Dead Hand: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery Read online

  Pickett actually sat back with that. Sarge just kept eating and she could tell there was no emotional energy at all talking about his ex-wife. He really did still get along with her.

  Pickett was really, really liking this man more and more.

  “So how about you?” Sarge said, glancing up and noticing that she had stopped eating and was staring at him.

  “Wonderful daughter living in Washington, DC,” Pickett said. “My husband had a midlife crisis and went off to LA with a twenty-some-year-old and a new red sports car. I got enough money to live comfortably the rest of my life and a wonderful condo in the Ogden, all paid off.”

  “Wow,” Sarge said, staring at her. He seemed surprised about something for a moment. Then he said, “Seems you are over it because I heard no anger there at all.”

  Pickett shrugged. “Only time I got angry was at him being so stupid. I don’t do well with stupidity in general, but especially from him. So I made him pay to get rid of me and it hasn’t bothered me much since.”

  Sarge laughed and kept staring at her, smiling.

  “I got egg on my nose or something?” Pickett asked, after a moment, pretending to wipe off her face. She loved it when he looked at her like that.

  “Nope,” he said. “just admiring someone who I have a lot in common with. Me and stupidity are not friends either.”

  “Oh, God,” Pickett said, going back to eating. “Heaven help a poor fool who runs into us together.”

  “Doubt heaven would help him,” Sarge said, laughing.

  Pickett laughed as well. Damn, how was this man even possible?

  But it seemed he was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  October 19th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  SARGE COULDN’T REMEMBER the last time he had enjoyed a breakfast as much as this one with Pickett. Not only was she the best-looking woman he had met, but she was funny, and smart, and a fantastic detective.

  And she liked the Golden Nugget Buffet.

  He wasn’t honestly sure which of those things scared him more about her. But he was going to just enjoy the time with her as he had it and see what happened.

  After breakfast, she had pulled out a notebook and he had taken his small notebook out of his back pocket with his notes about the case, and they set to work.

  “I haven’t heard from Robin yet about any of the searches she is doing,” Pickett said. “So got any ideas as to where we start?”

  Sarge liked the sounds of the “we” part of that. He had been fighting this case so long on his own, it felt fantastic to have top help with it.

  “I had an idea about six months ago I haven’t been able to do anything about yet,” Sarge said. “How about we detail out what a woman like Trudy would need to do to prepare for a wedding here in Las Vegas, then eliminate the stops she already made to figure out what her errands might have been the day she disappeared?”

  Pickett brightened up with that. “I like that a lot. Somewhere on one of those last errands is where things went bad for her.”

  “Exactly,” Sarge said. “But who do we know that would be able to detail out a Las Vegas wedding like that? My daughter eloped.”

  Pickett smiled. “Robin and I have a friend who could do that easily. So let’s put together the details we know that Trudy did before she disappeared, then head there.”

  “Your friend wouldn’t happen to be Elvis?” Sarge asked, poking at her.

  “Nope,” Pickett said, smiling at Sarge. “Elvis’s wife. Didn’t you know, Elvis is dead?”

  Sarge just laughed and shook his head. Then they spent the next thirty minutes putting together every detail that was known about Trudy’s three days in Las Vegas and what parts of her wedding details she had already taken care of.

  Then, with to-go cups full of fresh coffee offered by a friendly waitress, they headed out to Pickett’s car, a blue Grand Cherokee SUV parked on the second level of the parking garage.

  Sarge buckled into the passenger seat and tried to remember the last time he had ridden with someone to go anywhere. With him and Andrea, he had always driven.

  And with the rotating partners he had over the years, he had always been the main driver. It felt very, very weird to be in the passenger seat, that was for sure.

  But Pickett got them out of the garage easily and merging into traffic without a problem. She drove one-handed, with a confidence of a long-time driver who just knew where to look and when. After a few blocks, he relaxed completely. More than likely she was a better driver than he was.

  Was there anything at all wrong with this woman?

  The chapel they were headed to was on the Stratosphere end of the Strip, closest to downtown, so the drive only took about five minutes. Pickett pulled the SUV into a small parking lot behind a building with a giant Elvis holding a wedding ring on the front. Damn, she hadn’t been kidding. They really were going to an Elvis chapel.

  The business looked like it had seen better days and needed a coat of paint, at least. A gutter was hanging loose off of one side and some graffiti scarred up another wall. Sarge just couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to get married in such a shabby place. But it was Las Vegas, so anything was possible.

  The sun was starting to get warm already and Pickett pulled out a baseball cap from the back seat and made sure the wide bill shaded her face.

  “I burn instantly,” she said, shaking her head.

  Sarge laughed. “You ought to see the hat I wear in the summer. The brim is so wide all the way around, my daughter told me I look like a villain from a spaghetti western.”

  Pickett laughed as they opened the large front door of the building. The door had a stained-glass window in the middle that hadn’t been cleaned in months, at least.

  The inside was cool and dark and smelled slightly moldy. A background smell of old cigarettes covered everything. To Sarge the place felt more like a run-down mortuary than a wedding chapel. There were some overstuffed couches around a waiting room with dark-wood paneling and cheap end tables covered in ashtrays. Two of the ashtrays were still full of cigarette butts.

  Sarge had no desire at all to sit on the couches. God-only-knew what was on them, considering he could see patterns of stains in places waiting-room couches should not be stained.

  There were no signs, no pricing, no images of Elvis anywhere in the room. Just a plain room with dark wood paneling and ugly maroon couches. This really had to be the worst wedding chapel he had ever been in.

  A heavy-set woman came out of the back door. She had on a pink print dress that looked faded and a beehive hairdo that seemed to defy gravity.

  Her hair was a bright silver and her face had what looked like built-up layers of make-up. Her eyes had so much dark make-up around them, she looked like a distant relative of a raccoon.

  “Detective Pickett,” the woman said, her voice hoarse like a person who smoked far, far too many cigarettes. “What a welcome surprise on a dull morning.”

  “Business bad?” Pickett asked.

  The woman shrugged and the hair towering on her head didn’t even shake. “Got five weddings this week I’m working on around town, but that’s slow.”

  Pickett turned to Sarge. “This is Detective Carson,” Pickett said. “Detective, this is Madeline Stein, just Stein to all her friends. She’s the best wedding planner in the city.”

  “Nice meeting you,” Sarge said, nodding to the woman who nodded back at him and seemed pleased at Pickett’s description of her, but not surprised.

  “So we have an old cold case we’re working on,” Pickett said. “We had a woman back in the spring of 2010 go missing right near the end of planning her wedding.”

  The woman nodded, the tower of silver hair staying firm on her head, and Pickett went on. Sarge was going to let her lead on this one all the way.

  “We have traced most of everything the woman did before she disappeared. But we are wondering what she would have left to do.”

  Stein smiled. “To see who
the woman planning her wedding was going to visit when she vanished to give you some leads, huh?”

  “Exactly,” Pickett said.

  “You got a list of what she already had done?”

  Sarge handed Stein the list. “This is what we know she did and in the order she did it.”

  Stein scanned down the list quickly, nodding. Then she looked up and asked, “Do you know if her dress needed a fitting?”

  “Already done before she came into town,” Sarge said.

  Stein nodded again and once again the tower of hair didn’t seem to even shake, let alone threaten to fall off her head. The thing had to be wired up there somehow. No hair could hold that shape without a lot of help.

  “The woman was a good planner,” Stein said. “She did everything exactly right and in the right order. Right out of my book, actually.”

  Sarge was surprised at that mention of a book, but said nothing.

  “So if she was following your book,” Pickett asked. “What last-minute things did she need to do?”

  “Could be a number of things,” Stein said.

  Sarge took out his notebook as Stein started to list things Trudy Patterson might have done that final day.

  “If she was alone in town, she might have been taking care of the groom’s tux.”

  “She was alone,” Pickett said.

  “She would have checked on the flowers she ordered,” Stein said. “She would have had a final appointment with the wedding chapel and she might have wanted to set up limos for the guests arriving at the airport.”

  Stein handed the list back to Sarge and turned to Pickett. “Was this woman ever found?”

  “Five days later,” Pickett said, “In her car.”

  “Wearing a wedding dress with nothing under it and a ring no one had seen before with a number on the ring,” Stein said.

  Sarge damn near staggered backwards. How in the world did this woman know that?

  Pickett seemed rocked as well. “Stein, how did you know all that?”

  “Did the girl give a description of her rapist?” Stein asked.

  “She was dead,” Pickett said.

  “Sat for days in a hot car,” Sarge said.

  “Oh, the poor girl,” Stein said, shaking her head. “Never heard of any of them dying before.”

  “Them?” Pickett and Sarge said both at the same time.

  “Sure,” Stein said. “I can give you a list of the ones I remember. But I’m sure they all filed rape reports, or at least most of them. The bastard doing that cost all of us planners and chapels around town a lot of business over the years and you folks could never get a lead on him. When the bride gets raped right before a wedding, the wedding always gets called off.”

  Pickett and Sarge just looked at each other. Sarge felt like he was in shock.

  Stein laughed a throaty, deep laugh. “You two are surprised, I can tell.”

  “We are,” Pickett said. “We are homicide detectives, so we didn’t follow much else.”

  “And this case never linked to any rape cases,” Sarge said.

  “I think the detectives who came by here a few times called the guy the Bride Rapist.”

  “Any cases lately?” Pickett asked.

  “I’ve heard of one or two,” Stein said, nodding. “Might want to check with some of the bigger chapels and with your own folks.”

  Sarge just couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His one case, his nightmare case, had just gotten a lot, lot bigger.

  And even more nightmarish.

  CHAPTER NINE

  October 19th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  PICKETT DIDN’T SAY anything after they thanked Stein for her time and headed toward her car. The heat of the morning was picking up and the parking lot pavement made it worse.

  As she unlocked her car and climbed in, she called Robin, then turned on the car to get it cooled down.

  Sarge climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door as Robin came on the line and Pickett switched the phone to speaker so they could both listen.

  “Sarge and I discovered something huge,” Pickett said before Robin could say anything but “Hi, partner.”

  It took Pickett about three minutes to explain what they had just discovered from Stein, including the stops Trudy might have taken the morning she vanished.

  When Pickett finished, Robin was silent for a long moment. The only sounds were the air-conditioning and the traffic on the nearby Strip.

  Finally Robin said, “Jesus, the poor girl.”

  “I’m betting we’re not dealing with a purposeful murder,” Pickett said.

  Beside her, Sarge was nodding.

  “She was raped right before her wedding,” Robin said, “so in shock she went up to that ridge and just sat and passed out and died from the heat.”

  “Exactly,” Pickett said.

  “That just makes me sick,” Robin said. “But we still take this bastard down for her death.”

  “Agreed,” Sarge said.

  Pickett couldn’t agree more. Her stomach was twisted up like she was staring at a freshly-opened grave. She hated that more than anything, and this felt exactly like that.

  Again the silence was broken only by the air-conditioning hum and the street noise. It seemed like a very heavy silence.

  Sarge just stared at his notebook.

  “So you want us to go get the files from the sexual crimes unit on all of the cases?” Pickett asked.

  “I can do that easily from here,” Robin said. “I’m going to get one or two of our computer people on this, searching for patterns, anything that might give this sicko away.”

  “We’ll follow up on the leads that Stein gave us that Trudy might have done that last morning,” Pickett said. “Let us know at once if a pattern starts to emerge so we can focus down.”

  “Got it,” Robin said.

  And she hung up.

  Pickett clicked off the phone and turned to face the handsome detective beside her. His expression was one of determination.

  “Suggestions on which thing Trudy did that we tackle first?” Pickett asked.

  Sarge nodded and looked at her, his hazel eyes intent. “Since there are so many, and all of the cases are around weddings of some sort, I’m thinking that narrows it down to the flowers or the tuxes or the chapel.”

  Pickett nodded. “Tuxes. That kind of shop would also have access to wedding dresses.”

  “Good place to start,” Sarge said, nodding.

  He flipped open his notebook and went through it quickly until he reached a page about halfway through. “August’s Tux Place.”

  Picket was impressed that he had taken that detailed of notes.

  “I went in there,” Sarge said, “but they claimed to have never seen her that day.”

  “Of course they did,” Pickett said.

  Then she realized there was a huge bit of data they didn’t have. They were so used to working homicides where the victims couldn’t talk, it just dawned on her that there were survivors. From what Stein had said, a lot of them.

  “We need the information from the survivors first,” Pickett said. “See what they remember.”

  “Of course,” Sarge said, shaking his head.

  Pickett smiled. A homicide detective seldom had survivors to talk with.

  Pickett called Robin back and asked her to quickly scan a bunch of the reports to see how the rape victims were taken. That alone would narrow their focus.

  “Give me three minutes,” Robin said and again hung up.

  Pickett glanced over at Sarge, who was staring at his notebook.

  “Anything there that make sense with this new information?”

  Sarge nodded. “No real clear cause of death. Now that makes sense. And why she was on that ridge makes sense now as well. So many questions suddenly answered as a ton more questions pop up.”

  Pickett looked at the handsome detective. Then she said, “Why do I have the suspicion this is bigger than even a se
rial rapist?”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Sarge said, glancing at her. “Not a clue why, however. But my gut is twisted on this one, which tells me we’re missing a lot of this.”

  Pickett knew that feeling as well. And as detectives, you learned to trust that gut. Sometimes your subconscious could see things your waking mind couldn’t see. Someone had once explained to her that was what “gut sense” meant. She just knew she had learned to trust hers.

  At that moment Robin called back and Pickett clicked on the phone.

  “No help,” Robin said.

  “How can there be no help?” Pickett asked. “That makes no sense at all.”

  “That’s what has stumped the detectives working these cases,” Robin said. “The women have no memory at all on the day they were taken.”

  “Any record of some of them being hypnotized to bring up lost memories?” Sarge asked.

  “Six of them that I can tell tried that,” Robin said. “I’m still digging, but what the pattern is that the women seem to remember is leaving for an errand on their own, then waking up as they are being married to a tall man wearing a plastic face in some sort of wedding chapel. They are drugged and can’t speak or even talk. Then they are taken to a nearby bedroom and raped, then the next thing they remember, they are in their cars.”

  “Drugs,” Sarge said a moment before Pickett could.

  “That’s the theory on this,” Robin said, “but no drugs were found in the women’s systems in any fashion. No DNA traces, nothing.”

  “So we have someone who knows chemicals and drugs,” Pickett said.

  “You said they were married?” Sarge asked Robin. “Someone else there?”

  “Yes,” Robin said. “A third person was always involved in the ceremony wearing an Elvis mask and dressed like Elvis.”

  Sarge glanced over at the Elvis chapel at the same time Pickett did.

  Then Pickett decided she needed to quickly ask Robin one more question to make sure Stein was cleared.

  “Any description of the groom or the Elvis person besides the masks?”