Sin City Homicide

8

Stanton lifted the Steed file and felt its weight. The hotel was quiet at this time of day, and all he could hear was the shower running in another room. He tucked the file under his arm and headed out the door to the casino.

He stood at the edge of the slot machines for a while, watching the faces of the gamblers. Some were young, but most were old, probably before their time. They were playing a losing game that was rigged against them from the beginning, yet they still maintained hope that somehow, some way, they would win against fate. A person might be able to defeat chance, Stanton thought, but no one couldn’t defeat fate.

He went to a Japanese restaurant up on a platform, a sleek design of black and red, and sat at one of the booths over the casino floor. He ordered an orange juice and a J roll of sushi then opened the file. The first few pages contained a brief bio issued by the company Daniel Steed had founded.

Daniel Steed came from a generation that Stanton hadn’t been sure existed anymore. He was born in Jackson, Wyoming, to David and Bethany Steed. David was a miner, and Bethany was a homemaker for Daniel and his five siblings. He’d earned average grades in school, but when he was twelve, he went to work in the mines. He saved every penny he made for five years, and when he was seventeen years old, he struck out for California. He got as far as Las Vegas before the Vietnam War broke out.

The file said that Daniel had served two tours in Vietnam, and that was the only mention of his time in the war. Stanton had seen similar silences on many occasions. Most Vietnam veterans refused to speak about their experiences.

At twenty-three, Daniel bought his own company, a small motel with a few slot machines. He had borrowed heavily to turn the motel around. Within five years, he owned two casinos, several restaurants, and a private golf course. By the age of forty-five, his real estate holdings and his casinos had made him a billionaire, and he had officially retired.

His wife, Emily, was the typical spouse of a man like Daniel. She came from an affluent family and had been a model, appearing briefly in Levi’s commercials in the ’80s. At thirty-two, she met Daniel, and they married six months later. They had one son, Fredrick Steed, who purportedly lived in Las Vegas, although the file didn’t provide an address.

The rest of the file consisted of financial records, credit reports, court records, birth certificates, copies of social security cards, death certificates, police narratives, CAD call logs from dispatch, and clippings of media reports, as well as lists of the Steeds’ neighbors, business associates, and relatives. The autopsy reports were extraordinarily detailed, far more than they needed to be-a sign of the couple’s influence.

There were two ballistics reports, one from the Las Vegas crime lab and one from a private expert hired out of Portland. Both had come to the same conclusion: the man in the ski mask had used a 9 mm gun. The private expert had identified the make of the gun as a 9 mm Smith amp; Wesson, where the crime lab in Vegas thought it was a Beretta. The rifling impressions, the scratches found on the bullet that had been fired, were chaotic, and in some places, even vertical. They had been purposely altered with a metallic wire shoved into the barrel of the gun. On the street, it was called a “rat’s tail.” Few people knew about rat’s tails. Those who did had usually learned about them while serving time in prison.

Mindi had even included handwritten notes taken by Jay and Javier during the investigation. Files never included handwritten notes, and even the prosecutors and defense attorneys never saw those. She was good.

Stanton read the police narratives, but they were little more than descriptions of what he’d already seen on the video. They did include one interesting note about Bill James, a business partner of Daniel’s who had sued him over a real estate deal. He had been interviewed, and his alibi-he’d been in Los Angeles at the time-had checked out.

At face value, the detectives were saying that the case was open and under investigation for possible suspects. Reading between the lines, however, Stanton knew they had made up their minds that this was a random attack akin to a shark attack. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was devastating.

That very well could have been what it was, but something told him it wasn’t. At the end of the file, attached in a paper slip, was a copy of the video. Stanton went to the hotel lobby, where he asked the front desk where he could find computers that were for guests’ use. The concierge arranged for a laptop to be delivered to Stanton’s room, so he went back up and waited.

When the computer arrived, Stanton tipped the bellboy then put the disc into the laptop. He immediately recognized the end cabin of the tram. He watched the video then watched it again. He put it on a slow forward, going through it frame by frame.

Emily was facing forward when she screamed. There were doors on her right and left, but she didn’t look at either, which meant the perp had been on the tram already. They would have noticed someone in a ski mask, so he must not have had it on beforehand. The only person who could have done such a thing without worrying about being seen would be someone who had planned to kill the witnesses.

Stanton watched the rape. He watched it again and again and again, until he no longer felt the tug of emotion in his gut telling him to pity this woman.

For the perp to grab Mrs. Steed and bend her over only took a few seconds. He penetrated her from behind shortly after, perhaps for no more than four seconds. Though the man’s penis wasn’t visible on the film, based on the Mrs. Steed’s movements, Stanton guessed it was erect. How could he have gotten an erection in approximately four seconds?

He may have already had an erection. Studies performed on sex offenders had shown that violence, as much as sex, aroused a certain population. Penial studies measuring the arousal time during different video and audio stimuli showed that in over thirty percent of incarcerated sex offenders, scenes of violence caused an erection as quickly as pornography did.

Stanton took out the disc and placed it back in the file before closing the laptop. The images were in his head now; they were part of him, along with the thousands of others he had absorbed in his time as a homicide and sex crimes detective. He needed to depressurize, to spend a significant amount of time doing something other than working the case. Once his head was clear, he could work the case without having to watch the video again.

He picked up the phone and called Marty.

“Hey,” he said. “I’d like to see some of these fun spots you were telling me about.”