Las Vegas Crime

by Leslie Wolfe

  Krista started crying, and her quiet, frightened sobs stretched the man’s inked lips into a lustful grin. Then he walked over to the door and left, slamming it shut behind him.

  Krista stopped crying, breathed, and put her fingers through the chain links of her cage, reaching for Mindy. The girl sat on the floor crying quietly, but her fingers reached for Krista’s and grabbed them, squeezing tight.

  “It will be all right,” Krista said, “you’ll see, it will be over soon.”

  For a while, Mindy didn’t say a word, just quietly sat on the floor, staring into thin air. Every now and then, a tear rolled down her pale cheek.

  Krista continued saying comforting words in a gentle, soothing voice, wondering why she’d stopped believing in their meaning. Nothing could ever be all right again, even if they made it out alive. She thought of her mother, how desperate she must have been when she didn’t come home from school, how she must be looking for her. I’m never coming home, Mom.

  Mindy let go of Krista’s fingers and withdrew a few inches, hugging herself and rocking back and forth slowly, rhythmically.

  “When they come for you,” Mindy said, her voice barely a trembling whisper carried forward on tear-filled breaths, “don’t fight it. You won’t be able to. Just let it… happen.”

  Krista wiped her lingering tears with a quick swipe of her hand. “What are you talking about?”

  “They teach you how to please them,” she whispered, turning her head away, ashamed. “If you don’t do as you’re told, they beat you up, then they make you do what they want anyway. That’s much worse.”

  Krista couldn’t think of anything she could say. Inside her chest, a chasm had opened, dark and filled with unspeakable horror. She looked to the right, and her eyes met the brunette’s terrified gaze.

  “They’ll drug you,” Mindy said quietly, “if you don’t do what they want. They’ll give you cocaine or something, I don’t know, but it’s bad. They drugged me the first time,” she added, sniffling while she lowered her head under the burden of the humiliation she’d endured.

  “Why?” the brunette asked, her voice strong, fearless. “What did you do?”

  Krista wanted to slap that crazy bitch. Couldn’t she show Mindy an ounce of sympathy?

  “I… bit one of them, hard,” Mindy replied, her eyes still avoiding Krista’s. “They almost knocked my teeth out. They would’ve stomped all over me, but they want the faces intact, beautiful. No bruises on the skin; only where you can’t see them.”

  In the cage next to Krista’s, that crazy brunette was livid, her eyes rounded in fear, and her hand covering her mouth. She’d finally shut up.

  20

  Immersion

  Thirty-one hours missing

  A few moments earlier, eating had seemed a great idea, because I hadn’t touched anything but stale water in almost twenty-four hours. I’d stopped for a drive-through at the In-N-Out Burger on East Flamingo Road and picked up a double cheeseburger with fries, knowing I was going to regret every single one of those empty calories. I took one bite, and the mouthwatering smell that had drawn me to eagerly unwrap the burger shifted into a stench I couldn’t tolerate. Not because there was anything wrong with the food, other than the obvious long-term effect on my arteries; no, it was because whenever I closed my eyes all I could see was Alyssa’s body, immobilized in the cold desert under a layer of dirt and rocks, buried alive.

  I rewrapped the remaining burger, threw it in the paper bag it had come in, and sent it flying out the window into a trash can by the curb. I washed away the aftertaste with some cold water, and then took a long sip of bitter coffee, brewed black with two shots of espresso, the kind of stuff that injects life back into the veins of sleep-deprived, malnourished cops hunting for serial killers.

  I took out my notepad and started jotting thoughts, ideas, questions. I’d been quick to paste the label of serial killer on the suspect, because of the way we found Alyssa. Carefully posed, her hair spread around her head and weighed in place with rocks, her naked body under the tarp. But was she really the victim of a serial killer? The microchip Anne had dug out of her arm pointed toward a sex trafficking organization. That very notion was incompatible with a serial killer holding and raping Alyssa for three weeks, before killing her slowly in the Mojave.

  Then, if that couldn’t’ve happened, what made sense? What scenario?

  I let myself slouch a little into the driver seat, sinking a few inches lower, and took a deep breath. I steeled myself as I was about to enter a world that brought feverish chills down my spine and a dull pain to the pit of my stomach. If I wanted to catch Alyssa’s killer, if I had any chance to find out what had happened to her and to Meredith Holt, I needed to understand how the killer thought. What he felt. What brought him the release he killed for.

  I pushed aside the contradicting thoughts about the sex trafficking organization and focused on the killer. Later, I’d figure out how he got his hands on Alyssa, and when.

  I closed my eyes and pictured him in the desert at dusk, dragging Alyssa to her early grave. Who was he? What did he look like? What did he crave?

  He was strong, I knew that for sure, although the fact he had chemically restrained her seemed to point in the opposite direction. When a rapist or a killer couldn’t overcome their victims with the strength of their own bodies, they employed physical or chemical restraints, ranging from a simple rope to tie their victim’s hands and feet, to modified tetrodotoxin.

  Yeah… precisely. A weak killer would’ve used cuffs, or rope, or duct tape, as seen on many occasions in the history of criminal investigations. This killer used modified tetrodotoxin, of all things. Something I didn’t even know existed, after all my years on the force, catching killers and rapists on both sides of the Atlantic.

  That was the key to his behavior, to understanding his urges. A toxin that rendered his victim completely inert, unable to resist or react in any way, as if she were dead. A specialty, an acquired and carefully developed taste, the deviant’s equivalent of gourmet food, of molecular gastronomy.

  He was a necrophile, or almost. One who was still discovering who he was. Or a smart one, who knew that preserving a dead body for extended periods of time was challenging, especially if he wanted to pay them the occasional conjugal visit.

  Feeling bile rising in my throat, I opened my eyes and let the light contract my irises and mitigate the shadows of horror dancing against my eyelids. Then I immersed myself back into visualizing Alyssa’s last hours.

  He’d chased her, toyed with her for a while, entertained by her zest for life, her fight for survival. Anne had found deep cuts and bruises on the soles of her feet, consistent with running barefoot in the desert. Her calves were covered in numerous scratches and gashes from brushing against cactus thorns.

  Then he’d caught her and forced her to ingest the poison. Based on Fletcher’s research, the toxin came as a fluid, and a few drops were enough to paralyze the victims for several hours, without killing them.

  Then what?

  Images refused to agglutinate in my mind past the point where her body had fallen to the ground inert, able to feel pain but unable to run from it or scream for help. Capable of feeling every little thing, and he relished making her suffer. He took his time with it, savored it, carefully prolonged her agony.

  Because he was a sadist. And nearly a necrophile.

  That’s why he hadn’t killed her quickly. If he had, she’d stop feeling pain, and that would’ve robbed him of half his enjoyment. The other half was feeling her body completely immobile, cold as ice, subdued, and helpless under his power.

  Images danced in my mind and started forming scenes as if telling a story of horror and despair. Every time he came back, he dripped more poison into her mouth and then took his time with her, raping her again, and again, and again. When he grew tired of her, he’d weigh her down under the tarp and rocks, and then go away for a while.

  Where?

  No idea, but
something told me Fletcher was going to find out, once he finished dumping all the cellular data for the area and comparing active mobile phone numbers with the time frames Anne had estimated for his visits. There was a strong chance only one mobile number was at that precise location during those times. Others might have been driving by, but only one came and went multiple times in the past forty-eight hours, spending time in the desert with his victim.

  I moved on to other unanswered questions.

  Why the tarp? Was he protecting her? From what? I let my mind wander while I munched absently on a cold, greasy fry from the package I’d forgotten to throw out with the burger. No… he wasn’t protecting her; he was protecting himself. The tarp made it more difficult for scorpions and other insects to hide in places where his hands or other extremities might’ve reached without looking, in the heat of the moment.

  Because he had urges, and when an urge was upon him, he couldn’t restrain himself.

  With my eyes scrunched shut, I visualized him returning to the grave at dawn, running toward Alyssa, unbuckling his belt, and touching himself, driven by a relentless compulsion to take, to possess, to find release. Then grabbing the corner of the tarp and pulling it to the side, exposing her naked body with one swift move.

  I breathed, realizing I’d been holding my breath for a while. With my eyes wide open, I searched for the sun and squinted, willing the images I’d conjured to form and paint the portrait of Alyssa’s killer to dissipate and be gone.

  Did this man have Meredith Holt?

  And what in bloody hell was Holt hiding from me?

  I tried his cell again and got sent to voicemail. Frustrated, I threw the phone onto the passenger seat. It was infuriating beyond belief that he knew something about who’d taken his daughter, yet he wouldn’t open up to me, his so-called partner in more ways than one.

  We weren’t partners… we were a sad joke.

  He kept his phone off, although he was expecting a follow-up call from the kidnapper with the terms of Meredith’s release. That didn’t make any sense, unless he had a different burner, one only the kidnapper knew to call. Had Holt been in touch with that man all this time and shut me off? Maybe he’d already traded his life for his daughter’s and things went south from there.

  That’s typically the direction any such exchanges went, and Holt, going in by himself, showed what an idiot he really was.

  I shrugged my anger away and refocused on the long list of unanswered questions. If I was going to find him and his daughter, I had to find Alyssa’s killer. That was the only lead I could follow.

  Meredith had been taken by two men, same as Alyssa. By all witness accounts, they probably were the same two men. Was one of them the killer? Then what was the other one’s role?

  There was no evidence at the gravesite of a second perpetrator and not a single trace of a second-donor DNA on the victim’s body. Somewhere between the abduction and the Mojave Desert, one of the perps had vanished, leaving the other one to do his bidding.

  I picked up my phone with fast-food, greasy fingers and flipped through some images Fletcher had sent, including a fuzzy screenshot taken from the school surveillance video, showing the two perps dressed as cops leaving the premises.

  Neither of them looked like a serial killer.

  But what did a serial killer look like? What did Ted Bundy look like? Perfectly average, normal, inconspicuous, charismatic even.

  Yet my gut was telling me neither of those men was the killer.

  If that was the case, who were they working for?

  Serial killers are usually solitary men or women, keeping to themselves and hiding their dark nature behind a thick veil of solitude, while the MO of the kidnappings pointed to a larger group. No matter how many different ways I looked at the facts, the pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit.

  Frustrated, I dropped the phone in the cup holder and wiped my fingers on a tissue I pulled from the glove box, my mind stubbornly gnawing at one bothersome detail.

  The same two perps had taken Alyssa and Meredith. Holt had received a ransom call, while Alyssa’s family had not. What did that mean?

  When I realized the answer, my jaw dropped.

  It was personal. Like I’d already suspected, Meredith’s kidnapping was personal, some score being settled by someone who also happened to kidnap and force girls into prostitution.

  That’s what Holt knew and wouldn’t share. That was the sword of Damocles that the kidnapper held above Holt’s head. The caller had hinted to Meredith being sold as a virgin sex slave if Holt didn’t comply. At the time, I thought that was just a threat cleverly constructed to subdue the parent of a teenage girl. In retrospect, I realized Holt knew exactly who he’d been talking to on the phone.

  He’d never asked the caller who he was, an instinctive question we ask of all strangers we interact with.

  A tiny smile tugged at the corner of my lips. The truth could be a weird animal, sometimes poking its unwanted head out from the darkest recesses of a perp’s mind. What if the caller had the possibility to make good on his threat to sell Meredith into slavery? What if he’d done it before?

  That still didn’t clarify where and how the serial killer fit in. If Alyssa had been taken into forced prostitution, why was she killed? To a human trafficker, girls like her were highly valuable, assets to be protected and developed, with the power to bring in serious cash. Could it be possible Alyssa had been kidnapped twice? Once from school and the second time by one of her johns? Not likely; serial killers never paid for sex; they preyed for sex.

  I reached for the phone, about to call Fletcher to send him shopping for virgin sex slaves on the Dark Web, when it rang loudly. I frowned, not recognizing the number on the caller ID display, but I answered nevertheless.

  “Detective Baxter,” I identified myself.

  “Yes, hello, Detective,” a man’s voice said. He sounded familiar, and I remembered who he was just as he said his name. “It’s Dr. Stuart Hickman, the—”

  “Ornithologist, yes, I remember,” I interrupted, rushed to get to the point. “What can I do for you, Dr. Hickman?”

  “My vultures are circling again,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “They’re not settling down to feed, just circling, but I thought I’d let you know.”

  My heart skipped a beat, then began pounding loudly against my chest. “Where?” I asked.

  “About the same area, two miles south of there. I can send you the coordinates.”

  I hung up, feeling numb with angst while tears burned at the corners of my eyes. Could that be Meredith out there, fighting for her life while vultures circled above her head?

  “No, no, please, God, no,” I whispered, then dialed Dispatch.

  Holt, you bloody fool, where the hell are you?

  21

  Two Cases

  Thirty-two hours missing

  SA Glover sifted through the pile of case files scattered on the living room table, looking for a particular one that had caught his attention. The technical analysts had run a complete search through Detective Holt’s entire work history and had flagged the cases they deemed most likely to have a connection with Meredith Holt’s kidnapping. A few phone calls and almost an hour later, the flagged case files littered former Mrs. Holt’s furniture.

  Her last name was now Sauceda; she’d kept her latest husband’s name after the divorce. Glover had looked at the ex-husband’s whereabouts and background as part of the initial due diligence, but the man was cleared immediately. When Meredith had been taken, he was on the East Coast attending a conference.

  Meredith’s mother was going through the usual stages of grief associated with a missing child that he’d seen in all his kidnapped victims’ families. After the initial shock came denial, then a rage she’d targeted at Jack Holt and his job, blaming him for everything that was going wrong in her life. But that was where the similarities with other kidnapping cases stopped.

  First, Mrs. Sauceda was probably right to bl
ame her husband’s job for her daughter’s abduction. From what he and his partner, Special Agent Rosales, were able to derive, the unusual kidnapping had nothing to do with a ransom demand, and more to do with Detective Holt’s job.

  Second, the detective wasn’t cooperating with the FBI CARD team. He wouldn’t share his whereabouts, and he knew how to hide his tracks. Glover knew where he was; out there, pressing informants and interrogating suspects. Other cops in his precinct had been doing the exact same things all night long. In theory, there was nothing wrong with Holt’s actions, but Glover preferred a more structured approach to the wake of chaos the detective and his colleagues were leaving behind.

  Rosales approached with a fresh cup of coffee in her hand. Her feistiness had turned into a cranky, vile mood, probably because she was tired, had been wearing the same clothes for more than one day, and was getting sick of cold pizza.

  She pulled out a chair and sat with a groan. “Any progress?” she asked, while her upper lip twitched as if she expected to see or hear something disgusting.

  Glover didn’t react; the woman oozed contempt and disdain through every pore. It was who she was; nothing to be done about it, although he firmly believed Rosales wasn’t a good fit for the CARD team. There wasn’t a single strand of team player DNA in her to complement her exceptional reasoning and communication skills. She’d probably be best suited elsewhere, in a role where she could work alone.

  He pushed a few folders her way. “Take a look and tell me which ones seem likely.”

  They flipped through pages in silence until the last file had been reviewed. The only noises that broke the stillness of the room were the rustling of papers and the occasional slurp of coffee taken by Rosales and gulped down with the loudest sound a human could make while drinking.