Sin City Homicide (4 page)

7

Stanton found Marty near the entrance of police headquarters
, sipping a Coke and reading a magazine about car repair.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, are you done?” Marty asked.

“Yeah. Mind giving me a lift back to the hotel?”

“The car is yours.” He pulled out the keys and handed them to Stanton. “It’s a rental.”

“Thanks. Marty, I need the file on the Steed murders. Any way you could get that to me without having to go through Jay and Javier?”

“No way. Parr would have my ass. They’re the assigned detectives, so no one looks at the file without their permission.”

“I could get it for you,” a voice behind him
said.

Stanton turned to see a young woman in a police uniform
, with straight red hair that came down to her shoulders.

“Hi,” she said, holding out her hand
. “I’m Mindi Morgan. I’m the assistant assigned to you.”

“I thought Marty was
.”

“He is. I guess I meant I’m
also your assistant. Sheriff Hall thought you might need both of us, since Marty isn’t in top form nowadays.”

Marty looked at the ground and was quiet a moment before saying, “I’m a little slow, Jon. I forget things sometimes.”

“I don’t find you slow at all.” He turned to Mindi. “Tell the Sheriff I’m fine with Marty.”

Marty perked up, a grin on his face. Stanton thanked Mindi again for her offer
, then left the building with Marty.

“Marty, I need that file. I know Jay and Javier are your friends
, but—”

“They’re not my friends. My mom used to say you don’t know what people really think of you until you hear them behind your back. I heard them once. They’re not my friends. I’ll see if I can get you that file.”

“Thanks, Marty. I’m over at the Mirage.” He took out one of his cards and wrote his cell number on it. “Call me when you find anything out.”

“Okay.” Stanton turned to leave
.

“Jon, thanks
,” Marty blurted out.

“It’s okay, Marty. Just get me that file.”

Stanton used the valet at the Mirage.
Since he’d been there last, the casino had set up a new street display for the throngs of tourists going past. It was something about volcanoes. Surrounded by lush vegetation, it appeared like an oasis among the crowded streets of the Vegas strip.

He walked through the lobby and
over a small bridge connecting the hotel to the casino. The smell of liquor and smoke was strong, and there were no windows or clocks. This was to trick the gamblers so that they wouldn’t know the time and would gamble freely without worrying about anything outside the casino.

During his time as a graduate student of psychology, Stanton had researched the tactics used by casinos to optimize gambling
for a class on limbic system manipulation in marketing. The goal of the casino was to literally recreate the womb, a place of comfort on a primitive level. The colors of the room were always red or soft orange, and mild music was always on a continuous loop, rather than individual songs, to maintain the constant rhythm. During the ’80s and ’90s, casinos released pheromones through the air conditioning systems to encourage aggressive gambling. When a group of Brigham Young University sociology students discovered the tactic, the casinos stopped it immediately and denied ever doing it.

Stanton
found the elevator and headed to the nineteenth floor. His room was halfway down the hall. The curtains were open, revealing a view of the strip below. He kicked off his shoes, turned off his cell phone, and collapsed onto the bed. He was asleep before he could even think about the video that he’d been running through his mind all the way there.

When Stanton awoke, it was to the sound of airplanes flying overhead. He looked at the clock: 3:36 pm. He went to the window and looked down at the strip. He was surprised how many families were down there, pushing strollers and hauling shopping bags. As the economy soured and fewer people came to gamble, the tourism board was attempting to remake the city into a family-friendly destination by focusing on the shows and the shopping.

Stanton showered and brushed his teeth then soak
ed in the tub for twenty minutes before getting out and dressing. As he was putting on his shirt, there was a knock at his door. He finished buttoning and answered. Mindi stood there, a thick file in hand.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey.”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

She
entered and looked around. “Nice pad. This is one of the nicer hotels here.”

“I’ve always liked it. What can I do for you, Mindi?”

“I have the file you want.” She put it down on a table and sat down on a sofa near the windows.

“I asked Marty to get it for me.”

“Have I done something to offend you or something?”

“I didn’t appreciate how you treated Marty.”

“It was the truth.”

“It was humiliating.” Stanton sat on the edge of the bed. “What happened to him?”

“He used to ride a motorcycle everywhere, a nice Harley he’d saved for, like, five years to get. When his wife left him, you couldn’t get him off that thing. ’Bout six years ago, he was out on the freeway, and his bike flipped over. He landed square on his head. His helmet saved his life, but it… well, you’ve seen him. It was totally random. They think he hit a rock or something, but they’re not sure. Sometimes, life just takes you where it wants to, I guess.”

“He’s high
-functioning and a nice guy. He doesn’t deserve to be treated like that.”

She sighed. “Fine, I promise you, I will not speak to him that way again.”

“That was quick. Out of curiosity, why do you care what I think? I’m not your boss.”

“Because this is the biggest case in the state right now
, and I think you can solve it.”

“And you want to be there when I do
. Is that it?”

“Girl’s gotta have ambitions. Do you know how hard it is for a female to rise in a police department? Any police department, much less the locker
room of Vegas Metro? I need any advantage I can get. When I heard Orson was bringing you in, I asked to be assigned to you.”

“Why? I can’t do anything differently than Jay or Javier.”

“That’s bullshit, and we both know it. I looked you up. I’d actually looked you up before this case. Orson talks about you more than you know. He thinks you’re psychic.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he thinks you are, and he’s throwing everything he has at you to solve this.” She pointed to the file. “That guy was one of the richest men in Nevada. His allies in the legislature, the mayor, and even the governor have called us, asking about the case. They’ve lost out on a big donor, and the estate’s been handed over to his son, who’s not doling out anything until the murderer’s caught. Like it or not, this is gonna be as high-profile as it gets.”

“I’ve never cared about that.
That’s not why I’m here. And I don’t need your help.”

“Yes
, you do. You just don’t know it.” She stood up. “I have connections that Marty doesn’t have—that even Orson doesn’t have. You’re gonna need ’em. Let me know when you’re ready.” As she walked out, she spun to look at him. “Sorry to hear about your divorce.”

“Thanks.”

After she was gone, Stanton turned to the file on the table. Inside it was the sum total of two lives that had been extinguished in mere minutes. Stanton would have to comprehend that madness in a way that made him sick; he would recreate what the killer had done and feel what he’d felt. When working cases, he had insomnia at best and outright manifestations of physical ailments at worst. He had thrown up blood, been constipated, ran fevers of over one hundred degrees… each case took a piece of him that he never got back.

He was going to know this madness, but first
, he would have to know Daniel and Emily Steed.

8

Stanton lifted the Steed file and felt its weight. The hotel was quiet at this time of day
, and all he could hear was the shower running in another room. He tucked the file under his arm and headed out the door to the casino.

He stood at the edge of the slot machines for a while
, watching the faces of the gamblers. Some were young, but most were old, probably before their time. They were playing a losing game that was rigged against them from the beginning, yet they still maintained hope that somehow, some way, they would win against fate. A person might be able to defeat chance, Stanton thought, but no one couldn’t defeat fate.

He went to
a Japanese restaurant up on a platform, a sleek design of black and red, and sat at one of the booths over the casino floor. He ordered an orange juice and a J roll of sushi then opened the file. The first few pages contained a brief bio issued by the company Daniel Steed had founded.

Daniel Steed came from a generation that Stanton
hadn’t been sure existed anymore. He was born in Jackson, Wyoming, to David and Bethany Steed. David was a miner, and Bethany was a homemaker for Daniel and his five siblings. He’d earned average grades in school, but when he was twelve, he went to work in the mines. He saved every penny he made for five years, and when he was seventeen years old, he struck out for California. He got as far as Las Vegas before the Vietnam War broke out.

The file said that
Daniel had served two tours in Vietnam, and that was the only mention of his time in the war. Stanton had seen similar silences on many occasions. Most Vietnam veterans refused to speak about their experiences.

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 & 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.

F
or 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.”