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The red baboon spider hissed at the showgirl.
"She's a little nervous," Gil Grissom said. "I don't take her out in public very often."
On Planet Showgirl, evolution had clearly favored sequins and feathers, while gravity was obviously much less of a factor. The showgirl leaned in closer and peered at the cage. "Hairy, irritable, and poisonous," she said. "Reminds me of my ex. Nice to see you, Gil." She strutted off on absurdly high heels, an exotic alien who somehow seemed completely at home.
Grissom glanced around the lobby. He often felt like an outsider in "normal" society, and his usual environment -- working graveyard shift at the crime lab in Las Vegas -- was anything but. Not only was it one of the busiest labs in the country; Grissom had helped it attain one of the highest case clearance rates as well. His world was one of high contrast, of bodies found in high-roller penthouse suites and in back-alley Dumpsters, of prostitutes who ODed on a thousand dollars' worth of cocaine, and homeless men frozen to death in the desert. Vegas was its own world, where all the rules were different and cash was king, where people came for the sex and the buzz and the shows and the slots, and everybody knew that beneath the city's bright neon smile were the sharp, hungry teeth of a shark. Vegas was a river, a shiny twenty-four-hour current of brilliant color and chiming bells, with the nets that let the fish through while separating them from their money so cleverly designed that people hardly noticed them -- and were too enthralled with the glitz to feel their pockets getting lighter. You could meet literally anyone in Vegas, from a celebrity throwing away his signing bonus at the craps tables to an elderly tourist couple from Iowa, from sharp-eyed hustlers honing their skills at poker to fresh-faced drunks eager to do something they'd regret tomorrow.
The town attracted many a convention-goer, too. Grissom had investigated his share of weekend warrior misadventures; the combination of booze, peer pressure, and sudden disconnection from their everyday lives pushed people to extremes of behavior they never would have considered at home.
Everyone needed to blow off steam; he understood that. Grissom himself rode roller coasters, the intense visceral rush so completely different from the cool calm of the lab. He sometimes wondered what sort of release his scientific colleagues indulged in -- not the ones he worked with every day, but other entomologists.
He supposed he was about to find out.
The sign board in the lobby read WELCOME ELEVENTH ANNUAL CONVENTION OF INTERNATIONAL ENTOMOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROFESSIONALS! They'd misspelled entomological. Grissom had already told the front desk, but they hadn't gotten around to changing it yet.
"Grissom? Gilly!" The voice was loud, Australian, and familiar: Grissom recognized the tall, lanky man who strode across the lobby toward him immediately. Jake Soames was from Melbourne, one of the foremost experts in the world on poisonous insects. He was dressed the same way he'd been the last time Grissom had seen him, in tan cargo pants and a jacket with too many pockets, a matching Tilley hat pinned up on one side of his head bushman-style. His face was wide and ruddy, his abundant red mustache streaked with gray.
"Hello, Jake," said Grissom. "Good to see you."
"You too, mate. How about this, eh? Guess we're on your turf now!"
Grissom smiled. "I suppose you are."
"It sounds," a polite voice from behind Grissom said, "as if you're conceding him the home-field advantage. Setting the stage for your inevitable admission of defeat?"
Grissom turned. The speaker was a short, trim Asian man, dressed in a conservative blue suit. Grissom knew him, too: Khem Charong, a researcher from Thailand. They'd met at a conference in Duluth, where Charong's entries in the cockroach races had just edged out Grissom's.
"Not bloody likely," said Soames. "I've got some real beauties this year -- though I'm sure Gilly's boys will give 'em a run for their money."
"Hello, Khem," said Grissom. They shook hands. "I don't know how much competition I'll be able to give you this year. Things have been extremely busy at the lab -- I'm afraid my breeding program's suffered as a result."
"I fail to be relieved, Mr. Grissom. A halfhearted effort on your part is simply not a credible premise."
"Well, thank you. I'll try not to embarrass myself."
"What have you got there?" asked Soames, peering at the cage. "Looks like a Harpactirinae."
"Citharischius crawshayi, actually," said Grissom. "I promised a colleague I'd bring her along. I'm supposed to meet him here, but he's late." Grissom glanced around the lobby once more.
"Well, we're all a bit early," said Soames. "Conference doesn't start until tomorrow, after all. I asked if anyone else had arrived, and the hotel told me so far us three were it."
Grissom frowned. "He hasn't checked in yet? That's odd."
"Never keep a man with a tarantula waiting, I always say," said Soames. "Could be a good thing you brought it, though. We can feed it the losers, give 'em a little incentive."
Just then, Grissom spotted whom he'd been looking for, standing at the front desk and looking through a pamphlet. "Ah, there he is. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I think the person I was waiting for just arrived."
The man looked up as Grissom approached. "Dr. Quadros?"
"Yes. Dr. Grissom, I presume?"
Dr. Roberto Quadros was a Brazilian man in his forties, his skin tanned by field work, his neatly trimmed beard and slicked-back hair pure white. His eyes were dark behind tinted, thick-framed glasses, and he wore a gray blazer over a T-shirt with a University of Rio de Janeiro logo on it.
"A pleasure to finally meet you," said Grissom. "I've greatly enjoyed our correspondence."
"As have I," Quadros said. His smile was wide but brief, his attention immediately turning to the cage Grissom held. "Ah. This is the specimen we discussed?"
"Yes." Grissom handed him the cage.
Quadros brought it up to his face, staring at the spider from no more than six inches away. "Beautiful," he murmured. "And one of the largest I've ever seen."
"Did you just get in?"
"Hmm? No, I arrived yesterday. Been looking around. Don't much care for the place so far. Too bright, too busy."
"Parts of it are. Vegas can be something of a shock to the system."
"I'm sure. Fortunately, we'll be too busy this week for such distractions. I'm looking forward to your paper."
"And I yours."
Quadros sighed. "I hate most conferences. Telecommunications are so advanced today that face-to-face meetings seem unnecessary; staying in the field and swapping files via a good satellite connection seems much more efficient."
"Well," said Grissom, "even a spider can't spend all its time on the web..."
Captain Jim Brass wasn't a cynic. He was the person cynics studied when they needed a role model.
"Yeah, okay, fine," he said to the motel desk clerk, a heavyset man with long, greasy black hair. "All you remember about who rented the room is he was a guy. Average height, average build, hair brown or possibly blond. Somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five years old. I'm gonna have to ask you to slow down -- I don't know if I can keep up with this blizzard of details."
The clerk, Manny, looked at him with eyes a little too bloodshot to be attributed to the late hour. "He was just this guy. I think he was black, or maybe Hispanic. Or he could have just had a good tan."
"Well, that narrows things down. You sure he wasn't Chinese?"
Manny thought about it. "I guess, maybe."
"Thanks for your help. I'll let you get back to your eagle-eyed observation of the immediate environment."
Brass left the motel office and climbed the stairs to the second level. The crime scene was in room 219, now guarded by a uniformed officer. As a homicide detective, Brass was usually the second official to arrive on the scene, after the beat cops who originally investigated the call but before the medical examiner. This led to Brass sometimes saying he was middle management in the death business, but nobody ever seemed to laugh.
The ME had arrived while he was talking to Manny. Doctor Albert Robbins stood just inside the doorway to the room, leaning against the arm crutch he used to help him get around.
"Hey, Doc. How are you doing?"
"Damn stairs," Doc Robbins grumbled. "I hate these two-level motels. They never have an elevator."
"Yeah, too bad the vic didn't have the consideration to die on the first floor. You open the bag?"
"No. And I'm not going to, either. I'll let Grissom do it."
"Grissom can't make it," Nick Stokes said, walking up with Riley Adams at his side. "He's at a conference."
"Where's he gone this time?" Brass asked. "The wilds of Duluth again?"
Nick shook his head. "No, this time it's right here in town. Some big bug expert thing. He's pretty pumped up about it."
"Well, he's going to be sorry he missed this," said Brass.
"What have we got?" Riley asked. She was a slender, pretty blonde with her hair tied back in a ponytail.
"Well," Robbins said, "at first glance I thought it might be a suicide." He moved aside to let Nick and Riley get a better look.
The body on the motel bed was that of a young, well-built white male, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. His arms were spread, wrists handcuffed to the bedposts, and his head was covered with a white plastic bag secured around his neck with a plastic zap strap.
"Suicide?" said Riley. She adjusted the focus on the camera she held and started taking photos. "With his hands cuffed like that?"
"Oh, sure," said Robbins. "A lot of suicides are afraid they're going to lose their nerve at the last minute, so they try to impose a point of no return. I call it hesitation insurance."
"Can't back out once that cuff locks into place," Nick murmured. "But you said 'at first,' Doc?"
"Yes. I was going to remove the ba...
