Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  “You’ve made it hard for me to ask what I wanted to ask,” Serena admitted.

  Claire shook her head. “Not at all. Ask me anything. I may ask for some of your secrets, too.”

  “I need to talk to your father. We think he may know what’s going on, and why. If it involves what happened to Amira, he’s the only one who may be able to put the pieces together.”

  “And you want me to call him,” Claire said.

  “That’s right”

  “I’m sorry, Serena. I’m not ready to do that. If it puts me in his debt, I won’t do it”

  “I understand. But lives are at stake. Maybe yours, too.”

  “Do you really think I’m in danger?” Claire asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Claire nodded. “I need to think about this,” she said. A moment later, she added, “I can’t give you an answer now, okay?”

  “Don’t take too long,” Serena urged her. She found a card in her pocket and handed it to her.

  Claire took it and tapped the card lightly on the table. “You tell me something,” she said.

  Serena smiled. “Okay.”

  “Was I right?”

  “You mean about me?” Serena knew exactly what she meant. The affair. Touching a nerve. “That’s none of your business.”

  “I forgot, you’re tough.”

  Claire stood up and stretched her arms languorously over her head. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

  Serena scraped her chair back along the linoleum and began to stand up. “I’ll go.”

  “No, it’s okay.” Claire waved her back to her seat. “We can keep talking.”

  She took the few steps to the dressing room door and turned the dead bolt, then began unbuttoning her blouse. When she was done, she left her blouse hanging open, her cleavage and midriff on display.

  “Do you sing?” Claire asked Serena.

  “Me? No. I clear the room on karaoke night.”

  “So how do you express yourself? You must have something.”

  “I take pictures,” Serena said. “Desert photos.”

  She watched Claire carefully remove her earrings, using two hands as she unhitched the gold hoops. Claire put the earrings on the table, then ran her hands back through her hair, gently separating the strands.

  “I’d like to see them,” Claire said.

  Claire nudged the blouse off her shoulders. The silk rubbed up along her skin, then separated and fell down her back. Her breasts were bare, perfect white globes with erect red nipples. She gently tugged the sleeve off each wrist and turned away to hang the blouse on the clothes rack. Her spine rippled, dipping into the hollow of her back.

  “Would you like to have dinner?” Claire asked, without turning around.

  “Sorry, I can’t.”

  Claire slid a zipper down the side of her black pants. She pushed them down over her ass and past her thighs and then bent each leg to step out of them. She was now wearing only a black thong. She turned back. “Too bad.”

  Serena knew she had an opportunity to say something, to make a joke, to leave. When Serena sat there, not moving, not even breathing, Claire stripped the thong off her body, exposing her auburn mound, which was trimmed to leave only a wisp of curly light hair. She stood there for a brief moment and then disappeared into the bathroom. The water in the shower began running.

  Serena got out of the chair. She looked at the locked door to the dressing room and knew she should simply leave. Then Claire returned, a towel slung around her neck, reaching low enough to cover her breasts but not the rest of her naked body.

  “The water takes forever to heat up,” she said.

  Serena nodded and tried to moisten her lips with her tongue, but her mouth was dry.

  Claire walked up to within a few inches of Serena, too close for comfort. “You could join me.”

  “No. I couldn’t do that”

  “You’re very beautiful,” Claire told her.

  “So are you,” Serena admitted, before she could stop herself.

  “I’d like to see you again.”

  “I’m not gay,” Serena said.

  “Does that matter? I’m attracted to people. I don’t care whether they’re men or women. I’m attracted to you.”

  “I’m involved,” Serena said. She added, “With a man.”

  “But you’re attracted to me, too.”

  Serena wanted to deny it, but she didn’t. “Look, this isn’t going to happen.”

  Claire reached out and touched Serena’s face with the back of her hand. “Don’t hide it from him. You’re keeping a secret now.”

  “I’m sorry.” Serena pulled away. “I sent the wrong signals.”

  “They weren’t wrong. You want me so bad you can taste it. What’s wrong with that?”

  Serena’s cell phone rang. She backed up as if the room had caught fire and dove into her pocket to retrieve it. She heard Stride’s voice, and she felt a wave of guilt crashing over her. She couldn’t believe what she was doing, what she wanted to do. Not since Deidre, she thought.

  “What is it?” she asked, and she hated herself because her voice was husky with arousal.

  Stride brought her down to earth.

  “There’s been another murder,” he said.

  TWENTY

  Amanda choked back tears as she stared at the body of Tierney Dargon. It surprised her. She had steeled herself to death over the years, but the bodies she saw day in and day out were rarely people she had known when they were alive. They were corpses, flesh, wounds, devoid of personality. Amanda had seen Tierney so recently that she could remember her perfume and hear the girlish intonation of her voice. She had liked her. Felt sorry for her. Tierney was a decent kid lost in the Vegas high life. No more.

  Now she was like MJ, eyes wide with shock and fright, trails of blood streaked on her face from the gaping bullet wound in her forehead. Dead in the foyer of Moose’s sprawling house, like Alice Ford in Reno, with no time to react or scream. Open the door, see the face of death, and bang. Her brain was gone before it had time to react. Instantaneous.

  Amanda looked beyond the foyer into the mansion and realized that, even alive, Tierney would have looked out of place here. She was young, and this was a rich old man’s house. Moose had made it into a shrine to his past, with bookshelves filled with awards, decades-old posters advertising his shows, and dozens of photographs of Moose onstage. He was larger than life, and so was his estate, both of them gaudy and giantlike. The living room was decorated like a lavish casino, with tall Roman columns, gold trim, a grand piano, and-most impressive of all-a second-story indoor swimming pool with a translucent bottom, so visitors could look up and see the blue water. Moose had one of the prime locations in Lake Las Vegas, in the MiraBella development, hugging the golf course and the resort’s private man-made lake, with the moonscape of the desert hills stretched out in the distance.

  No one would hesitate to open the door here, even to a stranger. Lake Las Vegas was located a few miles east of the city, over the mountains on the road to Lake Mead. There was only one narrow road into or out of MiraBella and the other south shore developments, with a guard station to keep out strangers and gawkers. If you made it in, you were safe.

  But not this time.

  Amanda wondered: How did the killer make it past the south shore gate?

  “Where’s Moose?” she asked one of the uniforms on the scene. She saw the cop’s eyes cloud over with disgust and felt her hackles rise. Nothing ever changed.

  “Guard at the gate said he left in the limo around eight,” he said. “I assume someone is tracking him down.”

  “You assume?” Amanda retorted. The cop shrugged, and she added sharply, “Don’t assume. Find out, and let me know.”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied acidly. Amanda felt her mood sour further as he left.

  There was a large team on hand to work the murder. That was one advantage of getting killed in a place like Lake Las Vegas, which was usually i
mmune to that kind of crime, unless it was a rich wife shooting a rich husband. A body out here got plenty of attention. The call had come in from a neighbor who heard the gunshot. He was a hunter and knew the difference between the report of a pistol and the crack of a target rifle, which wasn’t an uncommon sound in the desert hills. When he went to investigate, he found the door wide open and Tierney just inside.

  Amanda’s cell phone rang. It was Stride.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m parked outside, next to your car,” Stride said. “I thought you didn’t use the Spyder at crime scenes.”

  Amanda was puzzled. “Usually I don’t, but I love to take it on the mountain roads. So what?”

  “Come out here, okay?”

  Amanda swallowed back acid and felt a pit of worry in her stomach. She slapped her phone shut and headed for the front door. As she passed two of the crime scene techs, she heard a whispered comment and a laugh behind her. She wheeled around but couldn’t tell who had spoken. She gave them a fierce glare, then bolted past Tierney’s body into the warm air outside. The curving driveway was being scoured for evidence. She took a circuitous route through the garden rocks and passed the cluster of patrol cars on the edge of the crime scene tape. Beyond the house was the deep darkness of the lake and sparkling lights from the resort hotel on the opposite shore.

  Stride was leaning on his Bronco, next to her Spyder, about twenty yards away. He was standing under a streetlight. His arms were folded over his chest. When she joined him, he nodded at the driver’s door of her sports car. Amanda saw it and swore.

  The car was desecrated. Someone had chiseled the word PERVERT into the door of the Spyder in large letters.

  “I didn’t want you to find this alone,” Stride said.

  Amanda felt her emotions battling between rage and humiliation. “Fuckers,” she muttered. “It never stops. Thanks for telling me.”

  “I asked around,” Stride said. “No one admits seeing anything.”

  “Big surprise.” Amanda ran her fingers over the ruts in the paint. In some ways, it was like being raped. As if that were what they would do, if they got her alone.

  “Don’t take this shit lying down, Amanda,” Stride told her.

  “I never have before.” Amanda wondered, though, how much more she could take. It didn’t matter how often she proved herself, they kept coming for her, trying to drive her away. She stared at the word again. Pervert. She could feel the hatred of whoever had written it. This wasn’t a mean joke, a taunt. It was primal and ugly.

  “You okay?” Stride asked, watching her.

  She shook her head. She wasn’t okay. “I could have caught the Green River Killer, and the headlines would have been about my cock. I mean, is it really such a big deal?”

  Stride laughed.

  Amanda realized what she’d said and laughed, too. Some of the tension drained out of her. “Okay, it is a big deal,” she said slyly. Then she added, “I know what people think. It just hurts to have it constantly thrown in your face.”

  She spent another few seconds feeling sorry for herself. Stride waited, not pushing her, and she felt a surge of warmth for him. She remembered what Serena had told her-that Stride had swooped in out of nowhere and become a lifeline for her. Amanda felt a little like that herself-not in a romantic way, because she loved Bobby, and she knew Stride loved Serena, but it made her feel less alone on the force to have him there, as if she finally had an ally, a friend. That hadn’t happened, not since she was Jason. Her friends from back then had peeled away, one by one.

  “Tell me something,” she said to Stride. “Why don’t you hate me, too?”

  “Come on, Amanda. That question’s not worthy of you.”

  “You’re right. It’s stupid. Someone else asked that, not me.”

  Stride was all business again. “You said Tierney had a bodyguard, didn’t you? Where was he?”

  “Who, the Samoan? I think he’s just rent-a-muscle. There was no one else in the house.”

  “Shouldn’t there be a live-in staff at a palace like this?” Stride asked. “A butler, six maids, a few gardeners to water the rocks?”

  “Not according to the neighbor who found the body. I talked to him. He says there’s day staff only. Apparently, Moose likes to walk around naked at night.”

  “Thanks for putting that image in my mind,” Stride said.

  “What I’m wondering is how the perp got in here. He sure as hell didn’t walk from the highway at night.”

  “Is there a log of all the vehicles in and out?”

  Amanda nodded. “I’ve got uniforms tracking down every car in the security log, starting with the cars that left after the time of the murder.”

  “Did he leave the shell casing again?”

  “Yes, a.357, just like with MJ. I’m betting if we can recover the bullet, we’ll get a ballistics match. Although I doubt we’ll even need it. He’s not trying to cover his tracks. I’m having them dust for prints to see if he left us another souvenir.”

  “Three murders,” Stride said. “Four, if there’s a tie-in with Reno. He’s picking up the pace.”

  Amanda saw headlights approaching down the lakeside avenue where Moose and a handful of other wealthy neighbors had their homes. As the vehicle passed under the first streetlight, she recognized the limo in which she had sat with Tierney Dargon. When Tierney was alive and young.

  She pointed at the car. “Moose,” she said.

  Stride could see where the comedian got his nickname. He was amazingly tall and seemed to be all legs, like a circus magician on stilts. He had a shaggy head of long hair, unnaturally black and thick for a man his age. It flopped across his face as he sat with his elbows propped on his knees and his long, spindly fingers cupping his face like tentacles. His tuxedo fit loosely. He had undone his bow tie, which lay like a squashed bat on his ruffled white shirt.

  He was alone with Stride and Amanda in the rear of the limo. His feet almost touched the other cushions of the stretch.

  “My beautiful girl,” he said. “I should have left her where she was: I’m a selfish bastard. I wanted someone to take care of me. To bury me. Now I have to bury her instead.”

  He looked up at them, his dark eyes haunted. Stride noticed his trademark eyebrows, furry and wild, which he was able to curl and twitch at will. They were part of his act. He could make his eyebrows dance, and crowds died laughing. Stride had seen him in a stand-up routine on television almost twenty years ago. His humor was black and self-destructive, filled with jokes about drinking, divorce, and strokes, drawn from his own life. But his eyebrows lightened everything, as if they were twin dummies and Moose the ventriloquist. Tonight, though, they sat motionless above his eyes like sleeping dogs.

  “Can you tell us where you were this evening, Mr. Dargon?” Stride asked. He was polite but firm.

  Moose slowly focused. He seemed genuinely numb with grief, but Stride had been disappointed too many times by suffering spouses. Too often they turned out to be perpetrators, not victims-and Moose was a performer.

  “I was entertaining at a fund-raiser,” he said, pointing to a reelection button for Governor Durand on his tuxedo lapel.

  “Why didn’t Tierney go with you?”

  One of Moose’s eyebrows sprang briefly to life. “I’m a beast when I have a show to do. I don’t talk to anyone before or after. Tierney would have had to sit by herself with a table full of gassy lawyers. Listen to them telling her about their latest Daubert motion while checking out her tits. She would have hated it.”

  “Who else knew she was going to be home alone?” Stride asked, putting a faint emphasis on the word “else.”

  “I can’t think of anyone,” Moose said. “Usually, Tierney goes out if I have a show. She’s young. But today she decided to stay home and watch some movies.”

  “Did she tell anyone about her plans?”

  “Just the security company. She called them around noon and said she wouldn’t need an es
cort tonight.”

  Stride glanced at Amanda, who was already scribbling in her notebook. He asked Moose for details about the security company he used, which was called Premium Security. Stride remembered that Karyn Westermark used a bodyguard, too, when she was in Vegas, and he jotted down a reminder to find out whether she used the same firm.

  Amanda leaned forward. “Mr. Dargon, did you know MJ Lane?”

  Moose’s face was blank. “ Walker ’s son? The boy who was murdered last weekend? I knew the old man, back in the sixties, but not MJ. Why?”

  “There’s no way to be delicate about this,” Amanda told him. “Tierney was having an affair with MJ.”

  “Oh.” Moose rested his head back until he was staring at the ceiling of the limo. “Now I see. You think I’m a jealous cuckold. First I had her lover killed, and now my wife.”

  “You have a reputation,” Stride said. “A temper.”

  Moose looked down and gave them a sad smile. His eye-brows rippled. Stride noticed the man’s gray pallor, how the outline of his skull showed through the skin. He had seen the look before, when his wife Cindy was dying of cancer.

  “Once upon a time? Sure. But we were all bad boys then. We drank, we partied, we got out of hand. We were colorful, and that’s how people liked us. I used to piss into the fountains at Caesars. I’d egg on pretty boys until they took a swing at me, and then I’d break their jaws. I’d dance on blackjack tables. That was part of the show. When I went too far, they’d throw me in a jail cell until I sobered up, and then I’d have bacon and eggs with the cops in the morning. I knew the first name of every cop in the city, and I went to most of the birthday parties for their kids.”

  “So your mean streak was just an act?”

  “I’m saying I was what everyone wanted me to be. Look, I could blow up with the best of them. I was a son of a bitch sometimes. But I’m eighty years old, Detective. I’m on my way out. I’m a squealing little pig with his nuts cut off. My devil days, when I had a temper and liked to use it, were a very long time ago. I didn’t marry Tierney for sex, and not even to have a pretty young thing on my arm. Believe it or not, we liked each other. We were friends. I encouraged her to see young men if she wanted to, because I knew she’d have to go back to that life after I was gone. I didn’t ask for details, so I had no idea she had a relationship with MJ or anyone else.”