Chapter 6
Shaw
“Your ass should be home, Shaw,” Sarge said.
“Almost done.”
“You look like you have a lead on something.” He narrowed his eyes at my desk.
I shook my head. “Bunch of fucking dead ends.” I patted one of the files on my desk. “Getting close, though.”
“Get some sleep, Shaw,” he said, and then he was gone.
Sarge knew there was nothing at home for me. I was the cliche detective people saw in the movies or read about in books. It was me, an ex-wife, and a fucking cat that wanted to be fed and left alone. Despite all that, I still had the dream of opening a tiki bar in Key West someday when I retired.
I was the last man on the floor, long past the point where even the janitor gave up on me.
The homicide bullpen was a tomb at 2:30 AM, all the flickering fluorescents and humming machinery and the residue of human misery caked onto the walls in a way Lysol could never touch.
My desk looked less like a workstation and more like a landfill exhibit: empty coffee cups lined up like a firing squad, takeout boxes that had gone tectonic, case files bristling with enough yellow sticky notes to flag a city block.
It should have been a humiliation, but nobody else was watching.
Except me, and I’d been watching for months.
I swept aside the crap with a forearm, uncapping a small clearing at the center, and set the folder down with the care reserved for munitions and marital secrets. The folder wasn’t even marked anything official, just the scrawl: SPADE, all caps, as if I thought it would intimidate her.
“Let's see what you’re made of, little lady,” I said to the empty room.
I flipped it open, and the contents spilled out in a slow, sick tide: three stills from three different casino surveillance feeds, each from a different quarter of the city, each pulled within days of the corresponding kill.
Each one was a black-and-white moment from a night already gone, grainy as memory.
In every photo, she was there, always just off-center, always walking away.
Sometimes she was caught in full stride, sometimes just an elbow or the sweep of a boot, but always her.
Always the jacket, heavy black leather with a collar folded up like a shark’s fin.
Always the same unhurried posture, the stride that said: I’m not running, I’m not even worried.
I lined the photos up shoulder to shoulder on the scratched desk, sliding them straight with the edge of a knuckle.
At a glance, the only constant was her—none of the victims had known each other, none of the locations shared so much as a parking valet.
Three men dead, three clean, beautiful murders.
I flipped the photos over, one by one, so the victims’ faces glared up at me.
Case One: TAYLOR, Bradley A., age 46. Found cuffed to a banister in his own condo, throat opened to the bone.
The medical examiner called it “almost artistic,” as if that would have comforted the widow.
I remembered the crime scene: no defensive wounds, no sign of a struggle, no sign the killer even hurried after the cut.
The banister was still sticky when I arrived.
The stench of pennies and the raw, animal look frozen on the corpse’s face.
A lock of hair tucked behind the victim’s ear, as if she couldn’t stand the mess.
Case Two: LI, Vincent W., 27. Pro poker player.
Dead in a suite at the Bellagio, wrists zip-tied behind his back, tongue bitten clean off.
Someone had taken their time with him. The room service tray was still warm when they found the body, but she was already long gone, caught only as a shadow on the hallway camera: leather jacket, boots, deliberate as a metronome.
Case Three: DAWSON, Harold, 63. Retired judge, but the type who collected enemies instead of stamps.
Found in the garage of his McMansion, pants around his ankles, evidence of “pre-mortem restraint and deliberate wounding,” which was the polite way the pathologist wrote, “tortured the son of a bitch, then finished him neat.” In this set of security stills, the camera caught a silhouette and a cold-blooded casualness.
I traced the arc of the image with the tip of my finger, and felt a jolt like static.
I slid the victim photos to the edge of the desk, then reached deeper into the folder for the real poison.
I’d printed them at home, not even trusting the work machines.
They were color this time: a series of nude photos, pulled off a Goth lifestyle forum, the kind of site the department’s IT would flag in six seconds flat.
I spread them on the desk, right next to the carnage, as if conducting a séance.
In every photo, the woman was alone: standing in front of a mottled backdrop, seated on a cracked velvet chaise, sprawled on concrete with her hands behind her head as if arrested by invisible police.
She was tall, just as the cameras had promised, lean and hard in a way that was almost punishing.
Her body was a battleground of ink: sleeves, ribs, thighs, even the hollow above her pubic bone marked with an hourglass in jet black.
The only thing not tattooed was her face, which was left blank as a dare.
I looked closer at her naked body, the large, lush nipples that were closer to brown than pink.
A stomach that showed signs of a six-pack.
I let my gaze lower, eyeing the thick but closely shaved black bush between her legs.
My dick hardened for a woman who would just as soon murder me as look at me.
I shook my head, trying to replace my fixation with professional empathy.
She stared out of the photographs with the same flat, unseduced stare: here I am, now what. Come get me motherfucker, and die trying.
I leaned in, chin over the desk, five-o’clock shadow gouging my palm as I braced against the edge.
The light made every detail harsh. The scar on her jaw, exactly where the security still had promised it.
The spatter of tiny chemical burns on her forearms healed over with a kind of proud carelessness.
In one shot, you could even make out the little crescent moon on her middle finger, black as coal.
I shifted my dick, realizing it was still hard for the woman. I wanted to catch her, but now, worse than that, I wanted to fuck her.
There was a word for how long I lingered, but I didn’t let it form in my head.
I flicked my gaze back to the crime scene prints.
The parallels were absolute: no panic, no mess, no random violence.
Even the way she posed in the nudes was a kind of anti-performance, the absence of seduction a negation more powerful than anything soft-core.
She was in total control of her body, and by extension, the scene.
That was her signature. That, and the way she erased herself from the world right after.
I shuffled the security stills under the victim faces, then laid the Goth shots overtop, aligning her indifferent stare with the gaping faces of the dead. I tapped the jaw scar again, once, hard enough to leave a print.
This was the part where I was supposed to call in my superior, do a full department brief, loop in a psychologist to spitball about “female aggression patterns” and “trauma indices.” Instead, I closed the folder and pressed my thumb to the manila as if to drive it through the desk.
I took my time standing. My back hurt the way it only hurts when you’ve failed at something big and secret.
I shoved the folder into the bottom drawer, cleared the desk with the side of my arm—let the junk avalanche into the trash—and reached for my jacket. It was the only thing I wore every day without fail: black canvas, plain, anonymous, like a man who never wanted to be remembered.
The elevator was dead, so I took the stairs two at a time, feeling the ache work itself out in my legs.
The air outside the precinct was a physical shock, dry and electric, Las Vegas strip lights gouging the sky to the west. Somewhere out there, she was walking, the stride never hurried, never afraid.
A woman in a leather jacket, unkillable, untraceable, unseduced.
A woman I wanted to both catch and fuck. I couldn’t do both. Or could I?
I locked the car without getting in, stood in the lot under the sodium glare, and watched the city until my eyes hurt.
There was a kind of peace in knowing exactly what you wanted and exactly how much it would destroy you to get it.
I breathed in the gasoline stink and the low, predatory hum of neon. In a few hours, I’d start the questioning.