Binding Ties Read Online Free

street to get her mail …”
    Logan pointed at the row of mailboxes running along the curb.
    The cop continued: “… then our neighbor lady glanced over and saw the door open. The guy who lives here …” He checked his notebook. “… guy who
lived
there, Marvin Sandred, usually worked during the day. So, when the neighbor, woman named …” He checked his notebook again. “… Tammy Hinton, saw the door standing open, she went to check on the place. One gander at the body and she phoned us.”
    Grissom asked, “She said it was Sandred?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWe should talk to her.”
    â€œYeah,” Damon said, as if reminding everyone, including himself, that he was in charge, “we should talk to her right away.”
    â€œI can cover that,” Logan said, but shook his head. “I’m just not sure it’ll do any good, right now. She was pretty shook up, which is why I sent her home. Anything else you need?”
    â€œNo, Henry,” Damon said. “Thank you.”
    Logan frowned at Grissom. “All due respect, Dr. Grissom—I know who you are, everybody does—I don’t appreciate you going all self-righteous on me.”
    With no inflection, Grissom said, “Then don’t use terms like ‘dead as shit’ to describe a murder victim.”
    Logan’s indignation faded to embarrassment. “Yeah, okay. Point taken. No harm, no foul?”
    â€œNot yet,” Grissom said.
    Logan headed to the neighbor’s house, while Damon said, “You ready to check this out?”
    â€œYes.”
    Grissom started for the house, the CSIs and the North Las Vegas cops trailing in his wake. Over his shoulder, he said, “Nick, you take the backyard—Warrick, the front.”
    â€œYou got it, Gris,” Nick said.
    Warrick just nodded.
    While the two CSIs peeled off, Grissom, Catherine, and Sara—trailed by Detective Damon—pressed on to the front door atop a two-step stoop. At the threshold, he stopped.
    â€œSara,” Grissom said, as he and the others snugged on their latex gloves, “let’s see if there are any prints on the doorbell.”
    She nodded and stepped off to the side. Like the other CSIs, she had lugged along her tool-kit-style crime-scene case, which she set down on the concrete, and got to it.
    Grissom led the way through the front door, Catherine right behind; Damon was lingering on the porch, watching Sara work, making conversation that she wasn’t taking much part in.
    The house was dark, curtains drawn, lights off. In the gloom, Grissom could nonetheless see that the living room was to the right, the kitchenthrough a doorway to the back and a hallway, at the rear of the living room, led to the bedrooms and bathroom.
    Next to him, Catherine clicked on her mini-flash. There could be no turning on of lights until the switches and their plates had been dusted for prints. She used the beam to highlight doorways, then settled on the corpse, at right.
    The living room stank of death in general; sweat, urine, and excrement, in particular. With its scant rent-to-own furnishings—a sofa, a coffee table, a TV at an angle in the far corner, and a couple of end tables—the room seemed as lonely inside as the house had from out. A lamp on one end table seemed to be the only potential light source, other than a picture window behind drawn curtains. Newspapers, some mail, a couple of carry-out containers cluttered the coffee table; otherwise, the room was clean—not counting the body sprawled in the middle of the floor.
    The first detail Grissom picked up on was a pool of blood near one of the hands, where the index finger had been amputated. Grissom got his own mini-flash out and its beam looked around, but there was no sign of the digit. Perhaps the killer had taken a souvenir.
    â€œI’ll work the body,” Grissom said, “while you do the rest of the