Freezeout: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  With that she hung up.

  “Looks like we might have caught a break,” Sarge said.

  Pickett could only agree with that. She listened while Sarge thanked Buddy Charles for making time for them but they had to chase a lead and would be back with him as soon as things worked out.

  Then Pickett got them through the later afternoon traffic and into her parking spot at the Ogden. On the way they had both decided they needed a little exercise, so they met fifteen minutes later in the condo’s exercise room. No one else was there and they both did thirty minutes of running and weights before heading back upstairs for showers.

  They were in Sarge’s condo, feeding all three kittens their evening treat together when Robin called back.

  Again Pickett put the phone on speaker.

  “Every husband had an abusive family member that died right after the disappearance of the wife,” Robin said. “All of them, no exceptions, and all from a form of food poisoning or alcohol poisoning.”

  “Any of them found to be an actual poison?”

  “One doctor thinks that two of the men were killed purposely and both cases remain open as possible murders,” Robin said. “In both cases both men showed up at the hospital in cabs, extremely sick and died within days without regaining consciousness. Cab drivers said the men were picked up at two of the hotels our women disappear into.”

  Pickett was shocked.

  Could this actually be possible? Could these five sisters be serial killers and damn good ones.

  “How long after the women disappeared,” Sarge asked, “were the two possible murders committed?”

  “One was six days,” Robin said. “One was eight days.”

  “Any idea what the poison was?” Pickett asked.

  “The doctor on the two cases think it was Croton Oil.” Robin said. “It is used in animal lab testing in pain experiments and can be made from seeds of the Croton Tigium plant that grows in this area of the country.”

  “Mimics food poisoning?” Sarge asked.

  “Almost impossible to spot and only takes ten to twenty drops to be fatal,” Robin said. “You can add it to drinks or food and it takes about fifteen minutes for the reaction to hit once the poison is ingested.”

  “So they don’t need a lot of it,” Pickett said.

  “Exactly,” Robin said. “If what I have learned is right, the five women have killed eighty-five abusive men.”

  “Revenge for what their father did to their mother,” Sarge said.

  Pickett agreed completely.

  “We now have a motive and a crime,” Pickett said. “But no way to prove any of it and no idea where the women are now.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Robin said.

  “Well, this is progress,” Sarge said.

  Pickett nodded. It was movement forward and smack into another dead end.

  “You two enjoy your evening. Will and I are going to have date night. And no, don’t ask.”

  With that Robin hung up.

  Pickett laughed and at that moment the three kittens all ran into the living room together. Kittens seemed to never do anything slow.

  And they were sure a wonderful distraction from the ugliness of the world.

  PART FIVE

  Still Another Dead Hand

  TWENTY-FOUR

  November 20th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  SARGE WAS ABOUT as discouraged as he got on a case. For three days they had covered everything they could think of.

  Nothing.

  No headway at all.

  As more and more information about the deaths came in, there was little doubt the men they were targeting were abusers. Clearly the five sisters did their research, which was more than likely what they were doing in those retreat hotel rooms.

  And they did their research by marrying into a family to get the inside information about the abuser. Very careful as to their targets.

  And from what Pickett and Sarge could figure talking to husbands, the sisters did it without much attention. For every husband they had talked to in three days, it was clear that at one point or another the sisters met each victim.

  Today, Sarge and Pickett and Robin had all decided on trying to figure out how the sisters got the poison into the abuser’s drinks or food.

  It was a wonderful Sunday in late November, just four days before Thanksgiving, and Sarge wondered if he and Pickett had even needed the light jackets they wore on their walk to the Golden Nugget buffet. The sun was low, but had some warmth to it and the air felt like it might actually warm up.

  Sunday in Vegas was like most other days in Vegas to Sarge. Neither he nor Pickett were religious, and besides, as a detective, cases didn’t follow weekend rules, which had been part of the problem with his marriage.

  Actually, the only way anyone who didn’t work a regular five-day-a-week job in Vegas could tell any difference was that on Friday and Saturday nights there were a few more people than other nights. And on Sunday morning people in the casinos were either hung over or desperate to try their luck one more time before climbing on their plane home.

  And most of them were dragging luggage around.

  The buffet wasn’t even half full and no family or hungover gamblers were near Sarge and Pickett’s normal table when they got there. Robin hadn’t arrived yet, so they got coffee ordered for all three and put their jackets at the table and headed to get food.

  Robin arrived ten minutes later and within fifteen minutes all three of them were eating.

  Sarge hadn’t realized just how hungry he was this morning. He and Pickett had stayed up late watching a Mission Impossible movie. Nothing like watching a movie with fresh popcorn, three kittens, and the woman he loved to make a perfect Saturday night.

  “Notebooks,” Robin said as she finished her slice of ham and pulled out her spiral notebook.

  Sarge took out his small pocket notebook and put it beside his plate, then went back to finishing his second waffle. Robin’s call for notebooks meant they needed to talk about the case.

  “I don’t know if it’s going to help us at all on this,” Robin said, “but we need to focus on how the poison is being delivered. So I have all eighty-five case files of each death.”

  She took out of her pack a pile of gray folders and set them on an open area on the table.

  To Sarge, the files were small. He was used to murder files and only two of these were even being investigated as possible murders. Those two files were on top and were the thickest. The rest were thin.

  Very thin. Just unusual deaths in hotels or from food poisoning of undetermined origin.

  The folders were so thin that Robin could pick all of them together out of her pack without a problem.

  “I did a bunch of research on Croton Oil,” Robin said. “It’s frighteningly quick and lethal. It has to be ingested to do any real harm. And it causes extreme pain, so much so that the victims tend to drop into comas before eventually dying.”

  “So they have no time to talk,” Pickett said, which was exactly what Sarge had been thinking.

  “No time,” Robin said, nodding.

  “How hard would it be to get?” Pickett asked.

  Robin shrugged. “Not difficult in enough quantity to kill this many men. A small jar would do it and the stuff isn’t regulated.”

  “Oh,” Pickett said, scratching something off her notebook.

  “So connections in the deaths to the three hotels the women use?” Sarge asked.

  “Half of the men were found dead in the three hotels,” Robin said. “Another dozen or so managed to get either into cabs or to hospitals before collapsing. Cab records show they all came from the three hotels.”

  “The rest?” Pickett asked.

  Robin shrugged and pointed to the files. “No mention at all. Three collapsed on the sidewalk, the rest died in the hospital without any record of how they got there.”

  “So let’s just assume all of them were poisoned in the three hotels,
” Sarge said. “Safe assumption?”

  “Seems very safe,” Robin said, nodding.

  “And the women can get in and out of any room in the hotel at will,” Pickett said. “So they vanish into the hotel, change identity, stay under a fake name in another room until the target gets brought to the hotel and then manage to get the target poisoned, usually in a room.”

  “This has to be simple,” Sarge said, sitting back and thinking about it. “Eighty-five times this has happened, so the method of getting the poison into the food has to be simple and not involve anyone else.”

  Both Pickett and Robin nodded, clearly also thinking.

  Sarge then realized what he had said. “Not involve anyone else but the sisters.”

  Robin sat forward and started making notes.

  “You thinking another sister lured each man into the hotel?” Pickett asked.

  “They can’t trust another person,” Sarge said, “and the men need to get there in some fashion or another. How about in the two cases being looked at as a murder, any link to a woman?”

  Robin slid him one file and Pickett another. In the file Sarge had, it was clear that there was no mention of anyone with the victim and the hotel room was under the victim’s name.

  “Witness in this one saw the victim with a woman in the hotel,” Pickett said. “Short, in good shape, long blonde hair.”

  “Short,” Sarge said, nodding.

  “Robin,” “Pickett said, “any chance we can get security video of this man and the woman entering the hotel?”

  “We can,” Robin said, nodding, gabbing her phone. “I’ll get someone on it with facial recognition. But I am betting Sarge is right on this.”

  “So am I,” Pickett said.

  Sarge just smiled as Robin talked to someone in Will’s office, then hung up.

  “We’ll know in fifteen minutes,” Robin said.

  Sarge wasn’t so sure it was going to get them any closer to the five sisters, but in three days it was the first forward progress they had made and that felt great.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  November 20th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  AROUND THEM THE buffet sounds were quieting down as more and more of the morning breakfast crowd left. Now it was mostly just the sounds coming from the kitchen area that echoed over the large space. Pickett really felt comfortable here and she liked how the staff mostly just left them alone to take care of themselves, except to swoop past to pick up dirty plates and refill coffee.

  Pickett felt slightly excited that they had had a breakthrough. It wasn’t confirmed yet, but she was sure that Sarge was right and that the sisters helped each other.

  And it made sense that there would be two of them in case something went wrong. After all, they were luring abusive men into hotel rooms to be alone. It wouldn’t have surprised Pickett if a third sister was also in the return air ducts waiting to help.

  “So if another of the sisters in disguise help get the man into the hotel room,” Sarge said, “that brings us back to how in the world are they getting these disguises and identifications?”

  That question had bothered Pickett a great deal.

  Robin nodded. “Will asked the same question again last night. He has had no luck at all with the answer. These women set up complete fake histories and they manage to get driver’s licenses and birth certificates. Very, very professional and all the identification and fake history holds up to a pretty good background check.”

  “Any sign they take the id from someone else?” Pickett asked.

  “No,” Robin said. “They make these new identities up out of whole cloth.”

  “How?” Sarge asked. “If they are going under fake identities into these hotels with the men, those have to be solid ids in case something goes wrong. So they could be coming up with upwards of ten completely new identities every year for the last seventeen years.”

  “Patterns in the identities?” Pickett asked.

  Robin nodded and wrote in her notebook. “Might be worth a shot at running a computer program over the fake identities we know to see if there are repeating patterns of backgrounds, jobs, hometowns, and so on.”

  “And money?” Sarge said. “None of this can be cheap and they seem to take nothing from their husbands.”

  Money was something Pickett hadn’t thought of at all.

  “Damn,” Robin said, looking up. “Each identity had to open a bank account of some sort and transfer money or write a check. That might be a link.”

  Pickett watched as Robin went back to quickly writing in her notebook.

  Sarge excused himself to go get some dessert and Pickett asked him to bring her a piece of cherry pie if there was any.

  Robin kept writing and Pickett just sat thinking. There had to be a way into the covers that these five women had set up. Since it was November, the women were more than likely working on their next husbands, maybe getting married by now. More than likely the woman who had been Sandy Hunter was already married or close.

  They had to figure out how to find these five women, even if at the moment they couldn’t pin anything on them.

  Suddenly Pickett realized what she had been thinking about.

  Marriage.

  There were a lot of marriages in Las Vegas every year. Hundreds a day. But they had these women’s sizes and general ages.

  Sarge slid a piece of cherry pie in front of her and sat down with a piece of his own.

  “Robin,” Pickett said.

  Robin glanced up at Pickett, looking suddenly worried. Pickett never just called her by name like that unless it was something important and Robin knew it.

  “I know after the case a month ago, none of us want to think about marriage stuff,” Pickett said.

  Sarge had a piece of pie halfway to his mouth. He stopped and put the piece down on his plate.

  “Somewhere right about now the January and March sister and maybe the May sister might be getting a marriage license.”

  Robin nodded, thinking. Then she said, “We have their ages. If we could get the files, we could sort for age.”

  “Mike can get us the files again,” Sarge said.

  Pickett nodded. It was Mike in the big tunnel case last month who had helped them find key evidence by hacking into the marriage license database.

  “How were all of the women married before?” Pickett asked. “Chapels, churches, backyards?”

  “Nothing at all in any of the files on that,” Robin said. “But we can look that up easily since all the wedding licenses had to be filed after the ceremony to make the marriage valid. All that is public.”

  She wrote a quick note in her book, closed it, gathered up the files, and put them in her pack and stood. “Will and I have a ton of searches to do and he’s going to want to bring in extra help on this. If they get married in chapels, the photos will be available.”

  At that moment her phone rang and she answered it. She nodded for a moment, then said, “Thank you.”

  She put her phone away and looked at Sarge and Pickett.

  “The woman seen with the last victim from September going into the hotel was Miss March. She had on a brown-haired wig, had heels that made her seem taller, and wore dark glasses. But facial has it at a one hundred percent match.”

  “So she lured Miss September’s victim into the hotel,” Sarge said.

  “And one of them poisoned him,” Pickett said. She could feel her stomach twisting.

  “We have got to find these women before January,” Sarge said.

  “We don’t have them rounded up by early December,” Robin said, “we go public with all this. Splash their photos over the news and papers. We’ll lose them, but save five lives.”

  Pickett could only nod to that. She didn’t want to have these women vanish. She wanted to arrest them.

  Personally.

  TWENTY-SIX

  November 20th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  AFTER ROBIN LEFT, Sarge called Mike D
ans again and asked for the favor of hacking the marriage licenses. Sarge couldn’t believe he was asking someone to break the law. He never would have done that as an actual detective, but retired now, sometimes small lapses over the line saved lives.

  Mike agreed and then Sarge and Pickett finished their cherry pies and sipped on their coffee.

  “Seems like we made a little progress again this morning,” Pickett said.

  “It does,” Sarge said.

  “But something is bothering you, isn’t it?”

  Sarge glanced at Pickett and smiled. He loved how she could already read him. Before meeting her, having someone be able to really see him would have bothered him something awful. But he really liked it with Pickett.

  “I’ve just been worrying about the evidence,” Sarge said. “Even if we track and find these women, it will be like catching an endangered trout. Catch and release.”

  Pickett nodded and sipped on her coffee as a waitress nearby worked on cleaning all the empty tables.

  “I think as we work on finding these five women,” Sarge said, “we also need to start building a real case against them.”

  “And how do we start that?” Pickett asked.

  “The poison is one lead,” Sarge said. “I had never even heard of Croton Oil before this case.”

  “Neither had I,” Pickett said. “We could also get them on creating fake ids and polygamy to hold them. Those we might be able to prove.”

  Sarge agreed with that. His focus was the murders, but at least they had something they might be able to hold the sisters on. But both of those charges wouldn’t hold them for long. Days, maybe. And then the sisters would vanish.

  “Also they all took their diamond wedding or engagement rings,” Pickett said. “The most recent ones we could hold on felony theft.”

  Sarge nodded to that. It would be enough to hold them for a time. But they had to prove conspiracy on at least one or two of the murders.

  Somehow.

  If they could find them first.