Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  Stripped

  Brian Freeman

  In this stunning follow-up to Brian Freeman's remarkable debut novel, Immoral, Detective Jonathan Stride discovers that there are only two ways to go in Las Vegas. You can hit the jackpot. Or you can get Stripped…

  They looked like isolated cases: a hit-and-run and a celebrity murdered during a fling with a prostitute. No one could ever imagine they'd be linked to a brutal crime in Las Vegas 's steamy past-and that the race against the clock to corner a determined serial killer would stir up secrets long thought buried with the dead. As detectives Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial are called separately to investigate, they have no idea what they're stepping into: a world where desperate ambition rules and loyalties know no bounds, and where their own uncharted emotions and sexual desires will reach an explosive conclusion.

  Shocking, twisted, with edge-of-your-seat suspense, Stripped pushes the limits of its heroes and keeps the reader turning ever page until the last plot twist.

  Brian Freeman

  Stripped

  The second book in the Jonathan Stride series, 2006

  For Marcia

  Must crimes be punished but by other crimes,

  and greater criminals?

  – LORD BYRON

  PROLOGUE

  S he slipped the robe off her shoulders, and the white silk gathered in a pool of accordion folds at her feet.

  Her naked body became a riot of color, bathed by the neon sign that towered over the rooftop patio. Giant letters spelled out the name SHEHEREZADE above her in flashes of green and red. The light spilled across her skin and painted psychedelic graffiti over the urns, fountains, and date trees that decorated the terrace like a Moroccan palace.

  The city lived on light. Garish signs illuminated the valley, but their names told the truth of where they were. The Sands. The Dunes. The Frontier. Outposts in the middle of nowhere. Sanctuaries from the dust and sun.

  Where the neon glow didn’t reach, the roof of the She herezade was dark, like the black desert lurking on the fringe of the Strip. She didn’t study the shadows. She didn’t see the man waiting for her there.

  The luminous blue water of the swimming pool invited her. She had showered after her performance, but the heat of the dance lingered, and she yearned for the cool shock of the water. With nothing on but her high heels, she glided along the marble skirting to the end of the pool. Hot, gritty wind blew across her body. She kicked off her stilettos and stepped onto the diving board. She sliced the water as gracefully as a mermaid, then sidestroked leisurely to the shallow end. When she stood up, water dripped from her breasts. She ran her fingers through her wet black hair.

  This was paradise. She was meant to live like this.

  Very soon, she would be able to live like this anywhere in the world. No more sweaty showrooms with chorus line amateurs. No more playing the harlot in the closet. She had made the decision to escape months ago. Tonight was the last night. Tomorrow she would be free.

  She wondered if she would miss it-the power she felt onstage, the hunger in the men’s eyes as they screamed her name. “Amira!”

  Amira Luz. The Spanish beauty with the dark skin and teasing eyes. Her hair lustrous and long. Her nose sharp and angled like a blade. Her flesh full of sensuous curves. Amira Luz-goddess of the Sheherezade.

  Yes, she would miss it. This was Las Vegas, where everything was sexy. Sinatra’s voice. The diamonds on a woman’s neck. Even smoke from a freshly lit cigarette. She could sashay through the casinos and hear whispers trail behind her. Here, she was a star. Once she left the bright lights behind, she couldn’t come back. But she wasn’t going to be a prisoner anymore.

  A loud splash startled her. Her heart pounding, she turned and saw a creamy form knifing toward her under the water. She was frozen with fear, and then, relaxing, she grinned. He had arrived early to surprise her. She felt a surge of desire and anticipation, thinking of their making love in the pool.

  “You little shit,” she said play fully, as he emerged out of the water in front of her, solid and strong, naked like she was.

  But it wasn’t the face she expected to see. She knew him. He leered at her every day in the casino. A horny boy who wasn’t worth her spit.

  She knew why he was here.

  Amira stumbled back and started to scream, but he was on her in an instant, his hand clamped over her mouth, his other arm snaking around her waist. He jerked her squirmy body against him. He took his hand from her mouth, but before she could shout, he kissed her hard. Under the water, she kicked furiously, trying to dislodge him, but his legs were rooted to the tiled base of the pool. He lifted her effortlessly. She felt his erect shaft drag along her stomach.

  First, rape, she realized.

  And then murder.

  Their mouths parted. She sucked in a breath and screamed for help.

  “Shout all you want,” he told her, laughing. He ripped his arm from around her back and threw a stinging slap across her face, cutting off her cry. She tried to wriggle away, but he grabbed her again and shoved her whole body under the water. She felt his knee worming against her stomach, and then he jerked it upward, compressing her lungs. Her mouth opened involuntarily, water rushing in. Air bubbles leached from her nose. Thrashing, panicking, she tried to lunge above the surface, but his hands held her in a vise.

  There would be no freedom for her now, she knew. She would always be a prisoner.

  Her wide-open eyes burned with chlorine. Through the distortion of the water, she saw the man’s scrotum hanging like a huge pod, inches from her face. She had enough play in her arm to reach out and grab it, and as she tightened her grip and twisted, she dug her long, elegant nails into his testicles as if she were piercing a grape.

  His animal wail carried to her ears through the water. He reared back, releasing her. She burst up with a splash and took several long, labored breaths, feeling the hot summer air rush back into her lungs. Her assailant was clutching his genitals and cursing. Furious, she laid both hands on his chest and shoved. His heels spilled out from under him, and he splayed back, landing flat on the water. Amira dove past him. She swam for the edge of the pool.

  Behind her, she heard him scrambling to regain his balance. She felt his fingers scratch her leg as he clawed for her. Her left hand grazed the smooth marble, and she laid both palms flat on the tile, pushing herself up. She tried to pull her leg onto the skirting, but her foot slipped, and she lurched back into the water.

  Quickly, Amira grabbed for the tile again, but she wasn’t fast enough.

  He was right behind her.

  He spun her around. She saw his eyes, contorted into dark little dots of fury, with a dirty stare that traveled from her face down to her full breasts and below the water to the black triangle between her legs.

  “You won’t be fucking anyone tonight,” she said, smiling at death, spitting the words at him.

  “Neither will you,” he hissed, his voice filled with malevolence.

  He yanked her long hair from behind, snapping her neck back. With a hand around her throat, he drove her skull into the sharp edge of the marble, where the bone split with a sickening crack. An electric charge erupted behind her eyes, agony flooding into every nerve end. Then, as quickly as it came, the pain was gone, and she felt nothing at all. Her body was sinking, sliding, twisting, her limbs as powerless as a marionette’s. She stared peacefully at the night sky overhead and the fiery glow of the neon sign as the water closed over her face. It was her last glimpse of the city, living on light, dying on light. Her body corkscrewed down toward the deep end. Clouds of red trailed behind her. By the time she hit bottom, she was far away, on a wooden stage somewhere, her feet thundering to the flamenco beat as the crowd cheered.

  “Amira!”

&
nbsp; PART ONE. AMIRA

  ***

  ONE

  Elonda scanned Flamingo Road with the practiced eyes of a turkey vulture, lazily circling the desert landscape and hunting for prey. She spotted her quarry a half block from the Oasis casino and sized him up.

  He was tall and tan, like a surfer washed up in the city, with wavy blond hair that hung below his ears and wraparound silver shades. Young, maybe twenty-two. He wore a loud, untucked short-sleeve shirt with the buttons done wrong, a loose-fitting pair of white shorts, and dirty sneakers with no socks. His cocky walk told her he had money in his pocket. He wore sunglasses at night, and she knew that behind the shades his eyes were on the hunt, too, just like hers.

  His head swiveled in her direction. He saw her and grinned.

  Her cop radar wasn’t going off. Cops didn’t walk-they pitched the girls from inside their unmarked, air-conditioned sedans. Only the newbies fell for them.

  Elonda sauntered across the wide street, raising her hand to stop the speeding cars and flashing the drivers with her white teeth and a jiggle of her breasts. There was plenty of traffic at one in the morning. The city operated on jungle rules: Feed under the cool cover of darkness, and find a patch of shade to sleep through the hot days.

  On the opposite sidewalk, she ducked into the doorway of a magic shop. She pulled a bottle of K-Y from the back pocket of her jeans and squirted some on her fingers. Sucking in, she squeezed a hand inside her skin-tight pants and lubed up. She did a little dance, rubbing it in. A trick of the trade. Oh, I am so wet for you, baby. Although most guys weren’t looking to pole her these days. They were too afraid of AIDS or too klutzy to get inside her standing up. So they went for the mouth music.

  With the grease between her legs, Elonda flipped her hair back and listened to the rap of the multicolored beads dotting her cornrows. She tugged on her feathered pink tube top until the black crescents of her nipples peeked through. Finally, she popped a wintergreen mint onto her tongue. Another little trick. Guys loved the cool burn of the mint in her warm mouth.

  She eased back onto the sidewalk and scoped out the street, looking for competition. No, she was alone, just her and the bad boy. The lights of the Strip shone like fire across the freeway. On this side of 1-15, where casinos spilled over from Las Vegas Boulevard like popcorn out of an overflowing box, the Gold Coast and Rio shimmered on the north side of the street, and the Oasis tower loomed a block away. Where she was, though, Flamingo was dark, nothing but an empty lot and the old cinder-block magic shop butting up to the street.

  Elonda leaned her shoulders against the shop window, her hips jutting out, and casually nibbled on one painted nail. Letting a slow smile creep onto her face, she turned her head and drank him in. He was headed right for her, his feet trampling on nudie brochures littering the street. No hesitation. This wasn’t his first time.

  As he got closer, her eyes narrowed. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. He wasn’t a regular-she hadn’t done him before. Maybe she recognized his face from one of the tabloids. Behind the shades, it was hard to tell. But Elonda studied him long and hard, because a celebrity paying for sex from a Vegas hooker might be worth some serious cash from someone.

  He stopped right next to her. “Hey.”

  His voice was young and carefree. Bored. Slurred.

  “Hey yourself.” Elonda reached out and slid a finger inside his shirt, making a circle on his chest. “Don’t I know you, baby?”

  “You ever been to Iowa?” he asked.

  A hick with a familiar face, she thought. Damn. “A lot of cows and corn there, right? And shit on your shoes? Nc thanks.”

  Elonda cast her eyes up and down the street, looking for Metro patrol cars. The traffic came and went-Hummers, limos, pickups, beaters-but there was no one who would hassle her. A block away, near the Oasis, she spotted a man standing by a bus stop, looking bored, checking his watch. In the other direction, no one at all. The coast was clear.

  “Suck or fuck?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, but stuck out his tongue and flicked it al her. She smelled gin wafting from his mouth. Elonda gave him a price, and he dug out two crumpled bills from his pocket. She used one of her ragged fingernails to nudge him backward into the doorway of the magic shop. Elonda got or her knees and unzipped him. She glanced up. His eyes were closed. She saw a couple of days’ worth of yellow stubble or his chin.

  She began counting in her head. That was her little game, something to pass the time, like the office workers who listened to their iPods while they typed all day. One, two, three, four. No guy had ever made it to one hundred. Most didn’t make it to ten.

  He took a few seconds to stiffen-that was the gin, she figured-but she worked her magic, and his body responded She heard a low rumble in his throat, a purr of pleasure. When she glanced up from her work, she saw that his mouth had fallen open.

  Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four.

  He was already close. She could feel his hips moving, starting to thrust, and she sucked harder and moved her head faster.

  Thirty-nine.

  Elonda heard something clip-clop nearby, the sound of heavy boots on the sidewalk. Someone was heading their way from the casino. She looked up again, but the farm boy was already on another planet, and he didn’t hear a thing. Clip-clop, clip-clop. She didn’t really care. She got peeped all the time and heard the shocked whispers from people who secretly wished she was on her knees in front of them. If he looked their way, let him enjoy the show.

  Forty-five, forty-six. The farm boy was getting ready to blow.

  The tapping of the boots came up directly behind her in the doorway, and then they stopped right there. Elonda heard a rustle of fabric and a strange metallic click. The john’s eyes were still closed, and he moaned loudly.

  It was creepy, that man standing behind her, watching them. She got a bad feeling. The hairs on her neck pricked up, and she knew he was still there, although she couldn’t even hear him breathing. She could feel his eyes. A cloud of menace engulfed her. It was the kind of sixth sense you got after enough time on the street.

  Elonda let the man’s shaft slip from her mouth. She bit her lip and looked up, but she wasn’t going to look back, not for anything. Immediately, the John’s eyes snapped open, his lips twisting into an angry scowl. Then she watched as he spotted the stranger behind her.

  “What the-”

  His anger became slack-jawed surprise. His eyes widened. She saw his face register disbelief.

  Then he didn’t have a face anymore.

  The loudest sound Elonda had ever heard detonated in her ears like the cap being blown off a volcano. The farm boy sprouted a third eye, and his head fell forward, so she could stare right at him and see up into the hole burrowed into his skull, a red river pouring out of it. As she watched, he crumpled into a pile and collapsed on top of her, pinning her to the ground. Blood streamed over her, rippling like worms across her skin and seeping into her clothes. She smelled urine and shit as his bowels evacuated.

  Finally, Elonda remembered to scream. She closed her eyes and unleashed a screeching yell that went on and on until she ran out of breath. No one seemed to hear. None of the traffic stopped. All she heard was the sound of footsteps again, going away now, heading back down the street as casually as they had arrived. Clip-clop, clip-clop.

  TWO

  Fish out of water.

  Jonathan Stride tried to concentrate on Elonda, who was slumped on the sidewalk, her body and clothes painted in dried blood. She talked a mile a minute, and he tried to keep up with her, but his eyes kept glancing over her head into the window of the magic shop. There was a black box inside, with a glass fishbowl in one half, filled with water. In the other half of the box, a goldfish swam back and forth. Outside the bowl. Seemingly in midair.

  It was a hell of a trick, and Stride wondered how long a fish could survive in those conditions.

  He tried to slow Elonda down. “Take it easy, okay? We need your
help.”

  “You just get this bastard!” Elonda screeched, her arms waving, her cornrows clicking like poker chips. “Son of a bitch probably left me deaf. Sounded like a bomb going off.”

  Stride squatted down until he was eye to eye with Elonda, and he took one of her flyaway wrists firmly in his hand. “Stay with me now. We’re going to get you cleaned up, put you in some new clothes, and then you’re going to eat yourself silly at the Rio buffet, all courtesy of Metro. Okay? That sound like a deal? But I need you to give me some information first.”

  “I like the Harrah’s buffet better,” Elonda snapped.

  “Okay, Harrah’s it is. Now are you ready to talk to me?”

  Elonda pouted with her thick lips. She hugged her bare knees with her arms. Stride pushed himself to his feet and slid a notebook and pen from the inside pocket of his navy blazer. He wore the coat over a bone white, button-collar dress shirt and crisp new black jeans. Serena had insisted that he start the new job with new jeans, and he had finally relented, although he hated to abandon the fraying pair that had fitted his body like an old friend for the last ten years in Minnesota. The starched denim felt stiff, like cardboard, which was how he felt here in Las Vegas. A fish out of water. It was another universe compared to the midwestern world where he had spent his whole life.

  “The victim, did you see where he came from?”

  “The Oasis,” Elonda said.

  Stride eyed the casino and its slim, phallic tower. The hotel was hosting a Victoria’s Secret fashion show, and a slinky lingerie model thirty stories tall stared imperiously back from a huge vertical banner that stretched nearly to the Oasis roof. She had white wings, as if she might fly away and terrorize the city. King Kong with a D cup.