Smith's Monthly #18 Page 10

  On the dirt floor in front of Lott, sitting with their backs against the left wall of the tunnel, legs stretched out on the dirt, were the eleven dead women. The women were mummified in the heat after clearly being in here for some time, their faces contorted and sunken-in with wrinkles that made them look ancient.

  Lott had no doubt that the heat and the tunnel environment was going to make it hell to determine how long these poor women had been in this mine.

  It might have been only weeks, but it could have been years. After decades of working as a cop in Las Vegas, Lott had seen heat do some amazing things to a dead human body, so the physical condition of the bodies was no surprise to him.

  But what they wore was what surprised him.

  Each woman had a black clutch purse on her lap, and her mummified hands covered the purse. Each woman was fully dressed in identical black skirts and white blouses, just sitting with their backs to the wall.

  If that wasn’t strange enough, they all had long dark hair, trimmed to exactly the same length and in exactly the same style. That, combined with the schoolgirl look of all of them, made the scene look more like a bunch of large wrinkled dolls sitting there instead of women.

  Thankfully, all had their eyes closed.

  “This is one sick mother who did this,” Andor said softly.

  Lott could only agree. He had no doubt this sight was going to give him nightmares for a very long time.

  “Let’s back out of here until forensics can clear the place,” Lott said. “If we’re lucky, we can just work off the pictures they take.”

  More than anything, he wanted to be out of that closed-in space and away from the dead women. As a detective, he had seen a lot of death and he had never gotten used to it.

  Andor nodded and turned to head back to the mine entrance ten steps away. “Let’s just hope the sick bastard who did this left the identifications of those women in those purses.”

  Lott took one more look back at the eleven dead women, their skin mummified, all dressed like a class of schoolgirls from a very strict school with a uniform dress code.

  Horrific didn’t begin to describe the scene.

  He turned to follow his partner back out into the warm and cleansing desert sunshine. He had a hunch that nothing about this case was going to be easy.

  And that hunch proved to be very accurate.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fifteen Years Later…

  August 6th, 2015

  5:30 P.M.

  Las Vegas

  RETIRED DETECTIVE BAYARD LOTT sat at his wooden kitchen table working at a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He loved the legs and always ordered extra legs when he picked up a bucket of KFC for dinner before the weekly poker game he held in his basement poker room. The open bucket now sat in the middle of his table smelling wonderful.

  For Lott, there was nothing like fresh KFC. It made the daily exercise he did to keep his sixty-three-year-old body in shape worthwhile to be able to eat KFC like this regularly.

  He would have the chicken for dinner tonight, lunch tomorrow, and maybe a snack or two over the next few days before buying another bucket. His fridge was never without KFC for long.

  Across the table from him was his former partner, retired Detective Andor Williams. Beside Andor was retired Reno Detective Julia Rogers. Both Andor and Julia were working at the bucket of chicken as well, making sure Lott didn’t have that many days of snacks from this particular bucket.

  Tonight, Julia had on a white blouse with a running bra under it and light tan slacks and tennis shoes. Her long brown hair was pulled back and tied off her face and her green eyes seemed to light up with every bite off a chicken wing.

  Lott had on a short-sleeved golf shirt and jeans and tennis shoes. Andor wore what he always did, a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up and tan slacks and brown dress shoes.

  They each had a paper plate, a stack of napkins, and both Andor and Julia had grease on their faces at the moment. Lott had no doubt he did as well.

  Julia looked wonderful, even with grease on her face. She exercised as much as he did, if not more, just so she could eat what she wanted as well.

  The newly remodeled kitchen echoed the sounds of the three of them working at the dripping, Original-Recipe KFC. The rest of the groceries and snacks for the Cold Poker Gang poker game tonight in the basement were forgotten for the moment on the new granite counter.

  Chicken had to come first, especially if it was fresh KFC. That was the rule in his house.

  Lott loved the Thursday night games when five or six retired detectives got together to play cards in his downstairs poker room. While playing, they also worked on and talked about cold cases for the Las Vegas police department.

  Even though they were all retired, a few years back the chief of police had given the Cold Poker Gang special unit status. That was because the Cold Poker Gang had solved some of the city’s most puzzling cold cases.

  All of the gang could still carry their guns and badges, but they didn’t get paid and weren’t officially on the force.

  But that was enough for all of them to feel valued. And after closing so many major cold cases, everyone on the force, including the chief of police, gave them all a lot of respect, which Lott liked more than he wanted to admit.

  Sometimes in retirement, all you had to live on was respect. Past or present.

  He would take either.

  And they all knew they were lucky. Even after retirement, they got to continue a job they all loved and had lived their lives to do. But they didn’t have to do all the paperwork or report at certain hours. They worked at their own pace and on their own time and money.

  Julia called it “Retirement with benefits.”

  Lott’s daughter Annie, also a former Las Vegas Detective, had found that extremely funny, but the humor had just gone right past Lott. Julia had promised she would explain at some point, which made Annie laugh all the harder.

  As far as Lott was concerned, this was a perfect job, even though he didn’t get paid for it. The job had value, made him feel valued, something that didn’t come easy in retirement.

  He had been forced to retire early, at fifty-nine, before he had wanted. He had decided to be with Carol, his wife, during her last year of sickness. She had now been gone for four years, and Lott was finally moving on with his life, thanks to the Cold Poker Gang, his daughter, Annie, and Julia beside him.

  Julia had been forced to retire from the Reno police department at the age of fifty-five when a bullet shattered her leg. She barely had a limp, but the injury had been too much to allow her to continue working, so she had moved to Las Vegas to be close to her daughter, Jane, and play some poker.

  It was during a poker tournament out on the Strip that Julia had met Annie and learned about the Cold Poker Gang. Julia was the only woman in the gang at the moment.

  But Lott knew that two of the best women detectives still active on the force were thinking of retiring soon, and both wanted to join the gang. It would be great to have them in the game.

  And to help with the cases.

  Julia and Lott had hit it off almost at once after she joined the game just over a year ago. They were slowly building a solid relationship. He now often spent the night at her condo and loved waking up beside her in the mornings.

  She and Andor made it a habit to come over early on game nights and help him eat KFC and set up the downstairs poker room.

  It was during the game that Andor presented cold cases he had gotten from the chief of police for the gang to work on. They only got a new case when they had solved an earlier one, or had given up on one.

  Actually, they never gave up on a case, they just put the file “on the bar” near the poker table downstairs to be reviewed every week. They were all very proud of the fact that in over two years of doing this, only five files were “on the bar.”

  They had closed a lot of very cold cases.

  “So what’s the new case tonight?” Julia a
sked Andor, giving him a smile that could melt most anyone. She blinked her large green eyes at Andor who just shook his head.

  “Nice try, Rogers,” Andor said, then took a bite on another piece of chicken.

  Lott laughed. Andor always kept the cases secret until after an hour into the game. Then he would present them like presenting a gift to a royal court. She asked him ahead every time there was a new case, and he never told her. It was a little dance they both seemed to enjoy.

  Andor was a bulldog of a human being. He never walked anywhere. He stormed. He had a heart of gold, but a bull exterior. Julia was thin and not much taller than Andor. She moved around him like a butterfly around a stump. Sometimes that drove Andor crazy, but Lott knew Andor really liked and admired Julia.

  Andor had also had been forced to retire early to take care of his wife, who had died just six months after Carol had died. Lott and Andor had spent a lot of those months after Andor’s wife died sitting in bars drinking.

  It did neither of them any good, but it was the only thing they could think to do at the time.

  The Cold Poker Gang had gotten both of them back to work, and they loved it.

  “All I will tell you about the new case,” Andor said, licking off his fingers and dropping the bones of the chicken on his plate, “is that today is the fifteenth anniversary of the day Lott and I originally caught the case.”

  Andor glanced at Lott and shrugged, almost an apology before going back to work on yet another piece of chicken.

  Lott stared at his former partner.

  Fifteen years would make the year of the case two thousand. Early August. What cases had they done at that time that went cold? They hadn’t had that many cases go cold over the years. Maybe ten major ones was all and they have already solved a couple of those with the gang.

  Then Lott suddenly realized which case Andor was talking about. And why he had given him that apologetic look.

  “You are kidding, right?” Lott asked.

  Andor shook his head. “About damn time we give those eleven women some justice, don’t you think?”

  Lott dropped the drumstick on his plate, wiped off his hands and sat back. He hated this idea.

  He hated it more than he wanted to think about.

  He had hated that case more than any other case they had caught over the years. It had given him nightmares for years, and there hadn’t been a clue that seemed to lead them anywhere to who had killed the women.

  He had woken up Carol on more than one night by screaming in a nightmare when that case was active.

  It was the coldest of the cold cases they had.

  Julia glanced at him, clearly seeing he was upset.

  “That bad?” she asked.

  Both Andor and Lott nodded.

  “A case of nightmares,” Lott said.

  “In more ways than one,” Andor said.

  “Damn, I hate this idea,” Lott said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Andor said. “But we need to do it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  August 6th, 2015

  11:30 P.M.

  Las Vegas

  THE TWENTY-FOUR HOUR café at the Bellagio was busy, but not so crowded at almost midnight that they couldn’t get one of their favorite booths tucked back in a corner and surrounded by tall green plants. The sounds of the slots in the casino was nothing more than a background noise. The low murmur of people talking and laughing filled the air.

  Julia loved casinos, loved the energy, loved the feel. And she flat adored the food in this café. Anything she wanted to eat at any hour of the day or night, and top quality at a decent price. Didn’t get better.

  Especially after a long night of poker.

  She enjoyed coming here after the Cold Poker Gang games with Lott. And tonight she had asked Andor to join them. She had really, really wanted to get more information on the cold case he had brought to the table tonight. And since Lott and Andor had been the two lead detectives on the cold case fifteen years before, they knew more than anyone.

  The case had been called “The School Girl Murders” because of the way the woman were dressed and placed in the cave. To Julia, the entire thing sounded grisly and yet fascinating. She could not have imagined walking into that mine with those bodies like Lott and Andor had done.

  But the entire case had the feeling of something far, far larger. And she didn’t know why.

  Lott had come into the casino near the poker room to tell his daughter, Annie, and her boyfriend, Doc Hill, that he and Julia would be in the café.

  So she had managed to beat Lott to the booth by only a minute and Andor was yet to be seen.

  “They still in the tournament?” Julia asked as Lott slid into the large booth beside her and took his cloth napkin and put it on his lap. She knew that Annie and Doc played in a major tournament here every week. Annie was also a retired Las Vegas detective, but she had retired to play poker full time and was now considered one of the best female poker players in the country.

  Doc was considered the best no-limit hold’em tournament poker player there was. Period. Julia considered herself a good player and had won her share of small tournaments, but compared to Annie and Doc, she was still a beginner.

  “Both still in the tournament,” Lott said, taking a sip of the glass of water the waitress had brought. “Annie has a stack and Doc is short-chipped, but I have a hunch that won’t last long. Three tables left, so they have a ways to go yet.”

  Julia nodded.

  At that point, Andor joined them, sliding into the booth across the dark-colored table to face them.

  “Hungry,” he said, grabbing a menu from where the hostess had left them on the front edge. Not hi, nothing.

  After they finished deciding what to order and gave the smiling waitress with blonde hair tucked up on her head their order, Julia looked first at Lott, then at Andor.

  “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.