Ace High

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Pickett nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “But I bet not one of us thought to get a picture of Bob Steven’s wife, did we?” Sarge asked, smiling.

  Both Pickett and Robin just stared at him, then Robin said, “Shit.” And grabbed her phone.

  As Sarge smiled, Robin told Will to pull up a picture of the brother’s wife and do facial recognition with Heather Winston.

  She held.

  Sarge smiled at Pickett.

  Less than thirty seconds later Robin said, “Well, guess we better put even more people looking for them.”

  She nodded, then said, “Thanks.”

  “We found Heather Winston,” Robin said. “Married to her pretend brother under the name Judy Winston. They were married four months after she disappeared and was replaced and during the same time frame as her last entry in the journal.”

  “And I bet their first child came along a few months later, right?” Sarge said.

  “Nailed it in one,” Robin said.

  29

  December 6th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  Pickett sat back on the barstool and tried to make sense of all of this. Heather Winston, her parents, more than likely fake, and her fake brother who became her husband, all arrived in town at the same time. They set her up in high school and the brother in college.

  But why and what were they doing and where did all the money come from?

  And more importantly, why did they leave all that money in that safe with a bomb? When they were quitting, why not just take it all?

  What was their scam and why shut things down? Who were they afraid of?

  “We need to figure out what they were doing,” Pickett said.

  Sarge and Robin both nodded and all three of them stood and headed into the dining room with all the files.

  The file cabinets looked so out of place in the modern dining room and had a faint smell of mold as well.

  They all started from the beginning of the files, making notes, going over each entry. They took each file out, each looked at it and they didn’t move on to the next file until they agreed to what it was, how much money was involved, and any other detail that was in the file but that they didn’t yet understand.

  It became clear fairly quickly that no matter what the object in the ledger might be, the entire thing was about cars, which actually surprised Pickett at first, but the deeper into the files, the more amazed she became that such an operation could exist.

  They quickly figured out what each initial stood for on the bills of sale. A Cadillac Eldorado was just CE.

  There were thirty different companies and hundreds of fake names selling the cars and seemingly they sold to every dealer in town. Records of fake bank accounts being opened and then closed a few months later were throughout the records.

  By the time Cavanaugh got there an hour after they had started, Pickett was convinced she knew where all the money came from. It was from selling cars.

  A lot of cars.

  They spent fifteen minutes getting Cavanaugh up to speed and how they were now looking for the brother and his wife and kids.

  “Might also want to get a search going for the parents,” Cavanaugh said. “If your hunch was right, they are still alive somewhere.”

  Robin nodded to that and stepped off to one side to call Will.

  Then they told him about the cars.

  “All that money,” Cavanaugh said, looking confused, “and all this and the bomb and the sniper and everything is about cars?”

  “Seems that way,” Pickett said.

  Sarge nodded, then said, “That’s what all this paperwork is about anyway.”

  “That makes no damn sense,” Cavanaugh said, shaking his head.

  Pickett agreed with that.

  Sarge looked at all the files. “We know only Heather Winston did all these books and handled all that money. But to move that many cars, legally or illegally, there had to be a lot of people involved.”

  Suddenly Pickett understood what they had missed.

  “We only have money coming into these ledgers,” Pickett said. “Nothing going out that we have come across yet.”

  Sarge looked at her, clearly surprised.

  “I heard that and you are right,” Robin said, stepping back closer to the table, her phone back in her pocket.

  “So how many cars are we talking about?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “From my best guess,” Sarge said, “and considering we are only a quarter of the way through so far, I’m guessing around eight thousand cars.”

  Pickett nodded. “The sale prices seem to be ranging in the four to six thousand dollar range. So that math works to get to forty million in the safe as the last entry noted.”

  “That means they were selling from ten to twenty cars a day for the entire time they were in operation,” Cavanaugh said, looking stunned and staring at the files. “How was that possible?”

  “And who did the selling?” Robin asked.

  “And where did all the cars come from?” Pickett asked.

  That question bothered her more than any of the other hundred questions she had.

  30

  December 6th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  Sarge and Pickett and Robin and Cavanaugh worked together to finish going through all the files. It took them three hours and they came up with a total of eight thousand and fifty cars sold, or at least recorded by Heather Winston in those records.

  Cavanaugh had gotten permission for two of Will’s people to come in here and spend the night digitizing every piece of paper and every page of every journal. Sarge was going to feel safer about all of this when that was done and all this information stored off-site.

  So when they finished, Robin headed home to help Will while Sarge and Pickett also headed home. Mike’s men shadowed all three of them and Mike said he would have men stationed around Sarge and Pickett’s place all night.

  Sarge had to admit he felt better having backup. No telling exactly how deep and how powerful a cesspool they had uncovered here.

  Sarge and Pickett agreed to meet Cavanaugh and Robin the next morning for breakfast at the Golden Nugget and plan what to do next.

  After the heavy breakfast and then the hamburgers for lunch, neither he nor Pickett was that hungry, but they both agreed they needed to eat.

  So when they got back to the complex Pickett worked to make them a light salad with some ham and cheese while Sarge sat on the floor in the living room and watched three kittens chase after a string he had tied on a stick.

  They seldom caught the string, but they were sure cute chasing it.

  “You ever feel like that we’re the kittens in this case?” Robin asked after laughing at a pileup of orange fur.

  “How’s that,” Sarge asked, keeping the string just out of reach of the three kittens.

  “We’re chasing this thing and just not catching it,” Robin said, putting two bowls of salad on the table, then going back for glasses of water and silverware.

  Sarge could only agree to that.

  Sarge dropped the stick and the string in the middle of the floor and stood. Instantly all three kittens seemed disappointed and didn’t care anymore about the string. It wasn’t trying to escape, so no point in even touching it. But all three kept an eye on the string while pretending not to.

  Sarge and Pickett talked for a time about the case, but both of them were so tired, nothing seemed to make sense.

  They finally decided to just table the discussion until breakfast and picked a romantic comedy to watch.

  Sarge was pleased that Pickett nodded off to sleep before he did. When he was young, he might have thought of carrying her into bed, but as it was he just shut off the movie, woke her just enough to get her to walk toward their bedroom, and then turned off the lights.

  The three kittens were nowhere to be seen.

  But the next morning the kittens were bac
k in their normal routine and he felt a thousand times better. Pickett had made the coffee for him and as they stood drinking in the kitchen Pickett asked, “Should we walk over today?”

  “Drive,” Sarge said. “No point in making it any harder on Mike’s men than we already are.”

  Sarge didn’t like the idea that their normal routine was disrupted, but he had a hunch it wouldn’t be for long. This entire case was unraveling quickly.

  The kittens were settled in the living room as he and Pickett headed out the front door. Everything felt normal until Pickett asked a simple question just as he pulled the door closed.

  “Whatever happened to Darling Black?”

  And instantly this case felt even farther from being solved.

  And Sarge hated that.

  31

  December 7th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  Pickett watched for any sign of Mike’s men as they went to her car in the parking garage and then pulled out to drive the short distance to the Golden Nugget parking garage.

  She didn’t see a sign of any of the security, but she knew they were there and watching. And that told her just how good they really were.

  The normal wonderful smells of waffles and bacon hit her as they went up the long escalator to the second floor. The place didn’t look too busy, with almost everyone seated against the big windows overlooking the pool.

  Robin was already sitting at the table with a number of notebooks beside her just about as far as they could get from those windows. She waved them over before Robin could pay.

  “Already paid for all four of us this morning,” Robin said.

  Pickett could see in Robin’s eyes that there was news. Good or bad, Pickett couldn’t tell.

  At that moment Detective Cavanaugh came up the escalator and Sarge went to get him into the restaurant and to their table. Two minutes later all of them were getting their breakfasts and four cups of coffee were on the big table.

  Sarge had also asked the hostess to not seat anyone close to them this morning so Pickett felt that they had some privacy.

  After they had all eaten for a moment and Robin had gotten her daily update on the three kittens, Pickett turned to Cavanaugh, who was looking tired, but not as tired as yesterday.

  “Get everything photographed and saved?”

  “All done,” Cavanaugh said, nodding as he worked on a large slice of ham. “And this place is better than I remember it for breakfast.”

  Sarge nodded. “And they change the selections regularly.”

  Cavanaugh just shook his head and kept eating.

  “So what’s the news?” Pickett asked Robin.

  “Bob Steven and his wife, formally his sister, have vanished completely,” Robin said. “However their two kids are still in college and acting as if nothing has changed. We have people on them.”

  “They might not know anything?” Pickett said.

  “I’m betting on that,” Cavanaugh said, nodding. “But that said, what do we know?”

  Pickett and Robin both took out their notebooks at the same time. Sarge was only a second or so behind. Cavanaugh just watched and laughed.

  “From the beginning,” Robin said, “We know that a young girl that looked similar to Heather Winston died in the old Landmark Hotel after it was closed up.”

  “A week later a fake Heather Winston took her place in the family,” Pickett said. “We have no idea why.”

  “We know that about four months after the fake Heather Winston was trapped in that hotel room,” Robin said, “the real Heather Winston, or whatever her real name might be, walked away from about fifteen million in a storage unit while setting explosives to blow up everything. It is pretty certain she never returned to the storage unit even though she lived here in town all those years, married to her pretend brother. She raised two kids like a normal parent.”

  Pickett found that just amazing.

  “The files in that storage unit show pretty clearly that they were selling cars to build up the cash in that safe,” Sarge said.

  Pickett nodded to all of that.

  “We also know,” Sarge said, “that Cinda Blessing knew about the money and the danger of the storage unit and tried to take it, but was killed by someone else who knew about the storage unit and what it contained.”

  “Or wanted to stop her,” Pickett said.

  “That’s pretty much it,” Robin said.

  “So we know things,” Pickett said. “But we have no answers to the many, many questions of how and why.”

  Robin, Sarge, and Cavanaugh all nodded.

  “So why not try to start from the real beginning of all this, at least the one we know,” Pickett said.

  Again all three nodded.

  “We know that two couples, an older couple and a younger couple, arrived in Las Vegas and set up fake identities as a family and somehow started selling cars.”

  “For cash,” Sarge said.

  “And no idea where they got the cars they sold or how they paid for them.”

  “If they paid for them,” Pickett said. “Any kind of transportation or theft ring would have to be vast to get that many cars in that short of time.”

  “Let alone sell them,” Sarge said.

  “We did some preliminary traces last night on some of the cars listed,” Cavanaugh said. “All were bought and sold aboveboard, many by reputable dealers. The paper trail is clean on all of them.”

  Silence around the table.

  The sounds of the tourists talking and laughing from the other side of the restaurant mixed with the faint sounds coming from dishes being bussed and kitchen work behind the buffet.

  Pickett could feel the frustration of this case starting to close in around her. She needed to clear her mind.

  “Bread pudding break,” she said, sliding her chair back and standing.

  Sarge came with her and Robin and Cavanaugh both passed on the offer to bring them one.

  As they walked back to the table, Sarge said, “We need to tie up some connections, first.”

  “Like what?” Pickett asked as she set her dish of bread pudding in front of her chair and sat down.

  “How did that DNA get planted on that body and why did it lead us to the brother?” Sarge asked.

  “You think she married her real brother?” Pickett asked.

  “In most cases DNA evidence is pretty solid stuff,” Sarge said. “But in this case I don’t trust it as far as I could throw the sample.”

  “But it just might give us some more answers,” Robin said, grabbing her phone.

  Pickett worked at the wonderfully sweet bread pudding while Robin asked Will to do a very deep background search on Heather’s DNA. Where did it come from, relatives that might be in the system, and so on.

  “Only going to take Will’s people a minute to run the program,” Robin said. “Didn’t think to do it before now.”

  Pickett watched as after a moment Will started talking. Robin just nodded slowly, writing some notes in her notebook, which Pickett knew meant the news wasn’t good.

  “Thanks,” Robin said after a moment and clicked off her phone.

  She looked at Pickett, then said simply, “We got a distant relative connection to a family in Washington state by the name of Winston. They were killed in a house fire. The entire family perished. Two parents, a college aged son and a senior in high school daughter.”

  “When?” Sarge asked.

  “Two weeks before the family appeared here in Las Vegas,” Robin said.

  “Bodies confirmed in the fire?” Cavanaugh said.

  “Confirmed and identified by family,” Robin said. “Somehow these imposters must have taken some DNA from the family and made sure the DNA was in the system as them here.”

  “Brother got his DNA in by filing it,” Cavanaugh said. “Two months after they got here. That’s how he got his into the system. He purposely put his DNA in as part of a pilot program back then for a university study.�
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  “So we really have no idea who this family is or where they came from?” Pickett asked. “Right?”

  All three nodded.

  Robin glanced at Cavanaugh. “Sorry to say but the lead detective on the dead girl’s case in the Landmark inherited just over two hundred thousand the same week as she was found.”

  “More than likely got him killed,” Cavanaugh said, shaking his head.

  Again silence around the table.

  “Will says they are looking for a possible family or two couples,” Robin said, “that vanished at the same time back then, but he thinks it is unlikely they will find anything.”

  “Not sure how much it would help us anyway,” Pickett said. All she wanted to know was what happened here in Vegas and who was that dead girl in the Landmark?

  32

  December 7th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  “Maybe if we just created a list of questions about all this,” Sarge said, “and then put them in an order of importance, we might be able to start carving at this mess.”

  He really, really needed some organization at this point in time. So much information they had thought they knew and then didn’t, he wasn’t keeping some of it straight.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Pickett said. “I’ll start. Who was Darling Black and what did he or she have to do with any of this?”

  All four of them wrote that down. Robin added, “Why did she stop at the same approximate time as Heather pretended to vanish for a week.”

  “She didn’t,” Pickett said. “That information came from Carla. Actually her columns went to December.”

  Sarge nodded on that and wrote that down.

  “What was being sold to make that kind of money?” Cavanaugh asked. “The records from the files want us to believe it was cars, but I sure can’t imagine how that could have been done without a huge organization.”