Free Strip Search by Rex Burns Page A

was working the night she disappeared.”
    “Did any of these people know Annette Sheldon?”
    Lee blinked and tugged his cuffs out of his coat sleeves, then he shrugged them back in. “I didn’t ask. There wasn’t any reason to.”
    There was reason to. Wager’s silence said as much. Lee, lips thin, poured himself another cup of coffee. “Have you had any reply from NCIC?” asked Wager.
    “I put in a request this morning.”
    Or he would as soon as Wager left. Sighing, Wager tapped the file together and closed its cover. “Where do you go from here?”
    “Just like you, I wait and see if something more turns up. There’s sure as hell not much to work with now.”
    “Yeah. Well, let me tell you what we’ve got on Sheldon.” He waited for the detective to take out a pencil and paper, but he didn’t. Instead, his face settled into an expressionless stare that told Wager the man did not believe that the two homicides were related, that he did not want to pool his information with Wager or anyone else, and that he would be happy to see the Denver detective drive off into the sunset. So Wager kept to facts and away from hypotheses. “We still haven’t found Sheldon’s missing clothes, money, or car. She might have had as much as five hundred dollars when she left work. There’s no medical evidence of rape. The only suspect we had was her husband, but he has no motive. The rest of it’s just like your case—no one saw her leave work with anyone, no one knows of any enemies she had.” A thought struck Wager. “Did Williams have a car?”
    Lee said grudgingly, “A ‘79 Caprice. It hasn’t been found yet.”
    Wager gave the man a description of Sheldon’s missing automobile and a list of people he and Axton had interviewed. And that balanced out the exchange between them. Any more information he might need about the Adams County slaying would be Wager’s to find, and they finished their cups of coffee talking about fishing streams.
    The drive back seemed much longer than the ride out. The morning’s freshness was gone from the wind, and Wager began to feel the drag of his duty tour heavy on his weary eyelids. It wasn’t just the overtime—he was used to that. It was the burdensome knowledge that even with people who were supposed to be in the same business, there was competition and jealousy—and the result was inevitably a half-assed job that made you ask the equally inevitable question: Is it really worth the effort?
    He pushed the radio buttons until a voice wailed in a nasal tone, “Does your love for me grow stronger or is your hate just plumb wore out?” Well, it was worth the effort—to Wager, anyway. He was subject to fitness reports and annual reviews, promotions and ratings, even the opinions of the men he worked with. But the only judgment that really meant a thing was what Wager thought of his own work. Not his team’s work or his division’s record, but his own. He knew when he did a good job or a poor one; nobody else’s blame, nobody else’s satisfaction really counted.
    Which was why, despite the tired sting in his eyes and the heat that sapped his remaining energy and pulled him toward sleep as he drove, Wager did not go home. Instead, he turned off the freeway and cut across the northern part of town for one more stop.
    This time, he approached down the alley. The service door at the rear of Nickelodeon Vending Repairs was open to catch any late-morning breeze, but there was none, and the dust that his tires raised from the gravel settled like a thin mist on the glossy enamel of his car’s fenders. Sheldon turned from his workbench as Wager’s car coasted to a stop, and now he watched without moving as Wager opened the door and got out.
    “You’re back soon enough,” the man finally said. “You got news?”
    Wager paused in the cool silence of the shop and looked at the two new roses beneath the shrine. “Nothing on Mrs. Sheldon. Did you or she ever know an Angela Sanchez