Private Vegas

by James Patterson

  “I’m just holding that stuff,” Boyd shouted. “I’m not in charge.”

  Jessica pulled the blanket up to her chin. “We’re the good guys,” she said angrily. “Who cares about those cars? It’s a crime that they even exist. I mean, two-hundred-thousand-dollar cars that get eight miles to the gallon? You’ve gotta be kidding.” The girl fluffed her pillow.

  Justine had treated enough teens to know that their brains weren’t fully formed. They lacked foresight. They didn’t understand consequences. They thought things were cool that were felonious, dangerous, deadly.

  In many ways, teens were still children, which was why the police couldn’t interrogate underage kids without permission from their parents.

  Private wasn’t the police.

  Scotty said, “Charles. You’re losing the advantage of getting ahead of this thing. Right now, we have time to get to whoever is in charge. Otherwise, well, I know what my partner is thinking. The smoking gun is right here, in your possession, with your fingerprints. So what are we going to do, buddy?”

  Boyd bolted off the bed, angry, blustering, chest out, hands curled into fists. Justine read his posturing as meaning that he was the victim here, and he wasn’t going to accept this.

  “Mr. Tong sent you, right?” Boyd spat. “He’s a fucking douche. Zero Sum worked out the mechanics and we executed the plan, okay? We killed Mr. Tong’s car. Are you gone yet?”

  Justine said, kindly, “Did you kill all of them? The Bentley, the Lambo, etcetera. The Aston Martin?”

  “Zero Sum did the last one solo. I was driving. But we didn’t know anyone was inside that car. It was an accident.”

  “That’s what you should say,” Justine said approvingly. “Say that it was an accident.”

  Charles Boyd ignored her, but he was afraid of Scotty.

  He said, “Look, don’t tell my parents. I’ll tell you who Zero Sum is and where he lives. He’ll straighten you out. He’ll tell you who the bad guys really are.”

  Chapter 77

  AS THEY LEFT the Boyd house, Justine said to Scotty, “Want to bet Charles is giving Zero Sum a heads-up right now?”

  “It’s okay. We’re only five or six minutes away.”

  Justine dialed chief of police Mickey Fescoe’s cell phone. A woman’s voice was on the recording, Mickey’s assistant saying he was away for the weekend and to leave a message.

  “Mickey, it’s Justine Smith. We found two of the kids involved in the serial car bombings and they have information about the Wilkinsons’ car.” Justine gave the name and address, then said, “You’re going to need a warrant to search the house for explosives.”

  She forwarded the photos of Charles Boyd’s bomb kit to Fescoe’s mailbox.

  “I hope he gets the message,” she said. “Soon.”

  She and Scotty got into their car, pulled onto the highway, and headed for the house where Ken Capshaw, aka Zero Sum, lived with his parents in Encinal Bluffs. Capshaw was second on Tong’s suspect list, and she read the note Tong had written next to the name out loud to Scotty.

  “‘Capshaw is a charismatic cockroach, antiestablishment and philosophically destructive. Not as bright as he thinks he is. His clueless parents travel on business. A lot.’”

  Scotty grunted, stepped on the gas. They were going about seventy, but still, Justine felt the pressure of passing time. If Boyd alerted Capshaw, and if Capshaw was smart, he would immediately get behind a wall of parents and lawyers. He might leave the country.

  As Scotty drove the car up the coast, Justine sent an e-mail to Dr. Sci, attaching the photos of the bomb kit. A minute later, her phone rang.

  It was Sci.

  “Justine. Where are you?”

  “In the car with Scotty.”

  “Something has happened. I’m sending you a link to a video. Open it now. It’s going viral as we speak.”

  Sirens sounded behind their fleet car, then police cars loomed in the rear window. Scotty pulled onto the shoulder and slowed as three cop cars sped past.

  Justine picked up her iPad and opened the link from Sci, which took her to YouTube. She watched for a couple of seconds, then hit Pause.

  She said, “Scotty. Capshaw just posted a video. Stop the car.”

  Chapter 78

  THE VIDEO HAD been shot in a garage, the camera angled at the BMW convertible with its top down. The kid in the driver’s seat looked to be in his late teens, had a narrow, intelligent face, curly brown hair, wore denim and glasses with wire rims.

  He drank from a plastic water bottle, then looked into the camera and said, “I’m Ken Capshaw and you should listen to what I have to say. You won’t want to hear it, but which would you rather have, romance or the truth? This is the truth.”

  The kid turned away, wiped his lips with his sleeve. It looked to Justine as though he was both nervous and detached, and in her estimation, that was a bad combination.

  Capshaw turned back to the camera and said, “As I speak, the world is coming to an end and it’s because of us. We’ve ruined the planet in the last hundred and fifty years. Thank the combustion engine for that.

  “We’ve enslaved ourselves to fossil fuel, and so we’ve poisoned the air and we’ve polluted our waters and we’ve taken objects like this petroleum artifact”—he waggled the bottle—“and thrown millions of them into the oceans and landfills where they will stay intact for a thousand years.

  “It’s all corrupt. The banks, the church, politics, corporations, the earth, the air, and the water we’ve ruined with our poisons and gases. And there is no sign of reversing this trend. No sign of redemption.

  “You see where this is going? Do you have an exit strategy? I’ve warned you on my blog, and I tried to demonstrate the pernicious nature of greed by torching a few cars. But I didn’t plan to kill someone.

  “That was a mistake and I’m sorry. At the same time…at the same time, no one here gets out alive. Not even me.”

  Justine yelled at the image on her iPad, “Jesus Christ. Noooo.”

  Justine and Scotty saw Capshaw take a cell phone from the top of the dashboard, type in a few numbers. There was a soft boom, the sound of something igniting.

  Scotty bellowed at Capshaw’s image, “Get out. Get out of the car.”

  Capshaw rose up in his seat. Justine saw the heavy chains around his waist, probably looped and locked around the steering-wheel column. Flames leaped around the sides of the car and then reached out to Capshaw, lighting up his clothes and hair. The boy screamed wordlessly, writhed in an agonized dance.

  The bomb turned the picture a staticky white.

  Justine threw her tablet down on the seat. She put her palms over her eyes. “Oh my God. Oh my God. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” she said. “And now everyone in the world will see it. Every kid in the world.”

  Her cheeks were wet, and her hands were shaking when she called Jack.

  PART FOUR

  UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS

  Chapter 79

  I WAS ON the phone with Justine when Mo-bot danced into my office. I signaled to her to sit down, told Justine that I was sorry, that she and Scotty should come back to the office.

  I was shocked by Capshaw’s suicide, rocked by how shit just happened. It didn’t require global events or an evil twin. Just a single, unintended event—in this case, that Capshaw hadn’t first looked to see if someone was passed out in the backseat of a car before he decided to fire up his protest.

  It was terrible to imagine what Capshaw had been thinking when he chained himself to his steering wheel so that he couldn’t change his mind at the last minute. His screen name, Zero Sum, referred to a game or an interaction where if one side won, the other lost by an equivalent amount, equaling zero.

  So Capshaw took his own life to balance the loss of Maeve Wilkinson’s. And now, two teenagers were dead. Both deaths were regrettable.

  I said to Mo-bot, “The car bomber confessed. Then he blew himself up on streaming video.”

>   “What? No.”

  “It was…horrific.”

  I thought about my brother, that he’d had nothing to do with torching my car. But even if I was paranoid, I couldn’t shake the feeling. I would still bet an arm and a leg that Tommy was planning to hurt me.

  I asked Mo what brought her into the office on a weekend and she told me that she’d been doing some work for our client Hal Archer, looking into Tule’s history to see if she could find anything that might help with Hal’s defense.

  “I uncovered this guy,” she said, showing me a photo on her iPhone of a man in his early twenties with bland, unremarkable features. He could have been a corporate CEO or a serial killer or the driver of a delivery van.

  Mo-bot said, “This is Lester Olsen. He graduated from MIT with a four-point-eight GPA. He has a degree in engineering, but instead of going into industry, he went to the land of no clocks and fast money.”

  “He counts cards in Vegas?”

  Mo-bot grinned, said, “Very good, Jack,” then went on. “He made a few million at poker by the time he was twenty-three, then, one dark night, the LVMPD found him unconscious in an alley with ten broken fingers and the ace of spades in his shirt breast pocket. There was some writing on the card: ‘This is your last hand.’

  “So, the reason I’m telling you about this guy is that after his poker career ended, he still showed up in the casinos. Lost money at craps, but he was friendly with the showgirls. And he started a new business. He became a kind of consultant. Teaching girls how to marry a billionaire.”

  I said, “And you’re thinking Hal’s a billionaire who married a Vegas showgirl who’d been trained to catch him?”

  My assistant, Val Kenney, came in with my Red Bull, said, “You can learn how to marry a billionaire? I have to hear this.”

  I asked Val to stay and asked Mo to go on.

  Mo said, “Okay, so, Lester Olsen charges ten thousand dollars for the six-week course, classroom version. But he’s got a higher-end course, more exclusive, no rates mentioned. His advertising promises ‘You will marry a wealthy man. Money-back guarantee.’

  “So I burrowed into Tule’s phone logs,” Mo said. “I found that Olsen called Tule five times a week for about three months before she married Hal and he kept calling her throughout her marriage, including the day she died. And what do you know? Mr. Olsen had been calling Barbie Summers Cooper too, same time frame and frequency. He’s still calling her.”

  Val asked, “Why is he calling these women after the wedding?”

  “Maybe he’s on retainer,” I said. “Maybe he gets a percentage of the take?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Val said. “I mean, really, Jack. What were Tule and Olsen doing after the nuptials? What are Barbie Cooper and Olsen up to now?”

  “What are you thinking, Val?”

  “I should go undercover. I should sign up for Olsen’s high-end course and let him coach me. See what I can find out. I’m single. I’m primed for this. If Mo-bot can give me a fake history, how is this not doable?”

  Val was ambitious and she was smart. I had 100 percent confidence in her.

  “Okay,” I said. “You and Mo work out the details.”

  Chapter 80

  GOZAN REMARI HAD fallen hard for Rodeo Drive, but the Grove put Rodeo in the shade. This outdoor mall was delicious and ostentatious in the unique American way that he both loved and abhorred.

  Mostly, he loved it: the wide avenue lined with excellent shops and restaurants, the electric trolley that zipped up and down between First Street and the Grove and the Farmers’ Market, taking tourists through this sugarcoated Disneyland of excess.

  And then, at the center of everything, there was this.

  Gozan stood in front of the dancing fountain, watching it shoot up jets of water in time to one of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits. He couldn’t keep himself from singing along: “‘The summer wind came blowing in from across the sea.’”

  Someone put a hand on Gozan’s shoulder, and he jerked around. Khezir was calling his name, breaking into his thoughts.

  “Don’t leave me by myself with them,” Khezzy said, reminding Gozan that they were not alone.

  The three men from Ra Galiz, standing with their hands behind their backs, were not amused by the many delights of the Grove. To them, the mall was obscene, but it was also a noisy backdrop for a meeting, a place where they would not be noticed.

  They were here to issue directives and warnings to Khezir and they had given Gozan an actual headache, right at the top of his head. They didn’t understand Khezzy. Talking to him as if he were slow only angered his nephew and would make him defiant.

  Gozan turned his back on the incredible fountain and joined the men strolling along the street. He was thinking that there could not be a more bizarre collection of people than the five of them walking together in sports jackets among the waves of visitors in shorts and flip-flops and floaty summer dresses.

  He assumed a studious expression. He walked, listened, interjected a patriotic comment every now and then, but he was also watching the women who were everywhere, shopping and smiling and showing themselves off.

  He caught the eye of a lovely, plump woman who was dallying in the doorway of Nordstrom, and she returned his look, boldly. She was with a friend. Blondes, both of them. Out here, they were almost always blond.

  Gozan had spent a long week with Khezzy at Shutters, keeping a low profile, as they’d had to do. But now he was hungry for the touch of a woman. He’d heard an American expression that he found hilarious: chubby chaser. He wanted to say it to Khezzy right now, because it made both of them laugh.

  Gozan interrupted the top man of the Ra Galiz unit, said, quietly, “I think this is a good time for us to part company, Balar. Good to see you again.” He shook the man’s hand. “We’ll be in touch. Khezzy. Come have lunch with me.”

  Khezir gladly fell into step with his uncle, who said, “There is a time to discuss politics and a time to be chubby chasers.”

  Khezzy started laughing and he kept at it until tears came into his eyes. Gozan turned back before the crowd swallowed them up, called to the men in black, “See you. Have a nice day.”

  Then he forgot them. He and Khezir backtracked toward Nordstrom. Gozan hoped he could find that fleshy woman now. The way she had looked at him was promising.

  Chapter 81

  VAL KENNEY WAS enjoying the first massage of her life in the spa at the Black Diamond Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Not only was this her first massage, her first spa, her first hotel of this magnitude and splendor, but she had never been to Las Vegas before. And what she’d seen of this town in the past four hours had been dazzling.

  Too bad there was no one to tell.

  Katrina’s strong hands rubbed oil into Val’s shoulders, and she moaned. This was sooo good, and she was so grateful to Jack for letting her run with her idea.

  As of four hours ago, she was no longer Val Kenney of Private Investigations, former scholarship student at Boston and Miami Universities and part-time worker at the Miami PD, typing up files, approving expenses, and keeping the schedule logs.

  Mo-bot had given her a different background, one that she was memorizing even now.

  Her new name was Valerie Fernandez. Her father was a Cuban-born doctor and her mother was black, a Miami native who taught eighth grade until she died, a year ago.

  Valerie Fernandez lived in Los Angeles now, a professional events planner who had created stupendous bachelorette parties for several celebrities and gala affairs for corporate clients.

  As her story would go, she was twenty-five, never married, in perfect health. All true.

  She would say that both her parents were dead, and that was also true.

  In fact, in her real life, before her mother died, she had encouraged Val to interview with Private for a job she had wanted since Jack Morgan gave a guest lecture at her school. Val was pretty sure that if her mom could see her now—an undercover investigator, u
nder the cover of a perfumed sheet, getting a three-hundred-dollar massage—she’d be laughing hard.

  Katrina wrapped the sheet entirely around Val, tucking her in so that she was a cocoon of happiness. She rubbed Val’s scalp and gently pulled her hair out to the ends. She said, “Miss Fernandez, please just lie still and rest. I’ll be back in a few minutes to take you to your mud treatment, okay?”

  Val said okay.

  She listened to the soft music and went over her new life story in her mind. And she also thought about the $3,480 in wonderful clothes she’d charged to her expense account. Later, she would put on the sexy black jumpsuit and the crystal beads and go to the casino. She’d watch the poker players, maybe feed the slots, but all for research, and she would be in bed by midnight. And when she woke up in her amazing room tomorrow, she’d be rested and ready for her class in how to land a rich husband with Lester Olsen.

  Oh, man, she could hardly wait.

  Too bad there was no one she could tell.

  Chapter 82

  KHEZIR MAZUL WOKE up in the darkened room and for a long moment did not know where he was. Then he remembered checking in to the Armstrong Hotel, a small, half-star place where they could be under the radar for now.

  He sat up, saw the tossed bedding, the video game paused on the TV, and the fat girl in bed beside him, still trussed like the pig she was.

  He reached over to the night table, grabbed the water glass that still held an inch of flat champagne, and tossed down the dregs. He looked at the clock. It was almost midnight. He fell back in the bed, covered himself with the blankets, and went to sleep.