Free Strip Search by Rex Burns

other areas of law enforcement, whether an agency was capable of them or not. “We have a similar homicide, Lee. Maybe you got a flier on it: Annette Sheldon, exotic dancer. One round to the back of the head, suspicion of rape. It happened less than a week before this one.”
    Lee shook his head. “I might have seen the report. I can’t remember.”
    “It looks like the same m.o. It’s possible that a special metro unit will be formed to take over the investigation of both homicides.” That was unlikely. Metropolitan task forces were expensive and unwieldy, and the casual murders of a couple of nude dancers wasn’t important enough politically to squeeze the effort and money out of the state attorney general’s office. But Lee was new; he might not know that. “Our district attorney’s talking about it. Naturally, the senior man would come from DPD.”
    “The body was found in Adams County!”
    “But it’s possible that the crime originated in Denver—she was probably abducted after work, in Denver County.” And in Colorado, the origin of the crime dictated the responsible agency. Wager gave him the option: “If we work together, of course, then the DA probably won’t see the need for a task force.”
    “You think it’s the same killer?”
    “I don’t know. You haven’t told me anything yet.”
    Lee didn’t look happy as he felt his case start to slip between his fingers. But he finally shoved back from his imitation wood desk and pulled open a file drawer. Lifting out a dark folder, he laid it open in front of Wager. The photographs showed the body facedown on a bed of weeds and buffalo grass. It was a half-disrobed female, and very dead. That was all one could tell from what was left.
    “No identifiable tire tracks or footprints?”
    “I checked all that personally. We found what might have been tire tracks, but we couldn’t get an impression—the scene was too old.”
    Wager leafed through the colored glossies and noticed, without saying anything, that the sequence of photographs showed minor disturbances in the evidence: in one photograph there was a cigarette butt; a similar shot later showed it was gone. Another pair of photos taken at different times revealed that the victim’s head had been moved. The crime scene, in short, had been violated before the photographic record was complete, so none of it would be worth a tiddly-fart in court. “What about the cigarette butt?”
    “Nothing. It was older than the crime. I told you, Wager, everything I found is in the report.”
    “Where’d you work before coming here?”
    Lee’s dark eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Newport Beach, California. Why?”
    “I thought it might be back East. DPD gets a lot of applicants from there.” Wager had heard some gossip about Newport Beach and its PD—the kind that warms the laughter-filled coffee breaks at three in the morning when patrols gather for their fifteen minutes around a café table. It was a playground for the rich, a tourist trap where little was spent on nonessentials such as police training. The department hired walk-ins because they were cheap, issued them badge and pistol, and told them to go out and bust tourists to keep the city treasury solvent with fines instead of tax money. Maybe it was to Lee’s credit that he wanted to move away from an outfit like that. But poor training always showed up, and now Adams County would be the worse for it.
    At the bottom of the folder, Wager found a sheet describing the subsequent investigation. Lee had interviewed the victim’s mother, had visited Foxy Dick’s, had appended a list of friends and acquaintances. At the top of that list was Williams’s boyfriend, and there was a little check behind his name.
    “The check means you interviewed the person?”
    “That’s right. And if there’s nothing there, it means he didn’t have any information to give.”
    “The boyfriend’s alibi is good?”
    “He’s a night clerk at a gas station. He