by Leslie Wolfe
“Officer Reilly?” I said, reading his name tag, “thanks for bringing him in.”
“Sure,” the young man replied. “He was trying to board a flight when we nabbed him.”
“Where to?” Holt asked. “His flight?”
The officer consulted his notes. “Um, Armenia, by way of Los Angeles, then Moscow. The tickets were purchased at the airport, with cash, only thirty minutes ago.”
The timeline worked; if he’d been the one who tried to run us over in front of the Scala corporate HQ, considering he failed and had raised all that heat, he must’ve taken I-15 straight for the airport.
“Armenia is a nonextradition country,” Holt commented. “Makes sense.”
“Did he say anything during or after the arrest?” I asked.
“Not a single word. He didn’t resist either; he could barely walk. There’s something wrong with his knee.”
I smiled. Anne was what was wrong with the perp’s knee.
“Officer Reilly, see if you can’t locate a black Suburban with a shattered rear window and a couple of bullet holes in it, somewhere at McCarran International. I believe we’ll find this man’s fingerprints in that SUV. I’d be happy to add two counts of attempted murder of a police officer to his rap sheet.”
“If it’s there, we’ll find it,” he replied.
“Okay, let’s have it,” I said, rubbing my hands together excitedly as I entered the interrogation room followed by Holt.
The first thing I noticed about him were the scratches, deep and ragged under his right eye and on the side of his neck. His eye was bloodshot and half-closed. The man’s breathing was accelerated and shallow; he panted due to the pain in his knee. Sooner rather than later we had to get him medical attention; last thing I needed was another issue with a perp in my custody landing in surgery.
Not that it mattered, anyway. By Monday, when I’d have nothing to show to the IAB, they’d fire me; hell of a way to start a new week.
I didn’t bother to pull out a chair; I leaned across the table and grinned in his face.
“You’re going down hard, Mr. Sanford.”
He glared at me without a word.
“Who did that to you, Mr. Sanford?” I asked, pointing a finger at the lacerations underneath his right eye, so close he flinched.
“My cat scratched me,” he replied, showing his teeth in a smirk loaded with hatred. “What’s it to you, bitch?”
“Well, the cat who did that to you has lived to tell the story and had your DNA under her claws.”
He stared at me in disbelief, then looked at Holt briefly.
“Uh-huh,” Holt said, with an exaggerated nod. “What she said.”
“That cat will testify; she’s brave like that,” I continued. “But you already know that, Mr. Sanford. A tough guy like you, floored by a chick,” I said, then chuckled lightly. “Who hired you?”
“Lawyer,” Sanford said quietly.
Bollocks… There it went, down the drain, just when I thought we were getting somewhere.
I looked at Holt and saw the same disappointment in his eyes.
“If we catch the killer before this dude names his employer, we’re going to fry his arse,” I told Holt, as if Sanford wasn’t even in the room. “He’ll have nothing valuable left to trade for his sorry life.”
“Lawyer,” he repeated, raising his voice.
“All right, sweetie,” I said, “but you don’t have to say anything, okay? We still have the right to talk among ourselves, even if your lawyer isn’t present. We aren’t asking you any questions; you had your chance to talk, now use your rights and shut up.”
“L-A-W-Y-E-R,” he spelled out, driving me nuts.
“Good thing they still have capital punishment in Nevada,” I said to Holt calmly, turning my back to Sanford. “He tried to kill us; he doesn’t deserve to live.”
Holt looked briefly at his buzzing phone, and then at me with a smile on his face. “We have the ME’s final report. We know the poison used in Crystal’s murder.”
“You know what that means, right?” I said, looking only at Holt, ignoring the perp completely. “It means we’ll nail the killer today, and tomorrow I will sleep the whole day through.”
“That also means this poor schmuck only has a couple of hours to spill his guts, or he gets toasted,” Holt replied.
“Lawyer, now!” he shouted. “Get me a lawyer and a reasonable deal on the table, and maybe I’ll talk.”
“What’s a reasonable deal to you, honey?” I asked, tilting my head as if I were a Southern belle flirting with him.
“No jail time, nothing; I’ll leave the country and never come back.”
Holt and I looked at each other and burst into laughter at the same time.
We were still laughing when we left the room and closed the door behind us. The moment we reached the observation room, I grabbed Holt’s arm.
“I just realized I never got a chance to thank you,” I said, searching his eyes.
“What for?” he replied, a little uneasy.
“For saving my life. Again.”
He looked at me for a moment, a mix of emotions on his face. Then his usual, lopsided grin reappeared. “Should I hope for the same reward as last time?”
“Ah,” I reacted, then shoved my elbow in his side. “I was being serious… Thank you, I mean it.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied simply. “Now let’s call Anne.”
“That was for real? She’s got the poison?”
“Uh-huh,” he replied, his grin evolving into a full-blown smile. “Your bestie came through.”
I dialed Anne, frowning at Holt’s last remark. He was doing it again, sprinkling words that were meant to trigger a response and give him the information he believed he had to have, like the full story with Anne and me.
“Detective,” Anne said, the moment she picked up.
“I got Holt with me, and we’re all ears.”
“The toxin used to kill Crystal Tillman was an alkaloid called pseudoaconitine, extracted from aconitum, a perennial plant you might know as monkshood.”
That didn’t mean a thing to me, one name or the other, and, by his reaction, Holt hadn’t heard of it either.
“How does one find this plant?” Holt asked. “Is it local, here, or exotic?”
“It grows in mountain meadows, in moist, well-drained soil,” Anne replied. “You could find it if you hike Mount Charleston, I presume, but you have to know what you’re looking for. Or, some people might grow it, although I can’t think of a nonhomicidal reason to do so.”
“What does this plant look like?” I asked, thinking I’d hiked Charleston many times and hadn’t worried about any poisonous plants. Ignorance, apparently, is bliss.
“It’s two feet tall, with dark green leaves and inflorescences of purple flowers that look like the hoods that monks wear.”
“How toxic is it?” Holt asked.
“Very. You can’t even touch it without gloves. If you run into anything like it, steer clear and leave it to the experts to collect samples.”
“How did Crystal get exposed to it?”
“I still don’t know that,” Anne replied with a sigh of frustration. “But now that I know what to test for, and I have samples of her organs, skin, and hair, I’ll be able to tell you shortly.”
“Skin? Why skin?” Holt asked.
“The first thing I did was test the stomach lining, but, as I had initially suspected, there’s no indication she ingested the poison. The only other alternatives are inhalation, and I will test her lungs for it, and direct dermal contact. I’ll test the hair for the odd scenario she had long-term exposure to minute quantities of the toxin, although the symptoms preceding death would’ve been different.”
“Anne, you’re awesome,” I said, then turned to Holt. “Now let’s send CSI to pore over Roxanne’s house and her personal belongings, to look for traces of this monkshood extract.”
“Already done, and the warrant inclu
des the Scala dressing room too,” he said, showing me his phone. “If she’s our killer, we’ve got her.”
42
More Money
Next stop was Fletcher’s desk. It felt like we’d left there only minutes earlier, and yet a lot had happened during that short time. I almost got killed. We’d discovered critical pieces of information regarding Paul Steele and his potential reason for making threats. We knew the name of the poison that killed Crystal.
We still didn’t know who killed her.
I couldn’t remember a single case I’d worked on in my entire career, when my gut couldn’t decide and favor a certain suspect, or at least give me a hint as to which door to pound on next. It seemed that the person I’d thought had the strongest motive to kill Crystal, Ellis MacPherson’s wife Celeste, actually didn’t have a motive, but everyone else did.
Paul was still a suspect in my mind, although he couldn’t’ve been so stupid to kill her immediately after having threatened her, paid her off, and been caught on camera with her.
Roxanne had the best motive, full-time opportunity, and means because anyone can climb a mountain and pick some flowers; she was the strongest suspect, yet my gut disagreed, but not wholeheartedly. As for Mrs. Steele, she was next on our list to visit and evaluate.
Instead of narrowing a list of suspects, we kept adding to it.
“You two again,” Fletcher greeted us with mock disappointment. “You should know better than to come empty-handed. This,” he pointed at his head, “works on caffeine and refined carbs.”
“I’m willing to sign an IOU,” I said.
He shrugged, the universal gesture for, “Whatever.”
“What have you got?” Holt asked.
“Who told you I got anything?” he reacted, scratching his stubble. “I didn’t call you, did I?”
“Don’t be a wiseass,” Holt replied harshly, to my surprise. “Give.”
“Okay,” he said, shifting through some database screens. “I will give, only because you can’t wait a little longer, but please be advised some of my information is incomplete, and I’m doing this under protest.”
“And no caffeine,” I added, smiling.
“That’s insult to the injury,” he muttered. “So, you asked me to see if the two happy couples, the Steeles and the MacPhersons, had prenups in place.”
“Do they?”
“Prenuptial agreements are not public information; they don’t have to be registered anywhere, and they can be kept in the family safe for eternity. That said, I will assume both couples did, because Paul Steele and Celeste Bennett brought fortunes of over one billion dollars into their respective marriages, and when people do that, they prenup the crap out of it.”
“That’s your deduction, not evidence-based fact, is that correct?” Holt asked.
“Entirely, with some circumstantial facts to support my conclusions.”
“Such as?”
Fletcher ran another search and some IRS reports displayed on one of his monitors. “Ellis MacPherson only made three hundred thousand a year before marrying Celeste Bennett. He wasn’t rich. Maybe, considering whatever prenup might be in place, he’s not really that rich now.”
“That’s still almost five times what I make,” I grumbled, throwing that tidbit of frustration out there although it brought no value; it just made me feel better for exactly one second.
“What I mean is, he’s not ‘unmarked helicopter’ rich. The Bennett fortune is huge compared to what he makes from sawing that chunk of wood.”
“I heard he’s really good,” I said. “How much is he making now?”
“About half a million a year, and that’s including his shows.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. He’s in a different world. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t considering a divorce, no matter how much he loved Crystal,” I said. “He’s got one hell of an incentive to stay married to Celeste.”
“Speaking of that helo—” Holt started to say, but Fletcher groaned and cut him off.
“I was just getting there, all right?” He threw a mint into his mouth and cracked it between his teeth with a loud noise, then flipped through some screens until it displayed the photo of a black helicopter. “The helo is a Eurocopter EC145, and it’s not completely unmarked.”
“What do you mean?”
“All aircraft have to display a tail number starting with the letter N, if it’s an American registration. This helicopter is no exception, only someone pasted the N-number on it with dark-gray characters, making it almost illegible. I spent hours looking at videos of the thing landing and taking off in the dark at the Scala heliport, then I called the security office and talked to them. They double as flight control for that pad, and they were able to find an older recording where the N-number was visible enough for me to track it.”
“And?” I asked, impatiently, although I kind of knew what was coming.
“I tracked it using the FAA database, and the bird belongs to Bennett Holdings, also known as BeneFoods. No surprise there.”
“What kind of traffic does the Scala see from that helo?” Holt asked.
“Just pick up and drop off, mostly undocumented, once or twice a week. They don’t announce arrivals ahead of time, and they never talk to them. Last time it was there,” he added, pulling on the screen a video recording cued to a certain time code, “was the night Crystal died.” He started playback, and we saw the helo landing and dropping off someone we recognized immediately: Crystal Tillman, wearing a lace cocktail dress over above-knee, black boots, the same ones she danced in later that night. The time code confirmed Roxanne’s statement, that Crystal had been out that night before her shift, and that the helo was there to pick her up, and drop her off a couple of hours later.
“Now there’s a surprise,” I reacted. “We asked Ellis if he’d seen Crystal on Sunday night, and he said no. He has a confirmed alibi for that night, playing in front of hundreds of people. If Ellis wasn’t the one picking her up in that helo, then who was?”
No one answered.
“Fletcher,” I said, a tad above whispering, “find me that pilot, please. We need to have a conversation.”
“We’ll likely need a subpoena for that,” Holt said, grabbing his phone. “I’ll ask Gully.”
“Nah,” Fletcher said. “How many licensed helicopter pilots work for BeneFoods, do you think? It can’t be that many; once I have that list, I’ll run it against active and recent flight plans and give you the name. Let sleeping ADAs lie,” he snickered.
Holt laughed, a hearty laugh like I’d rarely seen from him. “You really don’t feel the need to complicate your life with legal documents, huh?”
Fletcher’s smile widened, showing impeccable white teeth, despite their daily exposure to caffeine. “Just a waste of time; no need for that.”
Holt pulled himself off the desk he’d been leaning against, halfway sitting on, and beckoned me. “Thanks, Fletch, you rock.”
“And I’ll rock some more; I’m not done yet.”
Holt sat back against the desk, intrigued.
“No restaurant in this town serves all the items the coroner found in Crystal’s stomach contents. The closest I could find was one place that had the crab and the veal with rice, but nothing else. My guess, comparing the timeline of her dinner with the incoming and outgoing helo flights, is that she was taken for that dinner to an unknown location, probably not commercial.”
“Like what?”
“Like someone’s home, equipped with a helipad and personal chefs who cook those kinds of fancy menus.”
I nodded. It made sense, but then again, it didn’t. Maybe Ellis had some property close by where he could’ve flown Crystal? I couldn’t believe he’d taken Crystal home, to the mansion he shared with his wife. Maybe we should ask Ellis where they went that night. Or maybe we should just find out for ourselves.
“I’ll need a list of all real estate holdings Ellis has access to, that are within reasonable flight distance
. Or better yet, scratch that last order, and get me that pilot,” I asked, then grabbed my stuff, ready to go.
“Already on it,” he replied. “One more thing, quite surprising, because I’d never, in my wildest pipe dreams, expected to find a paper trail for this, but here goes: Mrs. Steele had some interesting cash withdrawal activities eight months ago.”
“What? Mrs. Steele? How much?” Holt asked before I could say a word.
“Fifty grand. One withdrawal out of her personal brokerage account, made to cash, two days before Roxanne registered a brand new, blue, Ford Mustang with the DMV.”
43
Terms
Driving to the Steele mansion burned a bit of daylight; we took I-515 south, then the Lake Mead Parkway exit going east. The Steeles owned waterfront property on Lake Las Vegas, nothing short of amazing, but different in many ways from the Bennett MacPherson homestead.
The house wasn’t secluded in its own park; rather, it was part of a community of high-end mansions nestled between the waterfront and the golf course, on Rue Mediterra Drive. I found myself wondering why I hadn’t, in all my years of being a Las Vegan, ventured to explore that neighborhood. Andrew and I liked to look at homes we couldn’t afford and dream of better times, of a different life. But here, on the shores of Lake Las Vegas, we’d never ventured.
We rang the bell and were immediately let in by a housekeeper with a friendly smile. She led us to a living room with black-and-white marble floors so shiny I was afraid I’d slip and fall. We were invited to take seats on the curved, white, leather sofa, but we declined, preferring to stand.
I ambled through the vast, two-story space, so neat and clean it seemed unlived in. After my initial awe subsided, I realized the room was cold, unfriendly, albeit worthy of the cover of Unique Homes magazine.
I focused my attention, trying to ascertain what exactly in the décor conveyed the chill I felt in the air. Maybe it was the colors, brightest white contrasting with matte black, those two colors present in the flooring, the furniture, even the table setting in the dining room. Or perhaps it was the crisp, winter-cold, blue sky visible through the tall, wide windows facing the lake.
