Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  The bright sheet of paper had a Navajo design of some kind at the top and in flowing script below said “Aura Balancing.”

  “What the hell is ‘Aura Balancing’?”

  “The electromagnetic field that surrounds the body. Everybody’s got one—it can even be photographed. This guy balances your aura for you. Look at Max there—you can just look at him and tell his aura’s pretty good.” Golding squinted. “But I bet it could use a little tune-up. But you, Gabe. Christ, you’re really turbulent!”

  “Golding—”

  “No, read it now. It really works, I’m telling you. Right here.” He pointed to a hand-lettered paragraph which explained that a turbulent or unclear aura gave one a turbulent and unclear relationship with the world. Aura Balancing through dialogue and through action of the Light (a pure force of spiritual energy) would clear the aura; negativity, judgments, and disturbances held in the aura would be released. All a person had to do was drive up to Boulder once every three months for an adjustment session.

  “I’m supposed to give this man fifty bucks every three months so I won’t make judgments? What kind of cop would I be then?”

  “Well, he means prejudgments—you know, prejudices and things that don’t let you see the world as it really is.”

  “Right—Boulder’s just the place to see the world as it really is.” He stood and pulled on his sport coat. “I’m off duty, Golding. See you tomorrow.” As he went past the personnel board and flipped the slide by his name, he heard Golding shift targets, “What this guy does, Max …”

  He was off duty, but he didn’t go back to his apartment. Instead, he swung his black Trans Am into the last half of the morning rush hour and nosed his way through the tangle of downtown streets blocked by the flashing lights and boarded sidewalks of constant construction. Even in depression or recession or stagflation or whatever bad times were called now, Denver kept putting up more office towers and buying up more residential and retail blocks around the downtown core. A few scattered groups were making efforts to preserve some blocks for homes and apartments, but the pressure of big money was always there, and gradually winning. His old neighborhood, Auraria, was long gone; street after street of frame houses that had been home and kinfolk and shortcuts through neighboring backyards as familiar as his own, all were gone. In its place a university sprawled—a collection of factorylike buildings as ugly as they were cheap. The whole downtown, following the same path, was becoming an area no one could grow up in: crowded and uncomfortable by day, blank and cold at night. And on weekends the empty streets were dotted here and there with straggling tourists who showed their uneasiness in the face of all the dark, locked doors. If a city had an aura, then Denver’s must be totally maladjusted—torn between the commuter life of nine-to-five, and the rest of the day, which was dead. Even the Colfax strip, with its drifting filth, was better than being dead, and Wager could understand the need of those who returned night after night to the busy lights and constantly moving feet, even though they did not like the pimps and pushers who jostled them. They were turning their backs on a dying city.

  He guided the low-slung car onto I-76, angling northeast. Now, most of the traffic was going in the opposite direction, and he could focus on trying to outstare a sun that made the concrete glow like copper against his eyes. Gradually, the highway swung farther north and the glare lessened; he pushed the accelerator closer to the floor and felt the car hunker a little nearer to the pavement. The road arced gently through an unending series of bedroom communities punctuated by glittering shopping centers where only a few years ago wide harrows had carved the heavy earth. Billboards flashed smiling families or gigantic split-level homes nestled under trees that the bare prairie never had. Other signs offered creative financing that anyone could afford if they were willing to sell themselves to a bank for forty years.

  The only thing Wager was willing to sell himself to was his job, as his ex had gradually discovered after many tears and angry words. In fact, that very phrase was hers. He didn’t think of it as selling himself; he was his job—he was what he did, which was the thing Lorraine could never accept. Maybe some of these people felt the same way about those split-level houses. Maybe those forty years of payments was what they were. Maybe they were really happy to fuss over a different paint scheme every decade or so, to drop their sweat all over the skinny saplings that they scratched into the hard clay, to quarrel with their neighbors about the kind of fence that separated their kingdoms. Maybe they were busy and happy making a neighborhood, one that would not be scraped away like Wager’s own. But he could not escape the feeling that these were one-generation neighborhoods, that their roots were far shallower than those of old Auraria.

  Well, theirs was the choice, what choice they had. Wager was very seldom surprised anymore at the ways people claimed identity. Or, for that matter, snuffed out the identities of others. Right now, it just felt good to know that none of these homes or struggling trees or growing families anchored him to a tiny square of earth. He was glad he was not buried before he was dead, and he found deep satisfaction in the wind tugging through the open window against his hair and the sound of its restless boom against his ear. It felt good to floor the accelerator and leave behind eight hours of stuffy routine, to follow the spread wings of the gold eagle traced on the hood in front of him. True, he was taking his work with him; but that was okay—his work was what he was—and the thirty or so miles to the Adams County sheriffs office went quickly in the mindless relaxation that lonely driving often brought him. He did not once think of the words “team concept.”

  Detective John Lee greeted him with a reserved smile and an offer of coffee. Somewhere in his mid-twenties, the man’s mustache was more neatly trimmed than Wager’s, and he had the habit of tugging his shirt cuffs from the sleeves of his blue herringbone jacket. Then he would hunch his shoulders and the cuffs would suck back in again. Wager didn’t know the man but he knew the type: three or four years in uniform, possibly in a department back East. Maybe another year as a detective; more likely, given his age, Lee joined the sheriff’s office right out of a patrol car, seeing it as one step up the long ladder to becoming a police captain by the time he was thirty-five. Wager had heard that, because of the rapidly growing population in Adams County, the sheriff’s office was upgrading its staff. Promotions came quickly when that happened.

  “I’m not sure what more I can tell you, Detective Wager. I sent a report over to you people last week. It’s all there.”

  It was never all in a report, and that report wasn’t too good in the first place. But that wasn’t what Lee was telling him. He was saying he did not want another lawman poking around in his homicide. Good murders were hard to come by in Adams County, and the successful solution of this one would make a nice entry in an ambitious cop’s personnel file.

  “Maybe if you told me about the crime scene,” he said. “Maybe something didn’t get into the report.”

  “My report’s complete, Wager. And this is an ongoing case.” Which meant that the notes and evidence which usually held the real information were hidden from any eyes except the detective assigned to the case.

  Wager sipped at the thick mug of coffee. A gilt seal on its side said Adams County Sheriff’s Department and reminded him that he was a guest, which was next to being a civilian. In Denver, the sheriff’s main duty was to assist the court in the care and handling of prisoners and to serve papers; in the unincorporated areas of outlying counties, the duties had to include all the other areas of law enforcement, whether an agency was capable of them or not. “We have a similar homicide, Lee. Maybe you got a flier on it: Annette Sheldon, exotic dancer. One round to the back of the head, suspicion of rape. It happened less than a week before this one.”

  Lee shook his head. “I might have seen the report. I can’t remember.”

  “It looks like the same m.o. It’s possible that a special metro unit will be formed to take over the investigation of both homicides.”
That was unlikely. Metropolitan task forces were expensive and unwieldy, and the casual murders of a couple of nude dancers wasn’t important enough politically to squeeze the effort and money out of the state attorney general’s office. But Lee was new; he might not know that. “Our district attorney’s talking about it. Naturally, the senior man would come from DPD.”

  “The body was found in Adams County!”

  “But it’s possible that the crime originated in Denver—she was probably abducted after work, in Denver County.” And in Colorado, the origin of the crime dictated the responsible agency. Wager gave him the option: “If we work together, of course, then the DA probably won’t see the need for a task force.”

  “You think it’s the same killer?”

  “I don’t know. You haven’t told me anything yet.”

  Lee didn’t look happy as he felt his case start to slip between his fingers. But he finally shoved back from his imitation wood desk and pulled open a file drawer. Lifting out a dark folder, he laid it open in front of Wager. The photographs showed the body facedown on a bed of weeds and buffalo grass. It was a half-disrobed female, and very dead. That was all one could tell from what was left.

  “No identifiable tire tracks or footprints?”

  “I checked all that personally. We found what might have been tire tracks, but we couldn’t get an impression—the scene was too old.”

  Wager leafed through the colored glossies and noticed, without saying anything, that the sequence of photographs showed minor disturbances in the evidence: in one photograph there was a cigarette butt; a similar shot later showed it was gone. Another pair of photos taken at different times revealed that the victim’s head had been moved. The crime scene, in short, had been violated before the photographic record was complete, so none of it would be worth a tiddly-fart in court. “What about the cigarette butt?”

  “Nothing. It was older than the crime. I told you, Wager, everything I found is in the report.”

  “Where’d you work before coming here?”

  Lee’s dark eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Newport Beach, California. Why?”

  “I thought it might be back East. DPD gets a lot of applicants from there.” Wager had heard some gossip about Newport Beach and its PD—the kind that warms the laughter-filled coffee breaks at three in the morning when patrols gather for their fifteen minutes around a café table. It was a playground for the rich, a tourist trap where little was spent on nonessentials such as police training. The department hired walk-ins because they were cheap, issued them badge and pistol, and told them to go out and bust tourists to keep the city treasury solvent with fines instead of tax money. Maybe it was to Lee’s credit that he wanted to move away from an outfit like that. But poor training always showed up, and now Adams County would be the worse for it.

  At the bottom of the folder, Wager found a sheet describing the subsequent investigation. Lee had interviewed the victim’s mother, had visited Foxy Dick’s, had appended a list of friends and acquaintances. At the top of that list was Williams’s boyfriend, and there was a little check behind his name.

  “The check means you interviewed the person?”

  “That’s right. And if there’s nothing there, it means he didn’t have any information to give.”

  “The boyfriend’s alibi is good?”

  “He’s a night clerk at a gas station. He was working the night she disappeared.”

  “Did any of these people know Annette Sheldon?”

  Lee blinked and tugged his cuffs out of his coat sleeves, then he shrugged them back in. “I didn’t ask. There wasn’t any reason to.”

  There was reason to. Wager’s silence said as much. Lee, lips thin, poured himself another cup of coffee. “Have you had any reply from NCIC?” asked Wager.

  “I put in a request this morning.”

  Or he would as soon as Wager left. Sighing, Wager tapped the file together and closed its cover. “Where do you go from here?”

  “Just like you, I wait and see if something more turns up. There’s sure as hell not much to work with now.”

  “Yeah. Well, let me tell you what we’ve got on Sheldon.” He waited for the detective to take out a pencil and paper, but he didn’t. Instead, his face settled into an expressionless stare that told Wager the man did not believe that the two homicides were related, that he did not want to pool his information with Wager or anyone else, and that he would be happy to see the Denver detective drive off into the sunset. So Wager kept to facts and away from hypotheses. “We still haven’t found Sheldon’s missing clothes, money, or car. She might have had as much as five hundred dollars when she left work. There’s no medical evidence of rape. The only suspect we had was her husband, but he has no motive. The rest of it’s just like your case—no one saw her leave work with anyone, no one knows of any enemies she had.” A thought struck Wager. “Did Williams have a car?”

  Lee said grudgingly, “A ‘79 Caprice. It hasn’t been found yet.”

  Wager gave the man a description of Sheldon’s missing automobile and a list of people he and Axton had interviewed. And that balanced out the exchange between them. Any more information he might need about the Adams County slaying would be Wager’s to find, and they finished their cups of coffee talking about fishing streams.

  The drive back seemed much longer than the ride out. The morning’s freshness was gone from the wind, and Wager began to feel the drag of his duty tour heavy on his weary eyelids. It wasn’t just the overtime—he was used to that. It was the burdensome knowledge that even with people who were supposed to be in the same business, there was competition and jealousy—and the result was inevitably a half-assed job that made you ask the equally inevitable question: Is it really worth the effort?

  He pushed the radio buttons until a voice wailed in a nasal tone, “Does your love for me grow stronger or is your hate just plumb wore out?” Well, it was worth the effort—to Wager, anyway. He was subject to fitness reports and annual reviews, promotions and ratings, even the opinions of the men he worked with. But the only judgment that really meant a thing was what Wager thought of his own work. Not his team’s work or his division’s record, but his own. He knew when he did a good job or a poor one; nobody else’s blame, nobody else’s satisfaction really counted.

  Which was why, despite the tired sting in his eyes and the heat that sapped his remaining energy and pulled him toward sleep as he drove, Wager did not go home. Instead, he turned off the freeway and cut across the northern part of town for one more stop.

  This time, he approached down the alley. The service door at the rear of Nickelodeon Vending Repairs was open to catch any late-morning breeze, but there was none, and the dust that his tires raised from the gravel settled like a thin mist on the glossy enamel of his car’s fenders. Sheldon turned from his workbench as Wager’s car coasted to a stop, and now he watched without moving as Wager opened the door and got out.

  “You’re back soon enough,” the man finally said. “You got news?”

  Wager paused in the cool silence of the shop and looked at the two new roses beneath the shrine. “Nothing on Mrs. Sheldon. Did you or she ever know an Angela Sanchez Williams?”

  Sheldon frowned and tugged at the corner of his mustache. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “She’s an exotic dancer. She was killed sometime last week, in the same manner as your wife.”

  Large and blurry behind their lenses, the blue eyes stared at Wager.

  “Mr. Sheldon?”

  They blinked rapidly and turned to the picture. “So it is some nut. It’s some goddamned nut with a thing for killing dancers.”

  “It looks that way. But you’re sure there’s no link between your wife and Angela Williams?”

  “Was she from the Cinnamon Club?”

  “Foxy Dick’s.”

  The man shook his head. “Annette never had anything to do with that place. It’s a dump.” His eyes met Wager’s and held them. “Some sick, crazy bastard. …”<
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  CHAPTER 5

  IT WAS WAGER’S turn to drive. As usual, they cruised the two northern districts of the city, with an occasional dip into the southwest quadrant where the West Ridge projects huddled in the smoky glow of a generator plant. They looped through those neighborhoods where trouble often burst out of sagging, crowded houses and apartments, filling the streets with blood and curses. But tonight, midweek, was a quiet one for Homicide, and the partners rode in a silence that had become as easy as conversation between them. Once, Axton mentioned that he was going to take his oldest boy camping on his next day off; Wager recommended Red Feather Lakes.

  “This time of year they’re still stocked. And it shouldn’t be too crowded if it’s not a weekend.”

  It had been one of his favorite spots when he was a kid and his old man was still alive. You could camp and then fish the small lakes for trout, casting your bubble almost silently on the glassy water just after sunup. Then, on the long drive back to Denver, you’d take that steep dirt road down into the Cache La Poudre valley and stream-fish. That was the best kind. It was a swift river with occasional deep holes where the big trout liked to hold themselves against the current. Wager had never caught one of those. But in the shallower parts of the stream, where the water widened over polished stones, the smaller trout would hit a tiny spinner with that solid thud that only stream fish have. A lot of the river was restricted to artificial lures, and the state wildlife agency was trying to bring back the green trout that so long ago had been fished out of the waters of Colorado. They’d have to be quick, though. There was more talk of damming the stream across a narrow part of the canyon. An Arab investment company had bought a million or so acres of high desert and suddenly discovered they’d need water in order to farm that land. The Cache La Poudre was one of the last undammed rivers along the east face of the Rockies, and to some it now seemed a shame to let all that water run free as far as the reservoirs on the prairie.