Strip Search (7 page)

“Half-nude, dumped along a roadside in Adams County. The sheriff’s report came in a couple days ago, but it went to Missing Persons. Our copy came in today.”

“The same m.o. as Annette Sheldon?”

“It looks like it.” Axton sipped. “Which means that your buddy Kenneth Sheldon isn’t such a hot prospect anymore.”

“Maybe there’s a connection—it’s worth checking out. Where’d she work?”

“Foxy Dick’s.” Max handed Wager a small pile of papers. “Here’s what the Adams County Homicide people came up with.”

Wager leafed through the Xeroxed sheets, scanning the less important information and spending more time on the narrative sections. The only witness was the man who found the body. There were the medical examiner’s reports summarized, a coroner’s report, a responding officer’s brief report. It was a spotty dossier, and Wager did not recognize the investigating officer’s signature.

“I hope it’s not a loony,” said Axton.

This victim’s name was Angela Sanchez Williams. Twenty-one years old, divorced, one child. She had danced at Foxy Dick’s for six weeks. Before that, she had worked as a cocktail waitress at a restaurant out at Stapleton Airport. She had no known enemies; she did have a boyfriend, Brad Uhlan. He had a confirmed alibi. She left work and didn’t arrive home. Her mother, who lived with her and baby-sat for the child, reported her missing early the following morning. However, no results on the Missing Persons bulletin came in until five days later when a body matching Williams’s description was found by a mower crewman along County Road 44, northeast of Denver.

“It does sound familiar,” said Wager.

“Don’t it though.”

The medical reports offered little more than the cause and approximate time of death; the body had lain too long in the sun to determine rape or assault, and the internal organs had decayed. Given the lack of clothing, however, and the probability that the woman had been killed elsewhere and tossed beside the road later, the presumption was rape and murder.

“Anything on NCIC?” asked Wager. One of the services of the National Crime Information Center was to list crimes with a similar m.o.

“Ross sent a query this afternoon, but no reply yet.”

Nor would there be for a while, and the crime’s characteristics were so common nationally that whatever did come back would probably be useless. Wager scanned the list of telephone numbers pressed beneath the glass top of his desk, then he dialed the Adams County sheriffs office. A quiet-voiced man answered.

“This is Detective Wager, Homicide, DPD. I’m calling about that shooting death out on County Road 44. Is Detective Lee on duty?”

“Yes, sir, I know the one you mean. But Lee’s not here. He’s our Homicide man, but he won’t be in until around eight-thirty, Detective Wager.”

“Thanks.” He hung up and shook his head at Axton’s inquiring glance. “Have to wait until morning.” Axton grunted. “Let’s go look for Pepe the Pistol.”

They turned the watch over to Munn and Golding at eight. As usual, Munn was a few minutes late coming on, just as he would be a few minutes early going off. Every minute away from this job, he once told Wager, meant an extra day of life for him. But he was too close to retirement to quit now. It was a race, he said, chewing on a chalky tablet, between retiring and dying, and sometimes he thought dying would be a hell of a lot easier in the long run.

Golding came into the stale office like a brisk whiff of after-shave lotion. “Gabe! Christ, you look sick, man!”

“I’ve been on duty eight hours.”

“And drank a gallon of coffee and filled your belly with pure crap. No wonder you look green.” He pulled a magenta sheet from his vest pocket. “Look here”—he unfolded it and slapped it on the desk like a high card—”this is it! This is the real thing. Biofeedback was good, but it used a machine. This is one hundred percent organic, and it works!”

The bright sheet of paper had a Navajo design of some kind at the top and in flowing script below said “Aura Balancing.”

“What the hell is ‘Aura Balancing’?”

“The electromagnetic field that surrounds the body. Everybody’s got one—it can even be photographed. This guy balances your aura for you. Look at Max there—you can just look at him and tell his aura’s pretty good.” Golding squinted. “But I bet it could use a little tune-up. But you, Gabe. Christ, you’re really turbulent!”

“Golding—”

“No, read it now. It really works, I’m telling you. Right here.” He pointed to a hand-lettered paragraph which explained that a turbulent or unclear aura gave one a turbulent and unclear relationship with the world. Aura Balancing through dialogue and through action of the Light (a pure force of spiritual energy) would clear the aura; negativity, judgments, and disturbances held in the aura would be released. All a person had to do was drive up to Boulder once every three months for an adjustment session.

“I’m supposed to give this man fifty bucks every three months so I won’t make judgments? What kind of cop would I be then?”

“Well, he means prejudgments—you know, prejudices and things that don’t let you see the world as it really is.”

“Right—Boulder’s just the place to see the world as it really is.” He stood and pulled on his sport coat. “I’m off duty, Golding. See you tomorrow.” As he went past the personnel board and flipped the slide by his name, he heard Golding shift targets, “What this guy does, Max …”

He was off duty, but he didn’t go back to his apartment. Instead, he swung his black Trans Am into the last half of the morning rush hour and nosed his way through the tangle of downtown streets blocked by the flashing lights and boarded sidewalks of constant construction. Even in depression or recession or stagflation or whatever bad times were called now, Denver kept putting up more office towers and buying up more residential and retail blocks around the downtown core. A few scattered groups were making efforts to preserve some blocks for homes and apartments, but the pressure of big money was always there, and gradually winning. His old neighborhood, Auraria, was long gone; street after street of frame houses that had been home and kinfolk and shortcuts through neighboring backyards as familiar as his own, all were gone. In its place a university sprawled—a collection of factorylike buildings as ugly as they were cheap. The whole downtown, following the same path, was becoming an area no one could grow up in: crowded and uncomfortable by day, blank and cold at night. And on weekends the empty streets were dotted here and there with straggling tourists who showed their uneasiness in the face of all the dark, locked doors. If a city had an aura, then Denver’s must be totally maladjusted—torn between the commuter life of nine-to-five, and the rest of the day, which was dead. Even the Colfax strip, with its drifting filth, was better than being dead, and Wager could understand the need of those who returned night after night to the busy lights and constantly moving feet, even though they did not like the pimps and pushers who jostled them. They were turning their backs on a dying city.

He guided the low-slung car onto I-76, angling northeast. Now, most of the traffic was going in the opposite direction, and he could focus on trying to outstare a sun that made the concrete glow like copper against his eyes. Gradually, the highway swung farther north and the glare lessened; he pushed the accelerator closer to the floor and felt the car hunker a little nearer to the pavement. The road arced gently through an unending series of bedroom communities punctuated by glittering shopping centers where only a few years ago wide harrows had carved the heavy earth. Billboards flashed smiling families or gigantic split-level homes nestled under trees that the bare prairie never had. Other signs offered creative financing that anyone could afford if they were willing to sell themselves to a bank for forty years.

The only thing Wager was willing to sell himself to was his job, as his ex had gradually discovered after many tears and angry words. In fact, that very phrase was hers. He didn’t think of it as selling himself; he was his job—he was what he did, which was the thing Lorraine could never accept. Maybe some of these people felt the same way about those split-level houses. Maybe those forty years of payments was what they were. Maybe they were really happy to fuss over a different paint scheme every decade or so, to drop their sweat all over the skinny saplings that they scratched into the hard clay, to quarrel with their neighbors about the kind of fence that separated their kingdoms. Maybe they were busy and happy making a neighborhood, one that would not be scraped away like Wager’s own. But he could not escape the feeling that these were one-generation neighborhoods, that their roots were far shallower than those of old Auraria.

Well, theirs was the choice, what choice they had. Wager was very seldom surprised anymore at the ways people claimed identity. Or, for that matter, snuffed out the identities of others. Right now, it just felt good to know that none of these homes or struggling trees or growing families anchored him to a tiny square of earth. He was glad he was not buried before he was dead, and he found deep satisfaction in the wind tugging through the open window against his hair and the sound of its restless boom against his ear. It felt good to floor the accelerator and leave behind eight hours of stuffy routine, to follow the spread wings of the gold eagle traced on the hood in front of him. True, he was taking his work with him; but that was okay—his work was what he was—and the thirty or so miles to the Adams County sheriffs office went quickly in the mindless relaxation that lonely driving often brought him. He did not once think of the words “team concept.”

Detective John Lee greeted him with a reserved smile and an offer of coffee. Somewhere in his mid-twenties, the man’s mustache was more neatly trimmed than Wager’s, and he had the habit of tugging his shirt cuffs from the sleeves of his blue herringbone jacket. Then he would hunch his shoulders and the cuffs would suck back in again. Wager didn’t know the man but he knew the type: three or four years in uniform, possibly in a department back East. Maybe another year as a detective; more likely, given his age, Lee joined the sheriff’s office right out of a patrol car, seeing it as one step up the long ladder to becoming a police captain by the time he was thirty-five. Wager had heard that, because of the rapidly growing population in Adams County, the sheriff’s office was upgrading its staff. Promotions came quickly when that happened.

“I’m not sure what more I can tell you, Detective Wager. I sent a report over to you people last week. It’s all there.”

It was never all in a report, and that report wasn’t too good in the first place. But that wasn’t what Lee was telling him. He was saying he did not want another lawman poking around in his homicide. Good murders were hard to come by in Adams County, and the successful solution of this one would make a nice entry in an ambitious cop’s personnel file.

“Maybe if you told me about the crime scene,” he said. “Maybe something didn’t get into the report.”

“My report’s complete, Wager. And this is an ongoing case.” Which meant that the notes and evidence which usually held the real information were hidden from any eyes except the detective assigned to the case.

Wager sipped at the thick mug of coffee. A gilt seal on its side said Adams County Sheriff’s Department and reminded him that he was a guest, which was next to being a civilian. In Denver, the sheriff’s main duty was to assist the court in the care and handling of prisoners and to serve papers; in the unincorporated areas of outlying counties, the duties had to include all the other areas of law enforcement, whether an agency was capable of them or not. “We have a similar homicide, Lee. Maybe you got a flier on it: Annette Sheldon, exotic dancer. One round to the back of the head, suspicion of rape. It happened less than a week before this one.”

Lee shook his head. “I might have seen the report. I can’t remember.”

“It looks like the same m.o. It’s possible that a special metro unit will be formed to take over the investigation of both homicides.” That was unlikely. Metropolitan task forces were expensive and unwieldy, and the casual murders of a couple of nude dancers wasn’t important enough politically to squeeze the effort and money out of the state attorney general’s office. But Lee was new; he might not know that. “Our district attorney’s talking about it. Naturally, the senior man would come from DPD.”

“The body was found in Adams County!”

“But it’s possible that the crime originated in Denver—she was probably abducted after work, in Denver County.” And in Colorado, the origin of the crime dictated the responsible agency. Wager gave him the option: “If we work together, of course, then the DA probably won’t see the need for a task force.”

“You think it’s the same killer?”

“I don’t know. You haven’t told me anything yet.”

Lee didn’t look happy as he felt his case start to slip between his fingers. But he finally shoved back from his imitation wood desk and pulled open a file drawer. Lifting out a dark folder, he laid it open in front of Wager. The photographs showed the body facedown on a bed of weeds and buffalo grass. It was a half-disrobed female, and very dead. That was all one could tell from what was left.

“No identifiable tire tracks or footprints?”

“I checked all that personally. We found what might have been tire tracks, but we couldn’t get an impression—the scene was too old.”

Wager leafed through the colored glossies and noticed, without saying anything, that the sequence of photographs showed minor disturbances in the evidence: in one photograph there was a cigarette butt; a similar shot later showed it was gone. Another pair of photos taken at different times revealed that the victim’s head had been moved. The crime scene, in short, had been violated before the photographic record was complete, so none of it would be worth a tiddly-fart in court. “What about the cigarette butt?”

“Nothing. It was older than the crime. I told you, Wager, everything I found is in the report.”

“Where’d you work before coming here?”

Lee’s dark eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Newport Beach, California. Why?”

“I thought it might be back East. DPD gets a lot of applicants from there.” Wager had heard some gossip about Newport Beach and its PD—the kind that warms the laughter-filled coffee breaks at three in the morning when patrols gather for their fifteen minutes around a café table. It was a playground for the rich, a tourist trap where little was spent on nonessentials such as police training. The department hired walk-ins because they were cheap, issued them badge and pistol, and told them to go out and bust tourists to keep the city treasury solvent with fines instead of tax money. Maybe it was to Lee’s credit that he wanted to move away from an outfit like that. But poor training always showed up, and now Adams County would be the worse for it.