Sin City Homicide

27

Sheriff Tom Brandish Keele walked from his Chevy Tahoe to the precinct doors and looked the building up and down. It looked so damned… modern. Everything was modernized. His detectives carried iPads, took notes with rubber styluses, and dictated into digital recorders. When he’d first started on the force as a young buck of eighteen, nearly forty years ago, Las Vegas was nothing more than a few hotels and horrible restaurants owned by the New York mob. Those days, detectives wrote everything in a little notepad, but most of the time, they didn’t have to; they were expected to memorize every single detail about every single case. Sure, they wrote it down at the end of the week in status reports, but that was it. And the status reports went up to bosses who didn’t really look them over because the department trusted that what needed to be done was getting done. There was no IAD, no staff of attorneys to cover their asses, no complaints about brutality. Unless someone was shot or beaten severely enough to spend the night in a hospital, claims of police brutality were unheard of.

At sixty-seven, looking at the building, Keele wondered if he should take his kids’ advice and finally retire. Elected officials had no mandatory retirement age, and he could realistically serve until he was dead or incapacitated. His kids were entrenched in their family life. They had baseball games, barbeques, school plays, and dances. They had Sunday dinners and family vacations. For the past two years-since his wife had died of complications with pneumonia-all Keele had was an empty condo and a lifetime of memories. They were not enough to warm the other side of the bed at night.

He walked into the building and nodded hello to the person at the front desk. When he was a new sheriff nineteen years ago, he was attacked with memos, signature requests, overtime slips, and interview requests the moment he stepped foot into any precinct. But now he had insulated himself well. He had four assistant sheriffs who handled most of the work he used to do himself. Over them was an undersheriff who saw to the day-to-day business. He also had heads of staff for finance, general counsel, administrative staff, and intergovernmental relations. He delegated most of his work so that he could keep his eye on the big picture: cutting bureaucracy so that cops could focus on actually solving crimes. Striking that balance was tough, considering he had added more bureaucrats to the payroll than any sheriff in the city’s history.

The elevator was about to take him up to his office when a hand parted them. Orson Hall stepped on, a coffee in his hand. He faced forward, waiting for the doors to close.

“I need to talk to you,” Keele said.

“’Bout what?”

“Daniel Steed’s case and that detective you flew in.”

“I can’t believe it myself. I keep hoping he shacked up with some hooker and just has his phone off, but the assistant I assigned to him says he’s been incommunicado for an entire day. I’m not quite in panic mode, but I think that we should-”

“They found him.”

“What?”

“They found him. Jon Stanton, right? They found him. He called the emergency line from a gas station.”

“Why wasn’t I told about this?”

“Take your dick out of that filly you got on the side and turn your damn phone on sometimes, Orson.”

Hall took out his cell phone. It was off. “Oh. Didn’t realize I did that. Where is he now?”

“He’s here.”

“I need to go talk to him.”

The elevator dinged, and they stepped off. They said nothing else until they were behind the closed doors of Keele’s plush corner office. Keele pulled a glass bottle out of a drawer and poured a glass of brandy. He offered some to Hall, who turned it down.

“You can’t talk to him yet,” Keele said. “I gave him to Alma.”

“For what?”

“He seems to think your boy is the prime suspect in that homicide from a while back, the burn victim. He asked if he could have an hour with him alone before anyone else, and I said it was okay.”

“Tom, he’s a friend a mine, out here as a favor to me.”

“I didn’t authorize pullin’ off his fingernails or anything. He’s just gonna talk to him.”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s all Alma does, right? Talk?”

“He’s got some fire in him. That’s for sure,” Keele said, sitting in his chair with a grunt, his knees creaking. “But I trust the tough bastard more than I trust anyone here. Even you.”

“Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that.”

“Oh, quit bein’ so sensitive. Your friend’s gonna be just fine, and as soon as Alma’s done with him, you can go down there.” He took a long drink and swirled the liquid in the glass. “I wanted to ask you if you think he could actually do something like that.”

“Murder somebody? Jon Stanton? No way.”

“How do you know?”

“I know him well enough to know he’s not a killer.”

“That’s not what his file says.”

“You looked up his file?”

“Made a call to the chief over in San Diego. His file says he’s had eight shootings in the line of duty. Seven were cleared as clean shootings, but they ain’t sure about this last one.”

“Every cop gets in that situation. Hell, how many shootings did you have? Ten? Twenty?”

“I’ve been at this three times as long, and I came up in the days when bank robberies ended in machine-gun battles. Different times.”

“I can’t picture him doing anything like that.”

He finished the brandy and set the glass on the desk. “My old man was a philanderer. Slept with anything that moved. I didn’t want to believe it, and neither did my mama. We ignored it as much as we could. Then he gave my mama syphilis. She died’a that. She was too proud to go to a doctor, so it ate away at her mind. Damn thing lays dormant so long, you don’t even know you have it until it turns your brain to Swiss cheese. That’s the trick, Orson. You gotta face that everyone is capable of everything.”

Orson took a deep breath. “What’d you wanna do?”

“Nothing yet. All we got is rumors from some wetback dope dealers. I don’t wanna move on a good cop if that’s it. Give Alma a chance to play this out. If there’s anything there, he’ll find it.”