Stripped (3 page)

But old things ended, and new things began. Meeting Serena had changed everything. She was beautiful, smart, and funny, despite the sharp edges that came with a troubled past. He fell for her fast and hard. When the investigation was over, he had followed Serena here, to this wild world, and wound up back on the street.

Now he had a real partner again, who looked like she didn’t relish the task of playing second fiddle to a Vegas newcomer.

“Amanda Gillen,” she announced brusquely as he approached her, as if she expected him to challenge her. Her voice was husky. Or maybe she was just half asleep, as Stride was, after the phone call had dragged him out of bed, and out of Serena’s arms, in the middle of the night. His first murder case in Vegas. A body on the street on Flamingo.

“I’m Stride,” he told her.

Amanda nodded and began nervously tapping her foot on the street. Her lower lip jutted out, and she glanced around to make sure they were out of earshot. Her face was taut and unhappy.

“Look, I give everybody one free joke before I get pissed off, so do you want to make it now, or do you want to save it for a rainy day?”

Stride cocked his head. “What?”

“You know,” she said sourly.

“You lost me, Amanda.”

Her eyes narrowed as she watched the puzzlement on his face. The wrinkles in her forehead went away, and her jaw unclenched. She gave him an odd, sparkling smile that was suddenly friendly and not at all closed off. “All right, maybe you don’t know. Forget it. No big deal. It’s two in the morning, and I’m crabby.”

“You and me both.”

‘That was nice with the hooker. The way you got her to talk. You’re good.”

“Thanks,” Stride said. He added, “I like your boyfriend’s car.”

Amanda smirked. “Oh, the Spyder. It’s mine, actually. We were out dancing when I got paged. I told him if he puts a dent in it, I put a dent in his dick.”

“Yeah, that’s an incentive,” Stride said. “You win it at the slots?”

“Something like that.”

Stride watched her swallow hard, and a flush rose in her cheeks. She had a long face that tapered to a slightly protruding chin. Her lips were puffy and pale pink. She had thin black eyebrows and she had taken the time to apply her makeup with considerable care. Her Saturday night look, Stride guessed. Despite the wrestler-chick bravado, she looked pretty when she smiled and vulnerable when she was nervous. Stride figured she was about thirty.

“Got an ID on the vie yet?” Amanda asked.

Stride nodded. “Canadian driver’s license. Probably a tourist whose luck ran out. Name is Michael Johnson Lane.”

Amanda did a double take. “
MJ Lane
?”

“That’s right.”

She whistled and shook her head. “Oh, shit.”

“You know him?”

“Check your spam folder once in a while, Stride,” Amanda told him. “His bare ass is probably in half of the messages. Not to mention every issue of
Us
magazine.”

“My subscription lapsed,” Stride said.

Amanda studied his face long enough to realize he was joking, and a smile curled onto her full lips. “Well, you’re in Las Vegas now,” she retorted. “
People, Us
, and the
Enquirer are
more important reading than a DEA circular around here.”

Amanda walked over to the body. She wore ridiculously high heels, and Stride realized she was several inches shorter than he first thought. He noticed one of the ME staff look at her nervously and back up to give her space. Amanda didn’t pay any attention. She bent from the waist until her hands were flat on the sidewalk, and she turned her head sideways to stare at the corpse’s dead eyes. Stride found himself noticing her attractive, muscular ass and firm legs as her jeans pulled tight. He looked quickly away as she got up and announced, “Yeah, that’s MJ.”

“All right So who is MJ Lane?”

“Trust fund baby,” Amanda said. “His dad’s
Walker
Lane. You know, the billionaire producer in Vancouver.”

“Other than Daddy’s money, what’s his claim to fame?”

“He hangs with the right crowd. Hollywood connections. He was low profile until he filmed a very nasty rendezvous with a young soap actress last year. Somebody stole it, and it wound up all over the Internet. Bondage, anal sex, real kinky stuff.”

“A star is born.”

“Absolutely. Him getting popped is big news. You’re going to get your picture in all the tabloids.”

“I’ll whiten my teeth,” Stride said.

“So what do you think? Does it look like someone was stalking MJ?”

“It feels like an assassination,” Stride said. “A pro.”

“But he didn’t kill the girl,” Amanda pointed out. “A pro would take out the witness.”

“Yeah, true. He left the shell casing, too. A .357.”

“So maybe not a pro.”

“Maybe not,” Stride agreed. “But he planned it well. Cool, in and out fast. The question is, was the guy specifically after Lane, or do we have some kind of moral crusader out to clean up the city’s prostitution problem?”

“Or both,” Amanda said. “MJ’s not the first celeb to get his ice cream cone licked around here. The perp could have been staking out the casino, looking to make a big splash, get some headlines with the hit.”

Stride nodded. “Except from what you say about MJ, there could be plenty of reasons for someone to want him dead.”

Pete, one of the valets at the Oasis, remembered MJ Lane.

“He came in around ten o’clock,” Pete told Stride and Amanda when they quizzed him at the casino’s porte cochere. Pete was young and as white as a tube of toothpaste, with brown hair slicked down to lie flat on his head. He wore black pants and sneakers, and a snug waist-length jacket in burgundy.

“Alone?” Stride asked him.

“Mr. Lane? Not hardly. He had Karyn on his arm. Karyn Westermark. You know, the soap actress?” He fanned himself as if the cool night air had turned warm. “You saw the video on the Net? That was her. Hot stuff. Man, she’s better than a porn star.”

“How’d they get here?” Amanda asked. “Cab? Limo?”

Without answering, Pete broke off to attend to a gray Lexus sedan, opening the passenger door and then running around to the opposite side to take the car keys and hand the driver a parking stub. He returned, apologizing and pocketing a fifty-dollar tip. He cast a nervous eye as two more cars pulled into the driveway. Two in the morning at the Oasis on Saturday night was prime time.

“How’d MJ get here tonight?” Amanda repeated.

“He drove himself,” Pete told them. “He’s got a condo in town, over in the Charlcombe Towers just off the Strip.”

“Why didn’t he ask for his car when he was leaving?” Stride asked.

“I figured he was just going for a walk. You know?”

Stride cocked an eyebrow and leaned in close to Pete’s face. “Why’d he need a ‘walk’ if he had Karyn with him?”

“Karyn left an hour before MJ did,” Pete explained. “I got a cab for her.”

“Did she look upset?” Amanda asked.

Pete shook his head. “She looked bored. She told the cabbie to take her to Ra, over at the Luxor. She was just hunting for another party.”

“Did MJ say anything when he left?” Stride asked.

“No, he looked pretty bombed. He headed straight down the sidewalk. I knew where he was going.”

“Did MJ ‘walk’ a lot?” Amanda asked.

The valet blanched. “Not very often. A guy like him, he doesn’t need to pay for it. But sometimes you want a little on the street, so you don’t have to wake up next to her, okay?”

“Tell that to your girlfriend,” Stride said. “Did anyone follow him out the door?”

Pete shrugged. “I don’t know. Cars were coming and going. I only noticed MJ because he’s a regular.”

A car horn blared noisily, and the valet waved and began dancing on both feet, anxious for his next tip. “Anything else?” Pete asked impatiently.

“Who’s head of security here?”

“Gerard Plante. Inside and straight back.”

“Thanks. We’ll send a team over to check out MJ’s car,” Stride added. “Make sure no one gets near it before we do. You included.”

“Sure.”

Stride clapped a hand like a vise on the boy’s shoulder. “If I read in
Us
magazine about ribbed Trojans in MJ’s glove compartment, I’m going to make sure the IRS comes knocking on your door about those fifty-buck tips. Got it?”

Pete’s eyes widened, and he licked his upper lip, trying to figure out if Stride was serious. Then he gulped and ran for the next car.

“
Us
magazine,” Amanda said. “Nice.”

“I thought you’d like that.”

Stride led Amanda through the revolving doors into the sea of noise and smoke inside the casino. The stale smell of cigarettes curled into his lungs like an old friend, and just like that, the craving was back. Funny how it never left. He hadn’t smoked in more than a year, but he felt himself rubbing his thumb and finger together, as if there were a lit Camel between them. He took a deep breath, sucking it in and expelling it, and wondering if Vegas had been dropped down in the desert by some sarcastic angel who wanted to test the willpower of ex-sinners.

He found himself getting aroused, too. It was autoerotica, part of a mind-control game the casinos played. He couldn’t pretend he was immune. He responded to the beating pulse in the city’s bloodstream. Not greed, like most people thought. Hunger. For money, for flesh, for food, alcohol, and smoke—naked hunger, oozing, obsessive, and overwhelming. The casinos programmed it that way. Maybe the little black half-moons in the ceiling weren’t cameras after all, spying on every finger on a slot button or flip of a card. Maybe they were all spraying some odorless drug that unleashed the mania, which lasted until your money was all gone and you slunk back home.

The Oasis was among the most explicit of the Vegas casinos in using sex to sell its machines and tables and to cultivate an image as the hip spot for rubbing shoulders with celebrities. Looking around the casino, Stride saw posters everywhere of impossibly gorgeous bikini-clad women, leering at him as they hyped slot tournaments, poker rooms, and crab leg buffets. It seemed to be working. The casino itself was relatively small, not a sprawling octopus like Caesars, but every machine was taken, and every seat at the blackjack tables was filled, with crowds pressing in to watch the action. It was a young crowd, dripping with women just as stunning as those in the posters.

Stride remembered what Serena’s partner, Cordy, said about nights in Las Vegas. The time when breasts came out to play.

He had a hard-on. It pissed him off.

“Come on,” he growled. Amanda had a look of cool wonder. The drug was working on her, too.

They weaved their way through the rows of slot machines and found the security desk at the back of the casino, an imposing oak monolith staffed by the only woman in the casino who was ugly and severe. Talking above the thump of rock music blaring from the overhead speakers, Stride asked for Gerard Plante. He held up his shield. She told him to wait.

Amanda sat down at a slot machine across from the security door and fed in a five-dollar bill from her pocket. The machine featured characters from some long-ago television show that Stride could remember watching when he was a kid in Duluth. He had an image of his bedroom window and of snow whipping past the glass.

Stride leaned against the machine and impatiently shoved his hands in his pockets. He leaned down to Amanda. “So how did you get stuck with me?”

Amanda took her eyes off the slot reels and gave him a suspicious look. “Excuse me?”

“The lieutenant thinks I should be back in Minnesota shoveling snow,” Stride said. “You must have pissed him off to get stuck with a newbie like me who’s on Sawhill’s shit list.”

Stride knew that Sawhill was just angry at the world. He used to get that way himself sometimes when he was a lieutenant, during those stretches when everything that could go wrong did. Sawhill had lost his favorite detective when the man won the Megabucks jackpot and retired instantly, eight million dollars richer. Then Serena went over Sawhill’s head to the sheriff to plug Stride, an experienced homicide investigator who just happened to be in town, available, bored, doing nothing but letting the city get on his nerves. And so Sawhill found himself with Stride crammed down his throat, and he had made it a point to make sure Stride knew that the lieutenant didn’t think he was up to the task of big-city crime.

“Oh, now I get it,” Amanda said, half to herself. “I was wondering what
you
did to get stuck with
me
. Now it makes sense. Sawhill has it in for you.”

Stride shrugged. “I like you fine. You seem smart. You’re something to look at, too. Seems like he’s doing me a favor.”

“Not hardly,” Amanda told him.

“Want to fill me in?”

Amanda took a long look at him. “You really don’t know, do you? Serena didn’t tell you?”

“I guess not.”

“You’re not just playing dumb-ass games with me?”

“I haven’t been in this city long enough to play games,” Stride said.

Amanda laughed, long and deep. “Oh, that’s good. That’s really good.”

“Are you going to let me in on the joke?”

“I’m a non-op,” Amanda said.

“What’s that?” Stride asked, genuinely confused.

“I’m a transsexual. A non-operative transsexual. I’ve had feminization surgery, and I take estrogen supplements to promote development of breasts, soft skin, the right weight balance, that kind of thing. But I decided not to undergo SRS to remove the genitalia. Got it? I used to be a guy.”

Stride felt his face turn multiple shades of crimson. “Holy shit.”

“So you see why I’m not exactly first in the rotation for potential partners.”

He couldn’t help himself. He found himself glancing at the large breasts pushing out from Amanda’s T-shirt and then at the crotch of her tight jeans, where his imagination seemed to freeze. He realized he was staring and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“Want to see?” Amanda asked.

“No!” Stride retorted, and then realized Amanda was giggling. “I’m sorry,” he added. “This really is perfect. Sawhill is sending me a message, you know. ‘Bet you don’t have any non-ops back in Nowhere, Minnesota, hey, Stride?’ ”