Sin City Homicide (6 page)

11

Stanton dressed and showered before seven
in the morning then ate a quick meal of eggs and fruit at the buffet in his hotel. He watched the families and the couples who were there, but he was mostly interested in the individuals who sat quietly at their tables with bloodshot eyes, barely eating their meals. He knew their minds were still in the casinos.

When he had finished, he got his car from the valet and drove to the Metro PD headquarters to pick up Marty. Mindi was waiting for him
outside, wearing slacks and a leather jacket.

“Mind if I hitch a ride?” she
asked.

“Where’s Marty?”

“He had some work to catch up on.”

“I thought he was only assigned to me?”

“Look, I know you want to go see the Steeds’ house. Marty can’t get you in there.” She pulled out a key and held it up. “But I can. Do you want to go or not?”

“Fine
. Get in. But tell me where Marty is.”

“I wasn’t lying. He had a bunch of paperwork from old traffic tickets that are going to court
, and he had to catch up on it. I told him I would cover this.”

Stanton typed the address
into his GPS and pulled away from the curb. He rolled down the window to get some fresh air, but there was none to be had. Exhaust fumes and the pungent odors of sweat and burning neon tainted the air.

“You know, you really should be nicer to me. I can help you a lot.”

“I saw you got Jay and Javier’s notes in the file. How’d you do that?”

“Do you really want to know
, or are you just asking to make small talk?”

“No, I probably don’t want to know.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes before Mindi said, “Your partner almost killed you once. I read that about you.”

“Yeah.”

“Eli Sherman, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you not want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“My partner, my first real partner, was a guy named Lawrence Zira. He was from Bosnia. He… he was married, but we had an affair. Well, he had an affair. I was twenty-one and an idiot. He didn’t tell me he was married. No one in the precinct told me—not my bosses, not the other uniforms. No one. I was in the dark until a receptionist finally pulled me aside and told me about it. When I confronted him, he laughed at me.”

“I’m sorry
.” Stanton glanced at her then back at the road. “Where is he now?”

“He transferred to SWAT, so I don’t see him
much. He was a dirtbag, but I’ve never forgotten that no one told me.”

Stanton turned right at an intersection
, where a man on the corner in a pink tutu was dancing and shouting at the passersby.

“He killed twelve girls that we know of,” he said. “That’s the only reason he joined the police force. He liked the opportunity to find victims.”

“Don’t they screen for people like him?”

“They do, but some psychopaths, the ones who are high
-functioning, can’t be detected. Most psychopaths are self-destructive. In my clinical internship, we had a patient who was considered a pure psychopath. She would try to break open her skull every day to pick at her brain. She had to be restrained most of the time. That’s a true psychopath. The manipulative sadist is a much more rare kind of psychopath, and we don’t understand them. You could live your whole life next to one and never know what they really are inside. You only see what they want you to see.”

“Or maybe what you want to see.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

He
sped up a winding road to the affluent suburb of Cottonwood Hills and came to a stop at a large three-story home. It looked much like a well-manicured log cabin, with the exception of the yellowing lawn and the untrimmed bushes and flowers.

“I’d like to go in by myself.”

“I know,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“I read that about you—that you’re solitary. It was in an article about Sherman.” She handed him the key. “I’ll be here.”

Stanton
grabbed the Steed file from the backseat and got out. “I’ll be out soon.”

He walked up the driveway and stood on the porch, staring at the front door
before inserting the key. He opened the door then stepped inside and shut it behind him. All the blinds had been shut, and the place smelled like dust. He slowly took to the stairs up to the living room, glancing at the plush white carpet decorated with a pattern of blue diamonds. At the top of the stairs, he could look into the kitchen, which was directly in front of him. The living room was to his right, along with the bedroom. He walked over to the sofa and sat down.

A massive projector hung from the ceiling
, and the handcrafted furniture was chocolate-colored wood. A large portrait of Daniel Steed standing behind his wife, who was seated in front of him, took up half a wall. A few photos of them with friends and family sat on a side table. He didn’t see anyone who resembled Emily or Daniel enough to be their son. He scanned the photos then opened his file and found the photograph of Fredrick Steed. The young man wasn’t in any of the family photos. Stanton made a note of that in the file.

Stanton rose and walked around the house. He peeked into the bedroom, the kitchen,
and the main bathroom. Mrs. Steed’s robe was hanging over the shower rod. Rather than giving the room a homey feel, it made it feel empty.

He walked back to the living room.
He skimmed the discs in the entertainment center DVD rack. Two had blank spaces where the titles should’ve been, and he took them out of their cases. One was labeled Family Reunion, 1998. The other had no label. He found the remotes to the projector and the DVD player and fiddled with them until they turned on. He inserted the family reunion disc.

As it turned on, Stanton saw a bird’s
-eye view of the massive casino showroom that had been rented to host the Steed reunion. Then the camera shifted, shut off, and turned back on. It was now held low, about shoulder height, and he knew a child was filming. He was going around to the different guests, asking them questions and grilling them about what they were wearing. He asked one guest in a hideous blue dress what it felt like to have the ugliest dress at the reunion. Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes, and she turned away from the camera and began to ignore the child. The boy behind the camera smelled the blood in the water and continued antagonizing her until her husband threatened him. Then he ran off, laughing.

Next the
boy harassed a young waitress. When she began to get upset, he said that his father had paid for the reunion, and she had better not piss him off, or he would tattle on her. The waitress, clearly fearing for her job, took the boy’s abuse, which consisted of teasing her about her appearance. Stanton was about to fast-forward when the questions the child was asking turned sexual.

The waitress appeared shocked and turned back to someone who looked like her boss standing a few feet away. He noticed her discomfort, came over, and asked what was going on.

“I just asked if she would show me her pussy,” the boy said.

The boss, shocked, looked out over the crowd. The boy continued to film and giggle. He turned back to the girl, asking more questions about her genitals
. Then suddenly, the camera shook, and Daniel Steed’s face appeared on the screen.

“What did you say to her, you little shit? Huh? What did you say?”

Mrs. Steed’s voice was in the background. “Danny, take care of this later. Not here.”

“Get the hell outta here before I paint your backside red.”

The boy pulled away but left the camera on. Before he got more than a few feet away, Daniel Steed said, “His father was as big an asshole as he is.”

Stanton rewound the disc
and played that part again. He guessed that Daniel wasn’t talking about himself. He flipped through the police reports. Nothing mentioned that Fredrick was Emily’s son from another marriage.

Stanton watched the rest of the disc
, but it consisted of Fredrick playing outside the reunion and sneaking back in to steal drinks from the bar. When the video ended, Stanton made a few notes in the file and put the unlabeled disc into the DVD player.

The disc was blank. He fast-forwarded through it a bit then stopped it.
Wondering why they would keep a blank disc with the others, he took it out and slipped it into the file. He scanned the living room for other clues before leaving.

Mindi was surfing the
Internet on her phone and looked up when he got back in the car. He pulled out of the driveway without a word.

“So?” she said.

“We need to pay Fredrick a visit.”

12

Sitting
on the hood of his Mustang in the middle of a rundown apartment complex, Captain Alma Parr lifted his Browning .45 caliber handgun. The gun was the 1911 model. Browning had designed it for the army, and it had passed the Ordnance Department’s highest level of testing for reliability, including the continuous firing of six thousand rounds without jamming. It was the most reliable handgun ever made. The army had dumped it because NATO refused to approve its use. Parr had bought as many as he could find and required his detectives to carry them.

He looked at the fresh tattoo still healing on his right bicep
s. A dragon ran across his collar bone, over his shoulder, around his biceps, and down his forearm to the tip of his wrist. He flexed the bulging muscles beneath it a few times, and waves spread through the ink, stretching and contracting it.

Parr glanced around him. This was the barri
o, MS-13 territory. They were one of the most dangerous gangs in the world. None of them would think twice to pop a high-ranking cop in broad daylight.

The red-brick complex made a U shape around the courtyard where
he was parked, right in the middle. He had no backup, no officers undercover. No one even knew he was there.

The tingling
of fear in his belly excited him. It made him want it more, to fight harder. Fear was his old buddy, and he looked forward to reuniting with it. It reminded him of his time in the burned-out buildings of Fallujah, left alone with his rifle and only enough rations for one week.
Take out as many son
s
abitches as possible
. Those were the only orders he could remember.

He heard
voices nearby and looked over. Three men came out of one of the buildings and headed toward an El Camino parked at the curb. They were laughing, and one of them threw his head back. Parr could see the outline of a handgun in the front of his pants, tucked in tightly against the belt.

Parr slid off his hood and ducked behind his car. The El Camino was about thirty feet away. He waited until they were closer… just enough. When the
men were ten feet from their car, Parr bolted out, his sidearm drawn. He was there so quickly that the men stood frozen. Then the man with the handgun went for it, and Parr fired.

The round went clean through the man’s hand
, and he screamed and doubled over, pressing on the wound, trying to stop the flow of blood.

“What the fuck?”
yelled the oldest man, who had a bad mustache.

Parr ran up, grabbed him by his throat, and spun around, slamming him against the hood of the El Camino. He turned and grabbed the handgun out of the other man’s pants.
The injured man was sitting on the grass with his shirt wrapped around his hand, shrieking about needing to go to a hospital. The third man raised his hands.

“Get on the ground,” Parr said. He complied
, and Parr turned his attention to the man he had pinned on the hood. “You lied to me, Mateo.”

“What? About what?”

“You told me Rico was gonna be at the drop with two keys he took off that barbequed body.”

“What body, man? I don’t know what you talkin’ about, white
boy.”

Parr
punched the man in his genitals.

“Fuck me!
Besa mi culo, puto
!”

Parr grabbed
Mateo’s genitals, felt for the testicles, and began to twist. Mateo screamed.

“You remember now?”

“All right, man. All right!”

Parr
let go. “The body in the car. That’s all I care about. I don’t give a shit about the keys. You can keep those. I want the concha who merced the body.”

“Somebody told Rico
’bout it.”

“Somebody or you?”

“No, man, it wasn’t me. I swear it, man. On my moms, I swear it.”

“Who then?”

“I heard it was a cop.”

Parr grabbed
Mateo’s testicles again and violently pulled, making him scream again and swear in Spanish.

“Don’t fuckin’ lie to me, Mateo.”

“I ain’t lyin’. I swear, man. I ain’t lyin’.”

He
released his grip. “What cop?”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know.”

“Well, you better gimme somethin’ if you wanna have kids,
ese
.”

“I heard from my boy, Chico. He said some cop took five G’s and told Rico and them
’bout it. Said you’d be waitin’ for him when he went over there. That’s why Rico didn’t go.”

“What cop? What does he look like?”

“I don’t know, man. On my moms, I don’t know.”

“Give me Chico’s address.”

“All right, man. I’ll give it, I swear.”

Parr pulled out his phone and opened a notepad app. “Type.”

Mateo typed in an address and handed the phone back. “Yo, you gotta call an ambulance.”

Parr looked at the address then
away put the phone. He glanced back at the man on the grass. He was pale, and his shirt was soaked in blood. “Drive him, Mateo. He ain’t gonna die yet.”

As he walked to his car, Parr tried to look in his side mirrors. He had kept the handgun he
’d taken from one of the men, but he was certain the other two were armed as well, and they would definitely have firearms in the car. They stared at him with venom but didn’t reach for anything. He got in, started his Mustang, and peeled out before speeding away.

The address was
in a nearby low-income housing project, and he knew the area. The homes had been government-subsidized during the real estate boom, and after the crash, owners couldn’t give them away because no one thought they were even worth the taxes. A few of the wealthier residents had bought them and rented them out to illegal immigrants and vagabonds, people who didn’t have identification, credit, or steady employment.

The one thing that always struck Parr about th
ose neighborhoods was the corners. Sometimes, as many as twenty young men were wasting their days away there. Streetcorners were the ghetto forums where gossip was traded along with goods—mostly guns and drugs, but sometimes hookers, illegal porn, and false IDs. As he passed a light, a man on a corner held out his arms, challenging him. He chuckled to himself and continued driving.

The
red-brick home at the address Mateo had given him was a modest two-story with a lawn that looked as if it hadn’t been cut in years. He drove past it then spun around the block before parking two houses away. Parr leaned back in his seat and watched. He turned on the CD player, blaring Creedence Clearwater Revival. He turned it down until it was loud enough that he could just barely hear it.

The neighborhood was quiet
, and no one waited on the corners. Even the pit bulls, which he knew should be prominently displayed, were inside. The locals had been tipped off.

He punched his steering wheel. “Damn it!” He would have to pay another visit to Mateo.

As he reached down to turn on the car, he saw the curtains of the home he was watching open about six inches then close quickly. Mateo could deny he’d tipped off Chico, but he couldn’t deny it if he had given Parr the wrong address. Chico was probably in that house.

Parr took a deep breath and stepped out of the car. There was a shotgun in the trunk
, but he opted against it in case civilians were inside. Most of the dope dealers, even the ones making six figures a year, still lived with their parents. The trunk also held a Kevlar vest, and he thought for a moment about putting it on but decided against it. He was probably being watched from all sides right now. If they knew he was sporting a vest, they would only aim at his head.

He looked behind him at all the houses on the street
, but when he got to the driveway, he didn’t hesitate. If he did, they would see his fear and know he didn’t have an army of officers waiting around the corner. He opened the chain-link fence, walked right up to the door, and knocked. He rang the doorbell a few seconds later and glued his eye to the peephole. He couldn’t see into the house through the peephole, but he would be able to see light if no one was on the other side, looking out. He kept his eye on the light, and the second it went dark, he cocked up his leg and bashed his boot into the flimsy door.

Splinters rained down
as the door slammed into the face of a Hispanic man in his twenties. The man grabbed his nose as blood began to flow. He tried to lift the sawed-off shotgun in his right hand. It was too late for Parr to go for his sidearm, so he grabbed the shotgun. The barrel was pointed at his hip, and he twisted to the side just in time for the buckshot to spray behind him.

“Motherfucker!”
the man yelled.

Grunting, Parr
braced his legs and pushed back, slamming the man into the wall. He wrapped both hands around the handle of the shotgun and got his finger over the trigger. He pulled it, spraying another shot into the floor and loosening the man’s grip with the recoil. Holding his finger under the trigger, he prevented another shot from being fired.

Parr spun with his elbow up
, and it impacted against the man’s nose and flung his head back. He landed a punch into his throat while his head was up, and the man gasped for air. Parr ripped away the shotgun and threw it behind him. He pulled out his Browning and pressed it into the man’s left eye.

“You have ten seconds,”
Parr said, breathing hard. “I don’t like what I hear, you die.”

“Fuck you,
puto
.”

He cocked back and slammed the butt of his gun into the man’s nose. It crunched
, and the blood that was already flowing erupted down his neck and chest. Parr spun him to the ground onto his stomach. He put his knees into the man’s back and lifted his chin with his palms, putting pressure on his spine. He lifted until the man screamed then lowered him.

“I lied
. I won’t kill you. I’ll turn you into a fucking vegetable so you can lie in bed all day. You won’t move. You won’t talk or fuck or shit or eat. You’ll just lie there.” He lifted the man’s chin again, evoking another scream. “You’re Chico, right, asshole?” He lifted higher.

“Yeah,” he gasped
though his air was being cutting off.

“Good, now we’re getting somewhere, Chico. Was it Mateo who told you I was comin’ just now?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, good. Few more questions
, and you’ll never see me again. All right? But if you lie to me, I’m comin’ back here. Not during the day, though. I’m going to sneak in here at night while you’re sleeping, and I’m going to cut your guts out and feed ’em to you. Then I’m gonna cut up any other fuckers in this house. I don’t care if it’s your daddy, your mommy, or your nana. You feelin’ me?”

“Yeah, yeah, I feel you.”

“Good. Now, where are the two keys you got off the body in the car that was burned up?”

“They downstairs.”

“Where downstairs?”

“In a cabinet. You just go down
, and it’s by the window.”

“You merc that poor bastard I found?”

“No way,
ese
. I don’t do that shit.”

“Could’a fooled me with the shotgun you said hello with.”

“That was for protection, man. I ain’t never killed nobody. Fuck, I just deal, man. That’s it. I just want that paper. I ain’t tryin’ to get no life in prison.”