Strip Search (8 page)

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. …”

I
T WAS
W
AGER’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.

“The Cache La Poudre’s up that way, isn’t it?” Axton asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s a nice canyon. One of the prettiest.”

It was. He hoped it stayed that way: free of dams and wild enough to worry people every spring with its runoff. But a lot of things never stayed the way they should. Maybe nothing did. Maybe when things stayed, they were dead. Still, he wondered why change so often seemed to be for the worse.

Turning into an ill-lit alley, he cut behind one of the newer housing projects for the evening’s first routine sweep. These buildings were among the better offered by the city, and a hell of a lot finer than some of the places he had lived in as a kid. Two-story brown-brick townhouses, they had grassy lawns trimmed by the state and fenced playgrounds and a subsidized daycare center. It reminded him of the married housing provided for the NCOs at some of the military bases where he had been stationed. But Wager did not want to live here. Despite its surface placidity, maybe nobody wanted to live here. It was as if the place dammed the people up into a reservoir and they, without knowing why, rose with periodic restlessness against the barriers that held them. Especially the kids. The variety and type of crime the kids of this project committed were far more savage than anything Wager and his various street gangs had ever gotten mixed up in. When he was a restless kid who roamed the barrio with his buddies looking for excitement, people still laughed at the old ladies who locked their doors at night. Now, if you didn’t, you were knifed. It was another of those changes.

Axton leaned forward to peer against the square shadows of the dark buildings. They were nearing the home of Pepe the Pistol, the kid who pumped all those .25-caliber bullets into his amigos. A call had come in saying that he was still in town and had sneaked back to his mother’s house regularly for a home-cooked meal and condolences.

Wager flipped on the spotlight and swung it across the lawns, catching a gray cat whose eyes flashed green before its head and tail dropped into a quick trot. Nothing else moved in the roving finger of light. He clicked it off and turned out of the alley. If things stayed quiet, they’d sweep the area just before dawn. Then the next shift would cruise past a couple times. And the one after that. And so on. If Pepe didn’t skip town, they’d get him sooner or later; when every officer in Denver knew who to look for, it was only a matter of time. Persistence, patience, time. The suspects you didn’t know—the increasing number of stranger-to-stranger killings—those were the ones you measured your skill against. Like Annette Sheldon and now Angela Williams. At least that’s how the rest of the Homicide team classified them—stranger-to-stranger. Calling them that made it easier to accept the fact that they were still unsolved. Some—Munn—accepted the fact that they would never be solved. Which, Wager had to admit, might turn out to be true; when you had a whole team assigned to an unsolved case, no single detective could be blamed.

Wager turned onto the bumpy and eroded Speer overpass; ahead of them and across the swirl of traffic filling the Valley Highway below, downtown Denver gave off a hollow glow from streetlamps and traffic lights that bounced across vacant sidewalks and office towers empty for the night.

“You wouldn’t be headed over to Foxy Dick’s?” Axton asked.

Angela Williams wasn’t their case, but Foxy Dick’s was in their jurisdiction. “Maybe we can help Lee out.”

“I’m sure he’ll be grateful.”

Wager didn’t give a damn what Lee thought. “It’s a slow night. You got any better suggestions?”

Axton said mildly, “I’m with you, partner.”

Foxy Dick’s was farther out on Colfax and its marquee said
Girls Girls Girls
. It flashed on and off in a series of three short winks and then stayed on for a long count in case someone hadn’t been able to read it the first time. Beneath that, a steadily glowing sign said L
ADIES
N
ITE
E
VERY
T
HURSDAY
Men Men Men
, and it was warming to see this small evidence of equality between the sexes. Like the Cinnamon Club, this entry was well lit, so a customer had to pause a moment before groping deeper into the darkness. Here, the bouncer was dressed casually in a dark turtleneck shirt and slacks and waited just inside the doorway, where a row of vending machines glowed coldly through their tiny windows. He smelled cop as soon as Wager and Axton stepped in.

“Can I help you men?”

Wager flashed his badge. “We’d like to talk to some of your people about Angela Williams.”

“Again? I thought you got all you needed last time.”

“We still need the killer,” said Wager.

The bouncer frowned as he searched for any insult in Wager’s words. “Oh.” Then, “Come on. I’ll take you back to the office.”

He led them around the panel of opaque plastic sheets whose moving ripples of light teased passersby. The oval stage was at the far end of the main room and lit by the rapid flicker of a blue strobe light that froze the dancer into a series of still shots against the solid black background. Jammed all around was a crowd of chairs where a scattering of men and women sat and stared up at the girl. Wearing only cutoff designer jeans, she stood over one of the gaping men and bent from the waist, swaying her heavy breasts back and forth in time to the music’s pulse. The man reached to slip a bill into her waistband and the girl swung a bit harder.

“Like putting a nickel in the slot,” said Wager.

“What?” said the bouncer.

“He said you don’t have a lot of people,” said Axton.

“Yeah, well, it’s Wednesday. It’s not bad for a Wednesday.”

The office cubicle was filled by a typewriter stand and an adding machine, a pair of filing cabinets and, in the middle, a small desk littered with celebrity magazines and newspapers. The magazines promised the true stories and asked penetrating questions. The newspapers were small in size and worn in print, and had mastheads like
The Singles’ Trumpet
and
The Rocky Mountain Oyster
.

The man behind the desk was in his mid-thirties and had straight, sand-colored hair that was blow-dried into a shaggy cut. His baggy eyes lifted irritably toward them from an accounting sheet. “What?”

“Cops—ah—police, Charlie. It’s about Angela again.”

“Shit! We been through all this once. I told you everything I know.”

“You told some other people,” said Wager.

“So you can’t talk to each other? You got to keep coming back here? Crapping business is bad enough without Angela getting herself killed and bringing you people around all the time!”

Axton closed the door behind the bouncer as he left. “Has business been that slow?”

“Everything’s slow. Except the goddamn bills. They’re quick enough.”

“Are you the manager?” asked Wager.

“Owner. One thing I’m grateful for, I’m not the manager. Business doesn’t get any better, he’s the next to go.”

“Where’s he?”