by Leslie Wolfe
“Thank you for that,” she said quietly.
“You’re welcome, Devine. What can you tell us—”
“My name is Roxanne,” she said, halfway through my question. “Devine is my stage name, so the freaks can’t find me. Crystal liked it.”
“Was Crystal a stage name too?”
She nodded, and a fresh tear rolled down her cheek. “She hated her given name, Carole Sue. Said it was her hillbilly name and wouldn’t hear of using it. She was from Arkansas, you know.”
“Can you think of anyone who could’ve hurt her?”
Roxanne shook her head, while her eyelids stayed lowered, moist with tears. “She was kind, caring. Ambitious like I’ve never seen before, but kind. Too kind…” she added, then quickly stopped her train of thought, as if she’d let something slip out involuntarily. “She was working hard, going to school during the day, and doing this every night.” She gestured with her hand to emphasize the word, loading her voice with contempt.
“She was going to school?” Holt repeated.
“Yeah, she was in her third year. She took business administration accounting at UNLV. She had a future,” she added, her last word choked by a sob.
“Was she seeing anyone?” I asked, thinking of the mysterious helicopter rides in the middle of the night.
“She had a boyfriend, Ellis. He’s married, but that didn’t seem to matter much to him; he was in love with Crystal. He’s famous somehow, I recognized him when I first met him, but can’t recall from where. Some kind of artist; plays the cello.”
Artists didn’t normally fly choppers, but this was Vegas. Many things were different here.
“Does Ellis have a last name?” Holt asked, frowning.
She shrugged, her thin shoulders seeming frail under the thin fabric of her top. “I don’t know his last name, I’m sorry.”
“How about a helicopter, Roxanne?” I asked. “Was he the one flying Crystal out from the hotel’s helipad?”
“Yes, that was him,” she replied, after a flicker of surprise lit her eyes. She didn’t expect us to know about that. “He spared no expense when it came to Crystal. But not in a bad way, no. She wasn’t like that; she wasn’t for sale. She rarely accepted his gifts.”
“What’s he like, this Ellis?” Holt asked, his frown deepening, as if he knew something I did not.
“He’s charming, a perfect gentleman, not like those bastards we see at work every day. He loved Crystal, I have no doubt in my mind. A little moody, unstable, but he was always good to her, generous, attentive.”
“Violent?” Holt asked.
“No, absolutely not. He’s in love with her, I told you.”
“Then, moody, how?” I asked.
“He’d turn sad sometimes, tearful. Other times he’d be the life of the party, so to speak. Cracking jokes with Crystal and me, showing us a good time.”
“Did you and—”
She shook her head with such determination her hair became loose. “I’d never do that to Crystal, and he only had eyes for her. I was just her friend, passing by on my way out or something. Those were the only times I saw him.”
“Roxanne, we’ll need to take a look at Crystal’s, um, your apartment, if that’s okay,” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, then reached into a Chanel knockoff purse and pulled out a set of keys. “Here you go, let yourselves in.”
“And you?” I asked, taking the keys from her frozen hand.
“I’ll use Crystal’s. Her bag’s over there,” she replied, pointing at a black, leather purse with a gold, shoulder, chain strap.
“Why don’t we take Crystal’s purse instead, okay?” I offered, handing back her set of keys. “We’ll need to log this in as evidence.”
Holt was already going through Crystal’s purse and had extracted her wallet. He pulled out a few plastic cards, then stopped his search with a whistle of surprise. Without a word, he handed me a driver’s license issued for Carole Sue Tillman, Crystal’s real name.
Based on that piece of government-issued ID, Crystal was barely eighteen years old.
Background
I ran into Fletcher as I entered the building and almost didn’t recognize him. At first, I thought he must’ve been some thug who just got released or something. He wore baggy track pants, and until then I didn’t even know such a thing existed. Maybe it didn’t, and they were just three sizes too large, like his T-shirt was. The message printed on the light gray shirt in red, block letters read, “Born to party, forced to work,” and got a quick laugh out of me. The young man climbed down the stairs two at a time, his entire body moving to the rhythm of whatever music he was listening to on his earbuds. His long, curly hair bobbed in the same rhythm, partially covering his eyes and making me wonder how he managed to see where he was going. Then again, Old English Sheepdogs have hair covering their eyes, but don’t trip over themselves either.
“Whoa, not so fast,” I said, stopping him before he reached the ground floor. “We need you badly.”
He looked at me with inquisitive eyes, then at Holt, who nodded and muttered, “Uh-huh.” Then he let out a long sigh and started climbing up the stairs with significantly less enthusiasm that he’d demonstrated on his way down.
“I still can’t get over how you manage to stay employed with your blatant disrespect for the LVMPD dress code,” I said, smiling. He barely seemed old enough to work, although I knew he was a Caltech computer science graduate, top of his class.
“That’s ’cause I’m irreplaceable,” he replied jokingly, showing off two rows of perfectly white teeth. “Can you do what I do?”
“No, I—”
“See?” he cut me off before I could finish my statement. “That’s why. No one can.”
He was probably right about that. I’d only met him last week, but I was already impressed. Holt called Fletcher a techie, but he was a genius. There wasn’t a single shred of data out there that he couldn’t find. Thankfully, he was on our team, and it seemed to me that he and I had hit it off beautifully.
He walked quickly with both of us in tow until he reached his desk, where he collapsed into his seat and put his hands over his keyboard, ready to type.
“Shoot,” he said, then slurped some dubiously colored liquid from a transparent, half-pint mug. “You’re standing between me and my burger.”
“We need background on the Scala victim,” Holt said, handing him Crystal’s real driver’s license. “She’s eighteen based on this ID, but her roommate says she’s taking classes at UNLV.”
“Got it,” he said, typing crazy fast and flipping through countless database screens displayed in stacks on his dual monitors.
“We need anything you can dig up,” I added, “tax reports, family background, criminal record, the works.”
“Okay, I said I got it,” he replied, his voice not conveying the typical frustration that accompanied those words when other people spoke them. “I’ll let you know when I got something for you.”
“Uh-uh,” Holt replied, “we’ll wait. We’ve already been handed a late start on this one.”
Fletcher shrugged. “As you wish.” A few moments later, he started delivering, speaking a little too loud, because he hadn’t removed his earbuds nor stopped the blaring music player. “Yeah, she’s eighteen, got her birth certificate right here. No criminal record whatsoever, not even a parking ticket.”
I stared at the screen, trying to keep up with Fletcher’s maneuvers between the various databases. He searched state and federal criminal records, the Interstate Identification Index, IRS, DMV, Crime Information Center, even the Homeland Security ATS, or Automated Targeting System.
“Tax records show her employed with the Scala, okay, we knew that,” he mumbled, to himself. “Last year’s reported income was a dime short of seventy-five grand, but she’s a stripper, right?”
“Exotic dancer,” I clarified, although he wasn’t exactly wrong. It just felt disrespectful to call her that. If I closed my eyes, I c
ould still see her body, lying lifeless on that stage, beautiful and serene and young, as if asleep, as if dreaming of a secret lover. Her being so young made it even harder.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said dismissively. “Most strip—um, dancers underreport their tips by at least sixty percent on average, and that puts her real income somewhere above six figures. Nice! I’m in the wrong line of work.”
I laughed. He and I both, but at least I had the looks for it.
Holt patted Fletcher on his back.
“Sorry, dude, can’t think of anyone who’d pay to see you take off your clothes.”
“You never know,” Fletcher said, still searching. “Okay, family next. Your vic was born in Grady, Arkansas. Father deceased when she was, um, nine. Mother, Elaine Tillman, thirty-seven, works as a shift manager at Outback Steakhouse, the one on West Sahara. There’s a sister, Tina Tillman, now twelve. They all moved to Las Vegas after the father died, looking for work. The mother never remarried.”
We took notes, while he typed another string into a search screen and waited for a couple of seconds. Then the screen shifted and displayed a man’s DMV record.
“I checked to see if anyone else had reported the same current address as the Tillmans with the DMV. Meet Norm Chaney, forty-two. Must be mom’s boyfriend or something.”
“Mom’s brother, maybe?” Holt asked.
Fletcher typed a few words, then replied, “Nope, mother was a single child. Must be the boyfriend or sublet tenant.”
“What does he do?” I asked.
“Tax records have him working a construction site as a foreman. But here’s something unusual: income was reported on a 1099, not on a W2. These guys are typically unionized.”
“How about Crystal? Was she really a third-year college student at eighteen?”
“You mean Carole Sue, your vic?”
I nodded, and his fingers danced on the keyboard some more.
“Believe it or not, she was. She graduated from high school two years early, and UNLV admitted her immediately. Based on her SATs she could’ve gone anywhere she wanted, but she chose to stay close to home. She claimed tuition on her taxes two years in a row, so, yes, she was a third-year college student.”
Unexpectedly, a wave of sadness engulfed me. There was something about this girl that tugged at my heart. She danced to put herself through school; how cliché that sounded, but to her it wasn’t. She wanted to get ahead, to have a chance for a better life. She fought hard, worked hard, and chose to study twice as much at the age when all her girlfriends obsessed over boys and makeup and parties. And somewhere along her uphill path she’d made an enemy. A deadly one.
“Can you trace her phone, see where she’s been?” I asked. “We need the phone dumped, calls and messages, you know the drill.”
“Don’t I know it?” he said quietly, thumping his foot against the floor in the rhythm of the music only he could hear.
“There’s video surveillance from the hotel coming in,” Holt said. “Start poring over it, frame by frame. There was someone who spoke to her while she danced last night; witnesses say he seemed angry. We need him identified, pronto.”
Fletcher typed notes on a separate screen, a quick and unpretentious to-do list.
“Crystal flew out in a helo last night,” I said, and for some reason Holt shot me a surprised glance. “Let’s find out who owns that eggbeater.”
“What else?” Fletcher asked.
“We need to map her last twenty-four hours,” I said, speaking to both of them. “Sometime in the last few hours of her life, someone got close enough to kill her.”
Internal
I checked my email while Holt brought us coffee from the local swill machine and I saw only one new message. As I read it, dread spread through my body bringing a chill along with it.
The Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) wanted to speak to me immediately, specifically my old nemesis, Lieutenant Steenstra. Bloody hell… I’d thought that entire thing was over, finished.
I hesitated for a moment, thinking what took priority: catching a killer or wasting my time with the rat squad. Of course, if I were to play by those rules, I’d never willingly sit down with them, not ever. Still, I had no choice.
I scribbled a quick note on a Post-it, affixed it to Holt’s computer monitor, and took the elevator to visit with my least favorite of all cops. On the way up, I repeated to myself the only two words that were going to matter in the following minutes.
Keep calm.
The elevator doors whooshed open and I stepped out, pasting a professional smile on my lips and doing my best to look relaxed, unfazed. The receptionist didn’t reciprocate the smile and invited me to take a seat in the adjacent conference room, while she called the lieutenant.
I’d been in that room before. Sternly decorated with two opposing chairs and a table, a one-way mirror and a video camera, with its red dot on, attached to the wall near the ceiling, the room did little to make visitors feel welcome. Quite the opposite. The IAB called it a conference room, while everyone knew exactly what it was: an interrogation room. The only thing missing were the shackles, designed to keep the perps chained to the table while they were being questioned.
Lieutenant Steenstra opened the door abruptly and I almost flinched. I smiled, but she didn’t smile back. She was dressed smartly in a blue gray pantsuit and matching, button-up shirt, an attire that was an excellent expression of her uncompromising attitude. Her blonde hair was cut short in an unpretentious style, reminding me of something I’ve read somewhere: beware of the woman who cuts her hair short; if she doesn’t have the patience for herself, she definitely hasn’t got any for you. How fitting.
Steenstra nodded once, put a half-inch thick folder on the table and took a seat across from me.
“Detective Baxter,” she said in a cold voice, “we are disappointed, to say the least.”
“Why is that?” I asked, while in my mind I recited my new mantra. Stay calm.
“I was under the impression that you and I had reached an agreement,” she announced. “Seems to me I was wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your career, something we’ve allowed to continue despite the things you’ve done to jeopardize it,” she added, tapping rhythmically on the folder’s cover with long, French-manicured fingernails. “I’m talking about the cooperation you had promised us, that has yielded zero results so far.”
“Oh, I see,” I replied before I could contain myself. “You’re talking about Detective Holt and the allegedly missing cocaine.”
“The cocaine is missing,” Steenstra corrected me. “Not allegedly, Detective. I’m telling you how it is, and you, because you’re on a probation that otherwise would’ve never happened, believe what I say and respect our agreement. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” I replied, bitterly using the name of the victim I was supposed to find justice for, in a twisted pun that only I understood. “I thought that this was over, because—”
“Because we weren’t for real?” she cut me off angrily. “Because we were part of some kind of cockamamie conspiracy looking to frame your partner? Is that it, Detective?”
I smiled hesitantly, apologetically. “Pretty much.”
“Well, news flash for you, Detective. That kilo of cocaine is still missing, and we know your partner took it. We need you to bring us the evidence, so we can lock him up. That’s all there is to it.”
“But what if he didn’t take it? You haven’t shown me a single piece of evidence leading to him as the perp in this case.”
She sighed, visibly irritated, frustration seeping through every pore of her skin. She undid the buttons of her tight suit jacket and leaned into her elbows over the table, then opened the file.
“Maybe we haven’t shown you any evidence regarding Holt, because you’re a detective, and we’re asking you to do your job, nothing less, nothing more, to find us the evidence we need. We can, however, show you plenty of
evidence regarding your own guilt in a number of situations where you broke the law.”
She turned the file my way, so I could see clearly. Video camera stills taken when I’d punched a suspect in custody, a drug dealer who’d killed my husband, only I couldn’t prove it. Pedro El Maricon Reyes, a twenty-something-year-old thug who’d put two bullets in my husband’s chest, just because Andrew happened to stumble across a major drug deal going on in our neighborhood. Reyes had left no evidence behind, not enough to prosecute. Andrew’s dying words described him and his rather unique heterochromia, but the DA had refused to prosecute because, apparently, odd-eyed people aren’t that rare after all.
Andrew died before he could pick Reyes out of a lineup. Heartbroken and restless, I kept looking for my husband’s killer at night, never giving up.
Until one day, when my former partner collared yet another drug dealer and I recognized him: his eyes, one green and one brown. Reyes recognized me too, he knew exactly who I was and made jokes about my lonely nights.
And I lost it.
As shown beyond any reasonable doubt in the photo stills from Steenstra’s file, I’d punched him, again and again and again, wanting him dead, wanting him to pay for the life he’d taken, for the happiness he’d destroyed, for the never-ending loneliness in my heart.
Steenstra touched my forearm with the side of a Kleenex box and only then I realized I’d been crying silent tears of grief over Andrew’s absence from my life. My grief turned to rage as I dried my eyes and glared at the woman who’d stirred up old wounds just to get an edge, then at the camera on the wall.
Bloody wankers, all of them. They didn’t deserve to see me cry.
“What exactly do you want, Lieutenant?” I asked coldly.
“You’re on probation for twelve months, Detective, and that’s because we, Internal Affairs, put in a good word for you when your Henderson commanding officer put in a request for your termination with prejudice. We own you for these twelve months. Is that clear?”
