Calling Dead: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery

by Smith, Dean Wesley

“The mine,” she said, turning around and grabbing a small notebook from the white counter top that separated the small kitchen from the dining area. “That mine bothered me last night and it is bothering me still.”

  Lott leaned forward watching as she took a sip of coffee and then sighed at the wonderful taste. If it was possible, she became more beautiful when focused.

  “You think the mine company has something to do with this?” he asked. “Andor and I just didn’t spend that much time on it, to be honest.”

  At that moment, the toast popped up and she stood to get it and put some butter and strawberry jam on the two pieces.

  “The stuff with my ex-husband made me realize that often mining companies can hide some pretty amazing things.”

  “Very true,” he said. “And Nevada sure has no shortages of old mines to hide things in.”

  She brought her toast over and sat down, taking a bite before looking at her notebook. Then she said, “My second idea was that maybe there was a mine tragedy at some point where eleven girls in a class were killed. Did you try to research that?”

  Lott sat back, surprised. “No, we didn’t, but I’ll call Annie and have her get Fleet and his wizards on it.”

  At that moment Lott’s cell phone buzzed in his shirt pocket. He had turned off the ringer for the night. He pulled the phone out.

  “Speaking of Annie,” Lott said, holding the phone up to the smiling Julia.

  He clicked on the phone, glad that Annie had called. “Up early this morning, daughter.”

  “Got some bad news,” Annie said, her voice sounding about as serious as it could be. “It didn’t take Fleet and his crew more than a few hours to track over three hundred missing women who matched the profile of the women in the mine. He ran the search from two years before you found the women to now.”

  Lott felt his stomach twist into a tight knot. “Three hundred?”

  Julia’s eyes across the table grew wide in a look of horror.

  “Afraid so,” Annie said. “Fleet has his people running advanced programs on all of them to see if there are similar details among them besides the initial look. Or if there was a more likely reason they went missing. He’s also looking for any similarities, such as a make of a car seen close by or things like that. But that’s going to take some time.”

  “How wide an area did he search?” Lott asked.

  “All of Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and every state west,” Annie said.

  “All basically a two day drive from the Las Vegas area,” Lott said.

  “Pretty much,” Annie said. “Not all of these women who are missing will be involved, of course. But if our killer did eleven women a year for the last fifteen years, that’s over a hundred and fifty women.”

  Lott had no idea what to say to that.

  Nothing at all.

  “We’ve got to find this sicko,” Annie said.

  “We will,” Lott said. “We’re not letting this one go. Two more things that Julia came up with to have Fleet research.”

  “Fire away,” Annie said. “After finding that number this morning, Doc and Fleet are all in with this investigation. Whatever we need, they are willing to throw time, money, and resources at this.”

  “Good to hear,” Lott said. “First off, have Fleet and his people do deep background on the mining company that owned that first mine. Find out how many other mines they own that are closed up around the Las Vegas area and where they are and so on.”

  “Got it,” Annie said.

  “And see if Fleet can go back in time and find an incident when a group of school kids died in a mine, or some sort of heat accident. Basically eleven of them, all girls. Something triggered this behavior.”

  “Tell Julia those are great ideas,” Annie said. “Talk with you soon.”

  She hung up and Lott sort of stared at his phone before turning the ringer back on and putting it in his shirt pocket again.

  “Over three hundred?” Julia asked.

  Lott nodded. “Fleet searched the years since we found the first mine from Montana south to the Mexican border and everything west of that. And with very strict parameters.”

  Julia just sat there in the warm sun basking the kitchen table, shaking her head, the last of her toast forgotten.

  Lott had no idea what to say. There was nothing he could say.

  Finally Julia asked, her voice soft, “What have we stumbled into here?”

  “A nightmare,” Lott said. “Actually a lot of nightmares for a lot of innocent women and their families.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  August 7th, 2015

  1:45 P.M.

  Las Vegas

  JULIA AND LOTT had talked with Andor and decided to meet for lunch back at the Bellagio Café. Annie said she would meet them.

  That way they could all get something decent to eat and plan the next steps in the case. Julia figured they were all going to need to have some good meals while this was going on.

  Even with stopping past Lott’s place for a change of clothes, Julia and Lott got to the restaurant first, with Lott driving his Cadillac SUV and the air conditioning working at full. The day’s temperature had already climbed past 105 and Lott gave the car to the valet so they were only in the heat for less than thirty seconds.

  Lott had on jeans, tennis shoes, and a light short-sleeved golf shirt. Julia had pulled her hair back and tied it away from her face. On summer days like this in Vegas, anything extra around her face just made her feel even hotter.

  Lott had admitted to her last night that both he and Andor had had nightmares for years about the fact that they had not stopped the killer. And that the killings had been going on.

  Now it seemed that nightmare might have been the truth.

  They managed, with only a short wait for the table to be cleaned, to get their favorite booth tucked back among the plants along the back wall of the cafe.

  Andor joined them five minutes later after they both had iced tea in front of them.

  “Do we have a permanent reserved sign on this booth?” Andor asked as he slid in across from them. He had a gleam of sweat on his face and took a napkin and wiped it off. Julia knew that even though he had more than enough money, Andor would never pay for valet service, even on the hottest days.

  Both Andor and Lott had lived their entire lives here in Vegas, so they understood the heat. But as Lott had told her a month ago on a really hot day, understanding the heat and liking it were two different things.

  Annie joined them a couple minutes later, sliding in beside Andor and putting a gray folder on the table in front of her.

  “Where’s Doc?” Lott asked.

  “He flew up to Boise this morning,” Annie said, “after we got the first count on the missing women. He wants to help Fleet and the rest at their corporate office headquarters in the research. Plus, knowing him, he’s going to be pulling in favors from law enforcement agencies everywhere if needed.”

  Julia was very glad to hear that Annie and Doc and Fleet were working on this so hard. They had basically unlimited resources, knew every cop and FBI agent in Idaho and Nevada, and weren’t afraid to skirt the law when it came to computer discovery methods.

  Annie pushed the folder toward her father. “Fleet and Doc just sent me this. They just found it.”

  To Julia, Lott looked like he was almost afraid to open it, but he did.

  From what Julia could see as she scooted over slightly closer to look at the same time, it was a newspaper article with a picture of a bus stuck on a dirt road among some desert rocks.

  “Nineteen eighty-eight,” Annie said. “A bus taking a small class of sophomore girls from Saint Mary’s, a local Catholic High School, on a desert field trip had engine troubles about thirty miles out in the desert north of here. They were in a small canyon, hidden from view for the most part.”

  Julia stared at the newspaper article as Annie went on giving a summary of what had happened.

  “The missing bus and students bec
ame a firestorm over the two days it took to find them, since they were not where they were supposed to be going for the day.”

  Julia glanced at the article, then decided to wait to read it. She wanted to hear what Annie had found.

  “The reporter made some assumptions,” Annie said. “The teacher, an older woman, was notoriously deathly afraid of snakes, and more than likely wouldn’t allow the girls to leave the bus.”

  “Oh, shit,” Andor said. “On a hot day in the sun, that bus would quickly become an oven.”

  Annie nodded. “The bus driver and his fourteen-year-old son went for help, but they were turned back by the heat and lack of water. The reporter and police reports believe that by the time the father and son made it back to the bus, the eleven girls were all passed out. The older-aged teacher was dead.”

  Julia could feel her stomach twisting just listening to this horror story.

  “Somehow,” Annie said, “the report believes that the father and the son managed to carry the girls out of the bus and up a small hill to an old mine. The mine was a little cooler and they put the girls in there, sitting up against the wall of the tunnel.”

  “Eleven school girls all dressed the same in a mine,” Andor said, shaking his head. “Now we know where all this started.”

  “There’s more,” Annie said, looking grim. “The father left the boy and went for help. The father didn’t make it, passed out near a highway and died. It was a full day before anyone found his body, and then found the girls. They were all dead. Only the boy survived. He was on the verge of death.”

  “I’ll bet,” Andor said.

  Annie took a deep breath and then said, “He had removed all the girl’s panties and had them in his pocket.”

  The silence at the table was so intense, Julia wondered if the casino had shut down around them.

  Finally Andor said, “So we’re looking for the kid. If he was fourteen in 1988, he would have been twenty-six when we found the bodies.”

  “And over forty now,” Lott said.

  Julia forced herself to take a deep breath and then sip her iced tea. At that moment, the waitress came by, a woman with a high voice, a big smile, and artificially built-up breasts under her white uniform blouse. She took Annie’s and Andor’s drink orders, then all of their food orders.

  That time allowed Julia to get back centered after listening to that horrid story. Sometimes, even as a detective, stories got to her, and the image of eleven school girls baking to death in a school bus was going to be hard to clear from her mind.

  “So what’s the kid’s name?”

  “It used to be Kirk Wampler,” Annie said. “But it seems his father was his only relative and when the father died, Kirk was put into the system and just vanished.”

  “Vanished?” Andor asked before Julia could. “It was damn hard, if not impossible for a kid to vanish into the Child Protective Services in this state. Run away, yes, but not just vanish.

  “That’s what Fleet and his people call it,” Annie said, “but they are looking and we have a few family names to go visit here in this area that he was put with right after his father’s death. They might be able to give us some hints as to what happened to Kirk.”

  “So we’re looking at Kirk to be the one for this?” Lott asked.

  He glanced at Andor, who nodded.

  Then Lott looked at Julia.

  “I think he’s our best lead at the moment,” Julia said.

  Lott smiled. “I could hear a ‘but’ there.”

  Julia was impressed. Lott was already getting to know her more than anyone before had ever done. And she was letting him and liking it, honestly.

  Julia tapped the folder with the story in it that Annie had relayed. “I believe this incident, if it happened as reported here, started all this. We have to make sure this actually happened as reported. Seems to me there is a lot of guessing in this report.”

  “A hell of a lot,” Andor said.

  “Fleet and his people are working on that,” Annie said, nodding in agreement.

  “I’ll get in touch with the chief and pull the official reports on the case and on the search,” Andor said. “See if anything was left out of the official story that we would need to know.”

  Julia nodded. “What bothers me is that this just seems a little too pat for my tastes, all aiming directly at Kirk. There are a lot of others who were hurt by this incident. For example, all the parents, all the brothers and sisters who lost a family member. And so on. Something like this could knock anyone over an edge.”

  Lott nodded and smiled. “Looks like we have a ton of work ahead of us on this.”

  “But at least we have some leads now,” Andor said. “Damn that feels good after all these years.”

  And with that, Julia could only agree.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  August 7th, 2015

  3:45 P.M.

  Las Vegas

  LOTT PARKED HIS Cadillac SUV just down the block from the home that had taken Kirk Wampler after the accident and his father dying. Lott left the car running for a moment to keep the air conditioning pouring cool air over them. Outside the official temperature had climbed to over a hundred and seven. No telling what it was on this street.

  Beside him Julia sighed, but said nothing. She clearly wasn’t looking forward to this any more than he was.

  It seemed Kirk had gone into some treatment after the accident at a hospital for a few months before being released to this family. It was amazing any family would take him after his history and at fourteen.

  The house was a sprawling, single-story brown stucco that needed some tender-loving care and a new coat of paint. The lawn was not only completely brown, but looked like it had gone to dirt years before. Two large green garbage cans sat near the closed garage door, both overflowing.

  It didn’t look much different, actually, than the other houses along this street off the old Boulder Highway. This neighborhood had seen much better days, of that there was no doubt.

  No trees or even small shrubs were around the house or any of the closest homes. The drapes in every home were pulled tight. One barren and lifeless place, that’s for sure.

  Lott knew the look of this home. More than likely this family took the kids in the system just for the money. And they did just a good enough job with the kids to keep getting more. Any kid tossed into the foster care system never really got much of a break.

  Kirk had vanished from all records after being with this family for just under a year. Lott hoped he and Julia might find some sort of trace of where he had gone.

  “Ready?” Lott asked Julia glancing at her. The air conditioning was blowing slight wisps of hair back from her face and she had a very worried look.

  “Is anyone ever ready for this kind of thing?” Julia asked, staring at the home they were going to visit.

  “Never,” Lott said, smiling.

  “Then let’s go,” she said, opening her door and climbing out.

  He laughed and shut off the car and climbed out into the blast-furnace heat, moving to the front of the car to stand beside her. On the pavement like this, the temperature had to be well past one hundred and ten and climbing.

  At a decent speed, they headed for the home’s front door. Both of them were armed and Lott had his badge ready as well to flash.

  They banged on the front door since it was clear the remains of an old doorbell were long past working.

  After fifteen extremely hot seconds waiting as the heat not only radiated from the porch, but off the side of the building, someone pulled the door open.

  “Yeah,” the woman who answered said from the shadows. The smell of bacon hit them through a rough screen door as well as some hints of cooler air.

  Lott flashed his badge, holding it up for the woman to see. “Detectives Lott and Rogers. Mrs. Mitchell, we would like to talk with you for a moment about a boy you once fostered by the name of Kirk Wampler.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” the woman as
ked. Then she pushed the door open and indicated they should come in.

  Inside the door was an entry area with empty hooks on the wall. Just beyond the entry was a big living room that looked to be an organized zone of clutter. Toys for small kids were scattered near a large wooden toy box, but not much distance from the box. A card table with a puzzle half put together was in front of a couch facing a large-screen television. And the entire place was dark and cool, something Lott very much appreciated at that moment.

  Mitchell was a thin woman, not much taller than five feet, with gray hair pulled back into a bun of sorts, and an apron covering jeans and a dark blouse. From what Lott could find out from a quick call, she and her husband, a dentist, had been fostering kids for over twenty years and seemed to be good at what they did and clearly didn’t need the money from doing foster care even though their home looked like they did.

  She had on flip-flops and far too much makeup. She didn’t indicate that they should sit down, so the three of them stood there on the scarred wooden entrance floor.

  “Why you interested in Kirk after all this time?”

  “His name came up in a cold case we were working on,” Julia said, giving the woman a smile. “Just trying to figure out what happened to Kirk after he left here. He seemed to have vanished from the system.”

  Mitchell laughed, a sort of rough laugh that had no warmth at all to it.

  “I suppose that case is about what happened to his dad and those poor girls in that mine, right?”

  Lott nodded.

  “It is,” Julia said.

  “Poor kid never really got over that, even after a couple months with professional help,” Mitchell said.

  Lott was surprised. Mitchell actually sounded sad.

  “So what was he like?” Julia asked.

  Mitchell shrugged. “Kept to himself, quiet, didn’t much like school. Real depressed. Not a damn thing my husband or I could do to change that and let me tell you, we tried. Near the end here the doctors from the hospital had him on some anti-depressants of some sort, but it did no good.”