Elonda scanned Flamingo Road with the practiced eyes of a turkey vulture, lazily circling the desert landscape and hunting for prey. She spotted her quarry a half block from the Oasis casino and sized him up.
He was tall and tan, like a surfer washed up in the city, with wavy blond hair that hung below his ears and wraparound silver shades. Young, maybe twenty-two. He wore a loud, untucked short-sleeve shirt with the buttons done wrong, a loose-fitting pair of white shorts, and dirty sneakers with no socks. His cocky walk told her he had money in his pocket. He wore sunglasses at night, and she knew that behind the shades his eyes were on the hunt, too, just like hers.
His head swiveled in her direction. He saw her and grinned.
Her cop radar wasn’t going off. Cops didn’t walk-they pitched the girls from inside their unmarked, air-conditioned sedans. Only the newbies fell for them.
Elonda sauntered across the wide street, raising her hand to stop the speeding cars and flashing the drivers with her white teeth and a jiggle of her breasts. There was plenty of traffic at one in the morning. The city operated on jungle rules: Feed under the cool cover of darkness, and find a patch of shade to sleep through the hot days.
On the opposite sidewalk, she ducked into the doorway of a magic shop. She pulled a bottle of K-Y from the back pocket of her jeans and squirted some on her fingers. Sucking in, she squeezed a hand inside her skin-tight pants and lubed up. She did a little dance, rubbing it in. A trick of the trade. Oh, I am so wet for you, baby. Although most guys weren’t looking to pole her these days. They were too afraid of AIDS or too klutzy to get inside her standing up. So they went for the mouth music.
With the grease between her legs, Elonda flipped her hair back and listened to the rap of the multicolored beads dotting her cornrows. She tugged on her feathered pink tube top until the black crescents of her nipples peeked through. Finally, she popped a wintergreen mint onto her tongue. Another little trick. Guys loved the cool burn of the mint in her warm mouth.
She eased back onto the sidewalk and scoped out the street, looking for competition. No, she was alone, just her and the bad boy. The lights of the Strip shone like fire across the freeway. On this side of 1-15, where casinos spilled over from Las Vegas Boulevard like popcorn out of an overflowing box, the Gold Coast and Rio shimmered on the north side of the street, and the Oasis tower loomed a block away. Where she was, though, Flamingo was dark, nothing but an empty lot and the old cinder-block magic shop butting up to the street.
Elonda leaned her shoulders against the shop window, her hips jutting out, and casually nibbled on one painted nail. Letting a slow smile creep onto her face, she turned her head and drank him in. He was headed right for her, his feet trampling on nudie brochures littering the street. No hesitation. This wasn’t his first time.
As he got closer, her eyes narrowed. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. He wasn’t a regular-she hadn’t done him before. Maybe she recognized his face from one of the tabloids. Behind the shades, it was hard to tell. But Elonda studied him long and hard, because a celebrity paying for sex from a Vegas hooker might be worth some serious cash from someone.
He stopped right next to her. “Hey.”
His voice was young and carefree. Bored. Slurred.
“Hey yourself.” Elonda reached out and slid a finger inside his shirt, making a circle on his chest. “Don’t I know you, baby?”
“You ever been to Iowa?” he asked.
A hick with a familiar face, she thought. Damn. “A lot of cows and corn there, right? And shit on your shoes? Nc thanks.”
Elonda cast her eyes up and down the street, looking for Metro patrol cars. The traffic came and went-Hummers, limos, pickups, beaters-but there was no one who would hassle her. A block away, near the Oasis, she spotted a man standing by a bus stop, looking bored, checking his watch. In the other direction, no one at all. The coast was clear.
“Suck or fuck?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, but stuck out his tongue and flicked it al her. She smelled gin wafting from his mouth. Elonda gave him a price, and he dug out two crumpled bills from his pocket. She used one of her ragged fingernails to nudge him backward into the doorway of the magic shop. Elonda got or her knees and unzipped him. She glanced up. His eyes were closed. She saw a couple of days’ worth of yellow stubble or his chin.
She began counting in her head. That was her little game, something to pass the time, like the office workers who listened to their iPods while they typed all day. One, two, three, four. No guy had ever made it to one hundred. Most didn’t make it to ten.
He took a few seconds to stiffen-that was the gin, she figured-but she worked her magic, and his body responded She heard a low rumble in his throat, a purr of pleasure. When she glanced up from her work, she saw that his mouth had fallen open.
Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four.
He was already close. She could feel his hips moving, starting to thrust, and she sucked harder and moved her head faster.
Thirty-nine.
Elonda heard something clip-clop nearby, the sound of heavy boots on the sidewalk. Someone was heading their way from the casino. She looked up again, but the farm boy was already on another planet, and he didn’t hear a thing. Clip-clop, clip-clop. She didn’t really care. She got peeped all the time and heard the shocked whispers from people who secretly wished she was on her knees in front of them. If he looked their way, let him enjoy the show.
Forty-five, forty-six. The farm boy was getting ready to blow.
The tapping of the boots came up directly behind her in the doorway, and then they stopped right there. Elonda heard a rustle of fabric and a strange metallic click. The john’s eyes were still closed, and he moaned loudly.
It was creepy, that man standing behind her, watching them. She got a bad feeling. The hairs on her neck pricked up, and she knew he was still there, although she couldn’t even hear him breathing. She could feel his eyes. A cloud of menace engulfed her. It was the kind of sixth sense you got after enough time on the street.
Elonda let the man’s shaft slip from her mouth. She bit her lip and looked up, but she wasn’t going to look back, not for anything. Immediately, the John’s eyes snapped open, his lips twisting into an angry scowl. Then she watched as he spotted the stranger behind her.
“What the-”
His anger became slack-jawed surprise. His eyes widened. She saw his face register disbelief.
Then he didn’t have a face anymore.
The loudest sound Elonda had ever heard detonated in her ears like the cap being blown off a volcano. The farm boy sprouted a third eye, and his head fell forward, so she could stare right at him and see up into the hole burrowed into his skull, a red river pouring out of it. As she watched, he crumpled into a pile and collapsed on top of her, pinning her to the ground. Blood streamed over her, rippling like worms across her skin and seeping into her clothes. She smelled urine and shit as his bowels evacuated.
Finally, Elonda remembered to scream. She closed her eyes and unleashed a screeching yell that went on and on until she ran out of breath. No one seemed to hear. None of the traffic stopped. All she heard was the sound of footsteps again, going away now, heading back down the street as casually as they had arrived. Clip-clop, clip-clop.
Fish out of water.
Jonathan Stride tried to concentrate on Elonda, who was slumped on the sidewalk, her body and clothes painted in dried blood. She talked a mile a minute, and he tried to keep up with her, but his eyes kept glancing over her head into the window of the magic shop. There was a black box inside, with a glass fishbowl in one half, filled with water. In the other half of the box, a goldfish swam back and forth. Outside the bowl. Seemingly in midair.
It was a hell of a trick, and Stride wondered how long a fish could survive in those conditions.
He tried to slow Elonda down. “Take it easy, okay? We need your help.”
“You just get this bastard!” Elonda screeched, her arms waving, her cornrows clicking like poker chips. “Son of a bitch probably left me deaf. Sounded like a bomb going off.”
Stride squatted down until he was eye to eye with Elonda, and he took one of her flyaway wrists firmly in his hand. “Stay with me now. We’re going to get you cleaned up, put you in some new clothes, and then you’re going to eat yourself silly at the Rio buffet, all courtesy of Metro. Okay? That sound like a deal? But I need you to give me some information first.”
“I like the Harrah’s buffet better,” Elonda snapped.
“Okay, Harrah’s it is. Now are you ready to talk to me?”
Elonda pouted with her thick lips. She hugged her bare knees with her arms. Stride pushed himself to his feet and slid a notebook and pen from the inside pocket of his navy blazer. He wore the coat over a bone white, button-collar dress shirt and crisp new black jeans. Serena had insisted that he start the new job with new jeans, and he had finally relented, although he hated to abandon the fraying pair that had fitted his body like an old friend for the last ten years in Minnesota. The starched denim felt stiff, like cardboard, which was how he felt here in Las Vegas. A fish out of water. It was another universe compared to the midwestern world where he had spent his whole life.
“The victim, did you see where he came from?”
“The Oasis,” Elonda said.
Stride eyed the casino and its slim, phallic tower. The hotel was hosting a Victoria’s Secret fashion show, and a slinky lingerie model thirty stories tall stared imperiously back from a huge vertical banner that stretched nearly to the Oasis roof. She had white wings, as if she might fly away and terrorize the city. King Kong with a D cup.
“Was he alone?” Stride asked.
Elonda nodded. “Yeah. Headed my way like a fucking laser beam.”
“He say anything to you about himself? Tell you who he was?”
“Oh, sure, baby, we had a fine conversation. People meet me, they want to talk.” Elonda snorted. Then she added, “He said he was from Iowa.”
Stride shook his head. “He wasn’t. His ID says Vancouver.”
“Fucker lied to me? Well, God’ll get you for lying.” She grinned at Stride.
“Was there anybody else on the street?” he asked.
“Nobody.”
Stride glanced at the area surrounding the magic shop. The street was open and wide-you could see for blocks. He didn’t think the killer appeared out of nowhere like one of the magic tricks in the window.
“You told me you heard the killer walk up to you. Where did he come from?”
“I don’t know, man. There wasn’t a soul.” She chewed a fingernail and idly scratched an itch between her legs. “Wait, wait, hang on. There was somebody at the bus stop down there.”
Stride tapped his pen against his front teeth and squinted as he studied the bus stop, which was near the base of the Oasis driveway about thirty yards away. No shelter, just a street sign and a notch in the pavement for the bus to pull off the street.
“What did he look like?” Stride asked.
Elonda shrugged. “As long as he wasn’t a cop, I didn’t care.”
“Tall? Short?”
“Fuck, I don’t know.”
Stride ran a hand back through his unkempt salt-and-pepper hair. It was wavy, with a mind of its own, and more salt and less pepper every day. He bit his lip, imagining the street empty, not a riot of police activity, just Elonda and the horny Canadian.
And a man waiting for a bus.
“Did you hear a bus?” he asked. “You would have noticed if one went by right behind you.”
Elonda thought back. “No. No bus.”
“How long were you in the doorway before the murder?”
“ ’Bout forty-five seconds,” Elonda said.
“You sound pretty sure.”
“I count,” she said, and gave him a broad wink.
Stride got the picture. No bus, and less than a minute before the shooting. He waved at one of the uniformed officers on the scene, a burly kid with a blond buzz cut and a stubble goatee.
“Go down to that bus stop,” Stride told him. “Then time yourself walking back here. Don’t hurry. You’re just a pedestrian on the street, okay?”
The cop nodded. It didn’t take him long. When he arrived back in front of the magic shop, he clicked his sports watch and announced, “Thirty-two seconds.”
Stride squatted down in front of Elonda again. “I’m going to need you to think real hard about that man at the bus stop.”
“That was the guy, huh?” Elonda said. “Shit. I’m telling you, I don’t remember him.”
“Let’s try something,” Stride began.
He stopped when he heard a car horn blare sharply behind him, then heard the expensive purr of a sports car pulling up nearby, just outside the crime scene tape. A door opened, and Stride saw the cop with the goatee, who was still hovering nearby, mutter something foul under his breath. Stride glanced back in time to see a yellow Maserati Spyder peel off toward the Strip.
“Who’s the tough-ass chick?” Elonda asked, looking over Stride’s shoulder.
The Spyder had dropped off a woman who now stood with her arms folded over a large chest and one leg bent, with her foot on the curb. Her hair was short and spiky, dirty blond with black streaks. She was tall, probably only three inches short of Stride’s own six-foot-one, and she looked strong and full-figured, with arms that filled out the sleeves of her tight white T-shirt. Her right arm sported a wolf’s head tattoo. A gold police shield hung from the belt loop of her blue jeans.
“Don’t worry about it,” Stride told Elonda. “Right now, I want you to close your eyes. Just relax and think back to when you first spotted your customer.”
“You trying to hypnotize me?” Elonda asked. “Can you make me stop biting my nails?”
Stride smiled. “No, I just want you to remember. Picture it in your head, okay? You just saw your mark. You’re crossing the street. Is the other man already waiting at the bus stop?”
Elonda started humming. Her head bobbed back and forth, following a rhythm. Then, abruptly, her eyes snapped open. “No, he wasn’t there! Hey, this is cool.”
“Close your eyes again. Keep replaying it.”
“Yeah, now the guy’s behind him at the bus stop. I see him. Where the fuck did he come from?”
“What’s he doing?”
“Checking his watch. Looking up and down the street. Real cool.”
“What’s he wearing?” Stride asked. He thought about a way to trigger her memory and added, “When he checks his watch, can you see his bare arm?”
Elonda pursed her lips, as if she were puckering for a kiss. Her brow furrowed. “A coat!” she said happily. “He’s got a windbreaker-tan, I think. And tan pants, too, khakis maybe.”
“You’re doing great. Is he a big guy?”
“He ain’t so tall. Not real big either. But he looks, I don’t know, tough. Mean dude.”
“How about hair color?”
“Dark,” Elonda said. “Cut short. A beard, too. He’s got a beard.”
“Elonda, you’re beautiful,” Stride said, and he watched the girl beam with pride. He spent another ten minutes playing out the rest of the scene, but the closer she got to the murder, the more her mind blacked it out. When he was done, he called over the goateed cop and told him in a whispered voice what to do.
“Harrah’s?” the cop asked in disbelief. “You’re kidding me. Sawhill will flip if I put this in for reimbursement.”
Stride shoved a hand into his pocket and fished two twenties out of his wallet. “Here, take this, and get yourself something, too. You’re looking too thin.”
The cop rubbed his oversized neck and smiled. “Whatever you say.”
“But hands off the girl,” Stride added.
When Elonda was safely in the back of a patrol car, Stride sought out his new partner.
It was odd, working the street again, a detective on the case. He had been the lieutenant in Duluth, a big fish in a small pond, and now he was just another investigator on the Metro Homicide Detail in Las Vegas. The closest thing he had ever had to a partner back home was Maggie Bei, the senior sergeant in his detective division. Stride and Maggie had worked together for more than a decade, and the tiny Chinese cop with the sharp, sarcastic tongue had become his best friend. Now Maggie was still in Minnesota, married and off the force, a baby on the way. Stride was in Sin City, the last place he could have imagined being.
Thanks to Serena.
He had met Serena Dial over the summer, while the two of them investigated a Las Vegas murder that had its roots in a teenage girl’s disappearance in Minnesota years earlier. The investigation had upended his life in Duluth and destroyed his second marriage, which he knew had been misguided from the start. Maggie rarely missed an opportunity to remind him that she had seen divorce coming for him like a train wreck, and he had ignored her warnings.
But old things ended, and new things began. Meeting Serena had changed everything. She was beautiful, smart, and funny, despite the sharp edges that came with a troubled past. He fell for her fast and hard. When the investigation was over, he had followed Serena here, to this wild world, and wound up back on the street.
Now he had a real partner again, who looked like she didn’t relish the task of playing second fiddle to a Vegas newcomer.
“Amanda Gillen,” she announced brusquely as he approached her, as if she expected him to challenge her. Her voice was husky. Or maybe she was just half asleep, as Stride was, after the phone call had dragged him out of bed, and out of Serena’s arms, in the middle of the night. His first murder case in Vegas. A body on the street on Flamingo.
“I’m Stride,” he told her.
Amanda nodded and began nervously tapping her foot on the street. Her lower lip jutted out, and she glanced around to make sure they were out of earshot. Her face was taut and unhappy.
“Look, I give everybody one free joke before I get pissed off, so do you want to make it now, or do you want to save it for a rainy day?”
Stride cocked his head. “What?”
“You know,” she said sourly.
“You lost me, Amanda.”
Her eyes narrowed as she watched the puzzlement on his face. The wrinkles in her forehead went away, and her jaw unclenched. She gave him an odd, sparkling smile that was suddenly friendly and not at all closed off. “All right, maybe you don’t know. Forget it. No big deal. It’s two in the morning, and I’m crabby.”
“You and me both.”
‘That was nice with the hooker. The way you got her to talk. You’re good.”
“Thanks,” Stride said. He added, “I like your boyfriend’s car.”
Amanda smirked. “Oh, the Spyder. It’s mine, actually. We were out dancing when I got paged. I told him if he puts a dent in it, I put a dent in his dick.”
“Yeah, that’s an incentive,” Stride said. “You win it at the slots?”
“Something like that.”
Stride watched her swallow hard, and a flush rose in her cheeks. She had a long face that tapered to a slightly protruding chin. Her lips were puffy and pale pink. She had thin black eyebrows and she had taken the time to apply her makeup with considerable care. Her Saturday night look, Stride guessed. Despite the wrestler-chick bravado, she looked pretty when she smiled and vulnerable when she was nervous. Stride figured she was about thirty.
“Got an ID on the vie yet?” Amanda asked.
Stride nodded. “Canadian driver’s license. Probably a tourist whose luck ran out. Name is Michael Johnson Lane.”
Amanda did a double take. “MJ Lane?”
“That’s right.”
She whistled and shook her head. “Oh, shit.”
“You know him?”
“Check your spam folder once in a while, Stride,” Amanda told him. “His bare ass is probably in half of the messages. Not to mention every issue of Us magazine.”
“My subscription lapsed,” Stride said.
Amanda studied his face long enough to realize he was joking, and a smile curled onto her full lips. “Well, you’re in Las Vegas now,” she retorted. “People, Us, and the Enquirer are more important reading than a DEA circular around here.”
Amanda walked over to the body. She wore ridiculously high heels, and Stride realized she was several inches shorter than he first thought. He noticed one of the ME staff look at her nervously and back up to give her space. Amanda didn’t pay any attention. She bent from the waist until her hands were flat on the sidewalk, and she turned her head sideways to stare at the corpse’s dead eyes. Stride found himself noticing her attractive, muscular ass and firm legs as her jeans pulled tight. He looked quickly away as she got up and announced, “Yeah, that’s MJ.”
“All right So who is MJ Lane?”
“Trust fund baby,” Amanda said. “His dad’s Walker Lane. You know, the billionaire producer in Vancouver.”
“Other than Daddy’s money, what’s his claim to fame?”
“He hangs with the right crowd. Hollywood connections. He was low profile until he filmed a very nasty rendezvous with a young soap actress last year. Somebody stole it, and it wound up all over the Internet. Bondage, anal sex, real kinky stuff.”
“A star is born.”
“Absolutely. Him getting popped is big news. You’re going to get your picture in all the tabloids.”
“I’ll whiten my teeth,” Stride said.
“So what do you think? Does it look like someone was stalking MJ?”
“It feels like an assassination,” Stride said. “A pro.”
“But he didn’t kill the girl,” Amanda pointed out. “A pro would take out the witness.”
“Yeah, true. He left the shell casing, too. A.357.”
“So maybe not a pro.”
“Maybe not,” Stride agreed. “But he planned it well. Cool, in and out fast. The question is, was the guy specifically after Lane, or do we have some kind of moral crusader out to clean up the city’s prostitution problem?”
“Or both,” Amanda said. “MJ’s not the first celeb to get his ice cream cone licked around here. The perp could have been staking out the casino, looking to make a big splash, get some headlines with the hit.”
Stride nodded. “Except from what you say about MJ, there could be plenty of reasons for someone to want him dead.”
Pete, one of the valets at the Oasis, remembered MJ Lane.
“He came in around ten o’clock,” Pete told Stride and Amanda when they quizzed him at the casino’s porte cochere. Pete was young and as white as a tube of toothpaste, with brown hair slicked down to lie flat on his head. He wore black pants and sneakers, and a snug waist-length jacket in burgundy.
“Alone?” Stride asked him.
“ Mr. Lane? Not hardly. He had Karyn on his arm. Karyn Westermark. You know, the soap actress?” He fanned himself as if the cool night air had turned warm. “You saw the video on the Net? That was her. Hot stuff. Man, she’s better than a porn star.”
“How’d they get here?” Amanda asked. “Cab? Limo?”
Without answering, Pete broke off to attend to a gray Lexus sedan, opening the passenger door and then running around to the opposite side to take the car keys and hand the driver a parking stub. He returned, apologizing and pocketing a fifty-dollar tip. He cast a nervous eye as two more cars pulled into the driveway. Two in the morning at the Oasis on Saturday night was prime time.
“How’d MJ get here tonight?” Amanda repeated.
“He drove himself,” Pete told them. “He’s got a condo in town, over in the Charlcombe Towers just off the Strip.”
“Why didn’t he ask for his car when he was leaving?” Stride asked.
“I figured he was just going for a walk. You know?”
Stride cocked an eyebrow and leaned in close to Pete’s face. “Why’d he need a ‘walk’ if he had Karyn with him?”
“Karyn left an hour before MJ did,” Pete explained. “I got a cab for her.”
“Did she look upset?” Amanda asked.
Pete shook his head. “She looked bored. She told the cabbie to take her to Ra, over at the Luxor. She was just hunting for another party.”
“Did MJ say anything when he left?” Stride asked.
“No, he looked pretty bombed. He headed straight down the sidewalk. I knew where he was going.”
“Did MJ ‘walk’ a lot?” Amanda asked.
The valet blanched. “Not very often. A guy like him, he doesn’t need to pay for it. But sometimes you want a little on the street, so you don’t have to wake up next to her, okay?”
“Tell that to your girlfriend,” Stride said. “Did anyone follow him out the door?”
Pete shrugged. “I don’t know. Cars were coming and going. I only noticed MJ because he’s a regular.”
A car horn blared noisily, and the valet waved and began dancing on both feet, anxious for his next tip. “Anything else?” Pete asked impatiently.
“Who’s head of security here?”
“Gerard Plante. Inside and straight back.”
“Thanks. We’ll send a team over to check out MJ’s car,” Stride added. “Make sure no one gets near it before we do. You included.”
“Sure.”
Stride clapped a hand like a vise on the boy’s shoulder. “If I read in Us magazine about ribbed Trojans in MJ’s glove compartment, I’m going to make sure the IRS comes knocking on your door about those fifty-buck tips. Got it?”
Pete’s eyes widened, and he licked his upper lip, trying to figure out if Stride was serious. Then he gulped and ran for the next car.
“Us magazine,” Amanda said. “Nice.”
“I thought you’d like that.”
Stride led Amanda through the revolving doors into the sea of noise and smoke inside the casino. The stale smell of cigarettes curled into his lungs like an old friend, and just like that, the craving was back. Funny how it never left. He hadn’t smoked in more than a year, but he felt himself rubbing his thumb and finger together, as if there were a lit Camel between them. He took a deep breath, sucking it in and expelling it, and wondering if Vegas had been dropped down in the desert by some sarcastic angel who wanted to test the willpower of ex-sinners.
He found himself getting aroused, too. It was autoerotica, part of a mind-control game the casinos played. He couldn’t pretend he was immune. He responded to the beating pulse in the city’s bloodstream. Not greed, like most people thought. Hunger. For money, for flesh, for food, alcohol, and smoke-naked hunger, oozing, obsessive, and overwhelming. The casinos programmed it that way. Maybe the little black half-moons in the ceiling weren’t cameras after all, spying on every finger on a slot button or flip of a card. Maybe they were all spraying some odorless drug that unleashed the mania, which lasted until your money was all gone and you slunk back home.
The Oasis was among the most explicit of the Vegas casinos in using sex to sell its machines and tables and to cultivate an image as the hip spot for rubbing shoulders with celebrities. Looking around the casino, Stride saw posters everywhere of impossibly gorgeous bikini-clad women, leering at him as they hyped slot tournaments, poker rooms, and crab leg buffets. It seemed to be working. The casino itself was relatively small, not a sprawling octopus like Caesars, but every machine was taken, and every seat at the blackjack tables was filled, with crowds pressing in to watch the action. It was a young crowd, dripping with women just as stunning as those in the posters.
Stride remembered what Serena’s partner, Cordy, said about nights in Las Vegas. The time when breasts came out to play.
He had a hard-on. It pissed him off.
“Come on,” he growled. Amanda had a look of cool wonder. The drug was working on her, too.
They weaved their way through the rows of slot machines and found the security desk at the back of the casino, an imposing oak monolith staffed by the only woman in the casino who was ugly and severe. Talking above the thump of rock music blaring from the overhead speakers, Stride asked for Gerard Plante. He held up his shield. She told him to wait.
Amanda sat down at a slot machine across from the security door and fed in a five-dollar bill from her pocket. The machine featured characters from some long-ago television show that Stride could remember watching when he was a kid in Duluth. He had an image of his bedroom window and of snow whipping past the glass.
Stride leaned against the machine and impatiently shoved his hands in his pockets. He leaned down to Amanda. “So how did you get stuck with me?”
Amanda took her eyes off the slot reels and gave him a suspicious look. “Excuse me?”
“The lieutenant thinks I should be back in Minnesota shoveling snow,” Stride said. “You must have pissed him off to get stuck with a newbie like me who’s on Sawhill’s shit list.”
Stride knew that Sawhill was just angry at the world. He used to get that way himself sometimes when he was a lieutenant, during those stretches when everything that could go wrong did. Sawhill had lost his favorite detective when the man won the Megabucks jackpot and retired instantly, eight million dollars richer. Then Serena went over Sawhill’s head to the sheriff to plug Stride, an experienced homicide investigator who just happened to be in town, available, bored, doing nothing but letting the city get on his nerves. And so Sawhill found himself with Stride crammed down his throat, and he had made it a point to make sure Stride knew that the lieutenant didn’t think he was up to the task of big-city crime.
“Oh, now I get it,” Amanda said, half to herself. “I was wondering what you did to get stuck with me. Now it makes sense. Sawhill has it in for you.”
Stride shrugged. “I like you fine. You seem smart. You’re something to look at, too. Seems like he’s doing me a favor.”
“Not hardly,” Amanda told him.
“Want to fill me in?”
Amanda took a long look at him. “You really don’t know, do you? Serena didn’t tell you?”
“I guess not.”
“You’re not just playing dumb-ass games with me?”
“I haven’t been in this city long enough to play games,” Stride said.
Amanda laughed, long and deep. “Oh, that’s good. That’s really good.”
“Are you going to let me in on the joke?”
“I’m a non-op,” Amanda said.
“What’s that?” Stride asked, genuinely confused.
“I’m a transsexual. A non-operative transsexual. I’ve had feminization surgery, and I take estrogen supplements to promote development of breasts, soft skin, the right weight balance, that kind of thing. But I decided not to undergo SRS to remove the genitalia. Got it? I used to be a guy.”
Stride felt his face turn multiple shades of crimson. “Holy shit.”
“So you see why I’m not exactly first in the rotation for potential partners.”
He couldn’t help himself. He found himself glancing at the large breasts pushing out from Amanda’s T-shirt and then at the crotch of her tight jeans, where his imagination seemed to freeze. He realized he was staring and couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Want to see?” Amanda asked.
“No!” Stride retorted, and then realized Amanda was giggling. “I’m sorry,” he added. “This really is perfect. Sawhill is sending me a message, you know. ‘Bet you don’t have any non-ops back in Nowhere, Minnesota, hey, Stride?’ ”
“Is it going to be a problem?”
Stride thought about it. He had lived his entire life, until a couple of months ago, on the shore of Lake Superior, in a city that was liberal about labor unions and health care and conservative about religion and sex, but he considered himself strictly nonjudgmental about anything that went on behind closed doors, so long as no one got hurt. He shrugged. “Like I said, you’re smart, and you’re the prettiest guy I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m a girl now. But thank you. Most of the others on the force, men and women, haven’t been so open-minded.”
“I bet.”
Stride had lots of questions for Amanda, but he wasn’t ready to ask anything that would make him look even more like a fool.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Stride turned and looked up into the olive-colored face of a very tall man who wore silver sunglasses even in the middle of the night inside the casino. His black hair stood up, a flattop cut to a perfect oneinch height.
“Detective?” he said. “I’m Gerard Plante, Oasis head of security.”
Stride introduced himself, and Amanda stood up, doing the same. Gerard wore a navy suit whose fabric glistened under the lights. A burgundy handkerchief, embroidered with the Oasis logo, peeked out from his breast pocket. When he shook hands, his skin felt like the smooth leather of a hundreddollar wallet.
“Let’s go in the back, shall we?” Gerard said.
He guided them behind the security desk, and when the heavy oak door closed behind them, the din of the casino seemed to vanish magically, replaced by a calming white noise. No sound track. No electronic pinging. This was where the volcanoes and white tigers vanished, where it was about nothing at all except money, the river that never experienced a drought.
Gerard led them into a vast office without windows, decorated in perfect taste and immaculate. He obviously wasn’t a man who believed in paper, because there wasn’t a scrap to be seen anywhere in the office, and his desk and credenza were both glass-topped with triangular steel legs and not a drawer in sight. Stride couldn’t pick out a smudge or fingerprint anywhere on the glass.
Behind Gerard, on the credenza, was the largest computer monitor Stride had ever seen, sleek and chrome, more like a plasma TV. A sliding drawer suspended underneath the glass top held a keyboard, mouse, and joystick.
Gerard motioned Stride and Amanda to two minimalist chairs in front of the desk and took his own seat in a black Aeron chair behind it. He moved with an arrogant grace. When he sat down, he inclined the chair, but his legs were long enough for his feet to remain flat on the floor. He carefully removed his sunglasses, folded them and laid them on the glass desk, and then steepled his fingers. His eyes were blue-gray underneath trimmed eyebrows.
“I assume this is about Mr. Lane?” Gerard asked. He held up a hand before Stride could interrupt. “I sent one of my security men there as a liaison when we saw the police arrive. He kept me informed about the incident.”
“Incident?” Stride asked. “One of your guests was brutally murdered less than a hundred yards away from your door.”
“Yes. It’s very unfortunate.”
“Because of all the bad publicity?” Stride remarked acidly, not sure why the man got under his skin. He had considered casino security himself for a day or so over the summer, but he decided he didn’t want to live in the lion’s mouth.
Gerard smiled thinly. “Not at all. The sad truth is, Detective, that publicity only helps us. Our gross will go up for weeks because of the murder. If it were all about that, I would have shot him myself. No, Mr. Lane was a regular customer, and a generous one. We will miss him.”
“Did you know MJ was in the casino this evening?” Stride asked.
“Of course. Mr. Lane and Ms. Westermark arrived together around ten o’clock and were escorted to a private gaming room to play blackjack.”
“Is this gaming room visible from the main casino floor?”
“No. The guests who play there don’t wish to have an audience.”
“Was it just the two of them, or were there others in the same room?” Stride asked.
“It wasn’t uncommon for MJ to be part of a crowd,” Gerard said. “But tonight it was just the two of them.”
“How long did they play?”
“About two hours. Around midnight, the two of them left the gaming room to visit her suite.”
“Did they go through the main casino to access her room?” Stride asked.
“No, there’s a private elevator,” Gerard replied.
“Did you watch them?” Amanda asked.
Gerard didn’t blink, and his voice was like honey. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we both know you have a camera in that private elevator. So we can sit here while you find the video clip, or you can tell us that you got a call when MJ and Karyn were leaving, and you tracked them on the elevator on that nice big monitor back there.”
Stride wasn’t sure if Gerard was the kind of man who ever sweated, but he had to believe there was a sticky film gathering on the back of the man’s neck. All three of them knew Amanda had scored a bull’s-eye.
Gerard inclined his head slightly, like a politician conceding a point in a debate. “They were frisky,” he acknowledged.
“But your valet told us that Karyn left early.”
“That’s right. Ms. Westermark left her suite after five or ten minutes, alone. Mr. Lane followed a few minutes later. He looked agitated.”
“We know Karyn left the casino,” Amanda said. “What did MJ do?”
“He returned to the blackjack table and played for another hour. He was drinking heavily. Around one in the morning, Mr. Lane told me he was planning to take a walk. I got the picture.”
“What did MJ talk about after he came downstairs?”
“He mainly talked about Walker Lane, his father. It’s no secret to anyone who knows Mr. Lane that he and his father don’t see eye to eye. I don’t exactly get along with my father, either.”
“Have you had any unusual troubles with casino security lately?”
Gerard actually laughed enough to show a glint of teeth. “Unusual would be a day when we did not have something unusual, Detective. Casinos run on money, alcohol, sex, and emotion. I don’t have to tell you, it’s a volatile combination.”
“But nothing involving MJ?” Amanda asked.
“No. Our VIP patrons rarely cause that kind of trouble. They’re more like children who play too hard. Sometimes their toys break.”
“We want to see some of the casino tapes from this evening,” Stride said. “Can we do that from here?”
“Of course. But nothing odd happened in the blackjack suite, I assure you. And there’s no sound on the tapes.”
Stride shook his head. “I don’t want the blackjack suite. I want the casino floor. If someone was following MJ, I want to know if he was in the casino.”
Gerard was proud of his eyes in the sky.
When he clicked a button on the mouse, dozens of thumbnail video feeds fanned onto his screen like cards dealt on a table.
“We were among the first casinos to go all digital in our cam system,” Gerard explained. “Everything’s burned for permanent storage. No more swapping out hundreds of tapes every day. You win more than a thousand dollars at a sitting, we keep your face on file forever. And we can capture anyone’s face in the casino and run a comparative search against our database and the Metro and Gaming Control files in a few seconds. Some of our technical staff used to work for the Bureau.”
He used the mouse to click on one of the thumbnails, and a larger image of a middle-aged Asian woman playing a Five Play video poker machine filled half the screen. The quality, Stride had to admit, was dazzlingly good. With a practiced nudge of the joystick, Gerard focused on the woman’s hands and zoomed in until they could clearly see her stubby fingers selecting each button.
“Most people know we’re watching,” Gerard said, “but they don’t realize the power of the technology.”
“Let’s check the cam on the main doors around ten o’clock,” Stride said. “You can do that?”
Gerard nodded. “All of the images are time-stamped.”
“I want to see MJ arrive and see if anyone follows him in,” Stride added.
Stride untangled himself from the chair, and he and Amanda crowded around Gerard, watching over his shoulder. Gerard slid his chair farther under the credenza and brushed imaginary lint from his coat sleeve. He caressed the mouse like a lover as he swept the cursor around the screen at lightning speed.
“Here we are.”
Stride watched MJ Lane and Karyn Westermark arrive through the revolving doors. Karyn wore an oversized purple football jersey, white short shorts, and white highheeled boots that hugged her calves and accentuated her long legs. MJ was wearing the same grunge-cool outfit-untucked shirt and loose shorts-in which they had found him a few hours later. Not a care in the world. Stride always felt slightly nauseous seeing videotape of victims shortly before their deaths. Their faces were unaware, oblivious to the fact that the sand had almost run out of the hourglass. The black-hooded devil stood right behind them, polishing his scythe, and they smiled and laughed as if death were years away, not exhaling on their skin.
“Keep the tape going,” Stride said.
They followed the parade of people entering and leaving the casino for another two minutes. Then Amanda extended a finger, almost touching the screen.
“There,” she said. “On the left.”
The man emerging through the left-most door wore a faded blue baseball cap with the bill tugged down low on his face. He tilted his head down, staring at the ground as he walked. They could barely make out the dark stain of a beard obscuring the lower half of his face.
“Tan khakis,” Stride said. “Windbreaker. I think that’s him. The son of a bitch is ducking the cameras.”
’Ten to one the beard’s a fake,” Amanda said.
“We need to find him again,” Stride said as the man disappeared out of camera range. “He looked like he was turning toward the front desk.”
Gerard fingered the joystick. Less than a minute later, he tracked the killer down at a nickel slot. His hat was askew, at a casual angle to anyone who looked at him, but strategically placed to minimize the camera’s view.
“He knows where we have the cams,” Gerard observed unhappily.
“Where’s that machine?” Stride asked.
“Opposite the VIP lounge.”
Stride nodded. “So he can see MJ leaving.”
Gerard zoomed in, but the close-up footage didn’t offer much more for them to see. Looking at the thick beard, Stride agreed with Amanda: It was a fake. The man may also have used putty on his cheekbones and nose to doctor his appearance further.
“We’ll want a print,” Stride told Gerard, “for whatever good it does us. And it would be great if you could have a tech review the other cameras and see if we get a better angle on this guy.”
“Of course.”
“Run the feed out,” Stride told him. “Let’s see what he does.”
Gerard accelerated the footage, but the killer’s movements were so precise that it hardly mattered. He seemed frozen, with the rest of the action of the casino speeding behind him in a blur. Every minute, he played a single nickel from the twenty-dollar bill he had fed into the machine-slow enough that he could sit there for hours without exhausting his stake. He never appeared to be studying the entrance to the sheltered VIP area, but Stride recognized him instinctively as the kind of man whose eyes didn’t miss a thing. Cool. Methodical.
Shortly before one o’clock, MJ reappeared. Gerard slowed down the tape again. MJ was obviously drunk now, and he weaved as he headed for the exit. The killer at the nickel slot stretched his arms lazily, betraying no interest, but he stood up, prepared to follow. Stride could imagine the adrenaline pumping, making the man hypercohscious. MJ was alone. The kill was close. He was ready to dog his victim’s heels.
Then the man at the machine did something. It happened so fast that Stride wasn’t sure he had really seen it.
“Stop, stop,” Stride insisted. “Back up. What the hell was that?”
Neither Gerard nor Amanda had noticed anything. Gerard backed up the tape and then, on Stride’s instructions, let it go forward in slow motion, frame by frame. As MJ disappeared in the background, the killer got up, every movement now jerky and unnatural, like an old penny movie machine.
Stretched. Pushed the chair in with his foot. Brushed past the machine as he moved to follow MJ.
Reached back with his hand.
“Son of a bitch,” Amanda said, seeing it.
“Freeze it!” Stride told Gerard.
As the killer walked away, he casually planted his thumb in the center of the slot machine’s glass window and rolled it, leaving a perfect print.
Stride felt his stomach turn upside down, as if he had boarded a tunnel-of-love ride and found himself on the wild tracks of a roller coaster instead. He felt the tingling chill of fear on his nerve ends.
“He must know he’s not in the system,” Amanda whispered.
Stride stared at the frozen image on the screen. “It’s more than that,” he said. “He wants us to chase him.”
As Stride and Amanda climbed into his Bronco, he heard his cell phone ringing inside his blazer pocket. He had recently replaced a ring tone of Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee” with “Restless” by Sara Evans, although it wasn’t the same without Sara’s amazing voice. Still, something about the song touched a lonely ache in Stride’s soul every time he heard it. It was all about home, and for the past few months his sense of home, of where he belonged, had fled from him.
He flipped up the phone and heard Serena’s voice.
“Bet you missed the glamour of this job,” she told him. He had crawled out of bed unhappily at one in the morning.
Stride felt himself relax. He had fallen so much in love with her that he felt it physically, deep in his gut, even though he wondered how the two of them could survive together in this city. Or how he could survive. She was his oasis, a dream to which a man lost in the desert could cling.
“Yeah, I missed being out with the night creatures,” Stride said. “I think Sawhill enjoyed giving me a reminder.”
“Hey, you wanted back in the game, Jonny,” Serena teased him. “I told you to stay home and be a kept man.”
Stride laughed. She was right When he retired from the force in Duluth and moved to Las Vegas to join Serena, he was just like that Sara Evans song. Restless. His whole life had been in Minnesota. A beautiful first wife, his childhood sweetheart, now deceased. A second wife, recently divorced. Maggie, his partner and closest friend. And all the cold, vast spaces of the far north-the great lake, the endless stands of birch and pine. Home.
But after the last murder case he investigated-the case where he met Serena-his roots had been pulled up. He had been at loose ends for the last two months in Vegas, needing to work again. He had thought about getting a PI license, but he couldn’t imagine himself hiding in the desert brush, spying on cheating spouses. Then, with a spin of a slot machine wheel, a Vegas homicide detective had walked off the job with a fortune in his pocket. Suddenly, Stride was back in.
“Any regrets?” Serena asked. “Wish you’d stayed in bed? Wish you’d stayed in Minnesota?”
Her voice was light, but he heard a pointed question there. Every now and then, she wanted a reality check on where they were.
“I definitely wish I’d stayed in bed,” he told her.
He didn’t take the bait about Minnesota. He knew it was too early to tell about the job and Las Vegas and what that meant for their future. They hadn’t really talked about it, because they both liked things the way they were and didn’t want to screw it up.
“What’s the case?” Serena asked.
Stride told her about the body and heard her whistle long and loud when he said the victim was MJ Lane.
“How come everyone knows about this guy but me?” he asked.
“If you read my Us magazine in the bathroom now and then, you’d know these things,” Serena said.
Stride sighed. “I’ve already been told that I’m culturally deprived.” He added, “We’re heading over to MJ’s condo now.”
“You got a partner with you?”
“Amanda Gillen,” Stride said.
“Amanda?” Serena retorted.
Her voice was loud enough to be heard throughout the truck. Stride glanced at Amanda. She stared discreetly at the lights of the city as he drove, but he recognized a smirk twitching on the corner of her lips.
“Nice girl,” Stride added.
Amanda laughed out loud.
“Uh, Jonny, you do know…?” Serena asked.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I hope this means I have nothing to worry about,” Serena told him.
“Never assume.” He added, “You’re up early, too. What’s going on?”
“A cop spotted an abandoned car in the parking lot at the Meadows Mall. I’m picking up Cordy. The uni thinks it may be the vehicle used in the hit-and-run on the boy in Summerlin last week.”
“That’s good. You needed a break.”
“Yeah.”
She sounded more tired than excited. Stride understood. Child killers were the toughest cases to handle, and the death of the boy, Peter Hale, had hit Serena hard.
“I should go,” Stride told her. They were nearing MJ’s condominium.
“I know. Me, too.”
Neither one of them hung up. Even the silence of air on their phones felt like a lifeline, connecting them.
“Hey, Jonny?” Serena added. “Watch your back. This isn’t Duluth.”
Stride pulled off Paradise Road in front of the Charlcombe Towers condominium complex. He leaned forward and stared upward through the windshield. The old and the new, he thought.
The three forty-story white towers, gleaming and new, reached for the night sky on the west side of Paradise. The balconies of multimillion-dollar apartments crept up the building walls like a stairway to heaven. A scant block away, crumbling and dark, was a vestige of old Las Vegas-one of the last of the 1960s-era casinos. A princess of its time grown tired and haggard. Still standing, but not for long. Stride had already learned that old didn’t last long in this town.
Amanda pointed at the derelict casino, ready for implosion. “Boni Fisso owns it. He’s launching a big new project called the Orient over there, once they detonate the old place. An Asian-themed resort. It’s supposed to cost almost two billion dollars.”
“Why Asia?” Stride asked.
“Lots of whales in Japan and Singapore, I guess. And I think they figure China’s the next capitalist up-and-comer. The outside’s going to look like a Ming Dynasty palace.”
“Too bad MJ won’t be around to enjoy the view,” Stride said.
He pulled up to the security gate and waved at the guards. Their faces were stony and suspicious, studying Stride’s dusty truck.
“Should have brought the Spyder,” Amanda told him.
It took them almost forty-five minutes to talk their way past the guards and into MJ Lane’s one-bedroom condominium, which was midway up the northern tower on the twenty-eighth floor. Inside, Stride snapped on gloves but lingered in the wood-floored foyer. He wrinkled his nose. “Pot,” he said.
He wandered down two steps into the living room, which featured a giant stone fountain in the center, two rich leather sofas, and an entertainment system that took up most of the west wall, including a seventy-two-inch high-definition television. The place was a mess, despite the tens of thousands of dollars that someone-MJ’s father?-had plowed into chrome art, a cherrywood dining room set, and chandeliers sculpted out of silver and crystal. MJ treated it like a college dorm. A skin magazine lay open on one of the sofas. Dozens of DVDs spilled onto the floor in a messy pile in front of the television. Remnants of breakfast for two-cereal and soured milk, cold coffee-littered the dining room table; the scent of a half-smoked joint hung in the stale air. He saw men’s underwear and women’s panties on the carpet near the open doorway to the master bedroom.
“MJ had a guest,” Stride said.
“And it wasn’t Karyn Westermark,” Amanda added.
Stride’s forehead furrowed. “How do you know?”
“No way Karyn wears underwear.”
Stride chuckled. He studied the unmarked DVDs on the floor and pushed the play button on the digital recorder. An image jumped onto the oversized television screen. Guttural moaning surrounded them from hidden speakers throughout the condo. Stride saw a man spread-eagled in bed, with a naked girl straddling him, her conical breasts dangling over his mouth. He thought for a moment that he was watching a porn film, but this was a home movie. The man on the bed was MJ. He didn’t recognize the woman, but her wiry chestnut hair didn’t match the straight-arrow blond locks they had seen in the security footage of Karyn Westermark at the Oasis.
“Some guys don’t learn,” Amanda said. “You’d think winding up on the Internet in your own nudie flick would make you a little more careful about this kind of thing.”
Stride stopped the playback. He noticed a phone and an answering machine on the glass skirt surrounding the gurgling fountain. The red light was flashing. When Stride tapped the button, an electronic voice announced that MJ had three messages.
“MJ, it’s Rex Terrell. I thought we could trade some secrets. I showed you mine, how about you show me yours? Give me a call, okay?”
Terrell left a number, which Stride jotted down in his notebook. The call had come in just after noon on Saturday.
“You know who Rex Terrell is?” Stride asked.
Amanda shook her head.
The next message was from Karyn Westermark, short and sweet.
“It’s Karyn. I’m in town, baby. Seven o’clock at Olives. See you then. Love ya.”
“So we know they had dinner at Bellagio,” Amanda said. “I wonder if Karyn knows about the brunette in MJ’s latest porno movie.”
The last message began with several seconds of silence. The tape crackled. Stride heard movements in the background, a man clearing his throat, strains of classical music. Finally, the words came, in a growly voice split by halting, uncomfortable pauses. Gaps where he didn’t know what to say. There was raw pain in his tone.
“MJ, it’s Walker… please don’t stop listening, don’t delete the message. We need to talk… You’re wrong…”
Stride hit the pause button. “Walker?” he asked.
Amanda nodded. “Walker Lane. The producer. MJ’s father.”
“What you’ve heard isn’t true, and I wish there was something I could say to make you believe that…”
The last pause went on longer than the others, and Stride thought the message was over. Then the voice continued, softer, pleading.
“I wish you’d come home. I wish to God you didn’t live there… I want to tell you the truth, face to face… I’m going to try your cell phone. If we haven’t talked when you get this, call me.”
Walker Lane hung up the phone. The time stamp on the recording was midnight, right around the time that MJ and Karyn were entering her suite at the Oasis. An hour before someone followed MJ into the street and shot him.
Stride looked around the room again. He saw a few framed photos of MJ with various celebrities, mostly women. There was a photo from years ago of a very young MJ with a woman Stride guessed was his mother, but nothing of his father. Not a sign anywhere that Walker existed, except for the smell of money.
“I wonder if he called MJ’s cell phone. That might explain why Karyn left early and why MJ was upset.”
“That’s not the voice of a man who paid to have his son murdered,” Amanda said.
“No. But I want to know what they were arguing about.”
They continued searching the condo. Stride expected to find more drugs, and he did: a carved wooden box inside a well-stocked liquor cabinet that contained a large bag of marijuana, a glassine envelope with several ounces of cocaine, and two prescription bottles with what appeared to be OxyContin. The labels had been scratched off.
“He looks like a high-end user, but not a seller,” Amanda said.
Stride nodded. He began loading and sealing the drugs in an evidence bag.
“What’s with the Maserati?” Stride asked, catching Amanda’s eye. “You didn’t buy that on a cop’s salary.”
Amanda shrugged. “I had to sue the city last year. Discrimination. Harassment. You wouldn’t believe the shit I put up with.”
“I think I would,” Stride said.
“Anyway, the city settled with me. The court made the brass say the right things, and most of the obvious crap went away. But they don’t want anything to do with me.”
“Cops are all men, Amanda. Even the women.”
“Don’t I know it,” she said. “The settlement was pretty good. Low seven figures. Nobody ever dreamed I’d stick it out. I’m sure they thought I’d take the money and go away, but the hell with that. I bought the Maserati, put the rest of the cash in the bank, and kept on working. It drives them crazy.”
Stride laughed. He liked her in-your-face attitude. It reminded him of Maggie, his longtime partner in Duluth.
“It’s been hard on my boyfriend, though,” Amanda added. “I feel worse for him than for myself. We hooked up about six months after I made the change, and that was four years ago. And no, he didn’t know, not at first. And yes, it was a shock. But he’s come around.”
“I really wasn’t going to ask,” Stride told her.
“Come on, you were curious. Everyone is. That’s okay.”
“Guilty,” he acknowledged.
“You’re lucky, you know,” Amanda said. “With Serena. She’s beautiful.”
“Yes, she is,” Stride said.
Serena’s beauty had knocked him over when he first saw her. Long black hair that his fingers couldn’t help but glide through. Emerald green eyes that danced and teased him. Suntanned skin and just a few dry lines creasing her face that told him she was past thirty and cruising toward forty. A tall, athletic body that she worked like hell to keep trim.
Amanda saw it in his eyes. “You love her, don’t you?”
“I sure do,” he said.
“I love Bobby, too,” Amanda said. “He takes a lot of shit, and he sticks around.”
“That’s worth a lot.” Stride suddenly stopped dead and rolled his eyes. “You picked the name, didn’t you? A-man-da.”
Amanda grinned slyly. “Most people never get the joke.”
“Let’s go in the bedroom,” Stride said. He added quickly, “To search.”
The lush carpet in MJ’s bedroom was black, and so was the furniture, all shining in black lacquer. The left-side wall was built with floor-to-ceiling windows, with double doors in the middle, and Stride could see city lights through the wooden vertical blinds. MJ’s California king was on the opposite wall. A checkerboard comforter, black and red, was half off the bed, and the burgundy sheets were a mess. Stride noticed a condom wrapper on the floor.
“Check the bathroom, okay?” he said.
Amanda disappeared through a doorway next to the bed. Stride turned his attention to the desk on the far side of the room, which was a war zone of unopened mail, bank statements, men’s magazines, and receipts from restaurants and hotels. He sat down and began sifting through the piles.
“More pills,” Amanda announced when she returned. “Lots of Ecstasy. And take your pick-Levitra, Cialis, and Viagra. He could have played tennis with his cock.”
Stride winced.
“Anything there?” Amanda asked.
“I haven’t found a date book or a PalmPilot. He had upwards of ten million in his bank accounts, probably courtesy of Walker. He gambled a lot, all over town and in the Caribbean, too.”
“Stalkers? Hate mail? Lawsuits?”
“Not so far.”
“So what’s our motive?” she asked. “Why would anyone want to kill this guy?”
Stride rubbed his eyes, feeling the lack of sleep catch up with him. “It doesn’t look like he owed money to anybody. We might have a love triangle going on between Karyn and the mystery brunette in the video, but I think everyone cats around on everyone else in this crowd. Doesn’t seem worth killing over, not with a hired gun. He did drugs, but what else is new? He was having an argument with his dad. That’s as much as we’ve got, and it ain’t much.”
“Unless we’ve got a psycho on our hands.”
Stride got up from the desk. He thought about the killer on the videotape, leaving his fingerprint for them. “Yeah, that’s something we have to consider.”
He saw a newspaper folded on the nightstand next to MJ’s unmade bed and picked it up. The pages were already yellowing, and he saw when he checked the date that it was more than three months old. He read the headline:
IMPLOSION TO MAKE WAY FOR “ORIENT”
There were photographs covering most of the front page. Boni Fisso shaking hands with Governor Mike Durand over an architectural model of the lavish new resort. The showroom of the old casino in its heyday, forty years ago, with near-nude dancing girls onstage. A billowing dust cloud from one of the earlier casinos that had been leveled in a few seconds with the efficiency of a bomb.
“Have you ever seen an implosion?” Stride asked Amanda.
“Yeah, I worked security when they brought down the last tower of the Desert Inn,” she said. “It’s awesome. An implosion always means a party around here.”
Stride nodded. He saw a back issue of LV, the city’s monthly magazine, lying under the newspaper. There was a corner photo of the same old casino on its cover and a teaser headline beside it:
ONE CASINO’S DIRTY SECRET
Amanda spied over his shoulder. “He lives upstairs, you know, if you want to say hi.”
“Who?”
“Boni Fisso. He owns this whole complex, like the hotel across the street. I’m pretty sure his penthouse is in this tower.”
Stride knew Boni Fisso’s reputation. He was one of a dying breed of Las Vegas entrepreneurs, a holdover from the mobbed-up days before the city went corporate. Fisso had to be over eighty, but he still looked suave and sharp in the newspaper photos, an old man who hadn’t slowed down. He was short, barely five-foot-six, but built like a fire hydrant that you could kick and kick and never dent.
“What’s your take on Boni?” Stride asked. “Is his money clean?”
“That’s hard to believe, but no one’s ever proved otherwise,” Amanda said. “Gaming Control has had him in their sights for years, but they never had the goods to put him in the Black Book. Either that, or Boni has juice with some politician on the inside. Either way, he’s been able to play the game. Pretend he’s like Steve Wynn, just an honest developer and philanthropist.”
“Does Boni have a connection to MJ?”
Amanda shrugged. “Not that I know of. Why?”
Stride gestured at the magazine and newspaper. “It looks like MJ was very interested in the new resort.”
“Well, his balcony looks right out on the implosion site. He was going to watch the Orient rise from the ashes for the next couple of years if someone hadn’t ventilated his skull.”
Stride nodded. He knew Amanda was right. It was nothing significant. Even so, something niggled at him. Little things did that to him-colorless pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit. MJ had too many fish to fry in this city. Drugs. Parties. Women. Why keep a months-old magazine by his bed?
What was it about the Orient project that was so important to him? A two-billion-dollar development, underwritten by a man whom everyone suspected of mob ties. That was certainly worth killing over, if someone got in your way-but Stride didn’t see how a playboy like MJ could be a threat to a man like Boni Fisso.
Stride wandered across the bedroom to the double-width glass doors that led to the balcony. He unlocked them and stepped outside. A breeze made the vertical blinds slap and twist. There was no furniture outside, just a long stretch of iron railing and a view toward the north end of the Strip. He grabbed the railing. His heart fluttered a little in his chest at the height. He imagined MJ standing here, high on cocaine, wondering if he could sprout wings and fly. The young are stupid, Stride thought. He realized that MJ probably never came out here, probably never even opened the door. He had Karyn Westermark naked in his bed, and probably countless other women, and that was a better view than all the lights of the Strip combined.
Stride stayed outside anyway. He wondered, just for the briefest moment, if he could fly. It was cool and beautiful up here, late September weather, when the worst of the heat was over and the nights had a taste of fall. To the east, there was a ruddy glow where the sun inched up to dawn above the mountains, but the valley was still wrapped in night.
Although night never really had a firm grip here. It was the land of the neon sun.
He stared down at Boni’s old casino, across the street, its roof about ten stories below him. The building itself was black, stripped of life. On street level, a hurricane fence and a makeshift plywood wall gated off the property; no more hotel guests, no more high rollers. In the weeks since the property closed, the demolition teams had already moved inside, ripped out the guts, drilled holes in the walls to plant cylinders of dynamite. In another couple of weeks, with a push of a button, a simple electrical charge, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.
Stride thought of the photo in the newspaper. Girls onstage. Men in tuxedos. Martinis. Money. All ghosts now.
He let his eyes travel across floor after floor, all of them quiet and dark.
Except for the roof. The roof was aglow.
It was such a Vegas thing to do, Stride thought, to leave the light on after the party was over.
He could see scalloped Middle Eastern icons stretching across the parapet like tiny onion domes. Where the roof notched downward in the very center of the hotel, he saw faintly the tiles and trees of what must have once been the garden of the casino’s penthouse suite. All of it was reflected in the glow of the casino’s sign, which still blazed out of the darkness in flashes of red and green neon that gave the ghosts inside a reason to believe they were still flesh and blood. No one had told them it was time to go.
Every few seconds, the sign would fade to black, and then each letter would illuminate again, one by one, as if nothing had changed, as if the floors below still pulsed with life.
One by one, letter by letter, until the entire name blinked on top of the roof.
Sheherezade.
Serena could see that Cordy was down. When she picked him up at his apartment in North Las Vegas, he wore a hangdog expression, like a kid who had been forced to stand in the corner. As they drove back south through the city streets, he stared sourly out the window without saying a word. Even his hair was having a bad day. Normally, it was greased back on his skull like a jet-black lion’s mane, but this morning there were tufts sprouting out in odd places like grass growing through the sidewalk. Not like Cordy at all.
“What’s up with you?” Serena asked, while they waited at a red light. There was almost no traffic at Cheyenne and Jones. They were in the short stretch of dead hours when the midnight crowd was finally in bed, and everyone else was drowsily starting to come awake.
Cordy gave a long, dramatic sigh. “Me and Lav,” he said. “We’re history.”
Lavender was a gorgeous black stripper who towered over Cordy by at least six inches. During the time Serena and Cordy had been partners, he had used up girlfriends like tissues, going from one to the next, each one tiny, blond, and young. Lavender was different, and when they had started dating, Serena thought Cordy might finally have met his match.
“What happened?” Serena said.
Cordy rolled down the window of Serena’s Mustang and spit. He cursed in Spanish, “What do you think, mama? I fucked up. I screwed one of her friends. Lav found out.”
“Shit, you are a stupid man.”
“I blame it on this goddamned city,” Cordy told her irritably. “All this fucking flesh. I mean, put a guy like me in a room full of sweet chilies, sooner or later I’m going to take a bite.”
“Only this time, the bite came out of your ass.”
She let Cordy stew silently as she turned onto Jones. She wanted to tell him that the real problem was that Cordy listened to his cock, not his brain. He wasn’t entirely wrong about Las Vegas, though. She knew that. You couldn’t put so much sin in one place and not tempt people across the line.
Serena had spent more than two decades in Las Vegas, including ten years on the job as part of Metro. There were plenty of ex-showgirls on the force, and most people assumed Serena was one of them because of her tall, lean physique. But Serena had lived through a much less glamorous side of the city in her early days, arriving in the dead of night from Phoenix with her girlfriend Deidre when she was sixteen.
There were about a thousand roads to ruin for young girls coming to Vegas. Stripping, hooking, gambling, drinking, stealing, fighting, doing drugs, filming porno, or just winding up in the wrong man’s bed. All of them led to the same end, turning pretty young flowers into garbage floating amid the green algae of a swamp.
Like Deidre. Her best friend, her savior, the girl she owed her life to, the girl who said she needed Serena more than anything in the world. Dead.
Sometimes it amazed Serena that she hadn’t died, too. She had chosen a back-office job in one of the casinos when she could have made ten times that in the strip clubs, looking the way she did. She had stayed in school, first studying to get her GED, then working nights and weekends to get a degree in criminal justice at UNLV. It took her ten years to make it that far. When Deidre died, the guilt sent Serena spinning into an alcoholic stupor that cost her two years of her life and almost everything she had worked for.
Eventually, she climbed back, dried out, and went back to college.
She wasn’t sure where the determination came from. Maybe it was because, when she escaped from Phoenix with Deidre, she had made a promise to herself that what she had gone through at home would not destroy the rest of her life.
But Cordy was right. Las Vegas didn’t make it easy.
“I can make you laugh,” Serena told him.
“No way. I’m in mourning. I’m wearing black.”
Serena glanced at him. Cordy wore a black silk shirt with two buttons undone, tapered black dress pants, and buffed leather shoes-but that had nothing to do with Lavender. Cordy was a creature of style, a small but slick package. Serena herself liked to be casual, not fancy, wearing jeans, T-shirts, and weathered cowboy boots on most days.
When she dressed up, she knew, she could pop men’s eyes out. She remembered meeting Stride for the first time at the airport in Duluth, when she flew in as part of the investigation of a girl’s murder in Vegas. On a whim, she had worn one of her hot outfits, baby blue leather pants, silver belt, midriff-baring T-shirt, black leather raincoat. That was the only time she had seen Jonny at a loss for words.
“Twenty bucks,” Serena said.
“You’re on. I ain’t laughing today.”
“Sawhill put Jonny on the street with Amanda,” she told him.
Cordy laughed despite himself. “Oh, mama! Amanda? You know, her breasts are even bigger than yours.”
“News flash, Cordy. She’s got equipment bigger than yours, too. Or so I hear.”
“It gives me the creeps just thinking about it.” He added, “Hey, how do you know that Amanda’s boyfriend is a couch potato?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“ ’Cause he likes to turn on the TV!” Cordy laughed until he snorted.
Serena shook her head. “Just keep that kind of crap between us, muchacho. “Jonny seems to like her. And hand over twenty bucks.”
“Uh-huh. Speaking of which, there’s a pool going on Stride. Most people think he’ll crash and burn in a couple of months.”
“Jonny’s as tough as they come,” Serena said.
“Yeah, but this is Vegas.”
Serena didn’t want to argue. Not because she thought Cordy was right, but because she could think of a lot of reasons why Stride might walk away that had nothing to do with the job.
“I suppose there’s a pool on me, too,” she said. “On whether Jonny and I will make it.”
“The odds on you are about as long as keno,” Cordy said. “Most of the guys, they still think you’re Barbed Wire.”
Serena winced, but only because Cordy’s words struck a nerve. Her reputation on the force-well deserved-was as the cool beauty, smart and unapproachable. Barbed Wire. She was the girl who cut men off at the knees, skewering egos with a sharp joke and building a tall fence around her emotions. A sexy package that no one could seem to unwrap.
As far as Serena was concerned, that was okay. She had never trusted men. In Phoenix, as her mother sank into a cocaine addiction, her father had skipped town, leaving Serena to fall through the ground along with her mother. They wound up living in an apartment near the airport with a half-Indian drug dealer named Blue Dog. Most of the time, her mother owed him money for her drugs. Serena became the currency.
She didn’t like to think about those days. The best defense was pretending they didn’t exist. Like Pandora’s box. Better to keep the lid closed and not see what was inside, because there was no going back. So she became a closed book to anyone who wanted to get near her. At thirty-six, she had never had a serious relationship, never really missed it, never really wanted it.
Until Jonny.
She didn’t know how Stride had broken down her walls so easily. Maybe because he was so unlike the men in Vegas, not slick, not a game-player who wore the face he thought you wanted to see. He was a cloudy pool of emotions himself, just like her, where you couldn’t see the bottom. That depth attracted her immediately. When he let her inside his own walls, told her about losing his first wife to cancer, her heart cracked into pieces. They barely knew each other, and yet she knew he had fallen for her, the real way, the hard way. And she had fallen for him.
But it was one thing to make love on the beach at midnight in Minnesota. That was a fantasy. Back here, this was life. This was day to day.
Pandora’s box was open. She didn’t like what she saw. Goblins from her past, flying out, following her in the dark. She prided herself on being tough as nails, but lately, she sometimes felt like a frightened teenager again. Frightened about love, about sex, about the future. She was more confused than she had been in years.
She had only told Jonny bits and pieces about her past and about what was happening to her now. Partly, she was used to relying on herself and dealing with her problems alone. She didn’t want help. Partly, she didn’t want to scare him away by showing him that she wasn’t solid to the core, that her armor had been pierced.
Besides, she knew he was struggling, too, trying to find his way. Homeless. That was as much as he’d been able to say to her. He felt homeless. Serena understood how he felt, being displaced from the only life he had known, but hearing him talk like that set off all kinds of warning bells in her mind. As if one day he would decide that home was somewhere else, away from Vegas, away from her.
Serena pulled into an open-air lot on the north side of the Meadows Mall. It was her mall, just a few miles from her town home; she had shopped there for years. No talking statues and giant aquariums, like at Caesars. No stores catering to celebrities who dropped a hundred thousand dollars a visit. It was just Macy’s and Foot Locker and RadioShack, the kind of ordinary stores where ordinary people shopped. Serena loved it, because the whole mall felt normal, like it could be dropped into any other suburb in any other city. There was nothing Vegas about it.
At five in the morning, the parking lot was a vast, empty stretch of pavement, just a handful of lonely cars spread out like pins on a map. The streetlights were still on, throwing pale circles of light on the ground, but dawn was near. Halfway across the lot, a patrol car was waiting for them. Its headlights were on, its engine running. As they pulled alongside, Serena saw that the officer at the wheel had his window rolled down, his arm dangling outside, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. The car they had come to see was parked twenty yards away, a midnight blue Pontiac Aztek.
Seeing them, the policeman scrambled out of his patrol car and reached back in to stub out his cigarette. He was gangly and tall, and his uniform was baggy at the shoulders. His blond hair was cut as if his mother still sat him in a chair and clipped him with a bowl over his head. He kept picking at his long chin as if he had a pimple that wouldn’t go away. Serena didn’t think he could be more than twenty years old, and she realized that he was both terribly earnest and terribly nervous.
Serena got out of her Mustang. “Good morning, officer,” she said. “You got us out here pretty early.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he told her, with a Texas twang in his voice. “I do realize that, and I’m real sorry. I’m Officer Tom Crawford, ma’am.”
Serena introduced herself and Cordy, and Crawford did everything but curtsy.
“How long have you been on the force, Tom?” Serena asked.
“Oh, coming on a month, I guess.”
Pretending to rub his eye, Cordy glanced at Serena and mouthed, “Shit.”
Serena shook her head and sighed. Rookies.
“Well, Tom, you’ve got a blue car here. We had a witness who thought she saw a blue car speeding away after the hit-and-run on the boy, but that was in Summerlin, which is several miles and a few tax brackets away from here.”
Crawford nodded, still scratching his chin. “Yes, ma’am, I read the incident report about that boy Peter Hale and the hit-and-run in Summerlin. Terrible thing. Word for word, I did. And I’ve had my eyes open all week for a blue car. See, we got a call overnight from the security company that patrols these lots, and they said this here car hadn’t been touched in at least a week or so, and they were figuring it was abandoned. They were planning on having it towed, and they wanted to know if we wanted to take a look at it first. The overnight super, he thought we should just let them yank it, but I heard it was blue, see, and we’re just a whiz straight down the parkway from Summerlin, and that accident was just about a week ago. So I thought it was worth checking out.”
“It took the security company a week to call it in?” Serena asked, shaking her head.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid so. They rotate a lot, is what I think, and the guy who made the rounds tonight hadn’t been in the lot since last weekend.”
“Go on,” Serena told him, yawning, and hoping she hadn’t been dragged out of bed for nothing.
“Well, when I came out here, the first thing I did was check the front of the car. And sure enough-well, let me just show it to you.”
With loping strides, Officer Crawford guided them around to the front of the Aztek and used the big steel flashlight on his belt to illuminate the car. Serena sucked in her breath. The dead center of the hood was bowed, the grill punched in. The shell of the bumper was cracked and the license plate twisted as if it were on its way to becoming a paper airplane.
Crawford got down on his knees. “If you look real close here, you can see fibers stuck on the grill. There’s other stuff, too, could be skin and blood.”
Serena had seen half-eaten corpses in the desert without her stomach turning over, but something about the damage to the car-not much damage at all, really, for what it had done-left her swallowing back bile. “Good work, Tom,” she told him somberly.
Cordy was silent, but his copper skin paled. He kicked the ground with the toe of his shoe, his hands shoved in his pockets. Only Crawford seemed unaffected and even enthusiastic about what he had found-but he was young, and this was a big deal, the kind of story he’d be telling the other rookies for the next year. He hadn’t been in the Summerlin street last Friday afternoon to see Peter Hale’s broken body, blood puddling under his head. To hear his mother wailing. To see the vacant, dead grief in his father’s eyes.
It was an upper-middle-class neighborhood, the kind where both parents had good jobs and twelve-year-old boys were latchkey kids, taking the bus home after school, letting themselves inside to watch television and play video games. Linda and Carter Hale thought they were lucky. Linda Hale didn’t work. Peter had someone to open the door for him after school. He had been playing outside in the driveway, tossing a tennis ball against the door and catching it in his mitt, when Linda Hale heard the thump all the way inside the kitchen. And she knew, the way any mother knows that something catastrophic has happened. She found Peter outside, half on the sidewalk, half on the street. No one around. No witnesses. The most they found was a maid three blocks away who caught a glimpse of a blue car racing through the neighborhood around the time of the accident. The lab was dragging its feet figuring out the model from the blue paint and the pieces of grill. Serena knew that didn’t matter now. It was an Aztek. It was this car.
“Did you search inside the car?” Serena asked.
“No, ma’am, I sure didn’t,” Crawford assured her. “The car was locked, and that wouldn’t be procedure anyway. I didn’t touch a thing.”
“How about running the plates?”
“Well, that I did do. Yes, ma’am. The car is registered to Mr. Lawrence Busby. He doesn’t have a sheet. Thirty-four, African American, six-foot-two, two hundred forty-five pounds. Or that’s what his driver’s license says. Mr. Busby reported the car stolen at eight thirty last Friday night.”
“Several hours after the accident,” Serena said. “Isn’t that convenient?”
Crawford offered her a shy, country-boy smile. “I thought so myself. A little too convenient. That’s why I offered Mr. Busby a free ride over here to collect his vehicle.”
“You did what?” Cordy asked.
“I got the supervisor to send a patrol car over to Mr. Busby’s home on Bonanza. You know, in case he decided to make like a prairie dog and scamper. Then I called him. Told him we had found his car and we’d be happy to bring him over to the scene. He should be here in a couple minutes.”
“You’re one smart Texan, Officer Crawford,” Serena told him.
“Thank you, ma’am. That’s what my mama says. My wife, she’s not so sure.”
“How did Busby sound on the phone?”
“Well, the first thing he asked was whether there was any damage,” Crawford said. “Guess that’s natural, but I thought it was interesting. I told him it was nothing a good body shop couldn’t make go away.”
Serena thought about it, trying to put herself in Busby’s shoes. He’s just killed a kid. He’s afraid someone saw the car, or that he left evidence behind at the scene that would lead them right to his doorstep. Another perp who watches too much CSI. So he ditches the car at the mall, then hops the bus home and reports it stolen. If he’s lucky, no one ever connects it to the accident. If they do, he’s laid the blame on someone else.
But something didn’t smell right. The Summerlin neighborhood in which the Hales lived was lily-white, and she figured that a black man the size of Lawrence Busby would have attracted somebody’s attention. She also couldn’t understand why Busby, who lived a couple of miles from downtown, would be speeding around a residential neighborhood on the far west side of the city.
“Open the car for us, will you, Crawford?” Serena asked. “I’d like to take a look before Busby gets here.”
“Don’t we need a warrant for that?”
Serena shrugged. “That’s a stolen vehicle, according to Mr. Busby. We need to look for evidence of who stole it.”
Crawford popped the trunk of his patrol car, pulled out a stiff narrow wire with a loop at one end, and disengaged the lock on the driver’s door of the Aztek in a few seconds. Taking care not to disturb any prints, he gingerly swung the door open.
Serena peered inside, then squeezed behind the wheel. She looked around. Busby had cleaned up after himself. The interior was spotless, vacuumed clean, no papers or trash. With the tip of a pen, she opened the glove compartment, but found only the owner’s manual inside. She pulled open the ashtray. It was unused.
She heard the back door open.
“Anything up front?” Cordy asked.
“Zip.”
“I’ll check under the seats.”
Serena saw a flashlight beam scooting like a searchlight on the floor.
Cordy whistled. “Come to papa,” he said. “Got a piece of paper here. Looks like a receipt.”
Serena got out of the car and watched Cordy maneuver his arm under the seat. He emerged triumphantly a few seconds later, clutching a two-inch by three-inch white slip in the tiny jaws of a tweezer. He shined the flashlight on the paper, and Serena leaned in with him to get a better look.
The receipt was from a convenience store somewhere near Reno, more than four hundred miles to the north. Six Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a Sprite at eight in the morning. Breakfast of champions. The receipt was dated more than two weeks prior to the accident.
“I reckon that’s Mr. Busby now,” Crawford said, as a second patrol car pulled silently into the lot.
As the car drew closer, Serena could see what looked like a grizzly bear in the front passenger seat. His driver’s license stats didn’t do him justice. Lawrence Busby had to weigh three hundred pounds. He had a moon-shaped face, black hair cut as flat as a pan on top of his skull, and jowls that drooped like the face of a bloodhound. Serena could see a sheen on the man’s ebony face. He was sweating.
“I bet his breasts are bigger than yours, too,” Cordy said, winking.
Serena fought back a grin. She saw Busby reaching for the door handle, and she held up a hand like a crossing guard stopping traffic in its tracks. The woman cop inside the car spoke sharply to Busby, and Serena saw the whites of his eyes get bigger. He put his hands back in his lap. Now he was sweating and scared.
Cordy crooked a finger at the cop in the patrol car, who got out and joined them. Serena approached the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. She left the door open, then used a button to roll down the passenger window. Cordy came over on that side, leaning his elbows on the door.
The car stank. Busby was wearing a gigantic Running Rebels T-shirt, and odor wafted from the wet stains at his pits and under his neck. His legs, like tree trunks, grew out of white shorts. Shifting nervously, he passed gas, then mumbled an apology. His eyes darted back and forth between Serena and Cordy.
“Mr. Busby?” Serena asked. “Is that your car there?”
Busby nodded. His chins swayed.
“How long have you owned it?”
“ ’Bout two months,” Busby mumbled. For a large man, he had a voice so soft that Serena had to strain to hear him.
Cordy jutted his face through the window. “You fit in that car, man? I wouldn’t think you’d fit in that car. What do you do, steer with that gut of yours there?”
Busby looked like he was about to cry.
“That’s enough, Cordy,” Serena said sharply. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Busby?”
“I’m a chef at the Lady Luck downtown.”
“A chef!” Cordy hooted. “They ever wonder why the guests look hungry and you got a big smile on your face?”
Busby meekly shook his head. “I don’t steal nothin’.”
“Do you work any other jobs?” Serena asked. “Anything to bring in a little extra cash?”
“No, I’ve been full-time at the Lady Luck for five years.”
“You ever been to Summerlin, Mr. Busby?”
“That rich place out west? Don’t think so. No reason to.”
“You didn’t go out there last Friday afternoon?” Serena continued.
“No. Like I said, I’ve never been there.” He wiped his forehead with a hand the size of a football. “What’s this all about?”
“This is about the kid you killed, you lying sack of shit,” Cordy told him.
Busby shook his head furiously. His eyes got even bigger and whiter. “I never killed nobody.”
“You ran down a little boy,” Cordy insisted. “Then you ran away like a piece of pussy, didn’t have the balls to tell his mother what you did.”
“You’re crazy,” Busby murmured. He turned to Serena. “He’s crazy. I didn’t do that. No way.”
“You want to tell us how your car got stolen?” Serena asked coolly.
“I parked in the Fremont Street lot downtown last Friday. When I came back, it was gone. I called it in. That’s what happened.”
“This was about eight thirty in the evening?”
“Guess so,” Busby replied. “Sounds about right.”
“And what were you doing downtown?” Serena asked. “Playing the slots?”
“I wasn’t playing, I was working,” Busby said. “Like I told you, I cook sausage and eggs at the Lady Luck.”
“When did you get to work?” Serena asked. She didn’t like where this was going.
“Around noon, like always.”
“You mean you parked the car in the Fremont ramp before noon?” she repeated, just to be sure.
“ ’Course. That’s what I do every day. That’s what I’m saying.”
Serena closed her eyes, feeling sick again. This time it was because she knew they were wrong. He had an alibi. She thought about Cordy teasing the man about his gut and then remembered, too, the tight fit as she slid into the Aztek to search. Wrong, wrong.
“Anybody work with you?” Serena asked. She knew she was wasting her breath. He wasn’t the one.
“Well, yeah, you’ve got a bunch of other cooks and waitresses in and out all day.”
“Did you take any breaks? How about a lunch break in the afternoon?” She was grasping at straws, and she knew it.
“No, I don’t take a lunch break. I work straight through.”
Serena couldn’t help smiling. She eyed the man’s whalelike physique. “Come on, Mr. Busby. No lunch break? You?”
Busby smiled for the first time, too. “The fact is, I’m trying to cut back. And, well, I guess I do have a little snack from time to time on the job.”
Serena sighed. “So tell us what happened to your car.”
“Not much to tell. I left work at the usual time, went back to the lot. No car. I always park in the same spot, so it’s not like I could have lost it. It just wasn’t there.”
“Any relatives have keys to your car?”
“I don’t have much in the way of relatives,” Busby said. “Mama’s dead, Daddy’s in the nursing home. Nobody wanted to marry me looking like this.”
Serena nodded. She felt like shit now, putting this poor man through the ringer. A sad, lonely life, and all she could do was sprinkle in a litde more pain and fear. Then she was going to have to tell him that he couldn’t have his car back tonight
She gestured to Cordy, and the two of them huddled. Cordy popped a piece of gum into his mouth and began chewing loudly. “He didn’t do it, did he?”
“Nope.”
“So what does that mean?” Cordy asked.
Serena stopped and thought about it The more she did, the less she liked the implications of what they had found. It didn’t feel like an accident anymore. It felt like something much worse.
“Somebody steals a car downtown and then just happens to get into a vicious hit-and-run in a suburb the same afternoon?”
“He killed the kid deliberately,” Cordy concluded.
“It sure feels that way.”
Serena remembered the receipt for the Krispy Kreme doughnuts. She returned to the patrol car, where Busby was waiting, and leaned inside.
“Did you go to Reno last month, Mr. Busby?”
Busby frowned. “No, I’ve never been to Reno. Not ever.”
Stride waited in Lieutenant Sawhill’s office, swirling coffee in his mug and staring down through the third-floor window at a black cat slinking across the street outside and disappearing into a garbage-strewn backyard. Not long after, a policeman sped by on a mountain bike that looked several sizes too small. His ass hung over the seat, and his knees were almost at his chin. The cat and the cop, both patrolling for rats.
The Homicide Detail was housed in the Downtown Command, Metro’s flagship building, modern and beige, its entrance lined with palm trees. The city fathers had located it in one of the city’s uglier neighborhoods, a few blocks from the downtown casinos, as if the presence of the police headquarters might somehow bring down the surrounding crime rate by osmosis. It wasn’t working.
Stride checked his watch and saw it was almost noon. His stomach was growling. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do more, sleep or eat.
Behind him, the office door opened and closed. Stride nodded at Lester Sawhill, who frowned and pointed a finger at the chair in front of his desk. The phone rang, and Sawhill picked it up. The lieutenant settled himself into his own leather chair, which was so large compared to his small frame that it made him look like a child visiting Daddy’s office. Stride took a seat, too, and waited.
“Good morning, Governor,” Sawhill announced, looking unimpressed, as if he talked to the governor every day.
Serena said she couldn’t remember ever being in Sawhill’s office when he wasn’t on the phone. He liked an audience. It reminded everyone of where he stood in the pecking order.
In Minnesota, Stride had reported to the deputy chief, a leprechaun of a man named Kyle Kinnick-K-2, they called him-who had elephant ears and a reedy voice that sounded like a clarinet played by a six-year-old. Sawhill wasn’t much taller than K-2, but he was a smoother piece of work. He seemed to get a haircut every five days, because the neat trim of his balding brown hair never changed at all. He had a narrow face like a capital V, pockmarked cheeks, and half-glasses that he wore on a chain around his neck when they weren’t pushed down to the little round bulb at the end of his nose.
Sawhill wore a modestly priced gray suit, old but well kept. His uniform. It didn’t matter if it was a July day under, the blistering sun, according to Serena. Sawhill never went so far as to open the collar button of his shirt or loosen the knot in his tie. He never raised his voice, which was toneless but utterly in control. He didn’t seem to have any emotions at all, at least none that made their way onto his face or that lit up his brown eyes.
“That’s a very nice gesture, Governor,” Sawhill said into the phone. He had a pink stress ball on his desk that he squeezed rhythmically, his slim fingers tensing. Every now and then, he studied a fingernail, as if it might need filing.
Stride might as well have been invisible, listening to the one-sided conversation.
It had taken years for Stride to trust K-2, because deep inside, Stride always believed that moving up the ladder in the police bureaucracy meant being a smart politician and giving up the things that made you a good cop. K-2 was different. For him, the cops came first. Stride respected him for his loyalty.
Maybe someday Lester Sawhill would convince him that he, too, was on the side of the angels, but Stride didn’t think so. That wasn’t to say that Sawhill was a bad man. He wasn’t. Stride knew he was intensely moral. A Mormon, like so many senior officials in Sin City. No caffeine. No tobacco. No alcohol. Lots of kids-at least seven, Stride figured, counting up the photographs he saw propped on the bookshelves behind Sawhill’s desk. But Sawhill put God and Vegas first, not his cops.
Stride didn’t know how Sawhill and the other Mormons survived here. They could work in the casinos but not gamble. They were religious in a godless town. He found it strange and a little hypocritical, like a bartender who thinks drinking is evil but doesn’t mind watching others pour poison down their throats.
Sawhill hung up the phone. “That was Governor Durand,” he explained, in case Stride had missed it. “That should give you an idea of the concern that exists over this homicide.”
“I’m aware of that,” Stride replied.
“This is a very public case, Detective,” Sawhill added. “A celebrity murder. The communications department is already fielding press inquiries from around the world.”
Stride could translate Sawhill’s meaning easily enough. If the lieutenant had known it would turn out to be such a high-profile case, he would never have turned it over to his black sheep, the untested detective from Minnesota and his transsexual partner. Not in a million years. Now it was too late to yank them. Unless Stride gave him a reason by screwing up.
“That reminds me,” Sawhill continued. “Direct any media inquiries to the PR office. Okay? You’ve got a case to solve. I don’t want you wasting your time with reporters. That goes for Amanda, too.”
Amanda most of all, Stride thought. Sawhill didn’t want either of them representing the city or, worse, snatching the limelight.
“What’s the status of the investigation? I need to tell the mayor something.”
“We have the perpetrator on film,” Stride said. “He left us his fingerprint. Deliberately. That’s a pretty ballsy move, and not like a hired gun who’s just doing a job.”
Sawhill narrowed his eyes. “Were his prints in the system?”
“No. We couldn’t get a good read on his face, either. He knew where the cameras were. All in all, one cool customer.”
“You’re sure he was after Lane? This wasn’t a random thrill kill?”
“It wasn’t a typical hit. But random? No. He was after MJ. Tracked him and killed him.”
“You have a line on a motive?” Sawhill asked impatiently.
“Drugs, gambling, women. Pick one, you’ve got a motive. But so far no reason to think any of them got him killed.”
“So how do you plan to crack the case?” He was the inquisitor now, probing for a weakness, looking for Stride to give him an excuse to pull him off the murder.
“We’re doing a sketch from what we’ve got, which isn’t much. The Oasis guys are reviewing their entrance tapes for the last month, to see if he was inside casing the joint and may have been a little less careful about keeping his face hidden. We’re backtracking MJ’s route that day and using the sketch to see if anyone spotted the perp when he picked up MJ’s tail. Amanda and I are talking to everyone who knew MJ or saw him recently, to see if we can pick up a thread on who he might have pissed off. And I want to talk to MJ’s father. There was something going on between them. It may be nothing, but it’s the only sign so far that anything was amiss in MJ’s party-boy life.”
Sawhill shook his head. “It might be better if I talked to Walker Lane myself.”
“Why is that?” Stride asked, struggling to betray no irritation in his voice.
“Walker Lane is a wealthy, influential man,” Sawhill said. He sounded like a teacher lecturing a slow student. “The governor himself was the one to break the news to Mr. Lane about the murder. I assume you’re not suggesting Mr. Lane is a suspect?”
“I have no reason to think so,” Stride said, “but a dispute was going on between Walker and MJ. We think they talked an hour before he was killed. It’s possible that MJ was involved in something that led to his death, and Walker might know what it is.”
Sawhill drummed his fingers on his desk. He nodded, looking unhappy. “All right, fine. You do the interview. But tomorrow, not today.” Stride began to protest, and Sawhill waved it aside. “Let’s give Mr. Lane a decent time to grieve. You’ve got plenty of other leads to follow. And kid gloves, Detective. He’s a powerful man who just lost his son.”
“Understood,” Stride said.
“How are you and Amanda getting along?” Sawhill asked. His face was stony, but Stride wondered if the man was hiding a smile.
“No problem. She’s smart. I like her.”
“Ah. Good.”
He sounded disappointed.
Stride barely had time to return from Sawhill’s office when Amanda poked her head around his cubicle wall.
“We’ve got company,” she told him brightly, her eyes twinkling. “Karyn Westermark in the flesh. And I do mean flesh.”
Stride followed Amanda to the third-floor conference room, which sported large windows looking out on the rabbit’s den of cubicles that made up the detective squad.
“Why’d they put her in the fishbowl?” Stride asked.
Amanda just grinned, and Stride understood when he reached the windows and saw that Karyn wore a white dress shirt, unbuttoned, with its flaps tied in a loose bow beneath her breasts, which were in serious danger of spilling out each time she leaned forward. Stride also noticed that most of the detectives had found reasons to take the long way to the kitchen to buy soda, a route that steered them past the windows of the conference room.
He went in and told Amanda to close the blinds.
“Sure, make me the bad guy,” Amanda muttered under her breath.
Karyn stood up and reached across the desk to shake his hand, offering another expansive view of her cleavage. Stride didn’t dare let his eyes drift south, and he saw a faint amusement in Karyn’s face, as if she were enjoying his struggle.
“I’m Karyn,” she said, pronouncing her name as if it were spelled Corinne.
Stride wasn’t familiar with her as an actress, but Amanda had already prepped him. Us magazine, Amanda told him again. Karyn was an up-and-coming soap star, trying to make the leap to the big leagues. She was L.A. stunning, with straight blond hair that reached well below her shoulders and glowed like a summer wheat field. She had a model’s long face and cool blue eyes, which reflected the sharp intelligence of someone who knew exactly how much power she had simply because of how she looked. Through the glass tabletop, he saw a red skirt that ended at the middle of her thighs, and then a long, silky expanse of bare legs.
“Thanks for coming in to talk to us, Ms. Westermark,” Stride said. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“A skinny no-foam latte would be great,” Karyn replied.
“I’m afraid we have black coffee, and we have white powder with little plastic spoons,” Stride replied. He added, “The powder goes in the coffee.”
Karyn smiled at him, but there was ice in her eyes and the barest nod of appreciation. “No coffee.”
“I’m very sorry about MJ. It sounds like the two of you were close.”
“I don’t think I’d go that far,” Karyn replied.
“No? We heard you spent a lot of time together. Including last night at the Oasis.”
“We were fuck buddies,” she said with a shrug. “We’d hook up when we were both in Vegas. Party. Gamble. Screw. That’s all.”
“Were you shocked to hear he’d been murdered? Right after you left him?”
“Sure.”
Stride didn’t think she was likely to break down crying.
“Do you have any idea who killed MJ? Or why?”
Karyn shook her head. “None at all.”
“When the two of you got together, was it usually at the Oasis?”
“Most of the time, but we’d go other places, too. The Hard Rock. Mandalay. If there was a fight or a concert, we’d be there.”
“How long had you known him?” Stride asked.
“A couple of years. I met him at a party at the Oasis. You know, he was young, cute, threw money at everyone. What’s not to like? He had a limo with him that first night, and we went for a ride, and I guess that’s how it all got started.”
“You had sex with him?” Stride asked.
Karyn leaned forward. Her breasts grazed the tabletop. Through her smile, he saw a glint of her cherry-red tongue. “I made a bet with him at the party that I could make him come using nothing but my right nipple.”
Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, Stride told himself.
“Who won the bet?” he asked.
Shit
Karyn’s eyes danced. He could see gold flecks in a sea of blue. “We had a bottle of Krug at Spago that night. MJ’s treat.”
Stride cleared his throat and tried to stay on track. “Was this a serious relationship?”
“What, like marriage? No way. I didn’t want to sign an eighty-page prenup.”
“Did MJ see other women?”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Like who?” Stride asked.
“I didn’t really keep track, Detective. The only one I. knew about was Tierney Dargon.”
Stride wrote down the name. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Tierney likes to pretend she’s part of our crowd, but she was just a cocktail waitress who got lucky and married some rich old comedian.”
“Comedian? You mean Moose Dargon?” Stride asked.
“That’s the one.”
Stride had heard of Moose Dargon, a comedian from the Rat Pack days who had a reputation as a bad boy in his prime. He had seen him on television a few times and remembered almost nothing from his act except that the man had an amazing set of eyebrows, which rippled on his face like giant caterpillars. He hadn’t even realized that Moose was still alive.
“What does Tierney look like?” he asked, thinking of the brunette in the video they had seen in MJ’s condominium.
“Brown hair, sort of kinky. Thin. Pretty.”
That description fit the girl in the video, as well as half the women in Las Vegas, Stride thought.
“Moose must be in his eighties,” Stride said. “How old is Tierney?”
“Maybe twenty-five.” Karyn laughed. “I’m sure it was a love match, Detective.”
“Was Tierney around last night?”
“I didn’t see her, but MJ said Tierney was always hanging on him. He was looking to get rid of her. I mean, she’s got a tight little body, but she’s still just a waitress.”
“Did Moose Dargon know that MJ was having an affair with his wife?”
“You’d have to ask Moose,” Karyn said.
“If MJ was seeing other women, what were you getting out of the relationship?” Stride asked.
“He was rich,” Karyn replied. “I like to live that way. Besides, whenever I was with him, the paparazzi usually hung out. I’m not at a point in my career when I can afford to find that annoying. I need them.”
“There were no photographers last night,” Stride said.
“I only got into town that afternoon. I guess they hadn’t smelled us out yet.”
“Who else knew the two of you were going to be together that night?”
Karyn thought about it. “My assistant. She’s in L.A. And my parents in Boca Raton.”
“Who did you tell here in town?”
“Well, the people at the Oasis when I checked in. I also used a bodyguard while I was shopping in the afternoon; but I told him I wouldn’t need him for the evening. And I made reservations in our names at Olives.”
“Who do you think MJ would have told?”
“I really don’t know, Detective. I didn’t know much about the other parts of his life.”
“How about the videotape of you and MJ?” Stride asked. “The one that wound up on the Internet, How did that happen?”
“You mean, why did I make it?” Karyn asked, licking her glossy lips. “Or do you want me to autograph your copy?”
“I mean, how did it get stolen?”
Stride thought he saw a ghost of a smile on Karyn’s face.
“I have no idea,” Karyn said. “But I’m sure glad it did. I got more ink from taking it up the ass in that video than I would have got with an Academy Award.”
“How did MJ feel about the tape getting out?” he asked.
“He thought it was cool. No one knew who he was before that.”
“Let’s talk about the parties at the casinos. Any drugs there?”
Karyn’s eyes narrowed. “I’m starting to feel like I need a lawyer.”
From the doorway, Amanda broke into the conversation. “This is Vegas, Karyn. What happens here, stays here, remember? We’re not out to bust you for anything. We just need the real dope. So to speak.”
Karyn noticed Amanda for the first time and gave her a long, careful look. She nodded approvingly. “Okay. Sure. We’ve been known to take the occasional snort.”
“Who supplied?” Stride asked. “You or MJ?”
“I don’t want to know where it comes from, okay? If it’s there, then I’ll be a recreational user like anyone else, but I don’t buy, I don’t sell.”
“And MJ?”
“Supply was never a problem with MJ,” Karyn said. “I don’t know where he got it.”
“Any ideas?”
Karyn shrugged. “There are always hangers-on. People at the fringes. Maybe it’s a driver. Or a waiter. When you’ve got the kind of money MJ did, and you lead the kind of life he did, you don’t have to worry about it. Those people find you.”
“Did they find MJ last night?”
“Not that I saw.”
“What kind of life did MJ lead?” Amanda asked. She was doing her best to look cool and cynical, but Stride thought that Amanda was a little star-struck by Karyn’s presence.
“He was the life of the party,” Karyn replied, pinning Amanda with her blue eyes. “It’s fun being in the fast lane, you know. You should join us sometime, Detective.”
“I’ve got more than you can take,” Amanda replied, laughing.
“What, because you’re a tranny?” Karyn asked. She smiled as Amanda’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. “You can pass with a lot of people, Detective, but a real woman knows the difference. Not that I have a problem with it. A lot of people in our circle would find it a turn-on.”
Stride interrupted. “Here’s the problem I have with all this, Ms. Westermark. MJ may have been the life of the party, but someone followed him and put a bullet in his brain. So somebody had a beef with him.”
“I don’t know who,” Karyn said, reluctantly breaking her eye contact with Amanda and turning back to Stride. “MJ was the gravy train. He was the one paying all the bills. Who’s going to mess with that?”
“He never lost his temper?”
“MJ? No. He was a little kid. He wanted everyone to like him. The only time I ever heard him arguing with anyone was with his dad. They went at it all the time.”
“His dad is a movie producer in Canada, right?” Stride asked.
“Sure, like Tom Hanks is some actor,” Karyn replied dismissively. “Everyone in the business knows Walker Lane. Hell, I admit it, I first came on to MJ because I thought he would put in a good word for me with the old man. But I learned fast enough that MJ didn’t want anything to do with Walker, except take his money.”
“He tell you why?”
“No, but it was always something. They argued about money. They argued about his mom. They argued about MJ living in Vegas. I was at MJ’s condo a few weeks ago when Walker called. MJ went ballistic. Took the phone and threw it against the wall. I’d never seen him like that.”
“Do you know when he last talked with his dad?” Stride asked.
“Sure. Last night.”
“What were they talking about?”
Karyn shrugged. She played with a scrap of paper on the desk, rolling it into a ball and rubbing it between two long nails.
“I don’t know. But MJ was pissed. So was I. We took a break from the blackjack tables and went up to my suite to fool around. I was really in need of a good fuck, you know? But we barely got started when MJ’s cell phone rang. It was Walker. They yelled at each other for a few minutes, and MJ wasn’t in the mood anymore. So I left. I told him to grow up.”
“Then what?”
“Then nothing. I went to a club, was there until almost five. I hear MJ went back to the tables and kept drinking. And then he went out to find a hooker. Bad choice, huh? If he’d stayed with me, this never would have happened.”
Or you’d be dead, too, Stride thought.
“I’d really like to know what he and his father were arguing about,” Stride told her.
“And like I told you, I don’t know. You’d have to ask Walker. But here’s something for you. I mean, I heard something MJ said to his dad. Pretty ironic, given what happened to him.”
“What did he say?” Stride asked.
Karyn gave him a catlike smile. “He called Walker a murderer.”
Serena felt it as soon as Linda Hale let her inside her Summerlin home. Grief.
It hung in the air, multiplying like a virus. It clung to the furniture, gathered in the deep carpet, and threw a blurry film over the lights. Each room carried a tiny echo of loss, unmistakable, heartbreaking. There were toys still littering the floor in the den. A kid-sized Wilson football. PlayStation cartridges. A Harry Potter book. No one had picked them up, Serena knew, because no one could bear to touch them. You’d get grief on your fingers.
The silence was the worst of all. It wasn’t meant to be a quiet house. Twelve-year-old boys made noise. Shouted. Turned up the volume on the stereo. But there wasn’t a sound anymore. Right now, a marching band could have come down the hallway, and Linda Hale would have smiled.
They sat around a solid oak breakfast table, in a porch off the kitchen that looked out on a small, carefully landscaped cactus garden. Linda clutched a mug of coffee with both hands. There were family photos, a lifetime collection of memories, strewn across the table, dumped from an old shoe box.
“We found the car used in the hit-and-run,” Serena told her.
Linda nodded but didn’t react. She was staring at the photos, shiny eyes moving from one to the next.
Like Serena, she was in her midthirties. Her blond hair was cut in a short bob, a functional cut for a stay-at-home mom, quick out of the shower and off to Peter’s soccer practice. She didn’t need much makeup, but she wore silver earrings and a slim silver chain around her neck. She had on a stylish Kuhlman shirt with the cuffs folded back.
“Your husband is an executive at Harrah’s, is that right?” Serena asked.
“Yes,” she replied softly. Her mind was still on the photos. On the past.
The house was large for a family of three. Linda kept it well appointed, frequent trips to Pottery Barn, every china knickknack carefully placed and dusted. Precise. Ordered. She probably used to have trouble getting Peter to pick up after himself. Once upon a time, it must have driven her crazy.
Serena studied the photos. They spanned decades. She picked up one, staring at a little boy’s glowing eyes. He was at the beach.
Linda brightened. “That’s Cocoa, on the east coast of Florida. We took Peter with my mom to Orlando five years ago.” She slid another photo in front of Serena. “Here he is with Mickey. He was so scared at first. Then he gave him a big hug.”
More pictures. Peter on a bicycle with training wheels, his dad beside him. Peter in a soccer uniform. Linda’s mother-it had to be; the resemblance was striking-nose to nose with her grandson at Christmas. Husband and wife in a hospital room, Linda looking tired, holding her new baby.
“Peter looks happy,” Serena told her. It was something to say.
“Very.”
“You look a lot like your mom,” she added, hating small talk, especially with a mother who had lost her son.
“I know, everyone says it. But I’m not glamorous like her. She has showgirl looks, like you.”
“Maybe a decade ago, I did,” Serena said, smiling.
“No, no. You’ve got it, of course you do. So does Mom. Me, I just get older.” She shuffled through the pile and found an eight-by-ten print among the family photos. It was a black-and-white publicity shot of a dancer in full costume, wild with silk and sequins. The girl in the photo, who looked about twenty years old, was a dead ringer for Linda Hale.
“See? Forty years later, and my mom still can have any man she wants.” She laughed. “Usually does, too.”
“Is your dad alive?”
She shrugged. “Oh, yeah. Somewhere. Mom’s on number four now. Number one was a lot of years ago. Stepdad two was as close to a father as I got. That’s one of the reasons my husband and I worked so hard to give Peter a normal up-bringing. Why I stayed home with him.”
She took a sip of coffee and put it down on a wooden coaster. She was distant again. Asking questions, Serena thought. Talking to God. Why us when we did all the right things? Made the sacrifices?
“You said you found the car,” Linda said. Serena watched her emotions shift. Despair became anger, and her jaw hardened. “Does that mean you know who did this?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“I don’t understand,” she replied.
“The owner of the car wasn’t driving it at the time Peter was killed. He has an alibi. Someone stole his car and then abandoned it after the accident.”
“What does that mean?”
Serena explained. “One possibility is that Peter was struck while the driver of the car was fleeing from somewhere, or rushing to get someplace. Another is that we’re dealing with a psychopath, who set out to kill someone, and Peter was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the other-well, the other is that Peter was the target. That someone killed him deliberately.”
“But that’s crazy! He’s just a little boy.”
Serena nodded. “I know. We have to consider the possibility that someone was trying to inflict pain on you. That’s why I wanted to ask whether it was possible the two of you had any enemies.”
“Enemies who would murder our child?” She shook her head. “There’s nothing remotely like that.”
“I know it’s hard to believe. But a mother in Texas hired a hit man over her daughter’s cheerleading squad. People are capable of anything. So it would be helpful to know about any disputes, even ones that may seem trivial to you.”
Linda sat back in the chair. Her hands dropped to her sides. “This is too insane.”
“I know it seems that way. But if there’s anything-”
“That’s just it, there isn’t. We’re your average middle-class family. We keep to ourselves. We’re not in the public eye. My husband is an accountant, for heaven’s sake.”
“Has he dealt with any funny numbers lately? Or received any threats?”
“No, no. This isn’t the old days. It’s all public companies and SEC filings now. If a casino exec picks up a quarter from the floor, you can find it in a financial statement somewhere. Everything’s out in the open.”
“How about the personal side?” Serena asked. “Please don’t take this wrong. I have to ask. Are there any problems with drugs? Money?”
“Sorry, I don’t have a secret life. What you see is what you get. Same with my husband.”
“You two are happy? Have there been any sexual issues? Affairs? Things like that.”
Linda’s face screwed up. “Once a week on Friday night is enough for both of us. I hope you don’t need to know our favorite position.”
“I’m sorry,” Serena said. “I know this is intrusive.”
“I just don’t see how our sex life is going to help you find out who killed Peter.” Her voice rose sharply.
“I understand your impatience, but this is a very unusual hit-and-run. Most accidents like this involve someone local, often someone who was drinking. They’re scared, and they flee the scene. Usually, within a few days, a friend or family member turns them in, or the guilt overwhelms them and they come in voluntarily. There’s no motive. No intent. But what happened to Peter no longer feels like an accident.”
“I realize that, but I can’t help you,” Linda insisted. “We don’t have any skeletons in our closet. I’d tell you if we did.”
Serena watched her eyes. There was nothing furtive behind them. “Do you have any ties to Reno? Have you visited there recently?”
“Reno? Not in years. There are plenty of casinos around here if I want to drop a nickel in a slot. Why?”
“We think whoever did this was in Reno a few weeks ago. We found a receipt in the car. There may be a connection. Do you have friends or family there?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
Serena nodded. “If you think of something, or if anything unusual happens, I hope you’ll let me know.”
“Of course I will, but I really think you’re wrong about this. I just don’t see why anyone would deliberately hurt our family.”
“That’s what scares me,” Serena acknowledged.
“Why?”
“Because it means we may not find this person before he kills someone else.”
Stride and Serena made it home separately just before midnight on Sunday. He had been awake for almost twenty-four hours, but he was still too wired on caffeine simply to tumble into bed and sleep. The two of them barely turned on the lights before leaving again and taking Stride’s Bronco west into the hills. It had become a nighttime ritual for them. They followed Charleston until the houses ran out, before the road wound into Red Rock Canyon. He steered the Bronco off the paved road and climbed a rocky slope to the high ground. They turned around and parked, doors open, windows open, with the night air blowing through the truck and the expanse of the Las Vegas valley stretched out below them. The tracts of suburban homes inching up the street, eating more of the empty space week by week, were dark.
Even in July, when the daytime heat was ferocious, the night cooled in the hills, enough that the breeze sailing down over the peaks behind them made it bearable. Now, in the early fall, there was a hint of chill, like a Minnesota evening without the fragrant scent of pine. He could see literally the entire city, its myriad lights creeping out like vines in all four directions until they finally ran out in the darkness of the desert. Cutting through the middle was the fiery glow of the Strip, taller and brighter than anything else around it, a multicolored, bedazzling belt across the city’s fat belly.
From far away, without the sunlight, the valley sparkled. There was no orange rim of smog floating over the city like a smoke ring. The casinos were jewels.
Stride twisted his upper body and stared at Serena’s face in silhouette. He knew she felt him watching her. This was the time when it was just the two of them, peaceful, in love, free of the city. “You are way, way too beautiful,” he told her.
“If you want sex, you’re going to have to do better than that,” Serena replied, laughing.
“But that was my best line.”
He smiled and stroked her dark hair, in a way that told her he wanted her. He knew, when they got home, they would be too tired to do anything but sleep, and he very much wanted to make love to her.
She leaned across and kissed him. “Haven’t we proven it’s not safe for a man in his forties to do it in a truck? Last time, you almost threw your back out.”
“It was worth it.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she told him.
Serena pulled her T-shirt over her head. Her hair was mussed and sexy. She unhooked and wriggled out of her bra, then stretched her shoulders back. She reclined her seat and began peeling down her jeans. Her skin was firm, her breasts milky white like oyster shells in the pale light. He climbed over her and felt her fingers on his clothes.
He was back in his own seat a few minutes later, sweaty and sore. “Ow,” he said.
“Your back?”
“Back, arms, legs.”
“I told you so.”
Stride dangled his foot out of the truck and rubbed it against the loose dirt. He hoped that a scorpion wasn’t scuttling nearby, or that a rattlesnake wouldn’t choose that moment to slither from the rocks. Those were the real night creatures, doing what came naturally, unlike the human ones below them in the valley.
Serena lay next to him, bare and disheveled. She made no effort to repair her clothes. Her eyes were lost, focused into the hills. She touched her skin idly with her fingertips. “Think the novelty of this is ever going to wear off?”
“Us having sex?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope not.”
“I’m ready to go again,” she told him.
“You’re on your own.”
Serena gave him a mock sigh. “Did it ever wear off with Cindy?”
Stride smiled as a picture of his late wife flashed in his brain. “No. She was like you. She couldn’t get enough.”
“Oh yeah, I’m a sex fiend. I’m just glad vaginas aren’t like piercings.”
Stride looked at her. “What?”
“You know. Closing up from lack of use.”
He threw his head back and laughed, and Serena joined him. Her head fell against his shoulder, and he slipped an arm around her. They sat silently for a few more minutes, lulled by the wind.
The longer they sat, the more he felt her go away somewhere. That was how it usually happened. When they got close, and she felt safe with him, she took another step into her past and pulled another ghost from her closet.
It was a compliment, she told him. She had never done that with anyone else. Her secrets were like notes plugged up in bottles that she had long ago tossed into the sea. Now, one by one, they were drifting back to shore.
He knew only sketches of what she had gone through. Raw facts. She had told him what had happened to her as a teenager in clinical terms, like a doctor reciting from someone else’s file. Her mother used her as a whore to pay for drugs. She got pregnant, she had an abortion, she ran away. End of story. Only those kinds of stories never ended.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.
Serena took a long time to reply, and he wondered if she would drop it and go back to something safe, like work or music or the lights in the valley.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Deidre,” she said.
Deidre was the girl who had come to Las Vegas with Serena when she escaped from Phoenix at the age of sixteen. Serena had never told him much about her. Only how she died.
“Strange, huh?” she went on. “I really haven’t thought about her in years, but she’s been in my dreams lately. I fall asleep, and there she is.”
“She got AIDS. That wasn’t your fault.”
Serena rubbed her shoulders as if she were cold. “The thing is, I never went to see her. Maybe there was nothing I could do, but I didn’t have to let her die alone. I mean, she saved me. Back in Phoenix? She saved me. I was being abused night and day, and she helped me escape. I loved her, Jonny. I really loved her, those first few years we were together. But I just let her die.”
“You don’t need me to tell you that isn’t true, do you?” Stride asked.
Serena shrugged. “No. But it keeps coming back to me. You’d think by now it would all be gone, dead, not a big deal. But I can’t switch on part of myself with you and keep the rest shut off.”
Stride frowned. ‘’How can I help?”
“I’m not sure you can.”
“So I guess one alternative is to shut me off, too,” he said.
“Sure it is. But that’s not what I want. I just have to learn how to deal with all this-and keep you around.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She turned to him, unconvinced. “I know how you feel about this place. I’m worried that you’ll hate this city more than you love me. You’ll go back home to Minnesota, where your heart is.”
“My heart’s here with you.”
Serena took one of his hands and kissed his fingertips. “Thank you for saying that.”
But he wasn’t sure she believed him. He wasn’t sure he believed himself.
He went to reach for her again, but somewhere on the floor mat, where her jeans were crumpled, her cell phone started ringing. Serena laughed, setting the tense moment aside, and found the phone.
Stride heard a man’s voice. Serena brightened. “Hey, Jay, hang on a second.”
She quickly covered the phone and whispered to Stride. “Jay Walling is a detective I know in Reno. Sixty years old and very dapper. Watches too many Sinatra movies.” She spoke into the phone again. “Jay, I’ve got another detective with me. I’m going to put you on speaker.”
She pushed a button and then continued, “Jay Walling, meet Jonathan Stride, and vice versa.”
“How are you, Jay?” Stride said.
“Excellent, thanks.” His voice had a smooth elegance. “So, Serena, is this the man you’re playing house with? Or did Cordy finally get arrested on a morals charge?”
Even in the darkness of the car, Stride could feel Serena flush with embarrassment.
“Nice to see the rumors have made their way across the state, Jay. Yes, Jonny and I are an item, and no, the women of Las Vegas are still not safe from Cordy. Mind if I ask who told you about us?”
“My lieutenant, actually,” Walling said. “He’s tight with Sawhill.”
“Great, just great.”
“Don’t be offended, darling. My wife will be relieved. She’s been looking for someone to fix you up with since we worked that case together last year.”
“Don’t make it sound like the impossible dream,” Serena snapped.
“Nonsense. You just have high standards. Detective Stride, my congratulations. Serena is one of my favorite people in the whole world, so treat her nice or I’ll have to have you rubbed out.”
Stride laughed, and Serena groaned. “Jay, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to have you rubbed out. Now, did you run down that receipt for me from my hit-and-run car?”
Walling chuckled. “Six Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a Sprite. At least we know your perp isn’t diabetic.”
“Funny.”
“I tracked down the store, but it was a cash sale, and the owner doesn’t remember a thing.”
“No surprise. That’s what I figured. Thanks for trying.”
“Yes, but there’s something else. I was hoping you might be able to fly up to Reno tomorrow.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because I don’t like coincidences,” Walling said. “The same day your perp got his sugar fix in Reno, a woman got murdered on a ranch a few miles south of here. Someone cut her throat.”
Stride began to do research on MJ’s father, Walker Lane, following dozens of links on the Web from the computer in his cubicle. There was no official home page about the man, just gossipy sites that rehashed the same dry facts from his Hollywood biography and spiced up the written record with hints about his reclusive lifestyle in Canada.
There was plenty of information about Lane’s early days in the 1960s, when he was a wunderkind producer-director who struck it rich with his first self-funded film. From the beginning, he was about money, not art. Cherry Tree featured a fifteen-year-old newcomer, sort of a Hayley Mills with breasts, whose huge eyes and innocent sex appeal won over audiences, despite a lame spy story about a teenager helping George Washington win the Revolutionary War. Two more family comedies followed, both hugely successful, and Lane won a reputation as Frank Capra Lite, the boy with the golden touch. Because he hadn’t thrown in his lot with the big studios, he reaped the financial rewards himself.
Scandal dogged him, mostly because there were rumors on the set that he had been having an affair with his underaged star since their first film together. Lane denied it, but he didn’t hide his playboy ways, partying in L.A. and Vegas, and leaving a trail of photographs of himself with starlets on his arm.
Then came the big disappearance.
As far as Stride could tell, it happened in 1967. Lane left Hollywood, moved to Canada, and essentially vanished from the public eye. From a distance, he continued to build his reputation as a mover and shaker. He chose and funded a series of monster hits throughout the next three decades, deftly moving in and out of comedy and drama as public tastes changed. He never directed again, not as far as Stride could tell, but he became a huge force, a star-maker, without ever setting foot out of his estate in British Columbia. He was the executive producer behind two of the twenty highest-grossing films ever.
He became almost fanatically private. Actors and directors who met with him signed nondisclosure agreements. Like Howard Hughes, he seemed to run his empire primarily by phone. Stride couldn’t find a photograph of the man taken in the last twenty years. There were rumors of a disabling illness that left him in a wheelchair and of facial degeneration that had ravaged his once handsome, boyish looks. There were also rumors of a scandal that had driven him out of the country, but as far as Stride could tell, no one had pierced the veil and uncovered the real story.
Lane married a young actress in the early 1980s, after she interviewed for a role in a science fiction film he was bankrolling. She didn’t get the part, but she got Walker, and two years later, MJ was born. There were no public details about the relationship between Walker and his twenty-something wife, but somewhere along the line, it went badly wrong. Stride found news reports from 1990 about the woman’s suicide. There was no public memorial, no photograph of a grieving Walker Lane, and no public comment. She might as well not have existed.
Stride couldn’t find any evidence that Lane had given an interview in decades. That wasn’t a good sign. He didn’t expect the man to open up and discuss all his father-son secrets with a police detective from Las Vegas.
“You ready for your close-up?” Amanda asked, dropping into the chair squeezed inside his cube. She looked scrubbed and rested, which made him feel old. He had taken Serena to McCarran to catch an early flight to Reno, and two cups of coffee hadn’t dented the haze in his head. On the other hand, his body still had the pleasant ache from cramped, sweaty sex with Serena a few hours earlier.
“I’ll be lucky if he takes my call,” Stride said.
“He’s still a father with a dead kid. He’s got to be anxious to find out what happened.”
Stride shrugged. “Maybe. Sounds like Sawhill practically had to beg the governor to get Lane’s number. Nobody wants me to make this call.”
“Except me, because I want to hear what the big guy sounds like. So make it.”
“Let’s go in a conference room.”
They took over a small, windowless office and shut the door behind them. Stride had another cup of coffee with him, and Amanda had a cruller and a glass of orange juice. They sat down on opposite sides of the conference table, and Stride dragged the phone to him. Amanda had a yellow pad in front of her. He punched the hands-free button and dialed the number.
He expected to go through five layers of secretaries, personal assistants, and senior aides. Instead, almost immediately, the man answered his own phone.
“Walker Lane.” His voice sounded exactly like the one they had heard on the answering machine in MJ’s condo, but flat, without the emotional pleading. It was a terrible voice, as gritty as sandpaper, an old hound trying to bark like a fierce dog in its prime.
Stride couldn’t help but think of the photo he’d found of Walker Lane in the 1960s: absurdly tall, a mop of blond hair, Clark Kent glasses. Cocksure, as if he would someday own the world, which he pretty much did today. The price he’d paid was chiseled in his voice.
Stride introduced himself and Amanda. Lane didn’t sound surprised. Stride wondered if the governor had tipped him off to expect the call.
“Do you have any idea who killed my son?” he demanded.
Stride explained what they had found on the casino video-tapes and the steps they were taking to retrace MJ’s movements. “We were wondering,” he added, “if you had any idea who the killer might be or why he wanted your son dead.”
“No, I don’t. I just want you to find him.”
“Did MJ talk to you about any problems he was having?” Stride asked.
“No.”
“Do you know of anyone in Las Vegas he was particularly close to?”
“No,” Lane repeated.
“What about women in his life? Did you know who he was involved with?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Walker Lane didn’t waste unnecessary words. Stride realized he was just going to have to lay down his cards.
“Mr. Lane, we heard the message you left for MJ on his answering machine. We know you talked to MJ shortly before he was killed. There was obviously a significant disagreement between the two of you. Can you tell us what it was about?”
This time there was a long pause.
“That’s a private matter, Detective. It has nothing to do with his death.”
“I understand you feel that way, Mr. Lane,” Stride said, choosing his words carefully, “but sometimes we find connections in ways we don’t anticipate. Or we can pursue more productive areas of investigation because we can cross things off the list.”
In other words, we’ll keep digging until we find out, Stride wanted to say.
Lane didn’t take the bait. He didn’t say a word.
Stride finally gave up after the silence stretched out too long. “How long had MJ lived in Vegas?”
“Since he turned twenty-one.” Lane’s tone was clipped, unhappy.
“You didn’t approve?” Stride asked.
“No.”
Stride began to understand why the man had never made a movie longer than eighty-seven minutes. “Why is that?”
“Because the city is a sewer,” Lane snapped. “It’s immoral. A wasteland. There are only two kinds of people living there, users and suckers.”
Amanda casually held up one hand and extended her middle finger at the phone. Stride shrugged.
“When were you last here?” he asked.
“A lifetime ago, Detective.”
“A lot’s changed since then,” Stride said.
“Nothing’s changed. Nothing at all. Now, if you have nothing else, let me go back to my job, and you can go back to yours. Finding out who killed my son.”
“I do have a few more questions,” Stride said.
Lane’s impatience crackled through the phone line. “What?”
Stride was running out of ideas for making the man talk and decided to take a wild leap. “MJ seemed to be very interested in that new casino project near his building. The Orient project that Boni Fisso is launching. Do you know why?”
“I have nothing to say about Boni Fisso,” Lane hissed.
Stride and Amanda looked at each other. Boni’s name had obviously struck a raw nerve.
“Was MJ somehow involved with the Orient project?” Stride persisted.
Lane exhaled in disgust. Stride wished he were there in person to read the man’s body language.
“MJ didn’t care about the new casino,” Lane retorted. “All he could talk about was the Sheherezade.”
“Why is that?” Stride asked.
There was another stretch of silence.
“The Sheherezade,” Lane said. “When I read it was coming down, I thought finally it would all be over.”
He paused, but Stride could hear the fissures in the dam grow wider. Lane wanted to tell them. Just like he had wanted to tell MJ.
“Boni couldn’t just drop it in the dead of night. Let everyone wake up and find a pile of rubble. All its secrets leveled, ready to be carted away. No, no, make it another goddamn tourist attraction. The governor’s going to push the button. Half the congressional delegation will be there applauding. Like it was something noble. Like they were saying goodbye to something sacred.”
“What happened there?” Stride asked.
“Las Vegas killed me, that’s what happened,” Lane retorted. “Now it’s killed my son. Both of us. My God, it never ends. Sins live forever in that city. I just never believed it could reach out and destroy me again.”
Stride waited until he was done. He could hear Lane gasping for breath.
“You sound like you think you know why MJ was killed,” Stride said. He added, “Does it have something to do with Boni Fisso?”
“No, Detective, I don’t know why. The past is the past, and I have no reason to think what happened then has any relevance to what happened to MJ. Or any connection to Boni. I don’t see how it could.”
“Still-” Stride began.
“Still, you want to know. You’re curious. That’s your lot in life. I’m sorry. I’ve said more than I should have already, and I can’t say anymore.”
Amanda leaned closer to the phone. “But if it was so long ago, Mr. Lane, why not tell us?”
“No, I can’t. I’m grieving over MJ. I’m wishing I had been a better father. That’s enough pain without dredging up mistakes I made when I was a young fool.”
“Mr. Lane,” Stride said, “we know that MJ called you a murderer.”
“Yes, he did.”
“Why?”
Lane sighed. “You’ll have to ask Rex Terrell about that, Detective.”
Stride remembered the answering machine message in MJ’s condo. He quickly checked his notes.
MJ, it’s Rex Terrell I thought we could trade some secrets. I showed you mine, how about you show me yours?
“Who’s Rex Terrell?” Stride asked.
“He’s a writer,” Lane replied, his voice curling around the word with contempt. “He’s the one who dragged this trash up about the Sheherezade and put ideas in MJ’s head. Ask him to tell you what I did, and maybe you can find a way to kill me again. I’ve died many times, Detective. What’s once more?”
Serena sped south out of Reno in a rented Malibu, gulping in the sweet mountain air that whipped through the car, and cranking Terri Clark on the stereo until the speakers of the Chevy vibrated.
“I think the world needs a drink,” Terri sang in her Canadian twang.
People sometimes told Serena she looked like Terri Clark, without the cowboy hat. Both tall, with silky dark hair. Maybe that was why Serena liked her so much.
Like the world in the song on the radio, Serena realized, she needed a drink. When she licked her lips, she could still imagine the taste of vodka, although it had been more than a decade since she quit. A drink was a no-no, off-limits, verboten. She imagined it was like Jonny and cigarettes. It didn’t matter if it was one year or twenty, the desire could come back in an instant and take your breath away.
Her mother’s face flashed in her brain. She tried to will it away by gazing out the window at the crown of Mt. Rose in the distance, but her mother might as well have been standing by the side of the road like a hitchhiker in some old episode of The Twilight Zone. Appearing over and over, following her. Of all the things her mother had done to her that she couldn’t forgive, the worst was passing along her addictive genes. For her mother, the demon was cocaine. For Serena, the demon was alcohol. For two years in her early twenties, she had drunk her way into deadness. She was grateful for AA and for a crowd of strangers who had pulled her back.
Those were the two years after Deidre died. Funny that she didn’t start drinking when the two of them left Phoenix, when the flashbacks of the drug dealer’s dirty hands on her breasts still visited her every night. Or that she didn’t start when Deidre began having sex with men for money and encouraging Serena to do the same. No, it was years later, when Deidre was out of her life. A week after her funeral. One drink became two, two became ten, and ten bled so easily into hundreds.
Someone had told her that Deidre weighed sixty-eight pounds when she died. Serena shivered in the car. The girl she had known was so different, so alive. Red, kinky hair. A trashy way of dressing and walking that men loved, like they loved the tattoo above the crack of her ass, a coiled serpent that seemed to wriggle with pleasure whenever her shirt rode up. She had pale skin, not made for the southwestern sun. Her whiteness set her apart in a town of bronzed bodies. When she was naked in the shower, she almost seemed to glow.
The truth was that Deidre and Serena were never from the same world. Deidre was fast in a fast town, a perfect fit. For the first few years, Serena was grateful that Deidre had plucked her out of the lion’s mouth, but sooner or later, she was bound to split off and go her own way. Eventually, she left Deidre and moved out.
They never talked again. When Deidre died, the guilt came crashing down on Serena, and she filtered it through bottles of Absolut.
She remembered how amazing it was to her that she could put bottles in the freezer and let the alcohol get colder and colder and colder, and still it didn’t freeze.
Sixty-eight pounds, God.
Following the directions that Jay Walling had given her, she pulled onto the shoulder at the end of a long dirt track off old 395, near the house where the murder had taken place. She got out of the car and enjoyed the silence. The few sounds she did hear were crisp and clear, like the crunch of gravel under her feet and the distant rumble of a plane climbing over the hills out of the Reno airport. A hawk pin-wheeled above her, scanning the fields, but otherwise, she didn’t see another living soul anywhere around her.
A handful of old ranch houses dotted the overgrown fields. Farm machinery lay rusted and unused nearby, and telephone wires sagged between poles. She saw the tall mountains to the west, with evergreens climbing the sides and patches of snow clinging to the very peaks. Closer by, the foothills were covered with auburn down, which would turn green when the rains came.
The house she had come to see was modest, a gray twostory with an RV parked on the side. Its closest neighbor was a half mile away. There was a large white-fenced meadow in which she expected to see horses, but it was empty, its bitter-brush bending in the cool breeze. The air was fragrant with wild flowers.
She had a large cup of coffee. She sipped it while she waited, leaning against the hood of the car. Fifteen minutes later, she watched a white Ford Taurus pull up behind her. It was glossy, as if it had just been washed. Serena figured that Jay Walling probably took personal offense at any dirt particles that had the audacity to affix themselves to his car. She knew Walling well. They had worked a nasty homicide the year before, in which a body had been found in the Las Vegas desert and its head had turned up in the ball rack of a Reno bowling alley. Who said murderers didn’t have a sense of humor?
“What say, Jay?” Serena said as Walling got out of the car. “What’s with the bird crap on your coat?”
He looked down in horror, and Serena laughed. Walling wore a black shearling overcoat that must have cost him two thousand dollars, and he pampered it like a baby. He also wore a black fedora that made him look like a holdover from 1950s Manhattan. He was tall, with a long face and a boxy mustache.
“I’ve missed your sense of humor, sweetheart,” Walling told her. “I hope my phone call last night didn’t interrupt a little love fest between you and Detective Stride. I was truly figuring I would get your voice mail.”
“Ten minutes earlier, and you might have heard some heavy breathing.”
“Ah, good” Walling looked a little uncomfortable with the details. “So is it serious?”
“I think so,” Serena admitted. “He seems to think so, too. I’m trying not to screw it up.”
Walling, who knew some of Serena’s history, nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I appreciate your coming up here. Can you tell me more about this receipt you found?”
Serena gave Walling a quick summary of the hit-and-run in which Peter Hale had been killed and told him about their discovery of Lawrence Busby’s car in the parking lot of the Meadows Mall. “The receipt was under die driver’s seat,” she said.
“No line yet on who stole the car?”
Serena shook her head.
“Shame. This could all mean nothing, but it smells funny. That receipt of yours was from a little convenience store less than five miles away. About two hours after those half-dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts got sold, a woman was murdered at this ranch. Then the receipt shows up in a stolen car used in a hit-and-run in Las Vegas.”
“I don’t like it.”
“No, neither do I.”
“So what happened here?” Serena asked, inclining her head toward the ranch house.
Walling tugged at his mustache and then removed the fedora. He smoothed his carefully trimmed gray hair.
“Brutal killing. We don’t get cases like this very often. Albert Ford came home from a golf game and found the front door open and his wife lying in the foyer. Clean cut across the carotid. Near as we can tell, she opened the door, and the perp dropped her right there. Bloody mess.”
“Motive?”
“We don’t have one,” Walling said. “Nothing was taken from the house. It doesn’t look like he even went inside.”
“And no witnesses?”
Walling shrugged and gestured at the empty landscape. “Out here? Not many neighbors. The road dead-ends to the east. We haven’t found anybody who saw a thing.”
“What do we know about the woman who was killed?”
“Salt of the earth,” Walling said. “Both of them. The Fords are multi-generation Reno residents. Both retired. Albert Ford bred horses for decades and sold out a few years ago. His wife Alice was a schoolteacher-third grade. She put in thirty-five years and retired around the same time that Al unloaded the horses.”
Serena shook her head. “A third-grade schoolteacher?”
“Exactly. It makes no sense.”
“And Al is in the clear?”
Walling nodded. “His golfing buddies gave him an alibi. Alice had been dead for several hours when he found her.”
“They have kids?”
“Four. All grown. The youngest is in her early thirties.”
“Any of them in Las Vegas?” Serena asked.
“No, two in Los Angeles, one in Boise, one in Anchorage. All clean. Alice has a brother in Reno, but that’s it within the state. Al’s the only one left in his family.”
“I don’t suppose the brother is mobbed up,” Serena said.
Walling laughed. “Retired director of an adoption agency. He’s in a retirement home now.”
“So we have a twelve-year-old boy run down by a car and a retired schoolteacher with her throat cut,” Serena said. “Nothing similar about the MO, nothing similar about the location. The only thing we have to tie the cases together is a few doughnuts. Maybe we’re just blowing smoke here, Jay.”
“Except both vies do have something in common,” Walling said.
“Oh?”
“We can’t find a reason why anyone would want to kill them.”
Rex Terrell was thirty minutes late.
It was fiveo’clock, and Stride and Amanda had a booth in the corner at Battista’s, underneath a wall of vintage celebrity photos that spanned the decades. They had already shooed away the accordionist, who was ready to serenade them, and turned down the house wine that came with dinner, but they had finally agreed to accept two bowls of penne with meat sauce, on the house.
Terrell had picked the place, which was on a side street behind the Barbary Coast. “Real Vegas,” he said. “A landmark.”
Stride had Terrell’s number from MJ’s answering machine, and he had finally reached him in the middle of the afternoon. It turned out that Rex Terrell was a freelance writer who did gossipy features for entertainment magazines, including LV. Stride wanted to know what Terrell had told MJ Lane about his father and the Sheherezade.
They waited impatiently. Amanda stabbed a few noodles with her fork.
“So what’s it like in Minnesota?” she asked.
Stride smiled. “Are you thinking of moving?”
“Who knows? I know how this sounds, but I wouldn’t mind living somewhere a little less strange. Bobby and I have talked about getting out.” She added, “It would be nice to be someplace where not everybody knew, too, know what I mean? My little secret, that is.”
Stride nodded. “Minnesota is cold.”
“Cold? Is that news? Here’s a hint, Stride, that white stuff that hangs around up there for six months? That’s called snow.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Stride said. “I don’t care about the weather. I used to live right on the shore of Lake Superior. I’d watch the big ore freighters come and go from my porch”
“So why’d you leave?” Amanda asked.
He hesitated, wondering how much to say, and then realized he was still doing it. Being a Minnesotan, locking everything away. “I began to realize it was a cold place. Minnesotans are hard to get to know. They don’t let you inside. You won’t find nicer people any where, but you can live with them for decades and never really know them on the inside, where it counts. They don’t open up.”
“That sounds a lot like Serena,” Amanda said.
Stride shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m that way, too. And yeah, that’s Serena. But we’ve been able to get to each other in a way that no one else did. I found out I liked it. So to me, that was worth moving for.”
“But you miss Minnesota,” Amanda said.
“Sure I do.”
“What about Vegas? If it’s too strange for me, I can’t imagine what you think of it.”
Stride let his eyes wander around the restaurant. Terrell was right. This was Vegas in all its kitschy, bitchy glory. He thought about Walker calling the city immoral and about executives like Gerard Plante at the Oasis calmly manipulating his guests. But then there were the mountains and the blue waters of Lake Mead. And Serena. And something irresistible and terrible about all of it together.
He looked up, and fortunately, he didn’t have to answer.
Rex Terrell was waving at them as he crossed the restaurant, his other arm draped around the back of the maftre d’. He wore a lime green shirt, untucked, over expensive black silk slacks. His blond hair was gelled, sticking up in jagged spikes, and he wore narrow black sunglasses. He was about thirty years old, of medium height, and muscular. He carried a lowball glass with a coppery drink that sloshed over the side as he approached.
“Rex Terrell,” he said, jutting out his hand. “And you’re detectives? What a trip. A real murder investigation. This is so CSI.”
Stride shook his hand, which was moist, and introduced himself. Amanda did the same.
“Amanda Gillen?” Rex stripped off his sunglasses and leaned into her face. “Oh my gawd, I know you. What delicious headlines. ‘Metro Sexual: Pre-Op Cop Says Her ‘Equipment’ Is No Big Deal.’” He giggled, spilling more of his drink. “Remember that one?”
“Fuck off,” Amanda said.
Terrell sat down and picked up a fork. He plucked a mouthful of pasta from Amanda’s bowl. “Oh, no, no, I loved it! Your lawsuit? I was with you all the way. I cheered when you won. And look at you, you are so hot! Tranny is definitely the new gay.”
Stride saw the ice in Amanda’s eyes. She was holding a glass of water with such force that he thought the glass would shatter in her hand. “You’re poking the bear, Rex,” he told him.
Terrell blathered on. “Listen, honey, how about an article in LV? We could do a photo spread with it. I don’t mean chicks with dicks, not that kind of thing, although wouldn’t that drive up our numbers! But very tasteful, very erotic, cleavage, maybe a bulge in the right place. I’m talking artistic here.”
Amanda grabbed Terrell’s jaw and clenched it until he shut up. She yanked his face toward her. “Focus, Rex. Listen carefully. I am not a freak show. I am not a circus performer. I’m Amanda. I may be a little different from most people, but all I want to do is lead an ordinary life. What I don’t want is people invading my privacy. So leave me alone, or the operation that I chose not to get, I’m going to give to you right now with a butter knife. Got it?”
She pushed Terrell away, and he rubbed his jaw. “Ow, ow, ow.” He looked at Stride. “She’s a pistol. But I like that, I really do:’
“Maybe we can get down to business,” Stride said.
“Oh, absolutely. I smell a story here. MJ murdered? I want the dirt.”
Stride shook his head. “No story, Rex. This is off, off, off the record, and the conversation goes one way. You tell us what you know about MJ.”
“Start by telling us where you were on Saturday night,” Amanda added.
“You think I killed him? How exciting. But no. David and I got to Gipsy at ten, and we were there, like, all night.” He winked at Amanda. “You can call David and check if you’d like, but not your partner here, because David has a teensy weakness for the strong, silent type.”
“MJ,” Stride repeated.
“Well, what can I tell you?”
“How did you meet?” Stride asked.
“He called me after the story appeared. Very upset. But who can blame him for that, right? I mean, if it was my father?”
“What story?” Amanda asked.
Terrell clapped a hand to his heart. “Best thing I’ve published in LV. I was sure I was going to get death threats, but not a one. I’m disappointed. But I named names, and no one else did. Two big names in particular. Walker Lane and Boni Fisso.”
Stride remembered. There was an issue of LV magazine on MJ’s nightstand, underneath the newspaper story about the implosion.
“What was the story about?” Stride asked.
“It was called ‘The Dirty Secret of the Sheherezade.’ Does that give you a clue?”
“MJ called his father a murderer” Stride said. “Is that what you said in your story?”
“He is. Scandalous, isn’t it?”
“We talked to Walker Lane. He says you were putting ideas in MJ’s head.”
“You talked to Walker? And he mentioned me! Oh, now that is too much. I wondered if he would hear about it. Walker Lane telling people about Rex Terrell. God, David is going to flip over this.”
Stride and Amanda shared an exasperated glance.
“Tell us about the story,” Stride said. ‘The short version, please.”
Terrell nodded. His drink was empty, and he waved the glass in his hand at a waitress.
“The Sheherezade was Boni Fisso’s first big place,” he said. “Now, that was Vegas. The real stuff. Like Battista’s here. Authentic. I mean, look around most bars in town now, it’s all fake. You got your celebrity photos there, sure, but its all Tara Reid and Lindsay Lohan, and ten years from now, people will look at them and go, ‘Who’s that?’ Sinatra, he was authentic. Alan King. Rose Marie.”
“Rex,” Stride said, through gritted teeth.
“I mean, I’m a Vegas baby,” Terrell continued. “How rare is that? Born and raised. I’m authentic. These days, everyone is from California.”
Amanda picked up a butter knife and began slapping it against her hand. Terrell blanched.
“All right, all right. For you, I’ll leave out the good parts. Back in 1967, the Sheherezade was the hot place in the city. Right up there with the Sands. Part of the buzz on the joint was its showroom, see? They had an amazing dancer. Amira Luz. Spanish beauty, dark hair, spitfire. Absolutely a sex machine, and I am not lying. She did a nude dance that filled the seats, SRO every night. I mean, in those days, there were plenty of boobies jiggling onstage, but it was all chorus line stuff, deathly dull. Amira did a flamenco number and stripped down like a thousand-dollar call girl. H-o-t.”
“So?” Stride asked.
Terrell leaned forward and whispered, “So one hot July night, they found Amira at the bottom of the pool in the high roller’s suite on the roof of the Sheherezade. Someone had bashed her skull in.”
“And you think it was Walker Lane?”
“Absolutely. Everyone knew back then, but no one was going to say a word, not in those days.” Terrell twisted his index and middle fingers together. “Boni Fisso and Walker Lane were like this. Walker was Boni’s whale. He was there at the casino every weekend. Staying in that very same high roller’s suite where Amira was killed. He was a party boy, couldn’t get enough of Vegas, liked rubbing shoulders with the mob.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Amanda said.
Terrell put on a look of faux astonishment. “Oh now, don’t play innocent with me. I talked to people Who saw Walker in the casino that weekend, but the official word is, he wasn’t in town. He wasn’t in the suite. I mean, come on. Walker was a horny little dog. He wanted to hump Amira’s leg and move up to her fur. People told me he was obsessed with her, and Amira wasn’t interested. Turned him down flat. But Walker wasn’t about to hear the word ‘no’ from some Spanish stripper. Crack, pow.”
“Apparently, the police didn’t think so,” Stride said. “Walker was never arrested.”
Terrell sighed dramatically. “The police? This was 1967, Detective. You don’t think Boni could make the police go away? Puh-leez. The detective in charge of the case was Nick Humphrey, and Nicky was in Boni’s pocket. Everyone knew it. So Boni spirited Walker out of town. I mean, the man did a Roman Polanski and left the whole fucking country. And Nicky looked the other way. A murder in a high roller’s suite, for heaven’s sake? How easy should that be? But all the police could come up with is that some fan climbed down into the garden from the maintenance area of the roof and killed her.”
“What was Amira doing in the suite?” Amanda asked.
“The story was, she had seduced a key out of one of the desk clerks, and she liked to go up there for a nude swim after her shows, when the suite wasn’t occupied. Again, that was the official word. I mean, as if.”
Stride shook his head. “You put all this in your story? Get ready for a lawsuit, Rex.”
“Oh, we had a lawyer read every word,” Terrell replied, rolling his eyes. “We added lots of maybes and allegedlys and other weasel words like that. Anyway, you think Walker wants to make the story even bigger by suing? I think not. Walker wants this to go away. So does Boni, so he can put up his new slant-eyes baccarat palace.”
“So what about MJ?” Amanda asked. “How does he fit into this?”
“Hang on, honey. My butt’s vibrating. Damn cell phone. I swear, it goes off so often I could have an orgasm if I kept it in my shorts.” He slid a wafer-thin phone out of his back pocket and checked the caller ID. “Oh, her again. Never mind. Some little blond flack, never has any real stories to sell. Probably bangs her clients.”
“Rex, we’re running out of time,” Stride said.
“Chill, detectives. Like I said, MJ called me when he saw the article. He asked about my sources, which I could not tell him-duh-other than to suggest he ought to check out the archives at the library. Most of it was tucked away in the gossip columns back then if you could read between the lines. Dishy stuff. He asked me honestly if I thought his dad had killed the girl, and I told him honestly, yes I did. End of conversation.”
“But you called and left a message on the day he died,” Stride said.
“Surely. In my business, I give you a little, you give me a little. Which reminds me that I’m giving you guys a lot, so hello, don’t forget your friends. I figured MJ could feed me some dirt about Karyn Westermark, but oh well, somebody popped him first.”
“Do you have any idea who would have wanted him dead?” Amanda asked.
“Other than Walker and Boni?” Terrell grinned. “No, MJ seemed like a decent enough celeb. Pretty vanilla if you ask me. He poked it around a lot, though, so maybe you ought to find a jealous husband.”
“Like who?” Stride asked.
“Well, all I have is gossip. Rumors.”
“Tell us,” Amanda said.
Terrell glanced around at the other tables. “I do know that Moose Dargon’s wife, the little twenty-something waitress, hangs with a lot of celebs at the Oasis and likes to hook up. I heard she was very impressed with MJ’s performance in that sex tape with Karyn. Word is that Moose can’t plump the wiener anymore, even with Viagra. And you know what kind of temper Moose has. In the old days, he was in and out of the jails around here for busting people up.”
“His wife is Tierney, right?” Stride asked. He remembered that Karyn Westermark had already mentioned her as one of MJ’s flings.
“Tierney,” Terrell groaned. “Puh-leez. I mean, whatever happened to ordinary names? Did you hear one Hollywood actor thought it was such a riot and named his daughter Tinkle?”
“What does this Tierney look like?”
“Brunette. Kind of a bottlebrush look. She did Playboy last year. Breasts look like the pyramids in Egypt. Know the type?”
Stride did. He realized they had seen Tierney and her cone-shaped breasts on the video in MJ’s condo. He wondered what someone like Moose Dargon would do if he saw his wife fornicating on camera and whether it would be enough to make him hire a professional killer.
“What else can you tell us about Moose?” he asked.
“He’s still a riot and a half, even with one foot in the grave, Terrell said. “He’s mostly retired, but he still does charity stuff, fund-raisers for the gov, that kind of thing. His jokes are dirty, dirty, dirty, and they are hysterical.”
“He still have a temper?”
Terrell’s face lit up, and he leaned in and whispered, “Oooh, like would he blow MJ away for condomizing little Tierney? Isn’t that a delicious idea. Well, it would be very ironic, you know.”
“Why?” Stride asked.
“Because Moose used to be a regular at the Sheherezade back in the 1960s. And who was he banging at the time? None other than Amira Luz.”
Sawhill was on the phone with Governor Durand again. Stride and Serena sat in the two chairs in front of Sawhill’s expansive desk while the lieutenant affixed his lips electronically to the governor’s ass. Cordy was leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets. Amanda stood there, too, and Stride smothered a smile as he watched her play games with Cordy. She kept inching closer, and Cordy, looking pained, kept shifting farther along the wall, trying to keep his distance. Then she took a deep breath that swelled her breasts and lazily stretched her arms upward. Cordy couldn’t help but stare.
Sawhill saw the game, too, and snapped his fingers at them.
“I’m meeting with my team right now,” Sawhill told the governor, his voice casual and familiar. “No, no, I can assure you that line of inquiry is closed. You can pass the word along.”
Stride didn’t like the sound of that. Sawhill was staring directly at him while he said it, and Stride had a sinking feeling that his hands were about to be tied.
It was no secret that Sawhill was aiming for big things in the department, with an eye on the sheriff’s job. Stride had to give Sawhill credit. The lieutenant knew how the game was played and understood the political connections he would need to leapfrog the competition. The current sheriff had already announced his retirement the following year. At least two Metro veterans who were older and more senior than Sawhill had made noises about campaigning for the job, but no one was ruling Sawhill out. A sheriff’s election was more about endorsements than votes, and Sawhill had spent the last decade cultivating friends in high places.
Most of all, he knew that murder headlines made bad politics.
Sawhill put down the phone. He picked up a copy of the Tuesday edition of the Las Vegas Sun.
“I have two murder investigations on page one,” he told them. “The governor doesn’t like that. I don’t like that. That’s why I wanted all of you here to tell me what you’re doing to get these cases off the front page.”
He said it as if somehow the four detectives in the room did like it and were basking in the media glow.
“Serena,” the lieutenant continued, pushing down his half-glasses so he could stare at her above the frames. “You go first. Tell me more about the murder near Reno and whether this ties in to the hit-and-run on the boy in Summerlin.”
“A schoolteacher named Alice Ford had her throat cut at her ranch home,” Serena explained. “Jay Walling and I spent an hour and a half with the victim’s husband. We couldn’t find any connection between Alice Ford in Reno and Peter Hale’s family in Summerlin. There’s not even a hint of a common motive for both victims.”
“So maybe there’s no connection,” Sawhill concluded. “You’re talking about a major artery between Reno and Carson City. It may seem like a backwater compared to Las Vegas, but you’ve got thousands of cars on that highway every day. Just because our perp in the hit-and-run bought doughnuts up there the same day Alice Ford was killed, it doesn’t mean he did it.”
“I don’t like coincidences.”
“Neither do I, but they happen. Other than the receipt you found, there’s nothing to tie these cases together.”
“That’s true,” Serena admitted.
“What about a hit man?” Amanda suggested from the other side of the room. “It could be two separate jobs, and you stumbled across a way to tie them together.”
“Sure, it’s possible,” Serena said. “Except who hires a pro to kill a twelve-year-old boy and a retired schoolteacher?”
Sawhill made a chopping motion with his hand, cutting off the conversation. “Let Reno worry about Reno,” he told Serena. “The crime that concerns me is right here. What else do you have?”
Cordy cleared his throat, then squealed and practically jumped in the air, as if he had looked down and found a tarantula crawling across his foot.
“What’s wrong with you, Cordy?” Sawhill demanded.
Cordy blushed furiously. “Nothing,” he murmured. “Sorry.”
Stride saw Amanda struggling to keep a straight face.
Cordy tried to regain his cool. “We did another run through the neighborhood in Summerlin, I thought now that we know it was an Aztek, we might jog some memories. The thing’s butt ugly, who can miss it?”
“And?” Sawhill asked.
“We got a hit. A neighbor remembered seeing a blue Aztek parked across the street, a few minutes before the hit-and-run. It means our guy was lying in wait. He wanted a shot at the kid.”
“Did the witness see the driver?” Sawhill asked.
Cordy shook his head. “She was on the second floor. Couldn’t even see if someone was in the car.”
“So what’s next?”
“Jay Walling sent me a pile of receipts from the store that sold those Krispy Kremes,” Serena said. “Credit card purchases in the last two months where the person ordered doughnuts and Sprite. Plus other people who were at the same store within an hour of our man. I could use some help making phone calls.”
Sawhill nodded.
“We’re also running a search on other hit-and-run deaths in the Southwest where a child was involved,” she continued. “Maybe this guy has done this before. And we’re expanding our background checks on the family and friends to see if anyone might have been carrying a grudge about something.”
“Use discretion,” Sawhill reminded her. He extended a slim finger at Cordy. “You, too, Cordy.”
They both nodded. Stride knew he was next.
“Detective Stride, you’re new in this department,” Sawhill told him, “but Governor Durand already knows your name.”
“I’m flattered,” Stride replied pleasantly. Serena kicked him.
“Don’t be. He added a few expletives in front of it. Walker Lane called him, complaining that you seemed more interested in a forty-year-old murder than in finding out who killed his son.”
“I didn’t know anything about the murder of Amira Luz when I talked to Walker. He was the one who steered us to Rex Terrell.”
Sawhill snorted. “Rex Terrell has turned LV magazine into the National Enquirer. He writes gossip and trash. It has no place in this investigation.”
“But there was a murder at the Sheherezade.”
“Yes, I’m familiar with the crime, Detective.”
“I’d like to talk to the detective who ran the investigation back then,” Stride said. “Nick Humphrey. Is he still alive?”
“He is, but that would be a waste of time.” Sawhill leaned forward and stripped his glasses off. “What Rex Terrell probably did not tell you is that the murder of Amira Luz was solved.”
Stride hesitated. He hadn’t pulled any files on Amira’s death yet. “You’re right, I didn’t know that.”
“The murderer killed himself,” Sawhill replied crisply. “He was a stalker. An unemployed gambling addict from Los Angeles. A month after Amira Luz was killed, he was found hanged in his L.A. apartment. He had pictures of the girl all over his bedroom wall, and he had a receipt from the Sheherezade the night she was killed. I imagine Rex left that out of his little story.”
Stride felt his cheeks growing hot. “Things still don’t add up. Terrell says he talked to people who saw Walker in Las Vegas that day. Then he left the country and has hardly come back since. Why?”
“Maybe he likes Canadian bacon. Maybe he always wanted to be a Mountie. I have no idea, Detective, and I don’t care. Walker Lane didn’t kill anyone.”
“MJ thought he did.”
“MJ was wrong. Rex Terrell was wrong. You are wrong. There is no connection to MJ’s death, because there is no mystery here. Move on. Is that clear?”
Stride nodded. “Perfectly clear.”
Even so, his doubts lingered. He was willing to admit that Rex Terrell might have spun a fairy tale for them, more fiction than truth. If nasty rumors had followed Walker Lane after the girl’s death, he might have chosen to leave town, even if he was innocent. There was another name that had popped up in the middle of the story, though, like a bathtub toy that wouldn’t sink.
Boni Fisso.
Boni, who owned the Sheherezade and had ties to both Amira Luz and Walker Lane.
Boni, who had two billion dollars on the line in the Orient casino project. Worth killing over.
Sawhill wasn’t stupid. He could read Stride’s eyes. “You don’t sound convinced, Detective. So you tell me: What connection could there possibly be between the death of Amira Luz and the murder of MJ Lane?”
Stride shook his head. “I can’t think of a thing,” he admitted.
“Good. Let’s look for a more plausible theory of the crime. And I really hope you have one.”
“We know that MJ was having an affair with Tierney Dargon,” Stride said.
“Moose’s wife?”
Stride wondered how many Tierney Dargons there could be in Las Vegas. “There was video in MJ’s apartment of the two of them together. We heard about the affair from Karyn Westermark and Rex Terrell, so the word was out.”
Sawhill leaned back in his chair and tugged at his pointed chin. “Moose is a wild man. He always has been. I wouldn’t put it past him to go into a rage and kill someone. He’s come close a few times.”
“Except this wasn’t a rage killing,” Amanda pointed out. She came forward and leaned over the desk. “This was planned.”
“And unless he’s dropped several decades and a hundred pounds or so, the killer wasn’t Moose himself,” Stride said.
“So he could have hired someone,” Sawhill said. “The two of you will talk to Tierney?”
Stride nodded.
“What about the video archives at the casino? Did we get another look at the killer?”
“If he was there, he didn’t look like he did on Saturday night,” Stride said.
“All right, keep me posted.” He waved his hand, dismissing them, and picked up the phone again. He grabbed the pink stress ball on his desk with his other hand and squeezed it. Stride hoped he used a lighter touch with his wife’s breasts. “I want your teams on both of these cases day and night. Get them off the front page. Or get me the perps. And Stride, I don’t want you talking to Walker Lane again without consulting me.”
“Understood,” Stride said.
The four of them made a beeline for the door. Stride pulled it closed behind him as they left, Cordy shot an evil glance at Amanda, who winked at him and gave him a tiny wave with a crook of her index finger. He stormed away.
“What did you do to him, anyway?” Stride asked.
Amanda giggled. “I pinched his butt”
Amanda drove over to the south side of McCarran and parked in a lot where she could watch the jets landing on runway 25 Left. She was driving her aging Toyota rather than the Spyder, which she reserved for weekends and road trips. She turned her radio to the frequency of the tower and listened to the chatter between the pilots and the traffic controllers. Tierney Dargon’s United flight from San Francisco was scheduled to land in half an hour.
There were a few other plane nuts parked around her. Some people made checklists of the incoming and outgoing flights and ticked them off as they watched the planes come and go. Amanda wasn’t that extreme. She just liked to sit here with a latte and a cigarette. She didn’t smoke often, not anymore, but she allowed herself one cigarette when she came here and kept a pack in the glove compartment for those occasions. Something about the smoke and the sweet coffee, and the roar of engines and the smell of jet fuel, made time stop for her, like a kind of hypnosis, when her mind could wander. She didn’t even take Bobby here. This was her place.
She had found it when she came to the city from Portland five years ago. Back when she was Jason Gillen, a smart Oregon cop who became a smart Vegas cop. Back when she was thinking about killing herself. She remembered sitting here with her gun on the seat beside her, wondering if she had the guts to do it, and finally realizing that it took no guts at all to run away. The courage was in sticking around and facing down the people who were afraid of her because she was wired differently from others.
So Jason died, and Amanda was born.
She took the cigarette out of her mouth, exhaled a trail of smoke out the window, and smiled as she saw the lipstick ring on the white wrapper.
People always thought that it was about sex. That to be her, the way she was, she had to walk on the wild side. That she could only do that to her body, and gulp down hormones every day, if she were obsessed with sex. They never believed her when she told them that she and Bobby were pretty conservative at heart, in or out of the bedroom. They were the ones who were obsessed with sex. They were titillated by her. Aroused by her. Men and women alike. They wanted to know how she did it, in what positions, and how often. They wanted to see her. Taste her.
The worst were the he-men on the force. People like Cordy. She got under their manly skin. They were so scared of the fact that she turned them on that they ran like hell from her. It used to bother her. Now she had fun with it. It was her way of showing them that she did have guts, that she wasn’t going away. Maybe it was a little payback, too.
She knew the jokes hadn’t stopped, just gone underground, because the brass had told the other cops to stay cool. Seven-figure settlements had a way of making people behave, at least to her face. No one wanted her around, though. She knew that. They ignored her, talked behind her back, and waited for her to take the money and run. It killed them when she stayed.
She had been worried about Stride. She could deal with the others for the most part, but a bad partner could make your life miserable. Worst of all, he was a heartlander, from the Midwest. She thought of people from the ag belt as narrow-minded, quick to judge. She figured he would look at her as if she were an alien. But Stride surprised her. She understood what Serena saw in him. He was attractive, no doubt about that, but he also seemed to have a soul a mile deep. Once he got over the shock, he simply treated her like a person. He was curious-everyone was curious-but she felt respect from him for what was in her brain, not what was between her legs.
That was rare.
Beyond the fence, a Southwest 737 angled gracefully upward and soared toward the sky. She knew that most of the people on the plane were going home, with lighter wallets, leaving the fantasy world behind and winging back to reality. To her, it looked like freedom. One day, she might really take the money, climb into the Spyder with Bobby, and run. Not because she couldn’t take it, but because she wanted to be somewhere where no one knew her, where people didn’t stare.
Bobby deserved that, too. He probably didn’t tell her half the shit he got for living with her, or the abuse he took, but he had stood by her and slept beside her for more than three years. She had avoided sex with him for months when they were dating, because she had assumed she would lose him as soon as he found out the truth. When she finally told him, she had lost him, at least for those two weeks while he came to grips with what he felt. Then he had come back, and he had stuck around, never once asking her to be anything but what she was.
She had never wanted to have the SRS surgery, to take the final step. She was afraid that things would go wrong, that the parts wouldn’t work, that she would be left with no sexual sensation whatever. She didn’t need it to define her as a woman. She had been willing to have it for Bobby, though, to make herself a little more normal for him-except he said no, that he didn’t want it, not unless she wanted it for herself. She loved him for that.
It sounded so appealing, to run away with him someday, to escape all the cruelty. San Francisco maybe, where Tierney was coming from. No one would give them a second look there. Not in the City by the Gay.
Amanda tossed the cigarette butt out of the car. She laughed at herself and shook her head. She was as guilty of fantasy as the people on the plane. The truth was, she would never leave.
The radio crackled to life. United 1580 was cleared to land.
Amanda fired up the engine. Tierney Dargon was coming home.
She spotted Tierney in the baggage claim area, standing apart from the crowd, a cell phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear. She was stick-thin and pretty, with a loose pink top that let her breasts sway and rose-colored tight pants, but other than her Vegas body, she wasn’t making any effort to look glamorous. Her brown hair hung limply to her shoulders in a mess of curls. She hadn’t put on makeup or jewelry, except for a gold bracelet that she twisted nervously around her wrist with her other hand. The whites of her eyes were lined with red.
Amanda began to approach her but found her way blocked by a giant Samoan in a Hawaiian shirt, obviously a bodyguard. She discreetly flashed her badge. The man asked if she could wait, then lumbered over to Tierney and whispered in her ear. The girl studied Amanda, murmured something to the Samoan, and went back to her phone call.
“Mrs. Dargon wonders if she could talk to you in her limo,” the bodyguard told Amanda. “It’s waiting outside. There’s a picture of Mr. Dargon on the door.”
Amanda shrugged. “Okay.”
She found the limo without any problem. Samoa had obviously radioed to the driver, who was waiting for her with the door open. He was in his sixties, and he tipped his black hat to Amanda as she got in.
’There’s champagne if you’d like,” he told her. “We have muffins, too, but don’t take the blueberry oatmeal muffin. That’s Mrs. Dargon’s favorite.”
Amanda smiled. “She eats carbs?”
The driver laughed but didn’t reply. He closed the door with Amanda inside.
She had never been in a stretch before. Her ass slid all over the leather seat as she tried to get comfortable. A television was built into a corner unit toward the front of the car, with a stereo and DVD player on shelves underneath. A rap video was playing, with the sound muted. The opposite corner included a refrigerator and a circular glass serving tray with sweets, fruits, an open bottle of champagne, and a carafe of juice.
There was a portrait of Moose Dargon on black velvet stitched into the middle seat on Amanda’s left. He looked twenty years younger, with wild wavy black hair, caterpillar eyebrows, and a bulbous red-veined nose. Amanda clucked her tongue in disbelief. Elvis had not left the limo.
She chose to sit on Moose’s face, because she could get some traction on the velvet. There was a series of wooden drawers built into the lower half of the seats. She glanced through the limo window, then slid open the drawer between her legs.
No surprise: drugs and a six-pack of Trojans. Amanda removed the envelope of cocaine.
She felt the car rock as the driver got out. A few seconds later, the rear door swung open, and Tierney slipped inside. She took a seat opposite Amanda and brushed her dirty curls out of her face. She wasn’t smiling.
“This is about MJ, huh?” Her voice was girlish and made her sound even younger than she was.
Amanda nodded.
“Sorry, I must look like a mess,” Tierney apologized. “I’ve been really upset about what happened.”
“You look fine.”
Tierney gave her an embarrassed smile. “That’s nice of you to say.”
It was amazing, Amanda thought. In Las Vegas, even murder was no excuse for not looking your best.
“I guess you found the video,” Tierney added.
“Yes, we did.”
“God. I can’t believe I was so stupid. But MJ thought it was hot doing it on film. If this gets out, Moose is going to kill me.”
Amanda raised an eyebrow. “I hear he has a temper”
“No, no, I didn’t mean literally. Moose would never touch me. But he’d be upset, humiliated. I never wanted that.”
Her defenses were up. Amanda decided to go another way. “When did you go to San Francisco?”
“Sunday morning. As soon as I heard about MJ. My family’s there, and I told Moose I wanted to spend some time with my parents, but mostly I stayed in a downtown hotel and cried. I didn’t want Moose to see me that way. He’d wonder why.”
She was on the verge of tearing up. Amanda realized that Tierney wasn’t cold, like Karyn Westermark. This girl actually felt something for MJ.
“Were you in love with him?”
“Who, Moose?” Tierney asked, misunderstanding. “Of course. I know what everybody thinks, that he wanted a bimbo on his arm and I wanted his money. It’s not like that. We care about each other.”
“He does have a lot of money,” Amanda pointed out. Moose lived in Lake Las Vegas, a gated resort community on the other side of the mountains.
“Sure, but I won’t see any of that. I’m with him because he’s funny and sweet and he treats me nice. I was nothing before him.”
“What about MJ?”
Tierney stared blankly at the television screen in the limo for a long time before saying anything. “I’m twenty-four, okay?” She said it as if that were enough to explain everything.
“You have a reputation as a party girl. Lots of hookups.”
“Well, that’s crap,” Tierney retorted. Her brow wrinkled in annoyance. “I’ve only slept with a couple guys. Lately it was just MJ.”
Amanda wondered about the pack of condoms in the drawer under her feet. “Did Moose know about MJ? Or the others?”
“It was more like ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ He knows there are things he can’t give me.”
“But what if he did find out? Moose has put a few people in the hospital in his time.”
“That was years ago! He’s eighty years old, for God’s sake.”
“But would he hire someone to send a message? He might not hurt you, but what about MJ?”
“You think Moose had MJ killed?” Tierney shook her head vehemently. “No way. First, he wouldn’t do that. I told you, we have an arrangement. And second, he didn’t know about MJ.”
“Come on, Tierney,” Amanda scolded her. “Don’t be naive. People knew. We didn’t recognize you from the video. We asked someone who MJ might be sleeping with, and yours was the first name that came up.”
Tierney’s mouth fell open. “Oh, shit. I can’t believe this.”
“Did you love MJ?”
“Love him? Yeah, a little, I guess. I don’t sleep with people I don’t care about, whatever you think.”
“Well, if Moose thought you had feelings for MJ, that might make him feel pretty vulnerable. Like you might leave him.”
“You’re wrong,” Tierney insisted. “Moose knows I would never do that. He’s sick. Cancer. He doesn’t have a lot of time left, and he knows I’ll be there for him. MJ, he was-well, I kind of wondered about the future. After.”
Amanda was having a hard time deciding whether Tierney was a sweet, lonely girl or a shrewd gold digger with her eyes on the next prize. If she was putting on an act, it was a good one.
“Did you know about MJ and Karyn Westermark?” Amanda asked.
Tierney pressed her full lips together until they formed a thin line. “Yes.”
“Did that bother you?”
“We did a threesome once. That freaked me out. I didn’t want to do it again. MJ wanted to, though.”
“Were you with MJ on Saturday morning?”
She nodded. “And Friday night, too.”
“Why’d you leave on Saturday?”
“I had a thing with Moose on Saturday night. A party.”
“Where?” Amanda asked. She jotted down the details as Tierney told her. “Were you with Moose the whole time? Did he make or receive any calls on his cell phone?”
Tierney shook her head. “He was schmoozing. It was a political thing for the governor. You know, it’s reelection time. I was with Moose the entire evening.”
“Did you know MJ was with Karyn that night?”
“I figured,” she said unhappily.
“You sound jealous.”
Tierney tucked one of her curls around her finger and played with it. “Karyn is the big leagues. I know that. I’m just a cocktail waitress who was in the right place at the right time. I try to fit in with MJ and his crowd, but I don’t, not really. I know they laugh at me.”
“So why hang out with them?”
“What else do I have? My old friends, they can’t deal with who I am now. Because of Moose. You know, living by the lake, the bodyguards, the limo. It doesn’t matter that I’m still who I was. If you’re young and you’ve got money, you just wind up at the Oasis. And there are all the same little cliques in that crowd. It’s like high school.”
“What clique was MJ in?”
“Karyn’s. That’s how I met him. He was at the casino with Karyn about six months ago. She was really friendly to me, and I only realized later it was because she wanted to get me in bed with them. But I liked MJ, so I did it. We started going out after that, just the two of us.”
“How did Karyn feel about that?”
Tierney shrugged. “I don’t suppose she cared. She still slept with MJ whenever she wanted.” There was a hint of bitterness in her voice.
“Karyn says MJ was planning to dump you,” Amanda said.
Tierney was shocked. “She said that? No way. I don’t believe that. MJ wouldn’t do that.”
“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill MJ?”
“No, I don’t,” Tierney said. “I can’t imagine. But not Moose. Definitely not.”
Amanda asked, “Do you know if MJ had anything to do with Boni Fisso? Did they know each other?”
“Boni? Not that I know of. He never mentioned him.”
“How about Moose? Does he know Boni?”
Tierney nodded. “Well, sure. Moose played the Sheherezade all the time in the old days.”
Amanda wasn’t sure it meant anything, but Moose was a volatile man, despite his age and health. If someone like Moose did want to hire a hit man, it was easy to imagine him talking to Boni.
She thanked Tierney and reached for the door to the limousine. Tierney took her arm in a soft grip. Her hand felt small.
“Does this have to become public? Me and MJ?”
“I can’t make any promises,” Amanda said. “And like I said, it’s already an open secret.”
Tierney nodded. Her eyes drifted to the drawer on the other side of the limo, which wasn’t fully closed. She glanced back at Amanda, then looked away. “You took my stuff, huh?”
“Yeah,” Amanda told her. “But I’m not vice. It gets flushed. You know, it’s none of my business, but you don’t seem cut out for the fast lane, Tierney. Maybe you should think about making some changes.”
“Thanks.” Tierney took a jaded look around at the limo and gave her a half-smile. “Believe it or not, there’s a part of me that wishes I was still slinging drinks at the Venetian. Sometimes it’s easier being on the outside, looking in.”
Stride leaned back in the uncomfortable wooden chair and stretched his arms. The knotted muscles in his back tugged and strained. He felt a pain behind his eyes, and he closed them, hoping to tame his headache. He had been staring at the fiche reader for three hours, squinting at fuzzy forty-year-old images, feeling himself transported to 1967. The year Amira Luz was killed. It was odd, looking at headlines from newspapers back in those days, knowing how history turned out. The young girls in the ads were old women now. There was a photograph of Robert Kennedy. Most people had cigarettes hanging off their lips.
Things weren’t so different then. Las Vegas still floated above the times, corrupt and somehow incorruptible. He saw articles about desperate times for blacks in North Las Vegas and, a few pages later, ads for the black entertainers headlining on the Strip. He saw names from the past, in their prime: Red Buttons, Milton Berle, Ann-Margret. Miniskirts were in. The latest Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, was in the theaters that summer. Connery was cool.
He tried to imagine what it was like to live back then, to be a part of those days. From a distance, it looked old-fashioned, like the pencil drawings of models and the washed-out color in the photographs. Sophisticated but naive. He felt the pull of nostalgia, the yearning for the good old days. But nostalgia was nothing but sadness over times past. The good old days weren’t so good. He saw headlines about labor strikes and bribery scandals. The death of a Cosa Nostra leader thousands of miles away in New York made the front page in Las Vegas. The rumor of dark things was in the papers along with Frank’s old black magic, like shadows of clouds passing overhead.
He picked up a copy of the first article he had printed. It was dated June 18:
AMIRA MAKES TRIUMPHANT RETURN
Fresh from a six-month stint in the Montmartre district of Paris, Spanish dancer Amira Luz got a roaring welcome home on Saturday night from a packed crowd at the Sheherezade, where she introduced a risqué new show entitled Flame.
Like other shows now in vogue in casino showrooms, Flame features a cadre of lavishly dressed topless showgirls, as well as a riotous comedy performance by Strip veteran Moose Dargon. But Luz is the star. Her showstopper is a flamenco striptease, where the stage is lit by dozens of candles and a single guitarist provides accompaniment as she sheds her fiery red Spanish costume…
Stride retrieved another article from the third week in July. Amira was on the front page:
SHOWGIRL MURDER SHOCKS STRIP
Las Vegas police confirmed today that Amira Luz, star of the hit show Flame at the Sheherezade, was murdered on Friday night in a luxury suite in the popular casino. While police offered few details, sources inside the casino say the dancer was found early Saturday morning in a rooftop swimming pool, her skull crushed. Luz was last seen onstage on Friday during the late performance of Flame.
Detective Nicholas Humphrey declined to speculate on a motive for the crime or on any possible suspects. In a prepared statement, casino owner Boni Fisso declared “profound sadness” over the death of Luz and vowed “complete cooperation with the police in tracking down the deranged individual who defiled our property in order to perpetrate this heinous crime.”
One day after Luz was killed, and already Boni was laying the groundwork to pin the blame on an outsider. Stride wanted to talk to Nick Humphrey.
As he reread the article, Stride felt experienced hands massaging his shoulders. He glanced up as Serena leaned down and put her face next to his.
“This is your idea of a lunch date?” she asked him. “The library?”
“Just don’t stop,” Stride told her. “That feels great.”
Her fingers continued to knead and separate the tissues in his back. She looked at the newspaper articles over his shoulder and at the stack of microfiche boxes.
“Maybe I heard wrong,” she teased him. “Didn’t Sawhill say the case was closed?”
Stride smiled. “Did he? I must have misheard him.”
Serena dragged another chair across the worn gray carpeting and set it down next to him. Stride noticed several of the men in the library watching her. The midday crowd in the library was almost all men, unemployed, in jeans and baseball caps. Some made a show of reading the newspaper. Others simply stared into space.
“Find anything?” Serena asked.
Stride shrugged. “You have to read between the lines. It’s mostly rumor and innuendo. There was a gossip column back then that dropped some broad hints. I think that’s where Rex Terrell picked up a lot of the details for his story in the magazine.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Jonny,” Serena told him. “I trust your instincts, but I’m not sure I see the connection. I don’t know how you take a 1967 murder that was supposedly solved and draw a line to MJ’s death today.”
“Maybe you don’t,” Stride admitted. “There may be nothing in this. But I’m like you. I don’t like coincidences.”
“Such as?”
Stride leaned back in the chair. “Here’s what I have. MJ starts nosing into the murder of Amira Luz, because he reads allegations in LV magazine that his father was the one who killed her. Shortly thereafter, MJ winds up murdered himself. The murder of Amira took place at a casino owned by Boni Fisso, who may or may not have ties to organized crime and who is set to break ground this year on a new two-billion-dollar development project. How’m I doing?”
“You have my attention,” Serena said. “First question: Who was Amira Luz, and why was she killed?”
Stride nodded. “Amira was a nude dancer, and very good at it, according to the papers. They called her Spanish, but I found a bio that said she was actually half Spanish. Her father was a Spanish diplomat, and her mother was the blond bombshell daughter of a Texas congressman. When Boni Fisso opened the Sheherezade in late 1965, Amira was eye candy, twenty-one years old, in a show built around a comedian. Guess who?”
“Moose Dargon,” Serena guessed.
“Exactly. Another interesting coincidence. Anyway, Amira is a big hit. By May of 1966, she has her own show, Lido-style, backed up by a chorus line of wannabes. Toward the end of the year, Amira went off to dance in Paris for six months. Or maybe she was over there planning her next act. Regardless, by June of‘67, Amira is back in Las Vegas at the Sheherezade in a whole new show called Flame, and she’s bigger than ever.”
“Until someone kills her,” Serena said.
“Right. A few weeks after the show opens, Amira winds up murdered in a penthouse suite at the Sheherezade. By the way, Moose wound up as a supporting act in Amira’s new show and lost his solo gig. I don’t imagine he was too happy about it.”
“Go on,” Serena said.
“Now let’s look at Walker Lane. He filmed one of his movies in Vegas during the spring and got hooked on the city. Soon he was a regular, flying here every weekend from L.A. His favorite watering hole was the Sheherezade. Walker was tight with Boni Fisso. And Rex had it right, too: The gossip columns in June suggested that Walker had his eye on ‘a Latin beauty regularly seen on the Vegas stage.’ Amira.”
“So what’s the theory?” Serena asked. “What happened to Amira?”
“Try this. Walker gets carried away in his suite when Amira rejects him. Or maybe rough sex gets out of hand. She winds up dead. Then Boni helps Walker get away clean and finds a patsy in L.A. to take the fall.”
“Why’d Walker stay away after the police closed the case?” Serena asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe Boni had a secret deal with the cops back then that Walker wouldn’t set foot in Vegas again. Anyway, it’s ancient history until Rex Terrell drags the story into LV and brings up all the old rumors about Amira, Walker, and Boni. Then MJ gets hold of it and starts asking questions.”
“And gets killed.”
Stride nodded. “I keep coming back to Boni’s plan to implode the Sheherezade and launch the Orient project. The last thing you want to deal with when you’ve got that kind of money on the line is a skeleton in the closet from forty years ago. Like Amira’s murder.”
“I hate to point this out, but Sawhill doesn’t want you asking questions about this. What are you going to do?”
“Ask questions about this,” Stride said.
Serena laughed. “You could wind up the fastest-hired, fastest-fired detective in Metro history. Come on, let’s get out of here, and you can buy me lunch.”
“Deal.”
Stride gathered up his copies and shoved them inside his blazer pocket. He stacked the boxes of microfiche together and balanced them unsteadily. “Can you grab that copy of LV? That’s the one with Rex Terrell’s article.”
Serena picked up the magazine. One of the pages had a Post-it note, and Serena opened it to look inside.
“That’s Amira,” Stride told her.
There was a large black-and-white photograph in the magazine from the 1960s, with Amira in a sexy Spanish black dress, her black hair spilling across her sweaty face, her hand pulling up her skirt to reveal her bare, muscular leg. Behind her, in white, another showgirl struck a similar pose.
Stride dropped off the boxes with the librarian. He looked back and realized Serena hadn’t moved. She was holding the magazine in her hands, staring at it.
“What is it?”
Serena didn’t seem to hear him. Then she folded the magazine back and pointed at the photo.
“This girl in white behind Amira. That’s Peter Hale’s grandmother. The boy who was killed in the hit-and-run.”