Sin City Homicide (14 page)

26

Stanton hid the slack of the rope underneath his legs. He leaned his head back against the wall to make himself appear weak. The footsteps
descended, and he heard a key insert into the lock and twist. Then the door opened.

The man was dressed in jeans and a green jacket
. A ski mask covered his face. He was wearing gloves and thick boots. His neck was covered. Stanton knew instantly that this man wasn’t an amateur. He had hidden everything that could’ve indicated his ethnicity. The only thing he couldn’t cover was his eyes, which were dark brown.

The man stood in front of
Stanton, staring at him. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a large hunting knife, the type used to gut a deer. Stanton’s heart raced, but he was practiced at hiding his reactions. The man began pacing slowly around the room, his hands behind him. He was tapping the knife gently against a watch, making a metallic clink. His head was down as he paced.

Stanton could see the hesitation in his body language. The nervous tapping, the pacing… he had come down there
certain of his choice, but seeing Stanton had changed something. The future was no longer definite. Stanton knew he had only a few moments before the man made up his mind again.

“I was being followed,” Stanton said. The clinking stopped
, and the man turned to him. “There was a white van. It was in a classic tailing pattern called the Three-Hook Pattern. There are three cars, one far enough away from the mark that he can still see him without the mark noticing. Then you have a second car behind the first, far away, but close enough to see him. Then you have a third car trailing the other two. The mark can only see the first car, so you switch which car is the first car at regular intervals. They were in a five-minute pattern with me. White van, brown Chrysler, and a black SUV. The Three-Hook is usually used by law enforcement. They were tailing me.”

Stanton saw
the man’s chest heaving just a bit more. He was either nervous or building up courage.

“They’ll find me here
, eventually. Dead cop will bring the entire force down on this case. Maybe they’ll bring in the feds, too. If I’m alive, it’ll be a kidnapping case. It won’t even go to Robbery-Homicide, where the top detectives are. If you’re playing the numbers, you have the highest probability of getting away with it if I’m alive.”

The man didn’t move
, then the knife came out again. He held it up near his face and ran his finger along the edge before he spun around and walked back through the open door. As he heard the door lock, Stanton exhaled loudly. He began to loosen the ropes around his ankles, then he lifted himself onto his hands and into an upright squat. His hands were still bound, but his feet were free.

The cabinet was about twenty feet away. He took one step then paused
. Another step then paused. He made his way over to the cabinet and stuck his finger between the doors, opening them only a few centimeters at a time to ensure they wouldn’t creak.

O
n the bottom shelf, he found coiled cable wire, a pair of pliers, and work gloves. The middle shelves were empty, and the top shelves held screws, nails, a glue gun, and a few other tools. He took the pliers and spun them around so they were facing downward. The cuffs had a little hinge that held the locks in place. He tried putting the pliers’ teeth around the hinge to snap it, but he couldn’t get a good grip. Instead, he sat down and pulled his wrists under his legs, bringing his hands to the front. After cutting his restraints, he put the pliers back and walked up the stairs to the door. The lock was a simple doorknob. This wasn’t a dungeon or part of a premeditated plan. This was a basement, and he’d been brought here on a whim.

Stanton went back to the cabinet and sifting through the nails. He found one that was long and slim like a paperclip. He took it back to the door at the top of the stairs and placed his ear on the frame.
The other side was quiet. He didn’t hear footsteps or voices. Gently, he placed the tip of the nail into the lock and pushed.

A little at a time, the nail went in until it hit the metal cylinder and the lock button. There was a click as it unlocked. Stanton didn’t open it right away.
Once more, he looked around the basement for a makeshift weapon. He went back to the cabinet, took a six-inch Phillips head screwdriver, and held it against his wrist, concealing it. He went back to the door and opened it.

Roughly twelve
more stairs led up to the second floor. He slipped off his shoes and climbed each one as lightly as possible, his eyes fixed above him. If his captor returned with a gun, Stanton would be an immobile target on a downhill slope. He would be dead.

The edges of the stairs nearest the wall were the least likely locations to develop creaks
, and he placed his feet there. He was halfway up the stairs when he heard a door slam. His heart jumped into his throat, and he gripped the screwdriver tighter. He could climb the rest of the stairs in maybe three seconds. If he surprised the man, even a little, Stanton might make it up there.

A car roared to life as a garage door opened. The engine
noise faded then disappeared as the garage door closed again. Stanton quickly climbed the rest of the stairs. Without searching the home, he found the nearest exit—the front door. He hurried over and unlocked it, glancing back once as he walked out into the darkness of the night.

27

Sheriff Tom Brandish Keele walked from his Chevy Tahoe to the precinct doors and looked the building up and down. It looked so damned… modern. Everything was modernized. His detectives carried iPads, took notes with rubber stylus
es, and dictated into digital recorders. When he’d first started on the force as a young buck of eighteen, nearly forty years ago, Las Vegas was nothing more than a few hotels and horrible restaurants owned by the New York mob. Those days, detectives wrote everything in a little notepad, but most of the time, they didn’t have to; they were expected to memorize every single detail about every single case. Sure, they wrote it down at the end of the week in status reports, but that was it. And the status reports went up to bosses who didn’t really look them over because the department trusted that what needed to be done was getting done. There was no IAD, no staff of attorneys to cover their asses, no complaints about brutality. Unless someone was shot or beaten severely enough to spend the night in a hospital, claims of police brutality were unheard of.

A
t sixty-seven, looking at the building, Keele wondered if he should take his kids’ advice and finally retire. Elected officials had no mandatory retirement age, and he could realistically serve until he was dead or incapacitated. His kids were entrenched in their family life. They had baseball games, barbeques, school plays, and dances. They had Sunday dinners and family vacations. For the past two years—since his wife had died of complications with pneumonia—all Keele had was an empty condo and a lifetime of memories. They were not enough to warm the other side of the bed at night.

He walked into the building and nodded hello to the
person at the front desk. When he was a new sheriff nineteen years ago, he was attacked with memos, signature requests, overtime slips, and interview requests the moment he stepped foot into any precinct. But now he had insulated himself well. He had four assistant sheriffs who handled most of the work he used to do himself. Over them was an undersheriff who saw to the day-to-day business. He also had heads of staff for finance, general counsel, administrative staff, and intergovernmental relations. He delegated most of his work so that he could keep his eye on the big picture: cutting bureaucracy so that cops could focus on actually solving crimes. Striking that balance was tough, considering he had added more bureaucrats to the payroll than any sheriff in the city’s history.

The elevator was about to take him up to
his office when a hand parted them. Orson Hall stepped on, a coffee in his hand. He faced forward, waiting for the doors to close.

“I need to talk to you,” Keele said.

“’Bout what?”

“Daniel Steed’s case and that detective you flew in.”

“I can’t believe it myself. I keep hoping he shacked up with some hooker and just has his phone off, but the assistant I assigned to him says he’s been incommunicado for an entire day. I’m not quite in panic mode, but I think that we should—”

“They found him.”

“What?”

“They found him. Jon Stanton, right? They found him. He called the emergency line from a gas station.”

“Why wasn’t I told about this?”

“Take your dick out of that
filly you got on the side and turn your damn phone on sometimes, Orson.”

Hall took out his cell phone. It was off. “Oh. Didn’t realize I did that. Where is he now?”

“He’s here.”

“I need to go talk to him.”

The elevator dinged, and they stepped off. They said nothing else until they were behind the closed doors of Keele’s plush corner office. Keele pulled a glass bottle out of a drawer and poured a glass of brandy. He offered some to Hall, who turned it down.

“You can’t talk to him yet,” Keele said. “I gave him to Alma.”

“For what?”

“He seems to think your boy is the prime suspect in that homicide from a while back, the burn victim. He asked if he could have an hour with him alone before anyone else
, and I said it was okay.”

“Tom, he’s a friend a mine, out here as a favor to me.”

“I didn’t authorize pullin’ off his fingernails or anything. He’s just gonna talk to him.”

“Yeah,
’cause that’s all Alma does, right? Talk?”

“He’s got some fire in him
. That’s for sure,” Keele said, sitting in his chair with a grunt, his knees creaking. “But I trust the tough bastard more than I trust anyone here. Even you.”

“Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that.”

“Oh, quit bein’ so sensitive. Your friend’s gonna be just fine, and as soon as Alma’s done with him, you can go down there.” He took a long drink and swirled the liquid in the glass. “I wanted to ask you if you think he could actually do something like that.”

“Murder somebody? Jon Stanton? No way.”

“How do you know?”

“I know him well enough to know he’s not a killer.”

“That’s not what his file says.”

“You looked up his file?”

“Made a call to the chief over in San Diego. His file says he’s had eight shootings in the line of duty. Seven were cleared as clean shootings, but they ain’t sure about this last one.”

“Every cop gets in that situation. Hell, how many shootings did you have? Ten? Twenty?”

“I’ve been at this three times as long, and I came up in the days when bank robberies ended in machine-gun battles. Different times.”

“I can’t picture him doing anything like that.”

He finished the brandy and set the glass on the desk. “My old man was a philanderer. Slept with anything that moved. I didn’t want to believe it, and neither did my mama. We ignored it as much as we could. Then he gave my mama syphilis. She died’a that. She was too proud to go to a doctor, so it ate away at her mind. Damn thing lays dormant so long, you don’t even know you have it until it turns your brain to Swiss cheese. That’s the trick, Orson. You gotta face that everyone is capable of everything.”

Orson took a deep breath. “What’d you wanna do?”

“Nothing yet. All we got is rumors from some wetback dope dealers. I don’t wanna move on a good cop if that’s it. Give Alma a chance to play this out. If there’s anything there, he’ll find it.”

28

It took Parr nearly half an hour to get through to someone at NV Energy who could answer his questions. He spoke with a manager named Nate, who had a Texas twang. Parr gave him the address and asked who had been out to read the meters in the past three days.

“Sir, we barely do that anymore. It’s only on some of them older homes. Usually
, we can just read ’em right here on our computers.”

Parr thanked him for his time and hung up. The next step was to re-canvas the neighborhood. Uniforms had already canvassed two blocks in every direction, but they hadn’t asked about someone claiming to be from the electric company. Parr would have to grab some men and do it again. He looked at his watch and realized it was noon
—most of the neighbors would be at work. He would have to wait until five or six and pull overtime. Besides, he had something much more important to do.

He had been purposely stalling
, and now forty-five minutes had passed. That was enough time for Stanton’s nervous anticipation to cook a little in the interrogation room. Parr picked up his notepad, a pen, and a photo of the unidentified body that had been nearly incinerated in a ’97 Ford Taurus. He walked down the hall to the interrogation room where Stanton was waiting.

Jon Stanton didn’t look like much. He was slender
, with a boyish face. He looked like the kind of guy who would stop to help someone on the side of the road, the type who celebrated every holiday and never had anything to complain about. Parr thought he looked like a Mormon missionary who was just a little too old to still be out there, trying to convert people.

He sat down across from
Stanton and looked him in the eye. He took Stanton’s wrists softly in his hands and looked at the deep purple bruising that wrapped around them.

“You sure you don’t want a medic?” Parr
asked.

“No,” Stanton replied. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“We didn’t get a proper introduction earlier,” Parr said, flashing his best smile. “I’m Alma Parr. I’m the captain over Robbery-Homicide.”

“Alma. Do you know that’s the name of a prophet in the
Book of Mormon
? He was a warrior. He left his people to wander through the wilderness and convert his enemies.”

“Yeah, well, it’s also an old German name
, and my grandparents were fresh-off-the-boat Germans.” Alma placed his pen down on the pad. “I know you went through the story and what happened with the detective from Missing Persons ’bout an hour ago. That was just a formality. He needed that interview to close your case.”

“I didn’t know one had been opened.”

“Mindi pulled some strings and had it opened. We usually wait seventy-two hours. Anyway, I was outside the mirror, watching. So you picked the lock with a nail?”

“It’s easy to do. Hairpins and paperclips actually work better, but you use what you have.”

Parr shook his head. “Quick on your feet. I like that.”

“You must have been
the same to get out of Iraq without a scratch.”

Parr glared at him. “How’d you know I was in Iraq?”

“Oh, sorry. The tattoo.”

Parr looked down at his bicep
s. Part of a tattoo of a rifle half-buried in the ground, a helmet propped on it and boots set in front, poked out from under his sleeve.

Stanton said, “The tattoo’s really dark, so I guessed it was pretty recent.”

Parr shifted in his seat. “Yeah.”

“Where were you?”

“Fallujah. For two tours.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to talk about you, Jon. I checked out your record. You got more arrests than any other detective in Homicide over there in San Diego. That’s pretty fucking impressive. How do you do it?”

“Same as everyone else.”

“That’s not true. There was a note in the file—and excuse me for looking at this—but there was a note from the precinct shrink after you took out some dirtbag, saying that you had a photographic memory and—what was the term he used? Unhealthy? Yeah, he said you had an
unhealthy
amount of empathy. That you can slip into other people’s shoes, and sometimes, you can’t even stop yourself.”

“I follow the same procedures every detective in every city does. I’ve gotten lucky a few times.”

Parr looked down at the burn scar on his neck. “And you’ve gotten unlucky a few times, too, haven’t you?”

Stanton sat quietly for a few moments
then said, “Did you get divorced because of the war? Excuse me for looking, but I can see a slight indentation on your ring finger. You still wear the ring at night when no one’s around, don’t you?”

Parr said
, “I want to know what happened to you when you were abducted.”

“If you were standing behind the mirror
, you already know. This is about something else, and you don’t want me to know what. Just be straight with me. It’ll save us both time.”

Parr exhaled loudly. His rhythm felt out of sync
, and frustration was growing in his belly. The mention of the ring had thrown him off. He would have to stop wearing it at night.

He took the photo out from under the notepad and laid it
in front of Stanton. It was a body that had been cooked to the driver’s seat of a car. The figure was absolutely unidentifiable, and his toothless mouth was agape, the gums charred black.

“What about it?” Stanton
asked.

“Do you know anything about it?”

“No. When did it happen?”

“Four days before you flew into Vegas.”

“If it happened before I got here, how am I supposed to know about it?”

“You tell me.”

Stanton leaned back in the chair. “I’m guessing you’re the one who put the tail on me.”

“Jon, I’m gonna be straight with you, like you said. I don’t give a rat’s ass about this piece
o’ shit. He was probably some dope-head, pedophile, or who the shit knows what. But I do care about Marty Scheffield. I’m sure you wouldn’t do that to another cop, so you’re not a suspect. You don’t need to worry about that. But this piece o’ shit here, I don’t care about. You tell me you did it, and I say, ‘Good.’ I need to close this case and make sure it had nothing to do with Marty. You can clear that up for me right now.”

“I’m not a dope fiend off the street
, thinking you’re my friend, Alma. I can see the hatred in your eyes when you look at me. Your smile can’t hide it.”

Parr chuckled. “I’m just trying to help you. One cop to another.”

“Am I the only suspect for this?”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Is there anyone else you’re looking at for this crime?”

“Maybe.”

“How did my name come up?”

“You were identified by a witness.”

“At the scene?”

“None of your damned business.”

Stanton pushed the photo toward Parr. “I had nothing to do with this. Whoever told you I did is lying to you. Should I be asking for a lawyer, or are you going to let me go?”

Parr glanced at the camera and jumped to his feet suddenly, knocking back his chair. He grabbed Stanton by the throat and squeezed, staring into his eyes, looking for the fear he was accustomed to seeing, but Stanton didn’t respond. His
passive gaze never wavered or broke eye contact. Parr let go and chuckled.

“Just kidding with you, Jon.” Parr took the photo
and held it inches from Stanton’s face. “But I’m not going to let you get away with it. You’re gonna fry for this. This ain’t hippie-dippie California.”

He turned and left, letting the door slam behind him.