Calling Dead: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “All right,” she said. “What’s not in that file you two aren’t talking about?”

  Andor just shook his head and beside her Lott sighed.

  Then Lott said, “We had eleven women, all in their mid-thirties, all with long black hair cut to the same length.”

  “And all dressed the same,” Julia said, shuddering a little and glad they were in the bright, alive casino. Those pictures Andor had brought with him had been just like a bad horror movie.

  Andor nodded, so Lott went on.

  “We found the identities of nine of the eleven women,” Lott said, “as was in the file. They were abducted about one per month for almost a year. The best anyone could figure, they had been in the cave for two years. We never did find information about the other two I’m afraid.”

  “And no connection at all between the women?” Julia asked.

  “None that we could find,” Andor said. “Except that they all had natural black hair. And the school uniforms they were dressed in were standard and could be bought anywhere in the country at the time.”

  “File says no DNA,” Julia said. “Any chance fifteen years and better technology would make a difference on that?”

  Andor shook his head.

  “All the women were cleaned perfectly,” Lott said.

  “How did they die?” Julia said. “I didn’t see that in the file.”

  Andor glanced at Lott, then looked at Julia. “We kept it out of the file to use if we needed it.”

  Julia knew that was standard. Every department did that.

  “They basically died of dehydration and heat,” Lott said.

  “Slowly,” Andor said. “There was no indication that any of the women struggled at all, so more than likely they were drugged and then died from the heat.”

  “In the cave?” Julia asked, shocked.

  Lott shook his head.

  Andor stared at the table.

  “They were left to die somewhere in the heat?” Julia asked. She didn’t know what she felt about that. Only a true monster would do that.

  “Not really, no,” Andor said. “They weren’t just left in the heat.”

  “They were baked,” Lott said

  “Baked?” Julia asked, turning to stare at the very troubled face of the man she had come to love over the last year. Baked made no sense at all. How could you bake a human being?

  Lott nodded.

  “Best we can figure,” Andor said. “They were slipped into a huge oven on some sort of surface that would not conduct heat. Then they were baked, first on one side, then on the other. Slowly.”

  “Very slowly,” Lott said, clearly disgusted. “Not hot enough to blister the skin, but hot enough to dry them out like a raisin over time.”

  “Oh, my god,” Julia said. She was having trouble even trying to imagine such a thing, or one human doing that to another.

  “Then the sick bastard dressed them, trimmed their hair, and staged them in the cave,” Lott said.

  Julia shook her head, trying to push the image of a naked woman baking in an oven out of her mind. “That’s going to give me nightmares.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Andor said.

  “And that’s not the worst part,” Lott said.

  “There’s something worse than baking a woman alive?” Julia asked, now really, really sorry that she had been interested beyond the game earlier.

  Andor stared at the table in front of him, then he said simply, “The guy liked flank steak.”

  “Rump roast as well,” Lott said.

  “Yeah,” Andor said. “All the good parts.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  August 7th, 2015

  12:30 A.M.

  Las Vegas

  THE FOOD CAME at that moment, the waitress carrying a large round tray on her shoulder and putting it down on a stand beside the table. Lott was glad that they had all decided to not talk about the cold case while eating. That case was just not good dinner conversation.

  The possibility of cannibalism just put most sane people right off their food.

  By the time they mostly finished eating, Annie walked up. She was frowning and had what Lott recognized as a “bad beat” cloud over her head.

  She had on a dark blue blouse and jeans and had her brown hair pulled back off her face. Like her mother, Carol, Annie was tall and thin and always walked with a purpose.

  She slid in beside Andor, shaking her head.

  “Thought you had a large stack,” Lott said. “What happened?”

  “Pair of nines cracked my aces,” Annie said, “and then I couldn’t get ace-king to hold up.”

  “Ouch,” Lott said.

  “Yeah, double ouch,” Julia said. “Doc still in?”

  “He is and it’s a thing of beauty to watch at times,” Annie said, shaking her head. “But after those two beats, I needed to get something to eat.”

  “Well,” Lott said, smiling at his beautiful daughter, “we’re happy to have you.”

  A moment later the waitress came to take some of their dirty dishes and Annie’s order.

  “So what’s the new case tonight?” Annie asked. “A fun one?”

  “Not so fun tonight,” Andor said.

  “Gross, actually,” Julia said.

  “The School Girl Murders,” Lott said. “We’re giving that case another run.”

  Annie looked at him surprised. “The cannibal case? Really?”

  “We don’t know the guy was a cannibal,” Lott said.

  “We don’t even know it was a guy for sure,” Andor said. “In fact, we flat know nothing.”

  “Fifteen years and not a clue has surfaced,” Lott said. “Cold as a dark day in the winter in Antarctica.”

  “Wow,” Annie said. “So refresh me on the case and let’s set a plan of attack.”

  Lott laughed. “You want to help on this one?”

  “I was still a patrol officer when this one came in,” Annie said. “Always sort of held a fascination for me.”

  “Gave me nightmares,” Andor said. “But glad to have any help on this monster.”

  So for the next few minutes they went over again what was in the file and the knowledge that wasn’t common, such as the slow baking of the bodies to kill the women, and then the removal of some of the body’s meat.

  Lott was feeling a little more settled about taking on the case again. He was putting it back into perspective. This all was done by a sick serial killer who needed to be caught and punished if he was still alive after all this time.

  “So let’s list the clear points we have to go on,” Julia said, pulling out a notebook from her purse and opening it to a blank page.

  “School girl obsession,” Andor said. “Those uniforms were mostly used for grades seven through twelve. Usually in Catholic and some private schools.”

  Julia nodded and wrote that down. Then she looked at Lott. “You said the women were abducted at a pace of about one per month?”

  “They were,” Lott said. “Two years before we found the bodies.”

  “Nothing at all similar with the women. Some were rich, some single, some married. All had black hair.”

  “So black hair a certain length is an obsession as well,” Julia said, writing that down.

  “I wonder why the killer stopped at eleven,” Annie said. “Is there something about the number eleven that might be a lead?”

  Lott nodded as Julia wrote that down as well. He remembered that he and Andor had thought of that, but could find no connection at all. But never hurt to look again.

  “So how could a human body be baked?” Julia asked. “Was one side or the other burned?”

  “No burns,” Lott said. “Just really slow baked and the fluids drained off.

  “We tried to figure that out as well,” Andor said. “The bodies must have been put on something that wouldn’t transmit heat, some sort of pad or something, then put in a very large oven.”

  “Actually they were still alive when put in the oven,” Lott s
aid. “But drugged. Since all the blood was gone when we found them, basically either drained out or evaporated from the heat. Add onto that the two years that had passed in the cave and we never did determine what that drug might have been.”

  That stopped the four retired detectives cold. Standard for this case. No real leads at all.

  Julia wrote in her notebook, but Lott didn’t try to follow what she was writing. She was good at sometimes putting pieces together that others didn’t see. This case was going to take a miracle of pieces and some real luck to solve.

  After a few moments, the waitress brought Annie her Denver omelet with white toast and coffee. Even though Lott had just eaten a Chef’s Salad, the omelet smelled good.

  Lott wasn’t convinced he could eat and talk about this topic, even though it had been years and he was working to get some distance on the topic.

  “So after they were baked,” Julia said, looking at the paper in front of her, “the killer cut off slices of meat from each woman?”

  Lott nodded.

  “So the assumption was that the killer was a cannibal,” Julia said.

  “That’s where all the jokes around the force went,” Andor said. “But we have no evidence of what the killer did with the cuts of meat from the bodies. He could have fed them to zoo animals for all we know.”

  “I can’t remember,” Annie said, working at the omelet. “How did you find the bodies in that old mine? Wasn’t it boarded up?”

  Lott laughed. “A psychic called it in, saying she was having nightmares, seeing a class of girls sitting in the heat in an old mine.”

  Julia looked at him. “You’re serious?”

  “Betty?” Annie asked.

  “Betty,” Lott said, smiling at Julia. “We used her all the time, off the books, of course.”

  “She was damned good,” Andor said. “But never quote me on that.”

  Julia just shook her head. “Can this case get any stranger?”

  “We just started investigating it again,” Lott said. “So who knows?”

  “Oh, great, just great,” Andor said. “I may never sleep again.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  August 7th, 2015

  1:00 A.M.

  Las Vegas

  “SO WHAT KIND of oven would be large enough to bake a human body without burning it?” Annie asked between bites of her omelet.

  Julia nodded and quickly wrote that question down as well. She liked how Annie thought. Actually, she liked Annie period. She was an amazing woman, and very accepting of Julia being with her father. She seemed to know that Julia would never try to replace Annie’s mother.

  “We figured it was a commercial bread oven,” Andor said.

  “Or a pizza oven,” Lott said. “We checked the bread ovens and they pretty much have a crew on them twenty-four-seven. Pizza ovens were another matter.”

  “I think we found something like sixty-five pizza ovens in the Las Vegas area,” Andor said, “all large enough to hold a human body full inside while on some sort of protective padding.”

  “Nothing came of that, I assume,” Annie said.

  “Nothing,” Lott said.

  Julia wrote that down as well. Something was bothering her and that bit of information finally brought it out. “So why go to the bother of baking the women before taking the meat? Wouldn’t that just dry the desired meat out?”

  Lott shrugged. “We asked ourselves that same question.”

  Andor laughed. “Lott even had Carol put in a roast and bake it at a slow temperature without water like a pizza oven would bake it.”

  “Dried up so bad,” Lott said, “that when I cut it, it was so dry, I just marinated the strips I cut and put it into the food dehydrator to make jerky.”

  “You never told Mom the reason you were doing that, did you?” Annie asked, looking shocked.

  Julia and Andor laughed.

  “I never said a word as to why,” Lott said. “I promise. But she thought I had lost a marble or two for wasting a perfectly good roast like that.”

  “So back to my question,” Julia said. “Clearly baking the women has some meaning to our killer, just as the clothing and the number of victims does. He decided to actually kill them by baking them. That has to mean something.”

  “I’m betting it does,” Annie said.

  “And maybe the mine shaft as well,” Lott said.

  “We didn’t even look much at that angle,” Andor said. “The mine was owned by a mining corporation that was as surprised as anyone to discover what their closed mine had been used for.”

  Julia nodded and wrote that all down. Lots of pieces, no idea what the puzzle even looked like. But there was something else really bothering her, so she just blurted it out.

  “Why did this killer stop?”

  Beside her Lott shrugged and Andor shook his head.

  “We’re not sure the killer did stop,” Lott said. “For years after finding the bodies, which was two years after they were put into the mine, we searched for any references to anything similar anywhere. Nothing came up.”

  “So we need to do that search again,” Annie said. “I’ll get Fleet and his team of computer experts on that. They should be able to easily find any sort of reference to this kind of thing if it came up anywhere in the world.”

  “Thanks,” Lott said. “That will help.”

  Fleet was Annie’s boyfriend’s best friend. Doc and Fleet had been partners since they had both been in college, with Doc earning massive amounts of money from poker, and Fleet making very wise investments and building a vast corporation of holdings. Right now they were both so rich, they almost felt embarrassed to talk about it.

  But Fleet had a computer crew that could get any information without being caught or seen. Annie had met Doc when Doc and Fleet were after the man who had killed Doc’s father, and eventually would kill the White House Chief of Staff. That case had forced them to set up a very deep network of computer experts, and they had kept the team together.

  Doc and Annie and their team now helped the FBI a great deal on different cases, including one that Lott and Julia had been involved in just lately, stopping one of the worst serial killers of all time.

  “My nightmare,” Andor said, “is for the last fifteen years, this killer has just continued in this area unchecked.”

  “That many women haven’t gone missing in Las Vegas, have they?” Annie asked.

  “Not in Las Vegas,” Andor said. “But the women we identified in that cave were from five different states.”

  That made Julia’s stomach twist hard. A killer who went out to get his victims was even harder to trace.

  Julia hoped the killer was long gone. Because if not, a lot of woman had died an ugly death over the last fifteen years.

  She looked over at Annie. “Can you have Fleet and his computer friends do one other search?”

  Annie nodded, her eyes dark and very serious. “You thinking he should look for more black-haired women who have gone missing around Nevada and in all the neighboring states?”

  “Exactly,” Julia said. “Make the search pattern the entire western half of the country.”

  “Damn I hope you are wrong about that being possible,” Lott said.

  “So do I,” Julia said. “And I’m sure I am. But we got to check.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  August 7th, 2015

  10:45 A.M.

  Las Vegas

  LOTT SAT AT Julia’s small wooden kitchen table, sipping coffee and trying to wake up after a restless night. The kitchen window beside the table looked out over the condo complex’s lawn and pool and was very calming. There was no one in the dozen lounge chairs around the pool at the moment.

  Bringing back the case had certainly made sleeping difficult, even with Julia beside him. But the sun of mid-morning streaming in the window was helping some, along with the coffee.

  Julia’s condo’s kitchen was small, but functional and comfortable. It was partially open to a larger dinin
g room over a granite counter, but he and Julia liked the small wooden table tucked off to one side of the kitchen in front of the window.

  The view out the small kitchen window was calming, if calming was possible when dealing with this case. Lott figured he would take anything he could get when it came to calm at the moment.

  The coffee he had made was a French roast and tasted rich. It was Julia’s favorite kind, and he had a hunch she was going to need it. She had tossed and turned more than normal during the night, and looked tired when she kissed him good morning and headed for the shower.

  He had already showered ahead of her and made coffee and now worked at a bowl of Raisin Bran. But he couldn’t finish it all. The dried raisins just kept bringing him back to how those poor women’s skin looked while sitting in that mine.

  He had hated this case when they had caught it the first time. He was starting to hate it just as much with this second look. And they hadn’t even been at it for a full day yet.

  Just as he pushed the half-finished bowl of cereal aside, Julia came in looking refreshed, her skin glowing from the shower, a faint smell of lotion around her. She had on a thin white blouse with a sports bra under it and jeans.

  He watched her, marveling at how lucky he was to have met her as she poured herself a cup of coffee and put in some toast before kissing him good morning and sitting down beside him. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever met, of that he had no doubt.

  After Carol died, he had never figured he would ever move on. Carol had been the love of his life and his partner in life for decades. But now, four years later, he wasn’t replacing Carol. He was just starting something new with Julia.

  “Long night?” he asked.

  “Up twice to make some notes,” Julia said. “If that pervert is still out there, we have to stop him.”

  “I agree,” he said, smiling. Detectives just never let a case go. Carol used to complain that he couldn’t stop working on a case even at breakfast. Now clearly, Julia was the same way he was.

  “So what did you think of that got you out of bed?” Lott asked.