Brian Freeman: Stripped

He used the mouse to click on one of the thumbnails, and a larger image of a middle-aged Asian woman playing a Five Play video poker machine filled half the screen. The quality, Stride had to admit, was dazzlingly good. With a practiced nudge of the joystick, Gerard focused on the woman’s hands and zoomed in until they could clearly see her stubby fingers selecting each button.

“Most people know we’re watching,” Gerard said, “but they don’t realize the power of the technology.”

“Let’s check the cam on the main doors around ten o’clock,” Stride said. “You can do that?”

Gerard nodded. “All of the images are time-stamped.”

“I want to see MJ arrive and see if anyone follows him in,” Stride added.

Stride untangled himself from the chair, and he and Amanda crowded around Gerard, watching over his shoulder. Gerard slid his chair farther under the credenza and brushed imaginary lint from his coat sleeve. He caressed the mouse like a lover as he swept the cursor around the screen at lightning speed.

“Here we are.”

Stride watched MJ Lane and Karyn Westermark arrive through the revolving doors. Karyn wore an oversized purple football jersey, white short shorts, and white highheeled boots that hugged her calves and accentuated her long legs. MJ was wearing the same grunge-cool outfit-untucked shirt and loose shorts-in which they had found him a few hours later. Not a care in the world. Stride always felt slightly nauseous seeing videotape of victims shortly before their deaths. Their faces were unaware, oblivious to the fact that the sand had almost run out of the hourglass. The black-hooded devil stood right behind them, polishing his scythe, and they smiled and laughed as if death were years away, not exhaling on their skin.

“Keep the tape going,” Stride said.

They followed the parade of people entering and leaving the casino for another two minutes. Then Amanda extended a finger, almost touching the screen.

“There,” she said. “On the left.”

The man emerging through the left-most door wore a faded blue baseball cap with the bill tugged down low on his face. He tilted his head down, staring at the ground as he walked. They could barely make out the dark stain of a beard obscuring the lower half of his face.

“Tan khakis,” Stride said. “Windbreaker. I think that’s him. The son of a bitch is ducking the cameras.”

’Ten to one the beard’s a fake,” Amanda said.

“We need to find him again,” Stride said as the man disappeared out of camera range. “He looked like he was turning toward the front desk.”

Gerard fingered the joystick. Less than a minute later, he tracked the killer down at a nickel slot. His hat was askew, at a casual angle to anyone who looked at him, but strategically placed to minimize the camera’s view.

“He knows where we have the cams,” Gerard observed unhappily.

“Where’s that machine?” Stride asked.

“Opposite the VIP lounge.”

Stride nodded. “So he can see MJ leaving.”

Gerard zoomed in, but the close-up footage didn’t offer much more for them to see. Looking at the thick beard, Stride agreed with Amanda: It was a fake. The man may also have used putty on his cheekbones and nose to doctor his appearance further.

“We’ll want a print,” Stride told Gerard, “for whatever good it does us. And it would be great if you could have a tech review the other cameras and see if we get a better angle on this guy.”

“Of course.”

“Run the feed out,” Stride told him. “Let’s see what he does.”

Gerard accelerated the footage, but the killer’s movements were so precise that it hardly mattered. He seemed frozen, with the rest of the action of the casino speeding behind him in a blur. Every minute, he played a single nickel from the twenty-dollar bill he had fed into the machine-slow enough that he could sit there for hours without exhausting his stake. He never appeared to be studying the entrance to the sheltered VIP area, but Stride recognized him instinctively as the kind of man whose eyes didn’t miss a thing. Cool. Methodical.

Shortly before one o’clock, MJ reappeared. Gerard slowed down the tape again. MJ was obviously drunk now, and he weaved as he headed for the exit. The killer at the nickel slot stretched his arms lazily, betraying no interest, but he stood up, prepared to follow. Stride could imagine the adrenaline pumping, making the man hypercohscious. MJ was alone. The kill was close. He was ready to dog his victim’s heels.

Then the man at the machine did something. It happened so fast that Stride wasn’t sure he had really seen it.

“Stop, stop,” Stride insisted. “Back up. What the hell was that?”

Neither Gerard nor Amanda had noticed anything. Gerard backed up the tape and then, on Stride’s instructions, let it go forward in slow motion, frame by frame. As MJ disappeared in the background, the killer got up, every movement now jerky and unnatural, like an old penny movie machine.

Stretched. Pushed the chair in with his foot. Brushed past the machine as he moved to follow MJ.

Reached back with his hand.

“Son of a bitch,” Amanda said, seeing it.

“Freeze it!” Stride told Gerard.

As the killer walked away, he casually planted his thumb in the center of the slot machine’s glass window and rolled it, leaving a perfect print.

Stride felt his stomach turn upside down, as if he had boarded a tunnel-of-love ride and found himself on the wild tracks of a roller coaster instead. He felt the tingling chill of fear on his nerve ends.

“He must know he’s not in the system,” Amanda whispered.

Stride stared at the frozen image on the screen. “It’s more than that,” he said. “He wants us to chase him.”

As Stride and Amanda climbed into his Bronco, he heard his cell phone ringing inside his blazer pocket. He had recently replaced a ring tone of Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee” with “Restless” by Sara Evans, although it wasn’t the same without Sara’s amazing voice. Still, something about the song touched a lonely ache in Stride’s soul every time he heard it. It was all about home, and for the past few months his sense of home, of where he belonged, had fled from him.

He flipped up the phone and heard Serena’s voice.

“Bet you missed the glamour of this job,” she told him. He had crawled out of bed unhappily at one in the morning.

Stride felt himself relax. He had fallen so much in love with her that he felt it physically, deep in his gut, even though he wondered how the two of them could survive together in this city. Or how he could survive. She was his oasis, a dream to which a man lost in the desert could cling.

“Yeah, I missed being out with the night creatures,” Stride said. “I think Sawhill enjoyed giving me a reminder.”

“Hey, you wanted back in the game, Jonny,” Serena teased him. “I told you to stay home and be a kept man.”

Stride laughed. She was right When he retired from the force in Duluth and moved to Las Vegas to join Serena, he was just like that Sara Evans song. Restless. His whole life had been in Minnesota. A beautiful first wife, his childhood sweetheart, now deceased. A second wife, recently divorced. Maggie, his partner and closest friend. And all the cold, vast spaces of the far north-the great lake, the endless stands of birch and pine. Home.

But after the last murder case he investigated-the case where he met Serena-his roots had been pulled up. He had been at loose ends for the last two months in Vegas, needing to work again. He had thought about getting a PI license, but he couldn’t imagine himself hiding in the desert brush, spying on cheating spouses. Then, with a spin of a slot machine wheel, a Vegas homicide detective had walked off the job with a fortune in his pocket. Suddenly, Stride was back in.