His caresses on her upper thighs became more directed, and he let his hand slip between her legs. Her hips thrust against his fingers. “Make me come again,” she told him.
But he had hardly begun when muffled electronic music began playing in Serena’s discarded jeans. She groaned, and they both laughed. Stride found her cell phone in a rear pocket and handed it to her.
“This is Serena.” Then, a moment later, “Cordy, your timing sucks.”
He heard a voice on the phone talking at a rapid clip.
“Slow down, Cordy,” Serena said. “What the hell are you saying?”
Although he couldn’t make out the words, he saw Serena’s eyes, as she listened, light up with intense interest.
“Are you sure it’s him?” Serena said into the phone. “If you’re wrong, we’re going to look like fools.”
Stride heard the pitch of her partner’s voice rise. Cordy was sure.
“I’ll be damned,” Serena said. “All right, get someone to watch the place, but don’t roust him. See what he does. I’ll fly back tomorrow.”
Stride felt his breath leave his chest, leaving only a tight ache behind.
“Good work, Cordy,” Serena said. “I’m sure you and Lavender will find a way to celebrate.”
Serena flipped down the phone.
“We may have been searching in the wrong city after all,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“It turns out that Christi—Rachel—had a boyfriend. Cordy found a photograph from the club where she worked. The guy was in the background. He recognized him.”
“How?”
“We know the guy,” Serena explained. “Except now he looks more like Howard Hughes. It’s the same old drunk desert rat who owns the trailer where Christi’s body was found. And that sure puts a new spin on the ball.”
“He kills her and simply dumps the body behind his own place?” Stride asked.
“This guy doesn’t exactly have all his cereal in one bowl, at least when he’s been drinking. If he was dating Christi, and she dumped him, it could have sent him over the edge.”
“So he goes to her apartment to try to convince her to take him back,” Stride speculated. “She tells him to take a hike, and he drops a vase on her head. He brings the body home, dumps it, and then ties one on.”
“It’s possible,” Serena said.
Stride shook his head. “But what about the ATM receipt? The connection to Duluth?”
“Maybe I was wrong,” Serena said, trying to put the pieces together. “Maybe Duluth is a red herring.”
“You weren’t wrong,” Stride insisted. “There’s something else going on.”
Serena leaned over and kissed him with cool lips. “Come with me.”
“What?”
“You were in at the beginning, Jonny. You deserve to be there when it all ends. Even if it turns out this guy didn’t kill her, he must know something. Let’s go see him together.”
Stride got up out of the sand and began gathering their clothes. “All right,” he said. “But there’s something I have to do first.”
She knew. “Talk to your wife?”
He nodded.
“I feel responsible,” Serena said.
“You’re not. I am.”
He didn’t dread the idea of divorce the way he had for so long. Andrea had already opened the door. Now he would walk through.
“We may find the answer tomorrow,” Serena said.
Stride wasn’t so sure. He knew there was a mystery in Las Vegas, but he didn’t believe for a minute he would find the truth there. The truth would still be here in Duluth. Waiting for him to come back and find it.
46
During the three years of their marriage, Stride and Andrea had carved out Saturday mornings for themselves. They had remained faithful to that except for the few weekends a year when Andrea visited her sister, Denise, in Miami. Even when he was in the middle of an investigation, Stride tried to keep Saturday morning free. Usually, they drove to Canal Park for breakfast overlooking the lake and brought along the paper to read over coffee. Or they jogged a few times around the high school track and rewarded themselves with pastries at the Scandinavian bakery. Those times, more than any other, he felt like they were husband and wife.
But here he was, on Saturday morning, packing for a flight to Minneapolis and then on to Las Vegas. It was like broadcasting an alarm. Andrea got the message. She stood in a corner of the bedroom, her arms folded, her jaw set in a pinched, unhappy line. Much of the anger she had first sent his way, upon learning of his trip, had dissolved already into bitterness and hurt. She didn’t want to hear his explanations, and he had few to offer.
“Don’t do this,” she murmured, not for the first time. “Don’t walk away from me, Jon.”
Stride shoved a few pairs of socks into the end pocket of his duffel bag. “I have to do this.”
“Oh, come on,” she snapped. “This isn’t your problem anymore. Why can’t you just let it go?”
What could he say? He owed it to Rachel to uncover the truth. She had haunted him for years, and he wanted to unravel her mystery once and for all. But there was no denying to himself that he had another motive left unspoken. He also needed to know where his relationship with Serena was going. Because his marriage was over.
She seemed to read his mind. “You’re leaving me. I’ve been there before. I know what it looks like.”
He stopped packing. “Okay. Maybe I am.”
“That’s how you deal with this?” Andrea demanded. “By running away? For months, we’ve been like strangers. For days, you’ve hardly come home, never called. Where the hell were you last night?”
“Don’t go there,” he said.
“Why not? You think I don’t know about you and Maggie?”
“There’s nothing between me and Maggie. I’ve told you that before. I’m not talking about this.”
“If we talked, we could work it out,” Andrea insisted. “Goddamn it, all you can do is shut me out. I’m telling you not to go. I need you to stay here.”
In his mind, he could hear Maggie warning him years ago. “I know. But you don’t love me. You never did.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Don’t pretend,” he told her. “I’m done with pretending.”
Andrea was defiant. “I’m asking you to stay here and work this out.”
He heard the implicit message: You’re my husband. Do this for me. He wanted to make her happy, but he had been trying and failing for years.
“I’m sorry. This is something I have to do.”
Andrea gasped, putting a hand over her mouth. “You want a divorce, don’t you?”
He closed his eyes. “Don’t you?”
“No!” she insisted. “No, I don’t want that. I would never want that!”
“But you’re not happy,” Stride said. “I’m not happy. There’s only one answer here.”
“We can fix this if you’ll just stay and work with me, but all you can talk about is going away.”
He took her hands in his and shook his head. “We can’t fix this, Andrea. It’s going to be better for both of us if we make new lives. And I think you feel that way, too.”
She whirled away from him in anger, her blonde hair falling across her face. She squeezed her hands against her head, her eyes wild. From her dresser, she grabbed a bottle of perfume and threw it against the wall, where it shattered, filling the room with a sickly sweet scent. Andrea stared at the glass sprinkling the floor. It seemed to transport her. She seemed to be somewhere else entirely.
Stride put an arm around her shoulder. She shrugged it off.
“Just go,” she told him.
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyes were fierce. “No, you’re not. You’ve already decided what’s important to you. If it matters so much to you, then just get the hell out, and go. I hope you get what you want. And when you find it, I hope you ask yourself why you wanted it so damn bad.”
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47
Stride was on the highway by the edge of the wilderness. It was the chase dream again, where he was running after a girl he couldn’t find, but this time, after pursuing her along the trail and hearing her laughter luring him on, he did find her. He found Rachel in the middle of a clearing, dead in a ruby pool of her own blood. Surrounding her, looking down at the body, were Cindy, Andrea, and Serena. All of their hands were stained in red.
“Who did this?” he shouted.
Each of the women, in turn, raised a finger and pointed at him.
He started awake.
Serena was next to him, reading the airline magazine. She looked at him. “Bad dream?”
“Sort of. How did you know?”
“You called out Rachel’s name.”
Stride laughed. He rubbed his hands over his face and through his hair, trying to escape the fuzzy feeling of waking up. “Did I really?”
“No. I’m teasing. You just looked like you were somewhere you didn’t want to be.”
He leaned over and kissed her. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”
Stride could feel the plane descending. He craned his neck to look out the window, but their seats didn’t allow a view of the city. He saw only a bright glow suggesting an enormous source of light somewhere nearby. As they touched down, he could see little in the darkness but the guiding lights of the taxiways. When the plane turned toward the terminal, however, he caught a glimpse of a shimmering gold tower, angled toward him like a boomerang.
“That’s Mandalay Bay,” Serena said. “Amazing, huh?”
As they exited the plane and made their way inside the gate, Stride stopped, assaulted by the flood of color and neon that flashed everywhere. He couldn’t help but smile, thinking of Serena in the quiet Duluth airport, comparing the terminal to the spectacle here in Vegas. It was another world.
In the baggage claim area, he noticed a man detach from the crowd and approach them. Serena gave the man a quick hug.
“Jonathan Stride, this is Cordy Angel, my partner.”
Stride shook his hand. “That was a terrific break, making the connection between the body and the boyfriend.”
“I am an extraordinary detective,” Cordy said, winking.
“A lucky bastard is more like it,” Serena said.
Cordy turned to Serena. “We’ve got trailer-man staked out. He left earlier this afternoon and drove to the liquor store. Got himself stocked with more gin. Then he went home, hasn’t moved since.”
Serena scowled. “Shit, that means he’ll probably be incoherent tomorrow. I wanted him to have at least one foot in the real world.”
“I don’t think he spends a lot of time there.”
“Well, we can always sober him up at the station,” Serena said. “How about the warrant? You got that?”
Cordy nodded. “We can go in and tear the place apart. But I’ve been there. It ain’t going to be me going through that pit of a trailer.”
Stride interrupted them. “Did you find out any more about this guy’s background with Rachel? Or Christi, I guess I should say.”
Cordy smoothed down his slick black hair. “Nada. His so-called shop is unlicensed. Lavender only saw him once and said Christi never talked about him. He’s one of those Vegas drifters, came from nowhere, going nowhere.”
“Well, he had to come from somewhere to land a girl like Christi,” Serena said. “We’ll head out with a team first thing in the morning. Can you drop us off at my place?”
Cordy raised an eyebrow. “Whatever you want.”
Stride deliberately didn’t meet Cordy’s stare, which was probably an admission of guilt as far as the other cop was concerned.
“You ever been to Vegas?” Cordy asked.
Stride shook his head. “First time.”
“A Vegas virgin,” Cordy said, chuckling.
Stride sat in the back seat of Cordy’s PT Cruiser, staring out the window agog at the parade of mammoth casinos on either side of Las Vegas Boulevard. Cordy didn’t want to take the Strip, but Serena insisted, to give Stride a view of the city. They were stalled in bumper-to-bumper Saturday night traffic, crawling between Tropicana and Flamingo. On his left, Serena pointed out, was the Monte Carlo. On the right was the Aladdin. Up ahead was Paris, then the Bellagio, then Bally’s. The size of each property overwhelmed him.
He couldn’t believe the heat. When they stepped out of the airport, it hit him in the face like a fire, sucking oxygen from his lungs. It was night, but the temperature still hovered near ninety. He could taste desert grit in his mouth with each breath. Fortunately, Cordy had the air conditioner at full power, and it was now cold enough inside the car to make him shiver.
“Greatest city in the world,” Cordy said proudly. “Who’d want to live anywhere else? This is the tops, man.”
“People live here?” Stride asked, only half seriously.
“Now, now, Jonny,” Serena murmured. She glanced back over the front seat and winked at him.
“You know what makes this town tick?” Cordy asked, as he pounded the horn at a limousine cutting in front of him.
“Oh, shit, not the breast thing,” Serena said.
As if he hadn’t heard her, Cordy explained, “Las Vegas is all about breasts, man.”
Stride laughed. “What?”
“Breasts! It’s true. You see more breasts in this city than anywhere else on earth, okay? That’s what makes it special. That’s what gives Vegas its character. It’s not gambling, it’s not drinking, it’s not eighty million hotel rooms. It’s walking down the street and having all these breasts quivering like Jell-O in front of you. All shapes. All sizes. Spilling out of everything they wear. Cotton, Lycra, nylon, bikini, tankini, halter, I don’t care what, you know? Just so long as it’s tight or see-through or shows lots of skin or lets you see their nipples, they’ll wear it. Women come here so they can show off their breasts, and all the men walk around so horny they can’t see straight.”
“Cordy’s something of a sociologist of tits,” Serena explained dryly.
“Am I wrong? You tell me if I’m wrong.”
Serena didn’t have a chance to reply. Three women in their twenties, two blondes and a brunette, ran through the stalled traffic in front of them. The brunette passed closest to Cordy’s cruiser, and Stride’s eyes were drawn instinctively to her chest. She wore a low-cut T-shirt, from which her breasts overflowed. Cordy honked the horn and gave her a thumbs-up. The girl stuck out her tongue at him and wagged it lasciviously.
Serena sighed. “I didn’t say you were wrong.”
“Uh-huh. Good thing, mama. The only reason this town can put so many strippers through college is that all of the men are so wired from watching the rest of the girls, they’ll pay anything to see what’s underneath.”
Serena just shook her head.
When they passed Flamingo, traffic loosened slightly. Serena pointed out the next wave of mega-resorts, stretching from Caesars at the southern end to the Stardust in the north. As they passed the Mirage, the resort’s street-side volcano exploded into action, cascading columns of water, steam, and fire into the air before a crowd of gawkers. He had never seen a city that pulsed with life the way Vegas did. The sensation was electric, watching the streams of people flowing in and out of the casinos and jostling to cross the street. Cordy was right: There were loose, jiggling breasts everywhere, plus the smell of sex, cigarettes, and money.
Even so, Stride noticed that the glitzy aura of the Strip faded quickly the farther north they went. Instead of expensive casinos catering to high rollers, he noticed porn shops and massage parlors, bars with nickel video poker signs, and motels with burned-out neon signs. The crowds of tourists on the sidewalks thinned; most of them were smart enough not to explore these neighborhoods. He saw hookers on every corner, grinning at them from behind garish lipstick and dyed hair. Several homeless people slept in doorways.
“No volcanoes here,” he murmured.
Serena shook he
r head. “We call this the Naked City. And that’s not a breast joke. You’ve got the Stratosphere tower, but all around it, there’s more drugs and murder here than anywhere else in the city.”
After another mile, they turned off the Strip on Charleston, leaving both the casinos and the Naked City behind them as they headed west. Out here the town looked like any other inner-ring suburb, with strip malls, discount stores, and chain restaurants. They reached Serena’s town house complex in less than ten minutes. The gated community was a beehive of bone white, two-story stucco buildings with bright red roofs. Serena waved at the guard, who opened the electronic gate and let Cordy’s Cruiser slide in. Cordy, who was obviously familiar with the grounds, navigated a bewildering maze of intersecting roads and driveways, pulling up to a unit at the far back of the complex.
“Home sweet home, mama,” he announced.
Stride and Serena recovered their luggage from the trunk. Heat radiated from the pavement. The stiff, dry breeze out of the mountains offered no relief. Stride felt the urge to wipe his brow, but he realized the arid landscape was too dry even for sweat.
“Let’s meet here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” Serena told Cordy. “Alert the search team to meet us at the site at ten.”
Cordy winked at Stride. “You sure you want to stay here? We could hit some clubs I know.”
“Good night, Cordy,” Serena said.
“But hell, mama, how can you let him stay in your boring town house? It’s his first time in the city. The man deserves to have some fun.”
“He’ll have fun,” Serena told him.
48
Morning sun streamed in through the vertical blinds in Serena’s bedroom. Stride, long since awake, watched Serena sleep.
She lay on her stomach. Her hair fell loosely across her face. Her arms were tucked under the pillow, leaving the swell of her right breast visible where it pressed against the mattress. Her back sloped downward to the valley at the base of her spine, then rose again at her buttocks. She had one leg under the sheet and one leg above it.
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