“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?”
TWENTY-FOUR
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.
TWENTY-FIVE
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 th
at 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.”
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