Brian Freeman - Stripped

Stride was leaning on his Bronco, next to her Spyder, about twenty yards away. He was standing under a streetlight. His arms were folded over his chest. When she joined him, he nodded at the driver’s door of her sports car. Amanda saw it and swore.

The car was desecrated. Someone had chiseled the word PERVERT into the door of the Spyder in large letters.

“I didn’t want you to find this alone,” Stride said.

Amanda felt her emotions battling between rage and humiliation. “Fuckers,” she muttered. “It never stops. Thanks for telling me.”

“I asked around,” Stride said. “No one admits seeing anything.”

“Big surprise.” Amanda ran her fingers over the ruts in the paint. In some ways, it was like being raped. As if that were what they would do, if they got her alone.

“Don’t take this shit lying down, Amanda,” Stride told her.

“I never have before.” Amanda wondered, though, how much more she could take. It didn’t matter how often she proved herself, they kept coming for her, trying to drive her away. She stared at the word again. Pervert. She could feel the hatred of whoever had written it. This wasn’t a mean joke, a taunt. It was primal and ugly.

“You okay?” Stride asked, watching her.

She shook her head. She wasn’t okay. “I could have caught the Green River Killer, and the headlines would have been about my cock. I mean, is it really such a big deal?”

Stride laughed.

Amanda realized what she’d said and laughed, too. Some of the tension drained out of her. “Okay, it is a big deal,” she said slyly. Then she added, “I know what people think. It just hurts to have it constantly thrown in your face.”

She spent another few seconds feeling sorry for herself. Stride waited, not pushing her, and she felt a surge of warmth for him. She remembered what Serena had told her-that Stride had swooped in out of nowhere and become a lifeline for her. Amanda felt a little like that herself-not in a romantic way, because she loved Bobby, and she knew Stride loved Serena, but it made her feel less alone on the force to have him there, as if she finally had an ally, a friend. That hadn’t happened, not since she was Jason. Her friends from back then had peeled away, one by one.

“Tell me something,” she said to Stride. “Why don’t you hate me, too?”

“Come on, Amanda. That question’s not worthy of you.”

“You’re right. It’s stupid. Someone else asked that, not me.”

Stride was all business again. “You said Tierney had a bodyguard, didn’t you? Where was he?”

“Who, the Samoan? I think he’s just rent-a-muscle. There was no one else in the house.”

“Shouldn’t there be a live-in staff at a palace like this?” Stride asked. “A butler, six maids, a few gardeners to water the rocks?”

“Not according to the neighbor who found the body. I talked to him. He says there’s day staff only. Apparently, Moose likes to walk around naked at night.”

“Thanks for putting that image in my mind,” Stride said.

“What I’m wondering is how the perp got in here. He sure as hell didn’t walk from the highway at night.”

“Is there a log of all the vehicles in and out?”

Amanda nodded. “I’ve got uniforms tracking down every car in the security log, starting with the cars that left after the time of the murder.”

“Did he leave the shell casing again?”

“Yes, a.357, just like with MJ. I’m betting if we can recover the bullet, we’ll get a ballistics match. Although I doubt we’ll even need it. He’s not trying to cover his tracks. I’m having them dust for prints to see if he left us another souvenir.”

“Three murders,” Stride said. “Four, if there’s a tie-in with Reno. He’s picking up the pace.”

Amanda saw headlights approaching down the lakeside avenue where Moose and a handful of other wealthy neighbors had their homes. As the vehicle passed under the first streetlight, she recognized the limo in which she had sat with Tierney Dargon. When Tierney was alive and young.

She pointed at the car. “Moose,” she said.

Stride could see where the comedian got his nickname. He was amazingly tall and seemed to be all legs, like a circus magician on stilts. He had a shaggy head of long hair, unnaturally black and thick for a man his age. It flopped across his face as he sat with his elbows propped on his knees and his long, spindly fingers cupping his face like tentacles. His tuxedo fit loosely. He had undone his bow tie, which lay like a squashed bat on his ruffled white shirt.

He was alone with Stride and Amanda in the rear of the limo. His feet almost touched the other cushions of the stretch.

“My beautiful girl,” he said. “I should have left her where she was: I’m a selfish bastard. I wanted someone to take care of me. To bury me. Now I have to bury her instead.”

He looked up at them, his dark eyes haunted. Stride noticed his trademark eyebrows, furry and wild, which he was able to curl and twitch at will. They were part of his act. He could make his eyebrows dance, and crowds died laughing. Stride had seen him in a stand-up routine on television almost twenty years ago. His humor was black and self-destructive, filled with jokes about drinking, divorce, and strokes, drawn from his own life. But his eyebrows lightened everything, as if they were twin dummies and Moose the ventriloquist. Tonight, though, they sat motionless above his eyes like sleeping dogs.

“Can you tell us where you were this evening, Mr. Dargon?” Stride asked. He was polite but firm.

Moose slowly focused. He seemed genuinely numb with grief, but Stride had been disappointed too many times by suffering spouses. Too often they turned out to be perpetrators, not victims-and Moose was a performer.

“I was entertaining at a fund-raiser,” he said, pointing to a reelection button for Governor Durand on his tuxedo lapel.

“Why didn’t Tierney go with you?”

One of Moose’s eyebrows sprang briefly to life. “I’m a beast when I have a show to do. I don’t talk to anyone before or after. Tierney would have had to sit by herself with a table full of gassy lawyers. Listen to them telling her about their latest Daubert motion while checking out her tits. She would have hated it.”

“Who else knew she was going to be home alone?” Stride asked, putting a faint emphasis on the word “else.”

“I can’t think of anyone,” Moose said. “Usually, Tierney goes out if I have a show. She’s young. But today she decided to stay home and watch some movies.”

“Did she tell anyone about her plans?”

“Just the security company. She called them around noon and said she wouldn’t need an escort tonight.”

Stride glanced at Amanda, who was already scribbling in her notebook. He asked Moose for details about the security company he used, which was called Premium Security. Stride remembered that Karyn Westermark used a bodyguard, too, when she was in Vegas, and he jotted down a reminder to find out whether she used the same firm.

Amanda leaned forward. “Mr. Dargon, did you know MJ Lane?”

Moose’s face was blank. “ Walker ’s son? The boy who was murdered last weekend? I knew the old man, back in the sixties, but not MJ. Why?”

“There’s no way to be delicate about this,” Amanda told him. “Tierney was having an affair with MJ.”

“Oh.” Moose rested his head back until he was staring at the ceiling of the limo. “Now I see. You think I’m a jealous cuckold. First I had her lover killed, and now my wife.”

“You have a reputation,” Stride said. “A temper.”

Moose looked down and gave them a sad smile. His eye-brows rippled. Stride noticed the man’s gray pallor, how the outline of his skull showed through the skin. He had seen the look before, when his wife Cindy was dying of cancer.