by Tim Weaver
At the junction for Charleston – a straight six-lane boulevard bisecting the entire length of Las Vegas – we headed west until the city began to fizzle out entirely, the looming spectre of the Spring Mountains ahead of us, shadows forming in its tan-coloured folds. Soto indicated, pulling his Ford Expedition into a diner on his right.
Inside, we found a booth at the back and he ordered breakfast and I just asked for some coffee. He hadn’t said much at the Bellagio; just that, after my call, he’d been on to the internet and done a little digging on me, and that – when he’d done a sweep through the casino floor the previous night – he thought he’d seen me in the bar.
‘I figured you’d probably fly out,’ he said.
‘You don’t even know me.’
‘I know enough.’
‘What do you know?’
He shrugged. ‘I know that you’re the type.’
‘Type?’
‘The type that doesn’t let things go.’
We were both quiet for a moment, the waitress placing cups down in front of us and pouring our coffee. After she was gone, I said, ‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘You want to find the girls’ graves.’
‘I’m not going to find them in a diner.’
He looked out of the window, off towards the Spring Mountains. ‘I’m sure I don’t need to give you my history. I’m sure you already know it. I was a cop for a long time but it started to get to me. I couldn’t let things go. Most cops can handle finding a victim on the side of the road with their head smashed to paste. You’re not unfeeling about it, but I guess you become capable of detaching yourself. That’s the theory, anyway.’ He turned back to me, acceptance in his face. ‘But it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t switch it off. So I took the job at the Bellagio, and it had been fine. It paid good money. Everything had been swell. And then Cornell turned up with his high-roller friends and it all went to hell.’
‘How?’
‘He asked me to get him some footage from the hotel. One of his group had a laptop stolen from his room.’ He eyed me, as if trying to see if that meant anything. I kept my face even, unmoving: he was talking about Schiltz. ‘I was resistant to it, but I knew it was going to be hard to turn him down. He brought in a shitload of green for the casino, plus he was …’ He shook his head, staring off into space. I knew what kind of word he was trying to find: something to describe Cornell, the way he’d carried himself, the threat he’d given off. ‘So I did it. But my problem came back to haunt me: I couldn’t let it go.’
‘So, what, you went after him?’
‘No, not exactly.’ He paused, fingers around his coffee cup, turning it in circles. ‘Things didn’t add up. The guy whose laptop went missing never reported it. Can you tell me why you wouldn’t report that? Then there’s the woman who stole it, a prostitute who served some time up in Cali. She’s vanished. No trace of her anywhere. Then there’s the guy she was working with, her boyfriend, her partner-in-crime, whatever the hell he was. We know a bit more about him cos he’s got plenty of ink on his rap sheet. He’s found in a parking lot off East Flamingo. Stabbed in the throat. Any of that sound right to you?’
‘Could you link any of it to Cornell?’
‘Me?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t have that power. I’m running a casino security team now, not a homicide department. I don’t have access to that kind of information.’
‘What about the friends you had at Las Vegas Metro?’
A humourless smile. ‘What friends?’
‘You burned all your bridges?’
‘No. It wasn’t that. I thought I had a lot of good friends left there. Picking up the phone to them was the first thing I did. But I got nowhere. Zip. People I trusted never got back to me, not even to tell me they hadn’t managed to find anything out. And the next time that bunch of high rollers came to town, I looked around the room and saw Cornell watching me, this insidious expression on his face, and I realized he knew exactly what I was doing. And not because he could read it in me – because someone had told him.’
He was paying off the cops.
Just like he was doing at home.
‘So I stopped looking for the prostitute and stopped asking questions about the laptop going missing. Because, ultimately, I didn’t want to end up out there.’
He nodded in the direction of the desert. Except, as he turned back to me, something about his expression stuck. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe what he was saying. I did. But it felt like his conviction had waned at the last; that, when he told me he’d taken a step back, that wasn’t quite true.
‘So you don’t know where the girls are buried?’
He looked up, as if deciding whether to commit himself or not. ‘I followed Cornell every day for a month. He used to come into the hotel and sit out by the pool, 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. The only time he ever deviated from the routine was when he went to the airport down in Henderson. That’s where a lot of his high rollers came in. Henderson’s mostly corporate aviation.’
Soto’s eggs Benedict arrived.
He waited for the waitress to leave us.
‘He’d take the same route in and out of the city every single day,’ he continued, gesturing to Charleston with his fork. ‘This route. Charleston. When he got out into the desert I stopped tailing him, because when you get into the flats you don’t have a lot of places to hide. It would have been easy for him to see me.’ He paused, knife and fork hovering above his plate, steam curling up past his face. ‘Except on a Wednesday, when he’d stop at a drugstore about a mile back.’
Soto started eating, a frown on his face, still unsure as to what role the drugstore played in his routine. But, as I looked out into the desert, a thought formed in my head.
Kalb was an old man.
What if the drugs had been for him?
‘One day,’ Soto said, his voice bringing me back, ‘I got a cab here and told the driver to wait. Then, when Cornell came past, we followed him out into the desert.’ He studied me, food in his mouth, and I knew this was the moment we’d been working towards. ‘He was using Charleston to get to one of the old mining roads, out in the foothills of the mountains. He was going somewhere elevated.’
And then I remembered what it was that Cornell had said to me at Miln Cross, what it was I was trying to pull out of the dark at breakfast: I drove them up into the hills.
I drove them up into the hills.
Then I cut them both into pieces and buried them in the desert.
Up into the hills.
‘What road is it he turned off on?’
‘It hasn’t got a name, but it’s where Charleston straightens out. There’s a one-, two-mile stretch of road where it’s just up and down. There’s a green gate. That’s all I saw.’
We both looked out of the window.
‘That’s where Firmament is,’ I said quietly.
68
Under a vast blue sky, I pulled in next to the green gate fifteen minutes later. Charleston, this far out of the city, was empty. No cars. No sound. The desert was completely silent.
I got out of the Challenger, went to the gate and slid the bolt across, then pushed it all the way open. The track beyond it snaked up into the folds of the mountains, curving around to the left and out of sight. In the middle of the day, the sun beating down out of the markless sky, everything seemed a different shade of orange; some of it a beautiful hue, like the colour of a sunset; some of it, brown, burnt, scorched by the endless heat.
Ascending out of the desert floor, with Las Vegas hidden on the other side of the mountain, the features of the valley soon became indistinguishable, just a series of dust-coloured peaks. After about a mile, the road kinked left, into a kind of enclosed wave of red rock, like a tunnel with no roof. Singed cottonwood began appearing halfway along, looming overhead, and then I emerged into a flat, circular space, surrounded by trees and loose rubble. Across from me, sitting like it was wedged between two rocks, was a gate.
; There was no view of either side of the desert floor from where I was, but when I got out of the car and walked over to the gate, about eight feet high and padlocked, I saw the road dropped down – tracing the folds on the opposite side of the mountain – until it disappeared out of sight. Another wave of rock, like a mirror image of the one I’d just been through, hid the full view of the valley, but I could see glimpses of Las Vegas and assumed, at some point further down, the road would give you a view of the entire city.
I looked around.
It was lonely and isolated, and – but for the gentle sound of birdsong – absolutely silent. It was colder too; maybe four or five degrees cooler than the desert floor. I grabbed a jacket from the car, locked up and then headed back to the gate. The padlock looked pretty new. The gate was older, but still tough enough to keep out any unwanted visitors.
I didn’t have any picks.
So there was really only one way in.
I hauled myself up the front face of the gate, using its mesh for footholds. It shook against my weight, rocking slightly in its bed, but it took about ten seconds to get over.
Once I landed on the other side, I followed the old mining road around to the right and down through the second wave of rock. Five minutes later, I emerged on to the other side, and Las Vegas appeared, a couple of miles away, and three thousand feet below.
The view was breathtaking.
Ahead of me were the edges of a sandy building.
It was nestled in a flat area, surrounded by a natural ring of red rock – almost like a wall – and a scattering of cottonwood. If I’d approached it from any other direction, I’d have missed it. As I got closer, I could see more: it was a big, single-storey property with a slanted coral-coloured roof. Two windows on the near side, then, as I got even closer, a deck out front. The deck was made from wood, supported on a pair of stilts and looking out over the sprawling city. An ornate, handcrafted rail traced its entire circumference.
The closer I got, the more something started to stir in me. A recognition. A sense that I’d seen this place somewhere before. The front of it came into view: more windows and a front porch, hemmed in behind a replica of the deck’s railing. I walked on, past the front porch to where the road continued its trail down the side of the mountain, and on the other side of the house was some kind of adjacent building. Plain, white, no windows, no doors, its access point from inside the main house. It looked like it was sitting about five or six feet further down the slope. I returned to the house and moved up on to the porch.
Then I reached down and tried the door.
It bumped away from its frame.
Immediately inside was a long, thin room, all done out in dark wood and divided into two by a six-foot-wide brick fireplace, running from floor to ceiling. In its centre was a bed of ash. I inched further in. Off to the left were steps down to what I assumed would be the adjacent building. At the bottom of the steps was a closed door. Ahead of me, the room ran all the way through to the deck, sofas and a La-Z-Boy on the other side of the fireplace, as well as shelves full of books and DVDs. There was a television too, mounted on to the wall. Off to my right, a hallway fed off, five doors visible from where I stood.
The place had the feel of an old hunting lodge, but it was more modern and better furnished. The floors were beautiful – polished oak, expensive rugs laid in patches across it – and the house had all the mod cons: a Blu-ray player, a Bose sound system, and while there was no cable this far out of the city, it was well served by a satellite decoder.
Then, a noise. Like a buzz.
It had come from the hallway.
I edged across the living room. The first door led into a big kitchen that, like the living room, connected with the deck. Three ensuite bedrooms. One separate bathroom. One of the bedrooms was empty. Not even carpeted. The other two were decorated. One was full of junk: empty picture frames, tiny statuettes, candles, china, loose change, a lifetime of worthless junk.
On the wall, above the bed, was a photograph.
No frame, just fixed there with a pin.
It was Miln Cross.
I backed out and looked across the hallway to the other decorated room. It was minimalist: a bed, a wardrobe, a bedside table. Clean, no clutter. A different room. A different person. My mind reeled back to what Soto had said in the diner: he’d seen Cornell pick up a prescription from the drugstore, same time every week. I’d wondered if it had been for Kalb. But if I was right, Cornell wasn’t just picking it up.
He was bringing it home.
They’d been living together.
I headed back along the hallway, into the living room, my eyes already fixed on the opposite side of the house, on the steps. Then I heard the buzz again, from behind me.
I turned.
Something caught my eye.
Where the wall met the ceiling, close to the fireplace, there was a security camera. It was focused right on me, a red light winking above its lens. I kept my eyes fixed on it and moved towards the centre of the room. It moved with me. When I stopped, it stopped.
I looked back at the steps. To the closed door at the bottom.
It’s a panic room.
And someone’s inside.
Moving more quickly, I took the steps two at a time, dropping about six feet into the earth. The sun – coming into the living room in bright boxes of light – disappeared and the house darkened. There were no windows here, no sun in this part of the house.
There was no handle on this side of the door.
No way of getting in.
But when I went to touch it, the metal cold against my hands, I heard a clunk and the door slowly eased backwards. Whoever was on the other side had opened it up. I felt my heartbeat quicken, my muscles tense, knowing that none of this made any sense.
Why would you open a panic room?
To start with, as the door got to the halfway point, all I could see was darkness. But as my eyes adjusted, I could make out another flight of stairs, shorter this time, down into an all-white room. There was a table with handcuff arches fixed to it, the sort you normally got in a police interview room. Two chairs, one on either side. A second door, right in the corner. And everywhere, on every wall of the room, were pictures.
I edged down the steps.
In the subdued light, it was hard to make out the details of the photos, so I reached into my pocket and took out my phone. Slowly, I moved it across the wall of faces.
Except they were all of the same face.
Daniel Kalb.
This is his life.
These were memories of him the rest of the world were never meant to see. There were hundreds of photos, taken in different places, stuck to the wall in chronological order, like an album. I saw him in Miln Cross before it was washed away; in the fields of south Devon, working on a farm; his feet in the sand with Start Point lighthouse a mark in the distance; him, looking pensive, by a window, the London skyline visible; happier as he stood by the water in Santa Monica, the pier framed behind him; a shot of him in Vegas, outside the Sands before it was demolished; more and more of him in Vegas, on the Strip, at a golf course, on the edges of the city with the mountains in the background. They went on and on, his hair getting greyer, his body losing its shape, his face sliding towards his throat. I noticed, once he got to the States, the severity of his scar had reduced, the pinkness disappearing. He’d had work done on it – so much so that, by the end of his life, as his skin creased and liver spots appeared, it was hard to see at all.
The last photograph, on the other side of the room, right next to the second door, was different: it was the only one, of the hundreds pinned up, where he wasn’t alone.
It was taken out on the deck.
There were three people in it.
Kalb was in the centre, an old man in his nineties, eyes milky, leaning slightly to his right, his walking stick bearing all the weight. On one side of him was Cornell. He was dressed in a black suit, black tie, his hair oiled down an
d perfectly parted at one side. His face was a total blank – just an emotionless stretch of skin, eyes like a fallow void.
Then there was someone else.
I looked from face to face, eyes falling back on Cornell. I understood why it felt like I knew him now, like I’d seen him before. It hadn’t been in Vegas, five years ago.
It was in the face of his grandfather.
And the face of his father.
Next to me, I pushed the second door open and it swung into a small, dark space, lit by a single lamp. In the centre of the room was a trapdoor, a padlock securing it in place.
Against the far wall, a man was sitting on a chair, looking at me, a half-smile like his son’s marked in his face. Both hands were wrapped around the shotgun on his lap.
‘Welcome to Vegas,’ said Carter Graham.
69
Carter Graham looked across the room at me and then tilted his head slightly. Physically, he and his son were different enough for me not to have ever made the connection. Graham was big and broad, over six feet, knots of muscle in his upper body, even as the end of his sixties approached. Cornell was smaller – five-eight, five-nine – lean, skinny, much more like his grandfather. The skill that Graham had that Cornell had never been able to harness was the ability to mask who he really was. Looking at Cornell was like gazing into the chaos: you could see everything he was once you studied him hard enough.
The only time I’d seen that chaos in Graham was now.
As my eyes got used to the change of light, I quickly scanned the room. Against the wall immediately to my left were two small black-and-white monitors, their screens showing the views across the living room to the panic-room steps, and out from the front of the house, along the trail that led back to the gate. On top of that was an empty cup and a half-eaten tin of papaya in syrup, a fork standing in it. The trapdoor in the centre of the room looked like it was made from steel: heavy, reinforced, studded with screws all the way around its edge.