Kill Game: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Lott said, laughing. “But they made some contacts when they were working on his father’s death.”

  “Same one where the President’s friend and Chief of Staff were killed?” Julia asked.

  “Same one,” Lott said.

  She dropped the subject at that. If Lott trusted his daughter and Doc to get the information, then they were good as far as she was concerned.

  “So we also need to put traces and impound searches on that Impala,” Andor said.

  “Back to the DMV for me,” Lott said. “They love me there.”

  “I’ll check the missing persons,” Andor said, “and get someone going on the impound of the Impala, see if that happened.”

  “What do you need me to do?” Julia asked.

  Lott glanced at Andor. “Head home, take a nap for about two hours, change into your sorting clothes, and meet me and Andor back at my place in three hours. We have a lot of boxes to sort.”

  She appreciated the thought. And she planned on doing part of it. “Tell you what. I’ll only take an hour-long nap to get my feet under me, then get on the internet and see what I can find for books on lost mines and treasures around this part of Nevada.”

  “Perfect,” Andor said. “And check the old bookstore down on the corner of Sahara and Industrial. Who knows what they might have as well. Those folks in there seem to know more about Nevada history than anyone in the state.”

  “That I can do,” she said. “Someone is going to have to contact his parents and let them know their son is dead.”

  Lott glanced at Andor.

  “Let’s wait until we have a few more answers first,” Andor said.

  She agreed and nodded her thanks to Lott, then quickly finished off her chicken sandwich in two bites as the other two stood.

  Typical. She was always the last one still eating. Especially with other detectives.

  Over the years, she had left many a meal half-eaten. At least these two were kind enough to let her get close to the end before heading to the door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  September, 2014

  Pleasant Hills

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  JULIA ARRIVED AT LOTT’S HOME and parked out front of the well-kept two-story home. It was clearly a loved place with a green lawn and desert plants arranged with care in great patterns in rock gardens. Lott hadn’t gotten there yet, since his car wasn’t in the carport attached to the house where he normally parked it.

  More than likely he had gotten hung up at the DMV. She didn’t envy him that task. She had spent her time in the DMV up in Reno over the years. They had been friendly people, at least in Reno, and she always bought them small Christmas presents every year.

  But even with nice people, the task of searching old databases was never easy or fun.

  Before she came over, she had managed to find a good dozen books on lost treasures and mines in Nevada online, and a few more that covered the entire Southwest, from California over through Utah and Arizona. Stan had no receipts from Arizona, so she had ignored books on that state. She had managed to get three of the main ones she had found online from the bookstore that Lott had suggested. One, a book titled Nevada: Lost Mines and Buried Treasures by McDonald had been published in 1981 before she had met Stan, so it might have been one of the books he used. Or at least knew about.

  It would give them a start if they found an area he might be working.

  Earlier, after getting back to her apartment, she had actually made herself lie down for a short time. That, and the lunch, had helped her get her mind back and she now felt fine again.

  She supposed it shouldn’t have surprised her that Stan had another wife. As Denise had said, he was a freeloader.

  For all she knew, Stan also had wives in Winnemucca and Salt Lake. Now if she and Lott found them, those extra wives wouldn’t surprise her. If he had to marry while freeloading, that would only make sense. He clearly had had the ability to remember who he was with at any time and keep his stories and different lives straight.

  But what bothered her a lot was why they had called her as his wife and not Denise, right here in town. That made no sense at all.

  And why he had named his son after her? He hadn’t lived long enough to have anything to do with naming Jane. He was dead before she had been born, so Julia had named her new baby daughter after her own mother.

  Now she was going to have to tell her daughter that her father had been a bigamist and that she had a half-brother about her age.

  That wasn’t a conversation she was looking forward to.

  Over twenty years after his death, Stan was still driving her crazy.

  At that moment, Lott pulled into his driveway, waving at her and smiling through the tinted windows as he went past.

  Just seeing him made her smile. She couldn’t believe that at her age she was falling again for someone. She couldn’t even remember how this had felt all those years ago, before meeting Stan.

  She hadn’t even felt this way with Stan. He had just been someone easy to hang around with, who didn’t mind her being a cop, and who was pretty decent in bed. She had a hunch that if she really looked at it, she used him as much as he used her.

  It would have been nice, though, if he could have helped raise Jane some. But he clearly hadn’t lived long enough to even know that Jane was coming along. Julia had planned on telling him the next time he was in town. But instead got a phone call about his murder.

  She climbed out into the late afternoon heat. It was just around 3:30 and the temperature in late September still had to be over ninety, easily. She had no doubt this heat and weather were going to take her a few years to get used to.

  She moved up behind Lott’s white Cadillac as he climbed out and opened the back hatch. Then he went to open the backdoor as she reached for the first brown box.

  It was light, so she grabbed another and took two into the back door and the coolness of the kitchen.

  “Where shall I stack them?” she asked.

  “Against the wall in the kitchen dining area,” he said, going past her for a load.

  Clearly this wasn’t anywhere near the first time he had done something like this.

  Working quickly, they had the nine brown file boxes out of the car and into the coolness of the dining area. The boxes were clearly dirty and smelled of smoke after all the years in Denise’s home.

  “You have some fresh boxes?” she asked. She had spent her years in and out of smoke in bars and restaurants and people’s homes, but there was still nothing worse than the smell of smoke built up on paper and cardboard over decades of time. It had a rich, thick, rank smell like something long spoiled.

  He wrinkled his nose and nodded, turning toward an area off the kitchen that looked like a storage room.

  He came back a moment later with a stack of ten fresh file boxes from Staples, not yet put together.

  They quickly put the boxes together, dumping the contents of each of Stan’s boxes into a fresh one without looking at any of it and then tossing the old box outside into the carport.

  It only took a few minutes and when they were done and had lids on the boxes, the smoke smell was mostly gone.

  “Much better,” he said, nodding, clearly relieved. “Good idea.”

  Then he stopped, faced her, and looked her squarely in the eyes.

  She was again startled at how intense his gaze was and how handsome he was when he looked at her like that.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Honestly,” she said, “that was a shock, especially the part where he named his kid after me. But I’m fine now. Got past it.”

  “You sure?” he asked, clearly worried, as she would have been in his spot.

  “Completely sure,” she said. “It’s been over two decades after all that he’s been dead. I didn’t like him much anymore when he was killed.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, still looking into her eyes with that fantastic gaze of his.r />
  “But there is one thing I need,” she said, looking at him with her most intent stare, as if she was going to ask him for the secrets of the world.

  “Anything,” he said, being very serious right back.

  “A glass of that wonderful iced tea of yours.”

  Then she smiled.

  It took him an instant, but then he laughed, shaking his head as he turned toward the fridge. “Yup, you’re fine.”

  With that she laughed, and honestly, that felt great after how the day had already gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  September, 2014

  Pleasant Hills

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  LOTT ENJOYED THE FEELING as he and Rogers settled in with their iced teas and starting looking through the boxes from Denise Miller’s home. He was very glad Rogers was going to be all right. He had worried about her all afternoon since leaving her at her car.

  And when he realized he was worrying about her, he felt startled and surprised. It was the same kind of worry he used to feel about Connie. A kind of worry that was anchored in actually caring for a person.

  They started off by sorting receipts again, making sure that all the receipts were in the four major areas that they knew about, plus another pile for the ones they couldn’t read or that were not in Winnemucca, Boise, or Salt Lake.

  They tossed the Reno and Las Vegas receipts back into a fresh box unless it was something unusual or that they couldn’t figure out.

  They put all the maps and books and notebooks into another box. They were through the second box and had the third one dumped out on the table when Andor banged on the front door.

  “Open!” Lott shouted and Andor came in, stomping through the living room like he always did.

  Lott glanced at Rogers who was smiling much like Connie used to smile every time Andor did that. Andor sounded more like a monster approaching than a retired detective.

  “Any luck at the DMV?” Andor asked as he came in and went to the fridge to get a bottle of water.

  “Nothing,” Lott said. “But they are running the same searches they did on the van on the Impala for me. They’ll have it tomorrow.

  “So he didn’t own that car either,” Andor said, shaking his head and sitting down at the end of the kitchen table.

  “How about you?” Rogers asked.

  “No Impala impounded anywhere around the city from 1992 to 1995. Nothing. So I have running searches for the car in other areas outside of the metro limits.”

  “Good,” Lott said. “And I called Annie and asked her to search the records of the building and compare it to outside interests of any type. She said that she and Doc and their friend Fleet would get right on it.”

  “So we have a ton of irons in this fire,” Andor said.

  Lott couldn’t agree more. A lot more than he had expected them to have at this point. He half expected them to be playing cards every week with no leads at all.

  Now, as Andor sat down and took a long drink from the bottle of water, Lott could tell his partner wasn’t giving all the information. After working together for almost twenty years, he knew that look on Andor’s face.

  “So spit out the rest,” Lott said, pretending to sort receipts and not look at Andor.

  “Sometimes you are a damn kill-joy,” Andor said.

  Lott glanced up at Rogers’ smiling face and winked.

  “We got two hits on the missing persons search,” Andor said, smiling. “One four months after Rocha’s death in Winnemucca and another the same month in Salt Lake.”

  Then he frowned and looked at Rogers.

  “Let me guess, both were from his wives,” she said, shaking her head in disgust.

  “Got that in one,” Andor said. “Sorry.”

  Lott stared at Rogers, who clearly didn’t seem to be bothered by it. And from what he had seen of her over the last four months, she didn’t have that good of an emotional poker face.

  “It’s starting to figure,” Rogers said. “And after this morning I expected it.”

  “How’s that?” Lott asked, clearly puzzled as to why Rogers was now taking this news so well.

  “He was a freeloader, plain and simple,” Rogers said. “And he was in search of some lost treasure. No sane woman was going to let him do that and help support him unless he married her. And more than likely if he had even told me what he was doing, I’d have booted his ass down the road sooner than I was doing.”

  Lott had to admit that she was right on that.

  Andor looked at her, frowning. “Are you saying it’s one thing for a husband to be a freeloader, another for a boyfriend to be one?”

  “You got it,” she said. “Women won’t stay with freeloaders very long as boyfriends. Husbands who don’t work are as common as sand on the beach.”

  Lott had to agree with her on that as well. He’d seen that more times then he wanted to think about.

  “Got any idea how long he was doing this sort of thing?” Andor asked.

  “I got a hunch these boxes are going to help answer some of that question,” Rogers said, pointing to the stack of banker boxes. “But I don’t think he was any older than me when we met, so it had to only have been a little over four years at most. Maybe a few more, but it would take a few years to come up with this kind of plan I would think.”

  “Denise said she met and married him in 1988,” Andor said.

  “Same year for me.”

  “So what do we do about these other wives?” Andor asked.

  “Same thing we do with his parents in Boise,” Lott said. “We wait and see what else we can come up with first.”

  Suddenly Lott noticed that Rogers frowned and sat back.

  “Something wrong?”

  She laughed. “With this case, just damn near everything. You have the official police file on this?”

  “On the counter over there,” Lott said, pointing toward the stove. “And I got the second one that Annie started as well with it.”

  Andor and Lott went back to sorting the paper on the table as Rogers moved over to the file. After a moment she said, “I thought I remembered that.”

  “What?” Lott asked.

  “Small caliber killed him.”

  “Twenty-two,” Andor said, nodding. “More than likely from a rifle at fairly close range.”

  “Twenty-two rifles are often used as saddle rifles,” she said.

  “You thinking he might have been on horseback when he was shot?”

  She shook her head. “No idea. But just thinking that a twenty-two is an odd weapon choice to kill someone in an execution-style murder in a city like Las Vegas.”

  Lott nodded. She was right about that. It was very odd for downtown Las Vegas. But now that they knew Rocha spent time out in the desert, it was less and less odd.

  Rogers sat at the table and looked at both of them. “So, tell me, gentlemen, why did you call me as his wife and none of the rest of the other women he was mooching off?”

  “I thought about that and looked it up,” Andor said, scooting back his chair and going for the official file by the stove. He flipped it open, went in a couple of pages and then pulled out a sheet.

  He handed it to Rogers who stared at it for a moment.

  “Rocha’s driver’s license on him when he was killed was issued in Reno,” Andor said. “He had you down as wife and next of kin.”

  “I’ll be,” she said, shaking her head and handing Andor back the paper.

  Then she turned to Lott. “Did the DMV have a statewide database on driver’s licenses in 1992?”

  “Sure,” Lott said. “But I’m betting that Rocha had no issue at that point getting fake driver’s licenses for each family. My gut sense is that the license for Reno was the only real one. Or the one he had on him because his next stop was Reno.”

  “So where did those extra licenses end up?” Andor asked.

  That question stunned Lott and he grabbed his notebook and quickly wrote it down.

  “He must
have had a place all his own somewhere,” Rogers said, shaking her head. “But I have no idea how he could have afforded that.”

  “Nope,” Lott said, suddenly having a flash of insight. He smiled at his two friends. “I know exactly where all his secret stuff is stashed.”

  “Where?” Andor asked.

  Rogers looked at him just as puzzled.

  “Tell me if I’m wrong,” Lott said. “We’re dealing with a guy here who liked to be taken care of, right?”

  Rogers nodded. “He liked it when I made the decisions for him like what to eat or what to wear somewhere.”

  “And from what I saw of Denise this morning,” Lott said, “she would have treated him the same way.”

  “Mother,” Rogers said, nodding.

  Lott smiled. “We’ll find all his secret stuff stashed safely at his home where his mother could take care of it all.”

  “Looks like someone’s going to Boise sooner rather than later,” Andor said.

  “As soon as we get this all done and find out some results of some ongoing searches,” Lott said.

  He had a hunch they were just starting to scratch the surface of this case. And going to Boise would only be part of the key to who killed this freeloading bigamist.

  And with four known wives, there was now some pretty clear motive. Men over the centuries had been killed for a lot less.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  October, 2014

  Foothills

  Boise, Idaho

  DOC HILL’S BIG CADILLAC SUV rode in silent comfort as Lott drove it slowly up the winding road into the foothills above Boise. Doc had let them use it because, as he said, it was just sitting in his garage doing nothing.

  Lott couldn’t believe how beautiful this town was, and how rich. The higher they went up the hill, the bigger the homes seemed to get. The home they were looking for was a mansion, plain and simple. He had been to Boise once before and liked it, but clearly he hadn’t seen much of it.

  Beside him, Rogers rode silently, staring at the homes and huge lawns and carefully trimmed shrubs and shaking her head. She was clearly as surprised as he was about how much money they were driving past.