Sin City Homicide

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.”