Free Stripped by Brian Freeman

palm trees. The city fathers had located it in one of the city’s uglier neighborhoods, a few blocks from the downtown casinos, as if the presence of the police headquarters might somehow bring down the surrounding crime rate by osmosis. It wasn’t working.
    Stride checked his watch and saw it was almost noon. His stomach was growling. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do more, sleep or eat.
    Behind him, the office door opened and closed. Stride nodded at Lester Sawhill, who frowned and pointed a finger at the chair in front of his desk. The phone rang, and Sawhill picked it up. The lieutenant settled himself into his own leather chair, which was so large compared to his small frame that it made him look like a child visiting Daddy’s office. Stride took a seat, too, and waited.
    “Good morning, Governor,” Sawhill announced, looking unimpressed, as if he talked to the governor every day.
    Serena said she couldn’t remember ever being in Sawhill’s office when he wasn’t on the phone. He liked an audience. It reminded everyone of where he stood in the pecking order.
    In Minnesota, Stride had reported to the deputy chief, a leprechaun of a man named Kyle Kinnick—K-2, they called him—who had elephant ears and a reedy voice that sounded like a clarinet played by a six-year-old. Sawhill wasn’t much taller than K-2, but he was a smoother piece of work. He seemed to get a haircut every five days, because the neat trim of his balding brown hair never changed at all. He had a narrow face like a capital
V
, pockmarked cheeks, and half-glasses that he wore on a chain around his neck when they weren’t pushed down to the little round bulb at the end of his nose.
    Sawhill wore a modestly priced gray suit, old but well kept. His uniform. It didn’t matter if it was a July day under, the blistering sun, according to Serena. Sawhill never went so far as to open the collar button of his shirt or loosen the knot in his tie. He never raised his voice, which was toneless but utterly in control. He didn’t seem to have any emotions at all, at least none that made their way onto his face or that lit up his brown eyes.
    “That’s a very nice gesture, Governor,” Sawhill said into the phone. He had a pink stress ball on his desk that he squeezed rhythmically, his slim fingers tensing. Every now and then, he studied a fingernail, as if it might need filing.
    Stride might as well have been invisible, listening to the one-sided conversation.
    It had taken years for Stride to trust K-2, because deep inside, Stride always believed that moving up the ladder in the police bureaucracy meant being a smart politician and giving up the things that made you a good cop. K-2 was different. For him, the cops came first. Stride respected him for his loyalty.
    Maybe someday Lester Sawhill would convince him that he, too, was on the side of the angels, but Stride didn’t think so. That wasn’t to say that Sawhill was a bad man. He wasn’t. Stride knew he was intensely moral. A Mormon, like so many senior officials in Sin City. No caffeine. No tobacco. No alcohol. Lots of kids—at least seven, Stride figured, counting up the photographs he saw propped on the bookshelves behind Sawhill’s desk. But Sawhill put God and Vegas first, not his cops.
    Stride didn’t know how Sawhill and the other Mormons survived here. They could work in the casinos but not gamble. They were religious in a godless town. He found it strange and a little hypocritical, like a bartender who thinks drinking is evil but doesn’t mind watching others pour poison down their throats.
    Sawhill hung up the phone. “That was Governor Durand,” he explained, in case Stride had missed it. “That should give you an idea of the concern that exists over this homicide.”
    “I’m aware of that,” Stride replied.
    “This is a very public case, Detective,” Sawhill added. “A celebrity murder. The communications department is already fielding press inquiries from around the