Void Moon (1999)

by Michael Connelly

  She had to assume the stairwells were being watched. It was the only way up without a key. So she ignored them and headed directly to the Euphrates Tower elevator alcove. She pushed the up button.

  Before an elevator arrived two couples walked into the alcove, the male half of each pushing the already lit call button. Cassie needed an elevator to herself. When one arrived she stepped back and let the others have it, then pushed the button again. This happened two more times until she started to think she would never get her own elevator. Finally, she decided to take her chances and got on an elevator with a woman carrying a plastic change cup. She waited until the other passenger chose her floor - luckily it was the sixth floor - and then punched the button for the nineteenth floor.

  While they rode up Cassie checked her watch. It was ten o'clock. As soon as her fellow passenger stepped off the elevator, Cassie pushed the buttons for the seventeenth and eighteenth floors as well. She then removed her hat and hooked it over the camera in the upper corner. She did it in such a way that the hat was held between her face and the camera until the camera was blocked. Her hope was that when the tampered camera was discovered and investigated it would be written off as a prank.

  Cassie slipped her lock picks out of her back pocket and put them in her mouth. She hooked one arm through both straps of the gym bag, then put one foot up on the railing that ran along the side wall of the elevator. She hoisted herself up with her back to the corner and put her other foot on the railing on the rear wall. Braced against the corner she went to work with the picks on the lock on the elevator's overhead door.

  The elevator stopped on seventeen and the doors opened. Cassie glanced down and out into the empty alcove and then went back to work on the lock. She was having trouble because of her uncomfortable posture and having to work on tumblers in vertical alignment. The door closed and the elevator made a quick jump to the next floor.

  Just as the doors slid open Cassie heard the click of the final tumbler and turned the lock. She pushed the door upward and open, then looked down as she pulled the gym bag off her arm. She saw a man standing in the elevator looking up at her. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt tucked into beltless pants. Cassie didn't know how much he had seen but she knew there was no valid explanation for what she was doing. His eyes moved from Cassie to the black hat hooked over the camera. The doors started closing behind him but he suddenly shot his arm out and hit the bumper with his hand. The doors opened again.

  "I think I'll catch the next one," he said.

  "Thank you," Cassie said, one of her picks still in her mouth.

  She didn't know what else to say. The man stepped out and the doors closed behind him. Cassie shoved the gym bag up through the hatch, which was about two feet square. She then reached her arms up through the opening and braced them on the top of the elevator roof. She pulled herself up and through.

  The elevator started moving upward again. Cassie quickly closed the hatch and heard its lock click into place. Dim light came down from the top of the elevator shaft where a single bulb hung from a roofing beam.

  Cassie stood up with the gym bag and maintained her balance while waiting for the elevator to stop at the nineteenth floor. When it did, she stepped off the elevator onto an iron crossbeam that separated the elevator shaft from the one next to it. After a few moments, the elevator she had ridden up in began descending, leaving her on a six-inch-wide piece of metal nineteen stories from the ground.

  The doors to the penthouse alcove were just across the chasm and up another six feet. She slowly moved along the ironwork until she reached the front wall of the shaft. There was latticework of steel cross struts creating a support cage for the elevator. She began climbing these, finding the going slippery and treacherous because the struts were caked with dust.

  When she had reached a point where she was level with the penthouse doors, she gripped one of the struts with one hand and reached across the open chasm to the doors. Once she had a grip on the inside lip of one of the doors, she reached a foot across to the five-inch ledge below the doors. She swung her body across to the ledge. In doing so the gym bag slipped down her arm and was going to drop when she caught one of the straps in her hand. The bag, heavy with bricks of currency and her tools, banged sharply on the thin metal of the elevator doors. The sound echoed loudly down the shaft below her. Cassie froze. She thought the noise must have been just as loud in the alcove and the penthouse hallway.

  Karch looked up from Leo Renfro's date book. He had heard a loud banging from somewhere out in the hall. He stood up and pulled the Sig from its holster while his other hand went into his pocket for the silencer. Then he thought better of it. He holstered the weapon and his hand went under his jacket to his rear beltline. He pulled the . 25 out and went to the door.

  Through the peephole the hallway was empty. He debated whether to investigate the noise or to call Grimaldi. He decided it was better not to wait for someone to be dispatched. He stepped back and grabbed the card key off the entranceway table and opened the door.

  In the hallway Karch saw no one. He stood with the . 25 palmed in the same hand in which he held the card key. He paused and listened. He heard nothing but the buffered sounds of the elevators from the nearby alcove. He walked that way and stepped into the alcove. Again he stood still and listened.

  Cassie gripped the door with taut muscles, her ear pressed to the crack between the panels. She had thought she had heard a door open and close but then there was no other sound. After a minute she decided it was time to move. She released one hand's grip and removed a penlight from her back pocket. She flicked it on and put it in her mouth. She then directed the beam over the door's framework until she saw a spring-activated release lever on the upper left side. She inched her way over to that side of the door. Just as she reached up and put a hand on the lever she felt a strong rush of air from below. She hesitated and looked down, just as the elevator directly below her loomed up out of the darkness and came up to crush her against the door. In a split second she had to decide whether to pull the lever and try to push through the doors or to catch the elevator by stepping back onto its roof as it came up.

  The light over one of the elevators went on and there was a soft chiming sound. Karch quickly stepped backward out of the alcove. He looked both ways down the hall and saw the double-push doors leading to the housekeeping station. He quickly stepped over and pushed through the doors.

  He held one of the doors open an inch and looked back out into the hallway. He heard the elevator doors open and close. Then a man and woman stepped into the hallway and headed the opposite way from Karch's position. The man looked like he was in his fifties, the woman her twenties. Karch watched as the man reached behind the woman and stuck his hand up the short black dress she was wearing. She giggled and playfully slapped his hand away.

  "Wait till we get to your room, sugar," she said. "Then you can grab whatever you want."

  He watched until they went into a room down the hall. He then looked around the housekeeping station. On one end there were linen and bathroom supplies locked in a fenced closet. On the other side was a service elevator. Also in the small space was a room service table piled with dirty dishes. It smelled rancid and Karch thought it had been forgotten about all day.

  He stepped back into the hallway and went back toward 2001 , pausing at the entrance to the elevator alcove but again not hearing or seeing anything that raised his suspicion. He moved on to the door of 2001 and used the card key to go back in.

  After thirty seconds the elevator was called to another floor and dropped down the shaft. Cassie stepped off the roof onto the crossbeam and once again worked her way to the door. This time she secured the gym bag when she made the final move to the door ledge. She made it without a sound, then reached up and pulled the spring-release lever. She heard a metallic click and the two panels of the door separated a half inch. She worked her fingers into the crack and then pulled the door panels apart.

  She
stepped out into the elevator alcove, then turned around and slid the door panels closed until there was a click as they locked back into place.

  She quickly moved into the hallway and headed toward 2014 , unsure what she was going to do when she got there. But as she passed the door to 2001 she suddenly stopped as she realized something. Synchronicity. Karch had said the word when she had called and he thought it was someone named Vincent on the phone. She had immediately jumped to the conclusion that the Vincent he had referred to was Vincent Grimaldi, director of casino operations. The same Vincent Grimaldi that Hidalgo had referred to. The same Vincent Grimaldi who was chief of security six years earlier. But now who Cassie thought Karch was speaking to seemed less important than what he had actually said. Synchronicity. Cassie knew what it meant. It had been in the Las Vegas Sun's crossword puzzle at least a dozen times during the five years she religiously worked it. The aspect of seemingly separate events occurring in conjunction over time: synchronicity.

  She knew Karch's plan. From suite 2001 a man had fallen to his death almost seven years before. Tonight that man's lover - and their child - would do the same. Karch would take the money. All other things could be laid to blame on Cassie, the distraught mother who shot her co-workers and her parole agent, abducted her daughter and then returned to Las Vegas to end it all as her lover had.

  The plan was smart. She knew it would work. But knowing it wrested an advantage to Cassie's side of the board. She leaned forward, her head close to the door. She heard the faint sounds of cartoon mayhem coming from a television inside the suite.

  Cassie gently placed a hand against the door and whispered, "I'm coming, baby. I'm coming."

  43

  KARCH unwound the telephone wire from around the two doorknobs and looked in on the girl. She was lying on her stomach at the end of the bed, her hands propping up her head as she fought to stay awake and watch cartoons.

  "Everything okay in here, kid?"

  "Where's my daddy?"

  Karch looked at his watch.

  "Soon . . . real soon."

  He closed the door and wound the wire back around the knobs.

  "More like where's the goddamn food," he said to himself.

  He walked over to the phone and called Grimaldi's number. Again the call was answered immediately.

  "Anything?" Karch asked.

  "Not on this end."

  "Did you call in that room service order?"

  "As soon as we hung up."

  "Vincent, your four-star kitchen isn't worth a shit. I'm fucking starving up here."

  "It's busy down there. But I'll make another call."

  "All right. And let me know the minute somebody has her."

  "Will do."

  "Oh, and Vincent?"

  "What, Jack?"

  "You better close a few craps tables down there. You don't want anybody getting hit."

  "Jesus! Are you sure it has to be this way? Can't we just - "

  "Vincent! Vincent! You don't want questions, right?"

  "No, Jack."

  "Then there is no other way. Synchronicity, Vincent. Call the pit chief. Close the tables."

  He hung up and walked over to the window. He banged a fist on it, hoping to get a feel for the tension in the glass. He wondered if he shot the glass out first, to make it easier, if the Metro investigators would be able to tell that. Would they actually gather the glass and examine it? Probably not, he decided. Too much trouble, especially for what looked like an obvious murder-suicide.

  He decided the plan would be to shoot the glass out and then immediately drop the bodies. The girl first and then the mother. A classic murder-suicide: distraught mother tosses her daughter, then jumps herself.

  In the housekeeping station Cassie moved the room service table into a position directly below one of the panels of the drop ceiling. She then cleared the dirty dishes to one side of the table and climbed onto the other. The table was constructed with large wheels so that it would roll smoothly across the deep carpets in the penthouse suites. This made it unsteady as a platform. Cassie slowly stood up on it and reached to the ceiling. She pushed the panel up and to the side. She then gripped the tracks of the frame that held the panel and tested them against her weight. She was 110 pounds in her clothes, the gym bag another 20 or so. The tracks held secure. She tossed the gym bag up first, then grabbed the frame again and swung her legs up. She climbed into the utility crawl space between the false ceiling and the real one.

  The crawl space was no more than four feet top to bottom. It was crowded with electrical conduits, water lines and the fire sprinkler pipes. But what took up the most room was the network of air-handling ducts for the heating and air-conditioning system. Twin return and delivery ducts ran the length of the hallway and branched off in smaller tributary lines that went to vents in each suite on the floor. The main ducts were three feet square and large enough to crawl through easily. The tributary lines were smaller but Cassie knew from experience that the air-return ducts were large enough for her to move through, provided she pushed her equipment bags in front of her. She also knew that if she could make it through, Jodie could as well.

  Her plan had serious faults and difficulties. Noise would be a major factor. Any sound in the ventilation tunnels was magnified by the time it got to the room vents. She wasn't as much worried about her entry as she was her exit with Jodie. Keeping a five-and-a-half-year-old quiet in what was going to be a frightening situation would be difficult. She hoped the cartoons were still on the television and could be used as sound cover when they made their escape.

  Another problem that Cassie knew for sure was ahead would be the removal of the vent cover once she got to the room where Jodie was being held. The cover would be screwed on from inside the room. The difficulty would be in accessing the screws. Her plan was to use a small pry bar from the gym bag to bend the vent slats. She would then reach out with a screwdriver and remove the screws that held the vent in place. This, she knew, would be laborious and time consuming. If she dropped the screwdriver or even one of the screws the resulting noise could bring Karch right to her.

  Its success was predicated on her belief that Karch most likely had Jodie in the bedroom of the suite, while he was in the sitting room. But if she was wrong and Karch was keeping the girl close to him, then Cassie knew her chances of getting a shot at a rescue were infinitesimal.

  Despite all of this she pressed on. She carefully moved into the crawl space and slid the panel back into place. Once again she put her penlight into her mouth and directed it along the main air-handling ducts until she found the bolted seam of two conjoining segments. She crawled that way, careful to keep her weight at all times on the framework of the drop ceiling.

  Cassie started removing the bolts from the bracket that held the two segments of duct together. The work was difficult. Each of the eight bolts had been spot welded as an apparent security measure. It had been almost seven years since Cassie had been in this same crawl space - when she had set up the job Max then wouldn't let her do - but she still remembered and she knew the spot welds were new. It took all of her strength to break the weld on the first bolt and a half minute to remove it. The process instilled a feeling of panic in her. It was taking too long.

  Cassie had just started working on the last bolt when she heard the chime from the service elevator in the housekeeping alcove. She put her wrench down and quickly crawled back to the panel she had climbed up through. She lifted it a crack and looked down just as the elevator opened and a room service waiter pushed a table out onto the landing.

  As the elevator closed behind him the waiter slipped a leather check folder out of the inside pocket of his red uniform jacket. He opened it to double-check on his destination. Cassie was three feet above him and could easily read the notations on the check inside the folder.

  #2001 Leave in hallway. - V. Grimaldi Seeing the note was one more confirmation of Vincent Grimaldi's involvement. It also gave Cassie an idea for a new pla
n.

  The knock on the door startled Karch from his reverie at the window.

  "Room service," a voice called from the hallway.

  He turned and stared at the door and waited but there was no second knock or sound. He picked the . 25 up off the desk and cautiously approached the door. Before putting his eye to the peephole he put his ear to the jamb and listened. He heard nothing.

  He looked out through the convex view of the peephole. He saw a room service table sitting in the hallway. It was covered with a white tablecloth and was set for two. A small vase of cut flowers was placed at the center. He saw no one else in the hallway. He continued to watch and wait, just in case the room service waiter was waiting by the elevator alcove. Karch had no idea what Grimaldi would have instructed and if his instructions would have made the waiter curious.