Roll the Dice (10 page)

“The twenty-third of June.”

“It could have been him. He went to ground in the second week of the
month. We lost all track of him in L.A. He could have been here.”

“We picked him up last week. If he’d returned to town, he kept a low
profile.” Aurora’s mind shot back through the relevant dates she’d stored in
her mental file cabinet.

“What doctor’s office?” Cory perched his big body on the edge of his
desk, his hand reaching for the sheet.

Ham passed it over and said. “A GP called Montgomery. She was the bitchy
one who wouldn’t give us the time of day. Said when she'd needed us, we ignored
her.”

Cory scratched the back of his head. “The name sounds familiar. We
wouldn’t have been called in for a robbery. “What went missing?”

Ham answered—his Irish dialect obvious. “Looked like an ordinary
B&E. Figured to be neighbourhood kids. The place was ransacked and drugs on
the premises went missing.”

“What drugs?”

“Mostly pain killers but with street value. The doctor’s statement said
she’d been visited by a number of drug representatives who’d left her a
selection of samples. They were all taken. Looks to me like we jumped through
the hoops, but nothing came up.
 
Says
here, the lass called repeatedly.”

“I want you to go back and get the goods on what went down. If she gives
you any trouble, subpoena her. I want to know what files were messed with.
Also, if they took anything other than drugs. This might be a false lead, but
we can’t afford to let anything slip through the cracks. Not with this
bastard.” He handed the sheet back.

“On it, Boss.” Ham left the office.

“That leaves you two to work on the journal. I’ve called the special victims
units in the other places Rhondo hit and promised to send on the pertinent
data. But we need you to follow up on his victims here in this city.” With his
short red hair standing on end and his temper barely held in check, Cory meant
business. “I want him Aurora.

"We'll get him. You can bet on it." Flint-hard Kai
interrupted, and his positive tone spelled trouble.

Cory swung his head in Kai's direction. You have as much invested in
getting this guy as we do. But, we play by the rules and follow procedures.
It’s how we’ve always worked and this case is no different.” He swung away and
wriggled his fingers. “On the other hand, I don’t much care how hard you push
those rules. Got it?”

“Yes boss!” Aurora answered first. Then Kai echoed her answer before they
left the room.

Once back into their own small office, coffee cups in hand, they sat at
their desks across from each other. Neither looked at the other and it had been
this way since they’d arrived this morning.

Aurora opened her computer and brought up the e-mail the office
secretary had sent to everyone who was working on the case. Loaded into a
special file, each page from the journal was scanned and added in order of
place and date. She pushed the print button on two copies, one for her and Kai,
then sipped the vile coffee they brewed in-house.

Once we get the info, we can organize the victims and pay some home
visits.
 
Maggie, our old secretary
trained Linda well and she’s already gotten the addresses added for each
person. At least those she could find. They’re working on getting the others.
But we have lots to start on now.”

Kai sipped with enjoyment. “Humm. Good coffee—”

Aurora choked on the sip she’d just taken. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What do you think?”

With his eyebrow raised, and the sideways smirk on his face, she really
couldn’t tell.
 
“I don’t want to know.
If you said you liked it, I’d have to report you to PEAP.”

His look said he didn’t understand and she added. “Psych assistance.”

He laughed…and she swung around to hide the shock.
My good lord,
he’s delicious!

The beep on the copy machine warned her to get her mind back on the job
so she wouldn’t embarrass herself.

“Do you want to split up on these names or work together?”

Cory thought about the options and realized that many of the women would
refuse to talk to him because he was a guy. But they’d open to a female officer
much easier. “I’ll stick with you. Two of us doing the questioning will work
better I think. You okay with that?”

“Sure. Tell you the truth; I kinda suspected it’ll be a lot smoother for
me than you.”

“Yeah! I came to the same conclusion. You ready?”

The first two names on the list were young women living in crappy
apartments near the strip. Both knew the ropes and had grown a thick skin from
seeing and doing too much in their short lives. They answered the questions
with a bored attitude that personally hurt Aurora. She knew these girls had
accepted their ordeal. Just another fucked-up scenario in their screwed up
lives.

The next place they pulled up to was a home, well loved, and so was the
girl. She was younger than the other two, in her late teens. Her demeanour
showed clearly that Rhondo's torture had damaged her mentally. These poor folks
had been working hard for months to undo the destruction that one animal had managed
to accomplish in a few terror-filled hours.
 

While Aurora questioned the girl, dealing with her tears, her
self-recriminations, Kai talked to Mrs. Wright, the mother.

“Can you tell me how you found her? It says here that she called from a
payphone on West Sahara?”

“She said he’d dumped her from the vehicle onto the side of a road, and
she’d crawled to the phone. Only reason we found her was she’d recognized the
Golf club in the distance. That bastard had left her almost naked, ripped and
bleeding…” The sobbing cut into her monologue and after he handed over the
tissues he’d thoughtfully collected for his pocket, Kai waited patiently.

“I’m sorry. Every time I picture her looking that way, it brings the
nightmare back. My daughter had it all, straight A’s in her classes, more
friends than she had time for and a life planned out from university to medical
school. Now….” The sigh lasted a long time. But still Kai waited. Hands fisted,
he arched his neck, a relaxing technique he'd recently acquired.

Finally the woman straightened her shoulders and turned to him. “These
last few months have been unbearable. Nothing has made any sense. Do you know
what I mean?"

"Yes, Mrs Wright. I do understand."

" Except maybe something my mother used to say. It's called The
Serenity Prayer, do you know it?”

“No ma’am.
 
Can’t say that I do.”

The woman walked in a controlled manner that told him more than words of
the pain she bore. She opened the drawer of a small table near a wall of plants
and slowly stepped towards him, hand outstretched, a plastic card wavering
slightly.

“Keep this. It might help you sometime.”

Kai glanced down to see a short poem. Trying not to appear rude, he
placed it in his shirt pocket and then patted it.

“Thank you. Are you feeling up to answering a few more questions?
Sometimes small bits of information you think are unimportant can help us in
our investigation. “

The woman nodded.

“Do you remember what her first words were when you reached her?”

“Yes. She apologized for not being more careful. Said she was sorry for
deciding to walk home after dark. He’d picked her up a few blocks from here. A
few blocks…”

Again, Kai waited patiently.

Wiping her cheeks, Alicia’s mother continued.
 
“She said he approached her, asking for directions. When she
stopped to answer, he zapped her with a stun gun, and the next thing she knew,
he had her in a field outside of town. She could see the city lights in the
distance. He’d thrown her to the ground near the car and was drinking from a
bottle of rum, singing an Elvis tune and dancing to the music on the radio. He
tried to force her to drink. When she refused, he hit her. So she drank. Then
he hit her anyway because he could. Said he liked how it sounded. Reminded him
of when he was a kid.”

“Did she know how long he kept her there?”

“It was ten in the evening when she’d started walking home and five in
the morning when her call woke us up. Neither my husband nor I were aware she
hadn’t come home. You see we never had to worry. Alicia was the best girl in
the world. Now—not so much. Since that night, she craves the blindfolds of
booze.”

“I’m sorry. I’d suggest you find a good support group. Sometimes it
helps victims to be around others who’ve suffered in the same way. They truly
understand.”

“Do you think so?” Hope lit up the woman’s pale face across from him.
The dark roots in the tied-back hair added to the look of one not caring about
personal grooming.

“Yes. Phone the precinct for information. They’ll help you. Now, can you
think of anything else that might help us locate Mr. Rhondo? Did he tell her
anything she might have spoken about in those first few hours?”

“She told the therapist that he took a break from hurting her, stopped
to write in a book, a journal. Made her tell him her name, checked her wallet
for identification so she couldn’t lie. Then he told her if she got pregnant,
he’d know. And it would make him happy. My God! Those words alone were enough
for her to demand the morning after pill at the hospital. He was a monster, Mr.
Lawson and I hope he burns in hell.”

“Yes, Ma’am. I have no doubt they’ve a special place set up for him
there.”

Near the end of the day, frustration had set in as Kai and Aurora wrote
up their notes back at the office. They shared information and added their findings
on the boards. Pictures of the girls they’d interviewed. Relevant clues they’d
garnered from talking to each of them. One board had turned into two and just
that morning a third had been added.

All this evidence and they still had no idea where the culprit lurked.
The quiet ate away at Aurora. She realized he kept a low profile on purpose and
it worried her. Whenever he'd been in town, the man liked to be in the thick of
things. It wasn’t in his DNA to hide out for long.

They’d contacted other districts within his preferred hangouts but had
no luck. He’d gone into hiding. Her gut instinct screamed that Rhondo was here
in Vegas. The drugs he’d managed to sneak through their nets were showing up on
the streets. Common sense warned her he’d have to mess up soon. Just not soon
enough.

Ham stalked into the room and sat with one hip on the corner of Aurora’s
desk. “Hey Morelli, you okay? You look like it’s been a rough day.”

“It has. All those women’s lives ripped apart because of one freak’s
needs. It’s sick.”

“What’s sick is spending the day checking out their neighbours. They act
as if remembering their own name and address is taxing their intelligence.”

“I know what you mean. Their brains disappear when it comes to stepping
up, being accountable. Some people—it’s like they come in dumb waves.”

Kai snorted and caught her attention. She leaned back in her office
chair, drawing him into the conversation. “On the other hand,” she said.
 
“Talking to the victims frustrates the hell
outta me too. I thought the journal full of sufferers would give us a lot more
to work with, but so far, they mostly tell the same story.”

Kai adds. “He likes to hurt people. He likes to make them scream. And he
likes them to fight.” He picked up a sheaf of pages stapled together highlighted
with notes he’d made in the empty spaces. “I think I’ve finally figured out
what he means by the letters A, B, and F. After talking to some of these women,
I figure the ones who fought the hardest have earned an A. The ones who laid
back and let him do his dirty were the ones who he marked with an F. Just can’t
figure out what the B stands for.”

Ham looked over his shoulder. “You’re right. The sicko’s lettered every
one of the pages. Like grading them.”

Kai added. “That’s my theory. Look here, we know Tamryn and Alicia
Wright fought him and they have A’s on their pages. Deb had to have given him a
battle because she earned an A+ but then he’s marked her with a B also. The
other two we interviewed today both have F’s. I got the feeling that all they did
was stay alive.”

“Is there anyone else with a B on their page?”
 
Disgust rang in the Irish cop’s tone while his expression
screamed distain.
 

“Here, by this girl, Ruth Grainger.
 
She’s outside of Reno and was one of the ones who filed a complaint. Except
she’d waited for weeks before she came forward. She got an F, guess she didn’t
satisfy the freak. No fun if they lie there and take it. But he gave her a B,
and then with different coloured ink, he crossed it out, which denotes he
probably did that some time later. The letters have to mean something. I just
wish I knew what?”

Aurora held the back of her neck in both hands. First she stretched one
way and then the other. “Who know what goes through his mind. The profiler we
called in on the case gave us the regular jargon. Single mom, probably beat him
and brought home men who most likely beat her. They surmised he learned
physical brutality from behaviour he’d witnessed. Most likely lived through it
continually in his formative years. Because they’ve labelled him as psychotic,
they know the drugs and alcohol he uses exacerbates the condition.
 
His hallucinating that the females he’s hurt
have liked what he did to them is another symptom of his delusions.”