“We were at the time,” Lott said. “Thanks, I’ll call Andor and get him on it first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll keep that angle in mind as well.”
He had just got Andor to pick up the phone when Rogers came out of the back wearing a clean white blouse and tan slacks. Her hair was brushed back and tied and her face looked like it was freshly washed.
She was amazingly attractive.
“You remember,” Lott said to Andor, “how we confirmed the identity of the body?”
Across from him Rogers’ eyes got huge.
“Clothes, driver’s license on the body was about it if I remember right.”
“That’s what I remember as well,” Lott said.
“You saying that might have been someone else?”
“This case is so strange, I don’t think we can rule out anything.”
“I agree,” Andor said.
Lott looked at Rogers. “You up for taking a look at the scene pictures and autopsy pictures?”
“Not a problem,” she said.
“Can you have the pictures waiting for us at the airport in Salt Lake in about thirty minutes?”
“I can’t,” Andor said, laughing. “But I’ll bet your daughter can get them right out of the computer file and fire them to you. Want me to call her?”
“Would you?” Lott asked. “We’re going to be in the air shortly and she knows my suspicion.”
“Where did this come from?” Andor asked.
“Elvis,” Lott said, laughing. “I’ll explain later. Just get that information on the way.”
“Autopsy results as well,” Rogers said loud enough for Andor to hear.
As Lott hung up and put his phone away, he looked at Rogers puzzled.
“He had a tattoo on his left leg. Always wondered what it meant.”
“What was it?” Lott asked.
“The letters KM in bright red and blue on his hip where no one would see them unless he was naked.”
Lott felt even more puzzled. “KM?”
“Kate McDonald,” Rogers said. “His only real wife. I just now put that together.”
“Sorry,” Lott said.
She waved him off. “Just go get changed so we can get this flight in the air.”
He nodded. She was as tough a detective as they came, he had no doubt about that. But he had no idea how she was standing up to all this. He doubted he’d be able to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
October, 2014
Salt Lake City International Airport
Salt Lake, Utah
IT WAS AFTER EIGHT in the evening Salt Lake time, seven Las Vegas time. Lott and Rogers sat on Doc Hill’s private jet, comparing notes, trying to figure out exactly where they should go next. April had brought them both glasses of iced tea and it tasted wonderful to Lott.
It had been a long day for both of them, and Lott’s feeling was that they should head back to Las Vegas as planned and get some sleep.
But they had decided to take thirty minutes and make sure of that decision before telling the pilots to go.
Plus, they were waiting for the files with the pictures from the autopsy and the warehouse to come in to make sure they were chasing the right murder.
Ruby Rocha, Stan’s Salt Lake wife, turned out to be deep in her faith when she married Stan for life and into the next life and forever, as her church believed. When he left, she had just waited for him to return.
That simple.
She had waited for twenty-two years.
She had done nothing else with her life, it seemed.
Tragic, very tragic as far as Lott was concerned. And he caught himself thinking that and wondering a little if he hadn’t been doing the same thing with how he felt about Connie. More than likely, he had.
Maybe it really was time, as Annie kept telling him, to move on. He could wait until the day he died and Connie would never return. He had to finally admit that. He didn’t want to, but he had to.
That fact was really hard to see when inside the feelings. Not so hard to see when looking at Ruby Rocha lying in a huge Hospice Care bed. She now weighed almost four hundred pounds and was being chewed up by all the problems associated with not taking care of herself medically at that weight. Plus she had a couple forms of cancer that had gone untreated.
They found her in an assisted living home and the nurse on duty had warned them to not upset her. She had very little time left to live. Maybe less than a month.
So they had decided to just not talk with her. There seemed to be no point. Stan Rocha, by marrying her, had killed Ruby just as effectively as putting a bullet in her brain.
So they had headed back to the airport, riding in silence in the cab they had decided to take to see Ruby. It seemed neither of them wanted to talk about her. Lott knew he sure didn’t.
There just wasn’t much to talk about.
By the time they got back in the plane, the files had not yet arrived from Annie with Stan’s autopsy pictures. So they sat across from each other in big leather chairs, their notebooks in hand, iced teas beside them, going back over everything from the day.
Lott had no idea how much this jet cost Doc, but Lott sure liked the comfort of it.
They had just finished when the pilot, a smiling young man by the name of Lawrence, wearing dark slacks and a white dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up, came back into the cabin and said, “Detectives, the information you are waiting for from Annie is coming through now.”
He pointed to a desk in the rear of the main cabin, tucked off to the right side. He went to it and pushed a couple of buttons and a monitor rose from the desk and a keyboard swung out.
Lott just shook his head. Of course a private plane like this would have a desk to work at, just as it had a bedroom in the back to sleep in.
Lawrence got the computer up and running for them with a couple more buttons and then said, “Let me know when you are ready to go. And to where.”
“Thanks,” Lott said. “Really appreciate it.”
The pilot nodded. “Glad to help out.” He then headed back toward the front as Julia sat down at the screen and pulled up the images.
Lott stood over her right shoulder so he could see the screen as well. He hoped this was a good idea. He knew Rogers was a good detective and had seen her share of death scenes, but seeing her own husband the way they had found him wasn’t going to be easy.
The first one was of the warehouse scene and it made Julia sit back slightly.
It actually surprised Lott a little as well. He hadn’t looked at those pictures for a long time. There was a bloated man’s body in pants and a ripped-open shirt lying face-up on the floor, dead eyes staring at the ceiling.
The image brought back the incredible memories of that case for Lott, mostly attached to the smell of that body being in a hot warehouse and on the floor for seven days before being found.
It was not a smell he ever wanted to remember. No human death smell ever was. It was the kind of cloying, thick smell that ate at you and got into every pore of your skin and clothes. Connie hadn’t let him anywhere near the insides of the house when he got home that day. She had forced him to take his clothes off in the garage and then run for the shower while she opened windows.
It had taken a week for the smell to be completely out of his car after the short ride home. He had finally had to take the car in and have it detailed out to get rid of the last of it.
And Connie did something with his clothes that involved a long stick and a big black garbage bag.
The body in the image was even more bloated than Lott remembered it being. Lott now understood why they had just assumed the wallet with the victim was the right one. They had tested the fingerprints as well, but Stan Rocha’s prints had not been in the system.
“Can’t tell,” Julia said, shaking her head as she clicked through the five or six angles of photos of the body. “Looks like him in general. Same basic size and shape.”
Then she
brought up the first autopsy photo and gasped.
It was of the same bloated body, only now naked, the clothes cut away, the body lying on the morgue table.
“You all right?” he asked, putting his hand gently on her shoulder. He liked the feel of her strong muscles under his touch and he let his hand rest there only a moment before pulling it away.
“I am,” she said. “But your hunch was right. That’s not Stan Rocha.”
Now it was Lott’s turn to jerk. He had suggested that because of the Winnemucca wife’s comment. He really didn’t expect to be right.
“How can you be so sure?” he asked, staring at the bloated body on the table.
“He’s missing the KM tattoo on his side,” she said, pointing.
Lott nodded.
She clicked to the image of the other hip.
Nothing there either.
“And Stan was circumcised,” Rogers said, pointing at the body’s private parts.
It was very clear to Lott this man had not been circumcised in any fashion.
“I’ll be go to hell,” Lott said, standing and stepping back as Rogers quickly moved through the rest of the photos, then clicked off the computer and turned to him.
“So who the hell is our murder victim?” Lott asked, feeling more stunned than he wanted to admit.
“And where did Stan disappear to?” Rogers asked.
“And did he kill that man to stage his own disappearance?” Lott asked.
They both remained in silence for a moment before Lott finally broke it. “I think we need to head back to Vegas.”
Julia nodded. “I agree. Stan is wrapped up in this completely, since his identity was on the body. He staged this I’m betting anything. But we need to go back and start over, look at everything again.”
“Do you really think that the man you knew could execute someone to stage his own death?” Lott asked.
“Honestly,” Rogers said, “I can’t imagine Stan hurting a fly. But I can imagine him staging all this. He hid a lot from me, and his other wives, and his family. This kind of deception is right up his alley.”
With that, Lott nodded and turned to the front of the plane to tell the pilots to take them home.
After that he turned back to see Julia watching him. He smiled at her. “Looks like Elvis hasn’t left the building just yet.”
She actually laughed.
He sat down and buckled in across from her and for the entire short flight to Las Vegas, all he could think about was how he mis-identified the victim in his very first case as a detective.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
October, 2014
Las Vegas International Airport
Las Vegas, Nevada
JULIA WAS GLAD that Lott hadn’t wanted to talk much on the trip back to Vegas. The flight had only taken less than forty minutes and the entire time she just kept going over and over what they had discovered.
The real stunner was that Stan might still be alive. How he had remained hidden for twenty-two years was beyond her, but if he was alive, he had done just that.
She had spent over two decades knowing he was dead. And Jane had always thought her father murdered. How was she going to react to all this?
Julia decided that she would wait until they had all this solved before even thinking of talking with Jane.
Also, there was something about that body in the warehouse that seemed familiar. And it wasn’t because it had a general similarity to Stan. For some reason that body and how it had been shot rang bells for her. She just couldn’t, for the life of her, remember from what.
After they landed and the jet was moving toward the private hangar areas, she looked at Lott. “We got to tell Andor and Annie about this.”
Lott nodded. “Thinking the same thing. Got any ideas after that?”
She shook her head. “That body looks vaguely familiar somehow, but darned if I can place it.”
“It does?” Lott asked, looking puzzled. “And not because it looks like Stan?
She shook her head. “There’s something else. The bullet pattern for one. Was his shirt closed or open when he was shot?”
Lott frowned. “Open. No holes in the shirt at all, and the bullets didn’t go through, so no holes in the back either.”
‘So the body might have been dressed in Stan’s clothes after it was shot.”
“Likely,” Lott said. “I remember that we were very frustrated because the body had been cleaned before it was dumped. No trace evidence at all except for the residue that Annie traced in her investigation.”
“Weird, just damn weird,” Annie said, shaking her head. There wasn’t a damn thing about this case that had been straightforward.
“We’ll run the prints,” Lott said. “I’ll have Andor do that quickly. It’s only a bit after eight here.”
“Feels a lot later than that,” she said. “Long day.”
“A productive one, though,” Lott said. “You hungry?”
“I will be after a shower and a change of clothes,” she said, smiling at him.
“Me too,” Lott said, nodding as the plane eased to a stop. “I’ll call Annie, tell her what we discovered, and see if she can meet us at the Café Bellagio a little after nine.”
“I’ll call Andor,” she said. “I’ll get him on the fingerprints and have him meet us as well.”
“We have a plan,” Lott said, smiling.
Julia felt glad for at least that much.
But deep down inside, she was feeling shocked that Stan might still be alive. And that if he was alive, he had let her raise Jane alone and never helped in the slightest.
And that just pissed her off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
October, 2014
Café Bellagio
Las Vegas, Nevada
JULIA FELT A LOT BETTER once she had gotten home, taken a quick shower, and gotten into some fresh clothes. She needed to be comfortable tonight, so she went with a tan blouse, dark slacks, and comfortable low-heeled shoes. She pulled her hair back off her face and left it down long.
It was still a warm evening outside, but she grabbed a light jacket just in case she would need it later, and then headed for her car.
After just this one day, it was amazing how much more she knew about her former husband. Far more than she ever imagined knowing. Certainly a lot more than she knew about him when they were married.
There was a large part of her that was angry at herself. How could she not know all this back when they were together. Stan had been a master of hiding things, and she had been a master of denial. In a marriage, it always took two.
It was still going to take some time for her to forgive herself for not knowing at least some of this.
One thing for certain, as the day had gone on, she had gotten angrier and angrier at Stan. And now that she had a hunch he staged his own death, her anger was boiling. Especially after seeing what he had done to Ruby in Salt Lake. She had played the part of the dutiful wife, waiting for the missing husband to return.
And if he was alive, he had just left her.
And now that devotion was going to kill Ruby in a very ugly fashion.
Maybe, just maybe, Julia knew she might have been doing the same thing, avoiding relationships, never remarrying. And she had at least thought Stan was dead.
Why hadn’t she moved on as well?
That was going to be a topic she and a counselor were going to work out as soon as they had some more answers as to what really happened to Stan.
By the time she made it to the Café Bellagio, Lott was already sitting with his daughter at a table tucked off to one side.
Annie got up, smiling and hugged Julia.
“Thank Doc for the use of his plane,” Julia said as they sat down. “It was a joy to be in and allowed a lot of this to happen today.”
“That it did,” Lott said, nodding.
“Doc said he was just glad he could help,” Annie said. “He’ll join us as
soon as he’s done with the tournament.”
Julia nodded. The daily tournaments at the Bellagio often attracted some of the top players in the world. She had stood on the rail and watched many hours of those tournaments. At some point, she hoped to have enough courage and money to sit down in one. But for the moment, when she got back to playing poker, she would keep herself satisfied playing with the tourists in some of the other rooms with buy-ins under a hundred bucks instead of north of a thousand.
“I’m dying to hear what you two found today,” Annie said. “From the tidbits Dad has been giving me along the way, it was amazing amounts.”
Lott smiled at his daughter. “Soon as Andor gets here, we’ll lay it all out.”
“He’s on his way,” Julia said, pointing in the direction of Andor coming in the door.
As he came up to the table, he dropped a manila file folder in front of Julia.
He nodded to everyone and then sat down.
After the day, Julia was almost afraid to pick up the folder and see what was in it.
“Rogers, you said you thought the body looked familiar,” Andor said, smiling at her. “More than just a passing resemblance to your ex-husband.”
“I did,” Julia said. “Can’t seem to get a grasp on from where though.”
Andor pointed at the file. “You two just solved one of Reno’s most famous missing body cases.”
Suddenly she knew exactly where she recognized the body.
“The fingerprints match the Stanton Case?” she asked, staring at Andor. Was that even possible?
Andor grinned. “Spot on the money.”
“I’ll be go to hell,” she said, opening the file to stare at naked pictures of Benny Stanton. The same guy, the same bullet patterns, only he was not bloated at all. The photo she had in front of her was taken just before an autopsy was supposed to have taken place on the body.
And just before the body vanished without a trace from the ME’s basement office.
The guy who had executed Benny Stanton had already confessed, and they had the pictures and crime scene photos, so the body vanishing had just been an annoyance and a headline grabber in the papers. She remembered it well as a city cop, not yet a detective. It was the topic of a lot of conversations for months after it happened.
Kill Game: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery Page 10