“Kinda exciting, ain’t it? Being a part of a big story like this.”
“I don’t believe that either of our names is mentioned.”
“Maybe not. But it happened right where we work. And I know the guy who found the body.”
“You’re a celebrity, Harv.”
“If you ask me, this is what the money boys get for choosing such a creepy theme for this place.”
“The children like it.”
“Yeah, and since when did Vegas care about children? This new crowd-they got more bucks than brains. I liked the town better when the mob ran it.”
“Those were the good old days.”
“You really don’t think those cops would want to talk to me?”
“I really don’t, Harv.”
The paper crumpled in his hands. “Know what? I always wanted to be a cop. A real one, I mean. When I was a kid. But I couldn’t afford the school and I couldn’t pass the test. So I went into private security.”
“And isn’t that satisfying? You wear a uniform. You have the occasional opportunity to hustle prostitutes. Strong-arm card cheats.”
“It ain’t the same. People look up to cops.”
“Do they?”
“Cops are like heroes. They make TV shows about cops. When was there ever a series about a private security guard?”
And that of course proves, a posteriori, that security guards are without merit. “I suppose you have a point.”
“I mean, here I am, right on the premises, with a badge and a gun and everything, but those guys outside would never dream of asking for my help. Wouldn’t even cross their minds.” He released a slow sigh. “Here.” He tossed the paper back. “All that little print makes my head hurt.”
There were smudges on the main story, big black remnants of Harv’s Frankensteinian thumbs. He hated that. He didn’t want to read a paper that had been pawed over by illiterates. And this one was important; he needed this story for his History. He would have to pick up another copy on his drive home.
His eyes returned to the main story under the banner headline:
MURDER VICTIM “BURIED”
IN CASINO GRAVEYARD
BY JONATHAN WOOLEY
An unidentified nude female corpse completely shaved of body hair was discovered early Tuesday morning in a mock graveyard located at the multimillion-dollar Transylvania resort hotel, authorities revealed yesterday afternoon. The body was placed in a wooden coffin and buried under a thin layer of dirt. The graveyard is part of the hotel’s Edgar Allan Poe gallery, one of several horror-themed tableaus on the ballroom floor.
“We’re just glad the body was discovered before the doors were opened,” said Transylvania owner Katherine Wentworth. “We wouldn’t want any of our guests to be disturbed.”
Police officials remained tight-lipped about the investigation, but LVPD Chief of Police Robert O’Bannon indicated that they were pursuing several leads.
“Obviously, the irony of depositing a body in a fake graveyard was more than someone could resist. We’ve taken evidence, which should allow us to identify the victim in time. The large number of tourists coming in and out of Vegas makes a quick ID difficult. Nonetheless, we have all our top officers working on it and have every reason to believe we will identify the victim-and her assailant-in short order.”
At a press conference later in the day, a representative of the LVPD Homicide Department, Lieutenant Barry Granger, stated that preliminary tests indicated that the victim had died of suffocation. Several unanswered questions still remained about…
In other words, they knew nothing. He allowed himself a tiny smile. They didn’t know who Helen was, they didn’t know who he was, and they had no glimmer of the magnitude of what they had stumbled across. At least not most of them…
His eyes scanned the page and then the continuation on page three, searching for the information he wanted. Yes, yes, he knew O’Bannon, that blowhard was on television all the time. There were repeated references to Lieutenant Granger, who during his initial crime scene appearance seemed almost deliberately slow-witted. But what of the raven-haired beauty? Who was she? What was she doing there? Given the way she was treated by most of the other police officers, it was tempting to conclude that she was an unauthorized visitor, that she had no connection to them. But he knew that was wrong. He had seen the way she moved, the way she carried herself. She was on familiar ground. She had done this before. Had she been brought in from another jurisdiction? He had to find out.
“So I’m thinking maybe I’ll just march right up and introduce myself to ’em. What’d’ya think about that?”
“What?” He looked up. Had Harv been babbling the entire time he was reading? “Who?”
“The cops, Ernie. I’m thinking maybe I’ll tell them I’m available. Who knows? They might like the chance to work with someone who knows the lay of the land.”
“They won’t give you the time of day,” he replied. “If you had something to tell them, then maybe-”
He stopped short. That was it. If he had something to tell, something they really wanted, he could command anyone’s attention. Even hers.
“I’ll be out this afternoon,” he said, tossing down the paper. “Cover for me in the casino.”
“Sure, but-”
“Keep your eyes open and your lips sealed,” he added as he slid into his coat. “And most importantly, Harv-don’t hassle the police and don’t go near the Poe room. You never know what might happen there.”
7
The phone must’ve rung twenty times before it finally registered in my brain. Exerting all my available strength, I managed to pull my head out from under the pillow. It throbbed. More than throbbed-it felt as if someone were running an electric mixer inside my cranial case, scrambling my brains.
I grabbed the receiver, knocking over the end table in the process. The bottle fell to the floor with a bang but thank God didn’t quite break.
“ ’Lo,” I managed. My tongue felt like Velcro.
“Pulaski? Is that you?”
I stiffened. It was Chief O’Bannon. “Yes, sir.”
“Are you all right?”
“ ’M fine.”
“Took you forever to answer the phone.”
“Sorry. I was in the shower.”
He was silent for a moment. “Are you able to come out to a crime scene? As soon as possible.”
Truth was, I felt like shit. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “You want me at a crime scene? After last night-”
“I’ve changed my mind. Decided to give you a second chance.”
“Out of the goodness of your heart?”
“Out of respect for your father. And David.”
“Bullshit.” I shifted the phone from one ear to the other and pushed my aching self up to a sitting position. “There’s been another murder, hasn’t there?”
“Yes, but-”
“Buried alive?”
Again the silence. “No. This one’s worse.”
“You’ve got a psycho on your hands.”
“Looks that way.”
“And that’s the real reason for this call. Not any charity toward me. You need my expertise.”
“Look, I don’t have time for this. Are you coming or not?”
Get a grip, I told myself. Take the job before he changes his mind. “All right, I’m in. I’ll stop by headquarters and get my badge and-”
“No badge. No gun.”
“But you said-”
“I’m willing to hire you on a part-time consulting basis with respect to this one case. That’s it.”
“No way.”
“Those are my terms. Take it or leave it.”
“You-” I pounded my fist into the pillow, biting back what I really wanted to say. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“You’re not ready to be reinstated.”
“How the hell would you-”
“You have a problem, Susan. A major problem. And until you’ve
overcome it, you’re not going to play on my team. But I still need a behaviorist, at least until the Feds move in.”
“Feds?” I whistled.
“So I’m asking one last time. Will you take the consulting position or not?”
“I’ll take it.” Even though I found the whole situation offensive, I needed work if I wanted to get Rachel back.
He told me where to meet him. “I’ll be there in about an hour.”
“Twenty minutes,” he answered. “Or you’re off the case.”
“But I just got up-”
“I thought you just got out of the shower.”
I pressed my hand against my forehead. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
“See you in twenty.” He made a grunting noise, then disconnected.
My entire body ached. The head was the worst, but it was just part of the overall miserable package. I felt broken, shattered, both in body and in spirit. I looked down at the bottle rolling around on the floor-empty-and it made me sick in so many ways I couldn’t count them all.
My first night alone since the big breakdown, and I’d found a hell of a way to celebrate. I couldn’t be trusted for one night. I’d done exactly what everyone said I would do, and I was lying about it afterward, just as everyone knew I would.
Hell. I had work to do. That would be my cure-bury myself in a case. Get too busy to indulge in bad habits. I’d made one mistake, but I was determined not to let it happen again.
The hollow anxious aching in my chest reasserted itself. My wrist tingled.
I found the crime scene on the back forty of McCarran International. Out here in the desert, you could barely tell you were anywhere near a major city. The airport terminal was to the north; other than that, it was big-sky country. Hard to imagine what could’ve inspired those Mormons to settle down here all those years ago. John Fremont, now mostly remembered for the tourist trap street that bears his name, first wrote about the area he discovered in 1844 while he was out harassing Indians. But Mormon cattle ranchers set up the first settlement in these fertile plains, around 1855. By 1905, we had a train station-and casinos-and they held the first Las Vegas land auction, the event that put this city on the map.
Bugsy Siegel always gets the credit for founding Vegas-especially after they made that movie with the far-too-handsome Warren Beatty-but he was only one of several people who established Vegas as a fantasy pleasure destination. He was a gangster, for God’s sake, not a visionary. There were already a couple of hotels out here when he made the scene. If he’d been that insightful, he’d have bought all the land in the area, not just one lot, right? Meyer Lansky and a host of investors-one of whom probably had Siegel offed-were also major players. But everyone remembers Bugsy. There’s even a memorial garden shrine to him, out at the modern-day Flamingo. Lisa and I went there once, just for laughs. It was a hoot. Of course, I was snockered at the time.
After I parked my car, I stumbled down a sharp paved declivity to the recessed tarmac where the body had been found. The crime scene was in the midst of dozens of disabled aircraft. Apparently this was where the big birds came to die. One of the patrolmen on duty filled me in. The body had been stashed inside one of the retired jets. Judging from appearances, this young naked woman had already been dead before she was brought here. Why would the killer stash the corpse in an abandoned airplane? How was this connected to the woman who had been buried alive?
I wasn’t surprised to see Granger lurking about. Wasn’t surprised, but wasn’t happy, either. His face expressed his feelings about me pretty clearly, too.
“Took you long enough,” he grunted.
“You’re in a jocund mood this morning. Someone put castor oil in your coffee?”
“Just for the record,” he said, “your involvement in this case-or any other case, for that matter-is against my strong objection.”
“I assumed any smart idea wouldn’t come from you,” I replied, walking past him without stopping.
I found O’Bannon inside the plane, running down a checklist with Crenshaw. When he saw me, he glanced at his watch. “Twenty-nine minutes,” he said. “And you look like hell.”
“Top of the morning to you, too,” I answered, smiling.
He walked up to me and widened my eyes with his fingers, like I was a damn cow he was thinking of buying. “Your eyes are bloodshot.”
“I had trouble sleeping. You know how it is. First night in a new place.”
He frowned, then sniffed.
“Anything on my breath?”
“About half a tin of Altoids, unless I’m mistaken.” He gave me a long look, and believe me, I didn’t need hyper-empathy to know what he was thinking.
“Who’s the victim?” I asked, hoping to redirect his scrutiny from me to, well, anything. I stepped closer to the body, which the coroner’s assistants were in the process of transporting. She was young, probably sixteen or seventeen. Something odd about the way her face was set, but she had been a pretty thing, that was obvious, and she still had her hair, unlike the last one. Fingernails, too. Her skin was an icy white, so drained of color her lips were almost invisible. There were no apparent wounds or injuries.
“Don’t know. She was found with no identification. We’ll run her picture in the paper and with luck someone will recognize her.”
“What makes you think this is the same killer?” I asked, although I was certain it was. “Seems like an entirely different MO.”
“He left another note.”
O’Bannon handed me the evidence, already encased in a transparent sheath. It was similar to the one I’d spotted last night-letters and symbols and general nonsense on a sheet of lined notebook paper. “Any idea what this is?”
“No. I’ve got some of our biggest eggheads working on the first one, trying to see if it’s some kind of code. So far, no luck. It may just be psychotic rambling.”
“Can I get a copy? I know someone who might be able to help.” I surveyed the crime scene. “Who was the first responder?”
“Harrelson. Lucky choice, really. He did a solid, clean job.”
The first responder has the job of securing the crime scene. This is critical, not only to obtaining pure and useful information, but to being able to use that information later at trial. He or she must protect the evidence, then initiate safety procedures-in this case, make sure the killer wasn’t still around-and then contact the proper criminalists and finalize the relevant documentation, which with a homicide, was enormous. Once the crime scene experts and homicide investigators arrived, supervisory authority passed to them.
Contrary to what everyone thinks from watching C.S.I., the Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has no department called a C.S.I. Level III. Or for that matter, a Level II or Level I or Level 427.5. Those TV creations are a blanket fiction that allows characters to do the work of a wide range of criminalists: forensic lab techs, photo techs, latent print examiners, firearms experts, medical examiners, document experts, hair and fiber teams, and evidence custodians, just to name a few. The only thing the TV show doesn’t exaggerate is the importance of this work. Most cases are solved-and proven in court-thanks to the work of these technicians.
“How was she killed?” I asked O’Bannon.
“Naturally, Dr. Patterson won’t offer an opinion this soon. But judging from her skin tone, she bled to death.”
I was puzzled. “You mean, she had internal bleeding?”
“No.”
I glanced again at the body. “I don’t see any injuries.”
“Right. That’s the mystery.”
I stared down at the corpse, hoping to get some kind of fix on who she was or what she had been doing. What happened to you? I wondered. Who did this? And why?
I scrutinized the whole picture, the neck, the chest, the legs. Not only were there no signs of a wound, there were no signs of any kind of struggle. No signs of restraint, except perhaps some faint redness across her upper arms. Were you too scared to fight? I wondered. She looked healthy enough. Wh
y didn’t she claw his eyes out?
I put the coroner techs on hold and, against their heated protest, took a closer look at the body. I found signs of a body piercing on her navel. But the stud was gone. Ripped out.
A pattern was forming in my mind. Far from a complete picture-a hint at best. But something. Taking two tongue depressors from one of the coroner’s boys, I pried open her mouth. And gasped.
Now I knew why there was something odd about the set of her jaw. Her teeth had been removed. Every single one. The tearing of her mouth, her gums, was enormous; the extraction had not been executed by a trained professional. This was how she had bled to death. Not from any bodily wound. From the mouth.
Thank God I’d had no time for breakfast. Throwing up would not only be unprofessional, it would convince O’Bannon I’d been drinking. I’d seen some seriously twisted, weird, ugly stuff in my time, and it took a great deal to get a gasp out of me, even on a day like this when I was well off my game. But I was sickened by the thought of the pain she must have endured, both mental and physical. This was not the work of any ordinary killer. Not even an ordinary psychopath. This was something-someone-altogether different.
“I’ll want to see the coroner’s preliminary report,” I said, letting her mouth relax. “As soon as it comes in.”
“Natch.”
“I’ll want the files on the first victim, too. Everything you’ve got.”
“I’ve already had them sent to your office.” O’Bannon coughed. “Your temporary office. Downtown.”
“Criminalists got anything useful yet?”
O’Bannon shrugged. “Not that I’ve heard.”
“What about blood splatters?”
“Do you see any?”
“No.”
“Neither do we. Even after we went over the area with leucocrystal violet.”
Which confirmed my feeling that the young lady was killed somewhere else. And cleaned up afterward. “Firearms?”
“No indication.”
“Forensic entomology? Botany? Zoology?”
“Possible they’ll turn up something. But so far, no.”
“Hair and fiber evidence?”
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