by R. L. King
“What can we do, though?” Verity asked. “Do you even have any ideas? So far all you’ve said is that you don’t think they’re hiding it in one of the casinos. So where else could it be?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? I’m going to take another look at those notebooks tonight and see if I can find any more hints, but I’ll admit that for the moment I’m fresh out of ideas.”
Jason considered. “You know, one of the things they taught us at the police academy was that if you’re trying to find a suspect, you have to think like he does. Try to get inside his head and figure out what he might do based on what you know about him, or his past habits.”
“Yes, and—?” Stone leaned forward, attentive.
Jason shrugged. “I dunno. It might not be helpful at all. But if we can’t figure out where the Evil are, maybe we should go at this from the other side, kind of like we did in West Virginia. Look into what you can find out about the people who made the portal in the first place, and see if that gives you any ideas about where they might have decided to set it up. Even if there isn’t anything in the notebooks that you haven’t already found, you know their names. And if one of them is from Vegas, there’ll be records.”
Stone perked up. “Good idea. I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”
Verity rolled her eyes. “Great. So here we are in Las Vegas, the hedonist capital of the world, and where are we going? The library.”
“Hey, at least you look the part,” Jason said, grinning at her. He considered. “I wonder if libraries around here are open all night, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
As it turned out, the libraries in Las Vegas were not open all night, so Jason and Verity decided to go to bed early so they could visit the next day. They left Stone in the front part of the suite, lounging on the sofa with the five notebooks spread out next to him. When Verity came out the next morning she found him still there, asleep, with one open and still clutched in his hand.
“Hey,” she said, shaking him. “You find anything in those?”
He blinked. “What? Oh—no. Nothing more than the names of the researchers, but I already knew those. Oh, and which one is actually from the Las Vegas area. Arthur Baumgartner.”
Jason came out, running a hand through his hair. “Not much to go on.”
“No, but what else have we got?”
“Are you coming with us to the library?” Verity asked Stone.
He shook his head. “I want to keep studying these. I’m quite motivated to work out a way to shut down that portal without having to go inside, if possible.” He indicated the silver dollars on the table. “So, who do you want to be today?”
When they returned a couple of hours later, Stone was still working his way through the notebooks. He looked up when they came in, obviously relieved at the interruption. “Find anything?” he asked.
“Not really,” Jason said, discouraged. “Just one article talking about his disappearance. He and his girlfriend both vanished on the same day that the people in West Virginia did. They found their car at some place called the Lonely Palms Motel, but no other evidence. We checked out the motel—it’s a parking lot now, so no luck there.”
“Hmm,” Stone said, pushing the notebook aside. “Nothing else?”
Jason consulted his notes and the photocopy they’d made. “The two of them came out here from Chicago. Baumgartner grew up in Vegas. His dad was an Air Force colonel, out at Nellis. Worked on the nuclear program. He got transferred when Arthur was fifteen.” He shrugged. “Unless you think they’re hiding the portal at Nellis—which seems like it’d be harder than hiding it in a casino—then that’s probably no help. And even if they are, it’d be impossible for us to get in there to check.” He waved toward the notebooks. “You get anything?”
Stone shook his head. “Not a bloody thing. I’m learning more about portals, but for all the good it’s doing I might as well be studying molecular basket-weaving. So far there’s nothing in here that indicates there’s any other way to destroy the portal than the way we did it before.” He sighed. “I’m beginning to think there isn’t one. And as for where it might be located—” he spread his hands in a gesture of futility. “Absolutely no bloody clue. I’ve been researching a couple of ley lines that run through Las Vegas and out into the desert, but portals don’t require ley lines to function. So that’s probably a dead end.”
“Well, keep looking, Al,” Jason said, not wanting to get Stone into magical lecture mode again by asking what the hell a ley line was. He tossed the silver dollar on the table and returned to his true form. “If you don’t come up with something, maybe Harrison will.”
As the days passed, and they found no other useful information or any clues about where the Evil portal might reside, all three of them grew discouraged. Stone barely left the suite, spending all his time poring over the nearly illegible formulas in the notebooks and trying to improve on them. He’d requested a whiteboard, which he’d set up in the front room and covered with scribblings.
Jason and Verity split their time between doing touristy things, prowling the library looking for anything they might have missed, and driving around Vegas and its outskirts looking for potential portal sites. Jason spent a lot of time working out in the suite’s private weight room while Verity did her best to keep up on her studies. They even attended a couple of shows at other casinos. But after a week, all three of them began to wonder what they were still doing there.
Harrison had not contacted them during the week except to send them a few brief messages through Nakamura that his sources were hunting, but had not yet turned up anything either.
“Where is he?” Jason asked Nakamura one day when he’d come up to deliver their dry cleaning. “I’m really starting to feel like we’re stuck here with no idea if he’s even doing anything to help.”
“He’s doing what he can,” Nakamura assured him. “Mr. Harrison has many different projects that keep him occupied—he apologizes for not seeing you, but he assures you that he’s got resources on the matter and he’ll inform you if they find anything of use.”
“Yeah, right,” Jason muttered after he left. “Al, if you weren’t so convinced he wasn’t Evil, I’d swear he’s just doing a damn good job of stalling us and keeping us out of the way so his buddies can do their thing.”
Stone shrugged. “I don’t think he’s Evil. And as for stalling us: unless something’s going on that we don’t know about, the Evil are in the same boat as we are. Even if the portal is open, they’re as much at the mercy of the fact that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing as we are. Unless they’ve found someone capable of helping them stabilize it, they’ll have to content themselves with getting their current crop of new recruits through and assigning them to hosts. When the portal closes again, they’ll have to wait and try again next time.”
One day, while he and Verity were at the library (using yet again another disguise—they changed the illusion periodically so the librarians wouldn’t notice they were spending a lot of time there), on a whim, Jason decided to search for information about Harrison.
He was surprised to discover that there wasn’t any.
“None?” Verity asked, incredulous, when he pointed this out to her.
“Not a bit. It’s like the guy doesn’t exist. Nothing in the papers, nothing in the local tourist magazines—I even looked up the official info on the Obsidian. There isn’t much, since apparently it’s privately held, but his name doesn’t appear anywhere in connection with it.”
“Maybe that’s not his real name,” Verity pointed out. “or maybe he’s not connected with it. Maybe he’s just friends with one of the owners or something, and they let him stay there.”
“Dunno,” he said. “It’s pretty weird, though. I wonder if he even really looks like what he did when we saw him.” He pulled his silver dollar from his pocket. “If he can make these, you bet your ass he’s got one of his own.”
“Neve
r thought about that,” she admitted. She sighed. “Whoever he is, though, I wish he’d come up with something. Or we would. If we end up having to go back to California without ending this, it’s gonna really suck.”
The next night, the two of them convinced Stone to leave his studies long enough to accompany them to another show. “I’d rather not,” he said. “Not really feeling up to pretending to be American all night.”
“We’ll just stay here,” Jason urged. “We’ll go see Tarkasian’s magic show again. Now that you know what to expect, you can concentrate on watching closer to see if he’s really doing magic. Come on, Al. You’re gonna turn into a crazy old hermit if you don’t get out and do something every once in a while. We’ll go to the early show, and then you can come back up here and stick your nose back in the books again after.”
“Fine,” he conceded with a sigh, tossing aside the notebook he was studying.
When they got downstairs half an hour before the show was set to start, it quickly became clear that something wasn’t as it should be. A small cluster of people milled around outside the showroom, talking to an Obsidian employee in a black jacket. The doors were closed. “Wonder what’s up,” Verity said.
Stone stepped forward. “Something wrong?” he asked the employee. “Is the show sold out already?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the man said in his pleasant, apologetic professional tones. “I’m afraid this evening’s 6:00 show is cancelled. Mr. Tarkasian is a bit under the weather. You might try checking back later this evening—he might be feeling well enough to do the 9:00 show.”
Jason and Verity looked at each other. “Eh, that’s okay,” Jason said to Stone, disappointed. “Guess we can go see something else. We—”
The door opened and two people came out. One was another black-jacketed Obsidian employee, the other dressed in a polo shirt and jeans. They swept by without acknowledging the small crowd, muttering to each other in low tones. Jason got a glimpse inside as the door swung back shut, and saw numerous people running around in what appeared to be a state of agitation. He turned back, gathering up Stone and Verity with a look, and the three of them stepped out of the way into an alcove.
“What’s going on?” Verity asked.
“Something’s up,” Jason said. “Something’s going on in there. You don’t have that many people acting that freaked out if the headliner’s got food poisoning or a hangover.”
“What, then?” Verity’s eyes widened. “You don’t think he’s—you know—” she dropped her voice to a whisper “—dead or something, do you?”
“Let’s find out,” Stone said. He went over to a nearby bank of phones.
“Who are you calling?”
“Nakamura. He seems to be on top of things around here.” Stone punched the number into the house phone, waited a moment, and then had a short conversation that Jason and Verity couldn’t hear. He frowned, his expression growing perplexed.
“What is it?” Jason demanded when he hung up.
“Tarkasian’s gone missing.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“Missing?” Verity glanced at the dispersing crowd and then back at Stone. “What do you mean, missing?”
“His assistant’s missing too. Tarkasian called in sick earlier today. Someone stopped by their place to pick up some items and he and Tammy were both gone. Nobody has any idea where they are. Stay here a minute—Nakamura’s on his way down anyway.”
“Yikes,” Verity said, swallowing hard. “I was kidding about the ‘maybe he’s dead’ thing. I hope the Evil didn’t get hold of him or something.”
Two minutes later Nakamura showed up, heading straight toward the showroom doors. Stone, Jason, and Verity fell into step with him.
“What are you going to do?” Stone asked him. As he hoped, his question distracted Nakamura enough that the man didn’t object when the three of them followed him through the door that the black-jacketed employee held open for him.
Inside, the various employees associated with the show still circulated around, talking in small groups and obviously upset. When they spotted Nakamura, they came over to him. “Any word, sir?” asked a woman. “It’s not like them at all to just disappear. Have you heard anything?”
He shook his head. “No, nothing. I checked with Personnel—they called all their emergency numbers, but nobody’s gotten back to them. Even checked the hospitals to make sure something didn’t go wrong. Tarkasian’s car was missing too.”
A balding middle-aged man in a wilted shirt who had the manner of someone in charge of something hurried toward them. “What are we gonna do?” he demanded. “I’ve got a sold-out house for tonight. We can’t exactly stretch out the warm-up act for two more hours.”
“If we don’t find them soon we’ll have to cancel the show for tonight,” Nakamura said. “These things happen—we’ll deal with it.”
Yet another woman, this one about thirty and nervous-looking, came over, but she addressed the man in the wilted shirt, not Nakamura. “Mr. Cravetti—I’m sorry to ask you this now, but I need to leave.”
“Leave?” He glared at her. “Lucy, can’t you see we’ve got a situation here? Nobody leaves until we figure out what the hell’s going on.”
The woman looked even more nervous, but she visibly got herself under control. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cravetti. But my husband just called, and our son hasn’t come back from his field trip. The bus was due back at the school an hour ago, but it hasn’t shown up.”
Before Cravetti could answer, the doors opened again and Trevor Harrison strode in. Everyone got out of his way as he headed straight for the group containing Nakamura. “I understand Mr. Tarkasian is not here,” he said.
Nakamura nodded. “I was just about to call you, sir. It’s not like him to disappear like this.”
Lucy, meanwhile, was working herself into an agitated state. “Mr. Cravetti, please. I’m leaving. You can fire me if you have to, but my son is more important.”
Harrison’s intense focus settled on Lucy. “Your son?”
Lucy began to resemble a deer pinned in headlights, but still her fear for her child won out. She nodded. “Y-yes, sir. My son Max was one of the contest winners for that children’s art contest for casino employees. They were taking a field trip to an art museum today. The bus was supposed to be back at the drop-off point at five o’clock, but it’s almost six, and it hasn’t shown up yet.”
Harrison’s gaze flicked to Nakamura, then Cravetti, then back to Lucy. “Go,” he told her.
“Thank you, sir!” Her relief was evident. She didn’t wait for him to change his mind, but took off at a near-run down the aisle toward the door to backstage.
Cravetti sighed loudly. “Can we please get back to figuring out what the hell happened to Tarkasian? Otherwise we’re gonna have to cancel tomorrow’s show, too.”
“We’ve sent someone over to check on them again,” Nakamura told Harrison. “I’m expecting to hear back soon.” As if on cue, somebody came hurrying over to him with a phone. He took it and stepped aside. After a moment he came back. “That was Breen. No sign of either of them. No sign of foul play or anything like that, either. They’re just—gone.”
“We should call the cops,” Cravetti said. He pulled a large handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his ample, sweating forehead. “Maybe somebody’s kidnapped ’em.”
“What would anyone gain by that, Mr. Cravetti?” Harrison asked.
Cravetti seemed to finally realize who he was ranting at. “Uh—yeah, good point, sir.”
Nakamura and Cravetti both took off back toward the stage, leaving Harrison alone with Stone, Jason, and Verity. He raised an eyebrow at them. “I would not have expected to see you three here.”
“We were gonna see the show,” Jason said. “We heard people getting upset, so we stuck around to see what was up.”
Stone had his thousand-yard stare going again. “Mr. Harrison,” he said slowly. “Would you mind answering a question for me?”
“Is Mr. Tarkasian more than a stage magician?”
For a moment, Harrison didn’t respond. Then he inclined his head. “Yes.”
Stone took a deep breath, but didn’t reply further.
“Do you think this is somehow relevant to his disappearance?”
“No idea,” Stone said. “I don’t know the man, beyond the brief introduction we had to him and his assistant the other day. It’s just another data point.”
Harrison nodded. “If there’s nothing else, then, I must go. We need to find out what’s become of him.”
“The cops’ll be useless if they call ’em,” Jason said. “They’ve got to be mostly Evil. If they’re behind his disappearance, they’ll just bury the whole thing in red tape while assuring you that they’re doing ‘everything they can’ to help. You know that, right?”
Harrison nodded. “My methods don’t involve the police, Mr. Thayer. If you’ll excuse me—” And before they could say anything else, he was gone, back the way he had come.
Stone, Jason, and Verity were left standing there alone. Most of the other theater employees had worked their way backstage, and nobody paid the three outsiders any attention now that the big boss was gone. “What now?” Verity asked.
Stone shrugged. “Well, it’s not really our purview to try to find Tarkasian. I’m sure Harrison’s people will be much more efficient at that than we are, even if the police are useless, or worse.”
Nakamura came back over. “I hope you don’t mind—I need to keep working on figuring this out. If you need anything—”