Brian Freeman - Stripped

Stride felt his cheeks growing hot. “Things still don’t add up. Terrell says he talked to people who saw Walker in Las Vegas that day. Then he left the country and has hardly come back since. Why?”

“Maybe he likes Canadian bacon. Maybe he always wanted to be a Mountie. I have no idea, Detective, and I don’t care. Walker Lane didn’t kill anyone.”

“MJ thought he did.”

“MJ was wrong. Rex Terrell was wrong. You are wrong. There is no connection to MJ’s death, because there is no mystery here. Move on. Is that clear?”

Stride nodded. “Perfectly clear.”

Even so, his doubts lingered. He was willing to admit that Rex Terrell might have spun a fairy tale for them, more fiction than truth. If nasty rumors had followed Walker Lane after the girl’s death, he might have chosen to leave town, even if he was innocent. There was another name that had popped up in the middle of the story, though, like a bathtub toy that wouldn’t sink.

Boni Fisso.

Boni, who owned the Sheherezade and had ties to both Amira Luz and Walker Lane.

Boni, who had two billion dollars on the line in the Orient casino project. Worth killing over.

Sawhill wasn’t stupid. He could read Stride’s eyes. “You don’t sound convinced, Detective. So you tell me: What connection could there possibly be between the death of Amira Luz and the murder of MJ Lane?”

Stride shook his head. “I can’t think of a thing,” he admitted.

“Good. Let’s look for a more plausible theory of the crime. And I really hope you have one.”

“We know that MJ was having an affair with Tierney Dargon,” Stride said.

“Moose’s wife?”

Stride wondered how many Tierney Dargons there could be in Las Vegas. “There was video in MJ’s apartment of the two of them together. We heard about the affair from Karyn Westermark and Rex Terrell, so the word was out.”

Sawhill leaned back in his chair and tugged at his pointed chin. “Moose is a wild man. He always has been. I wouldn’t put it past him to go into a rage and kill someone. He’s come close a few times.”

“Except this wasn’t a rage killing,” Amanda pointed out. She came forward and leaned over the desk. “This was planned.”

“And unless he’s dropped several decades and a hundred pounds or so, the killer wasn’t Moose himself,” Stride said.

“So he could have hired someone,” Sawhill said. “The two of you will talk to Tierney?”

Stride nodded.

“What about the video archives at the casino? Did we get another look at the killer?”

“If he was there, he didn’t look like he did on Saturday night,” Stride said.

“All right, keep me posted.” He waved his hand, dismissing them, and picked up the phone again. He grabbed the pink stress ball on his desk with his other hand and squeezed it. Stride hoped he used a lighter touch with his wife’s breasts. “I want your teams on both of these cases day and night. Get them off the front page. Or get me the perps. And Stride, I don’t want you talking to Walker Lane again without consulting me.”

“Understood,” Stride said.

The four of them made a beeline for the door. Stride pulled it closed behind him as they left, Cordy shot an evil glance at Amanda, who winked at him and gave him a tiny wave with a crook of her index finger. He stormed away.

“What did you do to him, anyway?” Stride asked.

Amanda giggled. “I pinched his butt”

Amanda drove over to the south side of McCarran and parked in a lot where she could watch the jets landing on runway 25 Left. She was driving her aging Toyota rather than the Spyder, which she reserved for weekends and road trips. She turned her radio to the frequency of the tower and listened to the chatter between the pilots and the traffic controllers. Tierney Dargon’s United flight from San Francisco was scheduled to land in half an hour.

There were a few other plane nuts parked around her. Some people made checklists of the incoming and outgoing flights and ticked them off as they watched the planes come and go. Amanda wasn’t that extreme. She just liked to sit here with a latte and a cigarette. She didn’t smoke often, not anymore, but she allowed herself one cigarette when she came here and kept a pack in the glove compartment for those occasions. Something about the smoke and the sweet coffee, and the roar of engines and the smell of jet fuel, made time stop for her, like a kind of hypnosis, when her mind could wander. She didn’t even take Bobby here. This was her place.

She had found it when she came to the city from Portland five years ago. Back when she was Jason Gillen, a smart Oregon cop who became a smart Vegas cop. Back when she was thinking about killing herself. She remembered sitting here with her gun on the seat beside her, wondering if she had the guts to do it, and finally realizing that it took no guts at all to run away. The courage was in sticking around and facing down the people who were afraid of her because she was wired differently from others.

So Jason died, and Amanda was born.

She took the cigarette out of her mouth, exhaled a trail of smoke out the window, and smiled as she saw the lipstick ring on the white wrapper.

People always thought that it was about sex. That to be her, the way she was, she had to walk on the wild side. That she could only do that to her body, and gulp down hormones every day, if she were obsessed with sex. They never believed her when she told them that she and Bobby were pretty conservative at heart, in or out of the bedroom. They were the ones who were obsessed with sex. They were titillated by her. Aroused by her. Men and women alike. They wanted to know how she did it, in what positions, and how often. They wanted to see her. Taste her.

The worst were the he-men on the force. People like Cordy. She got under their manly skin. They were so scared of the fact that she turned them on that they ran like hell from her. It used to bother her. Now she had fun with it. It was her way of showing them that she did have guts, that she wasn’t going away. Maybe it was a little payback, too.

She knew the jokes hadn’t stopped, just gone underground, because the brass had told the other cops to stay cool. Seven-figure settlements had a way of making people behave, at least to her face. No one wanted her around, though. She knew that. They ignored her, talked behind her back, and waited for her to take the money and run. It killed them when she stayed.

She had been worried about Stride. She could deal with the others for the most part, but a bad partner could make your life miserable. Worst of all, he was a heartlander, from the Midwest. She thought of people from the ag belt as narrow-minded, quick to judge. She figured he would look at her as if she were an alien. But Stride surprised her. She understood what Serena saw in him. He was attractive, no doubt about that, but he also seemed to have a soul a mile deep. Once he got over the shock, he simply treated her like a person. He was curious-everyone was curious-but she felt respect from him for what was in her brain, not what was between her legs.

That was rare.

Beyond the fence, a Southwest 737 angled gracefully upward and soared toward the sky. She knew that most of the people on the plane were going home, with lighter wallets, leaving the fantasy world behind and winging back to reality. To her, it looked like freedom. One day, she might really take the money, climb into the Spyder with Bobby, and run. Not because she couldn’t take it, but because she wanted to be somewhere where no one knew her, where people didn’t stare.

Bobby deserved that, too. He probably didn’t tell her half the shit he got for living with her, or the abuse he took, but he had stood by her and slept beside her for more than three years. She had avoided sex with him for months when they were dating, because she had assumed she would lose him as soon as he found out the truth. When she finally told him, she had lost him, at least for those two weeks while he came to grips with what he felt. Then he had come back, and he had stuck around, never once asking her to be anything but what she was.