Victor Methos - Sin City Homicide

At twenty-three, Daniel bought his own company, a small motel with a few slot machines. He had borrowed heavily to turn the motel around. Within five years, he owned two casinos, several restaurants, and a private golf course. By the age of forty-five, his real estate holdings and his casinos had made him a billionaire, and he had officially retired.

His wife, Emily, was the typical spouse of a man like Daniel. She came from an affluent family and had been a model, appearing briefly in Levi’s commercials in the ’80s. At thirty-two, she met Daniel, and they married six months later. They had one son, Fredrick Steed, who purportedly lived in Las Vegas, although the file didn’t provide an address.

The rest of the file consisted of financial records, credit reports, court records, birth certificates, copies of social security cards, death certificates, police narratives, CAD call logs from dispatch, and clippings of media reports, as well as lists of the Steeds’ neighbors, business associates, and relatives. The autopsy reports were extraordinarily detailed, far more than they needed to be-a sign of the couple’s influence.

There were two ballistics reports, one from the Las Vegas crime lab and one from a private expert hired out of Portland. Both had come to the same conclusion: the man in the ski mask had used a 9 mm gun. The private expert had identified the make of the gun as a 9 mm Smith amp; Wesson, where the crime lab in Vegas thought it was a Beretta. The rifling impressions, the scratches found on the bullet that had been fired, were chaotic, and in some places, even vertical. They had been purposely altered with a metallic wire shoved into the barrel of the gun. On the street, it was called a “rat’s tail.” Few people knew about rat’s tails. Those who did had usually learned about them while serving time in prison.

Mindi had even included handwritten notes taken by Jay and Javier during the investigation. Files never included handwritten notes, and even the prosecutors and defense attorneys never saw those. She was good.

Stanton read the police narratives, but they were little more than descriptions of what he’d already seen on the video. They did include one interesting note about Bill James, a business partner of Daniel’s who had sued him over a real estate deal. He had been interviewed, and his alibi-he’d been in Los Angeles at the time-had checked out.

At face value, the detectives were saying that the case was open and under investigation for possible suspects. Reading between the lines, however, Stanton knew they had made up their minds that this was a random attack akin to a shark attack. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was devastating.

That very well could have been what it was, but something told him it wasn’t. At the end of the file, attached in a paper slip, was a copy of the video. Stanton went to the hotel lobby, where he asked the front desk where he could find computers that were for guests’ use. The concierge arranged for a laptop to be delivered to Stanton’s room, so he went back up and waited.

When the computer arrived, Stanton tipped the bellboy then put the disc into the laptop. He immediately recognized the end cabin of the tram. He watched the video then watched it again. He put it on a slow forward, going through it frame by frame.

Emily was facing forward when she screamed. There were doors on her right and left, but she didn’t look at either, which meant the perp had been on the tram already. They would have noticed someone in a ski mask, so he must not have had it on beforehand. The only person who could have done such a thing without worrying about being seen would be someone who had planned to kill the witnesses.

Stanton watched the rape. He watched it again and again and again, until he no longer felt the tug of emotion in his gut telling him to pity this woman.

For the perp to grab Mrs. Steed and bend her over only took a few seconds. He penetrated her from behind shortly after, perhaps for no more than four seconds. Though the man’s penis wasn’t visible on the film, based on the Mrs. Steed’s movements, Stanton guessed it was erect. How could he have gotten an erection in approximately four seconds?

He may have already had an erection. Studies performed on sex offenders had shown that violence, as much as sex, aroused a certain population. Penial studies measuring the arousal time during different video and audio stimuli showed that in over thirty percent of incarcerated sex offenders, scenes of violence caused an erection as quickly as pornography did.

Stanton took out the disc and placed it back in the file before closing the laptop. The images were in his head now; they were part of him, along with the thousands of others he had absorbed in his time as a homicide and sex crimes detective. He needed to depressurize, to spend a significant amount of time doing something other than working the case. Once his head was clear, he could work the case without having to watch the video again.

He picked up the phone and called Marty.

“Hey,” he said. “I’d like to see some of these fun spots you were telling me about.”

Bill James woke with a start. His eyes darted open to see himself looking back at him. He realized he was lying on his back in his bed, looking up at his mirrored ceiling. The two women next to him wore nothing but high heels, and he watched them for a while, running his eyes over the perfect curves of their bodies. He had seen a thousand girls like them. They came to the city, looking for success, only to learn that the way to achieve success in Vegas was to sell everything-not just their bodies, but also their souls. Soon, they would be burnt-out junkies like the thousands who were already plastered all over the city, for sale to any psychopath who had a mere sixty bucks. But for now, they had youth and beauty, and he took them in.

He rolled out of bed and into his slippers. James glanced out the windows at the city below. His suite was made up of all windows with only one solid wall, a design specification he had requested. He wanted as much sunlight as he could get during the day and as much neon light as he could get during the night. He guessed from the dimming daylight that it was probably around five or six o’clock.

He used the bathroom, showered, and pulled out a Polo suit with purple pinstripes from his enormous closet before heading down to the casino floor. When he was depressed or anxious, he went there to watch the action. He hadn’t gambled in over thirty years, and he didn’t see the draw of it, but he knew it didn’t need a draw. He watched people’s eyes. They were almost in a trance.

“Boss.”

He turned to see his floor manager, Timmy Rodriguez, come up beside him.

“Heard you had a scuffle,” said James.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle. Just some drunk redneck who got pissed off. We got a bigger problem, though.”

“What?”

“High rollers’ room. Guy there’s playing blackjack hard and fast, fifty- or sixty-thousand-dollar hands. House is down over a million bucks.”

“Who is he?”

“Never seen him before. He wasn’t in Vanessa.”

James pulled a thin cigar from a gold case he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket and lit it as he headed to the human resources office. Vanessa was the computer database they used to keep track of the proficient gamblers, usually just the whales-the high rollers-who came, gambled big and fast, and left with his money. There was only one way to beat the casinos: quit while you were ahead. The longer gamblers played, the longer the casino’s edge wore them down. If this man wasn’t in Vanessa, he was either getting lucky, or he was a new whale on the scene.

The HR’s room was elegantly designed. James had brought the designer from Paris after he had designed the Prime Minister’s vacation home. The designer was a jerk, and James had nearly thrown him out on his ass, but his work was so good that James tolerated him until the project was complete.