Freezeout: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery Page 3

Pickett clicked it on and then put it on speaker and held out the phone. “We’re here with James.”

  “Thanks, James, for helping us on this,” Robin said.

  “Just getting started,” James said. “And Patty sends her best wishes.”

  “Back at her,” Robin said. “And as far as the woman who went into that room you guys are going to study, it was Sandy Hunter. No questions.”

  Pickett glanced at Sarge who was looking shocked. On the way out to James’ house, they had both figured Hunter had been kidnapped before getting to the hotel and switched out.

  “One-hundred percent?” Pickett asked.

  “One-hundred percent,” Robin said. “Bye, James. You guys have fun.”

  And with that Robin hung up.

  “Not what you expected, huh?” James asked.

  Pickett just shook her head. “Not at all.”

  She looked back at the giant floor plan projected on the wall and the green room highlighted on the plan.

  What in the world had happened in that room?

  And more importantly, why?

  EIGHT

  November 16th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  SARGE WAS STUNNED at the natural beauty of James’ home.

  The lobby had stone and rough wood and yet it felt warm somehow. And the office he had led them to was huge, the size of two large master bedrooms. Built-in bookshelves covered one wall, another wall was nothing but windows looking out over the valley. A large oak desk occupied one side of the room and some drafting boards and large computers filled another part.

  James seemed like a great man, of that there was no doubt. And very willing to help. And Pickett sure seemed fond of him.

  “Can we see the heating and cooling plans?” Sarge asked.

  James smiled. “I’ll lay them over the floor plan.”

  On the large image on the wall a maze of heating and cooling plans ghosted over the solid floor plan.

  “Is that all through the ceiling?” Pickett asked.

  “It is,” James said, “and no access into it through anything larger than a small vent in the room.”

  “So heating and cooling is out,” Sarge said, feeling disappointed.

  “Not really,” James said. “This shows all the ducts for delivering the air. Let me clear that off and show you the return-air system. Keeping air moving in a large building is a critical factor. And damned hard to calculate. The newer hotels keep each room or suite as a unit because it’s easier to regulate, but the hotels from this time period used central heating and cooling per floor.”

  The ghost image vanished and then larger ducts appeared, clearly in the walls. It was at that moment that Sarge noticed how thick a few of the walls were.

  “Here is what a standard return air vent looks like in that room at that time,” James said.

  He showed on an area beside the plan a picture of a grated rectangle, clearly just inches from the floor.

  “How many of them would be in the room she vanished from?” Pickett asked a moment before Sarge could.

  “Two,” James said. “Both near the floor. These are the grates children get into and get lost. Hotels do their best to keep them secured tight. Modern return air ducts have moved up near the ceilings, usually over the entrance area and don’t ever go outside the room.”

  Sarge went over to get a better look at the system. The return air duct seemed to dump into a giant square area along with about a quarter of the rooms on the floor. “Does that have duct work in these areas?”

  Sarge pointed to the giant square.

  “No,” James said. “Open air flow. In this hotel there are four of those square room return flow catches. The heating and cooling unit for the floor is there beside it.

  “Door into this room I assume,” Pickett said.

  “There is,” James said. “All four of these have a door into the floor’s service area.”

  “Besides getting out onto the same floor,” Pickett asked, “are there other ways out of that service room?”

  James laughed. “A number. Let me show you.”

  On the screen the return air ghost image vanished and the floor plan of the large service area in the center of the building came up.

  Sarge could see that off that service room were the bank of elevators and also a large square area labeled plumbing.”

  “So you can get into the elevator service area,” Pickett said, “and the plumbing service stack from the large service room on every floor?”

  “Yes,” James said. “Standard large building design. Especially for the time.”

  “So exits from every floor from the elevator service area and the plumbing service area?” Sarge asked.

  “Yes,” James said. “Plus through the roof service area and also all the way to the basement utility room, which is one floor below the parking garage.”

  “And I assume no security cameras in any of it,” Pickett said, shaking her head.

  “Likely only at the entrances of each service area, and I wouldn’t even count on that in the basement.”

  Sarge looked around at James. “So a small woman, just over five feet tall, could have undone one of the return air grates and gone inside and put the grate back in place.”

  “Very easily,” James said, nodding. “And with the type of locking screws, she could have screwed the grate back into place from the inside. The grates were designed for workers to move through the passages when needed for cleaning and pest control.”

  Pickett just laughed.

  Sarge shook his head.

  “She could have gone in there,” Sarge said, “worked her way to the service room, into the elevator shaft and climbed down to the basement and left from there? Possible?”

  “Very possible,” James said.

  Sarge nodded. Now they knew how Sandy Hunter got out of that room, but not any of the whys involved.

  Pickett stared at the floor plan, then turned to James. “I know Robin got this plan easily and I’m sure you could have as well, but fourteen years ago, when this hotel was fairly new, who could have gotten the plans?”

  James shrugged. “Plans are filed in public. Security areas and cage areas and finance areas are kept a tight secret for each casino, but hotel plans are public.”

  “So anyone,” Pickett said.

  “But the key is who would know that this was even possible?” Sarge asked.

  James again just shrugged. “Any of the contractors. And on a project this size, there would have been dozens of contractors not counting their employees. And you have to add in any architect or architectural student.”

  “So Sandy Hunter could have gotten this idea from a thousand different people?” Pickett asked.

  James nodded. “At least.”

  Sarge just sighed and looked back at the floor plan projected on the wall. They had solved the mystery of how Sandy Hunter vanished from the room.

  But now they were miles from finding out why she did this and what happened to her.

  PART TWO

  The Bets Go Up

  NINE

  November 16th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  PICKETT CALLED ROBIN and told her to meet them at the Bellagio Café in twenty minutes for lunch.

  “Got some fun stuff for you,” Robin said.

  Pickett laughed. “We got some stuff to share as well.”

  Then she got them down the narrow driveway that wound through the rocks and out onto the main road heading back into town. Sarge wasn’t saying anything, just sort of staring off into space.

  “A real puzzle isn’t it?” Pickett asked.

  “None of it makes any sense,” Sarge said. “And that bothers me a lot. People do things for a reason. Money, love, hate, revenge, and so on. From what the file said about Sandy Hunter, there was no reason for her to do this.”

  Pickett agreed. Sarge hit on exactly what had been bothering her from the moment Robin said it was actually Sandy Hunter who went into that hotel r
oom.

  “So we dig until we find the reason,” Pickett said.

  Sarge nodded. “I think we take a run at the husband. He might think of something he hadn’t thought important when he learns she did it on purpose. And clearly planned it.”

  “I agree,” Pickett said. She wasn’t looking forward to that conversation, but she knew Sarge was right, that was the next logical step.

  The Bellagio Café had an atmosphere that Pickett flat loved. Brown tones of oak and cloth, with lots of plants between the booths to give each booth a sense of privacy.

  The sounds of the casino were like a distant background and even the sound of others talking in the restaurant never seemed to get very loud.

  She and Robin had often come here for lunch or dinner when out this far along the Strip. This was her second favorite place and had been happy to learn that it was Sarge’s second favorite restaurant as well.

  One of the big reasons was that not only was it comfortable, but the food was wonderful and the selection amazing at any time of the day or night.

  She had learned from Sarge that Julia and Lott and Andor, the three retired detectives that ran the Cold Poker Gang, also came out here a great deal when on cases. They were nowhere to be seen at the moment.

  She and Sarge got seated in a back booth with cloth seats, one of their favorite booths since the first case they met on. It was less than a month ago that she had spent a lot of time in this booth getting to know the handsome man sitting beside her. Now she couldn’t imagine not having him beside her.

  Amazing how her life had changed in just a short month.

  Robin wasn’t there yet, so both got coffee and water and menus.

  They had both just started to look at the menu when Robin slid into her spot in the booth and put her notebook on the chair.

  She had on a light pull-over jacket since the fall air still had a bite to it this morning. It looked police issue, but Pickett knew it wasn’t.

  “So who gets to go first?” Robin asked, smiling at the two of them.

  Sarge laughed. “She seems excited, don’t you think?”

  Pickett also laughed. “She does. So please go ahead.”

  Robin smiled and opened her notebook.

  “Your idea to check for patterns hit a gold mine,” Robin said. “From 1998 until 2015, over ten thousand women have been reported missing and last seen in a hotel in Las Vegas.”

  “What?” Pickett asked, not even grasping that number.

  Robin held up her hand. “Half of those were solved quickly, another quarter of them were run-away women, also solved. No one really missing with any of those. Many others were solved as well one way or another.”

  “So how many are still cold cases?” Pickett asked.

  “About eight hundred,” Robin said “over the seventeen years in all the hotels in Vegas. So I sorted for a woman’s description matching Sandy Hunter. Size, shape, married, that sort of thing in those eight hundred. And I also took out any disappearance from a newer hotel.”

  Robin smiled at both of them. Pickett knew that smile. It was clear she had a lot of information and was loving every minute of this.

  “So how many?” Sarge asked, shaking his head.

  “Eighty-five cases,” Robin said. “All similar. A woman who didn’t ever go to a hotel or casino suddenly vanishes into one and is never seen again.”

  “Eighty-five?” Pickett asked. “That’s stunning.”

  “It gets better,” Robin said. “This is a picture of the eighty-five women.”

  She took out a sheet of paper with eighty-five small thumbnail-sized pictures of women on it. She slid it first to Pickett.

  Pickett looked at it. The images were small, all the women looking right into the camera. Clearly driver’s license pictures.

  All the women had different haircuts and wore different clothing, but something about it seemed odd. She slid the paper to Sarge, who frowned looking at it.

  Pickett could feel that something was wrong with the pictures, she just couldn’t put her finger on what.

  “Here is what I found when I ran the woman’s pictures through a facial recognition software,” Robin said.

  She took out another page and slid it to Pickett.

  It had five women on it, all about the same age.

  Pickett looked at the smiling face of Robin and then slid the paper to Sarge who sort of snorted.

  “All eighty-five missing women are actually only five women?” Pickett asked.

  Robin nodded. “All between five foot tall and five-two.”

  “Any connections at all between them?” Sarge asked.

  “All I have is their many married names,” Robin said. “Seventeen married or fake names each, actually.”

  She pointed to the picture of Sandy Hunter. “I’m calling her March because every March she goes missing. Ten times she was married, seven times only engaged. The others each have their own month to vanish.”

  Pickett sort of sat there stunned. She couldn’t even begin to wrap her brain around this.

  “Every March?” Sarge asked, his voice soft.

  “Every March,” Robin said. “She always had different hair color and background and all that. Different job, everything. But no doubt at all it was the same woman every March. The Sandy Hunter case was the only one that actually got her entering a room though. And that was only because Bower took pity on the husband and was ahead of procedure.”

  Pickett just sat there, stunned.

  At that moment the waitress came to take their order, which was a welcome relief to Pickett as she tried to wrap her mind around why a woman would vanish seventeen times in seventeen years.

  Five women, actually.

  This case just kept getting stranger and stranger.

  And bigger and bigger.

  TEN

  November 16th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  SARGE GAVE HIS order to the waitress, but felt like he was almost sleepwalking. Why would the same five women set up a life and then disappear every year? In all his years of being a detective, he had never felt this stunned.

  Robin was smiling and Pickett looked as shocked as he felt.

  “It took me a good half hour to get past the idea that something like this could happen,” Robin said. “And it’s something that never would have been caught if we hadn’t been trying to dig up leads on this one cold case.”

  Sarge nodded to that. No chance that any normal investigation would have run a search like Robin did, looking for patterns. Just never would have happened.

  “So what’s your news?” Robin asked.

  Sarge nodded to Pickett that she should go ahead. He wasn’t certain he could even focus on what they had discovered at the moment.

  “James showed us how the woman got out of the hotel room,” Pickett said. “Because she was so tiny and short, she fit into a return air duct. She went out through the ductwork into a maintenance room, then climbed down an elevator shaft to the sub-basement and went out through the parking garage, more than likely.”

  “All the security footage from the hotel for three days before and three days after still exist,” Robin said. “I’ll find out when she got out and now that I know they changed identity, I’ll know what to search for.”

  Sarge nodded, then said what he was sure all of them were thinking. “Why?”

  Robin nodded, as did Pickett.

  “I have two of Will’s best people searching through records of all the left spouses,” Robin said. “They had gone through ten of them before I left and not a one reported anything at all missing when their wife vanished. Nothing out of checking, no credit card uses, nothing other than the jewelry and clothes they had on when they vanished.”

  Again Sarge just shook his head. Not a bit of this was making any sense at all.

  “So we have five women,” Pickett said, “getting into relationships that last exactly one year before they vanish and change identity.”

  “They all
work regular jobs?” Sarge asked.

  “From what we have found so far, yes,” Robin said. “Sandy Hunter, our March woman, was pretty typical. Her next time out she worked housekeeping at a second hotel. The year after that she worked at a catering service. I will be working on tracing back their first run at this.”

  “See if you can find the connection between the five women,” Sarge said.

  “There has to be one,” Pickett said.

  At that point the food came and Sarge slowly came to grips with the crazy idea of all this as he ate a French dip sandwich with fries. By the time the waitress took his plate and refilled his coffee, he felt like his mind had returned a little.

  “So here is what we know so far on this mess,” Sarge said, opening his flip notebook. “First off, we know that the same five women, starting in 1998, vanish from a hotel and each do so on the same month every year.”

  Robin and Pickett both nodded.

  “We are pretty certain that Hunter went out through a return air vent in a hotel room,” Sarge said.

  Again both women nodded.

  Sarge looked at his notes and realized he didn’t know one important fact. “Do they always vanish in the same hotel?”

  “Three different hotels,” Robin said. “They alternate around and all three hotels were built in the same period, so they all would have the same return air systems. But we can check that. I’ll have a lot more by dinner. I even have Will fascinated on this case, so he’s throwing help at it. Right now he’s got two computer specialists digging and has told me he’s willing to get more at it if needed.”

  Sarge nodded. That was great to hear. Not much hid for long from Will and his security people and computer specialists.

  Then it dawned on him what he had just thought. “Robin, these women are going to need to create new histories, new ids every year good enough to stand up to some heavy checking for jobs and a driver’s license. How would they do that?”

  “Shit,” Robin said, flipping open her notebook and writing quickly. “There can’t be a lot of people in this city who can do that level of work since 1998. I’ll find out.”