The Other Side: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  “Are you saying Gary was into something like that?”

  Roper spread his hands. “Maybe so, maybe not. It’s possible he just wandered out of the light and got eaten by one of the big nasty fish in the shadows. But I’ve been workin’ here a long time, and especially the last ten years or so, those shadows have crept out a lot farther than they used to, y’know? I don’t want to scare you, but it’s true.”

  “Can you tell us about Gary? Where he was found, and what happened to him?”

  “What do you know already?” Roper glanced at Verity.

  “Heard they found him in a dumpster, naked, with no ID. There were signs he’d been tortured—don’t have any details about that—and his throat was slashed.”

  “Yeah, that’s all true.” Roper shuffled through the papers again, pulled out what looked like a police report, and held it so he could read it but Jason and Verity couldn’t. “Body was found by a homeless guy dumpster-divin’ for food. We had him tagged as a John Doe for a while, until we looked at the missing-persons reports and found Gary. Estimates are he’d been dead for a few hours before the guy found him. Surprised he even reported it at all, honestly— as a rule, the homeless around here don’t trust the cops.”

  “But Gary wasn’t killed there, right?”

  “Nah, not nearly enough blood. Somebody dumped him there.”

  “But nobody saw anything? No witnesses? Aren’t there people out on the streets all night in Vegas?”

  Roper snorted. “Yeah, but around this area, not the kind o’ people who’d tell the cops anything. Even if somebody did see it, they wouldn’t get involved. That’s a bad end of town—lot of folks you don’t want to mess with hang out there.”

  Verity didn’t say anything, but this was something else she’d been afraid of. “He was tortured, we heard, and you said that was right. Can you say anything about how he was tortured?”

  “He was beaten up quite a bit—the body had a lot of bruises on it.” Roper’s gaze shifted sideways and he didn’t meet hers.

  Verity shifted to magical sight, and immediately spotted unease in his blue aura. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling us.”

  He looked surprised she’d picked up on that, but didn’t try to deny it. “Yeah.”

  “What is it?” Jason asked, leaning forward. “Come on—trust me, V’s probably heard worse than whatever you’re gonna say.”

  For a moment, he seemed to consider what he wanted to say. “Okay,” he said at last. “Yeah, he was beaten pretty bad before they killed him. He had bruises all over his body, like they worked him over good. But a lot of the damage was concentrated in the…genital area.”

  Jason frowned and winced. “Holy shit. That’s fucked up.”

  “That’s got to mean something, though, right?” Verity asked. “If they focused on that area—it sounds like whoever killed him could have been pissed at him because of something related to sex.”

  “That’s the usual MO,” Roper said with grudging approval. “We’re thinkin’ maybe he got caught with the wrong woman and pissed off somebody he shouldn’t have.”

  “Have they finished the autopsy yet?” Jason asked. “I’m guessing the throat slash was the COD, but anything left that might show who he was messing around with?”

  Roper glanced over the report again, then shuffled it to the back and pulled up another paper. “Yeah, autopsy report says he died of exsanguination—his carotid was severed by the slash. The bruises were bad, but they wouldn’t have killed him. No indication of recent sexual intercourse.”

  “No way we can see the body, is there?” Verity asked.

  “I’m…not sure about that,” Roper said. “I’ll have to check. It’s still in the police morgue—they haven’t released it to the wife yet, but I think they’re going to soon. I’ll give you a call. Trust me, though—you’re not gonna see anything the docs haven’t already found.”

  Verity wasn’t too sure about that, but she remained silent. It wasn’t hard to sense that Roper was uncomfortable talking about this around her, but she wasn’t sure if it was because she was young, female, or simply not an official investigator.

  Jason gave him the phone number for their hotel room. “Thanks. We appreciate the help.” He pulled out his notebook and scribbled some things down. “Couple more things and we’ll get out of your hair.”

  Roper chuckled. “Ain’t much to get out of anymore, but go for it.”

  “Can you tell us where the body was discovered?”

  “Yeah, hang on a sec.” He pulled the police report back to the front. “It was in a dumpster behind a strip joint called The Pussycat Club. It’s a couple blocks off Fremont Street—nasty end of town. Whoever put him there made no effort to hide the body. The homeless guy who found him said he was right there on top of a big pile of trash.”

  Jason nodded and wrote that down. “Also—we heard that he wasn’t found with any ID, but somebody else’s ID was found in the same dumpster. Can you tell us about that?”

  “Yeah. Might not be related at all, but we’re tryin’ to run the guy down. No luck yet, though.” He pulled out another piece of paper and pushed it across the table toward Jason.

  Verity looked over his shoulder. It was a photocopy of a California driver’s license. The photo was hard to make out clearly, but it appeared to be a man in his late twenties or early thirties with a lean face, a mustache, and sleek dark hair. The name read David Ames, and the address was for a place in Los Angeles.

  Roper pointed at the address. “That’s a fake. It’s a real place, but nobody by that name or description lives there.”

  Jason was making more notes. “That’s fishy right there. I got a gut feeling this Ames guy has something to do with Gary’s murder, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Roper said. He leaned forward. “Listen, Thayer—you’re workin’ for Fran, so I want to help you as much as I can, but I have to tell you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  He sighed. “Truth is, there are a lot of murders in Las Vegas. We get a few every week, and a lot of ’em don’t even make the papers. Point is, the police department’s strapped to the wall dealin’ with ’em. Are you followin’ what I’m tryin’ to tell you?”

  “You’re saying it’s not likely the cops will spend much time investigating Gary’s murder,” Verity said.

  Roper nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I don’t like it—it pisses me off, if you want to know the truth. But it’s the way it is. This one isn’t actually even my case, but the detective it was assigned to has a stack on her desk so high she has to look over ’em like one o’ those meerkats. Fact is, this one seems pretty straightforward—some upright suburban dad who’s maybe not so upright after all sneaks off to Vegas for a little fun, blunders into the wrong part of town, and gets himself whacked.”

  “So not high on the brass’s ‘solve this or else’ list, in other words,” Jason said.

  Again, Roper spread his hands. “I’m glad somebody else is takin’ an interest in this, is all I’m sayin’. Like I said, I’ll help where I can. But don’t expect much.” He glanced at his watch. “I gotta be headin’ back. Anything else?”

  Jason looked at Verity, who shrugged. “Guess not. We’ll give you a call if we have any other questions.”

  “Nice meetin’ you two.” Roper stood and tossed a five on the table. “Good luck—and be careful. I don’t want to have to tell Fran that her golden boy and his little sister got themselves shivved in an alley somewhere.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  By the time Stone arrived back at the winery, took a long hot shower, and headed to dinner, several others had already gathered in the now-open restaurant.

  He paused in the doorway, taking in the elegant little dining room. It was decorated in similar
style to the rest of the winery, with large casks set into the walls, old-fashioned lanterns, and warm, wood-beamed ceilings. A wide picture window near the rear afforded a view of a cozy deck (currently unoccupied) and the shadowy forms of the trees and vineyard beyond. A small buffet spread featuring simple fare like fried chicken, pasta, salad, and wild rice was laid out on a table near one of the other walls, along with several open bottles of wine and a collection of glasses.

  About fifteen people were seated around a cluster of tables near the window, already working on their entrees. Stone recognized Larry Duncan and Kelly Petrucci; Edwina Mortenson sat at a small table on the far side of the room, chatting with a slim, dark-skinned woman in a The Other Side T-shirt. Bryce Riley was nowhere to be seen.

  “Stone! Over here!” Larry Duncan waved him toward an empty seat at a table he shared with three others: Petrucci, a stocky young man in a T-shirt and cargo shorts, and a slender mid-thirties man in jeans, neat button-down shirt, and wire-rimmed glasses.

  Stone could think of many other things he’d rather do than eat dinner with Larry Duncan (a root canal came to mind, for instance), but most of the other tables were already full so he sighed and headed in that direction after putting together a hasty plate from the buffet table.

  “Hey hey,” Duncan greeted, once again waving him toward the chair as he drew closer. “Thought you weren’t gonna show up. Here, lemme introduce you guys.” He indicated the stocky man. “This is Cody Huff. He’s one of our co-stars. You mighta seen him on the show, yeah?”

  Now that he was closer, Stone did recognize Huff as Bryce Riley’s hapless, schlubby on-camera sidekick from the few episodes he’d watched. In person, Huff looked a lot less schlubby and a lot more intelligent than he did on the show.

  “You’ve already met Kelly, our director,” Duncan was saying, and then nodded toward the man in the glasses. “This is Randy Yates. He’s George Landry’s nephew. He and his wife will be taking over the bed and breakfast at the Brunder place. Everybody, this is Dr. Alastair Stone, from the Occult Studies department at Stanford. The consultant for this episode.”

  “One of the consultants,” Stone corrected. “Pleasure to meet you all.”

  “Right, right,” Duncan said, brushing him off. “Looks like Doc Mortenson has found Celina. Not surprised.”

  Stone was about to ask why, but realized he recognized the dark-skinned woman as well. Celina Wanderley was the third member of The Other Side’s on-camera triumvirate—an unexpected combination of tech wizard and “sensitive.” She was the one who always seemed to pick up on the “energies” swirling around a site, and who seemed to have the best success in communicating with whatever “spirits” were hanging around. Stone wasn’t surprised to see that she and Mortenson had connected with each other.

  “Randy was just telling us about what we might expect to find at the Brunder place tomorrow,” Duncan was continuing.

  Randy Yates shrugged. “We hear a lot of noises around the place, especially late at night. Sometimes Mary—that’s my wife—says she hears voices whispering. And a couple times both of us have heard things falling, like crashing to the ground, but when we try to find them, there’s never anything there.”

  Stone nodded politely, but didn’t respond. As far as he was concerned, it was nothing more than typical fake-haunted-house stuff. Everybody “heard weird noises” and “felt cold drafts” and “heard whispers from some other part of the house.” Those were the classics. Admittedly, the places he’d encountered that were “haunted” (as a mage, he hated that word—hauntings were nothing more than the echoes of energy from people who had died, but something still held their essence to this plane) often exhibited the same characteristics, but nowadays, especially with the proliferation of shows like this, they’d become nothing more than clichés trotted out by the unimaginative.

  “Those should play well on camera,” Huff said. “I’ll wander off on my own and see if something won’t go bump in the night for me.”

  “Or even bump in the daytime,” Duncan agreed. “Stone, I don’t know if you saw the schedule Rita shoved under your door, but we’ll start doing the interviews downstairs at the house at around noon, and then we’ll do a walk-through during the day to get some establishing shots and scout areas that might look interesting. We’ll need you in make-up no later than ten. Expect you’ll be pretty busy tomorrow—I want you to go through the place with Bryce and the others.”

  “What about Dr. Mortenson?” Stone asked, glancing over toward her. It appeared that she and Celina Wanderley had hit it off—she showed more animation in the discussion than Stone had seen her exhibit since she’d found out he was sharing the limelight with her.

  Duncan nodded. “Yes. Um. Dr. Mortenson. We’ve got an on-camera interview with her scheduled for tomorrow afternoon as well—she’ll provide some of the history of the area and commentary on what we might find in the house. But she won’t be doing the walk-through.” He looked apologetic. “Bryce gets a little…touchy if we get too many people involved.”

  “He thinks it messes with the energy,” Huff said in a mocking tone.

  Stone wondered if anybody had told Mortenson she wouldn’t be going inside the house, but supposed at this point there was nothing he could do about it. “Where is Mr. Riley, anyway?” he asked. “I don’t see him here.”

  “He never eats with the peons,” Huff said. “He told Larry to make Rita bring him a plate in his room.”

  Duncan glared at him. “That’s enough, Cody. You know he just likes to have time to get into the right headspace.”

  Randy Yates was looking between the two of them as if watching a particularly troubling tennis match. “Is everything okay? There won’t be any problems, will there?”

  Duncan patted his hand. “No, baby, no. Everything’s peachy. Bryce can be a little temperamental sometimes, but he always hits his marks like a pro when the cameras are rolling. Don’t you worry about a thing. Where’s Mary, by the way? I thought she’d be here.”

  “She…had a little headache, so she decided to skip dinner.”

  “She’ll be here for the get-together tonight, though, right?”

  “Yeah, she’ll be there. I’m sure she’ll be feeling better by then.”

  Stone, temporarily unnoticed, was amusing himself watching the conversation with magical sight. Even without it, though, he didn’t have a difficult time spotting the tension in all three of them. Perhaps this tight-knit little band wasn’t as tight-knit as they wanted outsiders to believe. He wondered if Yates’s wife really did have a headache, or if she’d managed to beg off for some other reason. “So then,” he said, “you and your wife actually live on-site at the Brunder place?”

  Yates looked relieved at the change of subject. “Yeah. It’s still pretty rough—the structure’s all in, so the rain and cold aren’t an issue, but most of it still needs the inside renovated. We live in a little apartment in the back that’s further along.”

  “It must get quite lonely up here sometimes, with so few people in town.”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “But it’s beautiful here, and it’s not far down to Delsey if we need a little more social interaction.”

  “So it’s your uncle who actually owns the building?” Stone asked. “Did he buy it, or has it been in your family?”

  “Oh, no. I’m not sure anybody knows who owned it in the last fifty years or so before he did. The paperwork and titles and stuff were a big mess, he told us. He bought it from the state after the folks here at the winery started making noises about reviving the town. Figured if the place catches on, it’ll be a nice investment.” He chuckled. “It’s not like anybody else was breaking down the doors to make a better offer. It’s costing him big to renovate the place.”

  “And he asked you to look after it for him?”

  “Yeah. I’d recently
lost my job and was having trouble finding another one, so I was happy to accept his offer. Besides that, I’m…” He looked a little embarrassed. “I’m sort of trying to write a book, so all the solitude up here lets me work on that in my spare time.”

  Stone raised an eyebrow. “Writing a novel in a haunted hotel? How very Stephen King.”

  Yates grinned. “Yeah, I get that a lot. But don’t worry—I’m not planning to chop through any doors with an axe, shouting ‘Here’s Johnny!’ anytime soon. Besides, my book’s nonfiction, about the history of the Gold Country. And Uncle George pays Mary and me enough for keeping an eye on the place that I’m not exactly a starving artist.”

  “But it wouldn’t hurt the bottom line if the place got a reputation for being haunted, would it?”

  Duncan glared at him, but Yates didn’t seem perturbed. “Hauntings fill rooms. Is the place really haunted?” He shrugged. “I don’t honestly know. I’m not lying about the stuff I’ve heard in the house, and Mary’s heard it too. As I’m sure you know, the town’s got a history of that sort of thing, which I think we’re all hoping will intrigue tourists enough that they’ll pick our town instead of the next one down the road.”

  Stone glanced at Duncan. “And you’re all right with that?”

  Cody Huff answered: “Hey, if we needed definitive proof that every place we feature is really honest-to-God haunted, we’d have gone off the air halfway through our first season. Our show’s not just about the hauntings—it’s about the history. And Brunderville’s got some great history. Ghosts, curses—those are ratings gold.”

  “Plus,” Duncan added, “we’ve got the best on-camera crew around. Have you seen some of those other shows? Audiences would much rather watch Bryce and Cody and Celina than a bunch of good ol’ boys straight outta Deliverance, or a couple of dude-bros who get loaded up on beer and weed and treat the whole thing like a big joke.” He stood up and leaned in toward the group at the table. “That’s the difference, babies. Maybe there are ghosts, maybe not. But we do our research, and we sell it. That’s what brings the numbers come ratings time.” He waved. “Anyway, I gotta go. Lot to do, lot to do. See you all tomorrow so we can make this thing happen. Get your beauty sleep, Stone, and get ready to turn on the charm—we’re gonna make you a star, you just watch.”