When Ally answered, I held the phone against the glass so the camera faced out at the amazing view. "Guess where I am?" I said.
"Hmmm, lots of lights," Ally said. "Oh my gosh, you're here, Daddy? In Las Vegas?"
"Yup."
"Why didn't you tell me you were coming?"
"Case just popped up this morning."
"Where are you staying?"
I braced myself. "SPACE."
"Daddy! You know I wanna see that place, and Mom won't take me! When can I come? Say I can come!"
"I don't know, sweetie. Not sure a casino is the best place for a fourteen-year-old, but I'll talk it over with your mom."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
We chatted a few minutes more and said good-night.
I stood at the window and marveled at the north-facing view, Las Vegas spread before me like a bejeweled domain. If only I had known what I was standing on top of.
CHAPTER 3
SPACE
LAWYERS HAVE A BAD REP. Many times it’s an unfair stereotype. Sometimes it’s not. Case in point was my meeting the next morning, which featured a couple lawyer examples. Jacob Allen was general counsel for SPACE Corporation and we met in his office. It was the first room I’d encountered that wasn’t technofuturistic. Instead, Allen was obviously enamored with the traditions of law. Situated on the hotel tower’s third floor, the office was all dark wood and tufted leather and old books. Allen was a human version of a Bassett hound, sad-eyed and droopy in his vested suit, and seemed a pretty nice guy.
He didn't small talk, got right to the case details. "What do you know about EGMs?"
"Don't know the term," I said.
"Electronic gaming machines. Slots, poker?"
"Not a lot. At the gambling game, you guys win. And I'm a sore loser."
He smiled. "Suffice to say there's a reason why we have ten times as many machines as tables: They're profitable. Very. Today's EGMs are all electronic, really just computers. Instead of adjusting mechanical parts to tweak payout rates, we just change some computer settings."
I said, "While I have some idea of what you're talking about, pretend I don't. What's a payout rate?"
"By law in Nevada, a slot has to have an RTP of at least seventy-five percent. So over time—and it can be a long time—a machine has to 'return to players' at least seventy-five percent of what's put into it. Make sense?"
"Perfect."
"In reality, the only machines with rates that low are the ones in airports, convenience stores, McDonald's, and a few gimmick machines in casinos. It's a competitive area and the average RTP in this town is about ninety-five percent. But here's the problem. Over the past several weeks, a number of our high-stakes machines have been paying out anywhere from ninety-eight to ninety-nine. Considering the amount of money fed into a thousand-dollar-a-pull machine, you can understand that this is resulting in a significant loss of profit."
I nodded. "You want me to find out who's doing the tweaking."
"Exactly," he said. He pushed a small binder across his desk to me. "This will get you up to speed on the general process of managing these machines."
I picked up the binder, opened it, flipped through its pages of diagrams, procedures, personnel.
"So, does this sound like something you can do?" he said.
"It's computer data. It's what I do."
"Excellent. If you look at the people in that binder, you'll see a summary for a former employee named Christine Gamboa." I found the page and he continued. "Miss Gamboa was an executive host when she came here, meaning she took care of certain VIP clients, the kind who play blackjack at twenty-five thousand per hand, slots at a thousand a pull. She's brilliant, has a graduate degree from CalTech in some kind of computer science. Not quite a year ago, she asked to be transferred to the technology department. We jumped at it and in no time she was running the unit in charge of programming EGMs. Two weeks ago, she bolted for a competitor, Renaissance. No trouble here, no warning signs, and no notice, just didn't show up for work one morning."
"She get a better position there?" I said.
"No. She went back to hosting. Makes no sense."
"Interesting," I said. "I assume you have her devices on hand for me to examine."
"Of course."
On the other end of the lawyer personality spectrum was Brandy Palmer, the outside counsel leading this charge. She was the high-powered titular head of Palmer & Bradford, a smallish forty-lawyer litigation firm known for its aggressive posture and unwillingness to lose. About fifty, she was dressed and smelled expensive. A slim brunette with curves, she had probably been a knockout as a young adult, but years of being a bitch had taken its toll. So far today, she always looked like she'd just bitten into a rotten pickle and sounded like a bulldozer.
"We'll need the results by the end of the week," she said.
I stopped taking notes. "Ms. Palmer, that's unlikely in the extreme."
"Why’s that?"
"This is a complex investigation involving, what, a hundred or more machines, not to mention Gamboa's devices? I could get lucky and find a smoking gun right away, but it could also take weeks. Just the way it is."
"The local forensic guy I use is willing to do what it takes to get the results I need. When I need them." She cut eyes at Allen. "And at half your rate, Mr. Flatt."
"Then use him," I said. "It's just millions at stake, after all. Maybe Mr. Allen should hire himself a cut-rate attorney, too. I'm sure he can find one around Fremont Street at a fraction of your rate."
I swear I saw smoke coming from her ears. "How. Dare. You," she said.
After folding up my notebook and stowing my pen, I stood, looked at Allen, and said, "Thanks for the trip, but I'm busy enough that I can reject cases I don't like. And this one? I don't—"
"Please sit down, Mr. Flatt. You are the digital forensic expert on this case."
"Jake," she said, "since when do you choose my experts?"
"This is an internal investigation. It may develop into litigation, but it's not there yet. That makes the expert my choice, Brandy."
She grunted, her lips drawn into a tight little wad that looked a lot like an anus.
I took a couple deep breaths and said, "Okay. If we can get my letter of engagement signed and retainer paid, I'll get started. But I have no patience for bullshit like this." I pointed at Palmer to be really clear.
Palmer started up out of her chair but eased back into it after a look from Jacobs.
Allen said, "My admin will take care of that right now. Your host—Nichols, I think?—will get you set up in a workplace and have the computers brought to you." He looked at Palmer. "And there won't be any more...bullshit." Looking back at me now. "Anything else?"
"Nope," I said.
I LEFT Jacob Allen’s office and Nichols took me to a mid-sized conference room where my equipment was waiting. Correction: Staying true to SPACEtalk, he took me to a conference chamber on the fifth floor. Apparently there are no rooms in space. By the time I had my gear arranged and powered up, the retainer was in my checking account and Christine Gamboa’s full personnel file had arrived in my inbox from human resources. The letter of engagement hadn't arrived yet but since the money had, work could begin.
The front page of Gamboa's file was a headshot of an absurdly beautiful woman. Glossy black hair and a mild Eurasian look with impossible green eyes. Twenty-six years old, never married. Master's degree from CalTech in Applied and Computational Mathematics—and she chose to take a job as a glorified escort? And then to work on slot machines? And back to escort? The rest of her file was more of the same: She was a brilliant and beautiful girl without a hint of trouble in her background. One of life's winners.
About the time I finished perusing her file, a courier arrived with her devices. It was a typical high-end corporate spread: desktop PC, laptop, iPad and iPhone. It took about twenty minutes to get forensic copies of all her data started. With that process chugging along,
I opened the binder Allen had given me and dug into the scintillating world of electronic gaming machines. Okay, it wasn't scintillating. Behind the flashing lights and cool sounds, it was all about a bunch of little computers that generated random numbers in a very careful way. An hour into it my eyes were glazing over and my stomach was screaming for input.
James Ever-Present Nichols was outside the door. "Hey, Jimbo," I said. "You guys have anything to eat around here?"
He took me to the Rings of Saturn, a big round buffet from which I ate a stupid amount of really good food. All terrestrial fare, best I could tell, but with creative names like Renduvian Rolls and Spironicus Spaghetti. At the exit, the doors whooshed open as I approached, Star Trek style, no doubt a function of the "credential bracelet" on my wrist. "Please tell me there's a holodeck," I said to Nichols.
"Sort of," he said.
"No crap?"
"Yeah, a virtual video game like you've never seen. We can go if you like."
"Definitely," I said, "But later."
THE FORENSIC COPYING was done when we got back from lunch, so I fired up the initial processing of the evidence, a bunch of techno-crunching that prepares the data for my hardcore examination. While that ran, I dug into the initial analysis of the oh-so-lovely Miss Gamboa's data. It took about two minutes to encounter the first red flag. She, or someone, had formatted the hard drives on both her computers. Silly people, especially computer-oriented people like her who should know better. Lesson number one? If you want to destroy data, find out how. Don't pull stunts like this that do nothing but make you look guilty. And stupid.
Fifteen minutes later, I had recovered the data she thought she deleted. The techno-crunching that was still running would recover far more, but for now I had enough to start getting an idea of who Cyber-Christine Gamboa was. On the surface, she was just a good-looking girl living the high life in Sin City. Like every woman on the planet with a smartphone, she loved taking selfies. Especially in her car. Why do they do this? I have no idea. She Facebooked and tweeted and Instagrammed and saved thousands of pictures to her boards on Pinterest. She texted a lot but thankfully she did so with real words, not "ur" and b4" and "bff" and other crap that make grown people look like twelve-year-olds.
She also bought enough books from Amazon to stock a library, but it would be an e-library. Kindle. She favored thrillers, which gave us something in common. Maybe when this was over I'd ask her out, if I hadn't helped put her in prison by then. Or even if I had, maybe we could have a prison romance. I'd write her beautiful letters and we'd have a darling little jailhouse wedding, and then would come the conjugal visits. Or maybe she'd tell me to go conjugate myself.
Quicken was her tool of choice for financial management, and it was there that red flags started pinging like the Whack-a-Mole at a county fair. Holy crap.
CHAPTER 4
McCARRAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
LAS VEGAS
CHRISTINE GAMBOA
CHRISTINE PINNED the Renaissance logo to her dress, checked her hair and makeup, then stepped from the limousine and walked to the bottom of the stairway, where she waited for the door of the private jet to open. When she heard the door being released from inside, she assumed her most radiant and expectant smile. The door opened and her client for the next couple of days appeared. Alexander "Sasha" Maslov was in his sixties, a thick and sturdy Ukrainian—or was that Russian now?—who had made a fortune in what he described to others as "an old family business in Crimea." She knew better.
When he saw Christine, his big Slavic face morphed from scowl to delight. "Chrissy!" He came down the stairs two at a time, wrapped her in a hug and kissed her on the lips.
"Sasha!" she said.
"Let us go now and you can to tell me all about your new job, Kohana."
IN THE LIMO, Maslov poured two glasses of pepper vodka and handed one to Christine. Despite the rule that she couldn't drink on the job, she had learned long ago it was best to have at least one drink with him even if they were headed to her workplace. The way she saw it, it was better to break a few rules than offend a client. Especially this one. She raised her glass to his with a solid clink and threw back the amber liquid, fighting not to gasp as the liquid fire hit her throat and stomach.
Maslov drank his, then roared with approving laughter at her accomplishment. "I think you learn to love my drinks!"
She smiled and blinked away the tears, shook her head to try to clear the buzz that had already hit. "I do it only for you, Sasha. Only you."
"Yes, and this is why you are my favorite Kohana!"
Christine bit her bottom lip and gave him a pouty look. "Favorite Kohana, huh? I bet you have these 'special girlfriends' stashed everywhere, you big charmer."
"Ah, but none like you, my love. Now, you must to tell me about your new job. I liked very much when you wore the outer space jumping suit, you know this?"
"Yes, I know you liked the jumpsuit, but I missed working with people, got tired of staring at computers all day. Renaissance is nice. They pay a little more and they give me three days a week off instead of one.”
"Wonderful. Wonderful. I want Kohana to be well rested when I come. And this time, this is the time when you will finally to marry me, yes?"
"We'll see, Sasha."
He roared again and poured himself another drink. "Yes, we will. We will to see."
ONCE THEY ARRIVED AT RENAISSANCE, they went straight to the high stakes gaming area, where Maslov played blackjack for hours, all joviality, win or lose. He put away enough pepper vodka to float a boat but never seemed intoxicated. Loose, yes. Drunk, no. Christine stayed nearby to meet any requests; clients like Maslov didn't wait for cocktail waitresses to come around taking requests. Whatever he was drinking or smoking—with him it was always pepper vodka and a particular Cuban cigar—stayed fresh and at hand. She also kept up with how his gambling was going, not because she was required to, but because knowing made it far easier to know whether or not to mention it later.
This had been a good night. She guessed he finished about fifty thousand to the good. In the elevator to his suite, she said, "How'd you do?"
"Wonderful night, Kohana, just wonderful. Sasha won many American dollars this night."
LATER, in Maslov's suite, Christine watched as Sasha got up from the lavish bed and walked toward the suite's living area. She stood from the bed and pulled on a hotel robe, then followed. He stood at the glass wall that looked out over the north side of the SPACE campus and the city beyond. She wondered what someone like Sasha saw there. A playground to be raided? A criminal kingdom to rule? And what was she to him and his organization? Princess? Concubine? Or just a loose end?
CHAPTER 5
SPACE
TIME HAD FADED AWAY, as it often does once I dig into a case. I was combing and analyzing, studying the digital breadcrumbs that would tell me who Christine Gamboa was and hopefully what she had e-done. Computers that were nothing more than a novelty a generation ago are today’s life recorders and it was time for some playback on Christine. I walked the halls outside my workroom enough to be sure no one else was still working nearby, then set up my little-yet-kickbutt wireless speaker, connected my phone, and cranked up a long, shuffled playlist.
She had made good money at SPACE—about one-fifty a year during her time as an executive host, ten grand more when she moved in with the brainiacs—but she spent a lot, too. Drove a 7-series BMW, lived in a pricey apartment, dressed expensively, and had an affinity for purses that cost a stupid amount. Her lifestyle was enough to max out her budget and then some. I assumed she picked up some pretty nice tips as a host, but it was hard to imagine enough tips for her to have anything meaningful left over. So how was it that she had over four hundred thousand in her personal checking account?
I dug into her Quicken data but it was no help in figuring out where the money came from. She had only been using the program for seven months, and she had logged a balance forward in her checking account of $453,269.22 wh
en she first set up Quicken. That number was now down to $405,200.86, so in seven months she had spent almost fifty grand of the mystery cash, plus every penny of her salary.
I spent some time going through her spending in more detail, taking notes as I went. Twelve grand on purses. Thousand-dollar bedsheets. Over two thousand a month payment on the BMW, and thirty-nine hundred rent on the apartment. An addiction to the latest and greatest of all things Apple, including an iPhone and iPad, curious since she already had both those items furnished by SPACE. And on and on it went. It was like an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Except she wasn't famous and didn't make enough money to be rich. It sure wasn't family money; according to the background report in her employment file, her parents eked out a living in a small grocery store they owned in rural Arizona.
A knock on the door made me jump. It cracked and Nichols stuck his head in. “Need anything?” He looked awake but looking that way was his job and I understood the real question.
I checked the time on my computer and saw that it was 2:26 a.m. “Am I wearing you out, Jimbo?”
It took a moment for the “Jimbo” to register, then he said, “Oh, no. No. I just thought you might need something.”
The head disappeared and the door closed. I did the math and realized it was 4:26 a.m. back home in Houston, decided to call it a night myself. I engaged the lock screen on my examination computer and stepped through the door. “How late can I get breakfast around here?” I said.
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