.com, where you'll also find a link to his blog.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wasn't what I expected but it's pretty good.,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Brass in Pocket (Kindle Edition)
The book is in the timeline where Sarah has left, Brown is dead and Grissom is still in charge although he's away at a conference during the entire book.
From the title and the synopsis, I was expecting Brass to have a big part in the book. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. While he's mentioned throughout, he doesn't really make an appearance until the very end. Catherine has a huge part in the book and the author did a good job with her. Actually with the exception of Brass and Grissom, everybody had about equal parts in the book. If I had one bad thing to say, it would be there were too many cases. It was a bit hard to follow the facts of everything especially when Catherine seemed to have her hands in all of them. I don't know if that was done intentionally. It's possible it was intentional because the author put Catherine in charge and several times reference was made to the fact that she had no idea how Grissom ever got anything done because of all the responsiblities. So, I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt on that one. As for the multiple cases going on... There were 4 cases I think. #1. Murder in a hotel room and a missing female victim/suspect. #2 Murder on a plane. #3 Missing girl. #4 Mass animal grave that may be the work of a budding serial killer. I think that was all of them. Like I said, it got a bit complicated. Overall, it was a good book. Not great but good. I would buy another CSI book from this author but in all honesty, I would buy another CSI book from any author. I'm glad they're still writing them.
3.0 out of 5 stars
So-So in pocket,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Brass in Pocket (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) (Mass Market Paperback)
I love all of the CSI tv shows, so I began to buy up any/all CSI books like 'Brass in Pocket'. Usually, the books are well-written and informative and good. Unfortunately, this book does not make the cut. It has all of the fave characters in the book, Like: Catherine, Nick, Sara, Brass, etc; . However, the behavior of the characters in this book do not make sense or go along with the characters we know and love from tv. Overall, I was a little disappointed in the book.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is Captain Brass guilty? An excellent CSI novel,
By David Roy (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Brass in Pocket (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) (Mass Market Paperback)
Being a big fan of the CSI television series (only the Las Vegas one, of course), I wanted to give the tie-in novels a chance as well. My first effort, Ken Goddard's In Extremis, didn't turn out that well, but I wanted to give the novels a second chance. My eyes brightened when I saw the latest novel, Jeff Mariotte's Brass in Pocket. While I haven't been a big fan of Mariotte's (I didn't like the one Star Trek novel of his that I read), I didn't hold that against this book. It's a good thing I didn't, as this is a marvelous tie-in novel, doing everything it can to give the characters depth despite not being able to radically alter them. That's a mean feat, and something that Mariotte does very well.
It's a busy night in the crime lab. Gil Grissom is off in Washington at a conference and then a Congressional testimony, and the lab is very shorthanded (this novel takes place during the 10 episodes before William Peterson left the show, so after Warrick Brown's death). But murder doesn't wait until it's convenient, and three crime scenes occupy their attention. A brutal shooting at a cheap motel that may involve police Captain Jim Brass, who's not answering Catherine Willows' phone calls. A "locked room" mystery where a pilot lands a plane at a small airport and is discovered dead in the pilot seat, and a gruesome find of some animal bones as well as a recently slain sheep that may be the lead up to a serial killer. And then Catherine's daughter calls with her problems! One thing I loved about Brass in Pocket is how much Mariotte uses the CSI characters we all know and love and does something different with them. He gives us some insight into how they think without treading on the toes of the TV show. He brings out a part of Brass' past (can't say what, as it's a spoiler) that adds to his character, though it's not a major enough addition that it transforms how we feel about the character played by Paul Guilfoyle. Since Riley's off the show now, Mariotte has a bit more freedom with her, and he gives her more depth than last season's episodes ever gave her. I loved her sense of humor and how she kept needling Greg, but she's got a darkness to her as well. Another great thing about the book is how Mariotte ties at least two of the stories together thematically. The last thing Catherine needs during this busy time, where she's temporarily in charge while Grissom is away, is to have to deal with Lindsey's problems. But she feels guilty because her job keeps her away so often that she's very happy that Lindsey is bringing the problem to her. Her statements to her daughter about friendship and how we can only see the side of people they want us to see, even if they are our best friends, really ties into the Brass storyline. The other two storylines, while not necessarily tying together at all, are also very well-written and imaginative. Mariotte does a good job with the "CSI-speak," all the technical terminology that we don't have to wade through on the TV show because we just see it in montage form. Goddard had a hard time making that interesting and it often dragged, but Mariotte doesn't have that problem. It did seem a little awkward when he was first introducing things like Luminol (for finding blood), but that's just a minor niggle. While the prose isn't stellar, it's very serviceable and interesting for a television tie-in. He kept me interested, which is the point of the whole process. His prose is also efficient, as he manages to fit a lot into a limited number of pages. Yet none of the plotlines feel rushed. Dragging Brass in Pocket down considerably, however, is just how tightly packed it is, throwing the timeline completely out of whack. There is just no way that everything that happens in this book takes place in one night, yet Mariotte insists that it did. We have characters criss-crossing Vegas, going back to the lab, out to interrogate suspects, including an area of Vegas that used to be desert but is slowly getting taken over by housing complexes. Just to name one example, take the opening scene at the seedy hotel. We all know our CSI heroes are very thorough. They're experienced, so they can be quicker than somebody who isn't, but they are thorough. For the events in the rest of the novel to have taken place in one night, Nick and Catherine would have had to process that entire scene in 10, 15 minutes tops. Riley and Greg have to go out to the small airport (I assume it's kind of on the outskirts of the city), process the scene, figure out how the guy was murdered, drive to the second crime scene with the animals (a casino that's being built kind of on the outskirts of the city as well), process that crime scene, back to the lab, back to the airport to process the plane for evidence (where Greg gets interrupted by various airport personnel, who are also suspects, five times)...you get the picture. It's all impossible. All of that really threw me out of the book, which is a shame because the rest of the book is so good. I read Brass in Pocket faster than I've read a book in quite a while, mainly because I couldn't put it down. I loved what Mariotte did with the characters, even those that he created. There wasn't a false note in the bunch. If you're a CSI fan and you want to see your heroes in action, you should definitely pick up this book. You'll be glad you did. (Note: The book also contains an excerpt from Tokyopop's new CSI manga comic. This is completely useless because we don't see our heroes and it doesn't even set up what happens in the comic. Couldn't they have excerpted something from later in the comic that's actually interesting? I thought that was the purpose of excerpts like this, but I guess not) Originally published on Curled Up With a Good Book © David Roy, 2010
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