Dead to Me Read online

  I could only smile as we headed back toward my brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee, a Christmas gift from Annie.

  That response had been a lot more than I had expected. We had solved a lot of cases on a lot less.

  Now at least we had something to go on.

  Four

  June 2014

  Pleasant Hills

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  I TOSSED my ten-jack off-suit into the muck as a response to Williams’ three-dollar raise and sat back in my leather chair. Williams usually played tight and when he raised, it was either a stone cold bluff, or he had decent cards. Ten-jack wasn’t a good enough hand to test the bluff theory.

  The Tuesday night game of the Cold Poker Gang had four retired detectives around the table in my basement game room. The game we always played was pure Texas Hold’em. The stakes were one-dollar small blind and two-dollar big blind with a max bet of five bucks. The worst I had gotten hurt one week was two hundred and my best night winnings had been around one hundred and fifty.

  All four of us tonight were good poker players, but not professional level like my daughter, Annie, and her boyfriend, Doc Hill. They both made more money from the game than I ever wanted to think about.

  All the players tonight had no real worry about money, so the stakes were good, but not enough to hurt any of us.

  To my right sat Ben “The Sarge” Carson. He was a year younger than I was at sixty-two and was in the best shape of all of us since he spent so much time in a gym every day. He told us it was a great place to meet women. I tended to believe him.

  He had gray hair cut perfectly, a smile that he said had cost him a fortune, and more money than any one person should have. He was the only heir to a major fortune. Except for a new sports car, he still lived as he had when on the force.

  He got his nickname from being a Sergeant in the Army before retiring and becoming a cop. Over the years that I had known Sarge, the guy had gone through three wives and yet managed to have no children. Now we all kidded him about looking for wife four, but he always said no, he had too much money to risk another wife.

  Outside of the game or working on a case, I never saw Sarge without a younger woman on his arm. Always a different one as well, so Sarge’s plan of avoiding another commitment seemed to be working.

  The fourth member of the night was Conklin. I wasn’t even sure of his first name since in thirty years I had never heard Conklin called by any other name.

  Conklin was the only one of us here tonight with a wife. She supported his poker and cold case hobby because “It got him out of her hair.” He had a badly broken nose that hadn’t healed right and looked smashed on his face, and he never seemed to smile, although he had a dry and biting sense of humor.

  He was also the only one of us with an advanced college degree. He had gotten a night-class MBA years back when he had considered quitting the force to start a business. Conklin always amazed me with his ability with numbers.

  Conklin called Williams’ raise and, since he was dealing the hand, burnt a card and put three up on the board, face up. My ten-jack would have been even weaker since the flop had come king, five, four, all off-suit.

  Williams bet three dollars again and Conklin just shook his head and folded, passing the deck of cards to Sarge for the next deal.

  “So, where does the Rafferty case stand?” Conklin asked, sitting back. Every night he was the one to sort of do an inventory of the cases we were working on.

  “It’s just laying there like a dead, stinking fish,” I said, feeling disgusted.

  Beside me Williams nodded.

  “The daughter said that the vic had killed her mother and her sister,” I said, “but the mother and younger sister both died a few years after Rafferty went missing, both from drug overdoses.”

  “We got no idea what she was talking about,” Williams said.

  I felt slightly angry that I had to agree with Williams. This case just seemed to be going nowhere.

  We had looked through all of Rafferty’s bills and debts and he seemed like a poor working slob that no one had paid any attention to.

  “So no luck there,” Conklin said. “But when I was coming in here tonight I noticed your view, Lott.”

  I glanced at my flat-nosed friend. “Yeah, one of the reasons Connie and I bought this place.”

  Conklin nodded. “Back when Rafferty was buried up here, why would someone bury a guy they had just shot on a hill with a view?”

  I glanced over at Williams. “That’s a question I never thought about. Why kill a guy and then give him a view like you care about him?”

  “Family,” Williams said, nodding. “Rafferty was a slight drinker, but had no gambling problems and no mob connections or any other crime record. So it goes back to family or a mistress.”

  “We need more on the wife and younger daughter,” I said, nodding. Now I suddenly felt like I had a direction with the case again.

  Sarge dealt, then as he put the deck down, he said simply. “Family. If it’s not sex that gets a guy killed, it’s family.”

  “Spoken like a guy with far too much experience in both,” Williams said.

  “You can never have too much experience in sex,” Conklin said flatly, picking up his cards and studying them as we all laughed and agreed.

  But I knew there was a lot of truth in what Sarge had said. And chances are if we were going to solve the murder of the guy who had been buried right were we were playing cards, I was going to have to dig deeper into the mother and younger daughter.

  I tossed away my seven-ten off-suit and sat back, sipping on my Diet Coke and thinking about the next step in the case as the others all called the blind and waited for the flop.

  It didn’t get any better for me than Tuesday night.

  Five

  June 2014

  Martin Luther King Blvd

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  I HAD DONE ALL the searching I could online of records about the wife and the younger daughter of Rafferty. But some of the older records hadn’t been loaded up to the online services, so I found myself once again downtown in the Clark County Records building, the smell of dust and cleaning solution filling the air like a musty perfume.

  It felt like old home week. I couldn’t begin to remember how many hours over the years before computers I had spent in this building digging through records.

  I had called Williams and got him to join me, since I knew Williams loved the musty paper files and didn’t trust the information on the computers. He was as old-school as they came. And sometimes that had paid off for us.

  It took us about twenty minutes, but we eventually found the death certificates for both the daughter and the wife of Rafferty. Both had died of prescription drug overdoses, way before that problem was even considered a problem.

  “Take a look at this,” Williams said, pointing to a name of the doctor who prescribed the drug for the daughter.

  I glanced at the name and then the credentials. It was a psychiatrist.

  I quickly glanced at the wife’s file, then nodded and slipped it over to Williams.

  “Same doctor,” I said, pulling out my iPad, another gift from Annie, and doing a quick search to see if the Doctor Harriet Bert was still alive. It was always a problem with cold cases, especially really old ones like this. People had a way of dying or moving out of state and making it damn hard to track.

  “Alive, but retired,” I said, feeling relieved as I jotted down her address. It was a house address off the strip near the university.

  “A visit?” Williams asked, smiling and standing.

  “A visit,” I said, glancing at my watch. It was almost noon. We might actually have a chance of catching her.

  It turned out she wasn’t home, but had started teaching part time at the University, so we tracked her to her office on campus in one of the older buildings.

  The day was growing hot and both of us were sweating when we reached
the red-brick building from the parking lot.

  I felt very much out of place walking down the narrow hallway toward her office as students passed us, giving us both odd looks.

  “Guess not many old farts take classes here,” Williams said.

  “No, they think we are professors,” I said.

  “Yeah, us professors,” Williams said, and laughed.

  “Why not?” I asked, laughing as well. “We could teach kids a thing or two.”

  “And both of the things would be wrong and outdated,” Williams said as we reached Harriet Bert’s office door.

  Shaking my head and trying not to laugh, I knocked and a woman’s voice said we should come in.

  I went in first to be met with a room full of books, floor-to-ceiling, with a matronly woman sitting behind a big, wooden desk. The place was fairly large and smelled of flowers and tea. Or a very flowery tea.

  We introduced ourselves and Harriet Bert switched glasses and offered us the only two chairs facing her desk.

  “We are investigating the murder of a man by the name of Nixon Rafferty,” I said.

  Bert looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “Excuse me for a moment.”

  She switched her glasses again, leaving the other pair hanging from a chain around her neck and turned to her computer. After a moment she finally nodded.

  “Sorry, just had to refresh a failing memory,” she said, turning back to us and again changing her glasses. “I didn’t know Nixon Rafferty was killed. All I knew was that he vanished suddenly leaving his family behind. I treated all three of his family for a time.”

  “That’s why we are here,” Williams said. “Rafferty’s body was dug up in 1992. He had been shot. The case was never solved.”

  “So you are trying to solve the cold case now?” she asked, nodding. “I like that. What can I do to help?”

  “As you mentioned,” I said, “you treated the entire family after the disappearance. Could you tell us when your treatment stopped?”

  She nodded, switched out the glasses again and went back to her computer. Then she looked over her glasses at them. “I treated all three for over a year, working to help them get past his disappearance, but all three quit at the same time in January of 1992.”

  I glanced at Williams. I knew that couldn’t be a coincidence. That was when the body was found.

  “We would never ask you to break client confidentiality, doctor,” I said, knowing I had to be very careful and walk a fine line. “But both the younger daughter and the mother died later that year from drug overdoses. The younger daughter first, then the mother. The older daughter is still alive. But on the two that are dead, is there anything you would feel comfortable telling us about.”

  Doctor Bert frowned and went back to studying her records. Then without looking at us she said, “I remember when they died. They had used a prescription I had given them while I was still treating them. It was no longer valid since they were no longer in my care, but they somehow made copies and altered it and filled it at a dozen different places. Police ended up shutting a few of those places down after that.”

  I said nothing.

  She studied the record for a short time on her computer screen, then switching glasses, she turned back to us. “I can tell you that Nixon Rafferty was a pedophile. He abused his youngest daughter and the mother had huge guilt feelings about letting him do that because she discovered it and let it go on. I was doing my best to help the two that died get past that. Clearly I failed.”

  I nodded and stood. I knew we would get nothing more from Doctor Bert. But now some pieces were starting to fall into place.

  We thanked the doctor for her time and headed through the crowds of young students to get to my car.

  “Think the family did it?” Williams asked as we climbed in and I got the car started and the air conditioning going.

  I nodded. “One of them did it, and I have a hunch which one.”

  “Youngest?” Williams asked.

  “Youngest,” I said, nodding. “Now, let’s just figure out how to prove it.”

  Six

  June 2014

  Pleasant Hills

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  * * *

  I SAT WATCHING the rest of the Cold Poker Gang battle over a hand. All three of them were in and Williams ended up taking it when he hit a third king on the river.

  That clearly disgusted both Sarge and Conklin.

  “Okay,” Conklin said turning to me, “after that stupidity, how does the Rafferty murder case go?”

  “Solved and closed,” I said. I bowed slightly as the other three applauded.

  “Williams had a lot to do with this as well,” I said.

  “So lay it out,” Conklin said as Sarge gathered the cards and started to shuffle.

  I explained how Williams and I had tracked down the psychologist on the prescriptions and she had given us the information that Rafferty had been a pedophile.

  “Family?” Conklin asked.

  I nodded, “But we both figured the younger daughter killed Rafferty in the act. She would have been twelve when he died and was fourteen when his body was found when they dug this basement in 1992.”

  “Why in the act?” Sarge asked.

  “The bullet went into his mouth,” Williams said, “in an upward direction and exited out of the back of his head.”

  “So he was on his back,” I said.

  “So she shot him,” Sarge said. “Then the fourteen-year-old sister and mother helped bury him up here on the hill.”

  Conklin nodded. “Thus the view.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Just ugly,” Sarge said, shaking his head. “A tragedy all the way around.”

  “That it was,” I said. “A twelve year old girl killing her own father. Doesn’t get much worse than that.”

  “Didn’t the detectives back when they found the body in 1992 make a run at the family?” Sarge asked as he started to deal out the next hand.

  “They did, but had no luck,” I said. “The three family members all held to their story that he had just vanished one night walking to the store for smokes. They were a complete dead end and the detectives then had nothing at all to point to them, or anyone else for that matter.”

  “So how did you get the older live sister to come clean now, after all this time?” Conklin asked.

  “Good old-fashioned blackmail,” I said, smiling.

  “She has a son who’s in and out of jail,” Williams said.

  “We got dealt some perfect cards,” I said, laughing. “At the moment the son was in jail for a minor drug bust, so when they hauled the older sister, his mother, in for questioning, the detectives told her that her son would serve twenty years on the drug charge unless she told them the truth about what happened to her father.”

  “And the chief went for that?” Sarge asked.

  I had to admit, I had been stunned when I suggested the idea and he had agreed.

  “He did,” I said. “The kid would have been released in a day or so, but she didn’t know that. It was a pure bluff.”

  “And she caved to that?”

  “She did,” I said. “Spilled every last detail like she had been waiting twenty-four years to tell someone.”

  “She had,” Conklin said.

  “So her younger sister killed her father for what he was doing to her,” Sarge said, nodding.

  “And when the body was found, the guilt just overwhelmed the poor young thing,” Williams said. “She could make herself believe that her father was just gone without the body and the investigation. But not after a funeral.”

  “Killed herself a month after the body was found,” I said, “and the mother did the same the next month.”

  “Wow,” Sarge said as he finished dealing out the cards. “What kind of deal did the older sister get?”

  I shrugged. “She’ll spend some time in jail for a number of charges. Chances are it won’t be many since she was a minor when it all ha
ppened. And maybe she can now get some real help.”

  “Always an optimist,” Williams said, laughing at me.

  I glanced down at a pair of jacks and nodded. “Sometimes I am.”

  I raised three dollars and only Williams called.

  “Now who’s an optimist?” I asked.

  “Trust me,” Williams said, “these cards have a thousand percent better chance of winning this hand then that poor woman has in coming out of that family mess even slightly healthy.”

  And with that, I sadly had to agree. Sometimes solving old cases had their downsides.

  But I still felt like a cop and it was my job, and this poker group’s job, to dig up the past and solve the cases.

  And even when what we found showed a true dark side of human culture, solving the case felt great.

  I sat back slightly and watched Sarge put a third jack on the flop.

  And somehow I managed to not smile.

  It didn’t get any better for me than Tuesday night with the Cold Poker Gang.

  Mary Jo kills people for money. After a thousand years, she knows patience and skill and how to cover her tracks.

  Mary Jo loves her job. She makes a lot of money as a hired assassin.

  She also loves vodka and orange juice. Passionately, but not in a dangerous way. After a job well done, she rewards herself with the drink.

  Mary Jo might be the coldest killer in all of fiction. Or at least the only really cold killer who loves vodka and orange juice.

  Make Myself Just One More

  Mary Jo stood, staring at the bottle of Smirnoff Vodka in her hand. She had a pitcher of orange juice beside her on the counter, ice was a touch away in the fridge, and a highball glass sat waiting.

  She was fairly certain she could have just one more.

  She thought she had done everything right.

  The granite surface was spotless, the white cabinets wiped down completely, the floor scrubbed.