Ace High

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Pickett just shook her head. “Might be our first stump. Not much to go on.”

  He nodded. “Having that same feeling. Maybe it will change after breakfast.”

  “Things always do look better after food,” Pickett said, laughing.

  With that, she closed the file and went to get her jacket from her condo, moving through the large new archway between the two living rooms.

  Damn she loved this life and this job.

  And she was falling in love more and more every day with Sarge.

  How had she got so lucky?

  2

  December 4th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  Retired Detective Ben “Sarge” Carson stood beside Pickett as the long escalator took them up toward the Golden Nugget buffet. The sounds of the casino below were fading as the fantastic smell of eggs and bacon hit them halfway up.

  “Just realized I’m hungry,” Pickett said, turning and smiling at him.

  “Suddenly got the same feeling,” he said.

  The six-block walk from their condos had been easy this morning. The air had a good bite to it, but wasn’t cold enough to require more than their normal light jackets. The sky only had a few clouds in it and those were over the mountains to the west. It was going to be a beautiful December day that was for sure.

  The buffet was separated from the escalator area by a wall of plants and fake windows. The buffet itself was huge with at least seventy or more tables in three large sections. Everything was decorated in brown and brass tones. Not gaudy like many restaurants in Vegas.

  Comfortable, actually. And light, very light. That was one of the many reasons he loved it here. So many restaurants in Vegas thought dark meant mood lighting. He liked to see what he was eating.

  Huge windows let in a lot of light on the far side. Those massive windows looked out over a large pool that seemed to always be jammed in the summer. Along the windows was the most popular area for tourists to sit in. He and Pickett always sat on the far side of the restaurant, away from the tourists.

  All the regulars here did.

  Sarge remembered his days of lying around a pool, mostly with his wife and daughter when Steph was young and he was still a patrol cop.

  He had never been one for not moving and just being in the sun covered by too much smelly lotion. But those days watching Steph play and Andrea watching her closely were good memories.

  It was Sarge’s turn to buy breakfast, so Pickett went on in and to their normal table tucked back to the right from the entrance. All the staff knew them here since they were regulars, so before Sarge finished paying, two cups of coffee were on the table. He knew that would be followed by two glasses of water and two glasses of orange juice.

  It was nice having the staff know them.

  Sarge just headed from the cashier for the food, following Pickett.

  He got started his normal morning three-egg ham and cheese omelet made fresh for him, then while that was being done, he got some fruit and a muffin from the pastry area.

  He took the fruit back to the table, went back and got a freshly made waffle, covered it with syrup and then picked up his finished omelet.

  He really was hungry today.

  As he was sitting down, Robin arrived.

  Robin had been Pickett’s partner when they were both active detectives. They were known as the best detectives on the force. Sarge had heard of them far before he had gotten lucky enough to meet them after they retired. They had worked out of a different station than he did.

  Robin was solid, with shoulders like a swimmer, and always dressed in a nice blouse and dress jacket that covered her badge and gun. Her husband Will had the city’s largest private security firm. He protected some of the most famous people in the world when they came to Vegas.

  He and his people were amazingly good on computers and Robin was one of the best. In the cases they had worked together so far, he and Pickett had done the leg work while Robin did the computer work. Sarge liked that agreement.

  “Beautiful day out there, isn’t it?” Robin asked as she approached the table.

  “Better than most,” Pickett said as she put her plate of eggs and ham on the table.

  Robin dropped her coat and purse and the cold case file she had taken home in her spot, then turned and headed for the buffet sections while Sarge and Pickett both started in on their food.

  When Robin came back, they all ate and talked about the cats for a time and how they were doing with the new archway.

  Then, as Sarge was sipping on his coffee and his plates had been taken away, Robin got to the case.

  “Any ideas at all?” she asked, touching the thin brown folder that they had been given by Andor, the retired detective who was the connection between the Cold Poker Gang and the actual working detectives.

  “An unknown young woman found dead in a closed-up hotel,” Pickett said. “No idea how she died, what she was doing there, or even exactly when she died, let alone how she got into the locked and boarded up hotel.”

  Pickett just shrugged.

  Sarge shrugged as well. “I got nothing either.”

  Robin laughed. “We’re going nowhere on this one.”

  “But we’re getting there fast,” Pickett said.

  Sarge could only laugh and agree with that.

  3

  December 4th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  Pickett finally took out her notebook and opened to a fresh page. Sarge got out his small pocket-sized flip notebook, and Robin pulled out her notebook she always used. It seemed that good detectives never trusted their own memories for anything and over the years she had come to appreciate the habit of writing everything down.

  And bringing out the notebooks meant it was brainstorming time, even though none of them had any ideas at all.

  “So we start at where we could dig out something,” Sarge said. “Do we have DNA we could test run?”

  Robin nodded. “We do, but it was run 25 years ago, which means it wasn’t compared against much of anything at the time. I’ll see if Will can push that through, looking for any kind of family hits as well.”

  Pickett nodded. Having Will and his people run it against databases might actually get a hit and have it happen within a day instead of months through normal channels.

  “How about we take a run at the people who discovered her body?” Sarge said.

  “Two guys working the hotel furniture inventory,” Picket said.

  “I checked last night.” Robin said. “One is dead, the other is still alive. I got his address and phone number.”

  “That girl, from the photos, had been dead for some time, right?” Pickett asked.

  “No way of really knowing how long since the mummification of the body made it almost impossible to tell,” Robin said. “But clearly longer than a month or so.”

  “What happens if she was there when they shuttered and boarded up the place in August of the previous year?” Picket asked. That seemed to make sense considering what kind of heat it would take to mummify the girl.

  “Possible,” Robin said. “I’ll check in on who did the shuttering and what that entailed. Someone should have some records on that.”

  “Manager of the place at the time?” Sarge asked.

  “I’ll find out,” Robin said, picking up her phone.

  Pickett knew exactly what Robin was going to do. She was going to have Will or one of his people do some quick research and get back to her fast, so they could plan.

  “I need bread pudding,” Sarge said, standing and smiling at Pickett.

  “Me too,” Pickett said, standing to join him.

  “Make it three,” Robin said before turning to talk with someone on the other end of her call.

  The bread pudding in the Golden Nugget buffet was one of the highlights. Light, fluffy, sweet, and when the hot bourbon sauce was poured over it, an entire range of tastes came alive. One evening here
, when eating alone and feeling sorry for herself, Pickett had managed four large servings of just the bread pudding. And had thought about going back for five.

  That was before she had joined the Cold Poker Gang and met Sarge. She had never admitted that feat of bread pudding consumption to him.

  When they got back to the table, Robin was done with her call.

  “Will is finding out who was in charge of the shuttering of the Landmark and is running the DNA information.”

  They all sat there in silence, eating and thinking. Finally Picket came up with another idea.

  “Missing persons,” Pickett said.

  “They ran it at the time,” Robin said, nodding. “But again it was 1991. Our computers might get a hit now.”

  “Run it against missing girls from all over the country,” Sarge said. “We can narrow the list down from there.”

  “That’s going to be a lot of girls,” Pickett said. “They weren’t even sure exactly how old our victim was.”

  “I think getting the data would be worth the shot,” Sarge said.

  Pickett nodded. She agreed. It would be worth the search. And at this point all they were trying to do was catch any break at all.

  “Anything with her clothes or pack that I saw in that picture?” Sarge asked.

  Pickett opened up the folder at the same moment as Robin. There was nothing. The detectives at the time checked into that. Clothes and pack were all standard stuff that could be bought in any department store. And the poor girl had no purse or wallet or anything else that anyone could find.

  Then Pickett had another idea she was almost afraid to voice considering some of their past cases. “Should we look for anything similar? Other young girls found naked and dead and in that position?”

  Robin nodded. “We should.”

  “We should,” Sarge said.

  “We really should,” Robin said. Then she sighed and wrote it down in her notebook.

  The last thing any of them wanted was to find that pattern.

  The very last thing.

  4

  December 4th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  Sarge finished his bread pudding. The stuff was so good, so sweet, it was too dangerous to go for seconds. He had a hunch he could just keep going back for more and more if he let himself.

  He pushed the empty plate away before he made a fool of himself by licking it clean.

  “So one thing is bothering me,” Sarge said after letting Pickett and Robin finish their desserts as well. “Why was she naked?”

  “She wasn’t sexually molested in any way that was obvious,” Robin said. “But the mummification might have cleared anything not obvious out.”

  “Possible,” Pickett said. “But that photo didn’t have the feel of a sexual crime scene.

  Sarge and Robin both nodded. They had all three seen their share of those over the years. And Sarge had no desire to ever see another.

  But he had to tell them what he was thinking. “Am I being crazy, but the first thing I thought about when I saw that photo was that she was napping.”

  Pickett nodded and Robin opened the folder again to look at the photos of the scene.

  “To me,” Sarge said, “she looks like she took off her clothes to take a nap and just never woke up.”

  “If the Landmark had already been shuttered when she went into that room,” Pickett said, “there would have been no power or air conditioning, so that room in late August would have been an oven.”

  “The water was turned off as well,” Robin said, glancing up from the report.

  “So they couldn’t find anything that killed her because she died from excessive heat,” Sarge said. “But why would she stay in a room that hot?”

  That question bothered him more than he wanted to admit because he could only come up with a couple reasons, none of which he liked.

  “Maybe the door just got stuck and she couldn’t get out,” Pickett said.

  Sarge nodded. That was one thing he had thought about.

  “She was locked in there,” Robin said, softly. “I bet she was locked in there by someone. It says in the report that the workers had to pry open the door. No key worked.”

  Sarge nodded. That had been his biggest worry. If that was the case, this had gone from an unexplained death to a murder case.

  “Photos of the door?” Sarge asked.

  “In the master file,” Robin said. “Andor only brought the cold case file with the basics. I can access the master file online. I’ll get the photos and send them to you when I get home.”

  “So we have a major hotel with hundreds and hundreds of rooms sitting empty,” Pickett said.

  “And the entire mess caught up in court proceedings, so who knew how long it was going to sit there,” Robin said.

  “And someone knew that and got in there and locked that girl in that room for some reason,” Sarge said.

  He didn’t much like the idea, but it was a theory, which was more than they had on this case so far.

  “Another pattern to look for in a computer search,” Pickett said. “Evidence of use of shuttered hotels.”

  Sarge sat back, feeling a little shocked. There were always hotels and motels shuttered around this town. No one paid them any attention at all, it was so common. Sometimes the hotel or motel sat boarded up for years and years.

  “So we go talk with the surviving guy who found the body first, then we find who was in charge of shuttering the place,” Pickett said. “We have a plan.”

  “And I’ll get all these searches going,” Robin said. “Amazing how the three of us can scratch a hole into a completely rock-solid cold case.”

  “Assuming any of these ideas pan out,” Sarge said, standing and putting a tip on the table.

  “Buzz killer,” Robin said, smiling.

  “Well, that poor young thing had to get in there somehow,” Pickett said, putting away her notebook and standing as well. “And someone, somewhere has to be wondering what happened to her.”

  “So let’s see if we can give her and her family some closure,” Robin said, nodding.

  Sarge completely agreed with that.

  The three of them headed for the exit and at the bottom of the escalator, Robin turned toward the parking garage and Sarge and Pickett headed through the casino toward Fremont Street to walk home and get a car.

  Sarge had a gut sense this case was going to be a lot more than what it seemed.

  He just didn’t know what that would be.

  Part II

  Not Just Another Closed Hotel

  5

  December 4th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  Pickett laughed as she and Sarge entered their condo complex. They had decided on the walk back from the Nugget to call their combined condos “The Complex.” She kind of liked that, actually. With all the bedrooms and bathrooms and living rooms and kitchens, it felt like a complex.

  And they had started to talk about what they were going to do for Christmas, but had gotten sidetracked.

  Lying in the sun coming in through the massive windows of the main living room were three kittens. All of them were on the couch, all sound asleep. Two orange kittens were stretched out on their backs, feet in the air, one on each end of the couch and a black-and-white kitten was in the exact same position in the middle.

  “Can they get any cuter?” Sarge asked, shaking his head and smiling.

  “Probably yes,” Pickett said, laughing. “They are kittens.”

  “Good point,” Sarge said.

  Sarge went to use the bathroom as she called a guy by the name of Munro Kristin. He had been one of the two men to break into that room and find the girl on the bed. Now Munro Kristin ran his own gym.

  He told her he doubted he would have much to add after twenty-five years, but he did remember it like it was yesterday and would be glad to answer any questions they had.

  And he was free in thirty min
utes.

  Perfect.

  Ten minutes later, as they headed out the door, the kittens hadn’t bothered to move. Sometimes cuteness almost got too much, but she and Sarge were both laughing as they left.

  And that felt nice.

  She drove her white Jeep Grand Cherokee. She tended to do most of the driving and Sarge seemed fine with that. She liked to drive and he clearly felt relaxed while she was driving, so as he said, it was a win-win situation.

  It took her just fifteen minutes to get from the Ogden Condominium’s parking garage to the Fitness and More Gym near the university. The place was modern and felt light and very clean. A dozen people were using different equipment around the large space and a man with far too many muscles was behind the counter.

  He glanced up, saw them and smiled. Pickett was impressed. The guy clearly had a personality and liked people. And from the looks of the gray hair on his nearly-shaved head, he wasn’t young either.

  She introduced herself and Sarge and showed him her badge.

  “Call me Munro. And what can I do to help you with such an old case?”

  “Just trying to clean up some of the really old cold cases,” Pickett said, taking the lead. “Glad you don’t mind answering a few questions about it.”

  He shook his head. “Wish I could forget it. Seeing that dead girl on the bed has haunted me for all these years.”

  “Never saw a dead body before that?” Pickett asked.

  No wonder he could remember so clearly. Trauma of seeing someone dead often did that to a witness. Or they went the other way and blocked it out completely.

  “Still haven’t beside her,” Munro said. “Even in a funeral.”

  “So can you run back over what you did when you found the body?” Pickett asked.