Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  2

  The girl was standing across from Detective Cassie Shirdon’s apartment the same way she’d been the last four times—purple sweatshirt hood pulled loosely around her face, partly obscuring her features, head down against the rain. No umbrella or raincoat, just standing there in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt getting drenched. She was in her early twenties or late teens, and she was always alone. She never stayed more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes. She never looked around or seemed interested in her surroundings, although at four o’clock in the morning on a deserted sidewalk in a quiet residential area, there wasn’t much to be interested in. Only the insomniacs and the rain were up at this time.

  One more homeless kid with nowhere to go, Cassie thought, just like dozens of others in this town. After the girl had shown up the first time, Cassie thought about going down and talking to her, trying to get her some help. But the girl never stayed long enough—or at least that’s what Cassie told herself in order to drown out that other voice, the cynical one that said, “Why bother? So you get her into a shelter or a youth group, she’s just going to be back out on the streets again doing drugs or selling herself.”

  Cassie shook her head and sighed. The cynicism was one of the worst things about working homicide. It sneaked into the facts and files of every case, stared out at you from the faces of every suspect and victim, waited in the shadows at night to fill your head with rape and murder and suffering while your family sat placidly watching television or eating dinner, unaware or unconcerned with the horrors right on the other side of the door.

  At least Cassie didn’t have to worry about the family part. Despite what her partner thought, there were definitely advantages to being alone. But staring out the window at four in the morning at a homeless kid standing in the sheeting rain probably wasn’t one of them.

  In fact, her partner was part of the reason Cassie was up at four in the morning in the first place. When Cassie had finally made it into homicide, she’d been as unsure of herself as any rookie. She’d been partnered with Monte Martinez, a big bull dog of a man with a droopy, almost comical mustache and deep-water eyes that could go from soft and sympathetic to knife-edge lethal quicker than a jail house snitch flips his testimony. Cass knew how some cops felt about having a woman for a partner, and she’d been nervous as hell that first day on the job.

  But Monte had given her a quick glance and a nod and said, “Damn, I hope you wear a hat when we’re working nights. That red hair is like a spotlight on your head for any bad guys wanting to take out a brand new homicide detective.” Then he’d stuck out his hand, given her that hang-dog grin of his, and said, “Welcome to the boneyard shift.”

  After that, Cassie had known everything was going to be all right. And it had been, for almost eight years. But now Monte was in trouble, and Cassie had no idea how to help him out of it.

  The case had been straightforward at first. An eight-year-old girl named Molly Stratton told her teacher that her stepfather was a “nasty” man, and then made an adult reference no child should make. The teacher, who happened to have been high school friends with the little girl’s mother, decided to call Sherry Stratton before she called the cops.

  That decision cost Molly her life. Before police could even take a statement, the child was dead. After confiding in her teacher, Molly had come home from school and drowned in an apparent swimming accident in the lake behind the Stratton’s property.

  It took the police six months to put together enough evidence to prove the drowning was murder, and another three months for the District Attorney’s office to build an air-tight case against William Stratton. Before the case went to trial, Stratton confessed to multiple child rape and molestation charges, but continued to insist that his step-daughter’s drowning was an accident. The jury disagreed, and Stratton was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  That might have been the end of it, but a large part of the evidence gathered against Stratton came from a search of the family’s home computer. The search revealed thousands of images of child porn, including one that caught the eye of an ambitious prosecutor in the D.A.’s office named Jim Needham. The image showed a nude dark-haired woman that looked a lot like Sherry Stratton holding a nude child on her lap. If Sherry Stratton was complicit in her husband’s abuse, the police had to build a case against her, not the least because Molly hadn’t been her only child—Kayla, Sherry and William’s four-year-old biological child, was now living with her mother while her father sat in prison for abusing and killing her older half-sister.

  If that was Sherry Stratton splayed nude on a bed with a naked child on her lap—possibly her own—proving it became even more critical. The problem was, no one could make a positive identification of either the woman or the child, let alone prove it in court. But Jim Needham was going to try.

  Shirdon and Martinez had been assigned to the original murder investigation. It was just a happenstance of timing that Martinez had been the one stuck at his desk the day Jim Needham called. Shirdon had been testifying at another trial, so when Needham told Martinez that he needed someone in homicide to drive down to the state prison in Corcoran, California to interview an inmate named Daniel Kelso, Sherry Stratton’s former boyfriend and Molly’s biological father, Martinez was on his own.

  It seemed Sherry Stratton had a history with bad men. Her former boyfriend was in prison on a repeat offender sexual assault and battery charge. Needham wanted Martinez to take a copy of the image of the dark-haired woman and child with him to see if Kelso recognized his old girlfriend.

  “Recognize her?” Martinez asked. “No one recognizes her, Jim. Her face is half out of the picture, and the half that isn’t doesn’t tell us much. You know how hard our guys tried with all the latest facial recognition programs.”

  “True enough--but you see, it’s not her face I’m going for here. I was hoping an old boyfriend might be able to identify…something else.”

  “Like what? The bottom of her feet?” Then it hit Martinez exactly what part of Sherry Stratton’s anatomy an old boyfriend might be able to identify, which also happened to be the part most on display in the picture. “Ah, no…you’ve got to be kidding me, Jim. You want me to walk into an interview room with a career sex offender, pull out a photo that would make any decent man’s skin crawl, and say, ‘Hey, buddy, does this vagina look familiar to you?’”

  Needham laughed, even though Monte didn’t see anything funny about it. “It’s routine for sexual abuse cases to include either photographic evidence or witness descriptions of genitalia, particularly in cases involving children. It would hold up in court in a minute.”

  And that’s how Martinez had ended up driving twelve hours south to Corcoran State Prison, a sprawling desert city unto itself.

  In the interview room, Kelso took one look at the picture and laughed. “So you want me to take a look at some picture of my ex getting nasty with some kid.”

  Martinez already felt his jaw tightening up. “The ‘some kid’ in question might be your own daughter. You know, the one raped and killed by Sherry’s last scum bag.”

  Kelso suddenly curled his hands into fists and pounded them on the table. “I never laid a finger on that girl! I’m not even going to try to defend myself for some of what I’ve done, but I never laid a goddamn finger on that girl! I’d kill the sick pervert that did if I could get a hold of him—send him down here to Corcoran and I’ll take him off the tax-payers hands quick enough, believe me.”

  “I believe you, Daniel,” Martinez said, which wasn’t a lie. “That’s why I’m hoping you can help me get a little more justice for Molly. To help put away the people who hurt her.”

  “Like Sherry, you mean. I don’t exactly have a lot of love lost for her, either, you know. Women are heartless, eh?”

  Martinez slid a copy of the photograph across the table. “I know you can’t see her face that well, but do you recognize…anything about the woman in this photo? I mean…are
there any identifiable marks or features on her body that you recognize?”

  The greasy smile spread across Kelso’s face like an oil slick. “Looks like her, all right. Never could keep her pants on more than five minutes as long as some man came along and told her she was special.”

  “But is there anything definitive that makes you think it’s Sherry? Something that you could swear to in court?”

  “Oh, I can swear in court, all right,” Kelso said, letting out a string of obscenities to prove his point. “In fact, I could swear to about anything if there’s something in it for me.”

  Jim Needham had already made it clear that there was no deal involved for Kelso. Whatever he said had to be as strings-free as possible.

  “Just look at the picture, Kelso,” Martinez said. “It’s too late to save your daughter, but there’s another little girl out there whose safety might depend on whether or not the woman in that picture is Sherry Stratton.”

  Kelso held the picture close to his face. Then he started shaking his head back and forth. “Nope, nope, nope,” he said, laying the picture down on the table in front of him. “It ain’t her.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I can be sure because that chick in the picture doesn’t have the mole.”

  “The mole?”

  Kelso nodded, satisfied with himself. “That’s right. Like I already told you, I’d be more than happy to string that bitch up if I thought she had anything to do with hurting my kid. But it ain’t her in that picture. Sherry’s got this weird mole way up high on her right thigh, right next to her pussy there,” Kelso said, stabbing at the spot in the picture where the woman’s legs were splayed open. “It’s an upside down teardrop shape and then there’s this little tiny mole coming right off the tip, like another teardrop is about ready to form. Funny, I always said if Sherry got mutilated by a serial killer, that’s how I could always tell it was her body at the morgue. By that teardrop pussy mole.”

  On that charming note, Martinez left the prison and checked into his flea-bitten motel. Back at the station the next day, he wrote and filed his report of the meeting and sent a copy to the D.A.’s office. That was the last he heard of it until two days later, when Jim Needham called with the news that the D.A. was ready to charge Sherry Stratton with multiple accounts of child molestation and sexual exploitation of a minor. The photo was key to the case, and the affidavit of probable cause described the evidence as “one photograph depicting the defendant naked on a bed with a naked pre-pubescent girl in her lap.”

  Sherry Stratton was arrested and sent to jail. Due to the nature and history of the crimes, and the fact that she had a child in her custody, she was denied bail. Her daughter Kayla was placed in the care of Sherry’s maternal grandparents. Stratton’s defense attorney demanded to see the evidence against her client, which included the photograph. Stratton strenuously denied it was her. That same afternoon, her attorney filed a motion insisting on her client’s release and a dismissal of all charges.

  It had been over a year and a half since Molly’s death and seven months since William Stratton had been convicted of her murder. On January 30th, 2015, a hearing was scheduled to determine whether or not Sherry Stratton’s case would go to trial. Martinez was scheduled to testify, and during the pre-trial preparations, he learned that Jim Needham had, as the law demands, turned over all of the prosecution’s evidence to the defense. All except one item, that is—Detective Monte Martinez’s report of the conversation that had taken place between him and Daniel Kelso at Corcoran State Prison.

  Martinez had met with Needham at the Slammer and asked the bartender for “Number Eight,” the special table in the corner that was positioned in just such a way that no one could see or hear what was taking place there. A lot of cops that frequented the Slammer used Number Eight to sneak a date with men or women who were not their spouses, but the table had also heard enough “off the record” conversations through the years to provide a true-crime author with enough material to retire on.

  Martinez hadn’t wasted any time getting started. “Jim, I know you’re going to tell me there’s been some mistake and that you disclosed my report about Daniel Keslo to the defense. So, go ahead and tell me that, Jim, because otherwise, we’ve got a problem here.”

  Needham lifted up his pint of ale and pretended to search beneath his coaster. “What report?”

  “Goddamn it, Jim, I’m serious.”

  “Relax, Monte, I’m just kidding. Or at least, I’m partly kidding.” When Martinez’s expression didn’t change, Needham added, “I mean, for all you know, I never got the report. It’s a busy office, you know. Things go missing or get misplaced all the time. We never exchanged any phone calls or emails about the report, you may recall.”

  “Are you kidding me? When this goes to trial, it’s going to take about five minutes for the defense to find out I met with Daniel Kelso, and about five minutes after that to find out what we talked about. Stratton’s attorney is nobody’s dummy, Jim—hell, who should know that more than you? She’s probably already down at Corcoran, asking Kelso the same thing I did.”

  “And that’s perfectly fine. The key part of what you said is ‘when this goes to trial.’ But that’s the thing—we’ve got to make sure that it does, and we’ve got to make sure that Sherry Stratton stays in jail until that happens.”

  “And in order to do that, you’re asking me to lie under oath.”

  Needham widened his eyes and made like he was going to faint. “Of course not! I’m asking you to answer any questions about the photograph of Sherry Stratton—”

  “That’s the goddamn thing, though, Jim! There’s no proof that it is Sherry Stratton in the picture! That’s been the goddamn problem from the goddamn start!”

  “Keep your voice down, Monte,” Needham said, sipping his beer as cool as ever while Martinez leaked steam from his ears. “Has anyone ever told you that you swear like a drunken sailor?”

  “Yeah, my wife. All the time. But you’re not my wife, so you’d better start making some goddamn sense really goddamn fast.”

  “Listen, Monte,” Needham said, leaning forward and using that “we’re just two old friends having a chat” tone that worked so well on jurors. “You know and I know that it’s Sherry Stratton in that photo. Everyone knows it, despite what Daniel Kelso says. Not to be crude here, but it’s not like the woman in the picture isn’t rather, well, hirsute in the vaginal department.”

  “Rather what?”

  “Hirsute—hairy, shaggy. Bushy,” Needham added with a sly smile. “A mole could be pretty well hidden in that much pubic hair. Any juror could see that. And the photo is so grainy, who can say for sure about some tiny mole?”

  “Goddamn it, Jim.”

  “Listen, Monte,” Needham said again, dead-serious this time. “If her attorney brings up the fact that Sherry Stratton’s ex-boyfriend says it’s not her in that picture, it might be enough to get the charges dropped. At the very least, it might get her released on bail pending trial.”

  “Then how the hell do you think you can win a trial? The main piece of evidence is a blurry photograph that even Sherry Stratton’s ex-lover says isn’t her.”

  Needham paused, swirling the ale around in his glass. “Because child services are working with Kayla Stratton, the surviving daughter, right now. I don’t want to say too much yet, because it’s going to take time. Kayla’s scared and she’s confused—it’s going to take time and patience to get her story one-hundred-percent airtight.”

  “What story?”

  “In one of the interviews with a child psychologist, Kayla indicated that she might have walked in on William Stratton taking nude pictures of Molly. And that Sherry Stratton might have been in the room at the time.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘mights,’ Jim.”

  “I know it is. And here’s another one—we’ve still got thousands more photos from the Stratton hard drive to go through again. We only looked at a handful really closel
y, so who knows what else we may turn up? We’re almost certain there’s more we can get from Kayla about Sherry’s involvement in what was happening to Molly. That’s why we need more time.

  Look, no one’s asking you to lie under oath, Monte. As far as we know so far—”

  “You say ‘we,’” Monte broke in. “How far up does this go?”

  “Me. I say me,” Needham self-corrected. “As far as I know, the defense doesn’t know about your visit with Kelso yet. So simply don’t bring it up at the hearing. That’s all I’m asking. When they ask whether or not you think Sherry Stratton is the woman in the picture, just tell them the truth—that you can’t say one-hundred-percent.”

  “And later on? When all this comes out at trial? I have proof of when I sent the report, Jim. It’s going to be your ass on the line for withholding it, and now you want me to put my ass on the line for covering it up at a pre-trial hearing. Hell, maybe we can share the same jail cell and start a book club.”

  “You’re right, Monte. I am asking you to put your ass on the line, although I’m not leaving either of ours completely uncovered. I have been at this awhile, so I know a thing or two about ass coverage. The less of which you know about, the better, by the way. And even then, I’m only doing it because I know you’re a good cop. And I think—I hope—that you know I’m a good prosecutor.”

  Martinez did know that. A little too ambitious, maybe, and definitely too smooth for Martinez’s taste, but he’d never known Needham to be anything but ethical. “So why take the risk? Worst case scenario, just drop the charges without prejudice so you have the option of charging her again later on, when you have more evidence.”

  Jim gave Monte a smile, but there was nothing sly about it this time. “Only that’s not the worst case scenario.”

  “What do you mean?”