Stripped (10 page)

“Has he dealt with any funny numbers lately? Or received any threats?”

“No, no. This isn’t the old days. It’s all public companies and SEC filings now. If a casino exec picks up a quarter from the floor, you can find it in a financial statement somewhere. Everything’s out in the open.”

“How about the personal side?” Serena asked. “Please don’t take this wrong. I have to ask. Are there any problems with drugs? Money?”

“Sorry, I don’t have a secret life. What you see is what you get. Same with my husband.”

“You two are happy? Have there been any sexual issues? Affairs? Things like that.”

Linda’s face screwed up. “Once a week on Friday night is enough for both of us. I hope you don’t need to know our favorite position.”

“I’m sorry,” Serena said. “I know this is intrusive.”

“I just don’t see how our sex life is going to help you find out who killed Peter.” Her voice rose sharply.

“I understand your impatience, but this is a very unusual hit-and-run. Most accidents like this involve someone local, often someone who was drinking. They’re scared, and they flee the scene. Usually, within a few days, a friend or family member turns them in, or the guilt overwhelms them and they come in voluntarily. There’s no motive. No intent. But what happened to Peter no longer feels like an accident.”

“I realize that, but I can’t help you,” Linda insisted. “We don’t have any skeletons in our closet. I’d tell you if we did.”

Serena watched her eyes. There was nothing furtive behind them. “Do you have any ties to Reno? Have you visited there recently?”

“Reno? Not in years. There are plenty of casinos around here if I want to drop a nickel in a slot. Why?”

“We think whoever did this was in Reno a few weeks ago. We found a receipt in the car. There may be a connection. Do you have friends or family there?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

Serena nodded. “If you think of something, or if anything unusual happens, I hope you’ll let me know.”

“Of course I will, but I really think you’re wrong about this. I just don’t see why anyone would deliberately hurt our family.”

“That’s what scares me,” Serena acknowledged.

“Why?”

“Because it means we may not find this person before he kills someone else.”

Stride and Serena made it home separately just before midnight on Sunday. He had been awake for almost twenty-four hours, but he was still too wired on caffeine simply to tumble into bed and sleep. The two of them barely turned on the lights before leaving again and taking Stride’s Bronco west into the hills. It had become a nighttime ritual for them. They followed Charleston until the houses ran out, before the road wound into Red Rock Canyon. He steered the Bronco off the paved road and climbed a rocky slope to the high ground. They turned around and parked, doors open, windows open, with the night air blowing through the truck and the expanse of the Las Vegas valley stretched out below them. The tracts of suburban homes inching up the street, eating more of the empty space week by week, were dark.

Even in July, when the daytime heat was ferocious, the night cooled in the hills, enough that the breeze sailing down over the peaks behind them made it bearable. Now, in the early fall, there was a hint of chill, like a Minnesota evening without the fragrant scent of pine. He could see literally the entire city, its myriad lights creeping out like vines in all four directions until they finally ran out in the darkness of the desert. Cutting through the middle was the fiery glow of the Strip, taller and brighter than anything else around it, a multicolored, bedazzling belt across the city’s fat belly.

From far away, without the sunlight, the valley sparkled. There was no orange rim of smog floating over the city like a smoke ring. The casinos were jewels.

Stride twisted his upper body and stared at Serena’s face in silhouette. He knew she felt him watching her. This was the time when it was just the two of them, peaceful, in love, free of the city. “You are way, way too beautiful,” he told her.

“If you want sex, you’re going to have to do better than that,” Serena replied, laughing.

“But that was my best line.”

He smiled and stroked her dark hair, in a way that told her he wanted her. He knew, when they got home, they would be too tired to do anything but sleep, and he very much wanted to make love to her.

She leaned across and kissed him. “Haven’t we proven it’s not safe for a man in his forties to do it in a truck? Last time, you almost threw your back out.”

“It was worth it.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she told him.

Serena pulled her T-shirt over her head. Her hair was mussed and sexy. She unhooked and wriggled out of her bra, then stretched her shoulders back. She reclined her seat and began peeling down her jeans. Her skin was firm, her breasts milky white like oyster shells in the pale light. He climbed over her and felt her fingers on his clothes.

He was back in his own seat a few minutes later, sweaty and sore. “Ow,” he said.

“Your back?”

“Back, arms, legs.”

“I told you so.”

Stride dangled his foot out of the truck and rubbed it against the loose dirt. He hoped that a scorpion wasn’t scuttling nearby, or that a rattlesnake wouldn’t choose that moment to slither from the rocks. Those were the real night creatures, doing what came naturally, unlike the human ones below them in the valley.

Serena lay next to him, bare and disheveled. She made no effort to repair her clothes. Her eyes were lost, focused into the hills. She touched her skin idly with her fingertips. “Think the novelty of this is ever going to wear off?”

“Us having sex?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope not.”

“I’m ready to go again,” she told him.

“You’re on your own.”

Serena gave him a mock sigh. “Did it ever wear off with Cindy?”

Stride smiled as a picture of his late wife flashed in his brain. “No. She was like you. She couldn’t get enough.”

“Oh yeah, I’m a sex fiend. I’m just glad vaginas aren’t like piercings.”

Stride looked at her. “What?”

“You know. Closing up from lack of use.”

He threw his head back and laughed, and Serena joined him. Her head fell against his shoulder, and he slipped an arm around her. They sat silently for a few more minutes, lulled by the wind.

The longer they sat, the more he felt her go away somewhere. That was how it usually happened. When they got close, and she felt safe with him, she took another step into her past and pulled another ghost from her closet.

It was a compliment, she told him. She had never done that with anyone else. Her secrets were like notes plugged up in bottles that she had long ago tossed into the sea. Now, one by one, they were drifting back to shore.

He knew only sketches of what she had gone through. Raw facts. She had told him what had happened to her as a teenager in clinical terms, like a doctor reciting from someone else’s file. Her mother used her as a whore to pay for drugs. She got pregnant, she had an abortion, she ran away. End of story. Only those kinds of stories never ended.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked.

Serena took a long time to reply, and he wondered if she would drop it and go back to something safe, like work or music or the lights in the valley.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Deidre,” she said.

Deidre was the girl who had come to Las Vegas with Serena when she escaped from Phoenix at the age of sixteen. Serena had never told him much about her. Only how she died.

“Strange, huh?” she went on. “I really haven’t thought about her in years, but she’s been in my dreams lately. I fall asleep, and there she is.”

“She got AIDS. That wasn’t your fault.”

Serena rubbed her shoulders as if she were cold. “The thing is, I never went to see her. Maybe there was nothing I could do, but I didn’t have to let her die alone. I mean, she saved me. Back in Phoenix? She saved me. I was being abused night and day, and she helped me escape. I loved her, Jonny. I really loved her, those first few years we were together. But I just let her die.”

“You don’t need me to tell you that isn’t true, do you?” Stride asked.

Serena shrugged. “No. But it keeps coming back to me. You’d think by now it would all be gone, dead, not a big deal. But I can’t switch on part of myself with you and keep the rest shut off.”

Stride frowned. ‘’How can I help?”

“I’m not sure you can.”

“So I guess one alternative is to shut me off, too,” he said.

“Sure it is. But that’s not what I want. I just have to learn how to deal with all this—and keep you around.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

She turned to him, unconvinced. “I know how you feel about this place. I’m worried that you’ll hate this city more than you love me. You’ll go back home to Minnesota, where your heart is.”

“My heart’s here with you.”

Serena took one of his hands and kissed his fingertips. “Thank you for saying that.”

But he wasn’t sure she believed him. He wasn’t sure he believed himself.

He went to reach for her again, but somewhere on the floor mat, where her jeans were crumpled, her cell phone started ringing. Serena laughed, setting the tense moment aside, and found the phone.

Stride heard a man’s voice. Serena brightened. “Hey, Jay, hang on a second.”

She quickly covered the phone and whispered to Stride. “Jay Walling is a detective I know in Reno. Sixty years old and very dapper. Watches too many Sinatra movies.” She spoke into the phone again. “Jay, I’ve got another detective with me. I’m going to put you on speaker.”

She pushed a button and then continued, “Jay Walling, meet Jonathan Stride, and vice versa.”

“How are you, Jay?” Stride said.

“Excellent, thanks.” His voice had a smooth elegance. “So, Serena, is this the man you’re playing house with? Or did Cordy finally get arrested on a morals charge?”

Even in the darkness of the car, Stride could feel Serena flush with embarrassment.

“Nice to see the rumors have made their way across the state, Jay. Yes, Jonny and I are an item, and no, the women of Las Vegas are still not safe from Cordy. Mind if I ask who told you about us?”

“My lieutenant, actually,” Walling said. “He’s tight with Sawhill.”

“Great, just great.”

“Don’t be offended, darling. My wife will be relieved. She’s been looking for someone to fix you up with since we worked that case together last year.”

“Don’t make it sound like the impossible dream,” Serena snapped.

“Nonsense. You just have high standards. Detective Stride, my congratulations. Serena is one of my favorite people in the whole world, so treat her nice or I’ll have to have you rubbed out.”

Stride laughed, and Serena groaned. “Jay, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to have
you
rubbed out. Now, did you run down that receipt for me from my hit-and-run car?”

Walling chuckled. “Six Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a Sprite. At least we know your perp isn’t diabetic.”

“Funny.”

“I tracked down the store, but it was a cash sale, and the owner doesn’t remember a thing.”

“No surprise. That’s what I figured. Thanks for trying.”

“Yes, but there’s something else. I was hoping you might be able to fly up to Reno tomorrow.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because I don’t like coincidences,” Walling said. “The same day your perp got his sugar fix in Reno, a woman got murdered on a ranch a few miles south of here. Someone cut her throat.”

Stride began to do research on MJ’s father, Walker Lane, following dozens of links on the Web from the computer in his cubicle. There was no official home page about the man, just gossipy sites that rehashed the same dry facts from his Hollywood biography and spiced up the written record with hints about his reclusive lifestyle in Canada.

There was plenty of information about Lane’s early days in the 1960s, when he was a wunderkind producer-director who struck it rich with his first self-funded film. From the beginning, he was about money, not art.
Cherry Tree
featured a fifteen-year-old newcomer, sort of a Hayley Mills with breasts, whose huge eyes and innocent sex appeal won over audiences, despite a lame spy story about a teenager helping George Washington win the Revolutionary War. Two more family comedies followed, both hugely successful, and Lane won a reputation as Frank Capra Lite, the boy with the golden touch. Because he hadn’t thrown in his lot with the big studios, he reaped the financial rewards himself.

Scandal dogged him, mostly because there were rumors on the set that he had been having an affair with his underaged star since their first film together. Lane denied it, but he didn’t hide his playboy ways, partying in L.A. and Vegas, and leaving a trail of photographs of himself with starlets on his arm.

Then came the big disappearance.

As far as Stride could tell, it happened in 1967. Lane left Hollywood, moved to Canada, and essentially vanished from the public eye. From a distance, he continued to build his reputation as a mover and shaker. He chose and funded a series of monster hits throughout the next three decades, deftly moving in and out of comedy and drama as public tastes changed. He never directed again, not as far as Stride could tell, but he became a huge force, a star-maker, without ever setting foot out of his estate in British Columbia. He was the executive producer behind two of the twenty highest-grossing films ever.

He became almost fanatically private. Actors and directors who met with him signed nondisclosure agreements. Like Howard Hughes, he seemed to run his empire primarily by phone. Stride couldn’t find a photograph of the man taken in the last twenty years. There were rumors of a disabling illness that left him in a wheelchair and of facial degeneration that had ravaged his once handsome, boyish looks. There were also rumors of a scandal that had driven him out of the country, but as far as Stride could tell, no one had pierced the veil and uncovered the real story.