Smith's Monthly #18 Page 15

  Andor nodded at what the chief said, then said. “You know the cold case we are working with the eleven dead women? We’re at the same mine. Directions are in the file.”

  Andor then hung up and nodded to Lott, who had turned and watched him talk to the chief. “He’ll be here in thirty minutes without fanfare. He said he’ll look at the situation and decide.”

  At that moment, Annie climbed back in. Just less than a minute in the sun had her sweating.

  “Fleet’s people are running the mine elevations in relationship to nearby roads now and will text the results to me shortly,” Annie said, digging into the cooler for a bottle of water. “Both Doc and Fleet will be on their jet and headed this way in an hour and will be in town in the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Good,” Lott said. “We’re going to need as much help as we can get very shortly.”

  Julia frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  Lott pointed over at the mine. “There were eleven women in there. One year’s worth if this sicko is doing what we think he’s doing.”

  “It’s been fifteen years,” Julia said softly.

  “Shit,” Andor said.

  “There are fourteen more mines full of bodies,” Julia said, her voice gaining strength with each word.

  Lott nodded, trying not to let the image of those eleven mummified women in that mine come back to his mind.

  “We need to find those other mines,” Lott said, “and then put it all together and stop this. And fast.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  August 14th, 2015

  11:30 A.M.

  Outside of Las Vegas

  LOTT HAD MOVED the SUV off to a wide area in the dirt road and just down from the mine entrance by the time the three other cars arrived.

  All four of them got out of the car, and moving slowly in the intense heat, went back up the road as Chief of Police Dan Beason, a thin man with bright eyes and a disarming smile, climbed out of one of the unmarked cars.

  Lott liked the chief more than he wanted to admit.

  Chief Beason stood a good six-three and just towered over everyone around him. He had thick, dark-brown hair and had taken off his jacket coat to show he was wearing suspenders with bright red stripes over his blue dress shirt.

  Lott had never seen him without a jacket, so the look was startling and seemed to give the chief even more power.

  “Detectives,” the chief said, nodding to all of them as they walked up along the dirt road. “What’s the discovery?”

  Andor pointed at the mine. “Fifteen years ago we found eleven women all dressed like school girls in that mine.”

  The chief nodded and said nothing.

  “Our theory,” Andor said, “is that the perp has been taking women at eleven per year for the last fifteen years from around the country, baking them, cutting meat off them, and staging them like a class of school girls in mines.”

  “Shit,” the chief said and two other detectives who had come up beside him went pale.

  Lott didn’t know them other than by reputation. Jones and Schmidt. The top team working at the moment. Lott and Andor used to hold that spot before they had decided to retire to take care of their dying wives.

  Andor pointed at the mine. “We came back here today wondering if we could find some clues or see something we had missed the first time around and smelled that same damn sick smell of musty death, so we opened up the mine.”

  The chief glanced at the open mine only about fifty paces away. “Are you serious?”

  “Don’t go in there if you want to sleep for the next month,” Lott said.

  At that, the chief and the two detectives and three others all turned for the mine.

  “No point in standing in the sun,” Andor said.

  They all turned and headed back to the SUV and Lott got it going and the air-conditioning on full.

  They all watched in silence as the two detectives went in first, somehow convincing the chief to stay in the sun from the animation of the conversation.

  After about two minutes, both came out, shaking their heads and not looking happy.

  Two of the other cops went in and less than fifteen seconds later one of them came out, stepped off to the side of the mine entrance, and lost what must have been a pretty good lunch.

  Lott remembered doing that himself on his first real death scene with a body that had been rotting in the sun for a few days. Nothing at all compares to that sickly odor of human death.

  At that moment the chief just turned and started back toward the road.

  “Better move the cooler out of the way and scoot over, Annie,” Lott said.

  Andor put the cooler over the seat and into the back and, as the chief approached their car, Annie opened the back door and moved over closer to Andor.

  The chief crawled in, slammed the door and then let out a huge sigh. “Oh, thank you.”

  Annie handed him a bottle of cold water and he drank half of it. Then he said, “So you think we can catch this bastard if we hold this information for a day or so?”

  Lott had turned around to face where the chief was sitting and Julia had done the same from her seat.

  “I do,” Lott said. “Doc Hill and his partner, Fleet, have been using all their resources to track missing women with black hair from around the western states. They have found just under two hundred and Doc has all the law enforcement offices in those areas combing the files for clues that we can put together into a large picture.”

  “Two hundred missing women?” the chief asked, his eyes large.

  Lott remembered that feeling as well. A stunning number.

  “The guy seems to take them at eleven per year,” Andor said. “He was somehow involved in the old bus tragedy near another mine where eleven school girls died when their bus broke down.”

  “We don’t know how, yet,” Annie said, “Since the only survivor was killed, a fake suicide we think, about a year after the initial tragedy.”

  “Shit, just shit,” the chief said, shaking his head.

  Lott could not have agreed more.

  “We think our perp,” Andor said, “was the one who carried all the girls from the school bus up to the mine. We think one of the two with black hair in those girls might have been his girlfriend or something like that. We’re digging on that now.”

  The chief nodded. “Glad you have Doc and Fleet with you on all this.”

  “So are we,” Lott said.

  “There might even have been more than one who carried those girls out of that bus tragedy,” Annie said. “But that’s the key to all this, we are convinced.”

  Lott couldn’t imagine how it felt to suddenly have all this information being tossed at the chief, but the guy was smart and was known for making solving crime more important than politics.

  “Also a key,” Julia said, “is the baking of the women. That takes a pretty large oven and we’re searching those, trying to cross-reference anyone from those girl’s age who owns an oven large enough to roast a woman without really burning the flesh.”

  “And what is our perp doing with the large amounts of flesh he cuts from every woman?” Andor asked. “Major question.”

  “He bakes them and cuts them up?” the chief said, looking startled. “Sorry, I haven’t read this old cold case.”

  Andor nodded. “The perp harvests the meat from the women’s butts and legs after he bakes them into what looks like a mummy. He drugs them, but the baking is what kills them.”

  The chief looked like he might be sick and Lott didn’t blame him in the slightest.

  Andor went on. “Then he dresses them in school girl costumes, trims their hair all the same exact length, and stages them in a mine just as the eleven girls were in the first bus tragedy, all without underwear.”

  “When we caught this case back fifteen years ago,” Andor said, “we didn’t know about that original bus tragedy back in 1988.”

  “Never put it together until now,” Andor said.

&nb
sp; The chief just sat there, shaking his head.

  At that moment, Annie’s cell phone chirped like a lost bird. She glanced at it, then she said, “The mine information is in from Fleet.”

  She looked at it and then glanced up at Lott. “There are two dozen closed up old mines this close to a road. All are owned by the same company that owns this mine. Fleet and his people are digging at the company, trying to find out who is behind it.”

  “Where is the closest?” Lott asked, not really wanting the answer, but needing it.

  Annie glanced at her phone. “Just over a mile from here.”

  “Hang on,” the chief said, “I’m coming with you.”

  He opened the door and went back to the detectives cooling off in the cars behind him. Then he returned to their car and got in.

  “I got three of them staying here until we decide what to do,” the chief said. “Jones and Schmidt are coming with us.”

  Lott nodded and with a quick motion buckled up his belt and headed the car down the road.

  “Give me directions,” he said to Annie.

  And less than five minutes later they pulled up across from another old, boarded up mine. The mine was similar to the last one, just off the road, with a cliff face on one side of the dirt road and the mine cut into an area between two rock faces.

  Lott flat didn’t want to know what they would find as all five climbed out into the intense heat. But he had no choice.

  They had to look.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  August 14th, 2015

  12:30 P.M.

  Outside of Las Vegas

  JULIA WALKED BEHIND Lott and the chief of police along a small dirt path toward the mine. Lott was leading and carefully watching the shadows in the brush and rocks for any snakes. There were a certain type of rattlesnake that lived in this kind of area, but the heat would force them down into the rocks.

  As they approached the mine, the ground around it cleared of brush and Lott and the chief walked right up to the wood nailed securely over the entrance.

  A huge sign the size of the entrance covered the wood warning of no trespassing and danger.

  Andor glanced at Schmidt and Jones. “You two want the pleasure.”

  “Haven’t got my stomach back from that last one,” Schmidt said.

  Andor glanced at Lott and Lott nodded.

  They moved up near the mine and both of them shook their heads, then stepped back.

  “Same smell,” Lott said.

  “Damn it,” Julia said.

  “I’d step back,” Andor said. “The first wave out is pretty bad.”

  The chief and the two active detectives stepped back.

  Julia stayed next to Lott until he indicated she should move back as well. “No point in taking this.”

  She nodded and stepped back next to the chief and Annie about four paces from the mine entrance.

  Both Lott and Andor took deep breaths of the hot desert air, stepped to the wood and at the same time, yanked it off.

  It came down as easily as the last mine wood had come loose. Clearly it had been taken down and put back up numbers of times.

  Both Andor and Lott ducked to one side, coughing.

  Then they both clicked on the light on their phones and headed inside.

  The chief stepped forward and Julia took his arm. “Trust me, you do not want to see this. The pictures will be bad enough. There is honestly no reason to.”

  “She’s right, Chief,” Schmidt said.

  “Those two found the original group of women fifteen years ago and have been having nightmares for years about it,” Annie said. “You don’t need those nightmares.”

  The chief nodded, but clearly didn’t like not going in. Julia liked that about him. Actually, she was liking a lot about the chief in the short time she had known about him and now met him.

  She could see Andor and Lott go in about five paces, both of them moving carefully and slowly and ducking to stay under the large timbers that still held the mine up. Then they both stopped, stood there for about ten seconds before turning and coming back out.

  Lott looked haunted and wouldn’t look at her. “This is one of the oldest ones. Those women have been in there a very long time, I would say over ten years.”

  “The Cold Poker Gang just solved another eleven missing persons cases,” Andor said as he and Lott pocketed their phones.

  “Same set-up?” Julia asked, her stomach clamped down into a tight knot.

  “Exactly the same,” Andor said.

  Lott nodded. “Now we got to find the mine that isn’t full yet.”

  The chief looked at him. “Not following you.”

  “By what Fleet and Doc have found in computer searches of missing persons that match these women’s descriptions,” Annie said, “Our perp takes women from January through November, one per month from somewhere around eleven western states, taking December off. There have been no missing women in December in the eleven western states that fit this profile in sixteen years.”

  “So somewhere in this desert we have an old mine with only seven or eight bodies in it,” Andor said. “We need to find that mine and get it staked out, which is why we wanted you to keep this all silent.”

  The chief nodded, his face sweating. Then he turned to look at Annie. “What time of the month do the women normally go missing? Any pattern there?”

  “Damn,” Annie said, grabbing her phone and hitting a key.

  “She’s going to find out,” Julia said, smiling at the chief. “Great question. One we had not thought of.”

  The chief turned to the active detectives. “Who else can we trust to not blab their faces off about this?”

  “The three at the other mine,” Schmidt said. “The rest I wouldn’t trust as far as I could toss them to not talk to the press.”

  The chief nodded. “Get a hammer and then board that mine back up just like it was. Those women will be fine in there for the moment.”

  Schmidt nodded and turned for his car.

  Julia watched as Annie clicked off her phone. “A black-haired woman by the name of Missy Andrews just went missing yesterday from outside of Missoula, Montana. A brown, 1990s panel van was seen close by at one point. No plates or real description.”

  “So we either get lucky and stop him on the road,” Julia said, “or we find where he is baking these women and stop him there.”

  Lott nodded. “And we do it in the next twenty-four hours to save that woman’s life.”

  Julia just felt her stomach clamp up at that.

  “No pressure,” Andor said.

  “Yeah,” the chief said. “No pressure.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  August 14th, 2015

  4:30 P.M.

  Las Vegas

  LOTT CAME OUT of Julia’s shower feeling much better. He had left a number of changes of clothes at her condo at her suggestion, since he often stayed there, and was now glad he did.

  He had soaped and scrubbed his skin and hair more than he had done in years to make sure that smell was completely gone. The memory wouldn’t leave, but at least the smell would.

  He had just finished dressing in jeans and a light blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and was combing his hair when Julia came in. She was wrapped in a towel and her face was red from all the sun.

  “I put our clothes in the wash machine,” she said. “That might be a smell that will never come out.”

  He didn’t honestly care. He might throw those clothes away even if the smell came out. Anything he could do to not remind himself of seeing that much death in one day would be a good thing.

  She turned on the shower, checked the temperature, and then dropped the towel and climbed in while Lott watched.

  In his opinion, she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever known. And if they hadn’t just spent the day finding more dead bodies than he wanted to think about, he might have offered to scrub her back right at that moment.

  But he had a
hunch she was as focused on this case as much as he was. And on saving that one woman they knew was headed in this direction and to a certain horrible death if they couldn’t stop it.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen getting a snack,” Lott said to the showering woman.

  “I won’t be long,” she half-shouted back.

  He headed out of the bathroom, feeling almost human again.

  The plan was that they would head for the Café Belagio after showering and getting changed to meet Doc and Fleet and Annie and Andor and plan what to do next.

  In the last four hours, they had found all but one of the mines with women’s bodies. Schmidt and Jones had taken some of the mine locations, the chief and the other two detectives had taken part of the list. Lott and Julia and Annie and Andor had stayed in Lott’s car and taken another third of the list Annie had gotten from Fleet.

  The four of them had found three more mines full of bodies.

  It had been the chief and the detectives riding with him that had found the one only half full to the south and east of the city.

  The chief had set up very discrete watching posts on both entrances to that canyon, hidden completely from view. No way that killer would get out of that canyon if he went in there.

  The chief was also going to get officers in the State Police working the highways coming down from the north, watching for any sign of a brown panel van.

  And his men were stationed, without knowing why, at all the major entrances to the city watching for the same thing.

  And he had promised that nothing would be broadcast at all over any police channel.

  Lott got into clean jeans, a long-sleeved white dress shirt, and put on new tennis shoes. More than likely after that smell, he was going to have to toss his favorite tennis shoes.

  While he waited for Julia, he took out his small notebook and pen and sat down at her kitchen table overlooking the trees and lawn and pool common area below and started to write a list of things they didn’t know yet.