Breaking into the car was child’s play.
He waited in the backseat of the Lexus, parked in the shadows of the underground ramp at the Fashion Show Mall. His gun, a SIG-Sauer.357, was on the seat beside him.
The Lexus was near the entrance to Nieman’s. Of course. She was a fashionable lady. Seventy-five years old, widowed. Thin as a bird. She parked in a handicapped spot, because she had arthritis in her legs. The windows of the car were smoked, and no one could see inside. But he could see out and see her when she came.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. He found himself staring back at his own dark features: thick black hair, heavy beard line, and his eyes, so deep brown they appeared to have no color at all. He scared people with his eyes. He always had. It was as if, when they looked into his eyes, they were inside a closet, black, without light, with the walls closing in.
He was like his eyes. Without emotion. Focused only on his goal.
Except he knew that wasn’t true when it came to the boy. Peter Hale. He had felt something then, despite all his training, despite the soldiers who had showed him how to view pain and death through the lens of a microscope. Study it. Learn from it. But feel nothing.
He did feel something about the boy, so much that he changed his plan in the middle, which he never did. He changed targets.
His plan had been the mother. He took the boy instead.
No one would know about his lapse except himself, but it bothered him. He didn’t like to think that he was a creature of anger anymore, not like in the old days. Those creatures made mistakes. He was a strategist, a mercenary in the field, with a goal and a plan.
He saw the doors that led to the ramp elevators open, and the old woman came out, shopping bags in both hands. She walked gingerly. Each time her right foot came down, she winced, feeling pain in her joints. He could see her clearly, but she couldn’t see him, not when she approached the car and put the bags in the trunk, not when she fumbled with her keys by the driver’s door. The ramp was dark, and the car was dark. Even when she pulled open the door and maneuvered her frail body inside, she didn’t see him. She pulled the door shut. He was right behind her, watching her. He heard her exhale, sighing, the pressure finally off her feet.
She hunched over, struggling to fit the key in the ignition. When she finally did, the engine turned over, and light classical music filled the car. She settled back, resting her head against the cushion, relaxing.
Then she glanced in the mirror and saw him.
His hand was already around her face, clamping off her scream. He didn’t bother with his gun. There was no need. Instead, he leaned forward, his quiet voice at her ear, soothing her.
“We’re just going for a little drive,” he said.
He didn’t want her dropping dead of a heart attack, and he needed her calm for what she had to do. The old woman had to get him through the security gate at Lake Las Vegas. She lived there, alone, in an estate where he could wait safely for night to fall.
He knew this was the hard way. If it was only about killing the girl, there were easier ways to get it done. She partied at the casinos. She stripped off at the spa. He could take her in any of those places. But he was sending a message.
Security doesn’t mean a thing.
I can strike anywhere.
I’m coming for you.
Linda Hale told them to take Bonanza Road east until they wanted to become Mormons. That was where her mother lived.
Her mother-Peter’s grandmother-who had been a dancer onstage with Amira Luz.
Stride didn’t understand the reference to the Mormons until he and Serena took the drive. Where Bonanza ran out, on the border of the eastern mountains, they were less than a block from the city’s giant Mormon temple, with its white spires visible throughout the valley. In the neighborhood surrounding the temple were lavish homes with Jaguars parked in the driveways, rock gardens landscaped with tall saguaros, and kidney-shaped clear blue swimming pools.
Linda’s mother, Helen Truax, had a house of luminous white stucco almost directly opposite the temple, with a view down the valley that Stride figured was worth at least two million bucks. According to Linda, her mother was no Mormon, and she enjoyed having her wealthy religious neighbors know about her past as a barely clad dancer.
When Helen Truax opened the door, she looked nothing like any grandmother Stride had ever seen. She was dripping wet, with a diaphanous white robe slipped over her shoulders, open, revealing a one-piece teal swimsuit underneath. She was barefoot and at least as tall as Stride himself. He knew she was sixty years old, but she could have passed for forty.
“Please, come in.” She smiled at Stride, and her teeth were snowy white. She held a bell-shaped glass of white wine and had the dirtiest blue eyes he had ever seen.
“Your daughter said you had showgirl looks,” Serena told her. “She was right.”
Helen laughed. “I’d love to tell you this is all original equipment, but it’s not. If it starts to sag, I lift it. If it starts to wrinkle, I tighten it.” She cupped her full breasts in her hands. “Without help, these babies would be pointing at my toes by now.”
She turned on her heels. The robe didn’t stretch to the bottom of her swimsuit, and Stride watched the rhythm of her ass as he followed her. Serena landed a sharp elbow against his ribs.
Helen’s house was sparingly decorated. There were large empty walls, painted in glossy white and soft pastels. The same honey-gold carpet spread from room to room. Where there was art, it was Italian, mostly handblown glass and landscape oils heavy on sienna and umber. In a wide corridor leading to the rear of the house, however, Stride saw a series of photographs hung in slim frames. Helen, elaborately costumed, with Sinatra. Helen with Wayne Newton.
Helen with Boni Fisso.
She noticed Stride admiring the pictures. “Helena Troy,” she said. “That was my stage name. Don’t you love it?”
“It looks like you knew all the big stars,” Stride said.
“Why, of course. It was a small town back then. Everyone knew everyone among the entertainers. Las Vegas was like our personal playground. The world was our stage. The tourists who came, they were like children with their noses pressed against the glass, watching us, and wanting to catch a little bit of the glamour.”
“It’s not that way anymore?” Stride asked.
“Oh, no. People don’t appreciate the magic of those times. The sixties were our golden age. There was such a sense of class. Today everything is corporate. It’s Disneyland with a topless Minnie Mouse. There’s none of the star quality the town had in the past. Ma and Pa Kettle come here from Kansas, and they dress like they’re taking the kids to Six Flags. Even the celebrities who stay here now are so crass. I miss the old days, I really do.”
Helen sighed. She led them into a sunken family room overlooking the valley. The east wall was made of rough-cut stone and featured a large fireplace. There was a wet bar on Stride’s right and a mirrored display of crystal behind it. Helen took them through French doors that led to the outside patio. She pulled out three chairs from around a glass table and angled the umbrella to block the sun.
Stride noticed two deck chairs placed side by side next to a forty-foot swimming pool. Two sets of wet footprints were drying quickly in the afternoon sun. Obviously, Helen had a guest who wasn’t invited to the interview.
“Linda was very upset when she called me,” she said. “She made it sound like you thought I was in some way responsible for Peter’s death.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Serena assured her. “We’re exploring whether there’s a connection between Peter’s death and the murder of MJ Lane over the weekend.”
“Who?” Helen asked. There wasn’t any guile in her voice. She noted their surprise and added, “You’ll probably think I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t use my television set other than to watch old movies. And I don’t read the newspapers. Too much bad news.”
“MJ Lane was murdered near the Oasis casino,” Stride said. “He was the son of Walker Lane.”
Helen blinked and looked uncomfortable. “All right, I knew Walker Lane, but that was forty years ago. I don’t see what possible connection there could be to Peter’s death.”
“We’ve had two murders in the space of a week under unusual circumstances,” Serena said. “Both victims had family relationships to people who had connections to the Sheherezade casino in 1967, and specifically-”
“Specifically, a relationship with Amira Luz,” Helen said, finishing the sentence.
“That’s right,” Stride said. He played a hunch. “You talked to Rex Terrell, didn’t you? He mentioned you in his article in LV as one of the people whose careers benefited from Amira’s death.”
Helen nodded.
Stride leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Why don’t you tell us exactly what happened back then?”
Helen stared off into the valley, then turned back to Stride with a hardness in her face. “I have a nice life. My husband is an international lawyer, and he makes a great deal of money. And he’s away a lot. I’m sure you understand.”
She knew Stride had spotted the footprints.
“It’s one thing to gossip with a reporter on background,” Helen continued. “It’s another to be a witness for the police. We’re talking about a murder at a casino owned by Boni Fisso. Boni has a long reach and a long memory.”
“Have you been threatened?” Serena asked. “Do you think someone was sending you a message by killing your grandson?”
“No,” Helen said flatly.“Not at all. I haven’t heard from anyone. Certainly not Boni. The idea that Peter’s death could somehow involve me or what happened in the past-that’s a complete shock to me. I don’t see how or why.”
“That’s why we need to know what happened in 1967,” Stride told her. “To find the connection.”
“It may be the only way to find out who killed Peter,” Serena added.
“Peter,” Helen murmured, struggling with her reluctance. “I can’t believe what happened to him. I’ve never been a very emotional person, detectives. I’m not one to believe that attachments last forever. You can ask my ex-husbands about that. But I loved that little boy.”
She drummed her nails on the patio table and bit her lip.
“I guess the first thing to say is that I feel like I have blood on my hands, too. I hated Amira. I was insanely jealous of her. When she was killed, I have to say I was glad. Funny, how petty it seems in retrospect. But I was barely twenty-one then, and ambitious, and Amira was standing in the way.”
“What was she like?” Serena asked.
“Amira? She was scandalous.”
“In what way?”
Helen gave them a wicked smile. “You two are too young to understand the times. It was the sexual revolution, but there was still a lot of the 1950s about the world back then. Big hair. Ugly black glasses that made us look like librarians. Lots of ridiculous hats. Flouncy little miniskirts so you could practically see our pussies, but we were still supposed to look virginal.” She laughed. Stride thought she was pleased to see that her language surprised them.
“There was plenty of flesh back then,” she added. “You had Lido at the Stardust, the Folies at the Trop, Minsky’s at the Slipper. All of them bare-breasted, but pretty tame. Even so, we took a lot of heat. We had some councilmen in Henderson who thought a few tits onstage meant the end of civilization as we knew it. They wanted the girls wearing pasties, elevated stages, all sorts of nonsense like that. Fortunately, no one listened to them. Like I said, the nudity was pretty innocent.”
She took a sip of wine. “Then Amira came along. Looking back, I can admit it now. Amira had something special, something I didn’t. She was utterly uninhibited. When Boni made Amira the lead dancer in our nudie show, she was a sensation. And that show was pretty conservative. But Flame-my God. Everyone thought she was a prima donna going off to Paris for six months, but when she came back, she unveiled Flame. No one had seen anything like it. Amira wasn’t stripping. She wasn’t dancing. She might as well have been masturbating right there onstage. For 1967, my dears, that was scandalous.”
“What was Amira like as a person?” Stride asked.
“Cold. Ambitious. Selfish.” Helen traced the top of her wineglass with a painted fingernail. “Does that sound harsh? I admit, I was biased against her, because she treated me like shit. She treated all the other dancers that way. Most of us would pal around, look out for each other, but not Amira. She was only interested in herself.”
“Do you know how she wound up in Vegas? How she got her start?”
“If you were a young girl with stars in your eyes, you went one of two places back then,” Helen said. “Hollywood or Vegas. I don’t think Amira liked the idea of being a movie star. She fed off the crowd. She liked performing in front of an audience. And she was all about sex. Vegas was a natural for her.”
“But you don’t just walk into town and become a star,” Serena said.
“Most of us, no. But Amira wasn’t like most of us. The first thing she did was have an affair with Moose, and he put her in his show. That gave her an audience. From there, her sex appeal carried her.”
“How did she get involved with Moose?”
Helen laughed. “Moose wasn’t exactly playing hard to get in those days. He told me later that Amira was the greatest fuck he ever had. Of course, he didn’t realize the little bitch would turn around and put a knife in his back. Take over his show.”
“He must have been angry,” Stride said.
“Furious. Which for Moose is saying a lot. He trashed his dressing room when Boni told him he wouldn’t have his own show anymore and would be a variety performer in Flame. Boni had to have Leo talk to him.”
“Leo?” Serena asked.
“Leo Rucci. Boni’s right-hand man. He ran the day-today operations at the casino.”
“What do you think Leo said to Moose?”
“I think Leo told him he’d be out on the street with a rearranged face if he didn’t shut up.”
“So Moose was nursing a major grudge against Amira,” Stride said.
“Sure. Most of us were. Amira didn’t care who she trashed to get what she wanted.”
“Did Amira have a boyfriend?” Stride asked. “After Moose, that is.”
“Not that I ever saw. In fact, I don’t really think she had many friends at all. Amira rarely hung out in the casino when she wasn’t onstage. The rest of us liked to gamble and drink with the other stars. Amira did her act and disappeared. I think that was part of how she cultivated her image. She was unapproachable. It made men want her.”
“Tell us about Walker Lane,” Stride said. “We heard he wanted Amira, too.”
Helen’s eyes twinkled. “Well, he wanted me first.”
“You slept with him?” Serena asked.
“Once. He was filming his Vegas movie that spring. Neon Nights. Remember that one? Well, it was forgotten quickly, but it made a lot of money at the time. A few scenes were filmed at the Sheherezade, and I got to know him when he came to the show. Over the course of about three months, I think he fucked all the dancers.”
“Was Amira one of them?”
Helen shook her head. “She wasn’t back from Paris at that point. But when Flame started up that summer, Walker fell for her hard. Every weekend, he flew in from L.A. and was in the front row. Like a puppy dog. But as far as we could tell, Amira didn’t give him the time of day.”
“It’s a long way from unrequited love to murder,” Serena said. “Sounds like Moose had a better motive. Or you, for that matter.”
“That’s true,” Helen acknowledged. “Then again, we didn’t leave town right after the murder. Why else do you think the word went out that Walker wasn’t in Vegas that night? Boni was covering for his whale. Walker was there. I saw him at the first show.”
“Tell us what happened that night,” Stride said.
“I don’t know, not really. We did our two performances of Flame that evening, at eight o’clock and then eleven o’clock. Amira was in both shows. She left around one in the morning. I saw her leave the backstage area. There was nothing unusual about it. By the next morning, the word was all over the casino that she had been killed.”
“Did you see Walker at the second show?” Stride asked.
“No. He usually attended both shows when he was in town, but he was only at the first show that night.”
“Did you see him in the casino at all after the first show?”
“I never saw him again, period. Ever.” Helen raised her eyebrows as if to say, That’s what I’ve been telling you.
“What did you do after the last show?” Serena asked.
“I went to one of the hotel rooms. Leo met me there, and we sweated up the sheets for an hour.”
“Leo Rucci? The casino manager?”
Helen nodded. “That was what he called himself, a manager. He was mostly just dumb muscle for Boni. He managed people by bullying and threatening and beating them up when he needed to.”
“So why sleep with him?”
Helen seemed amused at their naïveté. “Well, first, I was ambitious, like Amira. I knew whenever she decided she wanted more money somewhere else, I’d have a shot at the lead role. I thought Leo could put in a good word for me with Boni, and he did.” She winked. “But it wasn’t just that Leo also had the biggest cock I’d ever seen. Nine inches and fat like a sausage. I could only do him after a show, because there was no way I could dance after having that thing inside me.” She said it matter-of-factly. Stride got the feeling that Helen liked being outrageous. He tried not to blush but felt his face growing hot.
“How long was Leo with you?” Serena asked, coming to his rescue.
“About an hour. That was about two o’clock in the morning. Normally, I could count on Leo for a couple of go-rounds, but he had to leave.”
“Why?” Serena asked.
“Mickey called him. There was a problem outside.”
“Who’s Mickey?”
Helen shrugged. “One of the lifeguards. There were always students who took summer jobs to make money and screw some of the wives while their husbands were at the tables. Mickey told Leo some guy was drunk near the pool and trying to start a fight Leo went outside to break the guy’s nose.”
“That was how Leo solved most of his problems?” Stride asked.
“Oh, yeah. He was a vicious son of a bitch. Huge, like a linebacker. He slapped me a couple times, too, and that was the end of it for me.”
“Did you hear anything more about the fight?” Serena asked.
“Not a word. I assume it was some nobody. If it was Dean or Shecky, that would have been news. As it was, the next day, all the talk was about Amira.”
“And you didn’t see Leo again that night?”
“No, not until the next day.”
“Did he tell you anything about the murder?” Stride asked.
Helen smiled. “Only that I should keep my mouth shut and not ask any questions. The other girls got the same story. If anybody asked, we didn’t know a damn thing.”
“What about the detective who was investigating? His name was Nicholas Humphrey. Did you ever speak to him?”
“Sure. He interviewed all of us together, and Leo was there, too. No one said a thing. If you ask me, Nick didn’t look too disappointed. I’m not sure he was all that interested in the truth.”
“Nick?” Stride asked. “You knew him?”
“He was a regular at the Sheherezade,” Helen replied. “Sometimes he had private security gigs for the stars.”
Stride began to think that maybe Rex Terrell was right and the fix was in. “Did Nick Humphrey ever provide security for Walker Lane?” he asked.
“Well, it’s possible Nick helped him out on Neon Nights. I’m not sure.” Helen leaned closer to them. “Can I ask you something? How does this involve me? Or Peter?”
“Our first thought was that someone was trying to keep you quiet,” Serena said.
“But no one threatened me,” Helen insisted.
Stride watched her closely. He could see age there, no matter how much she tried to hide it with plastic surgery and makeup. He saw vice, too, plenty of it. But not deceit. Not fear. She wasn’t hiding from anyone or covering up the truth.
“Right now, we don’t know who’s doing this or why,” Stride admitted. “So please be careful. Until we know what game this person is playing, we don’t know his next move.”
Being up here, Stride thought, was like being on top of the world, staring down. Jagged, barren mountaintops of red-orange rock were set against a blue sky that seemed as tall as heaven. Streaks of erosion on the cliffs looked like grooves that had been carved into the hills with a knife. It was stark, surpassing beauty, ringing the valley.
The late afternoon weather was warm but not hot, although he could feel even in the waning glow of the sun how easily it could turn ferocious. He remembered the summer and how he had baked then, barely able to take a breath, feeling superheated grit clog his lungs. There were none of the lake breezes or storms from Minnesota, no electrical shows of thunder and lightning, no cool dampness. Just an oven, set on broil and left to cook for three months.
He took a last look at the whitewashed stucco of Helen’s palatial home.
“So how do you think she is in bed?” he asked, glancing at Serena with a smile.
“I think she’s more than you could handle,” Serena replied.
“You got that right.”
His cell phone rang. Sara Evans again. Restless.
“This is Sawhill.” Stride imagined him with his stress ball in hand, squeezing rhythmically.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” Stride replied.
Serena drew a finger across her throat and mouthed, He’s going to cut us off.
“Cordy tells me you think there may be a connection between MJ’s murder and the death of Peter Hale,” Sawhill said.
“It looks that way.” He explained how they had discovered the link between Helen Truax and Walker Lane, and what Helen had told them about Amira Luz.
“I thought I told you that line of inquiry was dead,” Sawhill said.
Stride chose his words carefully. “You did, sir. And it was. This was professional curiosity, nothing more. It was simply luck that Serena recognized the boy’s grandmother in a photo that ran in LV. In Rex Terrell’s article.”
“Professional curiosity,” Sawhill said, repeating the phrase as if he were tasting a sour wine. “Tell me, Detective, do you expect me to believe that story?”
“Not for a moment,” Stride replied.
Sawhill actually laughed. “All right. I fire cops who think I’m an idiot. I respect a cop who follows his instincts, even if it lands him in hot water. Which this still may, Stride.”
“I realize that,” Stride acknowledged.
“What about the murder in Reno?”
“Serena talked to Jay Walling. So far, it doesn’t look like the woman who was killed, Alice Ford, or her family had any connection to the Sheherezade or Amira, but he’s going to keep digging.”
As he talked to Sawhill on the street, Stride heard Serena’s cell phone ring, too. He watched her take the call and cup her ear, moving several steps away.
Sawhill kept talking. “For the time being, we keep this out of the press. Got it?”
“Agreed.”
“My restriction still stands. Don’t talk to Walker Lane again without clearing it through me.”
“Fair enough,” Stride said. He didn’t mention that Walker Lane was already back on his list, along with another name that would drive Sawhill crazy: Boni Fisso. This investigation had all the makings of a political tornado, sucking people into the updraft.
“What’s your next move?” Sawhill asked.
“I want to talk to Nick Humphrey,” Stride said. “The detective who handled the original investigation of Amira’s death.”
“All right, I’ll get you his address,” Sawhill replied. “He still lives in the city.”
Stride heard the clicking of computer keys, and then Sawhill rattled off an address in North Las Vegas. Stride jotted it down in his notebook.
“Step carefully, Detective. I’m willing to let you run because it looks like your instincts were right. But keep your professional curiosity on a short leash.”
Sawhill hung up the phone. A few feet away, Serena did the same.
“A reprieve,” he told Serena. “Sawhill thinks the connection is tenuous, but he’s not shutting us down. Yet.”
Serena was smiling. “He’s a lying bastard.”
“What?”
“That was Cordy,” Serena said. “There’s nothing tenuous about the connection. We ran the Aztek for fingerprints, and there was a beautiful print left for us on the inside of the front windshield. It matches the print you guys found on the slot machine at the Oasis. It was the same guy.”
“Son of a bitch,” Stride said. “Sawhill knew?”
“Cordy just left his office.”
“And to think I was actually polite to him.” Stride laughed.
They climbed into the Bronco and headed down the long stretch of Bonanza back to the city. The elegant estates disappeared behind them as they descended into the valley, replaced by drab middle-class housing behind gray walls. Stride pulled up to a stoplight, then turned and stared thoughtfully at Serena. They were working the same case again. Like the murder of Rachel Deese that summer, when they first met. It gave him a jolt of adrenaline.
“So we have the same killer,” Serena said. “And the guy is leaving his calling card behind at each crime scene.”
“Did Jay Walling run a match for prints at the scene in Reno?”
Serena nodded. “No match.”
“So maybe there’s no connection,” Stride said.
“Or we haven’t found it yet It’s possible the perp didn’t think about leaving a print behind until the hit-and-run. Then he decided he wanted to lead us on a merry chase. So he left the receipt as a clue to tie in the murder of Alice Ford at her ranch.”
“Except Helen and Walker Lane are both mentioned in Rex Terrell’s article in LV. They have a connection to Amira Luz. The Fords don’t, as far as we can tell.”
“You think the article by Rex is the connection?” Serena asked. “That’s what got this started?”
“Maybe,” Stride replied. “No one cared about Amira for years before he started nosing around. Rex may have got someone’s attention.”
As they climbed up Nick Humphrey’s driveway, a little blur of white came streaking like a comet from next door. They stopped as a West Highland terrier sped around their feet, dancing on its hind legs and then flopping over on its back. Serena laughed and crouched down, rubbing the dog’s belly. It closed its eyes, in heaven.
An elderly black man limped over from the neighboring house. “I’m sorry about that.”
The dog leaped up and began jumping for attention at the man’s legs, wanting to be picked up. He bent over with a groan and scooped her up. “Some watchdog you are,” he grumbled at her. The dog kissed his face.
“What a sweetie,” Serena told him.
“Yeah, she loves people,” the man replied. He added, “I’m Harvey Washington. You coming to see Nicky?”
They nodded.
“He’s inside. Probably watching ESPN. Me, I prefer the History Channel. I love it when they do those dinosaur shows.” He put the dog down, and the dog sat and stared up at him. “You wouldn’t have liked those days, huh, missy? You would have wound up an appetizer for one of them T-Rexes.”
The dog looked unconvinced. It pawed at Serena’s leg and then flopped over on its back again.
“Oh, you’re a lady, for heaven’s sake,” Harvey said. “Don’t go offering up your tummy like that. You want people to think you’re easy?”
Harvey had gray curly hair and a broad nose. His chocolate skin was wrinkled and hung like ill-fitting clothes on his arms and legs. He wore navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt.
“Have you known Nick long?” Stride asked.
“Oh, for years. Long before both of us moved here.”
“Were you on the force, too?” Serena asked.
“No, nothing like that. I can see you two are on the job, though. You both have that look. I’d know it anywhere.”
Stride saw a twinkle in Harvey ’s eyes and wondered if the man knew the police from personal experience. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a black man in Las Vegas in the old days.
“I won’t keep you,” Harvey said. “I’m sure you’ve got ground to cover with Nick. When you see him, ask him if he’s taking his lisinopril. The man’s blood pressure could pop a champagne cork.”
He waved good-bye with his dog’s paw and shuffled back to his yard.
A small plane floated overhead, its engine whining. They weren’t far from the North Las Vegas Airport. Nick Humphrey lived on a street of tract houses just off Cheyenne. There was still a lot of open land out here. Stride could hear the rumble of bulldozers digging up the rocky soil somewhere, giving birth to another look-alike development like this one. Each unit was cheap and without any soul, painted the same mute beige, dropped next to one another like part of a build-by-numbers master plan. Stride was sorry to think that this was the best Humphrey could afford, after several decades on the job.
Stride and Serena continued to the front door and rang the bell. Humphrey answered immediately, as if he had been waiting for them. His eyes were hooded with suspicion. Stride explained who they were and that they wanted to talk to him about an old case, but his granite expression didn’t change.
“Amira Luz,” Stride added.
“Yeah, I thought as much,” Humphrey said. With a shrug, he let them in.
Humphrey had a shock-white crewcut and a goatee. He was bulky for his age, and when he shook their hands, his grip was crushing. He wore jeans and slippers, but no shirt, and a green terry robe tied loosely at his waist. He led them into a small living room, trailing an aroma of Bengay.
“You guys want a beer? If anyone asks, I can just say it was bottled water.” They declined, and he didn’t seem surprised. He added, “That’s okay. No one would believe I kept bottled water in the house anyway.”
His living room had the look of a bachelor’s house, messy and unorganized. Prescription pill bottles and beer cans were strewn across a coffee table, its wooden veneer scratched and dotted with water rings. Books and newspapers sat in stacks on the floor. Stride took a seat on a sofa and heard its sagging frame squeak through the cushions. Stuffing spilled out through the ripped floral fabric on the arms.
Stride saw an old baseball rolling around on the coffee table. He picked it up and noticed the ball was autographed in a faded blue scrawl. Willie Mays.
“This must be worth a lot,” Stride said.
“Yeah, so what, I’m not allowed to have some nice things?”
“I never said that.”
Humphrey snorted. “I’m a collector.” He took a seat in an old leather recliner across from them. “So I hear Sawhill is in charge of homicide now.”
“That’s right,” Serena said.
“Bunch of Mormons running Sin City,” Humphrey said, curling his lip. “Ain’t that a fucking joke? But I suppose you got the Indians raking in the gambling bucks everywhere else. Take your pick.”
“Did you work with Sawhill?” Serena asked.
“Sure. Ambitious but smart. Politics first, God second. I hear he’s got his eyes on the sheriff’s campaign next year.”
Serena nodded. “But the word is that the sheriff will endorse someone else.”
“Don’t be so sure. He’s going to feel a lot of heat. Sawhill’s got a brother who’s a top aide to the governor, and he’s got a sister who does political ads and worked on the mayor’s last campaign. And the old man, Michael Sawhill, is a big-shot casino banker. The whole family’s connected.”
“You didn’t sound surprised that we were here about Amira Luz,” Stride said.
“I saw the article in LV ,” Humphrey retorted bitterly. “That little snot Terrell all but accused me of being on the take. I called a lawyer who told me there wasn’t much I could do. Too bad. A libel suit would pay for a few upgrades around here.”
“A lot of people back then seemed to think Walker Lane was involved in the murder,’ Serena said.
Humphrey shrugged. ‘There was no evidence he was involved, and there was plenty of evidence that this guy in L.A. did it.”
“ Walker was in Las Vegas that night,” Stride said.
“Hell, I know that. It was that goddamn article that said we were clueless about it. But I had six people who told me that Walker Lane left town before the second performance of the show. He drove back to L. A.”
“Could they have been lying to you?” Serena asked. “Sure they could, but if they were, they got their stories straight.”
“Did you talk directly to Boni Fisso about what happened that night?” Stride asked.
Humphrey shifted uncomfortably and tugged at his groin. “Boni talk to the cops? Fat chance. I dealt with Leo Rucci. He was the fixer, Boni’s boss on the casino floor. Everything went through Leo. Meanest asshole I’ve ever met.”
“We heard Leo Rucci was involved in breaking up a fight in the middle of the night on the night of the murder. Did you investigate that?”
“Fight? I never heard a word about it. Rucci never mentioned it. His alibi was he was balling one of the dancers, and she confirmed it. Besides, Rucci didn’t usually break up fights-he caused them.”
“How about a lifeguard named Mickey? He was the one who called Rucci. Did you talk to him?”
“Nah. Pretty boys by the pool were a dime a dozen.” Humphrey pushed himself out of his chair. “I got to take a leak,” he said. “Prostate. What a bitch. Bet mine’s the size of a fucking orange by now.”
He left the room, and Stride got up from the sofa, shaking his head. “It’s hell getting old,” he said.
“So you tell me,” Serena said with an impish grin.
He did think about it sometimes, the age difference of almost a decade between them. He worried about a day when she might wake up and ask herself what she was doing with an old man. He didn’t feel any older or younger than his years, but he wasn’t a superman. He was in his midforties, and some of the original equipment was a little worn. He felt better physically away from the Minnesota cold, suffering from fewer of the bone-deep pains that the frigid lake winds brought.
Serena, by contrast, was physically in her prime, at least in his eyes. It was her soul that felt older, and that was what held them together. It was as if she had started bruising and weathering it at a young age. He only wished she would tell him more about it. She had begun to offer him little glimpses, like opening the windows in an Advent calendar, but there was still a lot he didn’t know about her.
He studied Humphrey’s living room, looking for clues to the man. There were sports sections littering the floor near his recliner, not just from the Las Vegas paper but also from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Sports book, Stride thought. Humphrey probably spent a lot of time trying to beat the spread.
The recliner itself reeked of menthol. The whole house was dank, as if the windows had been closed for too long. He also picked up a remnant of Cajun smells in the air, as if someone had been spicing up a pot of jambalaya.
“Look at this,” Serena called to him.
She was looking at several framed photographs on the wall. They were publicity shots of old Vegas stars, similar to the ones that Stride had seen at Battista’s. He recognized Dean Martin, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe.
“All of these are autographed,” Serena said.
Stride shrugged. “So he collects memorabilia. He told us as much.”
“No, they’re autographed to him,” Serena said.
Stride joined her at the wall and realized she was right. Each photograph bore Nick’s name and a personal message in addition to the star’s signature. “Helen said he did private security gigs,” Stride said.
“Yeah, but look at Marilyn’s message,” Serena told him.
Stride leaned closer to the smiling photograph of the platinum blonde. Across one bare shoulder, in black marker, a feminine hand had written: Nicky-What a night. I needed you, and you were there. Love and kisses, MM.
“She was a hell of a girl,” Humphrey said as he reentered the living room behind them. He held a lowball glass with a large shot of what looked like whiskey.
“Come on, Nick,” Stride told him. “Maybe you could get by with Willie Mays and Dean Martin, but not Marilyn. I’m not buying it.”
Humphrey was smug. He put down his whiskey and rummaged through a pile of paperbacks on an end table. He pulled one out and tossed it across the room to Stride. It was a biography of Marilyn Monroe.
“There are some photographs after page seventy-two,” he said. “One of them shows a letter she wrote to DiMaggio. Now you tell me if that’s not the same handwriting.”
Stride and Serena found the page and held up the image of Marilyn’s old letter to the photograph on the wall. Humphrey laughed as their faces fell. Stride had to admit that the handwriting looked like a dead-on match.
Humphrey sat back down in his recliner, picked up the whiskey, and grinned at them, enormously pleased with himself.
“So you guys want to tell me why you’re really here?” he asked. “I don’t imagine Metro has the resources to be digging up forty-year-old murders.”
Stride and Serena sat back down. He found himself stealing glances at Marilyn’s photograph and still thought Humphrey was pulling one over on them.
’Two close relatives of people who were mentioned in Rex Terrell’s article have been murdered in the last two weeks,” Serena said. “Same perp. We want to know if these murders somehow are tied back to the death of Amira Luz.”
“Forty years is a long time to wait to start a vendetta,” Humphrey replied.
“Even so, you might want to take precautions,” Stride suggested. ‘Tell your family to do the same.”
Humphrey shrugged. “Never married, no kids. I’m the end of the blood line.”
“Do you have any idea who might be doing this or why?” Serena asked.
“None at all,” Humphrey said. “I hope you don’t think it’s me. A geriatric serial killer, now that would be a new twist They could show that one on Law & Order: Nursing Home Unit”
“Then what do you think is going on?” Stride asked.
“Look, you already mentioned his name,” Humphrey said. “Boni Fisso. He’s got a big new project going up, right? Couple billion dollars in play?”
Stride nodded. “That was our first thought, too. Boni might be afraid that the truth about Amira’s death would come out. We thought he might be sending a signal to people who were involved back then. Keep your mouths shut.”
“Boni wouldn’t bother with relatives and signals,” Humphrey said. “He’d simply take them out.”
The old detective shook his head, as if he had already figured it out Stride realized, watching the man’s mind work, that Humphrey had been a smart cop-which made the gaps in the investigation of Amira’s death smell even worse.
’Turn it the other way around,” Humphrey said. “Maybe someone wants to derail Boni’s big new casino as a kind of weird justice for Amira. So he starts killing people. Leaving bread crumbs for you guys to follow. All of it leading into the past.”
Bread crumbs, Stride thought Like fingerprints. “Did Amira have relatives?”
“None that I ever found. She was an only child, parents both dead. But it wouldn’t have to be someone who was related to Amira. Boni made plenty of enemies in his day.”
“The question is, where do the bread crumbs lead?” Stride asked. “If you’re right about this guy, he seems to think there’s more to Amira’s death than ever came out.”
“He’s wrong,” Humphrey insisted. “We closed the case.”
“Listen, Nick,” Serena said cautiously. “Don’t take this the wrong way. Word is you were a regular at the Sheherezade. You did a lot of private security gigs there.” She gestured at the photographs on the wall. “Looks like you’ve got the pictures to prove it, too.”
Humphrey’s eyes got as cold as the ice in his drink. “So?”
“So it was another time. Different rules. This was an outlaw town. What we’re wondering is-”
“You’re wondering whether I was paid off,” Humphrey said, his voice rising sharply. “Right? Fuck, you’re as bad as Rex Terrell.”
“No one said that,” Serena replied. “But there are a lot of questions, and you seem too smart to have missed them. We want to know whether you got pressure from somewhere to go easy on the investigation.”
Humphrey stared at them, and Stride thought he saw the pain of a compromised man. The retired cop looked down into his drink and drained the last of the whiskey in a single swallow. “There was no pressure,” he croaked, his throat constricted.
Stride saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Harvey Washington from next door stood in the doorway of the living room, his dog in his arms, his eyes sad. The dog squirmed to be put down.
“Nick, why don’t you tell them the truth? We’re old men. No one gives a rat’s ass about us anymore.”
Humphrey didn’t show any surprise. “Shit, Harvey, I could still get in trouble. We both could.”
Harvey shook his head and put down the dog. It immediately scampered across the room, jumped into Humphrey’s lap, and curled up for a nap.
Serena blinked. “She’s your dog?”
“Do you guys want to tell us what the hell is going on?” Stride asked.
Harvey folded his arms and waited. Humphrey scratched the dog’s head and refused to look up. He gave a petulant shrug. “You do what you got to do,” he told Harvey.
“Oh, don’t be a child,” Harvey said. He pulled a rickety wooden chair out from the wall and sat down. ‘There was pressure,” he told Stride and Serena, “but it’s not what you think. Nicky never took a dime. He went soft on those guys because of me.”
Stride didn’t understand. “You?”
“We’ve been partners for almost fifty years.”
In the recliner, Humphrey took a deep breath. If there had been a closet in the room, he would have crawled back into it. “Leo Rucci knew. I don’t know how. Those guys back then, they knew everything about everybody. He made it clear that if I pushed in the wrong direction, the department would find out I was gay. That would have cost me my job.”
“And the wrong direction was Walker Lane?” Stride asked.
Humphrey spread his arms wide. “What do you think? I knew it smelled, but I was fucked.”
“It was more than that,” Harvey added. “Nick was protecting me. He would have lost his job, and I would have wound up in jail. Me and the law, we haven’t always seen eye to eye about things.”
Stride saw Marilyn Monroe smiling at him from the wall. “You’re a forger,” he guessed.
“He’s an artist is what he is,” Humphrey insisted.
Harvey ducked his head modestly. “I imitate things. When I was younger, sometimes I wasn’t all that fussy about people knowing what was real and what wasn’t”
“But not anymore?” Stride asked, picking up the Willie Mays baseball.
Harvey grinned. “I give Nicky presents from time to time. It’s a game for us. These days, I can sell my imitations on eBay and still make pretty good dough. Mind you, I advertise them as imitations, not the real thing.”
“And I’m sure your buyers are always equally honest when they resell them,” Serena said.
“That ain’t my problem,” Harvey replied pleasantly.
Stride couldn’t believe it. A gay cop and a lover who happened to be a con artist. The result was that someone- Walker Lane?-got away with murder, and some poor chump in L.A. got killed to close the case. And forty years later, another round of murders had begun.
“Is Leo Rucci still alive?” Stride asked. “We need to talk to him.”
“He’s alive,” Humphrey said, “but Rucci was just the arms and legs. Boni was always the brains. He’s the only one who really knows what went on that night.”
“Except Boni’s not likely to talk to us without a warrant and seven lawyers vetting every question,” Stride said.
“See if Sawhill can get his dad to make a call,” Humphrey said. “The old man has done money deals for Boni and a lot of the other casino owners for years.”
“Sawhill has connections to Boni?” Stride asked.
“It’s a small town,” Humphrey replied.
“You could talk to Boni’s daughter, too,” Harvey suggested.
Serena looked up, surprised. “I didn’t know Boni had a daughter.”
Humphrey nodded. “Claire Belfort. She took her mother’s name. Claire and Boni had a big falling-out years ago. She’s a folk singer at one of the joints on the Boulder Strip.”
“Why would she help us?” Stride asked.
Humphrey shrugged. “She might not. Probably won’t. But if anyone can get you to Boni with a single phone call, it’s Claire.”
He parked the Lexus on the lake road in front of an estate where the windows were dark. Whoever owned the mansion was away in the city for the evening, or maybe cruising through the calm waters of the Greek islands. That was what the people in Lake Las Vegas did. They could afford to go anywhere and do anything.
It didn’t really matter if someone was inside. If they looked out and saw a Lexus parked in front of their house, it wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. Just one of the neighbors taking a nighttime stroll by the water. After all, strangers couldn’t come here. You couldn’t get in without passing through the security gate on the south shore.
The old woman had played her part well. Smiling at the guard, laughing as if nothing was wrong, as if no one was behind her in the backseat, with a gun. Rolling up the window and driving through the gate, as she did most days. The only telltale sign, which he could see from behind her, was the frantic quivering of her fingers on the steering wheel. Not from Parkinson’s, as anyone might expect from an old woman. This was terror.
He had spent the late afternoon with her in her house, watching her fear grow, watching the sun set. She was tied to a chair and gagged, eyes wide, following his movements as he went back and forth to the window. When it was night, he was finally ready. He knew she was waiting for him to kill her, and he wondered if her heart finally stopped racing when he simply left the house, took her car, and drove away.
He didn’t drive far. Just a few blocks down to the lake, where the largest of the estates hugged the water. He had a commanding view from here of the big house dominating the street.
Waiting.
He wanted a cigarette but didn’t dare open the smoked windows of the car. Better to let it look deserted, if anyone drove by. He sat, almost motionless, watching the large estate, observing the lights that went on and off from room to room, seeing occasional silhouettes moving behind the curtains. He used a miniature pair of binoculars to see inside and confirm that both of them were still home. Just the two of them.
Every now and then, his eyes flicked across to the lake. The lights of the resorts twinkled like a fairyland. That was what they peddled here. Illusion,
He cleared his mind. He had done this many times, and he wasn’t nervous, but the mental lapse with the boy still worried him. He had allowed himself to get angry, to let his emotions spill over. It hadn’t been a problem with the others. He didn’t want it to be a problem again. Not tonight. Not with the rest in the days to come.
He saw motion in the rearview mirror of the car. Headlights. A long black limousine glided by the Lexus, continuing down the lakeside street and pulling into the driveway of the estate he was watching. The driver didn’t turn the engine off, or switch off the headlights, or toot his horn-it was simply the time for him to be there, and with celebrity assignments, you were always there at the right time.
The door of the estate opened.
He raised his binoculars and watched the big man leave the big house and proceed to the rear door of the big limousine. Everything about the man was larger than life. The driver had jumped out and was waiting there, tipping his hat, smiling.
The car door closed. The front door closed. He watched the limo back out of the driveway and reverse course along the lake road, passing the Lexus as it went.
He gave it another ten minutes, sitting in silence and darkness. The street remained deserted. Finally, he turned on the car, leaving the headlights off, and rolled the Lexus quietly down the remaining stretch of pavement until he was in front of the large estate. He put the car in park and set the brake but left the engine running. This wouldn’t take long. He was always surprised to hear about the mistakes that other professionals sometimes made, such as turning the car off and finding, when they got back from the scene, that the car wouldn’t start again. A little thing like that could mean twenty-five years to life.
He studied the mirrors one last time and got out of the car. The SIG-Sauer was almost invisible in his right hand.
As he walked up the driveway, he felt a glimmer of hesitation, which he tried to quell. Then he understood-he knew her. In almost every other case, he had faced a stranger, whose story he didn’t know, but he had been with her and liked her. She seemed lost, a victim, a little like himself. He came up to the oversized front door, rich with wood and brass, and thought how small she seemed in these giant surroundings.
It didn’t matter in the end. Everyone was a victim sooner or later. That was what the voice in his head said, the one that had always been there, guiding him.
Amira.
He rang the doorbell. A few seconds passed. He grew uncomfortable, bathed in the porch light. His gun was sheltered behind his right thigh.
She labored to open the door, and when she did, she smiled at him, recognizing him. There wasn’t any fear in her face.
“Oh, hi,” she said in her girlish voice. Pretty. Vulnerable. “Didn’t you get the message?”
Those were her last words. When she saw the gun, she only had an instant to become confused and then afraid, and then it was over. You couldn’t afford to hesitate when you had any doubts. Ten seconds later, he was back in the Lexus, with the windows open to disperse the acrid smell of smoke, driving back toward the hills that led into the city.
Serena ordered a bottle of sparkling water and a champagne glass. She found a table for two near the stage and tipped the waiter twenty dollars to remove the other chair.
She hated being in a casino by herself, where she had to fend off drunken passes all night and watch drinks being poured that reminded her of what she couldn’t have. But Stride had suggested that Boni’s daughter, Claire, might respond better to her, one on one in the casual setting of the club, than to the two of them together.
The Boulder Strip casinos mostly attracted locals, people in the know, who assumed their odds here were better away from Las Vegas Boulevard (not likely) and that they could be higher rollers with more perks on a smaller stake out here (true). Serena knew that Cordy was a fixture at Sam’s Town, the largest of the Boulder casinos, a few miles to the north. He poured thousands of dollars into their greedy hands each year, but they treated him like a king in return.
The joint where Claire sang, called the Limelight, wasn’t in the same league as its bigger cousins like Sam’s Town, Arizona Charlie’s, or Boulder Station, and didn’t include an attached hotel. It was on the deserted southern end of the highway, where there were still acres of dirty, open land, interspersed with RV parks, adult superstores, and pawnshops. A few housing developments had begun creeping in at the edges, as the suburbs expanded their hold on the desert.
The Limelight had been recently renovated over the skeleton of a long-shuttered roadside casino, a beer-and-nickels joint where fights used to break out nightly and down-on-their-lucks gambled away their last few dollars. No one was sorry to see it go. The Limelight wasn’t upscale, but it was one of the few venues in town that featured live country music for the price of a couple of drinks. She and Stride had dropped in a few times. It was barely more than a bar, with a matchbox gaming room for tables and slots and a claustrophobic showroom with green walls, a long bar with video poker machines, and about fifty circular tables squeezed without much breathing room in front of a narrow stage.
She sipped her water and watched the tables filling up quickly. Claire Belfort obviously had a reputation. Anyone could fill the club on Saturday night, but it was Tuesday, and that meant the crowd was coming to see her. Serena had been ready to assume that Boni’s money had paved the way for his daughter’s career, but now she wasn’t so sure. The Limelight was a dive, but the people who came to the shows knew music.
At nine o’clock, Claire’s band took their places. It was a typical country arrangement, with fiddle, bass, drums, and steel. The lights went down in the showroom, and overhead cans lit the stage. The band opened with a keening, melancholy tune, and Serena recognized it immediately as one of her favorite songs: “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” a bitter elegy about the plight of Kentucky coal miners. Serena had heard Patty Loveless sing it, and Patty was a tough act to follow.
Then, from offstage, she heard a smoky voice wrapping itself around the lyrics and weaving all the pain in the world into the music. Claire’s voice could have stood up to the demands of the blues. It was strong and filled with emotion, but with a nuance in her expression that Serena had only heard in the most mature country singers. She sounded a little like Allison Moorer, with a voice so sorrowful and hypnotic that Serena found it arousing to listen to, and irresistible, like one of the Sirens.
Claire walked into the light from the corner of the stage. She kept singing, as applause erupted and then turned into a hush as people listened to the song. She had long, strawberry blond hair, with wavy ends that swished around her shoulders. Her face was angular, with hard edges and dimples in her cheeks, and a small birthmark in the hollow of one dimple that made her face both imperfect and attractive. She had piercing, intelligent blue eyes. She wore an untucked pink silk shirt, with its top three buttons undone, black pants that clung to her slim legs, and razor-thin stiletto heels. Light glinted on her gold hoop earrings.
She came to the very front of the stage, directly above Serena, singing a poignant story about a grandfather in the nineteenth century who went back into the coal mines to feed his family, only to die there like so many others. The music was haunting. Serena found herself staring up at Claire on the stage, enraptured. Their eyes met, and a strange, electric sensation passed between them. Serena passed it off as her imagination, but it felt real and intense.
When the song ended, with Claire whispering the last few lines over and over like a ghost, Serena found herself on her feet, applauding. She saw the flush in Claire’s face and the way she thrived on the energy of the crowd.
Claire moved on to another country ballad and followed it with a rockabilly foot-stomper, then a medley of bluegrass covers. All of them were sad songs, with lyrics about loss and surrender and death, the kind of song that would ring false with a lesser singer. Claire brought them to life, made them real and sorrowful. In every tragedy she sang about, she found an inner longing that Serena could relate to and remember.
Her eyes kept coming back to Serena. Speaking to her. Teasing her. This wasn’t Serena’s imagination. When they looked at each other, Claire’s lips would crease into a small smile, not of humor or irony but of kinship. It was almost as if Claire were singing to her. Or that was how it felt.
Serena found herself being seduced.
It was a sensation from long ago that she hadn’t felt for years. She wasn’t drinking anything but water, but she felt drunk anyway. The music and smoke made her light-headed. Claire’s voice felt like soft hands on her body, and Serena felt naked and exposed.
It was electrifying.
An hour later, Claire opened her dressing room door with the same dark smile. Her skin glowed with sweat from her performance. Her eyes, seeing Serena, were bright and curious.
“I’m Serena Dial,” Serena told her. “I’m a homicide investigator with Metro. I’d like to talk with you.”
Most people folded and became putty hearing what she did. They started spilling years-old secrets. Claire just arched an eyebrow to show her surprise and opened the door a little wider, so that Serena could squeeze past her.
The dressing room was small and dreary. Yellowing linoleum stretched across the floor. The ceiling was made up of water-stained foam panels, and aluminum pie pans on the floor caught occasional drips that plinked like music. There was a sleeper sofa on the right and a card table with several chairs around it. Hangers holding Claire’s costumes dangled from a clothes rack on wheels. She had a refrigerator, a sink, and a bathroom at the rear.
Claire gestured to the sofa and the card table. “Take your pick.”
Serena sat in one of the card-table chairs.
“Can I get you a drink?” Claire asked. When Serena shook her head, she added, “I guess it would be bad form to offer a joint to a cop.”
Serena laughed. Claire retrieved a bottle of water from the refrigerator and slouched into one of the other chairs, her long legs stretched out, her elbow on the table. She opened the water bottle with slim, delicate fingers. “Serena Dial,” she said. “Great name.”
“Thanks.”
Claire leaned over and combed her hand through Serena’s black hair. “I love your hair, too. What do you use?”
Serena told her, feeling embarrassed that it was just a cheap shampoo.
Claire nodded and rocked back in the chair. “I guess detectives don’t talk about those kinds of things. You’re tough, right? Detectives are tough. Shouldn’t you be fat and wear a bad suit, instead of being gorgeous?”
“This is my after-hours look,” Serena said with a smile. “During the day I’m fat and wear polyester.”
Claire smiled. “Did you like my show?”
“I thought you were amazing,” Serena told her honestly. “Why aren’t you in Nashville?”
“What, this isn’t glamorous?” Claire replied. She caught one of the drips from the ceiling in her hand. “I don’t do this for the money, and here I can sing whatever I want, whenever I want. In Nashville, people would want to control me.”
“Like your father,” Serena said.
Claire pursed her lips. “Yes, like my father. Am I supposed to be impressed that you know about him? It’s not a secret.”
“But you don’t advertise it.”
“No, I don’t. He probably likes it that way, too. Is that why you’re here? To talk about Boni?”
Serena nodded. “In part.”
“What’s the other part?” Claire asked, taking a drink of water.
“To tell you that you might be in danger.”
“That’s intriguing,” Claire said. “Will you be the one to protect me?”
“This isn’t a joke. Two people are dead.”
Claire nodded. “I never said it was a joke. But why would anyone want to kill me? Because I’m Boni’s daughter? We may be estranged, Serena, but someone would have to be a fool to do that. I know my father, and you’re a cop, so I guess you do, too. Boni would eradicate them. Torture them. They’d wind up in a cornfield like Spilotro.”
“I don’t think whoever is doing this cares about that.” Serena explained about the deaths of Peter Hale and MJ Lane, and the connection that had brought the detectives back to the forty-year-old death of Amira Luz. She added, “Have you ever heard of Amira?”
“No” Claire said. “Boni never mentioned her. But I wasn’t born until later that year.”
“How about Walker Lane?”
“I know of him, of course, but that’s it I wouldn’t have been able to tell you he had anything to do with my father.”
“Why are you and your father estranged?” Serena asked.
Claire didn’t answer. She put her bottle of water between her lips and drank again. Then she took one of Serena’s hands in hers and turned it over, palm upward. Serena didn’t pull away. Claire used her middle finger to lightly trace a line down along Serena’s palm to her wrist. Claire’s finger was moist from the condensation on the bottle.
“I can read palms, did you know that?” she said, with mischief in her voice.
Serena played along. “What do you see?”
“Well, we already know you’re tough.”
“Rights”
“You’re a cop, so I’m going to hedge my bets on your life line. Your love line is broken, I’m sorry to say.”
“Is that so?”
“Definitely.”
“I can also see that you had a passionate affair with another woman when you were young.”
Serena yanked her hand away. “What the hell is this?”
Claire raised her own hands in surrender. “Easy, okay? It was a joke.” She added, “But methinks I touched a nerve, Serena”
Serena realized her heart was pounding. “No, you just surprised me.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Claire replied smoothly. “I was reading my own palm. That’s my story. I’m gay, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Did Boni not approve?”
“That’s part of it”
“But only part?”
Claire sighed. “I spent my first twenty-eight years with Boni running my life, like he runs everything around him. I’m his only child, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. I went to UNLV, got a master’s degree in hotel administration, all so I could take over the business whenever he was ready to hand it over. That’s what I wanted, too. He bred all his ambition into me.”
“So what happened?” Serena asked.
Claire’s face was emotionless. “He had to make a choice between me and the business. The business came first. Big surprise.”
Serena guessed that she was covering something up. “What about your mother?”
“She died giving birth to me. It’s always been just me and Boni. At least until I walked out. I decided I wanted to be my own person, not some clone of my father.”
“You sound pretty tough, too,” Serena said.
“I told you, I was reading my own palm. Anyway, that was more than ten years ago, and we’ve hardly spoken since. He makes overtures from time to time, but I’m on my own now. I don’t want him to buy me. It drives him crazy. I’m the only person in the world he hasn’t been able to dominate.”
Serena felt sure that Claire must be very much like her father. Stubborn. Dominant. She imagined that they must have had titanic fights over the years. It impressed her that Claire had stood her ground. That was what she had had to do herself, along the rocky road from her mother to Deidre. People who promised to save her and then betrayed her.
“You’ve made it hard for me to ask what I wanted to ask,” Serena admitted.
Claire shook her head. “Not at all. Ask me anything. I may ask for some of your secrets, too.”
“I need to talk to your father. We think he may know what’s going on, and why. If it involves what happened to Amira, he’s the only one who may be able to put the pieces together.”
“And you want me to call him,” Claire said.
“That’s right”
“I’m sorry, Serena. I’m not ready to do that. If it puts me in his debt, I won’t do it”
“I understand. But lives are at stake. Maybe yours, too.”
“Do you really think I’m in danger?” Claire asked.
“Yes, I do.”
Claire nodded. “I need to think about this,” she said. A moment later, she added, “I can’t give you an answer now, okay?”
“Don’t take too long,” Serena urged her. She found a card in her pocket and handed it to her.
Claire took it and tapped the card lightly on the table. “You tell me something,” she said.
Serena smiled. “Okay.”
“Was I right?”
“You mean about me?” Serena knew exactly what she meant. The affair. Touching a nerve. “That’s none of your business.”
“I forgot, you’re tough.”
Claire stood up and stretched her arms languorously over her head. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said.
Serena scraped her chair back along the linoleum and began to stand up. “I’ll go.”
“No, it’s okay.” Claire waved her back to her seat. “We can keep talking.”
She took the few steps to the dressing room door and turned the dead bolt, then began unbuttoning her blouse. When she was done, she left her blouse hanging open, her cleavage and midriff on display.
“Do you sing?” Claire asked Serena.
“Me? No. I clear the room on karaoke night.”
“So how do you express yourself? You must have something.”
“I take pictures,” Serena said. “Desert photos.”
She watched Claire carefully remove her earrings, using two hands as she unhitched the gold hoops. Claire put the earrings on the table, then ran her hands back through her hair, gently separating the strands.
“I’d like to see them,” Claire said.
Claire nudged the blouse off her shoulders. The silk rubbed up along her skin, then separated and fell down her back. Her breasts were bare, perfect white globes with erect red nipples. She gently tugged the sleeve off each wrist and turned away to hang the blouse on the clothes rack. Her spine rippled, dipping into the hollow of her back.
“Would you like to have dinner?” Claire asked, without turning around.
“Sorry, I can’t.”
Claire slid a zipper down the side of her black pants. She pushed them down over her ass and past her thighs and then bent each leg to step out of them. She was now wearing only a black thong. She turned back. “Too bad.”
Serena knew she had an opportunity to say something, to make a joke, to leave. When Serena sat there, not moving, not even breathing, Claire stripped the thong off her body, exposing her auburn mound, which was trimmed to leave only a wisp of curly light hair. She stood there for a brief moment and then disappeared into the bathroom. The water in the shower began running.
Serena got out of the chair. She looked at the locked door to the dressing room and knew she should simply leave. Then Claire returned, a towel slung around her neck, reaching low enough to cover her breasts but not the rest of her naked body.
“The water takes forever to heat up,” she said.
Serena nodded and tried to moisten her lips with her tongue, but her mouth was dry.
Claire walked up to within a few inches of Serena, too close for comfort. “You could join me.”
“No. I couldn’t do that”
“You’re very beautiful,” Claire told her.
“So are you,” Serena admitted, before she could stop herself.
“I’d like to see you again.”
“I’m not gay,” Serena said.
“Does that matter? I’m attracted to people. I don’t care whether they’re men or women. I’m attracted to you.”
“I’m involved,” Serena said. She added, “With a man.”
“But you’re attracted to me, too.”
Serena wanted to deny it, but she didn’t. “Look, this isn’t going to happen.”
Claire reached out and touched Serena’s face with the back of her hand. “Don’t hide it from him. You’re keeping a secret now.”
“I’m sorry.” Serena pulled away. “I sent the wrong signals.”
“They weren’t wrong. You want me so bad you can taste it. What’s wrong with that?”
Serena’s cell phone rang. She backed up as if the room had caught fire and dove into her pocket to retrieve it. She heard Stride’s voice, and she felt a wave of guilt crashing over her. She couldn’t believe what she was doing, what she wanted to do. Not since Deidre, she thought.
“What is it?” she asked, and she hated herself because her voice was husky with arousal.
Stride brought her down to earth.
“There’s been another murder,” he said.
Amanda choked back tears as she stared at the body of Tierney Dargon. It surprised her. She had steeled herself to death over the years, but the bodies she saw day in and day out were rarely people she had known when they were alive. They were corpses, flesh, wounds, devoid of personality. Amanda had seen Tierney so recently that she could remember her perfume and hear the girlish intonation of her voice. She had liked her. Felt sorry for her. Tierney was a decent kid lost in the Vegas high life. No more.
Now she was like MJ, eyes wide with shock and fright, trails of blood streaked on her face from the gaping bullet wound in her forehead. Dead in the foyer of Moose’s sprawling house, like Alice Ford in Reno, with no time to react or scream. Open the door, see the face of death, and bang. Her brain was gone before it had time to react. Instantaneous.
Amanda looked beyond the foyer into the mansion and realized that, even alive, Tierney would have looked out of place here. She was young, and this was a rich old man’s house. Moose had made it into a shrine to his past, with bookshelves filled with awards, decades-old posters advertising his shows, and dozens of photographs of Moose onstage. He was larger than life, and so was his estate, both of them gaudy and giantlike. The living room was decorated like a lavish casino, with tall Roman columns, gold trim, a grand piano, and-most impressive of all-a second-story indoor swimming pool with a translucent bottom, so visitors could look up and see the blue water. Moose had one of the prime locations in Lake Las Vegas, in the MiraBella development, hugging the golf course and the resort’s private man-made lake, with the moonscape of the desert hills stretched out in the distance.
No one would hesitate to open the door here, even to a stranger. Lake Las Vegas was located a few miles east of the city, over the mountains on the road to Lake Mead. There was only one narrow road into or out of MiraBella and the other south shore developments, with a guard station to keep out strangers and gawkers. If you made it in, you were safe.
But not this time.
Amanda wondered: How did the killer make it past the south shore gate?
“Where’s Moose?” she asked one of the uniforms on the scene. She saw the cop’s eyes cloud over with disgust and felt her hackles rise. Nothing ever changed.
“Guard at the gate said he left in the limo around eight,” he said. “I assume someone is tracking him down.”
“You assume?” Amanda retorted. The cop shrugged, and she added sharply, “Don’t assume. Find out, and let me know.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied acidly. Amanda felt her mood sour further as he left.
There was a large team on hand to work the murder. That was one advantage of getting killed in a place like Lake Las Vegas, which was usually immune to that kind of crime, unless it was a rich wife shooting a rich husband. A body out here got plenty of attention. The call had come in from a neighbor who heard the gunshot. He was a hunter and knew the difference between the report of a pistol and the crack of a target rifle, which wasn’t an uncommon sound in the desert hills. When he went to investigate, he found the door wide open and Tierney just inside.
Amanda’s cell phone rang. It was Stride.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m parked outside, next to your car,” Stride said. “I thought you didn’t use the Spyder at crime scenes.”
Amanda was puzzled. “Usually I don’t, but I love to take it on the mountain roads. So what?”
“Come out here, okay?”
Amanda swallowed back acid and felt a pit of worry in her stomach. She slapped her phone shut and headed for the front door. As she passed two of the crime scene techs, she heard a whispered comment and a laugh behind her. She wheeled around but couldn’t tell who had spoken. She gave them a fierce glare, then bolted past Tierney’s body into the warm air outside. The curving driveway was being scoured for evidence. She took a circuitous route through the garden rocks and passed the cluster of patrol cars on the edge of the crime scene tape. Beyond the house was the deep darkness of the lake and sparkling lights from the resort hotel on the opposite shore.
Stride was leaning on his Bronco, next to her Spyder, about twenty yards away. He was standing under a streetlight. His arms were folded over his chest. When she joined him, he nodded at the driver’s door of her sports car. Amanda saw it and swore.
The car was desecrated. Someone had chiseled the word PERVERT into the door of the Spyder in large letters.
“I didn’t want you to find this alone,” Stride said.
Amanda felt her emotions battling between rage and humiliation. “Fuckers,” she muttered. “It never stops. Thanks for telling me.”
“I asked around,” Stride said. “No one admits seeing anything.”
“Big surprise.” Amanda ran her fingers over the ruts in the paint. In some ways, it was like being raped. As if that were what they would do, if they got her alone.
“Don’t take this shit lying down, Amanda,” Stride told her.
“I never have before.” Amanda wondered, though, how much more she could take. It didn’t matter how often she proved herself, they kept coming for her, trying to drive her away. She stared at the word again. Pervert. She could feel the hatred of whoever had written it. This wasn’t a mean joke, a taunt. It was primal and ugly.
“You okay?” Stride asked, watching her.
She shook her head. She wasn’t okay. “I could have caught the Green River Killer, and the headlines would have been about my cock. I mean, is it really such a big deal?”
Stride laughed.
Amanda realized what she’d said and laughed, too. Some of the tension drained out of her. “Okay, it is a big deal,” she said slyly. Then she added, “I know what people think. It just hurts to have it constantly thrown in your face.”
She spent another few seconds feeling sorry for herself. Stride waited, not pushing her, and she felt a surge of warmth for him. She remembered what Serena had told her-that Stride had swooped in out of nowhere and become a lifeline for her. Amanda felt a little like that herself-not in a romantic way, because she loved Bobby, and she knew Stride loved Serena, but it made her feel less alone on the force to have him there, as if she finally had an ally, a friend. That hadn’t happened, not since she was Jason. Her friends from back then had peeled away, one by one.
“Tell me something,” she said to Stride. “Why don’t you hate me, too?”
“Come on, Amanda. That question’s not worthy of you.”
“You’re right. It’s stupid. Someone else asked that, not me.”
Stride was all business again. “You said Tierney had a bodyguard, didn’t you? Where was he?”
“Who, the Samoan? I think he’s just rent-a-muscle. There was no one else in the house.”
“Shouldn’t there be a live-in staff at a palace like this?” Stride asked. “A butler, six maids, a few gardeners to water the rocks?”
“Not according to the neighbor who found the body. I talked to him. He says there’s day staff only. Apparently, Moose likes to walk around naked at night.”
“Thanks for putting that image in my mind,” Stride said.
“What I’m wondering is how the perp got in here. He sure as hell didn’t walk from the highway at night.”
“Is there a log of all the vehicles in and out?”
Amanda nodded. “I’ve got uniforms tracking down every car in the security log, starting with the cars that left after the time of the murder.”
“Did he leave the shell casing again?”
“Yes, a.357, just like with MJ. I’m betting if we can recover the bullet, we’ll get a ballistics match. Although I doubt we’ll even need it. He’s not trying to cover his tracks. I’m having them dust for prints to see if he left us another souvenir.”
“Three murders,” Stride said. “Four, if there’s a tie-in with Reno. He’s picking up the pace.”
Amanda saw headlights approaching down the lakeside avenue where Moose and a handful of other wealthy neighbors had their homes. As the vehicle passed under the first streetlight, she recognized the limo in which she had sat with Tierney Dargon. When Tierney was alive and young.
She pointed at the car. “Moose,” she said.
Stride could see where the comedian got his nickname. He was amazingly tall and seemed to be all legs, like a circus magician on stilts. He had a shaggy head of long hair, unnaturally black and thick for a man his age. It flopped across his face as he sat with his elbows propped on his knees and his long, spindly fingers cupping his face like tentacles. His tuxedo fit loosely. He had undone his bow tie, which lay like a squashed bat on his ruffled white shirt.
He was alone with Stride and Amanda in the rear of the limo. His feet almost touched the other cushions of the stretch.
“My beautiful girl,” he said. “I should have left her where she was: I’m a selfish bastard. I wanted someone to take care of me. To bury me. Now I have to bury her instead.”
He looked up at them, his dark eyes haunted. Stride noticed his trademark eyebrows, furry and wild, which he was able to curl and twitch at will. They were part of his act. He could make his eyebrows dance, and crowds died laughing. Stride had seen him in a stand-up routine on television almost twenty years ago. His humor was black and self-destructive, filled with jokes about drinking, divorce, and strokes, drawn from his own life. But his eyebrows lightened everything, as if they were twin dummies and Moose the ventriloquist. Tonight, though, they sat motionless above his eyes like sleeping dogs.
“Can you tell us where you were this evening, Mr. Dargon?” Stride asked. He was polite but firm.
Moose slowly focused. He seemed genuinely numb with grief, but Stride had been disappointed too many times by suffering spouses. Too often they turned out to be perpetrators, not victims-and Moose was a performer.
“I was entertaining at a fund-raiser,” he said, pointing to a reelection button for Governor Durand on his tuxedo lapel.
“Why didn’t Tierney go with you?”
One of Moose’s eyebrows sprang briefly to life. “I’m a beast when I have a show to do. I don’t talk to anyone before or after. Tierney would have had to sit by herself with a table full of gassy lawyers. Listen to them telling her about their latest Daubert motion while checking out her tits. She would have hated it.”
“Who else knew she was going to be home alone?” Stride asked, putting a faint emphasis on the word “else.”
“I can’t think of anyone,” Moose said. “Usually, Tierney goes out if I have a show. She’s young. But today she decided to stay home and watch some movies.”
“Did she tell anyone about her plans?”
“Just the security company. She called them around noon and said she wouldn’t need an escort tonight.”
Stride glanced at Amanda, who was already scribbling in her notebook. He asked Moose for details about the security company he used, which was called Premium Security. Stride remembered that Karyn Westermark used a bodyguard, too, when she was in Vegas, and he jotted down a reminder to find out whether she used the same firm.
Amanda leaned forward. “Mr. Dargon, did you know MJ Lane?”
Moose’s face was blank. “ Walker ’s son? The boy who was murdered last weekend? I knew the old man, back in the sixties, but not MJ. Why?”
“There’s no way to be delicate about this,” Amanda told him. “Tierney was having an affair with MJ.”
“Oh.” Moose rested his head back until he was staring at the ceiling of the limo. “Now I see. You think I’m a jealous cuckold. First I had her lover killed, and now my wife.”
“You have a reputation,” Stride said. “A temper.”
Moose looked down and gave them a sad smile. His eye-brows rippled. Stride noticed the man’s gray pallor, how the outline of his skull showed through the skin. He had seen the look before, when his wife Cindy was dying of cancer.
“Once upon a time? Sure. But we were all bad boys then. We drank, we partied, we got out of hand. We were colorful, and that’s how people liked us. I used to piss into the fountains at Caesars. I’d egg on pretty boys until they took a swing at me, and then I’d break their jaws. I’d dance on blackjack tables. That was part of the show. When I went too far, they’d throw me in a jail cell until I sobered up, and then I’d have bacon and eggs with the cops in the morning. I knew the first name of every cop in the city, and I went to most of the birthday parties for their kids.”
“So your mean streak was just an act?”
“I’m saying I was what everyone wanted me to be. Look, I could blow up with the best of them. I was a son of a bitch sometimes. But I’m eighty years old, Detective. I’m on my way out. I’m a squealing little pig with his nuts cut off. My devil days, when I had a temper and liked to use it, were a very long time ago. I didn’t marry Tierney for sex, and not even to have a pretty young thing on my arm. Believe it or not, we liked each other. We were friends. I encouraged her to see young men if she wanted to, because I knew she’d have to go back to that life after I was gone. I didn’t ask for details, so I had no idea she had a relationship with MJ or anyone else.”
Stride listened for a false note and didn’t hear one.
“Do you remember Helen Truax?” Stride continued. “Her stage name was Helena Troy.”
“Sure. She was a dancer at the Sheherezade.”
“How well did you know her?”
“Well enough to have a drink now and then,” Moose said, “but that was it. She was Leo Rucci’s gal, so I kept away from her, Where are you going with this?”
“Less than two weeks ago, Helen’s grandson was killed in a hit-and-run” Stride explained. “Then Walker Lane ’s son. Now your wife. We think the same person was responsible for all three murders.”
Moose sat up. “You think this is all connected to the Sheherezade?”
“All three of you were mentioned in the article Rex Terrell did about the murder of Amira Luz. Did you talk to Terrell?”
Moose’s upper lip and eyebrows seemed to curl in disgust at the same time. “Me? Talk to a fucking worm like Rex Terrell? No way.”
“Rex says you, Helen, and others benefited from Amira’s death.”
“I won’t deny I wasn’t too sad to see the little bitch dead and gone,” Moose said. “She played me. Used me to get to Boni and then kicked me in the balls.”
“Helen says you told her Amira was the best lover you ever had,” Stride said.
“That was no secret. We were involved. That Spanish blood, it runs hot. But she was no better than a hooker, using me to make her way up the ladder.”
“Where were you the night Amira was killed?” Amanda asked.
Moose laughed. “Drunk. In jail. Like I said, that happened a lot in those days. As it turns out, it was fortunate that I had an alibi.”
“So you don’t know what happened that night?”
“Just the rumors,” Moose said.
“You mean Walker Lane?” Stride asked.
Moose nodded. “Everyone assumed he did it. That story about a stalker, that was pretty convenient. I figure they wanted a fall guy. Like I said, I’m glad I had an alibi, because I would have made a sweet target.”
“So you believe Walker did it, too.”
“It makes sense,” Moose said. “But it surprised me.”
“Why?”
“I never thought Walker would have the balls for it. He was soft. He liked to dance with the devil, but he was just an L.A. rich kid. Killing Amira, that took guts. I can’t believe he’s still alive after doing that.”
Stride and Amanda looked at each other. “What do you mean?” Stride asked.
“Most people didn’t know. I knew, because I knew Amira. She told me, just to rub my face in it. And Walker would have known. He had to have known. I know he loved her act, went to all her shows. But he would have gotten word from Leo Rucci that the high-roller amenities didn’t extend to Amira.”
Stride’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
Moose’s eyebrows did a little dance, like caterpillars wriggling to the music of the Sugar Plum Fairy. “Amira Luz was the sole property of one man and one man only,” he said. “The man you didn’t mess with. Boni Fisso.”
Serena parked in her driveway at home. She didn’t get out of the car. She turned off her cell phone and sat silently in the darkness.
She remembered the first time it happened with Deidre, when she was eighteen. She was in the shower. Deidre knew that she went into little fugues sometimes under the water, letting it pour over her head as the memories came back, hoping it would somehow rise above her mouth and drown her. In Phoenix, she used to take showers after Blue Dog, her mother’s drug dealer, was finished with her. Brown water, lukewarm, then cold.
She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there that first time. Frozen. Lost. She felt like a quadriplegic, aware of her surroundings but unable to move or react, helpless to stop what was happening to her. Forced to rewind her past and watch it occurring over and over. As if, in the two years since she had escaped from Phoenix, she had not escaped at all but been consumed by a single, silent scream.
Then she felt someone else crawl inside her cocoon. Without a sound, out of nowhere, Deidre was there with her. Behind her, in the shower, naked flesh against naked flesh. Deidre’s lips were by her ear, and she was cooing over and over, “It’s okay, baby.”. Deidre’s hands encircled her stomach and held her gently, nurtured her, saved her. Serena leaned back against her, and something seized inside. A cofferdam of fear and shame began to grow fissures and give way. Serena sobbed. Her whole body trembled, and she was indescribably cold, frigid to her soul, except for the warmth of Deidre behind her. The more the tears fell, the more Deidre held her and soothed her.
It’s okay, baby.
Serena turned around and buried her head in Deidre’s shoulder, and still Deidre held her, letting her cry herself out. She didn’t know how long they stood there, as she climbed out of her flooded cave and back into the light. The water of the shower was still on; it was cold, but they were warm. When Serena finally looked into Deidre’s eyes, she felt free. She stared with exhilaration into Deidre’s damp, beautiful face and felt love and gratitude overwhelming her, morphing into passion. Deidre began, and Serena didn’t stop her. She joined in. Their lips came together. Their slippery bodies seemed to merge. She felt Deidre relishing her touch, and the more Deidre responded, the more Serena strove to give her pleasure. Kissing her. Massaging the hollow of her back. Hearing her whispered pleas to go further. Sliding fingers inside her, everywhere, front and back, deep and probing. Wanting to climb inside her.
In her memory, they seemed to glide, dripping, from the shower to the bed, then to spend hours together as night fell outside, making love to each other over and over in the squeaking twin bed where Serena usually slept alone. When they had sated each other, they fell asleep, exhausted, entwined.
They spent six months as lovers. She knew that Deidre wanted it to stay that way. In the beginning, so did Serena. She was afraid of men and felt safe in Deidre’s arms. She had no mother, and Deidre played that role for her, too. That was enough for a while.
As Serena’s confidence in herself came back, though, she realized that their relationship was built on sand. She loved Deidre, but she didn’t want to be her lover anymore. She wanted to see what she could build for herself, on her own, not leaning on anyone or running to someone to rescue her.
They argued about it. Deidre became hysterical. It finally dawned on Serena that Deidre was the frightened one, the one who needed love and was afraid of men. Deidre was the one who couldn’t live without Serena.
Serena ended it anyway. That was how Deidre’s new life started-the dive into prostitution and drugs. She always thought Deidre did it to get back at her, to throw it in her face. Serena still blamed herself. Her fault. Her guilt. Deidre had been there for her at the worst time in her life, and in the end, Serena walked away when Deidre needed her help. She just let her die without going to see her, without trying to comfort her.
Serena sat in her car, watching the memories play out in her head. She was eighteen-again. That was how it felt. When Claire walked out on that stage, Serena saw Deidre. When Claire touched her, she felt Deidre’s hands. They were nothing alike, but that didn’t matter. Claire was right. Serena wanted her. She wanted to follow Claire back into that shower, strip, kiss, touch, and find a way to make love to Deidre again. To tell her how sorry she was. To tell her everything would be fine.
It’s okay, baby.
What’s next?” Amanda asked. They stood outside Moose’s house.
“I’m calling Walker Lane again in the morning,” Stride said. “I don’t care what the hell Sawhill says.”
“ Walker won’t admit killing Amira.”
“No, but he may know who’s doing this and why. This isn’t some random vendetta. It’s personal.”
“If Walker did kill Amira, why didn’t Boni erase him?” Amanda asked. “Assuming Moose is right about Boni and Amira being lovers.”
Stride thought about the penthouse suite in the Charlcombe Towers and Boni Fisso looking down on his old casino-and his new Orient project. “It’s one thing to kill members of the family, but a CEO and a celebrity like Walker-that’s a lot harder to cover up. If Walker Lane was murdered or disappeared, people would ask questions.”
“ Walker did disappear,” Amanda said. “He ran to Canada.”
Stride nodded. “Maybe he was running from Boni. Maybe he’s still running.”
He heard his cell phone ringing. He grabbed it, expecting a call from Serena, but he didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID.
“Stride,” he answered.
He heard a man’s voice, flat and unemotional. A stranger. “Have you found her yet?”
Stride knew without having to ask. From the moment he had seen the killer leave the fingerprint for them at the Oasis, he had suspected that a time like this would come. The man would find a way to make contact. To make it personal.
He snapped his fingers sharply at Amanda to alert her. She read his face as he gestured at the phone. He punched the speakerphone button. “We’re at Moose’s house now,” he said.
“Not her,” the voice retorted impatiently. “Not the girl.”
“Who are you talking about?” Stride asked. He mouthed to Amanda, Another victim?
“You’re going to have to move faster, Detective. I don’t have time to spoon-feed you clues. I drove out in a silver Lexus. That should narrow it down.”
Stride listened for gloating in the man’s voice and didn’t hear it. He didn’t sound unbalanced, like a monster. “Why call me now?” Stride asked.
“I’m doing your job for you, Detective. I’m going to catch a murderer.”
“Why commit murder to catch a killer?” Stride asked him sharply. “These people, the ones you killed, were innocent. Why not just come in and tell us what you think you know about Amira’s death? Let us get justice for her.”
“Like you’ve done for forty years?” the man asked.
“You killed a little boy,” Stride snapped. “That’s worse than any thing that happened back then.”
There was a long silence in which he thought he’d succeeded in finding a vein and drawing blood. He heard the man’s breathing become more rapid and harsh.
“You don’t understand what happened back then,” the man said finally.
“Explain it to me,” Stride said. “And tell me what all of this has to do with you.” He wasn’t talking to an older man-at most, maybe someone his own age. There was no way he had been a participant in the events that happened at the Sheherezade.
“Are you there?” Stride added when the man didn’t reply. “Hello?”
The silence stretched out into dead air. He checked his phone and found the call was over. The caller had disconnected.
When he punched a button to redial the number, it rang and rang without being picked up.
“Shit,” he said. “There’s another body here.”
This one was alive.
Half an hour later, they found Cora Lansing, a seventy-five-year-old widow, tied to an oversized walnut chair in her dining room, in another house not far from Moose’s MiraBella estate. A strip of duct tape was pasted across her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fright, and she had soiled herself, throwing a stink into the lavender-scented home, but she hadn’t been harmed.
They called in a medical team, who gave the woman oxygen and carefully removed the tape from her mouth. It left behind a rash and a sticky residue that she picked at with irritated flicks of her finger nails. She was bird like and frail, but she was hopping mad, even after a shower and a change of clothes. Stride poured her a large glass of Rémy Martin from her liquor cabinet to calm her down.
They soon extracted her story. She had been shopping at Neiman’s and returned to find a stranger in her Lexus. The man forced her to drive back through the hills to the south shore entrance to Lake Las Vegas, and he hid in the backseat while she greeted the guard. He made it clear that if she tried to alert the guard, he would shoot them both, and his tone was such that Cora had no doubt he would do it.
She drove him to her home, where he tied her up, gagged her, and waited until night fell. Then he took her car and left.
“Did you see what he looked like?” Stride asked.
“I certainly did,” Cora replied immediately, surprising him. “I’ll never forget his face.”
Stride felt a rush of excitement, mixed with apprehension. He told Amanda, “Get a sketch artist down here.”
Stride looked at Cora and thought to himself what he would never say to the woman aloud. Why the hell are you still alive?
“Can you describe him for me?” he asked.
Cora swiftly painted a man similar in build to the man Elonda had seen at the bus stop before MJ was killed: not as tall as Stride, lean but very strong, with short dark hair and an angular face. Either he had shaved his beard or the one he had used on Saturday night was a fake. Cora provided enough detail that the police artist would be able to do a solid rendering. Stride glanced around at the tasteful, expensive art in Cora’s house. She had a good eye.
“Did he say anything to you?” Stride asked. “About who he was or why he was doing this?”
Cora shook her head. “Not a word. He hardly said anything. But he was very intense, very scary.”
Stride thanked her and tracked down a policewoman to sit with her while they waited for the artist to drive in from the city. He left Cora’s living room and made his way back outside. The killer’s phone call was vivid in his mind. He wished it had lasted longer, because he wasn’t sure the man would call again. He had said what he needed to say, enlisting Stride in the hunt-but the hunt for what?
Amanda joined him. “You don’t look happy,” she told him. “Isn’t this what we call a break? A lead? That’s a good thing, right?”
“We’ve only got it because he gave it to us,” Stride said. “He could have killed that woman, and we wouldn’t have a damn thing, but now he wants us to know what he looks like. Why?”
“Maybe he’s an arrogant bastard. He wouldn’t be the first serial killer to get tripped up by his own ego. Look at BTK. They never would have nailed him in Wichita if he hadn’t started sending letters to the papers again after thirty years.”
Stride shook his head. “He knows he’s taking a risk. He knows we might find him. His picture is going to be all over the papers. Someone could spot him.”
“He may think he’s covered his tracks so well that it doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t think so, Amanda. I’m sure he’s covered his tracks, but I don’t believe he’d give us something this big if it wasn’t part of his plan. Hell, he could have killed Tierney in the city any time he wanted. He didn’t need to figure out a way to get inside the security out here. And he sure didn’t need to give us his face.”
“He was showing off,” Amanda suggested.
Stride thought about it. He heard the killer’s voice in his head again. Cool, focused. Complaining about spoonfeeding them clues. As if the police were interfering with his schedule.
“Or sending a message,” Stride said.
Serena appeared in the doorway of his cubicle on Wednesday morning. He was leaning dangerously far back in his swivel chair, and he had his feet propped on the laminate desk.
“Hey, stranger,” he said. He had arrived home long after Serena went to bed, and he had been up and out at dawn, leaving her to sleep.
“Hey yourself,” she said.
“You really should try the perp power breakfast,” he added. Serena gave him a confused look, and he gestured at the desk. Her brow unfurled, and she laughed, seeing a sack of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a large plastic bottle of Sprite,
Serena came in and sat down, but Stride could see that her body language was uncomfortable.
“Something wrong?” Stride asked.
He was glad that she didn’t try to bullshit him with a fake smile and pretend that he was imagining things.
“Something happened last night,” she said.
“Oh? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She hesitated and added, “I’m not really ready to talk about it yet.”
Stride was good at poker. Nothing showed on his face.
“Should I be concerned?” he asked.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Clears that right up for you, huh? Sorry about that.”
He stared at her for a long while and tried to see behind her eyes and understand what she was hiding.
’I’m here when you’re ready,” he told her. “But don’t push me away.”
“You’re not that lucky,” Serena told him. She winked, trying to make everything fine again. It made him feel a little better.
Amanda came around the cubicle wall with a sheaf of white paper. “Here’s our perp,” she said. She handed each of them a copy of the sketch the police artist had produced from Cora Lansing’s description. Stride was immediately drawn to the man’s eyes, which were dark but remarkably expressive. He thought if he hung it on the wall, the eyes would follow him as he walked around the room.
“We’ve got uniforms reworking each of the neighborhoods where the murders took place, to see if anyone recognizes him,” Amanda said. “I faxed it to Jay Walling in Reno, too. Sawhill’s going to be releasing the sketch to the media at a press conference this morning.”
Stride smiled, knowing that Sawhill loved the limelight. He’d make it seem like this was the product of brilliant investigative work by his division, not a gift from the killer.
“Did you call Walker?” Amanda asked.
“Sawhill wanted a couple of hours to confer with the politicians,” Stride said. “I told him if I didn’t hear anything by noon, I was just going to pick up the phone.”
“How about Boni? We make any progress there?”
Stride turned to Serena. “Did you talk to Claire?” he asked.
She nodded. “They’re estranged. I don’t think she’ll call him, but she didn’t close the door entirely.”
“What’s she like?” Amanda asked.
“She’s fiercely independent. She didn’t seem to care that she might be in danger. As a singer, by the way, she’s exceptionally talented. And charming. I think, like her father, she’s driven in getting what she wants.”
Stride spoke to Amanda. “We need to warn people. Fast. There were a couple other people mentioned in Rex’s article. They or their families might be in danger. Let’s track down Leo Rucci, too. He was Boni’s right-hand man at the Sheherezade, the one who was sleeping with Helen. Anyone who started looking at what happened to Amira would find Leo’s name.”
“He’s already on my list,” Amanda said. “Maybe I can sweat him about Amira’s murder, too.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a talkative guy. If you can, find out about that fight the night of the murder. And that kid Mickey. That bothers me.”
“Right.”
He turned to Serena. “Can you or Cordy run down a lead for us? Tierney used a security agency in town. Premium Security. I don’t know if Karyn Westermark used them, but she told us she had a bodyguard with her during the afternoon, before she met MJ. It’s worth taking a sketch of the perp down there. Maybe this guy had access to inside information about the schedules of the victims.”
“Sure, you got it.” Serena grabbed a handful of the sketches and was about to walk out of the office. Then, with a smile at Amanda, she bent down and gave Stride a long kiss.
“That help?” she asked him.
“That helps.”
She winked again as she left.
“If I were you, I’d sue for harassment,” Amanda teased him.
“Not a chance.”
The phone on his desk rang, and Stride snatched it up. He was still a little breathless from the kiss. “Stride.”
“It’s Walker Lane, Detective. I understand you want to talk to me.”
Stride recognized the wheezing voice. He leaned back in his chair and gathered his thoughts. “Yes, I do, Mr. Lane. Do you have a few minutes?”
There was a long pause on the line, as he had come to expect from Walker. “I had something else in mind. I thought we could meet personally.”
“Are you coming to Las Vegas?” Stride asked, surprised.
“No, no. You know how I feel about that city. I’m sending my private jet for you, Detective. You can meet it at McCarran at two o’clock, and it will take you to Vancouver. Will that be acceptable?”
The secretary at Leo Rucci’s Henderson office told Amanda that Rucci always spent Wednesdays on the golf course. Amanda hung around long enough to find out that Rucci owned a successful chain of fast oil-change shops throughout Nevada and southern California. He was a multimillionaire, divorced, with one son whose primary occupation, like MJ’s, seemed to be spending Daddy’s money.
It wasn’t hard to tell who had set Rucci up in business. There was a large photograph in the office lobby of Leo Rucci and Boni Fisso together at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for his first quick-lube station.
Rucci wasn’t welcome in Boni’s casinos anymore. Or any casinos. He was in the Black Book-the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s list of persons whose ties to organized crime and other illegal activities got them banned from so much as using the bathroom in a casino within the state. According to Nick Humphrey, Rucci had taken the fall for Boni in the 1970s, when the feds raided the Sheherezade on the hunt for evidence of tax evasion. Boni walked away in the clear, but the feds needed a trophy, and Leo was it. He spent five years in prison on tax fraud charges but never sang a note about his boss.
When he got out in the early 1980s, Boni set him up in a legitimate business. Loyalty pays, Amanda thought.
Along the way from Henderson to 1-15, she made her usual stop for coffee and a cigarette in the parking lot near McCarran. She watched the planes and thought more seriously about chucking her job and escaping the city. Funny how her thoughts could change in a day, when just yesterday she assumed she would never leave. She and Bobby had had a long talk overnight, when she got home from the crime scene in Lake Las Vegas. He always stayed up to greet her-it was sweet-but when he saw the slur scraped into the door of the Spyder, he threw a fit and wanted to storm down to city hall. He was tired of the harassment, and she was, too. She knew it would never change. As long as she stayed in Las Vegas, she would be a freak, hated and unwanted.
The trouble was, she loved her job. She didn’t like the idea of being bullied out of town.
She stubbed out her cigarette and drove to the Badlands golf course in the northwest corner of the city to find Leo Rucci. The clerk at the pro shop told her that Rucci’s foursome would be somewhere on the Diablo nine, and he let her take a golf cart to find him. As she followed the cart paths, she fell in love with the city again, as she always did. The fairways were lush emerald green, dropped in narrow strips amid the giant estates and golden brush of the desert and dotted with pure white sand traps. The razor peaks of the red rock mountains loomed overhead a mile to the west. The temperature was in the mideighties, but the rushing wind on her face kept her cool.
She found Rucci and his three partners on the green of one of the later holes. Their rough laughter carried on the wind. She waited until they had putted out and were on their way back to their own golf carts, then drove up and parked behind them. She got out with the police sketch flapping in her hand.
“Leo Rucci?” she called.
All four of them stopped and studied her suspiciously. One of the younger men slipped a hand inside his wind-breaker, and Amanda wondered if he was armed. Rucci waved the others off and approached her, twirling his putter in his hand. He was obviously the alpha male, the tallest and biggest of the group. He was in his late sixties, but he was physically imposing, with a shaved head and a neck that looked like a tree trunk. He wore sunglasses, a charcoal-and-black Tehama windshirt, and khaki shorts. She could easily imagine him as a younger man, busting heads for Boni as the casino manager of the Sheherezade.
“Yeah, I’m Rucci. So what? Who are you?”
“I’m Amanda Gillen, from the homicide division at Metro.”
Rucci’s face didn’t move. “Cop, huh? So what do you want with me?”
Amanda handed him the sketch. “I’d like to know if you recognize this man.”
Rucci took the sketch without looking at it and wadded it up, then tossed it into the air and let the wind blow it away. “No, don’t know him.”
“Thanks for studying it so carefully,” Amanda said.
“I don’t like cops. That means I don’t like you. You want to put someone away, you do it without me.”
“This man may be trying to kill you,” Amanda said. “Or your son.”
Rucci reached into his pocket and took out a golf ball. He put it between his two huge hands and laced his fingers together. With his elbows up, he squeezed. His fingers turned red, but the muscles in his face didn’t contract, as if he were making no effort at all. Amanda heard a crack as the casing of the golf ball split. He opened his hand and peeled the cover off the ball, then tossed the remnants away along with the core.
“No one messes with Leo, sweetheart. If somebody wants to come after me, I don’t need your help.”
“How about your son?” Amanda asked. “Do you watch his back, too?”
“My boy Gino can take care of himself,” Rucci said.
“Well, you better warn him that somebody might be painting a target on his back. Three people are dead, including a little boy. They all had family connections to the Sheherezade and Amira Luz. Like you, Leo. So you or your boy Gino could be next.”
“Thanks for the advice, Detective.” Rucci turned on his heel and headed back to his three stone-faced colleagues.
“Hey, Leo,” Amanda called after him. “Who killed Amira?”
Rucci stopped. He turned back and leaned on his putter. “It was some nutcase in L.A. Why don’t you ask Nick Humphrey about that? He was the cop on the case.”
“Some people think Walker Lane killed Amira.”
“Some people think Castro killed Kennedy. That don’t make it true.”
“I guess it would have taken balls for Walker to kill Amira. I mean, she was Boni’s mistress, wasn’t she? Did Walker know that?”
Rucci came toward her with an ugly snarl, brandishing the putter as if he might take a swing at her. Amanda involuntarily stepped backward. “Boni Fisso has done more for this city than all the cops and politicians put together. Got that? He’s one of the guys that made this town great. So don’t you go fucking around about him with me, okay? Boni’s farts are worth more to Las Vegas than anything you’ll ever do.”
Amanda recovered and stepped inside Rucci’s shadow. She was half a foot shorter than he was, and she knew damn well he could snap her in two with little effort, but she shoved her face close to his anyway. “Where were you when Amira got killed?”
“You know where I was,” Rucci retorted, grinning for the first time. “And you know what I was doing. I was balling one of the dancers. She could hardly walk straight when I was done with her. Maybe you’d like to know what that feels like, Detective.”
“Or maybe I’d just cut it off and use it as a paperweight, Leo,” Amanda said, smiling back. “Tell me about the fight that night.”
“What fight?”
“The dancer you were sleeping with, Helen, says you got a call from one of the lifeguards. Kid named Mickey. There was a drunken fight outside, and you went to break it up.”
Rucci shook his head. “Helen’s wrong. She should be keeping her mouth shut and not talking to cops, if she knows what’s good for her.”
“You threaten a witness, Leo, and you’re going to regret it.”
“I don’t need to make threats. There was no fight. There was no phone call. Helen’s memory is fucked up. That happens. She’s an old woman now, underneath all the Botox and plastic. We had drunks get rowdy all the time, and I used to break their noses and send them back where they came from. But not that night.”
“You think Mickey would tell the same story?” Amanda asked.
“You find him, you ask him,” Rucci said.
“Any idea where I can find him?”
“Sure. I stay in touch with every fucking kid who spent a summer at the casino helping girls out of their bikinis.”
“What was his last name?”
Rucci grinned. “Mouse.”
He lumbered back to his cart and slammed his putter back into his bag. The foursome drove off in their two carts, and as they left, one of them looked back and extended his middle finger at Amanda.
She waved back at them.
Serena let Cordy drive his PT Cruiser to the offices of Premium Security. She sat in the passenger seat and stared out the window, trying to figure out which emotion would get the upper hand. She was angry at herself for dwelling on the past, confused about her feelings for Claire, madly in love with Jonny, and horny as hell. Take your pick.
Cordy had a Spanish-language radio station on, and he was pounding his fingers against the steering wheel to the annoying, thumping beat of a song she didn’t understand. When Serena couldn’t take it anymore, she reached down and clicked the radio off.
“What’s eating you, mama?” Cordy asked.
“Nothing. I’m just not in a mood to do ‘ La Bamba ’ now, okay?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
They pulled up to a stoplight, and Cordy kept humming the song without: the radio.
“Tell me something,” Serena said. “You had a good thing going with Lavender. Why’d you screw it up?”
Cordy pointed out the window. A leggy brunette was on the corner, jogging in place as she waited for the light to change. “You see that? That’s a sexy muchacha. I see her, and the first thing I do, I peel off her clothes in my head. What color are her nipples? How big are they? You know, quarter, half-dollar, bigger? What kind of panties is she wearing? Bikini, thong, maybe nothing at all? Then I wonder what she likes in bed, okay? Her, I’m thinking-”
“That’s enough,” Serena said, interrupting him.
Cordy Shrugged. “You asked.”
Serena hoped he would drop it, and he did. She didn’t need a man’s advice anyway. What was going on in her head wasn’t about lust. Or not only about lust.
She wondered if she was bisexual. She hadn’t thought that in years. Even when she was with Deidre, she had never thought of them as girl on girl, just as two friends who used sex to comfort each other. She had never dated any other women. Her experiences with men, until Jonny, had been rocky at best, but she chalked that up to her aggressive defenses, born of the hell she went through in Phoenix.
Nothing happened with Claire, she told herself. But she couldn’t take much comfort in her willpower. When Claire tried to seduce her, she was on the verge of giving in, and only Jonny’s call had broken the mood and given her an excuse to leave.
“Here we are,” Cordy said, turning into a grungy strip mall on Spring Mountain Road that looked like it would blow down in a stiff breeze. They were about two miles west of Las Vegas Boulevard.
Serena looked up and frowned. “This is Premium Security?”
Cordy pointed at a sign on the glass door in front of them, which advertised the name of the agency in flaking white paint. The windows were blackened so that no one could see inside. Serena took note of the other occupants in the tiny mall, including a fast-food gyros joint, an auto parts store, and a pawnshop advertising handguns.
“Low overhead,” Serena said.
“Uh-huh.”
They got out of the car and approached the door but found it locked. Serena saw a buzzer and pressed it several times. She peered into the darkened windows, not seeing anything, but she suspected they were both on camera. A few seconds later, she heard a soft click, and she pulled the door open. They entered a claustrophobic vestibule, about four feet by four feet, with another locked door on the other side. She had been right: There was a camera pointed down at them.
She heard a female voice through an overhead speaker. “Please let the outer door close behind you.”
Cordy let it shut, and this time they heard two locks click into place. When he tugged on the door again, it was locked from the inside. They were trapped.
“How can we help you?” the disembodied voice said.
Serena explained who they were and held up her shield in front of the camera. There was another click, and the inner door swung open for them.
They entered a surprisingly plush waiting area, which didn’t fit at all with the surroundings in the rest of the mall. Big band music played gently overhead. There was a cherry-wood welcome desk with a large vase of bright yellow daffodils. A petite blonde sat behind the desk, and Serena caught a waft of her perfume.
“Have a seat,” she said with a big smile. “Mr. Kamen will be with you in just a moment.”
Serena and Cordy sat on an overstuffed sofa that seemed to swallow them up. In front of them, a coffee table sported current issues of the Economist, the New York Times, and Variety. They waited less than a minute before the door to an inner office opened behind the receptionist, and a man emerged to greet them. They both struggled to extricate themselves from the sofa and shake his hand.
“I’m David Kamen, the president of Premium Security.” Kamen was dressed in a black knit turtleneck and gray pants. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and good-looking, with sandy blond hair and a freckled, southern California complexion. He wore boxy black glasses that had been out of style for so long that Serena assumed they were hip again.
Kamen guided them into his office, which was as attractively decorated as the lobby. Serena noted that the door was heavy and closed behind them with a solid thud.
“Before we sit down, may I see your identification, please?”
Serena and Cordy both presented their shields, and Kamen studied them carefully. He handed them back with a polite smile and gestured for them to sit around a circular oak conference table. Inlaid wood. More daffodils.
“We have some ex-Metro personnel on our team,” Kamen informed them.
Serena nodded and rattled off two names. She wanted Kamen to know they had done their homework. He gave her a small nod of appreciation.
“You’re a shooter, huh?” Cordy asked, pointing at a photograph on the wall that showed Kamen in camouflage, a rifle in his hand. It was one of the few pictures on a wall with dark, metallic wallpaper.
He nodded. “ Afghanistan.”
“A sharpshooter with glasses?” Serena asked.
Kamen winked. “You caught me. My vision is perfect. Better than perfect. The glasses make people think otherwise, and I like it like that. Besides, they’re cool, don’t you think?”
“Long way from shooting ragheads to guarding models in Vegas,” Cordy said. “How’d you wind up here?”
“I was recruited.” Kamen folded his hands together and smiled, not offering details. He wasn’t the kind of man who volunteered information. He waited for them to continue, keeping a polite expression on his face but glancing at the clock on the table.
Serena saw Cordy reaching for the police sketch inside his sport coat, but she gently reached over and took his arm, restraining him. She wanted to hear what they could coax out of the man before putting the killer’s face in front of him.
“You know that Tierney Dargon was murdered last night,” she said.
“Of course. Terrible thing.”
“Your firm provided security for her, right?” Serena asked.
“Mrs. Dargon often used our security personnel when she was in Las Vegas. Moose is an extremely wealthy man, and they were concerned about kidnapping attempts, but they felt secure while they were at MiraBella and didn’t use us there.”
“Bad move, huh?” Cordy said. “Guess they should have had some of your boys around.”
Kamen didn’t reply.
“Did Tierney call and cancel security arrangements with you yesterday?” Serena asked.
“Yes, she did.”
“What were the original arrangements?”
“She was going to spend the evening at one of the Strip casinos. One of my men was going to pick her up and escort her. But she contacted us around noon and indicated she was planning to stay home that night and would not need our services.”
“Did you talk to her directly?”
Kamen shook his head. “She talked to our receptionist.”
“You work with a lot of stars, I bet,” Cordy said. “Must see a lot of wild things. Guess it’s like the Secret Service, you have to keep your mouth shut.”
“We’re very discreet.”
“How about that soap star? The one that did the porno with MJ Lane. You ever work for her?”
“Karyn Westermark is one of our clients, yes,” Kamen acknowledged.
“But not MJ Lane?”
“No.”
“How about last Saturday?” Serena asked. “Was one of your men with Karyn?”
He nodded. “Ms. Westermark contacted us when she arrived in town, and Blake, one of our people, stayed with her while she shopped in the afternoon. She prefers shadow security, where we stay in the background, not with her. We’re there if needed, but we’re not obvious.”
“Was Blake with her on Saturday night, too?”
“No. She dismissed him when she was going to meet MJ.” Kamen added, “I hope you’re not suggesting that any of my people could be involved in the string of murders. Or that we released information about the schedules of our clients.”
“We’re just looking for connections,” Serena said. “When two of our murder victims have ties to the same security agency, we get curious.”
“We work with hundreds of clients, Detective, including many of the most famous people in the city. If someone decides to murder celebrities, or people close to them, there’s a good chance we’ll have a relationship. There’s nothing odd about it.”
Serena knew he was right. Tracking celebrities in Vegas was like shooting fish in a barrel. They were everywhere.
She raised the other names with him-Linda, Carter, and Peter Hale, Albert and Alice Ford-and wasn’t surprised to find that neither of those middle-class families had anything to do with Premium Security. Kamen looked relieved.
“Do you have any other celebrity clients that have ties to the Sheherezade casino?” Serena asked.
She saw a flutter of hesitation in his eyes. “I’m sure there are many,” he replied cautiously. “The Sheherezade has been around for years. Why?”
“There may be a link between the victims and the casino.”
“What kind of link?” Kamen asked.
“We’re not talking about that publicly yet,” Serena replied. “You sound like you’re holding out on us, Mr. Kamen.”
He was silent, pursing his lips and studying her intensely. Serena had the uncomfortable feeling that this was the same look he used on victims through the scope of his sniper’s rifle. “Mr. Kamen?” she added.
“We don’t have any actual ties to the Sheherezade,” he said.
Cordy leaned forward. “Actual ties? How about unactual ties? Sideways ties? Give us a clue, Dave.”
Kamen looked as if he would rather chew glass. “The agency is owned by Mr. Fisso,” he said.
“Boni Fisso owns Premium Security?” Serena asked.
“He owns many businesses,” Kamen said. “Slot manufacturing. Direct marketing. Golf apparel. He has no active day-to-day role in our operations. It’s simply an investment.”
Cordy’s white teeth shone as he grinned at Kamen. “So you’re telling me that you and the boys never do any private work for Mr. Fisso? Teach a few slot cheats that they’re messing with the wrong guy?”
“Nothing like that,” Kamen said through tight lips.
Serena didn’t buy that for a minute. A security agency owned by Boni Fisso was a great way to get muscle on demand and cloak their shadier services under the guise of a legitimate operation. It also explained the low-rent location, to keep the entire agency under wraps. She wondered whether any celebrity secrets made their way back to Fisso as grist for influence and blackmail.
Still, she knew they didn’t have enough, just based on the ties to Karyn and Tierney, to get a warrant to open up their books and go digging. Kamen and Boni were safe for the time being.
“If someone else gets killed and we find out you had information that might have prevented it, we’re going to be taking a long, hard look at Premium Security,” she said. “Is that clear?” Serena knew it was an empty threat, but she made her voice cold and hard.
“Of course, Detective.” Kamen wasn’t intimidated.
Cordy reached inside his jacket pocket to retrieve a copy of the police sketch and handed the paper across the desk. “Now it’s time for show and tell, Dave.”
“We want you to take a look at this sketch and then show it around to your men,” Serena added. “If anyone has seen this man, we need to know about it immediately. And tell them to watch out for him around your clients.”
“Naturally,” Kamen said. He unfolded the sketch and laid it facedown on his desk, using his thumbs to smooth out the creases. He turned it over, and the dark eyes of the killer stared up at him.
Serena watched his face turn to ash.
Stride had never been in a private jet before. It beat hell out of flying cattle class, where he spent most of the flight with his knees almost under his chin. The Gulf-stream cabin offered seating for eight in rich ivory-colored recliners that seemed to swallow up his body in leather and cushiony foam. He was the only passenger, just him, two pilots, and a middle-aged flight attendant who smiled at his overawed expression. He had his choice of sitting at a maple dining table or lounging in front of an entertainment center with satellite music and movies. When the flight attendant, whose name was Joanne, described a lavish lunch, he chose to sit at the dining table, read the Wall Street Journal, and watch the desert terrain giving way to the Rockies forty thousand feet below him. It was easy to pretend for a few minutes that he was one of the super-rich, and he realized it was a lifestyle that would be easy to get used to.
He changed seats after lunch and settled in with a cup of black coffee that tasted dark and smoky, exactly how he liked it. Joanne showed him how to navigate the remote control, and he found the country music station on satellite radio and boomed it through the cabin. He figured it was the first time that anyone on this plane had heard Tracy Byrd singing “Watermelon Crawl,” but Joanne was kind and didn’t complain. His plan was to review his notes on the case and plow through more of the research he had done on Walker Lane. Despite the coffee, though, the heavy lunch and the bouncing of the jet as it passed over the mountains acted like a sedative. Several days of stress and sleeplessness caught up with him, and he wound up reclining the seat and closing his eyes.
His dream took him back to Minnesota. He was on the beach in front of his old house on a finger of land jutting out between Lake Superior on one side and the placid harbor water on the other. He was in a dirty plastic lounge chair, watching the lake waves crash on the shore, and his first wife, Cindy, was in a matching chair beside him. They held hands. Every hand had a different feel, and he could actually touch hers again and feel the prongs of her emerald ring scratching his skin. She didn’t talk. There was a part of him that knew it was a dream, and he wanted to listen to the sound of her voice again, which had faded in his memory over the years, but she was quiet, staring at him, loving him. Eventually, in his dream, he fell asleep, and when he awoke, he was alone on the beach. Her chair was gone. There had been children playing by the waves, running in the sand, but they were gone, too. There had been an ore boat moored out on the water, the kind of ship on which his father had worked until a winter storm washed him into the lake, but the boat was gone, too.
Stride woke up as a thermal jostled the plane, and he heard Montgomery Gentry singing “Gone” on the satellite radio. That was how the dream made him feel. Long gone.
Joanne told him they were getting ready to land, and Stride looked out to see snowy peaks looming beyond the downtown Vancouver skyline. He knew why he had dreamed of Cindy. They had been to Vancouver together once, several years earlier, when they took a cruise of the Alaskan inner passage. They had spent a weekend in the city after the cruise, and it had been magical, jogging together through the fog of Stanley Park in the early morning and eating Dungeness crab meat from the market on Granville Island on a bench by the water, surrounded by hungry gulls. He remembered thinking on that trip that he had never been quite so happy in his life. It wasn’t long after they returned that a teenaged girl named Kerry McGrath disappeared, launching one of the darkest investigations of his career. In the midst of it, his beautiful Cindy was overrun by cancer, so swiftly and appallingly that he barely recognized her in the end. He figured later that the cancer had already taken root while they were in Vancouver. He wondered what that said about life, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
Stride was anxious to see Vancouver again. He liked the city, and he wanted to face his demons, or maybe just wallow in them. When they landed, he realized it wasn’t to be. There was no car to take him to Walker Lane but rather a helicopter waiting for him after he was cleared by a customs official who met the plane. It swooped him up and took him south, away from the city, toward the gulf islands north of Victoria. He was a little nervous flying over the water, not in a floatplane but in a rock that would simply hit the water and sink if its rotors stopped turning. At least it was a calm, cloudless day. They flew for what seemed a long time, but was probably only twenty minutes, before Stride saw islands dotting the blue water below them. He saw fishing villages and large bands of oak and fir trees covering the hills and sweeping down to narrow stony beaches. As they passed over one of the smaller islands, the pilot began to descend, perilously close to the treetops. Beyond the crest, on the southern shore of the island, Stride suddenly saw a clearing where a massive estate clung to the beach. The water seemed to lap almost to the windows overlooking the sound. The house itself was Victorian in design, with numerous gables and a large main tower topped by a cone-shaped roof. The coloring was dark and gothic.
The pilot flew over the home itself and gently set the helicopter down on a concrete circle amid the rear gardens. He cut the engine, and Stride climbed out. An attendant greeted him and guided him back through a maze of topiaries and fountains into an expansive rear porch, with heavy antique furniture and ceramic tile the color of creme brulee.
“ Mr. Lane will be right with you,” the woman told him, and left him alone to wait.
Stride stood near the doors and felt the cool cross-breeze cutting across the island. He wondered what to expect from Walker Lane. All he had seen was photographs from decades ago, when Walker looked very much like his son, MJ, with unruly hair and a gangly look, like a kid whose limbs had grown too far too fast. Even then, he had been a millionaire, and over the years, he had traded the m for a b. Stride had never met a billionaire. From Walker ’s voice over the phone, he imagined the man to be tall and severe, imperially gray, wearing a sweater and cupping a glass of port.
He was right about the sweater, and that was it.
“Welcome to Canada, Detective,” Walker said, as he rolled onto the porch in a wheelchair operated from a joystick in his right hand. “I’m glad you agreed to join me here.”
Stride found himself staring. He recognized the voice, which sounded like a stormy gale, but not the man. Half of Walker ’s face was strangely rigid, as if he had lost control of it in a stroke. The man’s right eye was fixed, and it took Stride a moment to realize the eye was fake, made of glass. His nose was misshapen, broken and reconstructed. When he smiled, his teeth were pristine and perfect, and Stride guessed that those were fake, too.
“Not what you expected?” Walker asked dryly.
Stride was too surprised to answer. He extended his hand, and Walker shook it. The man’s grip, at least, was strong and tight.
“I don’t advertise my disability, Detective,” Walker added. “I hope I can count on your discretion. Most people who come here sign nondisclosure agreements. I didn’t do that with you, because I want to trust you, and I want you to trust me.”
Stride was still unsettled by Walker ’s appearance and by the fake eye that seemed astonishingly real. “I understand,” he said.
“Do you know who killed my son?” Walker asked pointedly. He sounded like the impatient man Stride had talked to on the phone.
“Yes, we do.” Stride saw surprise bloom in Walker ’s good eye, and he reached into the slim folder he carried to retrieve the police sketch. “We haven’t arrested him, but we have his face. This is the man who killed MJ.”
“Let me see it.”
Stride handed him the sketch, and Walker took it eagerly. He held it far enough away in his right hand that his eye could focus.
“Do you know him?” Stride asked.
“No.” Walker shook his head, disappointed. “He’s not familiar to me”
“I’ll leave the sketch with you.”
Walker turned the sketch over and put it in his lap. “Would you like a tour before we get down to business? Not many people get to come here, you know.”
Stride had come halfway across the continent to see the man, and he was curious about the estate, which was the kind of home he was never likely to see again. “Why not?” he said.
“Good.”
Walker spun his wheelchair around and led him from the porch into the main body of the house. For all the antique decor, it was electronically sophisticated, with every feature controlled by computers and operated from the control pad on Walker ’s chair. Windows, lights, doors, curtains, skylights, everything could be opened, closed, turned on, and turned off with a flick of the keypad. They passed from room to room, and each one felt like something out of a European palace, huge and elaborately decorated, but sterile, like a museum. Stride knew the house couldn’t be more than two or three decades old, but it felt like a relic from another century. It didn’t feel like anyone lived here.
The house was generally warm, but some of the dampness of die region still made its way inside the walls, and the heat sometimes seemed to dissipate into the high ceilings. Stride found himself shivering and pulling die button closed on his suit coat. In just a few months, he thought, he had changed from a Minnesotan impervious to cold to a desert dweller chilled when the temperatures dipped below eighty.
“I rarely leave the island,” Walker told him. “I’m sure you know that. But I can do almost anything from here. I see just about every movie made right in here.” He guided Stride into a full-sized movie theater that had a handicapped-access row directly in the center. They might as well have been in the upscale multiplex in Las Vegas. Stride realized the theater here was probably always empty, just Walker sitting here, alone, analyzing movie after movie. He began to feel sorry for the man.
Walker sensed his emotions. “Don’t feel bad for me, Detective. I’m not Howard Hughes, you know. People visit me all the time-actors, directors, editors, agents. I am intensely engaged in every aspect of every one of my movies. When they’re being filmed, I have the dailies transferred to me electronically right here, and I review them and get my feedback back on the set by morning.”
“Why not go there?” Stride asked.
“First, I don’t need to. I can do it from here, and you have to admit, I have one of the most beautiful locations anywhere on earth.”
Stride nodded. That was true. Every time they passed a window, he saw the island, the sound, or the gardens, and each one was a view to get lost in.
“Second, I’m intensely private. I’m not a partier, not anymore. To be very candid, the way I look makes people uncomfortable. I hate that. The people who come here generally know me well enough to respect my privacy and not to be put off by who I am.”
He took Stride through the living room at the front of the house, with chambered windows looking out on the water, and then out onto a deck that led down toward the boat dock below. Stride could see a ferry passing by well offshore on its way to Victoria. The trees closed in around the estate, and he saw several eagles circling overhead.
“This is wonderful,” Stride told him honestly.
“Thank you, Detective.” Walker seemed to recognize that the compliment was genuine, and it pleased him. “You want to know about MJ, don’t you? How things went so wrong between us?”
“I do, yes,” Stride admitted.
Walker rolled his chair to the very edge of the balcony, where he could stare down at the waves slapping gently on the rocks. “Does it surprise you that many women want to marry me?”
Stride shook his head. “Not at all.”
Walker used his one eye to give him a knowing stare. “Very smooth, Detective. Of course, it’s my money. Actresses-hell, plenty of actors, too-seem to become very enlightened about wheelchairs and physical appearance when they think about all that cash in the bank. They tell me it’s love that matters. You really have to be from L.A. to make that line work.”
Stride laughed. Walker did, too.
“But MJ’s mother was different. Terrible actress-all the desire in the world but none of the talent. I think the director must have known she and I would hit it off, because he certainly didn’t send her to me because of her audition. Or maybe he just thought I needed a good lay. She wanted to be in this movie I was casting, and she was ready to do anything-I mean anything-to be in it. When I declined, she fell to pieces, crying. She was very unstable, but there was something oddly appealing about her. She was such a waif. I guess I wanted someone I could take care of. Much to the surprise of a lot of people in Hollywood, we got married. I guess you could say we were codependent for a while.”
“I understand,” Stride said. He thought about his second wife, Andrea. Their relationship was similar. Two people who needed each other but didn’t love each other.
“MJ was born two years later. I didn’t realize she was falling into a deep depression. People didn’t really talk about those things. I just thought she didn’t love me anymore and didn’t love the boy. I was a fool.”
Stride had read newspaper articles about Walker. His wife had killed herself a few years after MJ was born. “I think I know the rest,” he said.
“Yes, her suicide made the news. But you don’t know why, Detective. MJ understood it eventually, or he thought he did. He realized that my wife couldn’t stand the competition. She was fragile and neurotic, and I only made it worse. Because I couldn’t let go of the past, you see. MJ realized it, too. That’s why this business about the Sheherezade was so upsetting to him.”
Stride felt his senses shift as he heard the name Sheherezade. He tuned out his emotions and hardened his heart. It was a shame, because he found himself liking Walker Lane.
“You said your wife couldn’t stand the competition,” Stride said. “What do you mean? What couldn’t you let go?”
Walker sighed. “Yes, that’s what you’ve come for, isn’t it? To hear the real story.” He turned the wheelchair around and pointed up at the tower rising above the house. “Do you see it, Detective?”
Stride looked up, confused. He saw only peaked roofs and stone, and dozens of windows opening on the water. He saw the tower overhead, with a circular balcony at the top like a widow’s walk. “I don’t-” he began, but then his eyes finally lighted on the five stones different from the others in the tower. They were gray slate like the rest, but someone had carved a letter into each of them. There were other stones between them, so they were spread out, forming a word horizontally that stretched from one side of the turret to the other. Years of Pacific rain had washed down their edges, but he could still read it.
AMIRA
He stared down at Walker, not understanding. Walker was lost in thought, studying the letters with his one eye as if he could caress them.
“You named your estate after her,” Stride murmured. “Why?”
“Why? Detective, you’re not a romantic.”
“You killed her,” Stride said. The words slipped out.
Walker shook his head. He didn’t seem angry, just intense and heartbroken. “No, no. Never. Don’t you understand? I’d sooner kill myself. There are many days I’ve thought about doing that, just to be with her. I loved Amira. She loved me. We were going to be married that very night. The night that Boni Fisso murdered her.”
When they returned to the porch, Stride saw that the cloudless sky had dissipated into patches of darkness. It happened so quickly here, the changes from rain to sun, sun to rain. Drizzle began to dampen the garden outside and streak the windows. It grew colder. Walker called one of his staff, who stacked logs in the fireplace and started a blaze that quickly warmed the room. He opened wine, and Stride gave up his inhibitions and accepted a glass. Walker sipped the pinot noir and stared into the fire.
“I wish I could explain about Vegas in those days,” Walker said. “I think it had the same kind of allure that Hollywood did in the thirties. It was young, electric, glamorous. Millionaires rubbing shoulders with showgirls. Entertainers playing craps on the casino floor at two in the morning. Everyone dressed up in jewels and tuxes like they were going to the Met. I remember it seemed to me that everyone there was beautiful. Everyone was rich. It was illusion, of course. Sleight of hand. That’s what the town is so good at. You couldn’t walk into one of the casinos then and not get caught up in it. Maybe that’s because the real world seemed so far away. Walk a hundred yards in any direction and there was nothing but desert, an utter wasteland. I remember driving there on this two-lane nothing road from California, spending hours in the darkness without a glint of light anywhere. Then you’d see a glow like fire on the horizon, and you’d come over the crest of a hill and find this neon island blazing out of the night.”
“Helen Truax said the town had star quality then,” Stride said.
“Yes, she was right. That’s exactly what it was.”
Stride added, “Helen was one of the dancers with Amira.”
Walker shook his head. “Was she? I don’t remember her.”
“Her stage name was Helena Troy. She says she slept with you.”
Walker looked embarrassed. “I don’t doubt it. I played the game. I was young and rich, and I liked to sleep with lots of girls in those days. Vegas seduced me like so many others.”
“What about Amira?”
“Yes, her, too. She seduced me. Have you read about Flame?
Stride nodded.
“Words can’t do it justice,” Walker said. “I think I fell in love with Amira the very first time I saw it. I had had plenty of flings, but Amira was different. I fell for her, head over heels. Maybe I’m flattering myself, but I think it was the same for her. Perhaps she just wanted my money, or wanted an escape, but I think she loved me, too, just as passionately.”
“But Amira was Boni’s mistress, wasn’t she?” Stride asked.
Walker ’s face, the part of it that moved, showed his pain. “Foolish, wasn’t I? Naive. I was playing with gangsters, and I thought it was just another one of my movies. The tough guys in suits and fedoras looked like actors. But this was real.”
“What happened?”
“We thought we could keep it secret,” Walker said. “No one would know how we felt, until we were long gone and married.”
Long gone, Stride thought again.
“I wasn’t good at hiding my feelings. I was young, and love was written all over my face. Everyone knew it. They knew when I showed up every weekend at her shows. Boni knew, too, of course. Leo Rucci told me how it was. He told me Amira was Boni’s property, like a chair or a dog. That made me furious, but I pretended it was just a crush, nothing serious. Amira was the better actor. She never so much as looked at me in public. She told Boni if I ever laid a hand on her, she would knock me flat. Boni laughed about that, she said. So you see, we thought we were getting away with it. After her performance, in the middle of the night, she’d slip up to my suite on the roof, and we’d be together. It was our secret.”
“There aren’t many secrets in Vegas,” Stride said.
“No. Later, I realized he probably bugged my suite. We thought we were so smart, and he knew all along what was going on between us.”
“Tell me about that night.”
“That night,” Walker murmured. “That horrible, horrible night” He brought his right hand up and touched the frozen side of his face, rubbing it, as if he might feel something there. “After her last show, we were going to Europe. We planned to get married and spend six months traveling the world.”
“But Boni knew?”
Walker nodded. “He and I spent the evening together in his office. We did that a lot. I always thought Boni was charming. We had fun together. But the hours wore on, and there was something wrong. There was something different about him. As it got later, I knew Amira would be waiting in my suite, and I wanted to go to her. Boni kept finding excuses to keep me there, and I just watched the clock. Then Leo Rucci arrived. Boni’s enforcer. He always scared me, because you knew he was nothing but a vicious thug underneath his suit. Boni asked Leo to escort me back to my suite, and I protested, but Boni insisted. And as I left, Boni kissed me on both cheeks. I remember what he said. ’God be with you, Walker.’ Right then, I knew. I knew it was going to be bad.”
Stride didn’t say anything. He remembered standing on the balcony of MJ’s apartment, looking down at the rooftop suite of the Sheherezade.
“Leo followed me into the suite. I tried to stop him, but he just laughed. I expected to find Amira there, but it was quiet, and I thought she had come and gone. And then-I could see the door to the patio was open. I had this terrible feeling. I went outside.” Walker choked up. “She was in the pool. The water was red and cloudy. I just stared down at her. All I could think was that I was the one who killed her. By falling in love with her.”
“What did they do to you?” Stride asked, guessing what had happened next.
Walker looked down at his useless limbs in the chair. “Leo took me into the basement and put me in a limousine. He said they were taking me to the airport, and I was to leave the city and never come back. That wasn’t enough for them, of course. The two men in the car-they took a detour into the desert. Do you know what it’s like to have your knees broken with a baseball bat, Detective? Or to have your skull fractured by brass knuckles? I would have given them any amount of money to kill me, but they were very careful about that. Boni didn’t want me dead. He wanted me to know what he had done to me.”
Sitting in his wheelchair, Walker Lane, billionaire, began to cry.
Stride felt himself getting angry.
He was angry at Boni Fisso, a man he had never met. He was angry at Las Vegas for the lives it left in ruins. He felt a strange kinship with the killer in that sketch, trying to find justice for Amira in his own immoral way. He began to realize that the killer had been ahead of them all along.
This was never about Walker.
It was about Boni.
His name is Blake Wilde,” Serena told Stride. “Or at least, that’s the name he’s been using. He was one of the bodyguards at Premium Security. The guy who runs the agency, David Kamen, recognized Blake from the sketch. He’s our perp, and he’s disappeared.”
It was night, and Stride was in Walker ’s private hangar at the Vancouver airport, waiting for the return of the Gulf-stream. The jet was grounded in Denver by bad weather. It was raining on the coast now, too.
“How long has he worked there?” Stride asked.
“Just about three months. Kamen claims they did a background check on Blake, and it came up clean, but his personnel file is gone. They say Blake must have lifted it. I wonder if Kamen sent it to the shredder.”
“You think they knew each other?”
“Kamen has a military background. A sharpshooter for the marines in the Gulf. But I made some calls, and the rumor is he had ties to a lot of other groups in the Middle East, including smugglers and mercenaries. If you were Blake Wilde and you wanted to make a landing in Las Vegas, wouldn’t you look up an old friend?”
“The question is why Blake came to Las Vegas,” Stride said.
“To kill people.”
“I know, but why? Why him? Why now? I suppose his address was a fake?”
“A house in Boulder City,” Serena said. “Mormon family, five kids, a beagle. They never heard of Blake Wilde.”
“How about his SSN?”
“It traces to a boy in Chicago who died at age five.”
“He had to get paid,” Stride said.
“He cashed his checks at local pawnshops. A different one each time. It cost him ten percent, but no cameras and no questions asked.”
Stride stared through the door of the hangar at the rain falling outside. “So this guy was with Karyn Westermark on Saturday afternoon?” he asked. “He was running her security?”
“Nice, huh?” Serena replied. “It explains the disguise that night. He didn’t care about hiding from us, but he didn’t want Karyn recognizing him.”
“How about Tierney Dargon?”
“Yes, Kamen says he worked with her, too. No problem getting her to open the door in Lake Las Vegas.”
Stride couldn’t believe they were this close, and it still felt like they had nothing.
“There’s got to be something more,” he said. “What about expense vouchers, something with a credit card number or a bank account?”
“Zip,” Serena said. “Everything he gave them was faked. Nice jobs, too. I called Nick Humphrey’s next-door neighbor, Harvey Washington. Call a forger to find a forger, right? He had some names for me. Other local con men. Cordy’s checking with some of his snitches on the street, too. But this guy’s smart. I’m betting he didn’t have it done locally.”
“He probably has a backup identity ready as well,” Stride said.
“We’re getting in touch with all of the people that he did security for. We’re warning them to take care in case he shows up, and we’re interviewing them to see if Blake tipped anything about his personal life while he was with them. Where he shopped, where he ate, anything that might narrow down the area for us.”
“The sketch is on TV?”
“Yeah. We’re getting calls, but nothing solid so far. What did you get from Walker Lane?”
Stride quickly reviewed his day with Walker and what Walker had told him about the connections between Amira’s death and Boni Fisso.
“Do you believe him?” Serena asked.
“It plays either way,” Stride said. “Either Walker really did kill Amira, and Boni had him worked over as punishment, or Boni took it out on both of them because Amira and Walker were trying to run away. That’s what Walker says, and I think he’s telling the truth. The man has more money than God, and he still looks afraid of Boni.”
“There’s more,” Serena said. “Boni owns Premium Security.”
Stride shook his head. Boni Fisso had his tentacles wrapped around the neck of every person in the investigation. “So that means David Kamen has already told Boni everything that’s going on.”
“Count on it,” Serena said. “I wonder if our perp, Blake Wilde, knew that the company had Boni’s fingerprints on it. Maybe that was part of the game, worming his way into one of Boni’s shadow companies.”
“I think Blake Wilde knows Boni a hell of a lot better than we do,” Stride said. He added, “We’ve got to talk to Boni. He must know what the hell is going on. This all gets back to him. Maybe to his Orient project, too.”
“Sawhill says he tried to get us in to see him,” Serena said. “He even asked his dad to call Boni. No luck. The most we can get is an interview with Boni’s lawyer.”
“Goddamn it,” Stride swore. “I’m not going to arrest the son of a bitch. I’d love to, but I can’t. He’s not a suspect in any of these murders, so why the hell won’t he talk to us? The one murder we think he did commit was forty years ago, and we won’t be able to touch him for that.”
“Boni keeps his hands far away from the dirt,” Serena said.
“There’s only one way in. You’ve got to talk to Claire again.”
Serena was silent for a surprisingly long time. Finally, she said, “I don’t think that will work. She won’t talk to him.”
“You said she didn’t close the door entirely. We need her help.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Serena insisted.
Stride didn’t understand. “You can talk anybody into anything. What’s the problem?”
“Claire made a pass at me,” she said.
He almost laughed. “Well, so what’s the big deal? Guys make passes at you all the time. If she gets fresh, you have my permission to deck her.” He tried to understand what he was missing, why this had knocked Serena off her feet. Finally light dawned. “Unless it was a completed pass,” he said.
“No,” she told him. Then, embarrassed: “Not really.”
“Not really? That sounds like being a little pregnant.”
“Nothing happened,” Serena insisted. Then she went on. “But I wanted it to happen. I mean, it came out of nowhere for me. I was ready to jump into bed with her. That’s what scared me. Shit, I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
Stride was at a loss for words. He tried to let his brain catch up with his emotions, but he had no idea what he felt. Betrayed. Jealous. Aroused. All of those things.
“Just what are you telling me, Serena?”
He had stumbled into a conversation for which he wasn’t prepared, and the last thing he wanted to do was have it by cell phone, a thousand miles apart.
“I don’t know what I’m telling you.” Her voice was becoming part of the static. He strained to hear her. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. There’s a lot I don’t know about myself.”
“You’re making too much of this. You got caught off guard. You’re not made of ice.”
“It was easier when I was,” she said.
“So tell me this, do you love me?” he asked. He held his breath, because he was suddenly not sure what she would say.
“Yes.”
“Has Claire changed that?”
“No, no, that’s not it. But now I have to see her again.”
Stride thought about it. “You know you can use her attraction to you as a way to get her to call Boni.”
“Of course. That’s what I have to do. But I’m worried about getting in over my head,”
“The attraction is that strong?”
“Yeah, it is.”
Stride stared into the mist that hung like halos around the lights of the airport. His sense of homelessness had never been keener. He wanted to leave, start walking into the downpour, and disappear somewhere.
“Look, I can’t tell you what to do,” he said.
He was talking to air. The signal was gone, lost in the rain. For the time being, they were in different universes. He knew it was going to be a long wait and a long flight home through the dark sky.
Hello, Serena,” Claire said. “I’m glad you called.” Serena slipped past her into the one-bedroom apartment, passing through the honeysuckle fragrance of Claire’s perfume. Their eyes met.
“I’m sorry to come so late,” Serena said. “They told me at the Limelight this was your night off.”
“You’re not interrupting anything,” Claire said. “Just me and some chick lit.”
The lights in the apartment were dimmed, and several candles were lit, giving off a vanilla aroma. There was an indentation on the sofa and a blanket where Claire had been sitting with her book. A Tiffany lamp on the end table gave her light to read. There was a glass of white wine, half filled, on the coffee table. Soft jazz played from speakers discreetly hidden around the room.
“I love your apartment,” Serena told her. It was small but warm, with an oldfashioned feel, nothing metal or modern. The wood furniture looked antique but beautifully kept, and Serena wondered if Claire had done the restoration herself. There were collectibles everywhere, inlaid wooden boxes, glass angels, and stone animals.
“Can I get you some wine?” Claire asked.
“No, I don’t drink,” Serena said. She added deliberately, “Once I start, I can’t stop.”
“I understand. I’m sorry. How about some mineral water?”
“Sure.”
Claire disappeared into the kitchen, and Serena sat on the love seat. She knew she was playing a dangerous game. She was volunteering information, spilling secrets that gave up who she was. That was her strategy. Claire liked her. If she could balance their relationship on a high wire, close but not too close, Claire might do what she wanted. Call Boni.
But. she knew that high-wire artists sometimes took a long fall. She remembered what a divorced friend had told her about having an affair. You want to see how close you can get to the line without going across, and then one day you look back and realize the line is half a mile behind you. Serena wondered if she had made a mistake, believing she could get what she wanted from Claire and still hold on to herself.
Claire came back and offered her a champagne flute, filled with bubbling water. She had also refilled her own wineglass. Claire sat back down on the sofa and pulled her legs underneath her. She was relaxed and comfortable in her body, like a cat. She wore worn-out blue jeans and a black satin V-neck top. Her feet were bare.
“I owe you an apology,” Claire told her.
“Oh?”
“For coming on to you like I did. It’s not like me to be so forward. I must have seemed like a shark, and that’s not me.”
Serena wondered if that was true or if this was just phase two of the seduction. “You caught me unprepared, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry. Blame it on my romantic imagination. I thought there was something between us.” All the time she was talking, her blue eyes never left Serena and never even seemed to blink. Her voice, too, was mellow and inviting, like warm sake that went down smooth and washed away your defenses.
The ball was in her court, Serena knew. To say something. To deny it. Instead, she danced closer to the line. “You didn’t imagine it.”
Claire didn’t look surprised. She took a sip of wine. “I’m glad.”
“But nothing will ever happen between us,” Serena added.
“No?” Claire asked, giving her a mock pout.
“No.”
“Too bad.” She studied Serena thoughtfully, drumming her wineglass idly with her fingers. “Who was she?”
“What do you mean?”
“The girl I remind you of,” Claire said with a knowing smile. “Somewhere in your past, there has to be a girl. I don’t flatter myself that I’m so stunning that straight women suddenly climb the fence when they see me.”
“Okay, yes, there was someone else,” Serena admitted. “It was a long time ago.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Serena took a breath. This was what she wanted, the chance to draw Claire into her story, build a kinship between them-but it was easy to lose track of where her strategy ended and where her own catharsis began. She had wanted to talk about Deidre to someone for years, but she never had. Not to her therapist. Not even to Jonny. She had told him a little bit, but never the whole truth.
Serena put down her champagne glass, and the words spilled out. The memories were vivid, despite twenty years in between. She told Claire about meeting Deidre, who was two years older, at a diner in Phoenix where they were both waitresses. As the abuse from her mother and the drug dealer named Blue Dog became more horrific, Deidre became her lifeline, giving her a place where she could escape. Deidre held her hand when she got the abortion, an ugly one, far too late. They had talked about going back and killing them, her mother and Blue Dog, but freedom sounded better. Escape, go, get away. The two of them ran to Vegas and lived together, working and partying. They were best friends, and eventually more than friends.
Lovers. She had found ways to rationalize it over the years or pretend it was something other than what it was, but they were lovers. Serena realized, as she was telling the story, that she wanted to feel some of that sexual power again. She wanted to be the one to arouse Claire, and she knew, watching Claire shift her limbs on the sofa, that she was turning her on. She could have this woman. She could make Claire do anything to her. She could get back anything that she wanted.
It was a heady sensation, as if she were drinking again.
Even when she told her about leaving Deidre, and the destructive cycle that led to Deidre’s death, she no longer felt close to tears, as she usually did. She was strong, because she had to be.
“That’s a lot of guilt to carry around,” Claire said, when Serena was finished. “But I forgot, you’re tough.”
“I was cruel.”
“Do you think you can make it up to Deidre by making love to me?” Claire asked. She was too smart to be fooled. “Because you can’t. I don’t want that”
“What do you want?” Serena asked.
Claire didn’t miss a beat. “I want you to fall in love with me.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Serena said, although the fact that Claire could say it so calmly almost took her breath away. “I wasn’t in love with Deidre. We were lovers, but I was never in love with her.”
“I’m not Deidre.” Claire tossed her strawberry blond hair back, but it fell across her face anyway, covering one eye. “What do you want, Serena?”
“I want you to get me and Jonny in to see your father,” Serena said. “That’s what I want. That’s all I want.”
Claire looked like she had known that all along. “What if I do? Would you spend the night with me?”
Serena thought about Jonny and poker. She kept a stone face, even though a flutter of wind would have knocked her off the high wire and into Claire’s arms. “No. Besides, you said that’s not what you want.”
“I think maybe you’re not so tough,” Claire said. “I think if I kissed you now, we’d end up making love. You’re hoping I don’t try to find out.”
They were playing a game of chicken, and Serena tried to steel herself and not blink.
“I want you to call Boni,” Serena repeated.
Claire reached languidly down to the coffee table, and Serena saw a cell phone there. Claire flipped it open, tossed her hair again, and looked at Serena long and hard. “Do you know what a big deal this is for me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’ll never know what he did to me. How he betrayed me.”
“I understand. Maybe someday you’ll tell me.”
Claire punched one button on the phone. She still had Boni on speed dial. It was after midnight, but her father answered immediately. “It’s Claire,” she said, still staring at Serena on the opposite sofa. “I need you to do something for me.”
An express glass elevator-smoked windows, bulletproof glass-took them to the rooftop suite in the northernmost building of the Charlcombe Towers. To Boni’s lair.
Stride thought about MJ as they shot upward, watching the earth recede below them at a dizzying speed. MJ had lived in the same complex as Boni Fisso and looked out on the same casino where his father’s life had been destroyed. Where Walker Lane ’s lover had died under the glow of the Sheherezade sign. Stride wondered if MJ had ever met Boni, if he had even a glimmer of the titanic conflict between Boni and his father. It was little wonder that Walker was so desperate for his son to move.
He looked at Serena, who was quiet, staring out at the Strip. All the way home, listening to the hum of the Gulfstream’s engines, he had asked himself how he felt about her and Claire. He still didn’t know. He had half expected her to be gone, but she was in their bed, awake, when he arrived home in the middle of the night. Without him asking, she had blurted out that nothing happened. Then she made love to him, as intensely and passionately as he could ever remember, and he couldn’t help wondering if some of her attraction to Claire was spilling over into their bed.
Not that he was complaining about it right then.
The elevator doors slid open.
They stepped out into a small, brightly lit foyer. A whitewashed wall blocked the way, with mammoth double oak doors in the center. The floor, too, was white marble, shiny and spotless. Stride noted a total of four original paintings lining the wall on either side of the door, all of them done by realist painter Andrew Wyeth, from the Helga series. He guessed it was meant to soothe visitors while they waited for admittance to the inner sanctum-and perhaps to send the message that Boni was about class, not just money. If Steve Wynn could put Picassos at the Bellagio, Boni could build a gallery, too.
Stride had heard the stories about Boni, although it was hard to know which were true and which were spin. Like the rumor that he used to keep a rat, trained to chew the balls off casino cheats. Then he made the would-be thieves eat the droppings when the rat shit. Stride thought that one smelled like an urban legend. Or the story that half the politicians in the state had worked in his casinos when they were young and ambitious, and that Boni owned their souls. He figured that one was probably true.
Rex Terrell had done a long profile of Boni in LV a year ago. Bonadetti Angelo Fisso had been born in New York in the mid-1920s. His father made pennies driving trucks in Manhattan but managed to send his oldest son, Boni, to Columbia (with help, it was said, from the mob bosses). With degrees in law and business, Boni emerged from Columbia smart, polished, and clean. He ducked the draft with a 70 percent hearing loss in one ear and, in the boom following World War II, began buying and selling businesses up and down the East Coast. The rumors clung to him that his stakes were funded by the mob and that Boni’s companies were a laundry service for blood money, but several generations of FBI agents had devoted a lot of taxpayer money to proving Boni was dirty and wound up with nothing but wrist slaps for little fish in Boni’s empire like Leo Rucci.
Boni arrived in Las Vegas in 1955. He took over a series of low-roller casinos, added hotel rooms, lavish shows, and half-naked cocktail waitresses, and turned them into profit machines. He also nurtured an image as a grand benefactor, building hospitals, landscaping park land, and paying college tuition for the children of longtime casino employees. In public, he was a saint, always with a smile and a joke. The hard stuff went on behind the scenes. Bodies disappeared in the desert. Teeth got yanked, bones broken. The rat got fat, if you believed that kind of thing.
The Sheherezade was Boni’s jewel. It was the first property he had built himself from the ground up, and when it opened in 1965, it attracted the top-line entertainers of the era, along with the Sands and the Desert Inn. Boni had already figured out what later generations of Vegas entrepreneurs discovered-that the city had to be always new, always reinventing itself. So Boni never let the Sheherezade get stale. He found new shows, new stars. Like Amira and Flame. He found new ways to shock and tempt people. And the money flowed.
Stride had seen photos of Boni’s late wife, Claire’s mother, with whom he had a short and tempestuous relationship. Eva Belfort was a beautiful, aristocratic blonde, a distant cousin to French royalty. Marrying her gave Boni an aura of European style. The truth was, like everything else in Boni’s life, Eva was bought and paid for. Her family owned a château in the Loire valley and was about to lose it for back taxes when Boni, on a tour of the wine country, met Eva. The family soon became rich again, and Boni had his trophy bride. It must have killed her, Stride thought, a wealthy child of the French countryside forced to live in a sand-swept version of hell. According to Rex Terrell, Eva was a spitfire, and she and Boni had argued ferociously over Boni’s penchant for affairs with his dancers. Stride wondered if Eva knew about Amira.
It didn’t really matter, though. Their marriage, Boni’s only marriage, lasted just three years. Eva had lived only a few months longer than Amira. She had died in childbirth, and Boni was left with his one child, Claire.
He and Serena waited almost ten minutes in the foyer of Boni’s suite before the double doors suddenly opened with a click and swung silently inward. An attractive woman of about twenty-five, with pinned-up brunette hair and a tailored business suit, was there to greet them.
“Detective Dial? Detective Stride? Please come in. We’re very sorry to keep you waiting.”
She waved them into a lounge that seemed to stretch the length of a football field. The north wall was completely made of windows looking out on the Strip, with views to the mountains on the west and east.
“Mr. Fisso will join you in just a moment,” she told them. “We have breakfast set up here, so please, help yourself.”
She left them alone, disappearing through a door in a leather-clad wall that led to the rest of the suite. Stride eyed the buffet and realized he was hungry. The spread on the mahogany bureau could have served twenty people. He took a plate, spread cream cheese over half a bagel, and layered it with pink lox. He poured a glass of orange juice and did the same for Serena.
The room, which had a rough western feel to it, featured cowboy artists like Remington. There was sculpture, too, with a rodeo motif. Stride had a hard time imagining Manhattanborn Boni Fisso in a cowboy hat. He was about to make a joke to Serena, then was glad he hadn’t when he realized that Boni Fisso himself had made a silent entrance into the room.
Boni read his mind. “All men are cowboys at heart, Detective. Me, I’m an Italian cowboy. You’ve heard the term ‘spaghetti western’? That’s me.” He laughed, a loud, deep-throated bellow that echoed in the large room.
He moved with remarkable grace and speed for a man in his eighties. He shook both their hands and maneuvered them toward the full-length windows, where he pointed with a sweep of his arms at the view. “Look at that city! God, what a place. You know what they say, every world-class city has a river running through it. Fuck ’em. We’ve got dust and yuccas and rattlesnakes running through ours. Only river here is money. I’ll take that over all the sewage and fish heads floating through the Missouri or the Hudson.”
“You don’t miss the old days?” Stride asked him. “Everyone else from back then seems to think Vegas was better in the 1960s.”
“Hell, no!” Boni exclaimed. “Sure, I wish I had the body and half the energy I did in those days. We all think that, right? I’ve lost a lot of friends, too. Everybody gets old. You know the saying. Tempus fuck-it. But that’s the beauty of this town. It’s always young. Bulldoze the past, and get on with it Magic is what you grew up with, Detective. I guarantee you, forty years from now, old people will be talking about how they miss Vegas in the 2000s.” Boni poured himself a glass of champagne from the buffet “Come on, you two, eat, eat. God, I sound like my grandmother.”
There was no way around it. Boni was charming. Stride had to work to remind himself that the man wouldn’t think twice about ordering a homicide if it suited his purposes. He thought about Walker in the wheelchair, having been beaten nearly to death by Boni’s goons. About Amira and her crushed skull.
Boni fixed him with sparkling blue eyes, and Stride thought that the man knew exactly what he was thinking. It was probably the same thing that everyone who came into this room and met the man for the first time thought.
“Fill your plates, and then let’s sit down,” Boni told them. He took a red leather armchair for himself, and Stride noticed that it had been designed low to the ground, so that Boni’s feet lay flat on the floor. He was short, no more than five-foot-six. The chair itself was on a slight riser, higher than the sofas around it. His throne. Stride half expected a ruby ring to kiss.
Boni was dressed all in black. He wore a turtleneck, a tailored ebony blazer, and creased black dress pants. His shoes were patent leather, shined to a mirror finish. He still looked very much like he did in the photos from decades ago, when he already had a balding crown of black hair. The hair was gray now, and his forehead was mottled with liver spots. He had sunken crescent moons under his eyes and a five o’clock shadow that a razor couldn’t scrape away. Despite his age, he was fit and strong, and his eyes were piercing and alert. He still had movie-star teeth.
Assuming the movie was Jaws, Stride thought.
“Mr. Fisso-” Serena began.
“Oh, please. It’s Boni, Boni. Don’t make me feel so goddamn old.”
Stride saw that Serena was uncomfortable being on a first-name basis with the man, but she struggled to spit out the name. “Boni, then. My name is-”
Boni interrupted her again. “No need, no need. Serena Dial. You’re from Las Vegas by way of Phoenix, if my sources are correct.” His tone was light, but Stride had the feeling that Boni could have rattled off every detail of Serena’s past, maybe more than he could have done himself. “And you’re the new kid on the block,” he continued, turning to Stride. “From Minnesota? Lots of lakes there. I’d ask what the hell you’re doing in the desert, but that’s pretty obvious.”
He winked at him and glanced at Serena, and it was clear that he knew all about their relationship. Stride wondered if it came from Sawhill.
“I have to thank you,” Boni told Serena. “I haven’t talked to my daughter in years. It was good to hear her voice. Once upon a time, I thought she’d be living here, running my empire right beside me. Girl had a business sense like no one I’ve ever met. Hell, she must get it from her old man, right? I mean, Eva, her mother, she could cut you a new one, but her gift was spending money, not making it. No, my baby Claire, she’s the talented one in the family, I can’t hold a candle to her.”
“Why are you estranged?” Serena asked.
Boni’s face hardened like concrete. “A police detective concerned about my family values. That’s very nice. You didn’t really come here to help me patch things up with Claire, did you?”
“No, it’s just that-”
“Look, Claire and I didn’t see eye to eye about my business ventures. So she went off to sing her sad songs, just to spite me. And to live in that little apartment, when I know perfectly well she’s made millions in the market.” Boni watched Serena, who couldn’t keep the shock off her face. “She probably told you it’s because she likes to sleep with girls. That’s not the Catholic way. Well, I’d have been happier if she married some strapping fellow like Detective Stride here. I made her go on a few dates with some good-looking guys. Any sin in that? But no, I have to deal with Claire in confession every Sunday, God help me. Father D’Antoni always asks about her, to see if she’s come back to God’s way. I think he just likes hearing the details, if you ask me.”
“Have you heard her sing?” Serena asked.
“I have. She’s primo. That girl would run Nashville if she moved out there. It’ll never happen, though. She’s all Vegas at heart.” Boni settled back in his chair and took a sip of champagne. “But we have other things to talk about, don’t we? Claire says you two wanted to have an off-the-record conversation with me, no goddamn lawyers around. I have to respect that. I’m a lawyer myself, and I have to tell you that most of them might as well stick a talking parrot on their desk that says, ‘No, no, no.’ And they’d bill the parrot out at a thousand dollars an hour. So there’s no lawyers here, Detectives. Just the three of us. This conversation never happened. Got it?”
They both nodded.
“The reason we’re here-” Stride began.
“The reason you’re here is you’re trying to catch a killer. And you want my help.”
Stride nodded. “That’s right.”
“I saw the sketch in the paper. I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
“He worked for your company,” Serena retorted. “David Kamen hired him at Premium Security. I’m sure you know that, because I’m sure Kamen called you.”
“Yes, he did,” Boni said. “But that doesn’t change a thing. I never met this Blake Wilde, and I don’t know how you can find him. I wish I could help.”
“You realize Claire could be his next target,” Serena said.
“I’m not a fool, Detective,” Boni said sharply. He fixed Serena with his blue eyes and added, “I always have people watching Claire. Even when she doesn’t know it, I’m always protecting her.”
Serena fired back, “Was Blake one of the people you had protecting her?”
Boni didn’t reply, and Stride thought she had hit a nerve.
“Mr. Fisso, may I speak candidly?” Stride asked.
“By all means, Detective.”
“It hasn’t been in the papers, but you probably knew even before we did that these murders have one thing in common. The Sheherezade. Or more specifically, Amira Luz. Blake Wilde, whoever he is, seems to be bent on avenging Amira’s death, because he thinks it didn’t go down the way the papers and the police said it did. He may very well be right about that. But we’re not here to reopen the investigation into the murder of Amira Luz. That case is closed.”
“Really? I understand you’ve been making a lot of inquiries about it, Detective. I hear you even paid a visit to my old friend, Walker Lane.”
“You know he’s in a wheelchair,” Stride said. “He has been since that night.”
“Terrible thing. A car accident, wasn’t it? A good lesson about not driving while intoxicated.”
“That’s not what Walker says.”
“Oh?”
“He says you had him beaten. Crippled. As payback for trying to take away your mistress.”
“I suppose he also accused me of killing Amira,” Boni replied placidly.
“Yes, he did.”
“Naturally. I liked Walker very much, Detective, but his behavior was reckless. When you make mistakes that have awful consequences, you often try to blame someone else.”
“So you didn’t have Amira killed,” Stride said.
“Of course not.”
“No? Wasn’t she your property? Didn’t you own her?”
Boni tut-tutted him like a child. “No one owned Amira. No one. Least of all Walker. I believe that frustrated him enormously.”
“So you’re saying Walker killed Amira?” Stride asked.
“As far as I know, a deranged fan killed her. Walker wasn’t here when Amira was killed. He had already left to drive back to Los Angeles. Coincidentally, I believe that’s when he had his accident.”
“And I’m sure we’ll find a police report about the accident if we go back far enough,” Stride said.
“I’m sure you would. Then again, in forty years, things get lost.”
“What about employment records from the Sheherezade back then? Did they get lost, too?”
“Why?” Boni asked. “Who are you looking for?”
“A kid who worked at the hotel during the summer as a lifeguard. His name was Mickey.”
Boni cocked an eyebrow at Stride. “Why would you care about someone like that?”
“He called your casino boss, Leo Rucci, the night of Amira’s death about a fight outside. I want to know more about it.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Detective. I’m sure the old employment records are in a warehouse somewhere in the city, half-eaten by cockroaches, but when we had college kids working here over the summer, I usually had Leo pay them in cash. It was more hassle than it was worth to worry about the paperwork and taxes.”
Stride felt as if he were battling an old elk with a massive set of horns and the willingness to bang heads all day.
“If there was nothing unusual about Amira’s death, why is Blake Wilde so intent on avenging her?” Serena asked. She looked like she was tired of watching the boys play a game of which one’s bigger.
“He’s a serial killer. You know the mind of that kind of man better than I do.” He couldn’t keep a small smirk off his face.
“If we knew why he was doing this, it might help us find him,” Stride said. “And I think you know why.”
“You already said it, didn’t you, Detective? He has some misguided ideas about what happened to Amira.”
Stride shook his head. “Look, I know you want him first. I know you want to get him and pay him back your way.” Stride paused and noted that Boni didn’t disagree with him. “But the main thing is that one of us catch him, soon, before he kills anyone else. If you catch him, okay, we’ll never know. But I don’t think there’s a downside for you if we get him first.”
“Think harder,” Boni said. The mask slipped. A glint of steel.
Stride knew he was right. It was a race, and Boni needed to win. Not just to squeeze Blake but to make him disappear quietly and quickly from the headlines. In custody, who knew what Blake might say? Or what he knew. His allegations alone would keep the heat on Boni and might drive investors away from his Orient project.
He wasn’t going to help them.
“What if you’re too late, Boni?” Serena asked. “What if he gets to Claire first? Is it worth the risk?”
There was silence as Boni chewed on that thought.
“Where did Kamen find him?” Serena asked.
“That won’t help you,” Boni said. “Wilde was a mercenary in Afghanistan. David used him sometimes for ops that weren’t on the books. He was good. Fearless. Ruthless. But that’s all shadow stuff. Fake names. No backgrounds.”
“Were there others Kamen worked with who might know him?”
Boni shook his head. “No way I’m giving you that. No way David gives you that.”
Stride knew there were military channels he could pursue, but if Wilde was a rogue player, the brass wasn’t likely to give them any more information than Boni. “Then tell us why,” he said.
Stride watched Boni grinding through calculations. It was all mathematics to him, debits and credits. The value of information. He thought at first Boni would stiff them again, but the old man leaned forward, his hands on his knees.
“I tell you this, and we’re done.”
They both nodded.
“Amira, she wasn’t celibate, you get the picture? She came to town, and she started sleeping with Moose. Smart girl. Moose had juice. Pretty soon she was lead dancer in one of our T &A shows. Then she went to Paris, okay? Special engagement. That’s where she came up with the idea for Flame.”
Boni seemed to enjoy the confusion on their faces.
“The thing is, she didn’t go to Paris,” he went on. “She was pregnant. She wanted to keep it under wraps. So I sent her away for a few months, and she had the kid.”
A baby, Stride thought. A secret baby. Sometimes the hardest problems were really the simplest. Blake Wilde was Amira’s son.
“What happened to the baby?” Stride asked.
“Adoption,” Boni said. “Amira couldn’t get rid of the baby fast enough. It killed her stuck up there all alone. She couldn’t wait to get back. She knew Flame would be a huge hit.”
“Moose didn’t know?” Serena asked.
“No one knew.”
Something niggled in Stride’s brain. A plate shifted, like in an earthquake, and a piece of the puzzle fell into place.
“You said ‘up there,’” Stride said. “Where did you send her?”
“An associate of mine had resort cabins in Reno near the lake,” Boni replied. “That was where a lot of the girls from Vegas went when they had problems like that.”
Stride and Serena looked at each other. “ Reno,” they said.