Burn Card, page 6
June 15th, 2017
Las Vegas, Nevada
For the last three days, Sarge had been very relieved that he and Pickett had been off this case and away from those horror houses.
Robin had stayed in contact with Cavanaugh and had kept digging. So this morning at breakfast, she was going to fill them in on what the police had found so far.
And what she had found as well.
The morning air still had a little bite to it, but Sarge had no doubt today was going to be a pretty standard warm June day. Might not hit a hundred, but during the peak time in the afternoon, it might get close.
But now the air was comfortable. The tourists were calm and not many around, so the walk from their condo to the Golden Nugget was easy and enjoyable.
And both of them were curious as to what was going on. Somehow, the entire thing hadn’t hit the news yet, which stunned Sarge and Pickett. This should have been a front page, top-of-the-paper story and lead news on every television station. In fact, this should have been on all the national newscasts as well.
Somehow, it wasn’t even mentioned and Sarge really wanted to know why. He couldn’t believe the department had kept it quiet. No chance of that. Not something this big and with so many people having to be involved with it.
No, the paper and radio stations and television stations were holding this story for some reason and Sarge hoped Robin would know why. And it had to be something larger than hurting tourism, although that reason had gotten a lot of stories downplayed or killed over the years.
They got to the buffet ahead of Robin and since it was his turn to buy, he paid for all three of them while Pickett went ahead to the food. The place smelled so wonderful and rich, with bacon and waffle smells filling the air, he almost didn’t want to stop to pay.
He hadn’t realized how hungry he really was this morning.
He wasn’t far behind her, since the tourist rush was over and there were only about forty people in the large place, most over at tables against the pool windows. No one was sitting near their favorite table.
He had just gotten his omelet and waffle when Robin appeared at the top of the escalator coming up from the casino to the buffet. He waved her in, signaling she was already paid, and took his food back over to the table.
He and Pickett were half done eating by the time Robin joined them.
For the first ten minutes, as Robin dug into her food, they talked about the three cats and how calm and peaceful the last three days had been for them. They had seen five movies in total, three at night at home and two they had actually gone out to a theater.
“So,” Sarge said, stacking his empty plates to one side, “I am dying to know why the media is sitting on this one.”
“Families,” Robin said. “All those bodies in the attics were supposed to have been cremated thirty and forty years ago.”
“Oh, shit,” Pickett said.
“Attics?” Sarge asked.
Robin nodded. “All six houses were almost identical. Young blonde girls in beds and buried in the basements, naked pictures on the walls, and bodies stacked in the attics.”
Sarge sat back in his chair. He couldn’t even think of anything to ask. That was just too much to try to grasp.
“Stunning, isn’t it?” Robin said. “I’ve been trying to get a handle on this for days. Forget all the young girls’ bodies in the beds for the moment. The police have to identify and contact well over five hundred families that their grandmother or grandfather or mother or father wasn’t really cremated and the ashes they got back were fake. And all from deaths forty years ago.”
Sarge just shook his head. “Impossible.”
“Matching a body with the right date-of-death is a nightmare all by itself,” Robin said. “The media is holding off until they clear out every relative they can find easily, then the media will run with it to try to get the relatives that can’t be found and that still care to come out of the woodwork.”
“Do they know who did this?”
“No,” Robin said. “They know the bodies were supposedly shipped to the county’s only crematorium out on the old Boulder Highway from a dozen different mortuaries around town. Back in the early 1970s, pretty much every person who was to be cremated in Las Vegas during those years ended up in the attics of these six houses. Cremation back then was not accepted as much as it is now, so very few opted for it.”
“And even though it was only one place, there is still no idea who did this?” Sarge asked. He couldn’t believe that was possible.
“Nope,” Robin said. “The crematorium was torn down in nineteen-eighty-one so a subdivision could be built, which was pretty much when the last body was put in the attics. That part of the industry was hardly regulated back then in Nevada anyway. And the owner of the crematorium used a fake name.”
“Of course,” Pickett said.
“They must have made a fortune taking payments for bodies and doing nothing,” Sarge said.
He knew that for the longest time, the funeral business was full of scams and fakes. Thankfully, over the last thirty years, new restrictions and rules and organizations had stepped in to keep that sort of thing down to a minimum.
And even though there were five hundred bodies in those attics, the only crime would be fraud and mistreatment of a corpse, both long past statutes of limitations.
This was just a massive PR nightmare.
And all of this had happened before those sorts of government regulations and licensing on the funeral industry came into play. In fact, the years this was happening, the mob and Howard Hughes had just cleared the city and everything was trying to find a new balance.
Sarge just shook his head. “So we have six houses full of bodies. Each house is owned by someone with the fake names of a kid who went to high school as a junior eight years in a row? Right?”
Robin nodded.
“And what about Benjamin Ronald States?” Pickett asked.
“No connection that we can find in the slightest,” Robin said. “No one has even gone to talk with him about any of this yet because there is no connection.”
“Police a little busy, huh?” Sarge asked, shaking his head.
“Is Cavanaugh going to survive this?” Pickett asked.
“I’ve talked with him twice a day and he seems to be his normal grumpy self,” Robin said. “And the chief has pulled him off of the mortuary problem and has him focused back on the young blondes. They are not mortuary victims, even though they were also embalmed. They are murders.”
“How many young girls did it end up being?” Sarge asked, afraid of the answer.
“Thirty-one,” Robin said.
“Wow,” Pickett said.
“The chief wants us back helping Cavanaugh,” Robin said.
Sarge nodded. Part of him was glad to be able to be back on this case. But another part had really liked not thinking about this horror show.
“As long as we don’t have to go anywhere near any of those houses,” Pickett said.
“I doubt we will,” Robin said. “Those are locked down solid and the city is hauling out bodies at night from each home to a few mortuaries who are helping out. They don’t want the word out on this either because of the damage it would do to their industry.”
“Makes sense,” Sarge said. “So any updates on any of the tests on the girls?”
“And the guy in the basement of that first house?” Pickett asked.
Sarge kept forgetting about that guy.
Robin frowned and nodded. “The girls were all killed with blunt force trauma to the back of the head. All with a similar or same weapon.”
“So we had a serial killer,” Pickett said.
Sarge agreed, especially with the past tense on this. Looked like the killer operated for a short few years and then stopped for some reason.
Or at least Sarge hoped he or she stopped and didn’t just move out of town and start up again.
He didn’t even want to think of that possibility.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
June 15th, 2017
Las Vegas, Nevada
All three of them had out their notebooks and were trying to figure out what to do next. They had all gotten some more fruit and Sarge had gotten some bacon and they had settled in to work.
All three of them were drinking coffee. Pickett figured it was going to be one of those kind of days when coffee was a very good idea. She hadn’t expected the chief to let them back on these cases just yet, but she was glad he had. The regular detectives were just too busy with the mess from all those attics.
“So we forget about the attic stuff,” Sarge said. “Let’s go over exactly what we do have.”
Pickett and Robin both nodded. Pickett figured that if they didn’t concentrate down, they would never have even a slight chance of solving this one.
“First,” Sarge said, “we have a guy named Ben who came into town, registered as a junior in high school under a fake name, and then did it again for eight straight years, moving from school to school and name to name. Right?”
Robin nodded.
Pickett wrote that down, then put a big “Why” beside the question.
“On another topic, but somehow maybe related,” Sarge said, “we have a girl by the name of Cathy Wendt who went missing in June of 1977. She was a junior and her boyfriend’s name was Ben. Right?”
“And you traced that Ben from pictures of him in Cathy Wendt’s missing person’s files to a Benjamin Ronald States, who is still alive and married to Cathy Wendt,” Pickett said to Robin.
“Yes,” Robin said. “The connection becomes broken when we looked up the old records for a Ben March and he supposedly lived at the house where we found the first bodies. We first thought that Ben March was the same Ben, now we do not know for sure.”
“So we have no idea if Ben March is Benjamin States?” Sarge asked a moment before Pickett could.
“That is correct,” Robin said. “I have no connection in money or anything else from States to the fake name of March and that house. Or any of the houses.”
“Any idea who the guy was in the basement?” Sarge asked.
Robin shook her head. “We should be getting the first rushed DNA tests back on him and those first girls today or tomorrow. Kind of doubt that will help us much unless we get lucky somehow.”
Robin looked at some notes, then said, “We do know the old guy in the chair died of dehydration and natural causes. They put his age in the mid-seventies.”
Pickett was stunned. “That old? That meant he had to be in his mid-thirties, if not slightly older when those girls were killed.”
“Would look that way,” Robin said.
Pickett wrote that in her notebook. She had a gut sense that had something to do with all of this, but not a clue what that might be.
All the victims of the murders were about the same age, as best as could be figured without a lot of work. All wore their hair blonde, all were killed in the same fashion, and all were embalmed.
“So on the victims,” Pickett said, “our killer had access to a way to embalm his victims.”
“Twenty-one official mortuaries in Las Vegas in that time period,” Robin said. “Those were the official ones. Embalming was something that could be done by most anyone with the skill and supplies and some basic equipment.”
Pickett marked that down and wrote “Dead End” beside it.
“The pictures are another crazy part of this,” Sarge said. “How did someone, and for what reason, get those girls to naturally undress for nude pictures?”
“Maybe the promise of being in a major magazine like Playboy or Penthouse or one of the others men’s magazines at the time,” Robin said.
Pickett nodded. “That might do it. A promise of money and fame.”
“And back then Polaroid pictures were a standard way of doing test shots for major photo shoots,” Sarge said, “since the things developed in a minute or so.”
“And taking that many of them would be a normal thing for a professional photographer to do,” Pickett said. “Could those houses have been used as a form of photography business at one point?”
“I’ll look though old newspaper ads and such and see what I can find,” Robin said, nodding.
Pickett marked down in her book “Pictures.” Then she put a “Possible” beside it.
And that was where they stopped. They seemed to have a lot of information, but all natural ways of looking into all this was blocked by a solid barrier of forty years of time.
So much had changed since the early seventies. Pickett felt like they were living in a different world, the more they looked back through those forty years.
Then it dawned on her that maybe they weren’t looking exactly right. They were focused on the eight years and six houses.
She looked up at Sarge, then at Robin. “What happened during the thirty-plus years since all this went on and when that guy died in that basement and the power got turned off to all those houses?”
Sarge just blinked at her.
Robin swore softly and wrote in her notebook.
They needed to start last year, with modern techniques, and trace backwards. And Pickett knew exactly where to start.
“The cars,” Pickett said. “We start with the cars and work backwards. There have to be cameras and other records in car lots and at the Department of Motor Vehicles.”
Both Sarge and Robin nodded and both kept writing in their notebooks, which was a very good sign.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
June 15th, 2017
Las Vegas, Nevada
Sarge really liked the idea that they start with the cars. Turns out each house had a car parked in the driveway. And all were as clean as the one they had first looked at. It made no sense, but Pickett was right, it was a way to bring this investigation to now and work backwards.
And there was another way, but Sarge figured it was a long shot.
“How about we go talk with Benjamin States,” he said.
“Think Cavanaugh could get that approved at this point?”
Robin shrugged. “Let me find out.”
She took her phone out of her bag and hit a number and put the phone to her ear. “Cavanaugh,” she said. “Got the gang here finishing breakfast and getting ready to go to work.”
She listened for a moment, then nodded. “We’re wondering if you could arrange for us, with you along if you have time, to go talk with Benjamin States and his wife.”
She listened, then laughed. “Fire me the address. Sarge and Pickett will meet you there. I’ve got some tracing to do on those six cars we found.”
She listened for a moment, then said “Thanks,” and hung up.
“He already got it approved and figured we would ask, so he called the couple and set up an appointment in one hour at their home.”
Pickett laughed and Sarge just shook his head.
“Cavanaugh is going to be a great addition to this task force,” Sarge said.
“If the paperwork on this case doesn’t kill him first,” Pickett said, and they all laughed.
Fifty-five minutes later, after a brisk walk back to the condo to get the car and some ice in an ice chest and bottles of water, they made it to Benjamin States’ gated home on a sprawling acreage overlooking the Las Vegas valley.
“Wow,” Pickett said as they drove slowly up the twisting drive through the rocks and desert plants toward the big white stucco mansion that seemed to spread over the top of the rock bluff.
Sarge could only agree. It was an impressive place.
And expensive. Millions and millions expensive.
They pulled up and stopped in front of the home on a massive circular driveway. Pickett left the car running to keep the air-conditioning going and they both got a bottle of water from the cooler.
They didn’t dare make a move until Cavanaugh was with them. This was still an active case after all and they needed an active detective.
It seemed very strange to be working a live case again. Very strange.
A few moments later Cavanaugh pulled in behind them.
He met them beside Pickett’s Jeep and indicated the house. “You two are rich, why don’t you live in a place like this?”
“We’re not that rich,” Pickett said.
“And we can’t walk to breakfast either,” Sarge said, pointing back toward the city in the distance. This place was beautiful, but it was a way out of town.
“Yeah, good point there,” Cavanaugh said. “I’ll let you off the hook this time.”
“Thanks,” Pickett said, laughing. “You getting any sleep?”
“Like a log for four hours a night. Two naps a day when I can catch them. I plan on getting old enough to join you guys in the Gang.”
“Fifteen days,” Pickett said.
“Oh, really, I had lost track,” Cavanaugh said, then laughed.
The three of them turned to the massive ornate wood front door of the big mansion. The door was so huge, it either had to be balanced perfectly or it would need a machine to open it. Sarge figured it to be almost two stories tall.
Turned out, after they knocked, it opened easily in perfect balance to show an even larger and more ornate stone and tile and rough wood room beyond.
The man that met them was medium height, wearing tan slacks, a light shirt, and slippers. He had his gray hair cut short and had striking blue eyes. He looked to be in his fifties or early sixties and was clearly in great shape.
He introduced himself as Benjamin States, but that they could call him Ben. They shook his hand and gave their names and showed their badges. He then asked them to come in.
He led them through the massive tile-floored and high-ceilinged front foyer with a staircase that looked like it might go on forever upward. They ended the trip in what looked to be a library, with maple shelving and walls full of expensive leather books.
The place had a wonderful warm feel, which surprised Sarge considering the rest of the house had felt cold. And the room smelled a little of the remains of breakfast, so the kitchen must be close by as well.
