Stripped

by Brian Freeman

  Amanda sat down at a slot machine across from the security door and fed in a five-dollar bill from her pocket. The machine featured characters from some long-ago television show that Stride could remember watching when he was a kid in Duluth. He had an image of his bedroom window and of snow whipping past the glass.

  Stride leaned against the machine and impatiently shoved his hands in his pockets. He leaned down to Amanda. “So how did you get stuck with me?”

  Amanda took her eyes off the slot reels and gave him a suspicious look. “Excuse me?”

  “The lieutenant thinks I should be back in Minnesota shoveling snow,” Stride said. “You must have pissed him off to get stuck with a newbie like me who’s on Sawhill’s shit list.”

  Stride knew that Sawhill was just angry at the world. He used to get that way himself sometimes when he was a lieutenant, during those stretches when everything that could go wrong did. Sawhill had lost his favorite detective when the man won the Megabucks jackpot and retired instantly, eight million dollars richer. Then Serena went over Sawhill’s head to the sheriff to plug Stride, an experienced homicide investigator who just happened to be in town, available, bored, doing nothing but letting the city get on his nerves. And so Sawhill found himself with Stride crammed down his throat, and he had made it a point to make sure Stride knew that the lieutenant didn’t think he was up to the task of big-city crime.

  “Oh, now I get it,” Amanda said, half to herself. “I was wondering what you did to get stuck with me. Now it makes sense. Sawhill has it in for you.”

  Stride shrugged. “I like you fine. You seem smart. You’re something to look at, too. Seems like he’s doing me a favor.”

  “Not hardly,” Amanda told him.

  “Want to fill me in?”

  Amanda took a long look at him. “You really don’t know, do you? Serena didn’t tell you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You’re not just playing dumb-ass games with me?”

  “I haven’t been in this city long enough to play games,” Stride said.

  Amanda laughed, long and deep. “Oh, that’s good. That’s really good.”

  “Are you going to let me in on the joke?”

  “I’m a non-op,” Amanda said.

  “What’s that?” Stride asked, genuinely confused.

  “I’m a transsexual. A non-operative transsexual. I’ve had feminization surgery, and I take estrogen supplements to promote development of breasts, soft skin, the right weight balance, that kind of thing. But I decided not to undergo SRS to remove the genitalia. Got it? I used to be a guy.”

  Stride felt his face turn multiple shades of crimson. “Holy shit.”

  “So you see why I’m not exactly first in the rotation for potential partners.”

  He couldn’t help himself. He found himself glancing at the large breasts pushing out from Amanda’s T-shirt and then at the crotch of her tight jeans, where his imagination seemed to freeze. He realized he was staring and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “Want to see?” Amanda asked.

  “No!” Stride retorted, and then realized Amanda was giggling. “I’m sorry,” he added. “This really is perfect. Sawhill is sending me a message, you know. ‘Bet you don’t have any non-ops back in Nowhere, Minnesota, hey, Stride?’ ”

  “Is it going to be a problem?”

  Stride thought about it. He had lived his entire life, until a couple of months ago, on the shore of Lake Superior, in a city that was liberal about labor unions and health care and conservative about religion and sex, but he considered himself strictly nonjudgmental about anything that went on behind closed doors, so long as no one got hurt. He shrugged. “Like I said, you’re smart, and you’re the prettiest guy I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m a girl now. But thank you. Most of the others on the force, men and women, haven’t been so open-minded.”

  “I bet.”

  Stride had lots of questions for Amanda, but he wasn’t ready to ask anything that would make him look even more like a fool.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. Stride turned and looked up into the olive-colored face of a very tall man who wore silver sunglasses even in the middle of the night inside the casino. His black hair stood up, a flattop cut to a perfect oneinch height.

  “Detective?” he said. “I’m Gerard Plante, Oasis head of security.”

  Stride introduced himself, and Amanda stood up, doing the same. Gerard wore a navy suit whose fabric glistened under the lights. A burgundy handkerchief, embroidered with the Oasis logo, peeked out from his breast pocket. When he shook hands, his skin felt like the smooth leather of a hundreddollar wallet.

  “Let’s go in the back, shall we?” Gerard said.

  He guided them behind the security desk, and when the heavy oak door closed behind them, the din of the casino seemed to vanish magically, replaced by a calming white noise. No sound track. No electronic pinging. This was where the volcanoes and white tigers vanished, where it was about nothing at all except money, the river that never experienced a drought.

  Gerard led them into a vast office without windows, decorated in perfect taste and immaculate. He obviously wasn’t a man who believed in paper, because there wasn’t a scrap to be seen anywhere in the office, and his desk and credenza were both glass-topped with triangular steel legs and not a drawer in sight. Stride couldn’t pick out a smudge or fingerprint anywhere on the glass.

  Behind Gerard, on the credenza, was the largest computer monitor Stride had ever seen, sleek and chrome, more like a plasma TV. A sliding drawer suspended underneath the glass top held a keyboard, mouse, and joystick.

  Gerard motioned Stride and Amanda to two minimalist chairs in front of the desk and took his own seat in a black Aeron chair behind it. He moved with an arrogant grace. When he sat down, he inclined the chair, but his legs were long enough for his feet to remain flat on the floor. He carefully removed his sunglasses, folded them and laid them on the glass desk, and then steepled his fingers. His eyes were blue-gray underneath trimmed eyebrows.

  “I assume this is about Mr. Lane?” Gerard asked. He held up a hand before Stride could interrupt. “I sent one of my security men there as a liaison when we saw the police arrive. He kept me informed about the incident.”

  “Incident?” Stride asked. “One of your guests was brutally murdered less than a hundred yards away from your door.”

  “Yes. It’s very unfortunate.”

  “Because of all the bad publicity?” Stride remarked acidly, not sure why the man got under his skin. He had considered casino security himself for a day or so over the summer, but he decided he didn’t want to live in the lion’s mouth.

  Gerard smiled thinly. “Not at all. The sad truth is, Detective, that publicity only helps us. Our gross will go up for weeks because of the murder. If it were all about that, I would have shot him myself. No, Mr. Lane was a regular customer, and a generous one. We will miss him.”

  “Did you know MJ was in the casino this evening?” Stride asked.

  “Of course. Mr. Lane and Ms. Westermark arrived together around ten o’clock and were escorted to a private gaming room to play blackjack.”

  “Is this gaming room visible from the main casino floor?”

  “No. The guests who play there don’t wish to have an audience.”

  “Was it just the two of them, or were there others in the same room?” Stride asked.

  “It wasn’t uncommon for MJ to be part of a crowd,” Gerard said. “But tonight it was just the two of them.”

  “How long did they play?”

  “About two hours. Around midnight, the two of them left the gaming room to visit her suite.”

  “Did they go through the main casino to access her room?” Stride asked.

  “No, there’s a private elevator,” Gerard replied.

  “Did you watch them?” Amanda asked.

  Gerard didn’t blink, and his voice was like honey. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,
we both know you have a camera in that private elevator. So we can sit here while you find the video clip, or you can tell us that you got a call when MJ and Karyn were leaving, and you tracked them on the elevator on that nice big monitor back there.”

  Stride wasn’t sure if Gerard was the kind of man who ever sweated, but he had to believe there was a sticky film gathering on the back of the man’s neck. All three of them knew Amanda had scored a bull’s-eye.

  Gerard inclined his head slightly, like a politician conceding a point in a debate. “They were frisky,” he acknowledged.

  “But your valet told us that Karyn left early.”

  “That’s right. Ms. Westermark left her suite after five or ten minutes, alone. Mr. Lane followed a few minutes later. He looked agitated.”

  “We know Karyn left the casino,” Amanda said. “What did MJ do?”

  “He returned to the blackjack table and played for another hour. He was drinking heavily. Around one in the morning, Mr. Lane told me he was planning to take a walk. I got the picture.”

  “What did MJ talk about after he came downstairs?”

  “He mainly talked about Walker Lane, his father. It’s no secret to anyone who knows Mr. Lane that he and his father don’t see eye to eye. I don’t exactly get along with my father, either.”

  “Have you had any unusual troubles with casino security lately?”

  Gerard actually laughed enough to show a glint of teeth. “Unusual would be a day when we did not have something unusual, Detective. Casinos run on money, alcohol, sex, and emotion. I don’t have to tell you, it’s a volatile combination.”

  “But nothing involving MJ?” Amanda asked.

  “No. Our VIP patrons rarely cause that kind of trouble. They’re more like children who play too hard. Sometimes their toys break.”

  “We want to see some of the casino tapes from this evening,” Stride said. “Can we do that from here?”

  “Of course. But nothing odd happened in the blackjack suite, I assure you. And there’s no sound on the tapes.”

  Stride shook his head. “I don’t want the blackjack suite. I want the casino floor. If someone was following MJ, I want to know if he was in the casino.”

  Gerard was proud of his eyes in the sky.

  When he clicked a button on the mouse, dozens of thumbnail video feeds fanned onto his screen like cards dealt on a table.

  “We were among the first casinos to go all digital in our cam system,” Gerard explained. “Everything’s burned for permanent storage. No more swapping out hundreds of tapes every day. You win more than a thousand dollars at a sitting, we keep your face on file forever. And we can capture anyone’s face in the casino and run a comparative search against our database and the Metro and Gaming Control files in a few seconds. Some of our technical staff used to work for the Bureau.”

  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.”

  FOUR

  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.