Casino Girl

by Leslie Wolfe

  I sighed with satisfaction as I dabbed my mouth with a starched napkin, then placed it on the table next to the plate. “Thank you, Holt, this was amazing.”

  “I can think of a few other amazing things I could offer,” he replied with a crooked smile.

  Typical male; he’d heard nothing of what I had to say earlier, just because he didn’t agree with it. Too bloody bad.

  “Well, thanks, but no thanks,” I replied seriously, but almost burst into laughter when he licked his lips. I managed to refrain from doing that, keeping it all bottled up inside and holding his gaze without flinching. I could play this game too and win at it. If anyone was going to go home crying tonight, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.

  “Can I offer you the dessert menu?” Michelle inquired.

  “Strawberries,” I heard him say without looking at her, his eyes still riveted to mine.

  “We have strawberry cheesecake, strawberry soufflé,” the waitress started chanting, but we both glared at her so intensely she clammed up and disappeared.

  Holt’s hearty laughter made a few heads turn, although there weren’t many bracing the cold on the Strip at that hour.

  “What?” I asked, biting angrily into a piece of a leftover roll.

  “God forbid anyone interrupts our twisted foreplay, huh?”

  I laughed lightly, lowering my eyelids to hide my guilty eyes. He was right, although I’d never admit it to him. Our interaction reminded me more of flirting than of typical detective chatter. I admitted that obvious fact to myself, immediately doubting my own sanity. What the hell was I doing here with him if that were the case? Why wasn’t I eating an omelet by myself, at home, where I could avoid making more mistakes?

  “Get over it, Holt,” I replied, “it will not happen.”

  Michelle put a bowl of strawberries on the table, then another with whipped cream and a thin layer of chocolate syrup. She placed two spoons in front of us as quickly as she could, eager to disappear.

  Still looking straight at me, Holt picked up a strawberry and dipped it in whipped cream, then offered it to me. I accepted, then took a bite. The moment my teeth sunk into the delicious fruit, his eyes closed halfway and his grin widened.

  “Damn you, Holt,” I said, but my voice betrayed me, the laughter swelling my chest.

  Our phones chimed at the same time, but he was the first one to read the message. His smile vanished, replaced by a deep frown and an intensity I’d never seen before.

  He pushed himself away from the table and put some cash under the bottle of water. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

  11

  Night Caller

  Anne liked the silence at the morgue, late after hours. Now that Erika had finally gone home, she was the only one left and wasn’t planning on heading out anytime soon. Crystal’s body still lay on the exam table, more questions than answers keeping the Clark County coroner from filling out the autopsy report.

  How did an eighteen-year-old girl’s heart just stop, in the middle of her dance routine?

  Very few poisons and toxins could claim such performance in execution, but Anne didn’t see a trace of either.

  Cyanide, for example, can kill a person within seconds, but the smell of almonds it leaves behind is unmistakable. There was no trace of that smell on Crystal’s body, and the mass spec didn’t find traces of cyanide on the tissue samples she’d tested.

  Arsenic is another favorite poison, but it gives out a heavy, garlic-like smell, not something she’d overlook on a preliminary exam nor during an autopsy.

  There were some other poisons she could think of that could stop a heart, but none of them had left any traces in Crystal’s body. The most inconspicuous of them all, potassium chloride, rarely left any traces for the medical examiner to find in its terrible wake, except one: the concentration of potassium in heart blood. Anne had tested by comparison with femoral blood and found the two values close enough to eliminate potassium chloride poisoning as a potential cause of death.

  One by one, she’d worked through most poisons known to stop hearts and impair respiratory function, although she’d already sent a generous blood sample to the crime lab for a preliminary tox screen. She just didn’t have the patience to wait for the results, while the killer could disappear.

  It seemed logical the killer had used a toxin, not a poison. Okay, but which one? There were thousands of plant toxins that could kill in that manner, countless venoms, and on top of that, deadly bacteria like Clostridium botulinum, also known as Botox.

  Where could she start narrowing these down? After the preliminary tox screen came back, perhaps negative, she would’ve eliminated the most likely poisons and toxins. Then she’d have to order additional testing, one toxin at a time. The entire process could take years of trial and error.

  Unless she could think of something creative to do, like find the point of entry into Crystal’s body, before she could identify the toxin itself.

  She’d examined the entire body under a 10x magnifier glass, then under a fluoroscope, looking for any signs of trauma, no matter how small, like that given by a needle, for example. She’d found nothing, not a single puncture mark.

  She measured the skin color with a method called colorimetry, looking for hidden bruises under the skin, too new to show, and through special imaging techniques like reflectance spectrometry or hyperspectral analysis.

  Still nothing.

  Suddenly feeling tired after a thirteen-hour day, Anne let herself drop into the massage chair she kept in the adjacent room, hoping some inspiration would come if she distanced herself from all the things she could still try and look at the big picture instead. Who was this killer? How did he or she think? How does one instantaneously poison someone who has been dancing in plain sight, under video surveillance, for at least two hours before collapsing?

  She rubbed her forehead with frozen, achy fingers and closed her eyes, trying to visualize the scene at the casino. The four blackjack tables situated around the elevated stage where Crystal performed. Her grabbing the pole, every now and then, for balance, as she twisted her body in the advanced choreography she’d seen her perform on the video recordings.

  That pole… Maybe poison had been dripping down that pole, and she’d been absorbing it through her skin? She grabbed it with her palms, or wrapped her thighs around it, her inner thighs, where skin is soft, thin, permeable.

  Damn it to hell, how did she not see this sooner?

  She almost sprung out of her seat when she remembered she’d swabbed every inch of Crystal’s skin, looking for trace evidence, and the lab was still running those. She could only try one more thing, highly unorthodox, but enough to point her in the right direction. She could prepare tissue samples from areas of her skin she suspected of contact with the toxin and run them through the mass spec, looking for significant discrepancies among the various samples.

  She sighed and let herself lean back into her chair again. She remembered Erika had swabbed the entire length of that pole and already ran it through the mass spec. Nothing out of the ordinary, no unknown element or elements that would be indicative of a toxin.

  Nope, she had nothing but a fierce migraine starting to develop.

  She rubbed her forehead, trying to push the migraine cloud away, but then she froze. A clattering noise came from the morgue.

  She wasn’t alone anymore.

  Quietly, she got out of the massage chair and tiptoed toward the door. The pair of swinging doors that separated the autopsy room from the storage room were fitted with see-through glass panels, installed to prevent the staff from running into one another when moving between the two spaces. Walking quietly along the back wall, careful not to make a sound, she approached the doors and peeked inside the autopsy room, still hoping against all reason that it was one of her employees who’d forgotten something.

  At first, she smelled gasoline, even before she saw him. Tall and well-built, dressed in a black tactical parka and wearing a ski mask
, the man didn’t seem like someone she could easily take down on her own. She pulled out her phone and dialed nine-one-one, then placed the phone under some towels, so the operator’s voice wouldn’t give her away.

  Then she realized where the smell of gasoline was coming from. The man had brought a canister with him, had removed the cap, and started pouring the liquid along the walls.

  She couldn’t sit and wait for him to destroy all the evidence she had yet to examine.

  Her weapon was locked in the front office, where she kept it during the day. There was no reason to carry a gun in a morgue, at least not until that moment. Swallowing a detailed curse, she grabbed a scalpel from a spare kit stored on a shelf and made it through the doors, as quietly as she could.

  Then she leapt forward, planning to slash his throat from behind, her only chance against someone with twice her body mass.

  She slipped on some gasoline and grabbed the side of the exam table to stop her fall but dropped the scalpel. The tiny object clattered loudly against the cement floor, and the intruder turned to face her.

  She didn’t hesitate; she’d been trained in hand-to-hand combat during her two tours in Afghanistan, and she wasn’t going to go down easily. She charged at the man with her bare hands, aiming for the most sensitive areas of the human body. A clawed finger to the eye, a quick fist in the laryngeal prominence, then a strong, angry-as-hell kick in the side of his knee, just as he delivered a bone-crushing blow to her ribs.

  At least two of the blows she delivered hit home, because the man fell to the ground groaning in pain, but the sound he made was unnatural.

  “A shattered larynx does that,” she said, panting heavily, and coming around him to deliver one final blow to his neck.

  He pushed himself away from her and reached inside his pocket. She heard a familiar sound and froze. The man had pulled the pin out of a grenade and was holding it in his hand, ready to throw.

  She looked around, thinking hard. Where could she take cover? Could she outrun an explosion? Not likely.

  He pulled himself up and limped toward the door, while Anne retreated toward the back wall, putting as much distance between them as possible. She took her eyes off him and saw the gasoline puddle spreading toward her. In a second, her feet would be soaked in it. She backtracked a few more steps but ran into the wall. There was nowhere else she could go.

  He threw the grenade toward her and took off. The grenade bounced against the wall and rolled under the main exam table, now empty. She had four seconds at best.

  “One, one-thousand,” Anne counted, gasping for air and desperately looking for a way out. She made for the body storage units, built with solid, insulated stainless steel walls. “Two, one-thousand,” she counted again, opening an upper level storage unit and pulling the shelf out halfway. “Three, one-thousand,” she said, painfully hopping on the shelf and pulling herself inside the storage unit.

  Once inside, she couldn’t close the door; instead, she rolled herself over the body stored in there, landed on the last unit and curled up in a ball, shielding her head under her folded arms. “Four, one-thou—”

  The explosion shook the room and the entire building burst into flames, fueled by gasoline and the many chemicals she stored in her lab, letting out toxic fumes that would soon get to her. She felt singeing heat coming from the fire and a cloud of black smoke soon engulfed her. She choked, desperately gasping for air.

  Then everything faded away into still darkness, the heat of the fire, the smell of the toxic fumes, her own choked gasps for air, the thumping in her chest.

  12

  Fire

  By the time Holt pulled near the morgue, the fire had been extinguished, but the building was still smoldering. Parts of it had collapsed into a pile of rubble, but half of the autopsy room was still standing, and so was the entire back storage area.

  The street was engulfed in red and blue flashing lights, while three fire trucks still pumped water through hoses, suffocating the flames wherever smoke coiled up toward the night sky.

  My heart stopped when I saw the body covered with yellow tarp near the entrance. I felt Holt’s hand squeezing mine as I climbed out of the vehicle, afraid to move, afraid to discover Anne’s body underneath that tarp. Tears streamed from my eyes, making it difficult to see anything clearly.

  I forced a deep breath into my lungs and rushed to the body. Holt had run ahead of me and was talking to one of the officers on the scene. I kneeled next to the frail silhouette, afraid to touch it. Holt crouched next to me and grabbed my hand again.

  “It’s Erika,” he said, “Anne’s assistant. Her neck was broken.”

  “Oh, no,” I whimpered, covering my gaping mouth. “Where’s Anne?” I sprung to my feet, looking around, searching for her with frantic, illogical moves that led nowhere.

  “The coroner wasn’t here at the time of the explosion, Detective,” a first responder replied.

  “The hell she wasn’t,” I snapped, then pointed across the street. “That’s her car right there, under that tree, and her phone keeps going to voicemail. She’s here, I’m telling you.”

  I rushed to the entrance, crushing glass shards and debris under my feet, but didn’t make it all the way inside.

  “Baxter,” Holt shouted, catching up with me and grabbing my upper arm in a steeled grip.

  “Let me go, Holt. You don’t know her like I do. She’s strong; she’s a fighter. She’s in there somewhere, I know it.”

  “I can’t let you go in there, Baxter,” he replied calmly.

  “You can’t go inside, ma’am,” one of the firefighters said, standing in my way. “The fire is still active and there could be more explosions.”

  His attitude, although logical, made me immensely angry all of a sudden. Their job was to save everyone, not play it safe, just because there might be more explosions down the road.

  “Yes, I can go inside, and I bloody will,” I replied, freeing myself from Holt’s grip with a violent gesture and I sprinted ahead.

  As I moved past the firefighter, he grabbed my arm firmly. A split second later, Holt flanked me on my left side, locking his grip on my other arm.

  “Really?” I snapped. “Two macho men against one woman? Let go of me, right this instant,” I told them in a low, menacing voice. “My friend’s in there, and I’m going in.”

  The firefighter looked at me for a long moment. “Are you sure?”

  “No, I have a bloody death wish and a fetish for chemical fires, you tosser,” I replied, and he instantly let go of my arm, visibly insulted. Holt released his grip before I could sling insults at him too.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he took a mask fitted with an oxygen canister and gave it to me. “At least wear this, ma’am,” he said, fitting the mask over my face. “There are noxious fumes inside.”

  He led the way and I followed closely, watching, observing every detail, visualizing the explosion and the seconds that had preceded it. Right behind me, I heard Holt’s footsteps and I felt grateful for him being there for me, for having my back.

  “This is where it went off,” I said, pointing at a crater in the floor. Holt nodded, while keeping his mouth and nose covered with the flap of his jacket.

  My heart sunk when I saw there was no place Anne could’ve taken cover from a blast that strong. Contorted metal and equipment tables ripped to pieces stood testimony to the force of the explosion.

  Anne was nowhere in sight.

  Water still dripped from the remnants of the ceiling. The power had been cut off, but the occasional smoke swirl still climbed from beneath smoldering concrete debris. Various glass containers had been shattered in the blaze, fueling the fire with the chemicals normally found in all morgues, most of them highly flammable, like alcohol or formalin. It was a miracle that the single-story building hadn’t been completely leveled by the force of the detonation.

  I stopped, not knowing where to go. Other than the dripping of water and the humming activity outside the
morgue I couldn’t hear anything. Against all logic, I called out loud.

  “Anne! Where are you?”

  A faint thumping coming from the back wall caught my attention. It was so muffled I wasn’t sure it was real at first, but it continued, rhythmical, increasingly persistent.

  I rushed toward the body storage freezers as my heart swelled with hope. One of the shelf doors was missing, torn from the hinges, as if it were open when the explosion happened. I looked inside, but it was too dark to see anything. The firefighter lit his flashlight and gave it to me.

  She was covered in blood and soot and debris, curled up on her side, barely breathing. “She’s in here,” I shouted, as I opened the last door of the unit and pulled out the shelf as far as it could go.

  “We need a gurney in here,” the firefighter called into his radio. “On the double.”

  “Hey, sweetie,” I said, letting my tears fall freely as I caressed her hair.

  “Hey,” she whispered in a raspy voice. “I knew you’d find me.” She held her right hand up and I reached for it, but she stopped me. “Don’t touch me,” she said, and I instantly pulled back, afraid I was hurting her. “Bag this hand in plastic and tape it around the wrist,” she said, barely intelligible.

  I smiled, because I knew why.

  Two firefighters carried a gurney over the rubble, then put it alongside the freezer shelf, getting ready to haul Anne out.

  They took positions on both sides of the freezer shelf and one of them said, “We’ll move her with the shelf tray, on my count: one, two, three.”

  She whimpered a little while they slid her over the gurney but kept her hand up in the air the entire time.

  “I want you to wrap this hand carefully to preserve evidence,” she told the firefighter. “I scratched that bastard before he threw the grenade. I have his DNA under my fingernails.”