I returned to the lobby, surprised to see two uniforms, both female, standing near the intake desk chatting with the receptionist. In unison, they turned to look at me and then looked back at the receptionist, who nodded. They were here for me.
“We’d like to take you down to the station, ma’am,” said the blonde one, a tall statue of a woman in her midthirties. She had one more chevron on her uniform than the other officer, a fuller-figured spark plug with short jet-black hair that had obviously been dyed. Neither one looked overly happy to have me on their docket that afternoon.
“It wouldn’t be my first time at the station,” I muttered, following them out the door.
“You got a record?” The shorter one asked. I figured she thought I was a prostitute.
“No,” I said. “I’m a PI.”
They both stopped hard in their tracks and wheeled around. The blonde, whose tag said her name was Fischer, gazed at me with her piercing blue eyes. “You pulling something here, ma’am?”
I shrugged innocently and reached in my purse to find a business card. I handed it over to Fischer.
“Raven McShane,” Officer Fischer muttered, handing it to Officer Schwartz who looked at it and frowned.
“I’ve heard of you, I think,” she said, looking at me funny. “You the one who proved Cody Masterson was innocent?”
I smiled and performed a small curtsy, hoping we could speed this along and get into the air-conditioned squad car.
Fisher looked at me curiously, as if the light bulb had gone off inside her head, too. “Oh, I just knew he wasn’t guilty. He is so gorgeous, isn’t he?” She swooned.
Schwartz, who was less impressed, rolled her eyes. “Let’s get this over with,” she said, cocking her head in the direction of the car.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The officers were quiet on the drive back to the police precinct station, which was less than a mile from the hospital. Their radios blasted loud snippets of unintelligible information, which they studiously ignored, and I sat mum in the back wondering why police communication radios seemed to be stuck in the 1940s.
The officer manning the front desk nodded curtly at Officer Fischer and ignored Schwartz. He eyed me with a look somewhere between apathy and idle curiosity. They had to check me in, so I showed him my driver’s license number which he wrote down with pencil on a large ledger. Again with the 1940s technology.
The two officers escorted me to a back room, which was very bright despite having no windows. Schwartz asked if I needed coffee, which I accepted, and then they both disappeared. In the ensuing boredom, I whipped out my phone and caught up on Words with Friends where all six of the people I was playing were beating me. That was particularly sad, I thought since my opponents consisted mostly of ex-strippers, cocktail waitresses, and an elderly relative I hadn’t seen in fifteen years.
A new face appeared at the door, although “new” is being too kind. He was in his fifties, dressed in a hangdog, white, short-sleeved shirt with a wife-beater V-neck showing through from underneath, and his face had been through the wringer more than a few times, his nose looking like he’d gone a few rounds with Evander Holyfield. Through the gruff lines, bushy eyebrows, and hanging jowls, though, there were kindly blue-gray eyes trying to peek out. He said his name was Detective Vince Goss. It was just the two of us.
“So, you’re kind of famous, you know that?” he began, a little shyly. He was stirring a little packet of sugar into his Styrofoam cup of coffee, which I guessed would be his ninth cup of the day. I thought maybe, just maybe, there was a hint of a blush on his face.
“That’s what Officer Fischer said, but really, it was nothing,” I said, referring to my first big case. Earlier that summer, I had proven that the most famous murderer in Vegasâa former star of a huge male revue showâwasn’t actually a murderer at all. Instead, he proved to be a flamboyantly flaming playboy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. In fact, his wife had framed him for the murder. The case had made all the papers and the local news, and I’d been getting business ever since.
“Nothing?” he protested. “We were all convinced he was as guilty as O.J.”
“Well, the men were convinced of that,” I corrected him. “The women, not so much.”
He smiled knowingly. The common wisdom had been that Cody Masterson had been acquitted because he was simply too good-looking to imagine sending to prison.
“Anyway,” he coughed. “This is serious stuff we’re talking about here, Raven. Start from the beginning, if you would.”
I slurped at my coffee, which I had been fully prepared to spit out in disgust. It wasn’t nearly as awful as I’d imagined, so I slurped down some more, took a deep breath, and told him about the case I was working on and why I’d gone to see the Rev. Owen Clavette that afternoon. I even told him about how I thought the secretary hadn’t liked me, a point he dutifully scribbled down in his report. But of course, he was most interested in how I’d felt. Had I tasted anything funny in the coffee? Was the effect immediate or delayed? What did I remember about my last few conscious minutes?
I wasn’t too helpful, except for the fact that I was pretty sure Clavette hadn’t actually touched me. They wouldn’t be able to get him on assault charges, Goss explained, unless I remembered more than that. But they could get him for drugging me, which was a Class C felony.
“Which means what?” I asked. We had covered the various kinds of felonies in my night school PI classes, but champagne and wine had flushed all that information out of my brain long ago.
“Which means a five-year mandatory minimum but more likely ten years in the big house. And that might be just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, lowering his voice a half octave.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, in my experience, a guy like this⦔ He paused, taking a sip of his coffee. “This isn’t gonna be the first time he’s drugged somebody, if you know what I mean. He didn’t just wake up one day at the age of forty, or whatever he is, and say, ‘Today’s the day.’ This guy has done it before, I guarantee it.”
I nodded. “I think you’re right. I actually had the sense that the secretary might have known what was going on. Almost like she could have been the lookout, you know, to make sure no one interrupted.”
He cocked his head sideways as he scratched that little tidbit down on his sheet. “Interesting theory. How long you been a PI?”
I smiled. “Couple of months. Mostly, I’m a stripper.” No reason to hide it, I figured.
“I bet you make a killing,” he said quietly with a bashful smile. It was a compliment.
“Pays the bills, but I’m trying to get out of it. Too many creeps.”
He nodded knowingly. “No offense, ma’am, but most people in your line of work end up either strung out, broke, or dead. Not a lot of upside there. Still, there are a lot of creeps in this line of work, too.”
Tell me something I don’t know, I thought, but he was nice, so I kept the sentiment to myself. “Is there anything else?” I asked.
Goss made a show of examining all his paperwork and then shook his head. “Not on our end. The tox results will be back soon, and then I’ll get in touch with you.”
“Got it,” I said, standing up. We shook hands, and he showed me out a side exit.
As I was leaving, it occurred to me that I had no car. “Actually, Detective, two officers drove me here, so⦔
“Ah, yes,” he said apologetically. “You’re the one who went to the hospital first,” he said, ushering me back inside. He left me in a hallway for a few minutes and then returned, accompanied by an officer who couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. Apparently, his rookie duties involved chauffeuring victims around town to pick up their automobiles.
He and I made small talk on the way back to the hospital, but he wasn’t all that interested in my case or why I’d been at the police station. It made sense, I supposed. To me, it was a big deal to report a crime, to be a victim, but to him, it
was just another day at the office. I thanked him and fired up the Porsche, resigned to fighting rush hour traffic to get home.
The only upside was that I didn’t have to work that night. After being drugged by a creepy guy, I was in no mood to be friendly to the male sex, and so work would have been a waste of time anyway. No man would ask for lap dances from someone who was snarling at him.
After dinner, I found myself pacing nervously, checking the door repeatedly to make sure it was locked. I began wondering what I would do if I was in the reverend’s position. He had half completed his crime, and now there was a half victim out thereâmeâ who might turn him in to the authorities. That could make him do something crazy, something to harm me. On the other hand, I wondered if he might still be focused on completing the act he had started. Creeps like him often didn’t worry so much about getting caught. They simply wanted to commit as many sordid crimes as they could. Either way, I didn’t feel completely safe.
My insecurity compounded itself. As I paced around, calmed only a bit by an oversized glass of wine, I began having second thoughts about my new career choice. This wasn’t the first time I had feared for my own safety, and it was getting old. I simply wasn’t charging enough money to account for the danger, and, at that moment, I couldn’t even imagine what hourly rate I’d need to charge to make it worthwhile. Danger was one of those things that didn’t have a price.
Shocking as it might seem, I wasn’t in the mood to drink myself into oblivion and crash on the couch in front of a bad chick movie. What I really craved was some female companionship, but I didn’t exactly have a contact list bursting with options. Chalk another one up to my job, I thought. Detective Goss had been rightâmost of the girls who strip for a living end up in bad shapeâand I never made any close friendships with them. Except for Rachel, my casino heiress friend, a girl I’d helped out of a big jam a few months earlier. I reasoned that being friends with one heiress was the equivalent of being friends with ten nonheiresses.
I texted Rachel but didn’t hear anything back. She was AWOL. And then it hit me. If I couldn’t spend time with a woman, I could call upon the next best thingâa gay man.
“Are you busy?” I asked after Cody Masterson answered on the first ring.
“Not at all. You know me. I’m like a little old grandma over here,” he said, chuckling.
“Are you sober?”
He sniffed. “Define sober,” he said.
I sighed, feigning exasperation. “So I should go over there?”
“Bring popcorn,” he said excitedly.
I called down to have my car readied for me, stuffed an overnight bag full of necessities and popcorn, and headed downstairs on the elevator. The coast was clear, and so were the roads. It was only about seven thirty, but Las Vegas was dead on that Monday night. I arrived at Cody’s McMansion within fifteen minutes.
His smile told me everything I needed to know. Cody was a “partaker,” as they say, a guy who enjoyed himself a good joint every once in a while, which is to say pretty much every evening that I’d known him.
The only problem with hanging out with Cody was his looks. He was a guy who, until a few years ago, had made a living dancing around on stage for screaming, lust-addled women. And now, since he spent half of every day in the gym, I had little doubt that he could have unretired and gone back to that life. But since he had little interest in women, visiting him was a little like going to a candy store without any money.
We spent the night with some films noir, starting with The Postman Always Rings Twice, followed by The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I never saw the end of the movie. I have vague memories of being carried up to bed, of fighting it a little bit, but when I woke up in the morning I felt more refreshed than I had in a long time. As usual, Cody had let me use his amazing king-sized bed, which was officially the most comfortable bed in the universe, while he’d slept in a guest room.
It was eleven before I finally rolled out of bed, which gave me hope that there had been word from the police about my blood test. But my phone was a blankâno calls, no messages, no emails that weren’t trying to sell me something or trying to steal my personal information.
Cody was a big believer in protein, so our breakfast was a spread of sausage and eggs with some fresh melons and pineapple on the side. And coffee, lots of coffee. I wondered if Cody ate like this every day, and I decided the answer was yes. The man owned part of a casino and could have had a personal chef make everything, I thought. The coffee tasted like it had been brewed by his own personal barista.
“What is this?” I asked, holding up my coffee mug.
He flashed a knowing smile. “Hawaiian Kona. You like it? That’s the real stuff, flown in every week from the islands. Not that crap they sell in the big stores.”
“I’m on my third cup,” I said.
After chowing down on sausage and eggs, I told him the details about the previous day, about being drugged and winding up at the police station, and when I was done, it was impossible not to smile at how cute Cody looked when he got angry. His blond hair was perfectly coiffed, and his tanned skin formed a pleasing contrast with his silky white bathrobe.
“I should go find that asshole and beat the crap out of him,” he said, referring to Rev. Clavette.
“That’s tempting,” I said, chuckling at the image. “But the cops are handling it.”
“When do you get the blood tests back?” he asked, gnawing on a pineapple slice.
“Today, hopefully,” I said.
This was our fourth or fifth sleepover, I reflected, still savoring the Hawaiian Kona. We’d always done it at his place, mainly because it was so huge and because he had a movie room. And because he never seemed sober enough to drive over to my place. It was a life of pure decadence, attractive and enticing in small bits but ultimately unfulfilling. A lot like Las Vegas itself, come to think of it. The armchair psychologist in me reasoned that was why Cody resorted to smoking up most evenings. It was a conversation I would have with him at some point, but not then. I wasn’t feeling preachy enough.
We parted ways with him promising not to take the law into his own hands, which aroused another few giggles on my drive home. He was certainly strong enough to beat the pulp out of somebodyâhe could crush Clavette between his abs. But he was such a playboy, a soft-hearted bon vivant, that the image of him pummeling someone in a fight was downright comical.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My buzzing phone jolted me out of a nap, an unplanned zonkfest that had me splayed out on my couch in a manner that pinched just about every nerve in my body. Luckily, the phone was on the coffee table next to me, so I didn’t need to move much to pick it up.
It was Detective Goss.
“We’ve got a hit, Raven. You were right,” he said.
“Huh,” I muttered noncommittally. My brain was still shrouded in sleepy fog.
“You okay?” he asked. I must have sounded worse than I thought.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled, “I was just taking a little nap.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, sure you were.â
“Hey, I had kind of a rough night,” I protested.
“No need to explain,” he said. “I know the feeling. Anyway, I assume you’re OK if we go ahead and get this thing moving, right?”
“Meaning what?” I asked, still shaking off the slumber.
“Meaning, we take this to the DA, who will begin the process of filing formal charges. Your blood tested positive for roofies, and that’s pretty strong evidence.”
“Yeah, let’s go. I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said.
“Most people haven’t. It’s not fun. I’m not gonna lie. But it’s the only way we can stop guys like this. We need the victims to cooperate.”
“Okay. Whatever you need me to do,” I said, stifling a yawn.
After I hung up, a sense of uneasiness began spreading through my body, hitting my stomach in particular. I
t was reality finally hitting me, I figured. I had spent a carefree, frolicking night with Cody, and that had simply delayed the inevitable realization that what had happened to me was very serious and that it would launch a major criminal investigation. With me as the starring witness.
I could immediately see how women backed out when faced with that reality. Criminal cases took a long time, and then there would be an appeal, and in the meantime, the defendant had a hold on you, an outsized role in your life that would prevent you from ever experiencing “normal” again. But I knew what Owen had done, and I wasn’t about to let him get away with it.
Here we go, I thought. Welcome to your new life. Raven McShane, Victim. It didn’t have a very nice ring to it.
I realized I’d have to call Dan and tell him that the investigation was off, that as soon as this news hit the fan, everyone in the parish would know who I was. Under those circumstances, I’d never be able to uncover where the missing money went. Even so, I had a suspicion that Clavette was involved in some way. Was it being used for hush money to keep other victims quiet? There were also rumors that he wanted to build an even bigger megachurch, too, and maybe he was dipping into a number of extra sources of cash to fund that project, an undertaking that would make him an even bigger deal than he was. And those suits he wore looked like the wool was spun from the wings of angels. How did he afford all that on a pastor’s salary? And what, exactly, was a pastor’s salary?
My stomach finally settled down enough for me to make lunch, after which I did some food shopping to take my mind off things. After reading a tip in a magazine, I resolved to always do my shopping after a meal so as to avoid the temptations that an empty stomach makes irresistible. No chips or cookies for me, just solid foods I could multipurpose, like eggs, greens, olive oil, nuts, and cheese. We’ll see how long that lasts.
My phone rang while I was in the checkout aisle. It was a woman named Tricia Kohlman from the Clark County District Attorney’s Office. It was hard to give her my full attention since I was busy placing my stuff on the conveyer belt and then swiping my credit card, not to mention remembering to use my grocery rewards card. But the gist of it was they wanted me to come in that afternoon to be interviewed by one of their investigators. Tricia herself would be handling the case if they filed charges. They were moving fast, I thought to myself. I agreed to come in. She told me I could bring a friend for support if I wanted, but I declined, chuckling at the idea. Whom was I going to bring? Carlos? Cody? Mike?
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 11