Sin City Homicide

40

Prickly excitement in his belly, Stanton sped down the freeway to Marty’s house. He suddenly realized he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since that morning. He felt lightheaded and weak, and a headache was coming on. He pulled off the freeway into a burger joint and went inside, where he ordered a vegetarian burger and a Diet Coke with fries. It took all his willpower to simply place his order and sit at a table rather than run out to his car and get back on the freeway. He ate slowly so he wouldn’t upset his stomach and stared out the window at the passing traffic. Watching groups of people made him uncomfortable. It hadn’t always. When he was a kid and his mother had taken him to the mall or Disneyland, the groups had excited him, but ever since he’d joined the force, his thoughts always drifted to unpleasant things. How many of the men out there beat their wives? Or how many were drunk and would kill somebody on the road? How many of them were planning a rape or a home invasion? How many of them thought about these things but didn’t act on them?

The numbers were unknowable. It would be impossible to get someone with a family and a nine-to-five job, someone who is heavily involved in his church and community, to admit that he’s thought about raping children, shooting his next-door neighbor, or torturing another man. The good ones fought that dark part of themselves with everything they had. The weak ones gave in and fantasized. The line between fantasy and action was thin. It was just a matter of opportunity, and if that opportunity ever came….

“Are you done, sir?”

Stanton snapped back to where he was and what he was doing, realizing the young busser cleaning tables had spoken to him. “Yeah, thanks.”

He took his Diet Coke with him and headed back to his car. He caught a glimpse of his eyes in the rearview mirror, and it made him pause. His son, Mathew, had the same eyes. An intense ache gripped his chest, and he had the urge to drive back to San Diego and take his kids in his arms. But the draw of Marty’s house was too strong. It was a magnet, and he was a piece of steel, sliding toward it on a smooth surface.

The freeway drive was pleasant, and U2’s “Zooropa” was playing on the radio. He rolled down his window and let the evening air fill the car. The light scent of smoke mingled with the warm night air. The fire was somewhere off in the distance, far enough away that the smell was pleasant.

He turned off the freeway and found Flower Avenue. He counted the homes until he came to the fifth one down, where he parked in the driveway. He was glad for the streetlamp behind him, illuminating the sidewalk and part of the driveway. He got out of the car and shut the door. Then he leaned against it for a moment, listening to the neighborhood. A television was on in the house next door, some sitcom with canned laughter. The blue flicker of the screen illuminated the curtains, and he could see a man sitting in his boxer shorts sipping on a tall can of beer.

His heart pounding, Stanton walked up the driveway. He had been kidnapped the last time he was there, and the full impact of it hadn’t settled yet. He was able to disassociate experiences in his mind and keep going. The kidnapping was an experience to be analyzed and dissected and to draw conclusions from. If he treated it like an intellectual exercise, it didn’t bother him. It didn’t have the impact on him that it would have had on someone who wasn’t used to seeing what he saw every day.

At the front door, the doorknob was unlocked, but the deadbolt wasn’t. He went around back, checking the windows. The backyard was dark, and he took out a penlight he had on his keychain and flashed it on the backdoor. It was locked as well. The basement window hadn’t been replaced yet, but the broken glass had been cleared away. Taking a deep breath, he climbed down and went inside.

Inside the house, he paused. He put the penlight between his teeth, took out his firearm, and held it low. The weight of it, the smooth steel of the trigger, and the rough edges of the barrel against his thigh were like slipping into a well-worn silk shirt that fell over his shoulders like water. It was familiar and warm. It calmed him, allowing him to focus. He could see why egotists chose law enforcement more often than any other profession. There was a sense of power in being allowed to carry and take out a gun wherever one wanted.

Upstairs, he came to the three doors he had been to before and chose the one on the right. It was a sparsely decorated bedroom with little more than a bed and a painting on the wall. The house was still and silent, so quiet that he could hear the crickets outside. He began to whisper to himself.

“Marty was dead two days before we found him. You had two days in here by yourself. You were here two days,” he said, sliding open the closet. “Two days by yourself.” He reached down, brushing through some clothing. “Two days, and you didn’t find anything. You tried to stay so neat. You didn’t want anyone to know that you were here, but you couldn’t clean everything. I interrupted you before you put the cushions back and cleaned up the drawers. You had to leave those out.”

After closing the closet, Stanton checked under the bed. He stood up again and looked around. He went back to the hall and opened the other door, which opened into a storage closet. He began going through the shelves.

“Two days, and you didn’t find anything. You must’ve gone crazy looking through here. You wished you hadn’t killed Marty. He could’ve told you where it was, and now you’re stuck. But you couldn’t spend the whole two days here, either. You had other things to do. People would notice you were gone. When you were doing other things, your mind was still here. This was all you could think about.”

The storage closet was packed with two feet of junk. Marty had clearly filled it with everything that had nowhere else to go. It would take Stanton all night to search through it. He stepped back out into the basement and stood in the center of the room. He closed his eyes, listening to the sounds of the house as it settled for the night.

“You were so meticulous. You thought you were checking everywhere you could check, but you couldn’t find it. Marty hid it too well. He watched the disc. He saw what was on it. It was your face, and he knew who you were. That’s the only reason he would take this much effort to hide it. He knew you, and he knew you would come after him. But if you couldn’t find it in two days, I won’t, either. The house is too big. There’s too much to go through. Unless it’s…” He opened his eyes and turned, looking out the window at the backyard. “Unless it’s not in the house,” he said, making his way to the window.

He climbed out and stood in the large backyard. The quickest and most effective way to search a large space was with constricting circles. Stanton started at the edge of the fence and worked his way around, the penlight pointed at the ground. He took off his shoes to feel for any bumps or displaced dirt or grass.

He finished the first circle then continued with the second, the third, and the fourth. Somewhere near the center of the yard, his foot hit a small indentation. He stepped on it again, gingerly, so as not to disturb it too much. He knelt and put the penlight over it. There was a small bump in the lawn. Someone had cut a square into the grass, placed something underneath, then put the grass back over it. He lifted the sod, and underneath was a plastic case. Stanton wished he had thought to bring latex gloves.

He opened the case, making sure only to touch the edges. The disc inside was labeled June 12.