I started this project during the week of Thanksgiving 2005. I have spent a total of 48-50 hours on this story (all inside of a week no less). I wanted to write a story consisting of about 10000 words or less. I stopped at just under 9400.
My intent for this story is simply that of entertainment. The story holds nor does it project a message to sway the reader to a certain point of view. I try to leave the reader to his or her own conclusions about the story at hand and the characters. My one flaw may be that I tell this tale purely from a first-person perspective. That is intentional; I merely wanted to tell a tale.
I am thinking of possibly expanding on this story, maybe even penning a full length novel.
This first part is not just an introduction to the story. I take you a bit further into the tale than merely saying hello to Dick, Jane and Sally.
I hope you enjoy this tale. And, without further ado...
Pearl Kinney was holding up traffic as usual. Crazy Pearl, as she was known to the locals in her Las Vegas neighborhood, “walked” her dog everyday. The problem was not that she walked the little dog, but that she drove her car near the curb while her leashed mutt strutted along on the sidewalk. This walking of the dog took place three times a day, every day.
On this particular day, it was not Pearl’s old Buick that was holding up the morning commute; it was her body. She had been lying on the curbside, possibly since the previous evening and was discovered early in the morning hours by a jogger. It was a strange death. Strange as in the fact that Pearl never walked anywhere, because she was too feeble. Her car was nowhere to be found, nor was her dog. That wasn’t the only reason her dead body lying in the street was strange. To top off the mystery, Pearl had an almost peaceful look on her face. This was odd, considering that Crazy Pearl was known for having a perpetually bewildered look on her face.
Pearl was actually crazy. Some folks claimed she was born that way. Others said it was because the man she loved as a young lady impregnated her and left her to care for the child alone. But as far as anyone had any proof, she never had a child. Whatever the reason, she would curse at people who honked their horns at her because she was blocking traffic. Whenever she entered the local grocery store, children would cower behind their mothers in fear. Pearl was known to wear a horizontally striped stocking on one leg and a sheer hose on the other. Her age old Van’s tennis shoes were tattered and grungy. They were the last pair she would ever wear.
I arrived at the scene just after dawn. A white outline marked Pearl’s corpse as it lie in the street only a block from her house. All my years of service on the force gave me the experience and know-how to handle this type of a situation. However, this case was different.
I was greeted by Sergeant Michaels with a “How ya doing detective?” He told me that the information was just coming in and was sketchy at best. “It seems Pearl’s Buick was used in a string of armed robberies up in North Las Vegas. The abandoned car was found not too far from Pearl’s home. Even stranger was the fact that the alleged perpetrators’ mangled and shattered bodies were found in a parking lot adjacent to the Stratosphere, several blocks from where the car was located. They had apparently landed across a couple of vehicles in the parking lot. It would appear that these two young men had taken swan dives off the top of the Stratosphere. The trajectory that they evidently were on when they hit the cars indicated that they could have only come from the roof of the famous hotel and casino. “
The next day, I received an email from the Stratosphere’s security manager, James Johnson. Neither of the two alleged perps showed up on his internal cameras. Considering the fact that it was impossible to get to the top without being caught on the hotel’s cameras, it was a mystery in and of itself that these men were on the roof. “How the hell did these two unlucky bastards get up there?” I muttered under my breath.
Worse yet, I thought,
why did they jump? Or did they jump at all?
In the squad room, the crew was holding their daily briefing. After the captain emphasized the case’s pertinent details, a few questions popped up about why someone might want these two guys dead and who could have done it. Was it vindication for Pearl’s death? She had no husband or family that anyone knew of.
The captain answered with a sharp “As far as I know, this is a double suicide. But let’s find out what’s going on, shall we? And by the way, make sure you keep this case under wraps.” With that in mind, I left the squad room.
“My team just can’t find any trace of these young men stepping even one foot on the Stratosphere property until this…” said Mr. Johnson, as he played some video footage showing the two men falling from the tower. Another set of cameras caught the impact of the men as they reached the sudden stop on the ground. There was no logic to what we were seeing.
Johnson had sent his entire digital archive of the one day’s activity to the Las Vegas Crime Lab. He also kept copies for his employer. “I just don’t get. How could these guys climb all the way up there and not be seen on my cameras?”
Mr. Johnson was an upfront kind of guy, so I believed that he believed what his cameras and men were telling him. But his shop was the only way for me to get any answers in a hurry. The LVCL will take weeks to go over these videos, one frame at a time. Maybe they can decipher some otherwise unseen clues, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting around for weeks, not with a pissed off captain on my arse.
What I did know was that there had been similar deaths in recent months. There had been four separate occasions where alleged criminals had ended up getting splattered on the ground. Each victim was caught on surveillance video while falling to their death. And none of these victims had been seen going up to the roof of the high rise buildings before their plunge. It was as if they “beamed” up there. Heh, I had to laugh at myself. We all know that to be merely science fiction. There is no magical “Beam me up Scotty” device in the year 2087.
After doing some research in the Department’s database, I found out that there had been 63 of these deaths in the last decade or so. How odd that this stuff been overlooked for so many years. Did someone purposefully sweep these incidents under the proverbial rug? An odder fact I discovered was that every one of these “incidents” occurred during a new moon. “That rules out vampires and werewolves,” I laughed under my breath. It was my first clue. I was going to get to the bottom of this. The pun fit the case.
About four weeks down the road I was heading up a task force to create and operate a valley wide rooftop watch program. This program included all of the tallest buildings in downtown Vegas, including the Strip. The cameras in these businesses were all connected to a central monitoring facility, paid for and controlled by local casinos and hotels. It was created some 30 years ago by a consortium whose original intent was to investigate and squash the threat of high-tech cheaters at the slot machines and tables. For this task force, I merely lead the effort as a representative of the city, but the independent security agencies did all the work. Jump Watch, as it was referred to, was up to full speed at this point.
I checked with all of the businesses earlier in the afternoon. It was now night time. I thought back to Pearl’s death. How could she have been laying in the street all night and no one saw here until the next morning? Rigor mortis had set in by the time she was found, which meant she had been deceased for several hours. Her stretched and twisted body could have been riding in the trunk or backseat of her Buick all night. But how could she have gotten back to her own neighborhood, still several blocks away from where her car was found, and, so far from where the two perps’ bodies were mangled.
Ah yes, the perps. They had also been dead for several hours before they were found. I keep coming back to all that. How do two thugs carjack an old lady, stuff her carcass in the trunk of her Buick, and then drive around committing armed robbery, only to become possible victims themselves? What “critical” clues was I missing?
I was beginning to become impatient about not receiving any new news on this case. By now, the LVCL should have had something, anything that I could use. I was getting antsy as all get out. So, the next day, I went over the LVCL to check out their findings on the Stratosphere video. The lead technician, Joe Roberts, said that he found something highly unusual.
“I had to use a lot of different filters to get this to come out right, but I think you’ll find it to be fascinating,” Joe said.
What he had found was a phenomenon so incredulous that it defied all logic. The videos showed the two perps falling onto the roof. Yes, falling. This was captured by multiple rooftop cameras. Do you want to hear something even more bizarre? They were having a conversation with, or at least they were screaming at, it appeared, someone or something off-screen. And then two distinct shadows picked up the two men and threw them over the edge of the building. The case now officially became a homicide.
Driving back to headquarters, I thought about the video. A camera picked up one of the victims faces just before he went over the edge of the building. He had a look of sheer terror. Here was a guy who had hours earlier, contributed to the brutal murder of an elderly woman, driven around town committing armed robbery, and yet, he was scared out of his wits just before he was killed. Who killed these men? What killed these men? Oh yeah, there was something very weird indeed about this entire affair. Now I had an old lady who was murdered. Then I had her murderers, who were also murdered. What the hell?
I called Joe. “Hey Joe, can you do me a favor?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied, “I’ll be glad to help in any way I can”.
I asked him to go over any video collected from the casinos in relation to any previous similar deaths. Here we were thinking that all those other deaths were most likely suicides, since no evidence was found to support other people being involved. My gut told me that these incidents were all somehow related.
Two days later, I got a call from Joe. “You’re not gonna believe this, detective. Every video I can find shows the victim being thrown from a building by some shadowy figure. And there’s more,” he said, “I didn’t see it quite so much the other day, but there appear to be other shadow figures ‘floating’ around the area, almost as if they are spectators at an event.”
“Joe, can you do me another favor?” I requested. “You know that intersection where Pearl Kinney’s body was found? Take a look at that day’s traffic cam footage.”
Within an hour, Joe called me back. “This keeps getting weirder by the minute,” he choked up. “Pearl was set down on the street…by a…stony looking…figure. It’s like they just dropped out of the sky and on to the ground. It laid her down gently, and then it ‘leaped’ out of view of the camera. It was different that the others. I played the clip over and over and it’s the same thing every single time.”
I told Joe to keep this information, and our conversation, to himself for now, and that I’ll talk to my captain about how to proceed with this investigation. If I ever needed a beer, it was right then.
The next morning, I visited my hair stylist. Yes, I wanted to look good. You never know who you’re gonna meet while investigating a crime, right?
“Hey honey, how do you want it cut today?” asked Darlene. She was a newlywed. Her husband, Tom, was a wealthy business man. The happy couple recently moved into the Earhart Condominiums just down the Strip from the Griffin resort.
“Give me the usual.” I changed the subject immediately with, “So, how do you like that new condo?”
“I just love it. My husband has given me a blank check to decorate our home” said an excited Darlene.
“I was a little skeptical about making it our permanent home. But, now I’ve decided we should stay, especially after having what I call a very special dream about a month ago. It was the strangest thing.”
She went on, “It was just after midnight. I woke up a bit parched. As I went into the kitchen to get myself a drink of water, I heard a loud boom, and then the building vibrated. It almost sounded like an explosion, but not quite that intense. I could have sworn I heard someone yelling outside. I went over to the glass door, opened it, and then went out on the terrace. I heard a noise and looked toward the disturbance.”
Darlene started shaking as she spoke. I asked her, “Sugar, would you mind putting down those scissors for a bit?”
“Sure, hon.” she replied.
I told her to proceed with her story.
“Well, I could not believe my eyes. I honestly have no clue as to what I witnessed, but it looked as if two shadows were duking it out in the sky. I thought I was delirious, so I stepped back inside. Then it got even worse. The building shuddered as if there was an earthquake. So I ran back out onto the terrace. I heard a noise just below me. I was slightly apprehensive as I peered over the ledge.”
Darlene continued with,”I froze in horror as I gazed right into these deep blue eyes. They belonged to what I can only describe as a dark stone monster. It was hideous, yet not really threatening, except for the eyes. It looked at me as if it meant me no ill intent. I didn’t even realize how far I was leaning over the ledge until I slipped.
“It caught me with its huge appendage. I was cradled in its arm as it swept its gaze over me. I can only say that at that one moment, I felt so safe, so secure. This gargantuan being gently set me back onto my terrace. I was dizzy, and it took me a moment to regain my balance. When I looked up, it was gone. Just like that.”
“What did you do after that?” I asked.
She quietly replied, “I went back to bed with Tom. I curled up in his arms and slept like a baby.”
Neither of us spoke until she was done with my hair. I thanked her for the haircut and the story. Darlene just smiled and said she’d see me next time. I thought to myself, I want whatever drugs she’s taking.
Curious as always, I decided to check on something. Something, that is, I hadn’t thought of before…
