There was more, too. She felt a special pain when she worked on a case involving the murder of a young woman. It was too easy to remember her own teenage years in Phoenix and to realize that, if one turn or another had gone a different way, she could have been the body lying naked in the desert.
"What's your name, honey?" Serena murmured under her breath, staring at the girl's body.
"Looks like the cavalry is here," Cordy said. He pointed at the road, where a stream of police and medical vehicles had begun to arrive. "Tell me we're not going to stay out here and roast for five hours while they poke around the rocks."
Serena shook her head. "We'll get the scene sealed and transfer control to Neuss. An afternoon in the sun will do him good. We'll talk to the ME and see if he notices anything about the body that I missed. Then you and I are going to see if we can identify this girl."
"You want to tell me how you plan on identifying a body that no one's going to recognize?"
"Well, first you're going to have the department fax us local reports of missing persons, white, female, thirteen to thirty, in the last two weeks."
"Uh-huh. You want that bound or on CD-ROM?"
"I said two weeks, Cordy, not two years. I'll be surprised if we find her in there, anyway."
"Why?"
"I suspect she ran in circles where going missing isn't a big deal," Serena said.
"Uh-huh. So then what do we do?"
"Then we visit some strip clubs."
Cordy howled. "My kind of day, mama. You think the chick was a stripper? I hope she looked better than that. See that thing stripping off, and you'd be back home with the wife forever, you know?"
"Shut up, Cordy."
"Okay, so what am I missing? You find a stripper's union card or something? Why are you so sure she did the occasional lap dance?"
Serena shrugged. "She's got breast implants. That's why they didn't cave. Her pubic area is neatly shaved so that only a vertical strip of hair remains. There's remnants of sparkle on her breasts and thighs. She has a small tattoo of a heart on her left breast. Put it all together, and I say the girl's been twirling around a brass pole."
"Uh-huh. That only narrows it down to about four hundred joints. Not to mention all the on-call services."
"I said stripper, not hooker. Hookers don't bother with sparkle, sweetie. Or implants. Them's for show. We'll start with the big-name places and hope the girl was good enough at the bump and grind to break in there."
Cordy smiled. "You're the boss. If I have to spend my day talking to women who like to get naked in clubs, so be it."
35
Serena's eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness inside the club. The air was smoky and vaguely perfumed. Rock music blared from hidden speakers, with a thumping beat they could feel vibrating under the floor. The walls of the cramped foyer were covered with a dark wood paneling. A red upholstered door separated them from the interior of the club, and beside the door was a podium, with an erotic Chinese painting hung on the wall behind it. As they entered, a hulking man in a gray business suit slipped through the red door and confronted them with a smile. He had curly blonde hair and a bushy mustache.
He glanced at Cordy without interest, then his eyes lingered on Serena, drinking her in from head to toe.
"It's free for you, sweetheart. For Dudley Moore here, it's $24.95 cover."
The gorilla grinned at Cordy, and Serena thought she could see actual smoke coming out of her partner's ears.
"We're not customers," Serena said, flashing her shield. "We're from Metro. We're investigating a murder."
The smile vanished, replaced by cool indifference. "Whose?" the man asked, shrugging his broad shoulders.
"That's what we're trying to find out. It's a Jane Doe, found in the desert, back of her head bashed in. We think she may have worked one of the clubs."
Cordy slid a Polaroid from inside his jacket and presented it to Superman. "Recognize this girl?"
Serena watched the man's reaction, noticing his skin grow a shade paler and an involuntary grimace tighten his face.
"When was she in the business, 1940?"
"If you lie out in the desert for a few days, be sure to use sunblock," Serena said. "Do you recognize her?"
"No."
"Any of your girls gone missing in the last few days?"
The man laughed. It came out as a booming guffaw. "Are you kidding? Girls come and go every week, every day. This ain't exactly career work, you know?"
"We're just talking about the last few days," Serena said. She hated guys like this. Users. They gobbled up young flesh and then spit it back in the street when its value was gone.
"The answer is no."
"How about tattoos? You got a girl with a heart tattoo on her left breast?"
"Tattoos? We got dragons, kittens, boyfriends, barbed wire, sunflowers, and Dwight Yoakam. No hearts."
"You're sure?" Serena asked.
The man grinned. "I've seen them all."
"I'm sure you won't mind if we talk to the girls ourselves," Cordy said.
"You got a warrant?"
"We don't need a warrant to talk," Serena said. "On the other hand, if you want us to get a warrant, and we happen to find any drugs around here, well, that's going to take a bite out of business, isn't it?"
"Make it quick," the man replied, scowling. "And hey, some of the girls may look young, but they're all over eighteen, all right? I checked their IDs."
"Sure," Serena said. Her fake ID at sixteen had gotten her into clubs easily enough. Back in the bad days.
They pushed through the red door and entered the club. It looked and sounded identical to the seven others they had already visited today. The music, loud enough in the foyer, was deafening inside. A large, elevated runway, interrupted by shiny brass poles that reached to the ceiling, jutted out into the center of the club. Narrow schoolroom tables surrounded the runway, with squat stools squeezed side by side along the tables. Most of the action was on the runway, but there were also three low stages, with circular benches fitted around them, scattered across the club floor. Velvet-lined booths hugged the walls. The rest of the place was crammed with dinner tables and cocktail tables.
The club reeked of beer and pheromones. A hazy cloud clung near the ceiling, where the smoke from the cigarettes gathered.
Serena counted about thirty men, ranging from horny college kids in T-shirts to old men in suits, with a mixture of freaks and drunks thrown in. Some of them got into it, hooting and hollering, trying to get as close to groping the girls as they could without getting bounced. Others sat in awe, then-jaws hanging open, silly grins on their faces. Others sat and sipped their drinks and watched through slitted eyes. Those were the scary ones, who didn't show any emotion at all.
Serena felt the same claustrophobic sensation she had felt in all the other clubs. Involuntarily, she looked down, expecting to see her own body exposed, wondering what it would feel like to trade places with the girls up there. She was the only woman in the club, except for a couple of cocktail waitresses, who was wearing more than panties. Not surprisingly, she didn't attract much attention, except from a few men who didn't expect to see any women here at all who weren't naked. Those that looked at her gave her the same appraising glance they gave the girls onstage. Serena felt sick.
She studied the faces of the girls parading down the runway, looking past the plastic smiles. You could see their age in their faces. The more makeup they wore, the more they were trying to cover up. In the smoky, dark environs of the club, it usually worked, because most of the men didn't bother looking at faces. Serena could tell, though. She could look in their eyes and see their secrets. This was a higher-paying joint, where the girls were younger, not yet ravaged by alcohol or drug abuse. A girl here could still fool herself that she would wind up rich, like another Jenna Jameson. But Serena had seen too many wasted faces over the years, perched atop taut bodies. Eventually their bodies sagged, too, and the downward spiral began.