The grave the crew was working on belonged to a Mildred Case. Mildred had died eight years ago at the ripe old age of ninety-six, outliving three of her five children and her second husband. From what Pickett could tell, Mildred had had over sixty grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren at the time of her death.

  The funeral had been very large, from what Pickett could tell from the records. But it wasn’t Mildred they really wanted to dig up. It was what Pickett and Sarge thought was with Mildred. And it had taken days to get the court order to do this.

  Days of nightmares and worry for Pickett.

  She just hoped it would be worth it.

  The entire thing had started when she and Sarge and Robin were handed a new cold case to work on. All three of them were a team and as retired detectives, had joined the Cold Poker Gang task force to solve cold cases.

  Stephanie Donner, twenty-eight, and one of Mildred’s granddaughters, had vanished on the same day as they buried her grandmother. The case had gone cold almost instantly.

  So when Pickett and Sarge and Robin got the case, the first thing they started looking at was why the timing of the funeral and Stephanie going missing.

  From what they could tell, Stephanie didn’t even know her grandmother that well. She was an attractive young woman, standing only five-one with a bright smile and long, brown hair. She got top grades while in college and had worked up until the day she vanished as a project manager for a growing tech company.

  She often said how much she loved her job.

  She had a partner named Jill that she lived with and they had hoped to be married when the laws changed. Stephanie hadn’t lived long enough to see that day, sadly.

  Over the next few days after getting the case, Pickett and Sarge talked to dozens of co-workers and friends of the couple, without any success or leads. Everything they were told was the same as the original detectives on the case were told eight years before. No one had a motive to harm Stephanie.

  The standard response they got was how nice Stephanie really was. That she had kind words for everyone she met.

  Stephanie had told her partner that she was going to her grandmother’s viewing at the mortuary, go out to lunch with a couple of cousins she hadn’t seen in a while, and then go to the funeral before going back to work.

  The cousins never saw her at the mortuary, although Stephanie did sign the visitation book, but about a half hour ahead of the people she was going to meet.

  No one saw her from that point forward.

  It was Sarge at breakfast at the Golden Nugget that suggested that they look into the staff of the funeral home past what the detectives had done eight years earlier.

  Robin, Pickett’s best friend and former partner when they were active detectives, had liked that idea and did her computer magic. Robin got the list of names from the funeral home and discovered that all but one had been interviewed earlier. The one guy named Angelo Clark had worked at cleaning and on the grounds of the mortuary. Angelo had vanished without a trace.

  “Nothing suspicious about that,” Pickett had said.

  “The police had him as a person of interest as well,” Robin said, reading from her screen, “but never found him before the case went cold.”

  So the only thing that was different in that funeral home that day was Mildred and her large casket. If for some reason something had happened to Stephanie in that short time and she had been put in the casket at her grandmother’s feet, it would explain why Stephanie hadn’t been found in eight years.

  That’s when Pickett started having nightmares.

  Both Pickett and Sarge and Robin were sure they were right about this, even though they didn’t want to be.

  And what Pickett was the most afraid of was that they would find Stephanie with evidence that she had been alive when the casket was buried. That had Pickett waking up from nightmares two or three times a night the last three nights. Once she had been screaming so loud, the cats wouldn’t even get near her for breakfast the next morning.

  Sarge said the idea of being buried alive was his worst nightmare as well, but typical of Sarge, he didn’t show that he was bothered by this. Sometimes the man was just steel.

  But being buried alive terrified Pickett.

  In front of them it looked like the team was getting closer to the casket and getting ready to hook onto it to lift it up out of the hole they had dug. The court order was that if nothing was found, Mildred was to be just reburied at once.

  The cemetery they were standing in was one of the most expensive in all of the valley. It actually had real grass combined with some desert plants and tall trees and palms that allowed a little shade. But with the angle of the sun this morning, only the stone wall along one side actually served as shade.

  Every grave had a headstone, most ornately carved in some fashion or another. Mildred clearly had had some money to be buried here.

  None of her family had decided to show up for digging up their grandmother. Pickett didn’t blame them in the slightest. Always better to remember grandma alive than see her body after eight years in the ground.

  Pickett had seen pictures of Mildred before she died. She had been a tiny, shrunken old woman with a bright light in her eyes and a slight smile on her face. Pickett had a hunch she would have liked Mildred.

  Three minutes later the crew hooked the lift onto the casket and gently pulled it upward.

  “Shall we get closer?” Sarge asked.

  “No,” Pickett said, shaking her head. “Robin had the right idea in staying home. I’ve seen enough dug-up bodies that I don’t need to see this one.”

  Sarge nodded.

  “Besides,” Pickett said, “if Stephanie is in there, this gets sent to an active detective as a murder case. And if she isn’t in there, we still have an unsolved cold case on our hands.”

  Sarge again nodded as the casket was set on a platform built to hold it. Then, wearing masks, two of the techs unlocked the large casket and opened both the top and the bottom at the same time.

  Both of them instantly stepped back.

  The man on the lift turned his head, while the other two techs also took a few paces back from the coffin.

  Then the two who had opened the lid closed it at once and once again locked it.

  “Looks like we found Stephanie,” Sarge said.

  “Looks that way,” Pickett said as the lead tech started toward them, pulling off his mask.

  “Detectives,” the tech said. “You were right. We found a body of what looks to be a young woman wrapped around the older woman’s feet in the casket. She was not embalmed, so we have to seal up the casket and get it to processing quickly.”

  “Thank you,” Sarge said. “An active homicide detective will be taking over the case.”

  The tech nodded and turned to go back to his crew.

  “Was she alive while in there?” Pickett asked before the tech got two steps. “Could you tell?”

  She had to know. Otherwise she would keep having the nightmares.

  The tech turned and shook his head. “No signs of any struggle. From the look of the dried blood and caved in skull, I would say she was dead when put in there. But that will be up to the morgue to make the call.”

  “Thank you,” Pickett said, feeling relieved.

  The tech nodded and turned away.

  Sarge took Pickett’s hand and they walked slowly back to Pickett’s Grand Cherokee SUV.

  They didn’t need to talk.

  They were done with the case.

  They had given closure to the family of Stephanie after eight years of wondering and that was important. It was up to the homicide detectives to make a case against her killer and find him or her.

  She and Sarge and Robin were retired. They only worked cold cases for the Cold Poker Gang task force.

  And right now, today, Pickett was very glad that was all they did. They didn’t have to notify the family, or open a fresh case with all the photos of that casket, or face the scum who had killed Stephanie and stuffed her in her grandmother’s casket.

  Pickett had done that job for long enough as an active detective.

  And this case made her very glad she had retired.

  She squeezed Sarge’s hand as they reached the car and he smiled.

  “Tough to let this one go?” he asked.

  “Not in the slightest,” she said. “Not in the slightest.”

  And with that, she drove them back into Las Vegas toward breakfast at the Golden Nugget buffet.

  Their routine was to eat breakfast at the Golden Nugget Buffet.

  She needed the routine right now.

  She needed to feel alive and in control.

  And maybe by next week she might be ready for another cold case.

  Maybe.

  The Cold Poker Gang Mysteries feature a group of retired detectives who solve cold cases in Las Vegas. The stories always combine Vegas history with some compelling and suspenseful (and often creepy) idea.

  This story gives a nod to D. B. Cooper Day, with a mystery about missing persons…who are just begging to be found.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was D. B. Cooper Day. November 24th. Retired Detective Debra Pickett found that almost funny, in an ironic sort of way.

  In front of her, on the white-marble kitchen counter, two gold detective badges sat, looking very out of place. For the past two years and seven months, they had been on a shelf near the kitchen along with some mystery novels and a few goofy awards she and Sarge had gotten when still on the force. Over two-and-a-half years those badges had rested there, out of the way, out of sight, and seldom talked about.

  Now, of all days, on D. B. Cooper Day, she had brought the badges off the shelf and put them where Sarge would see them when he came down for his morning coffee.

  When she and Detective Ben “Sarge” Carson had retired from the force, they had both joined the Cold Poker Gang Task Force, solving cold cases. That was when they had met and fallen in love, which neither of them had ever expected to do again.

  The Cold Poker Gang Task Force had shut down in March of 2020 in the pandemic and now it was late November of 2022. Wow, that was a long time.

  They had spent the time together, staying safe, waiting for their vaccinations to finally come around. And besides even exercising more than they had before the shutdown, one of the things they had gotten into over the last two years was celebrating strange holidays.

  It seemed that just about every day was a holiday of something or another, and it had become not only a habit, but a lot of fun to try to figure out how to celebrate each holiday.

  Now, the day the cold case task force comes back into active duty is the day to celebrate the most famous of all cold cases. A man using the name D. B. Cooper hijacked an airliner, let all the passengers off in exchange for a large bag of money, then somewhere over the Washington/Oregon border, parachuted from the plane and vanished completely.

  Maybe Andor, the retired detective who ran the task force, had planned giving them this case today. She doubted it. Just not his style.

  She picked up her gold badge and held it, feeling the once-familiar weight in her hand as she shifted it from hand to hand, then put it back on the wide stone counter of the kitchen. She had honestly doubted those badges would ever be moved again except to dust the shelf.

  For so many decades that detective’s badge had been her main focus in life, and for a couple years after she retired, the badge had been a symbol of her value with the Cold Poker Gang Task Force.

  That badge and the cold case task force had introduced her to Sarge, the man she now could not imagine living without.

  She was now sixty-three and her new husband, Sage was sixty-seven. But both of them were still in top shape and had managed to stay that way, even through the entire pandemic. They had actually gotten married this last summer, even though both of them had originally sworn to never do that again after their first marriages.

  While Sarge was still sleeping, Pickett had gotten a call from her old partner while on active duty, Robin Sprague, who had told her the Cold Poker Gang Task Force was firing back up and she had a new case for the three of them from Andor.

  “Same rules and restrictions?” Pickett had asked.

  “Nothing changed,” Robin said.

  “Except the entire world,” Pickett said.

  Robin made no comment to that.

  Pickett pulled up a barstool and sat staring at the badges for a moment, sipping on her coffee.

  Around her, the morning Las Vegas sun filled their massive dual penthouse condo in The Ogden with bright morning light through the two-story floor-to-ceiling windows. At the moment, their three cats were nowhere to be seen. Pickett knew they were in the other half, spread out in the sun over two couches and an ottoman.

  For the last two-plus years, she and Sarge had lived very comfortably here, first off ordering in all their food and supplies, then after they both had their first two shots, heading back out to restaurants that were open and struggling, not only to get out, but to try to help the struggling businesses.

  And every day they played with whatever holiday it was that day, sometimes learning more about the holiday, sometimes just toasting to it in the evening.

  But the daily holiday had become an important ritual over the last few years. And they both thought it weird and funny.

  But it was also fun.

  Now, below the massive windows, the city seemed to be back and growing. Las Vegas had life again and she and Sarge had spent a lot of time seeing shows and finding new restaurants and just enjoying living.

  Part of Pickett didn’t want to put that badge back on. But part of her did. She wanted to wait and see what Sarge thought before she decided, before she let Robin send her the new case. Pickett didn’t want to be tempted by a cold case that was interesting. They had all been interesting over the years.

  She just sat at the counter, thinking as she stared out over the beautiful city and the Strip beyond until Sarge came down the stairs. His full head of white hair almost glowed from the shower. He was, far and away, the most handsome man she had ever known, and what he saw in her, she’ll never know.

  He had on his normal jeans, running shoes, and dress shirt tucked in, moving easily, not at all like many his age.

  He got a mug from the cabinet, poured himself a cup of coffee, picked up his badge and put it on his belt, and then sat down and smiled at her.

  “We’re back, I’m guessing.”

  She just laughed. She should have known there would be no doubt with Sarge. He was like her. He had lived for that badge and what it meant for decades. If he could put it back on, he would.

  She reached over and took her badge and hooked it to her belt where she had normally carried it. Damn that felt great. Beyond great. She wasn’t sure why she had even hesitated.

  “We’re back,” she said, smiling as they toasted with their coffee mugs.

  “What’s the case?” Sarge asked, sipping his coffee.

  “Damned if I know,” Pickett said. “How about we meet Robin for breakfast like we used to do and have her bring the file?”

  “Golden Nugget buffet never reopened,” Sarge said.

  Pickett nodded. That had been their meeting place for their first three years with the task force. She kind of missed it.

  “Main Street Station buffet is open for breakfast,” she said.

  “Perfect,” Sarge said, taking a long sip of his coffee and then placing the mug in the sink. “We can walk it like we used to do to the Nugget. You call Robin, I’ll get our guns out of the safe.”

  “Are we really sure we want to do this again?” Pickett asked.

  “I can’t imagine not doing it until they shut us down again,” Sarge said. “And besides, it’s D. B. Cooper Day. What a better day to solve a cold case.”

  Pickett smiled, feeling the excitement flow through her for the first time in years. “I can’t imagine anything else, either.”

  And she couldn’t. They had made it through the years of pandemic, now it was time to go back to work.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Main Street Station Casino was located near where the old Las Vegas train station used to be, and was decorated like a 1900s ornate station, with towering polished wood columns and massive beams thirty feet overhead. The front desk area even had polished wooden train benches and the front desk looked more like a front hotel desk from 1910 than anything modern.

  The casino had an old-time feel to it overall, and they even scattered old and sometimes expensive antique furniture around. Massive plants dangled from the ceiling and the beams and this was the only major casino in Vegas that actually had windows all around. Most of them were stained glass, but they were windows letting natural light flood over the slot machines.

  Pickett always felt comfortable in the place and this morning was no different. The walk was exactly five blocks and the morning wasn’t cool enough yet to require jackets. Perfect Vegas fall weather.

  Robin sat at a back wooden table under one of the massive windows when they got there, already eating. She looked almost identical to when she and Pickett had been partners. While Pickett kept herself thin and looking like a runner, Robin was always square-shaped and kept her brown hair short.

  Robin and her husband ran one of the top security companies in the city, protecting everyone from politicians to major celebs.

  Robin waved at them as they paid and then filled their plates before heading to the table to join her. Pickett got her normal eggs and bacon and oatmeal while Sarge did what he always did in a buffet and filled his plate with a half-dozen different forms of meat. Even for breakfast.

  “Happy D. B. Cooper Day,” Sarge said to Robin as he sat down across from her.

  “Happy day to you as well,” Robin said, smiling. “And Andor is really playing with us.”

  Pickett looked at her partner. She knew that grin on Robin’s face. It meant this case had something really strange about it.

 

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