CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

 

August 13th, 2015

10:30 P.M.

Las Vegas

 

LOTT WAS NOT pleased at all that yet another poker night had come and gone and they hadn’t made much progress on the mine murders. It had been one of the longest seven days that he could remember, and he had nightmares every night, sometimes waking up Julia.

She looked tired as well, and he offered to stay at home some night to allow her to get some sleep and all she had said was, “Don’t you dare.”

It seemed she was having as rough a time with this horrid case as he was.

Over the week, Doc and Fleet had narrowed down the list of missing to about eleven women with black hair per year that had gone missing since 1998. And they had found out the identities of the two unknown women in the mine that the Las Vegas police could never identify.

He and Julia and Annie had spread out all over the entire area, interviewing anyone who might have known the two girls in the mine with black hair. But there were some classmates that were dead, others just had no memory from school in 1988.

Now they were all headed once again after the poker game for the café at the Bellagio Casino, just as they had done a week before.

Over the game, the five attending retired detectives all brainstormed on various ways to come at this case.

Nothing at all came out of that.

Just more questions.

Why eleven per year?

Why the black hair?

And the question that bothered Lott the most was where were the missing women and why in fifteen years had no others been found?

As the leads with the students seemed to be fading, Doc and Fleet were digging deeper into the mines involved, both the one above the broken down school bus and the one they had found the women in. There was no connection at all between the two mines, but the one with the murdered women seemed to have a somewhat shady past.

Of course, for mines in Nevada, that was not at all unusual. But it was taking time even for Fleet’s miracle computer people to dig through the layers of ownership on that mine.

Lott and Julia dropped his car in valet parking and stepped quickly through the heat and into the coolness of the casino. The sounds of machines and bells and people laughing and talking seemed almost comfortingly normal as Lott and Julia took their spot in a back booth at the cafe, neither saying a word.

A minute later, Annie joined them, followed by a sweating and red-faced Andor. He had clearly parked out in the lot. Even though it was after ten and the sun had just gone down an hour before, the temperature outside still topped one hundred and twelve degrees.

“I had an idea on the way over here,” Andor said as he slid into the booth and took a cloth napkin to wipe the sweat off his face. Then he dipped the napkin in a glass of ice water and put it on his neck.

“So what’s the idea?” Lott asked.

“We’re going about this wrong,” Andor said.

Julia laughed. “No kidding.”

“We need to focus on why those women were cut up like they were,” Andor said, the red flush in his face slowly fading.

“We are pretty convinced it started in the bus tragedy,” Annie said. “But nothing in that tragedy leads to harvesting flesh.”

“Exactly,” Andor said.

“We think the ghost that Kirk saw in the mine is our perp, right?” Andor asked. “The one that gave Kirk a little water, took off the women’s underwear, and then left.”

All three of them nodded. Lott had learned a long time ago that when Andor had an idea, it was just better to not say anything and let him run with it.

“So what did our perp learn to do that forces him to cut off the meat from his victims after he roasts them?”

Lott understood where his partner was going. “And how does he bake them?”

“Exactly,” Andor said, pointing at Lott as he often did when Lott had something right. “We looked into that some back in the day, but this baking has, in theory, been going on now for another fifteen years. Which one of Kirk’s classmates owns either mines or something that could bake a person?”

“Or both,” Annie said.

Annie grabbed the phone and a moment later was explaining to Fleet what they wanted. Doc had stayed in Boise to help out and had been calling in favors all over the West investigating some of the women’s disappearances to try to get any little detail that would help. So far he had come up empty, but he was still going at it.

The petite brown-haired waitress took their drink order and their food order at the same time just after Annie finished.

“None of the men in Kirk’s high school has any interest or family in mining at all,” Annie said. “They had already done that search. They are now going after ovens and class members.”

“Damn,” Andor said. “So why, beyond some strange sexual thing I have never heard of, would a guy cut off a woman’s butt and large muscles in her thighs?”

“Steaks, roasts, maybe jerky,” Annie said.

“Damn dry steaks and roast,” Lott said. “From my little experiment. But jerky makes sense if the flesh was going to be eaten.”

“How much was taken from each body?” Julia asked.

“A lot,” Andor said. “Maybe twenty pounds or so from each woman if I remember the autopsy reports right.”

“That’s a lot of jerky every month,” Lott said.

“So we let Fleet and his people do the searches and see what they come up with.”

Everyone nodded and then sat there silently, just letting the casino sounds wash around them.

Lott felt the frustration of the week climbing back. Just so many odd details and none of it was fitting together. He knew it had to be the mines that were at the center of this in some fashion or another. He just couldn’t figure out how.

He turned to Julia. “You up for a trip to visit a couple of mines tomorrow while we wait for Fleet’s search to be done?”

“Not really,” she said. “But I see where you are going and I think I need to see them as well.”

“I’ll go with you,” Annie said. “I’ve been feeling that the mines are the key to this all along, just don’t know how.”

“I’m in,” Andor said. “But I’m going to be bringing a cold pack for my neck.”

Lott laughed. “Field trip.”

“Let’s hope it turns out a bunch better than the field trip those girls in the bus took,” Andor said.

“We’re bringing cases of bottled water,” Annie said, “cell phones, and telling Doc and Fleet exactly where we are every hour.”

“Where’s the adventure in that?” Andor asked, shaking his head.

“Thank you,” Julia said, smiling at Annie.

Lott could only smile at his daughter as well and say the same thing.