Sin City Homicide

2

Stanton woke early in the morning and went surfing at Ocean Beach Park. Earlier that month, a couple had been canoeing not a hundred feet from shore when their canoe overturned. Only one body was recovered. He’d known them well. They had spent time together in the ocean, waiting for the waves to pick up. He had liked them, but he realized that he didn’t remember their names. It bothered him a few moments, then he pushed it out of his mind.

After showering and dressing, Stanton dialed a number on his cell phone as he left his apartment on the eleventh floor of one of the poshest buildings in San Diego. He’d rented the place from an absentee landlord who had relocated to Florida. Stanton put a check in the mail every month, and the guy left him alone.

“Hello?” A female voice answered the call.

“Hey, Mel, it’s me.”

“Hey, you just missed them. They headed out to their friend James’s house for a sleepover.”

Stanton cringed. He had warned his ex-wife repeatedly that sleepovers weren’t permitted. His sons, who were eleven and six, were too young, and he had seen far too much happen at sleepovers during his time as a Sex Crimes detective years ago. Too often, mothers wounded from marriages that had fallen apart unexpectedly fell victim to the charms of predators. These stepfathers and boyfriends sought victims wherever they could find them.

“I don’t know how many times I can say this, Mel. How many times do we have to have this conversation?”

“If you don’t like it, we can go to court and have the judge decide if sleepovers are okay. I had them growing up, and nothing happened, Jon. You need to relax.”

Stanton exhaled and closed his eyes as he waited for the elevator. Not even a semblance of a relationship was left between them. His words carried no more weight than a stranger’s; she showed no consideration for what he wanted.

“I gotta go, Mel. I’ll call them tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

It was nearly ten o’clock when Stanton hopped onto the freeway and headed to the Northern Precinct. Traffic was light, and he listened to a Moby CD, skipping the songs that had lyrics. The day was turning out to be hotter than he’d expected, and he took his sports coat off at a stoplight, letting his badge dangle around his neck on a chain, a tactic he had picked up from Lieutenant Daniel Childs when Childs had been a detective. If he wore it around his neck, he was less likely to lose it. Few things were as humiliating for a police officer, and it was a constant worry of his.

He pulled into Northern and parked. Uniforms were buzzing around like bees in a hive as he walked into the building.

The secretary at the front desk saw him and smiled. “How are you, Johnny baby?”

“Good, Candace. How’s Jake?”

“He’s getting bigger every day. Pretty soon, he’s gonna have to be potty trained.”

“Well, don’t go too hard on him. We tried to get Matty potty trained before two, and he got so scared of the toilet, he wouldn’t go in to the bathroom until he was almost four.”

“We got a video with Elmo. It’s supposed to be the best thing out there, but we’ll see how it goes. Um, did you see that email?”

“What email?”

“IAD’s here to interview you.”

“Yeah, I was in a shooting yesterday.”

“Oh, no! You okay?”

“I’m fine. The perp’s gonna live, too.”

“Oh, just routine bullshit, then, huh? Well, they’re waitin’ for you in the interrogation room.”

“Subtle. They couldn’t do it in the lounge?”

She laughed. “Them boys are wound up so tight, I’m surprised they can walk with those sticks up their asses. Be careful with them, Johnny.”

“Thanks.”

Stanton walked down the hall, past the interrogation rooms, to his office. He placed his wallet and cell phone in his desk drawer before locking his office from the outside. Although it was a police precinct, thefts were reported every week.

He went down to a storage room at the back of the building, found the thermostat, and turned up the heat to one hundred degrees. Then he went out front, where he opened all the windows and closed all the vents. Then he went to the lounge and waited. He was willing to bet IAD would never take off their suit coats during an interview.

In about ten minutes, the building had heated up enough to make him sweat. He found the open interrogation room, where two men were sitting on one side of the large gray table.

“Hi, I’m Jon Stanton. I’m here for an interview.”

“Oh, yeah,” a tall man with dyed black hair said as he rose. “Please, Detective, have a seat.”

Stanton sat across from them. The other man was hefty with a round, cherubic face and balding hair that was gray at the temples. He was smiling widely and had his hands folded in front of him on the table. Sweat was pouring down his shining forehead.

“I’m Lieutenant Barkley, and this is Lieutenant Davis. I don’t think we’ve met before.”

“No, not since IAD got transferred to the administrative offices. I don’t get down there at all.”

“Well, this is a formal interview about the shooting of Mr. Gonzalez. You should know that we spoke with the victim in this case…” He flipped through his files. “A Ms. Vicky Guler. Would you like to read her statement?”

“No.”

“Now, Jon,” Lieutenant Davis said, “we’re on your side. We just want the truth. Hell, I think this was a clean shot, and I’m embarrassed that we gotta even do this.” He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “The more truthful you are with us, the sooner this will be over.”

“You guys haven’t read my file, have you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“I have some experience with IAD. If you’ll pardon the insult, I don’t have a lot of faith that you’re on my side. Let’s just do this and get it over with.”

Barkley pulled out a digital recorder and hit record. He placed it on the table between them. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No.”

Sweat was forming on Barkley’s forehead as well, but mixed with the black dye in his hair, it looked like cola.

“Good. Ah, for the record, this is interview number one with Detective Jonathan Nephi Stanton, conducted by Emmett Barkley and Mark Davis of Internal Affairs Division. February twenty-two, 2012.” He cleared his throat as he shuffled files and pulled out a couple of sheets of paper. “Now, Detective, please tell us how you first made contact with Mr. Juan Gonzalez.”

“Narcotics had gotten a tip from one of their CIs. They had been making controlled buys of heroin from Mr. Gonzalez for the past three weeks. One of the CIs who was making the buys said that when he went to the house for the pick-up, Mr. Gonzalez had a woman locked up in his bedroom. He asked the CI if he would like a ‘go’ with her. On the house.”

“And this was a prostitute?” Davis interrupted.

“No, this was a mother of four who had been kidnapped in a mall parking lot. He’d had her chained to the bed frame for three days when the CI arrived. She had been brutally-”

“We don’t need to go into specifics, Detective. So, you still haven’t answered our question: how’d you come into contact with Gonzalez?” Barkley said, wiping his forehead with his fingers, leaving a black smear.

“The CI told his handler in Narc, and the detective informed Sex Crimes, who informed us. The victim’s husband had been shot in the head during the kidnapping, and the case was active with Homicide. Sex Crimes and Homicide conducted a joint operation.”

“What did that operation consist of?”

“We raided Mr. Gonzalez’s home. We saved the victim, but Mr. Gonzalez jumped out of the back window and took off through the neighborhood.”

“Was the back of the home not covered?”

“It was. The window was next to a tall tree. He jumped into it and then leapt into his neighbor’s yard. By the time officers hopped the fence, he was already sprinting from yard to yard. We called for a chopper, but none were available at the time.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I chased him on foot.”

“You? By yourself, without backup?”

“Yes.”

“Are you aware,” Davis said, fanning himself with a file folder, “that protocol requires that an officer have assistance in this type of scenario? Especially with a suspect considered so highly dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you chose to ignore it?”

“I chose to catch him rather than lose him. He had cash and connections. He would’ve fled to Mexico, and we would’ve never seen him again.”

“So, what happened when you caught up with him?”

“He was in the girl’s home, Vicky Guler, and he had her by the throat, with a.32 caliber revolver to her head. He threatened to shoot her and her baby, who was in the apartment. He was asking for a car. I pretended to give in and threw my car keys to him. When his attention was diverted, I fired.”

“And you accidentally hit Ms. Guler?”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“You shot her on purpose?” Barkley said incredulously.

“I had to. I knew the round would go through the fleshy part of her shoulder and wouldn’t cause too much injury. I had to save her life. I made a call.”

“And you stand by that call?”

“Yes.”

Barkley shook his head. The black smear had spread down his forehead, and Davis noticed but didn’t say anything.

“Thanks for your time, Detective. We’ll be in touch.”

Stanton left and went to the storage room to turn down the heat. He went back to the main floor, where he watched the two IAD officers leave the room, Barkley rubbing furiously at his head with a napkin. Neither had taken off their suit coats.

He went back to his office and collapsed into his chair, staring at the ceiling. Glancing to his right, he saw the files for his open cases: fifty-seven in total. His pile was higher than the other detectives’ because he took the cases no one else wanted-the ones with no leads, no motives, and no suspects. The victims disappeared like ghosts but clung to life through him.

Stanton began going through his emails. The forty-one unread messages were mostly departmental emails about policies, updates on cases, or notices for birthdays, retirements, new babies, and deaths. He scrolled down about halfway to a name he hadn’t heard in a long time: Orson Hall. He opened the email.

Jon, long time, Brother. Please call me. I need your help desperately.

Assistant Sheriff Orson Hall,

Las Vegas Metro Police, Homicide Division

The “Las Vegas Metro Police” and “Homicide Division” weren’t a tag on his email. He had typed them in. Orson was telling him something with that, but Stanton wasn’t sure what. He was sure of one thing: the message was important. Stanton hit the speaker on his phone and dialed the number at the bottom of the email tag.

“This is Hall.”

“Orson, this is Jon Stanton.”

“Holy shit, Jon! How you been?”

“Good. How’s Wendy and the kids?”

“They’re great. Wendy went back to work ’bout eight months ago. It’s making life a little easier on me.”

“That’s great. She was a nurse, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, ER. Good money in it. She makes more than me. How’s Melissa and the boys?”

“We divorced a while ago.”

“Oh, wow. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know.”

“It just wasn’t meant to be, I guess. So, what’s up?”

“Well, I got a little something here that I think I need your help on.”

“What is it?” Stanton picked up his grip strengthener and began to squeeze in a slow rhythm.

“Rape-homicide. A couple. The guy’s kind of a big shot in town, and I need some help.”

“Have you called the feds?”

“FBI? You shitting me? They’re ninety-nine percent terrorism now. If your perp’s name isn’t Omar or Muhammad, you’re at the bottom of the list. Besides, to be totally honest… how long’s it been since you been up here in Vegas?”

“At least five or six years.”

“And you probably remember we were pretty ahead of the curve even then. A lot’s changed, even since then. We got new labs and an expanded CSI unit, thanks to the TV show, I guess. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone expected us to have the best, and so the higher-ups just fell in line. Anyway, my point is that I think we even got the labs in Quantico beat.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. I’m not just blowing smoke, either. So, I don’t need the feds for that. I need something else.”

“What’s that?”

“I need you, Jon.”

“Orson-”

“I know, I know. You think I’m superstitious, don’t you? But there’s something to the way you think, Jon, that I haven’t seen in other detectives. You know these fuckers inside and out. Call it a sixth sense or imagination or whatever. Harlow knows that. That’s why he recruited you for that bullshit Cold Case Unit of his.”

Stanton grew uncomfortable and put his feet up on the desk in an attempt to force himself to relax. “I’m pretty swamped with my own cases right now.”

“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I already spoke to the assistant chief over there. What’s his name? Hu?”

“Chin Ho.”

“Yeah, I spoke to him, and we worked something out. He’d be willing to bring in another detective to cover for you while you come out here.”

“And how’d you convince him of that?”

“We got something over here you guys need-money. Money yells louder than anything else.”

“You’re going to pay them to have me come out there?”

“We can talk about the details later, but you wouldn’t just be working. I’m going to set you up in one of the nicest hotels out here. Anything you need, you tell us. You wanna fly your boys out on the weekends? It’s done. You wanna drive around in a Ferrari while you’re here? No problem.”

“This guy was that important, huh?”

“More than you know.”

“All right. I’ll come take a look, but I gotta tie up a few loose ends.”

“I’ll book your flight now for Saturday, first-class. I really owe you one, Jon. I’m not kidding. You call in that favor whenever you need.”

“I’m just taking a look at the evidence, Orson. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Well, whatever, just get on that plane. I’ll feel better just having you out here.”

Stanton ended the call and noticed Lieutenant Childs standing at the door with his arms crossed. He had built even more muscle over the past few months, and they bulged underneath his smooth, black skin.

“Old friend?” he asked.

“I did some consulting work for him when I was still a grad student. We’ve stayed in touch since then.”

“All expenses-paid trip to Vegas? Sounds good to me.”

“Maybe. If he’s calling me and willing to shell out that kind of cash, it means he doesn’t have any other options. If I can’t help him right away, I’ll be flying coach on the next plane back here.”