Lieutenant Loretta Bradley of the Denver Police Department surveyed the scene in room 215 of the Oxford Hotel with a jaundiced eye. Friday night was definitely getting off to a strange start.
Damned strange.
“What we’ve got here isn’t the bloodbath we expected,” Connor Ford, her newest detective, said. “It’s just a bloody mess.” She’d snagged the sandy-haired, gray-eyed youngster from the Boulder Police Department about a year ago, and he was working out pretty damn well-so far.
“Yes, I can see that,” she said, letting her gaze range across the elegant hotel room one more time before it settled on the victim and the EMT patching him up with a little first aid. “So what did he do, panic and roll around on every single surface he could find?”
“Seems like it. He’s a little upset,” the detective said.
“Oh, yes,” she agreed. The old guy, one Otto Von Lindberg from San Francisco, was definitely upset, grumbling and complaining under his breath, giving them all the evil eye, wanting everyone to leave, just leave. “And what in the hell is that?” She gestured to the symbol someone had very carefully carved into the old guy’s back. He was bleeding, but he was in no danger of bleeding out. He’d been cut deep enough to maybe leave a scar, but not deep enough to kill, not even close. The EMT was using steri-strips and butterfly bandages, not stitches, to hold the guy together.
It was all damned strange.
Especially the black leather thong the old guy was wearing. It had snaps on it, and spikes, and… oh, hell, she’d seen it all in her twenty-five years on the force, but this was one of those things that was going to stick with a person, seeing this old fart in his leather thong, sporting a dog collar around his neck. According to Connor, he’d been handcuffed with his hands behind his back, flex-cuffed around the ankles, hog-tied, leashed to the bed, and bleeding profusely when the manager had found him, after being alerted by one of the maids.
Interestingly, the maid had not seen any blood or wounds when she’d first glanced in the room. But by the time the manager had calmed her down enough to understand what she was talking about and gotten up to room 215, the guy had definitely been bloody and writhing around on the floor. The 911 call had been dramatically overstated-with three squad cars bearing down on the hotel in award-winning response time… “Blood everywhere, it’s a massacre.”
Not quite a massacre, Loretta thought, shaking her head and looking the old guy over. He did have blood running down his back into his butt crack, though, and geezus, she would have just as soon skipped that part.
Half of a leash was hanging off the guy’s dog collar and trailing down the front of his chest, with a cleanly cut end, and the other half was still tied around the bed frame. He’d been easy pickings for whoever had cut him up and then cut him loose.
Sometimes Denver was an interesting town- too interesting.
“I don’t remember Dixie ever taking a knife to anyone,” she said.
“ Dixie ’s involvement was a misunderstanding on our part,” Connor said. “The guy was pretty wound up when we arrived, jabbering away in English and German, and it took a while to figure out he wasn’t saying ‘It was Dixie.’ He was saying ‘It wasn’t Dixie.’ Kind of a miscommunication thing…maybe.”
Loretta gave her new boy a long look. “I want Dixie anyway, and I want Benny-boy Jackman, and I want them both at the precinct before I get there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And if it wasn’t Dixie, who was it? Maybe this guy blew into town on his own and found a knife-wielding dominatrix hawking it on Colfax. Or maybe somebody helped him out. The doormen here at the Oxford usually have their little black book vetted better than this, but if someone in the hotel was involved, I want to know who.”
“The new valet,” Connor said. “He was approached a couple of days ago by a blond-haired woman who wanted him to make sure she got this trick instead of Dixie. The woman also requested that Von Lindberg be put in this room-two-fifteen. I think because of the fire escape. She paid the valet fifty bucks, and the reservation clerk fifty bucks.”
Loretta looked to the open window and the curtains blowing in the light breeze. Okay, she thought, the Boulder boy was earning his keep.
“And how was the valet supposed to steer this john to her?”
Connor flipped open his notebook and showed her the top page. “She left her phone number.”
Loretta grinned. “Find this blonde and bring her in. I can’t have hookers carving their initials into their customers.”
“It’s not her initials, Lieutenant. It’s kanji.”
“Kanji?”
“Japanese characters. At least the middle part of it looks like a distinct character. The angled lines around the outside of it might just be for decoration.”
Whatever it was, she didn’t want decorating fat old Germans with the sharp end of a knife to become a new trend in Denver.
“And what’s the kanji on this guy mean?”
“I’ll know here in just a minute,” he said. “I had the tech clean him up a bit and took a picture of it to send to-”
“Skeeter,” she interjected. Who else? Skeeter Bang Hart was a mutual friend, manga artist, and former kick-ass street punk turned good. The young woman had become part of a Defense Department black-ops team Loretta was very glad to have based in Denver and on her side. She’d saved most of the operators’ butts at one time or another as juveniles, and they made a habit of returning the favor when they could, sometimes quite handsomely. For reasons on both sides, their unspoken alliance remained just that-unspoken. They had each other’s numbers and weren’t afraid to use them. It was enough.
“Yeah.” The detective showed her the photograph on his phone, and Loretta was impressed. His phone took better pictures than her camera. Hell, she could hardly keep up with personal technology anymore.
“Well, let me know as soon as she…” Her voice trailed off, and she reached for Connor’s phone. Holding it one way into the light, and then the other, she swore under her breath. There was no doubt what she was looking at-dammit.
“What?” Connor asked.
She handed him back the phone.
“Swastika,” she said. “Those angled lines? That’s a swastika, radiating out of the kanji in the middle.”
Connor looked at his phone, then looked over at the German.
“Hell,” he said softly. “So what do you think? Aryan Nation?”
“Or just plain old Nazis,” she said. “Either way, I don’t like it. What’s Otto Von Lindberg been saying?”
Connor gave her a resigned glance. “Nothing except he wants us out of his room. He paid good money for the room and seems to have plenty left, and he wants to be left alone.”
Loretta gave a short nod. Von Lindberg had a fistful of hundred-dollar bills clutched in his right hand.
“Robbery would have been too easy,” she said.
Getting attacked and robbed was a nice, straightforward crime. Getting cut the hell up, while wearing a dog collar and a thong, and being tied to a bed, and not getting robbed-that was complex.
Most days, Loretta thrived on the complex, but she had a late date tonight, and a damned early morning tomorrow, and she wasn’t in the mood for ranting Germans.
“We’ve got a definite crime scene here, Lieutenant,” Connor said. “But Mr. Von Lindberg is saying he did this to himself.”
“Handcuffed and tied to a bed, he cut a swastika and a kanji into his back?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Connor said. “That’s his story.”
“It’s a little weak, wouldn’t you say, Detective?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve definitely heard better.”
So had she.
“Take him into protective custody. We’ll hold him as long as we can, see what we come up with. I want the window dusted. If the blonde paid for an escape route, I’m sure she used it.”
“And maybe the guy with the maid did, too,” Connor said. “Nobody saw him go back out the lobby, but there’s almost half a dozen ways out of the hotel. He could have used any of them.”
“Guy?” Loretta asked. “What guy with the maid?”
The detective had the wisdom to blanch slightly. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” He flipped over to the next page in his notebook. “I thought Weisman filled you in on the way up.”
“He did, but he didn’t tell me about any guy with the maid.”
“Young guy, in his twenties, five ten, maybe five eleven. Taller than the maid’s husband, she says, and her husband is five eight,” Connor said, consulting his notebook. “Hispanic, clean-cut, wearing jeans and a black-collared shirt, gray T-shirt, told the maid he was the police and asked her to open the door of this room for him. She did open the door for him. He walked in. She took one look, saw Von Lindberg tied to the bed, and ran the other way.”
“But this guy came in the room?”
“That’s what she says.”
“Did she see if he was carrying a knife?”
“No such luck,” Connor said. “But she did say he had a hard look about him, serious, very much in charge. She didn’t doubt for a second that he was a policeman.”
“In jeans and a black shirt.”
“She thought he was undercover.”
“Did he flash any identification?”
“No, ma’am. Not according to her.”
“And she goes around opening room doors for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes along?”
“If he says he’s a policeman, it seems so, yes, ma’am.”
Perfectly legitimate, Loretta thought. If she were an illegal immigrant shifting the sheets around in an upscale hotel, she wouldn’t be second-guessing anybody calling himself a policeman either, especially if he had a solid air of authority. It sucked, but that was the way of it.
“Take her in, get her an artist. Let’s find out what this clean-cut police impersonator looks like.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The detective’s phone beeped twice, signaling a text message, and they both looked at the screen while he opened the file. The sender was Skeeter, and only one word came up on the screen: HERO.
“Nazi hero,” Connor said, putting the two symbols together.
Well, that just about took the cake in Loretta’s book of crap she didn’t want to deal with on her beat, which was the whole damn city.
“I don’t like it,” the detective said, shaking his head, still looking at the screen on his phone.
“Neither do I, Connor,” Loretta agreed. “Neither do I.”
She was going to die. Her mind was going in circles, thoughts racing.
Her heart was pounding, pulse racing. Her legs were shaking, arms trembling, her stomach churning, lips quivering. She hated it all. She hated it so much-and yet she couldn’t stop any of it. She was going to die. She knew it with a dread certainty.
For no reason, she was going to become one of those horrifying statistics, an unsolved crime, a victim of senseless, random violence.
She only had one edge, and she was holding onto it with a death grip, using every ounce of her strength to keep her emotions frozen, to keep from crying.
The awful, terrifying man who had kidnapped her had taped her to a chair, her ankles taped to the legs, big, wide, gray duct tape, her wrists handcuffed to the arms. He’d stuffed something foul in her mouth and taped it in place, and it took every ounce of her strength not to gag. She hurt everywhere, especially where he’d hit her, backhanding her in the face, punching her in the stomach, where he’d pulled her hair out and wrenched her arm backward. She could see her blood on the front of her uniform shirt. He’d taken her name tag. She didn’t know why.
She didn’t know where he’d brought her, or why. It had all happened so fast. The huge, frightfully strong man had come out of nowhere, his attack so fast, so brutal, so unexpected, she’d never had time to react. One second, she’d been walking across the hospital parking lot, and in the next she’d been in the middle of a nightmare, caught in the maelstrom of violence, a random act of violence perpetrated by some pervert, some woman-hater.
She felt sick. She was so frightened, and she knew beyond any shred of a doubt that her situation was very, very unlikely to improve.