“Yes, I’m returning a call from Nick Stokes?”

“Beer! Thanks for getting back to me…”

Nick gave him a quick rundown on what he needed: the arrest record, if any, of Khem Charong.

“Let me check,” Sukaphat said. “Ah, here we go. Yes, he has been arrested before. Shall I send you his file? It’s in Thai, of course.”

“Can you just give me the highlights over the phone?”

Nick jotted them down as Sukaphat talked. By the time he thanked Sukaphat and hung up, his smile was gone.

Grissom closed the interview room door gently, t hen turned and smiled before taking his seat. “Hello, Lucas. My name’s Gil Grissom. I understand you’re interested in entomology.”

Lucas swallowed, looked from Grissom to Riley and then to his mother beside him. She had her own gaze fixed on Grissom, as if she could control what questions he asked through sheer force of will.

“Uh, yeah,” he said.

“So am I. In fact, I’ve studied insects for many years. Do you have a favorite?”

“I don’t know. I like spiders, I guess. And scorpions. They’re not insects, though, they’re arachnids.”

“That’s true. I own a baboon spider, myself.”

“Yeah? Those are pretty cool.”

“I think so.” Grissom smiled. “Don’t be nervous. We just need to ask you a few questions. All right?”

“I guess.”

Grissom glanced over at Riley, who took the cue.

“Where were you on the night Keenan Harribold died?”

“Uh-at home, I guess.”

“I can confirm that,” his mother said. “He spent the evening upstairs doing homework. If he’d gone out, I’d know about it.”

Riley nodded. “Have you or your family traveled to the Pacific Northwest any time in the last year? Vacation, field trip, anything?”

“No.”

“Vacation?” his mother said. “In this economy? Not for a while.”

“Do you ever get insects by mail-order?” asked Grissom. “It can be hard to obtain certain specimens locally.”

“No, I go to the Pet Cave for all my stuff. They know me down there.”

Grissom made a note on the pad in front of him. “I’m familiar with the place myself. They have a nice selection, don’t they?”

“I guess.”

“Mrs. Yannick, do you or your husband keep any firearms in the house?”

“What? No. No, we don’t.”

“Thank you, Lucas, and thank you, Mrs. Yannick. I think we have all we need.”

Riley looked less than satisfied but didn’t say anything until after Mrs. Yannick and her son had left. “That was kind of brief, wasn’t it? You didn’t even ask about his relationship to Keenan Harribold.”

“I didn’t have to. While it’s conceivable Lucas could have snuck out of the house without his parents being aware of it, he would still have had to obtain a gun to control Harribold and rent the motel room. Difficult for a teenager, even in Vegas.”

“He could have an accomplice.”

“Conceivable, but unlikely. If Lucas Ya nnick killed Keenan Harribold, he did it because he was an unpopular loner being bullied by a more popular athlete. Those kinds of kids rarely have accomplices.”

“Maybe not in your day. In mine, they wear black trench coats and carry automatic weapons.”

Grissom got up from the table. “Nobody wants to see a repeat of Columbine, Riley. But the circumstances in this case are very different. I suggest you concentrate on finding the man who rented that room rather than a fifteen-year-old who’s interested in bugs.” He left the room, closing the door behind him.

“Sixteen,” said Riley to the empty room. “He’s sixteen.”

Khem Charong glanced nervously around the interview room. “I don’t understand. Where is Dr. Grissom? Why have I been kept waiting for so long?”

Brass smiled. “Patience, Doctor. It isn’t Grissom who wants to talk to you-it’s me. You don’t have a problem with talking to a lowly police captain, do you?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Really? You seem a little jumpy.”

Khem made a visible effort to control himself. “How may I be of assistance?”

“Let’s see… I guess you can start with telling me where you were on the evening of the murder.”

“I-I was in my hotel room.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. The second thing you can help me with is, let’s see… oh, I know. You can stop lying to me.”

“What?”

“This is Vegas, Doctor, not the middle of the jungle. You sneak out of camp in the dead of night here, you get caught by security cameras. You left your room at around seven and didn’t come back until midnight. Where’d you go?”

“I… I went for a walk.”

“Sure. This is Vegas, after all. Things to do, places to go, twenty-four/seven. Get the urge to do a little gambling, maybe?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Where?”

“I… I don’t remember.”

“What a shame. Convenient, too, what with all the casinos having round-the-clock video surveillance. How’d you do?”

“I broke even.”

“Of course you did.” Brass shook his head. “Well, you’re about to lose big, Doctor. You may have managed to avoid a criminal record in Thailand, but that doesn’t mean you’re not in the system. This isn’t the first time you’ve gone out for a little stroll, is it?”

Charong’s face paled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. When you hit the big city after being in-country, Bangkok is your destination of choice. Certain neighborhoods in Bangkok. In fact, very specific clubs in certain neighborhoods.”

“You have the wrong man. Charong is a very common name-”

“I know exactly who I have, Doctor. You were arrested but not charged. Connections, or just a really good lawyer?” Brass held up a hand. “You know, don’t bother answering that-I don’t really care.”

Charong was visibly sweating now. You didn’t see that often in Vegas; it was too dry.

“Okay, you’ve told me your story,” said Brass. “Now it’s my turn to entertain you. Hope you don’t mind if I switch styles on you, but I’m more of a nonfiction guy.

“It started online. Maybe you were trolling on high school sites when a picture of a star quarterback caught your eye. Unfortunately, his Facebook page didn’t list middle-aged, male entomologists as one of his turn-ons, so you created a fake persona. You set up a rendezvous in a Vegas motel room to coincide with your visit-after all, what’s a convention without a little illicit sex? Knowing that you’d be something of a disappointment in person, you came prepared for your own creepy-crawly party.”

Charong swallowed. “Th at’s crazy. I didn’t bring any millipedes with me-ask the airline.”

“Oh, you didn’t bring them with you from Thailand -you got them here in the States. Wouldn’t have been that hard for someone with your background; you probably had a colleague in the Northwest mail them.”

“I didn’t! I didn’t do anything of the sort, and you can’t prove that I did!”

“Maybe I can’t,” said Brass. “But I’m not the one you should be worried about…”

“Well, the cat’s out of the bag now,” Nick said to Grissom.

They were watching Brass question Charong through a two-way mirror. “This is the next logical step,” said Grissom. “We had to treat them as suspects sooner or later. I’m just glad you found a viable reason to do so.”

Nick looked uncomfortable. “Yeah,” he said. “So… you think Charong’s our guy?”

“We’ll know more once we search his room. We’re just waiting for the judge to sign off on a warrant.”

“Right. Maybe we can close this one without putting your other colleagues through this.”

Grissom frowned. “Actually, Nick, I was hoping you and Riley could conduct the interviews with Soames, Quadros, and Vanderhoff. I’m having them brought in now.”

“Really? I mean, it might not even be necessary-”

“It’s necessary, Nick. Just because I know them doesn’t mean we treat them any differently. Brass suggested he conduct the interview with Doctor Charong because Charong seemed nervous around authority figures and Brass thought he could use that; I agreed.”