Sin City Homicide (10 page)

19

Stanton checked his messages first thing when he woke Monday morning.
Nothing from Marty. There was one message from Orson, asking if he wanted to go golfing that day, and one from Mindi, saying she had a hit on Fredrick Steed’s home address. There was another from his son, speaking in whispered tones, wishing him good night.

He dialed his ex’s number
, and no one answered. He hung up without leaving a message. Next, he called Mindi’s number, and she answered on the second ring. He could hear a shower running in the background.

“Hey, Jon. You get my message?”

“Yeah, how’d you find him?”

“Found a case in the statewide. He’s still on probation for a robbery charge from 2010. And you should see the rest of his history.”

“Any sex offenses or burglaries?”

“No sex offenses. Don’t remember if I saw any burglaries. Why?”

“Most sex offenders start off as burglars. When they enter a home and find someone asleep, they commit their first sexual assault and get a taste for it.”

“Really? I thought they started out with sex offenses.”

“Sometimes, but not usually.”

“Well, I’ll go grab his file and come get you. The place he’s staying at is like an hour outside the city, so we should leave now. I should probably tell you
, though, I Googled it, and it’s, like, a weird commune. Like… a white supremacist compound or something.”

“I don’t think we should go alone
, then.”

“We’re cops
. What are they gonna do?”

Stanton grinned. Her innocence had its charm. “A lot. I’ll talk to Orson and get some backup.”

“I really don’t think we need it. And that’ll take a bunch of time. Let’s just head out there.”

“That’s a bad idea. We’ll get some backup from Orson. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to get approved.”

“All right, you’re the boss here, I guess. I’ll see ya at the precinct.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Bye.”

He placed the phone down on the side
table and crawled up on the bed. There was a long cylindrical pillow lying there, made of a fluffy crimson material that was soft against his skin. He leaned his head back on it and flipped on the television. It was on a channel playing an infomercial for acne cream, but he didn’t bother to change it. He wasn’t watching for entertainment. Sometimes, he just needed background noise while he thought, fooling him into thinking he wasn’t alone.

The video replayed in his mind. Professor Hoffman, his dissertation advisor, once had him run through memory studies as part of the psychology department’s colloquium on modern mnemonic techniques. The premise was that they would t
each an average student—Stanton, in this case—mnemonic techniques that could advance his recall. At the time of the study, no memory system ever developed had been statistically validated in any significant way. As Hoffman liked to say, they were selling psychological snake oil.

But Hoffman, one of the foremost
memory experts in the United States, had stumbled upon a book on the history of ancient Greece while browsing the library. There was a section on Simonides of Ceos. During a party he was attending with over seventy other people, the roof of the home collapsed. Everyone was buried inside, and Simonides was the sole survivor. When help arrived, they needed assistance finding the victims in the palatial home. Simonides, the story said, was able to recall exactly where every single guest had been when the roof fell.

Hoffman discovered that the ancient Greeks had a highly developed system of mnemonics associati
ng concrete memories with those that would stand out. As he followed the thread to ancient Rome, he discovered politicians who were said to recite entire speeches lasting hours directly from memory. The ancients, or so he believed, had something that we had lost.

The associations were simple. One could have a house, a tent, a field, or anywhere th
at person liked. He would place the thing he wanted to remember with something so out of the ordinary that he was bound to remember its outrageousness and, hence, the object he wanted to recall, as well. Hoffman gave an example of being out on the town with his wife when he saw a horse-drawn carriage riding past. Realizing his anniversary was coming up, he wanted to remember the phone number on the side of the carriage without writing it down so that his wife would not notice. He thought of a home he remembered from the past, ran upstairs, and placed a horse in a bedroom. Next to the horse, he conjured a duck—for whatever reason, he had found ducks funny as a child—and painted the phone number in bright-red lettering on the horse. For extra effect, he imagined fireworks going off just outside the window. He remembered the phone number, even thirty-five years later.

After choosing Stanton for the study to be presented to the colloquium,
Hoffman found that Stanton had perfect recall without the use of his new memory system, down to the number of women’s earrings in a high school class photo that he had seen only for a few seconds.

Stanton had read about eidetic memory as a graduate student but found it indefinable
. How could he tell if he was recalling something perfectly or if he was only perceiving it as being recalled perfectly? Stanton had noticed one trait in himself, though, that he didn’t see in other officers: everything stayed with him. Ten years after visiting the scene of a homicide at a hotel, he could recall how many sticks of gum were left in the pack lying on the side table, what the thermostat had been set to, and… the exact expression on the corpse. Detectives in Homicide called it the “glamour shot,” the final facial expression at the time of death. He remembered every glamour shot from every victim he had ever seen. Sometimes, in quiet moments, they came to him. He would close his eyes, but they would be right there, seemingly between his eyes and eyelids. He was unable to shake them and would have to tolerate them until they went away on their own.

Stanton sat up in bed. He g
rabbed his phone and dialed Orson.

“Jon, what’s goin’ on?”

“Hey, I have a quick favor to ask.”

“Anything.”

“I need to pay Marty a visit and make sure he’s okay. You think I could get his address?”

“Sure. Hey, you should’a come out to the green yesterday. I left you a message
, but you never called me back.”

“Sorry about that. I’ve been preoccupied with this case.”

“That’s why I chose you for this, I guess. I’ll have someone at the office text you the address.”

“Thanks.”

The address never came. He had to call the station several times, and they had to confirm it with Orson before finally sending it. When it came twenty minutes later, Stanton rose and left the room. As he walked down the hallway, he heard a couple arguing behind closed doors. They were fighting because the man had not been honest about how the woman had looked in a dress she had worn the previous night. Apparently, he’d complimented her the entire night then made a comment the next morning about the dress not fitting well. Stanton grinned, remembering similar fights with his ex. He wished he’d known then what he knew now. It was all so trivial, but in the heat of the moment, it had seemed so important. If he could go back, he would apologize every time, his fault or not, and always have a soft heart with her.

He suddenly remembered that he hadn’t talked to his kids in a few days
, and he dialed the number as he rode the elevator down to the lobby.

A man answered.
“Hello?”

“Is Melissa there?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is Jon Stanton.”

“Oh. She ain’t here.”

“Are Mathew and—”

The man hung up. Stanton sat on the line a moment then put away his phone. That must have been the football player. Lately, Melissa only dated athletes. If that was her type, he wondered why she had married an intellectual.

Stanton exited the elevators and the hotel without noticing anything around him. The valet brought out the Cadillac. The radio station was tuned to hard rock
, and he changed it to an ’80s station playing the Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” before pulling away.

The address was twenty-seven minutes away
, according to the GPS, and he made two wrong turns before getting onto the correct freeway. He finally turned onto Flower Avenue and found the three-bedroom rambler belonging to Marty. There was no car parked outside, and the blinds were drawn. He parked in the driveway and went up to the front door. He knocked then rang the doorbell. The other homes in the neighborhood looked almost identical, just different enough to add a bit of variety. Stanton stepped back onto the front yard and looked around. Around back, he peered over the fence. All the blinds were drawn there as well. He was about to leave when he saw someone looking out a slit in the blinds on the front window. As soon as Stanton turned his head to look directly at the window, the slit closed.

He put his hand on his firearm, ensuring that it was there, a habit he had been taught by Sherman. Stanton knew the real reason they did this was for the sense of power that it gave them.

Stanton pounded on the door and shouted, “Police. Open up.”

N
o response. He went to the garage door and tried to lift it, but it was too heavy. He ran to the front and pushed. The thick door was locked with a deadbolt. He ran around the house and hopped the fence into the backyard. The backdoor was flimsy. He considered ramming through it, but he saw the basement already had a massive chunk missing. He walked over to it and kicked the frame lightly on the side, shattering the glass. He cleared away the jagged edges with his shoe and crawled into the house.

The home was dark and smelled of mildew. It was stagnant
, as if no one lived there or whoever did walked on eggshells in order not to disturb anything. Even the carpet had a coating of dust over vacuum cleaner tracks. As he passed a large, antique mirror on the south wall, Stanton glanced in the mirror, almost expecting to see someone else there.

There were three doors: one on the south wall, one on the east, and one on the north.
The door to the north was open, leading upstairs. He peered up the stairs. Taking a few steps out, he looked straight up to see if anybody was standing at the railing above. No one was there.

Stanton took
each step slowly, almost gingerly, as if he were walking on broken glass. He was halfway up the steps when he heard boots on linoleum and the turning of a lock.

“Police!”

He bolted up the stairs just in time to see the back of someone sprinting out of the house. Stanton ran down the hallway and leapt over the La-Z-Boy recliner. He pulled open the door and saw the figure, who was wearing a ski mask, hop the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Stanton sprinted after him and dove over the fence. The man was heading straight for the back porch and the door that led inside the house.

Stanton considered firing his gun
, but he didn’t know if civilians were inside. Instead, he landed hard on his feet from the jump over the fence and began running again. The man tried the backdoor, which was locked. He looked back at Stanton then rushed around the house and over the chain-link fence.

Stanton did the same
, following the man down the sidewalk to an office park .He didn’t take his eyes off the man for a second, not even to look at the cars speeding toward him as he crossed the street.

The man was fast, but
he was slowing down. He was wearing what looked like work boots, and they didn’t help his endurance. Stanton was at a full sprint now, breathing hard. He tasted bile in his mouth as his wind left him and his side began to ache. The man suddenly bolted right, down an alley, and Stanton trailed him. The man opened a side door to a building and ran inside. Stanton grabbed the handle and pulled before running in.

It was an industrial kitchen. Two massive ovens took up
both sides of the room. Between them was an island with a countertop cluttered with dishes, food, and cutlery. He could hear voices in the next room, just past a thick plastic door. Stanton held his firearm low.