Brian Freeman - Immoral

He was an attractive, if compact, package. He always dressed impeccably. Today, he wore a floral Tommy Bahama shirt and black silk pants. Cordy had jet black hair, greased straight back over his head. His skin had a dark cast, the color of virgin olive oil. His teeth looked noticeably white against it, and he had predatory brown eyes.

Serena jerked a thumb at the trailer. "So what's his story?"

"Ah, he's a pathetic old man. Not so old, but going downhill fast, you know? Spends each night drowning in a gin bottle. You see all the broken glass out here? He just tosses them out back when he's done."

Serena took note of the broad swath of glass shards behind the trailer. "Make sure the forensics team studies the glass pieces carefully. If our delivery man cut himself hauling the body in, maybe we'll get some blood."

"Uh-huh," Cordy said.

"We'll probably find Jerky Bob decomposing in the trailer in a few months," Serena said. "Did he call it in?"

Cordy shook his head. "He found the body and freaked. Started running naked down the road. A motorist spotted him from the highway and reported it. When the unis got to him, he was babbling about a corpse that was alive."

"Does he know the girl?"

Cordy shook his head. " Nan, he says he's never seen her before. Just saw the body when he came outside to take a piss. Surprise."

"How about timing? He have any idea when our little package may have been dropped off? Did he hear or see anything?"

"Man, he didn't hear nothing. Nada . Guy's been blacked out at least two days, maybe three. So it could have been anytime."

Serena sighed. "Great."

"So we don't got a lot to go on here, is what I'm thinking."

"I assume you scoped out the trailer for blood," she said.

"Uh-huh. His feet were bleeding from his run, but not enough to account for bashing in someone's head. And believe me, the place has not been cleaned up. Unless she was asphyxiated by the smell, the deceased was not inside. You should check out the jerky, though. He gave me a piece. Cajun turkey, I think it was. Good stuff, if you can stand the smell."

"If you have to pull off the road and take a dump in the desert on the way back to the city, you'll wish you hadn't tried it"

"I'm Mexican. Stomach of iron. Chiles, mama." Cordy thumped his chest.

Serena shook her head. "Salmonella, sweetie. It's not just for gringos."

"You forget. I wanted to see if he was hiding anything in his refrigerator, and I had no warrant. So now, one piece of jerky later, I know there is nothing in those shoe boxes but dried meat"

"Now you impress me, sweetie. You really do."

Serena took another look at the body, wishing she could cover it up and give the girl a little dignity. Las Vegas had its share of bizarre crimes, and she was long past surprise at anything they found in the city. She had been involved in the strip search of a female suspect, only to discover, after baring her impressive breasts, that the girl was actually a she-male with oversized equipment She had investigated the murder of a midget who had been put on a homemade rack by two thrill-seeking teenagers and stretched to death. She had arrested a man for walking downtown, naked, with two goats in tow. Weird, sick, stupid, she had been there, done that. Once in a great long while, though, she came across a case where her instincts told her she had stumbled into something deep, interesting, and dark. Which was exactly what her sixth sense was telling her now.

There was more, too. She felt a special pain when she worked on a case involving the murder of a young woman. It was too easy to remember her own teenage years in Phoenix and to realize that, if one turn or another had gone a different way, she could have been the body lying naked in the desert.

"What's your name, honey?" Serena murmured under her breath, staring at the girl's body.

"Looks like the cavalry is here," Cordy said. He pointed at the road, where a stream of police and medical vehicles had begun to arrive. "Tell me we're not going to stay out here and roast for five hours while they poke around the rocks."

Serena shook her head. "We'll get the scene sealed and transfer control to Neuss. An afternoon in the sun will do him good. We'll talk to the ME and see if he notices anything about the body that I missed. Then you and I are going to see if we can identify this girl."

"You want to tell me how you plan on identifying a body that no one's going to recognize?"

"Well, first you're going to have the department fax us local reports of missing persons, white, female, thirteen to thirty, in the last two weeks."

"Uh-huh. You want that bound or on CD-ROM?"

"I said two weeks, Cordy, not two years. I'll be surprised if we find her in there, anyway."

"Why?"

"I suspect she ran in circles where going missing isn't a big deal," Serena said.

"Uh-huh. So then what do we do?"

"Then we visit some strip clubs."

Cordy howled. "My kind of day, mama. You think the chick was a stripper? I hope she looked better than that. See that thing stripping off, and you'd be back home with the wife forever, you know?"

"Shut up, Cordy."

"Okay, so what am I missing? You find a stripper's union card or something? Why are you so sure she did the occasional lap dance?"

Serena shrugged. "She's got breast implants. That's why they didn't cave. Her pubic area is neatly shaved so that only a vertical strip of hair remains. There's remnants of sparkle on her breasts and thighs. She has a small tattoo of a heart on her left breast. Put it all together, and I say the girl's been twirling around a brass pole."

"Uh-huh. That only narrows it down to about four hundred joints. Not to mention all the on-call services."

"I said stripper, not hooker. Hookers don't bother with sparkle, sweetie. Or implants. Them's for show. We'll start with the big-name places and hope the girl was good enough at the bump and grind to break in there."

Cordy smiled. "You're the boss. If I have to spend my day talking to women who like to get naked in clubs, so be it."

Serena's eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness inside the club. The air was smoky and vaguely perfumed. Rock music blared from hidden speakers, with a thumping beat they could feel vibrating under the floor. The walls of the cramped foyer were covered with a dark wood paneling. A red upholstered door separated them from the interior of the club, and beside the door was a podium, with an erotic Chinese painting hung on the wall behind it. As they entered, a hulking man in a gray business suit slipped through the red door and confronted them with a smile. He had curly blonde hair and a bushy mustache.

He glanced at Cordy without interest, then his eyes lingered on Serena, drinking her in from head to toe.

"It's free for you, sweetheart. For Dudley Moore here, it's $24.95 cover."

The gorilla grinned at Cordy, and Serena thought she could see actual smoke coming out of her partner's ears.

"We're not customers," Serena said, flashing her shield. "We're from Metro. We're investigating a murder."

The smile vanished, replaced by cool indifference. "Whose?" the man asked, shrugging his broad shoulders.

"That's what we're trying to find out. It's a Jane Doe, found in the desert, back of her head bashed in. We think she may have worked one of the clubs."

Cordy slid a Polaroid from inside his jacket and presented it to Superman. "Recognize this girl?"

Serena watched the man's reaction, noticing his skin grow a shade paler and an involuntary grimace tighten his face.

"When was she in the business, 1940?"

"If you lie out in the desert for a few days, be sure to use sunblock," Serena said. "Do you recognize her?"

"No."

"Any of your girls gone missing in the last few days?"