As she watched, the man squeezed off several more rounds, his face twisted in concentration.
Chase observed with gritted teeth, wanting to spring to her feet and do… something.
But to do so would mean certain death; she was helpless.
A grunt came from the other side of the table and based on the change in the security guard’s face, Chase knew that at least one of the assailants had been struck. The guard started to rise to his feet, dragging his wounded leg behind him, when something strange happened.
The pressure in the room changed.
It took Chase a few moments to realize what was happening, and then she started to yell.
“Behind you!” she screamed. “Behind you! Look out!”
Chapter 43
“We should get some sleep,” Stitts said, rubbing his eyes. He checked his watch. It was nearly four in the morning.
Greg leaned out from behind his monitor.
“You might want to take a look at this first,” he said.
Stitts yawned and made his way over.
“What is it?”
“Another video… the one you asked for, tracking the food service cart.”
“Alright,” Stitts said. “Let’s watch it then pack it in for the night… or morning.”
Greg nodded and fired up the video. It was actually a composite of several videos from different cameras around the casino all stitched together rather seamlessly.
Stitts made a mental note for Chase to give whoever Greg’s contact was a significant bonus. The man got shit done.
The first video was taken from a loading dock and showed the waiter, Peter Doherty, standing on the edge, smoking a cigarette. Greg sped up the tape and they watched the man pace for nearly fifteen minutes before a box truck appeared. Peter guided the truck in, then the rear door was rolled up. There was someone in the back of the truck, but based on the shadow cast by the interior, Stitts couldn’t make out who. Together, Peter and the man struggled to pull a large black bag out and drag it onto the loading dock. It was heavy, and Peter’s face strained with the effort. The two men exchanged words, then the truck pulled away again.
When the truck was out of sight, Peter set about the difficult task of stuffing the bag beneath the food service cart.
“So there was something hidden under there,” Greg said absently.
On screen, Peter laid the white tablecloth over the top of the cart, then smoothed the sides. Confident that there were no unsightly bulges, he nodded seemingly to himself, and then pushed the cart back inside. The video then switched to a much brighter view of the inside of the kitchen. After saying something to several waiters, Peter grabbed a plate with the burger and fries and put it on the cart. After covering the food with a silver cloche, he moved forward. The video then switched to him getting into the elevator, then exiting on the seventh floor.
They’d already seen the rest.
“What the hell is in the bag?” Greg muttered.
Stitts chewed the inside of his lip.
“Go back to the video outside the loading dock,” he instructed.
Something wasn’t adding up.
Greg played the video at half speed and when the bag flopped partway onto the loading dock, Peter grabbed what looked like a handle.
“There,” Stitts said, pointing at the handle. “Do you think you can zoom in on that just a little?”
Greg did, and Stitts inhaled sharply.
“What in the hell?”
There wasn’t one handle on the bag, but eight; four on either side, evenly spaced.
“You ever seen handles like that on a bag before?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Greg answered, swallowing hard. “At the Village shooting — many of them.”
“Me too,” Stitts almost whispered. “It’s a goddamn body bag.”
Silence fell over the room for several seconds before Stitts piped up again.
“You know how I said that maybe there was a body under the cart?”
Greg turned to face him now, a serious expression on his face.
“Well, there was. Only it was a dead body.”
Greg’s eyebrows knitted again.
“But… why? And where did it go?” he sighed. “What the fuck, man. I’m too tired for this. I don’t understand—”
“Can you go back again?” Stitts asked, ignoring Greg’s comments. “I want to see if we can figure out who’s in the back of the truck.”
Greg rewound the video and they watched it several times before Stitts shook his head.
“Impossible. It’s all just shadows. But—”
Stitts grabbed the mouse and jogged the video back and forth. Just when the men pulled the body bag onto the loading dock, a car must have entered the parking lot. Headlights lit up the back of the truck and even though they never touched the man’s face, they reflected off something leaning up against the interior wall.
“Oh, fuuuucccccck,” Stitts moaned.
Everything suddenly clicked into place.
His own words came back to him, the ones that he’d said to Sgt. Theodore in the hallway on the way to give his profile.
We’ve got dead bodies and all you have is broken glass.
There was also the second call, the one about the sound of breaking glass to Shane McDuff. The one that he’d assumed was from the bottles behind the bar smashing.
Only he was wrong.
Dead wrong.
His mind flashed to earlier in the evening, when he’d rapped his knuckles off the seventh-floor windows. They’d been perfect. Too perfect.
And now he knew why.
“What? What is it?” Greg asked.
Stitts ignored him again and walked over to the board. He tore down Ms. Hartman’s photo and moved Mike Hartman’s image in her place.
“What? You think a dead man did all this?” Greg asked.
“No, not a dead man,” Stitts replied, staring at Mike’s face. “But someone we were supposed to think was dead.”
Chapter 44
The security guard hesitated, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from given that Chase was mostly buried beneath Deb Koch’s corpse.
And this moment of indecision cost the man his life.
The window behind him exploded inward, sending a rush of air into the room. In the darkness, Chase picked out the outline of a person, only they appeared to be levitating outside the fourteenth-floor window. Before Chase could wrap her mind around how this was possible, her vision flashed with muzzle fire. The security guard went down and this time, he didn’t get back up.
“Mike! Mike, we need to get the fuck out of here!” the hovering figure shouted.
Chase’s body seized. She wanted nothing more than to stand and confront these assholes, put a bullet in their foreheads.
But getting herself killed would mean letting down Ms. Hartman and Stu Barnes. And Chase had let enough people down for one day, one week, a lifetime.
As slowly and carefully as possible, Chase teased Deb’s body on top of her until only one of her eyes remained visible.
“Forget the money!” the man shouted from the window. “We need to get the fuck out of here, man!”
“They owe me,” Mike spat back through clenched teeth. “These assholes owe me!”
As he shoved stacks of bills into a bag, Chase focused on his hand, his wrist. His watch.
A very specific watch. Not expensive by any means, but one that Chase recognized.
It was the watch that Mrs. Hartman had showed her. It was the watch that Mike Hartman never left the house without.
What the fuck?
“Come on!”
In addition to the fire alarm, the room was suddenly filled with a metallic ratcheting sound as the man in the window started to lower out of sight.
With a curse, Mike sprinted across the room toward the smashed window. He had been hit once, Chase saw, maybe even twice, judging by the dark stain on his shoulder.
Just before he leaped o
ut of the window, the man turned back and their eyes met.
It was a fleeting glance, one that lasted no more than a fraction of a second. But Chase still knew, without a doubt, who the murderer was.
I was almost killed by a dead man, Chase thought moments before she passed out. I was almost killed by Mike Hartman.
Chapter 45
Stitts threw the door to Shane McDuff’s office open so violently that it nearly closed again before Greg could follow him inside.
Shane was so startled that he nearly fell out of his chair.
“What—what are you—”
Stitts strode across the room and hovered over the cowering man.
“Surprised to see you here this late,” Stitts snapped. “What, can’t sleep? Something on your mind? On your conscience?”
“You can’t—you can’t—”
“Show me your fucking arms, Shane.”
When the man didn’t answer, Stitts grabbed his wrist and yanked up his sleeve.
Shane’s arm was adorned with dozens of tattoos, all of varying quality, mostly shitty.
Stitts backed away, a disgusted look on his face.
“You like to do your own tattoos, don’t you, Shane? And let me guess, your best work was a sparrow, am I right?”
“Yeah… so-so what. That’s not a crime.”
“No, no it’s not. But tattooing a corpse? That is. Isn’t it, Greg?”
The officer, who was standing in the doorway and effectively blocking the view of the cameras from the hall, nodded.
“Desecration of a human corpse is indeed a crime.”
“That’s right,” Stitts said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think… I think I need a lawyer.” Shane reached for the phone, but Stitts slammed his hand down on top of it.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about? Hmm? Well, let me ask you this, then: do you know how much one of the windows in this hotel weighs?”
“Wha-wha-what?”
“The windows, Shane. How much do they weigh?”
“I don’t—”
“A little? A lot? Oh, they’re pretty big; I bet they weigh a lot. I bet they weigh so much that it would take a while for your buddy Peter Doherty to replace them on the seventh floor. But fake windows, temporary windows… they could go up pretty quick, am I right? Like maybe just a few minutes, if you knew what you were doing? What do you think, Shane?”
Shane looked like he was either going to cry or crap his pants — maybe both.
“That’s why he had to come back the day after the shooting. Peter had to take his time to replace the fake windows he put up with the real ones before anyone noticed that they were different.”
“I don’t—I just—I—”
“Eleven people are dead, Shane! Eleven people were murdered up there!” Stitts shouted.
Tears streamed down Shane’s cheeks now and his face turned a deep scarlet.
“No one was supposed to die!” Shane yelled back. “No one was supposed to die!”
Stitts snarled.
“Oh, but they did, Shane, and that makes you an accomplice to murder. Hey Greg, we have the death penalty in Nevada, don’t we?”
“We do.”
Shane started to sob now.
“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt!” he exclaimed.
“Death penalty, Shane. You better start talking or I’ll petition for lethal injection.”
With tears spilling down his cheeks, Shane started to open up.
“They told me to tear up the complaint after Harry Hartman died, that if I didn’t do it, then they would fire me.”
“Who did, Shane? Who told you to tear up the complaint?”
“The casino… my boss… I dunno!”
“But Harry’s son… Mike… he knew about it, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Shane shouted back. “He said he had a copy and that he was going to sue the casino. Said I was going to be charged with tampering with evidence or some shit! He just… he said he was just going to rob the players, take their money. I didn’t think anyone would get hurt, let alone die…”
The phone on his desk rang and Shane jumped.
Stitts’s first instinct was to tell the man to leave it, but for some reason, he changed his mind.
“Pick it up,” he ordered. With a trembling hand, Shane grabbed the receiver and brought to his ear.
“Shane McDuff,” he blubbered.
The man had been pale ever since Stitts had entered the room, but now he went completely white.
“No,” Shane moaned. The phone slipped from his hand and clattered on the desk.
“What is it?” Stitts demanded. When Shane didn’t answer, he grabbed the phone.
“Hello? Hello?”
The line was dead.
“Shane, who the fuck was that? Shane, you better—”
The man’s eyes suddenly lifted and locked on Stitts’s.
“There’s been another shooting,” he said in an airy whisper. “It happened again.”
Chapter 46
Chase opened her eyes and confusion washed over her. There was blood everywhere — on her face, her hands, her arms.
It took her several seconds to figure out where she was and when she did, her first instinct was to rise to her feet. But then she heard voices and froze again.
“Look what you did! This is you, Shane! This is all your fault!”
“Oh my god,” someone moaned, followed by a wail.
“You did this!”
This last voice was one she recognized; it belonged to someone she was very familiar with.
Chase grunted and slid Deb’s corpse off her. Then she somehow managed to convince her stiff and sore body to rise.
Even though one of her eyes was stuck together with blood, Chase still saw enough for her guts to flip.
The scene was like the seventh-floor massacre, only because she’d been part of this one, it seemed even more visceral.
All of the poker players were dead, their bodies strewn across the floor like discarded waste. There were bundles of cash everywhere, and everything — the walls, the floor, the cards — was sprayed with blood.
Her chest hitched and she wiped at her eyes.
In the doorway stood Jeremy Stitts, his gun leveled at her chest. There was a man on his knees in front of him, but his face was buried in his hands and Chase couldn’t tell who it was. Behind Stitts were several police officers that struggled to get into the room.
When their eyes met, Stitts’s face seemed to collapse inward.
“Chase? Chase — what the fuck?”
Stitts lowered his gun and then dropped it completely and ran to her.
“Are you okay?” He asked, gripping her sides gently and feeling her entire body.
Chase didn’t—couldn’t—answer right away. She’d been shot once before, right through the hip by Agent Martinez, and that had hurt like hell. But she recalled that after the initial pain, the wound had gone numb as adrenaline flooded her system. At present, she didn’t feel like she’d been shot, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been.
“Jesus Christ, Chase, what are you doing here?” Stitts asked as he continued to search her body.
“I… I think I’m okay,” she said quietly. A quick, internal rundown of her body revealed that aside from a small throbbing pain on her hairline, she couldn’t identify any other injuries. Chase brought a hand up and delicately touched her forehead. It wasn’t a bullet hole, thank God, but a gash. She must have struck her head on the table on the way down. It felt deep, and it was undoubtedly the reason for the blood in her eye, but she didn’t think it was serious.
Now, after confirming that she was okay, she suddenly collapsed into Stitts’s arms.
“Oh god,” she moaned as he held her.
Drawing Dead (A Chase Adams FBI Thriller Book 3) Page 16