Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  “I realize that, but I can’t help you,” Linda insisted. “We don’t have any skeletons in our closet. I’d tell you if we did.”

  Serena watched her eyes. There was nothing furtive behind them. “Do you have any ties to Reno? Have you visited there recently?”

  “Reno? Not in years. There are plenty of casinos around here if I want to drop a nickel in a slot. Why?”

  “We think whoever did this was in Reno a few weeks ago. We found a receipt in the car. There may be a connection. Do you have friends or family there?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  Serena nodded. “If you think of something, or if anything unusual happens, I hope you’ll let me know.”

  “Of course I will, but I really think you’re wrong about this. I just don’t see why anyone would deliberately hurt our family.”

  “That’s what scares me,” Serena acknowledged.

  “Why?”

  “Because it means we may not find this person before he kills someone else.”

  EIGHT

  Stride and Serena made it home separately just before midnight on Sunday. He had been awake for almost twenty-four hours, but he was still too wired on caffeine simply to tumble into bed and sleep. The two of them barely turned on the lights before leaving again and taking Stride’s Bronco west into the hills. It had become a nighttime ritual for them. They followed Charleston until the houses ran out, before the road wound into Red Rock Canyon. He steered the Bronco off the paved road and climbed a rocky slope to the high ground. They turned around and parked, doors open, windows open, with the night air blowing through the truck and the expanse of the Las Vegas valley stretched out below them. The tracts of suburban homes inching up the street, eating more of the empty space week by week, were dark.

  Even in July, when the daytime heat was ferocious, the night cooled in the hills, enough that the breeze sailing down over the peaks behind them made it bearable. Now, in the early fall, there was a hint of chill, like a Minnesota evening without the fragrant scent of pine. He could see literally the entire city, its myriad lights creeping out like vines in all four directions until they finally ran out in the darkness of the desert. Cutting through the middle was the fiery glow of the Strip, taller and brighter than anything else around it, a multicolored, bedazzling belt across the city’s fat belly.

  From far away, without the sunlight, the valley sparkled. There was no orange rim of smog floating over the city like a smoke ring. The casinos were jewels.

  Stride twisted his upper body and stared at Serena’s face in silhouette. He knew she felt him watching her. This was the time when it was just the two of them, peaceful, in love, free of the city. “You are way, way too beautiful,” he told her.

  “If you want sex, you’re going to have to do better than that,” Serena replied, laughing.

  “But that was my best line.”

  He smiled and stroked her dark hair, in a way that told her he wanted her. He knew, when they got home, they would be too tired to do anything but sleep, and he very much wanted to make love to her.

  She leaned across and kissed him. “Haven’t we proven it’s not safe for a man in his forties to do it in a truck? Last time, you almost threw your back out.”

  “It was worth it.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she told him.

  Serena pulled her T-shirt over her head. Her hair was mussed and sexy. She unhooked and wriggled out of her bra, then stretched her shoulders back. She reclined her seat and began peeling down her jeans. Her skin was firm, her breasts milky white like oyster shells in the pale light. He climbed over her and felt her fingers on his clothes.

  He was back in his own seat a few minutes later, sweaty and sore. “Ow,” he said.

  “Your back?”

  “Back, arms, legs.”

  “I told you so.”

  Stride dangled his foot out of the truck and rubbed it against the loose dirt. He hoped that a scorpion wasn’t scuttling nearby, or that a rattlesnake wouldn’t choose that moment to slither from the rocks. Those were the real night creatures, doing what came naturally, unlike the human ones below them in the valley.

  Serena lay next to him, bare and disheveled. She made no effort to repair her clothes. Her eyes were lost, focused into the hills. She touched her skin idly with her fingertips. “Think the novelty of this is ever going to wear off?”

  “Us having sex?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope not.”

  “I’m ready to go again,” she told him.

  “You’re on your own.”

  Serena gave him a mock sigh. “Did it ever wear off with Cindy?”

  Stride smiled as a picture of his late wife flashed in his brain. “No. She was like you. She couldn’t get enough.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m a sex fiend. I’m just glad vaginas aren’t like piercings.”

  Stride looked at her. “What?”

  “You know. Closing up from lack of use.”

  He threw his head back and laughed, and Serena joined him. Her head fell against his shoulder, and he slipped an arm around her. They sat silently for a few more minutes, lulled by the wind.

  The longer they sat, the more he felt her go away somewhere. That was how it usually happened. When they got close, and she felt safe with him, she took another step into her past and pulled another ghost from her closet.

  It was a compliment, she told him. She had never done that with anyone else. Her secrets were like notes plugged up in bottles that she had long ago tossed into the sea. Now, one by one, they were drifting back to shore.

  He knew only sketches of what she had gone through. Raw facts. She had told him what had happened to her as a teenager in clinical terms, like a doctor reciting from someone else’s file. Her mother used her as a whore to pay for drugs. She got pregnant, she had an abortion, she ran away. End of story. Only those kinds of stories never ended.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  Serena took a long time to reply, and he wondered if she would drop it and go back to something safe, like work or music or the lights in the valley.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about Deidre,” she said.

  Deidre was the girl who had come to Las Vegas with Serena when she escaped from Phoenix at the age of sixteen. Serena had never told him much about her. Only how she died.

  “Strange, huh?” she went on. “I really haven’t thought about her in years, but she’s been in my dreams lately. I fall asleep, and there she is.”

  “She got AIDS. That wasn’t your fault.”

  Serena rubbed her shoulders as if she were cold. “The thing is, I never went to see her. Maybe there was nothing I could do, but I didn’t have to let her die alone. I mean, she saved me. Back in Phoenix? She saved me. I was being abused night and day, and she helped me escape. I loved her, Jonny. I really loved her, those first few years we were together. But I just let her die.”

  “You don’t need me to tell you that isn’t true, do you?” Stride asked.

  Serena shrugged. “No. But it keeps coming back to me. You’d think by now it would all be gone, dead, not a big deal. But I can’t switch on part of myself with you and keep the rest shut off.”

  Stride frowned. ‘’How can I help?”

  “I’m not sure you can.”

  “So I guess one alternative is to shut me off, too,” he said.

  “Sure it is. But that’s not what I want. I just have to learn how to deal with all this-and keep you around.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She turned to him, unconvinced. “I know how you feel about this place. I’m worried that you’ll hate this city more than you love me. You’ll go back home to Minnesota, where your heart is.”

  “My heart’s here with you.”

  Serena took one of his hands and kissed his fingertips. “Thank you for saying that.”

  But he wasn’t sure she believed him. He wasn’t sure he believed himself.

  He went
to reach for her again, but somewhere on the floor mat, where her jeans were crumpled, her cell phone started ringing. Serena laughed, setting the tense moment aside, and found the phone.

  Stride heard a man’s voice. Serena brightened. “Hey, Jay, hang on a second.”

  She quickly covered the phone and whispered to Stride. “Jay Walling is a detective I know in Reno. Sixty years old and very dapper. Watches too many Sinatra movies.” She spoke into the phone again. “Jay, I’ve got another detective with me. I’m going to put you on speaker.”

  She pushed a button and then continued, “Jay Walling, meet Jonathan Stride, and vice versa.”

  “How are you, Jay?” Stride said.

  “Excellent, thanks.” His voice had a smooth elegance. “So, Serena, is this the man you’re playing house with? Or did Cordy finally get arrested on a morals charge?”

  Even in the darkness of the car, Stride could feel Serena flush with embarrassment.

  “Nice to see the rumors have made their way across the state, Jay. Yes, Jonny and I are an item, and no, the women of Las Vegas are still not safe from Cordy. Mind if I ask who told you about us?”

  “My lieutenant, actually,” Walling said. “He’s tight with Sawhill.”

  “Great, just great.”

  “Don’t be offended, darling. My wife will be relieved. She’s been looking for someone to fix you up with since we worked that case together last year.”

  “Don’t make it sound like the impossible dream,” Serena snapped.

  “Nonsense. You just have high standards. Detective Stride, my congratulations. Serena is one of my favorite people in the whole world, so treat her nice or I’ll have to have you rubbed out.”

  Stride laughed, and Serena groaned. “Jay, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to have you rubbed out. Now, did you run down that receipt for me from my hit-and-run car?”

  Walling chuckled. “Six Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a Sprite. At least we know your perp isn’t diabetic.”

  “Funny.”

  “I tracked down the store, but it was a cash sale, and the owner doesn’t remember a thing.”

  “No surprise. That’s what I figured. Thanks for trying.”

  “Yes, but there’s something else. I was hoping you might be able to fly up to Reno tomorrow.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Because I don’t like coincidences,” Walling said. “The same day your perp got his sugar fix in Reno, a woman got murdered on a ranch a few miles south of here. Someone cut her throat.”

  NINE

  Stride began to do research on MJ’s father, Walker Lane, following dozens of links on the Web from the computer in his cubicle. There was no official home page about the man, just gossipy sites that rehashed the same dry facts from his Hollywood biography and spiced up the written record with hints about his reclusive lifestyle in Canada.

  There was plenty of information about Lane’s early days in the 1960s, when he was a wunderkind producer-director who struck it rich with his first self-funded film. From the beginning, he was about money, not art. Cherry Tree featured a fifteen-year-old newcomer, sort of a Hayley Mills with breasts, whose huge eyes and innocent sex appeal won over audiences, despite a lame spy story about a teenager helping George Washington win the Revolutionary War. Two more family comedies followed, both hugely successful, and Lane won a reputation as Frank Capra Lite, the boy with the golden touch. Because he hadn’t thrown in his lot with the big studios, he reaped the financial rewards himself.

  Scandal dogged him, mostly because there were rumors on the set that he had been having an affair with his underaged star since their first film together. Lane denied it, but he didn’t hide his playboy ways, partying in L.A. and Vegas, and leaving a trail of photographs of himself with starlets on his arm.

  Then came the big disappearance.

  As far as Stride could tell, it happened in 1967. Lane left Hollywood, moved to Canada, and essentially vanished from the public eye. From a distance, he continued to build his reputation as a mover and shaker. He chose and funded a series of monster hits throughout the next three decades, deftly moving in and out of comedy and drama as public tastes changed. He never directed again, not as far as Stride could tell, but he became a huge force, a star-maker, without ever setting foot out of his estate in British Columbia. He was the executive producer behind two of the twenty highest-grossing films ever.

  He became almost fanatically private. Actors and directors who met with him signed nondisclosure agreements. Like Howard Hughes, he seemed to run his empire primarily by phone. Stride couldn’t find a photograph of the man taken in the last twenty years. There were rumors of a disabling illness that left him in a wheelchair and of facial degeneration that had ravaged his once handsome, boyish looks. There were also rumors of a scandal that had driven him out of the country, but as far as Stride could tell, no one had pierced the veil and uncovered the real story.

  Lane married a young actress in the early 1980s, after she interviewed for a role in a science fiction film he was bankrolling. She didn’t get the part, but she got Walker, and two years later, MJ was born. There were no public details about the relationship between Walker and his twenty-something wife, but somewhere along the line, it went badly wrong. Stride found news reports from 1990 about the woman’s suicide. There was no public memorial, no photograph of a grieving Walker Lane, and no public comment. She might as well not have existed.

  Stride couldn’t find any evidence that Lane had given an interview in decades. That wasn’t a good sign. He didn’t expect the man to open up and discuss all his father-son secrets with a police detective from Las Vegas.

  “You ready for your close-up?” Amanda asked, dropping into the chair squeezed inside his cube. She looked scrubbed and rested, which made him feel old. He had taken Serena to McCarran to catch an early flight to Reno, and two cups of coffee hadn’t dented the haze in his head. On the other hand, his body still had the pleasant ache from cramped, sweaty sex with Serena a few hours earlier.

  “I’ll be lucky if he takes my call,” Stride said.

  “He’s still a father with a dead kid. He’s got to be anxious to find out what happened.”

  Stride shrugged. “Maybe. Sounds like Sawhill practically had to beg the governor to get Lane’s number. Nobody wants me to make this call.”

  “Except me, because I want to hear what the big guy sounds like. So make it.”

  “Let’s go in a conference room.”

  They took over a small, windowless office and shut the door behind them. Stride had another cup of coffee with him, and Amanda had a cruller and a glass of orange juice. They sat down on opposite sides of the conference table, and Stride dragged the phone to him. Amanda had a yellow pad in front of her. He punched the hands-free button and dialed the number.

  He expected to go through five layers of secretaries, personal assistants, and senior aides. Instead, almost immediately, the man answered his own phone.

  “Walker Lane.” His voice sounded exactly like the one they had heard on the answering machine in MJ’s condo, but flat, without the emotional pleading. It was a terrible voice, as gritty as sandpaper, an old hound trying to bark like a fierce dog in its prime.

  Stride couldn’t help but think of the photo he’d found of Walker Lane in the 1960s: absurdly tall, a mop of blond hair, Clark Kent glasses. Cocksure, as if he would someday own the world, which he pretty much did today. The price he’d paid was chiseled in his voice.

  Stride introduced himself and Amanda. Lane didn’t sound surprised. Stride wondered if the governor had tipped him off to expect the call.

  “Do you have any idea who killed my son?” he demanded.

  Stride explained what they had found on the casino video-tapes and the steps they were taking to retrace MJ’s movements. “We were wondering,” he added, “if you had any idea who the killer might be or why he wanted your son dead.”

  “No, I don’t. I just want you to find him.”

  “Did
MJ talk to you about any problems he was having?” Stride asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you know of anyone in Las Vegas he was particularly close to?”

  “No,” Lane repeated.

  “What about women in his life? Did you know who he was involved with?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Walker Lane didn’t waste unnecessary words. Stride realized he was just going to have to lay down his cards.

  “Mr. Lane, we heard the message you left for MJ on his answering machine. We know you talked to MJ shortly before he was killed. There was obviously a significant disagreement between the two of you. Can you tell us what it was about?”

  This time there was a long pause.

  “That’s a private matter, Detective. It has nothing to do with his death.”

  “I understand you feel that way, Mr. Lane,” Stride said, choosing his words carefully, “but sometimes we find connections in ways we don’t anticipate. Or we can pursue more productive areas of investigation because we can cross things off the list.”

  In other words, we’ll keep digging until we find out, Stride wanted to say.

  Lane didn’t take the bait. He didn’t say a word.

  Stride finally gave up after the silence stretched out too long. “How long had MJ lived in Vegas?”

  “Since he turned twenty-one.” Lane’s tone was clipped, unhappy.

  “You didn’t approve?” Stride asked.

  “No.”

  Stride began to understand why the man had never made a movie longer than eighty-seven minutes. “Why is that?”

  “Because the city is a sewer,” Lane snapped. “It’s immoral. A wasteland. There are only two kinds of people living there, users and suckers.”

  Amanda casually held up one hand and extended her middle finger at the phone. Stride shrugged.

  “When were you last here?” he asked.