“Melanie, have you seen Bobby jump? Like, real far?”
“Oh! That’s his signature move, like Tusk has the Stomp dance? In the ‘Talk to the Hand’ video Bobby jumped over a pickup truck, the long way! Oh my God, did you see him jump?”
“And how about Devin? Have you seen him, well, climb on things?”
“All the time, Mami. He swings across the stage, and he doesn’t even use wires.”
Banks walked toward Luce but stopped ten feet away, giving her some privacy. Tusk was watching them from the cabana. His trunk, seemingly moving of its own free will, found a carrot and pushed it in to his mouth.
“I’ll talk to you later, mija,” Luce said. “Mami’s got to go look at some video herself.”
* * *
Las Vegas was a surveillance-happy town. In every casino, cameras nestled in the ceilings like glass wasp nests, and the gaming room in the Matador was no exception. The coverage in the hotel proper, however, was spotty. Most of the guest room hallways were on tape, but the penthouse level was a camera-free zone. No VIP wanted a video of prostitutes entering their room—at least not one that was badly filmed. There were no cameras in the stairwells, either.
The elevators, however? Each one was a tiny TV studio.
“Okay, coming up on four thirteen AM,” the tech said.
Four people were jammed into the tiny video control room—the tech, Luce, Banks, and the hotel manager—all sharing the space with the manager’s cologne. His name tag said: “Rudolfo.” He’d recognized Luce as soon as she appeared but thankfully hadn’t gone full fanboy.
“What is that?” Rudolfo asked. “A squirrel?”
“Close,” Luce said.
A person in a full chipmunk costume had entered the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby with a furry hand. The head was enormous, with puffy white cheeks, huge eyes, and two pert ears on top. The fur was a rusty brown color. A thin tail, white with a dark brown streak down the middle.
In one hand the animal gripped a pillowcase that held something heavy.
“Paws!” Luce said.
The tech punched a key on the keyboard and the image froze. Also a good thing.
“Are those stains on their hands?” Luce asked.
Everyone leaned forward. “I can’t tell, the color is off,” the tech said. “Do you want me to go back, or . . . ?”
“Never mind. Keep rolling. And Banks, make a note to check the suite for missing pillowcases.”
On-screen, the elevator doors opened and the chipmunk walked out.
“That’s the elevator rotunda,” Luce said. “Do we have a camera on that?”
“Just a sec,” the tech said. She scrolled through a list of names like MGLOB2, pressed Return, and a video window popped up. She began reversing through the video. The chipmunk walked out of the elevator carrying the pillowcase and stepped between two mammals waiting to get on, a gorilla wearing a space helmet and a chubby fox with an enormous tail. Then the chipmunk crossed a section of the lobby. At four in the morning the space was uncrowded by Las Vegas standards, but there were a few dozen people on-screen, a third of them in costume. The chipmunk walked toward the mall—a walkway of shops and restaurants gratingly called Mercado Alley—that connected the Grand Pool, the Grand Arena, where the band had performed, and a set of Matador-owned condo towers. The tech managed to keep finding cameras with the ’munk in view—and then the suspect turned down a service hallway.
“Keep following,” Luce said.
The tech worked for several seconds and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, they don’t have a camera there.”
“Okay, stick with the outside of the corridor, and see if anybody comes out.” No chipmunk emerged. In an hour of tape, they saw one bearded white man walk into the corridor and emerge five minutes later.
“What’s in that hallway?” Banks asked.
“Restrooms,” Rudolfo answered.
“Does it have an exit to the outside?” Banks asked.
“Ah! Yes! There’s a fire exit.”
“Show me,” Luce said. To the tech she said, “Keep scanning the footage, and flag anybody who walks out of that corridor, all morning. Also, as fast as you can do it, I want pictures of the suspect from that footage. Give me all the best frames.”
“Technically, there aren’t really frames, there’re just—”
“Do it. Jesus.”
Delgado and Banks walked out of the little office, trailed by the manager. “I want to tell you how much I admire your work,” he said to Luce. “And your father’s! I was a busboy at Circus Circus when you two had your show there. I was amazed! That thing you did with the swords, and you were so young! Never would I have thought I would get to work side by side with Doña Diavola. It’s an honor.”
“That’s ancient history,” she said.
“How is your father? Is he retired?”
“Extremely.”
They stepped into the lobby and cameras erupted, a flurry of flashes. Luce kept her serious face on. The captain would want to give a press conference soon, with Luce by his side, and that would kill her momentum.
The lobby was more crowded than it had been when the chipmunk took their stroll. The fans stood around with their luggage, and officers were taking names and IDs.
Luce followed the chipmunk’s path from the elevator to the corridor. There were three bathrooms—men, women, and family—and a door to the stairwell. At the far end was the fire exit. The sign said: EMERGENCY EXIT ALARM WILL SOUND IF DOOR IS OPENED.
“Which begs the question,” Luce said.
“No one reported the alarm going off,” Rudolfo said.
“Hmm,” Luce said. She pushed on the crossbar. The alarm began to blare. On the other side was an open-air courtyard, populated at this moment by half a dozen smokers. The paved path was a shortcut to the VIP parking lot where she’d left her car.
She pulled it closed and the alarm stopped. “So they didn’t rig the door. The alarm cuts off quick, though. We’ll want to check your logs to see if anything happened your staff missed.”
Rudolfo nodded once. “It will be done.” He stopped just short of clicking his heels.
“Tell me about the stairwell—can you get to the other floors?”
“Only the mezzanine, just above us, and the tunnel to the parking garage, below,” Rudolfo said. “The doors do not let you enter floors with the guest rooms—they’re exit only, unless you have a key.”
Banks was already jotting notes in his notepad. “Okay, our furry friend could have gone out through the garage tunnel, too. I’ll have CSD check the cameras in the garage and outside this door.”
Luce walked toward the women’s restroom. “Banks, check the men’s.”
The restroom was large and spotless—she hoped it hadn’t just been cleaned. She lifted the lid from the chrome trash can, tilted it onto its side, and shook the contents onto the floor. Nothing but paper towels. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then shoved her hand inside each receptacle under the sinks. Nothing. She opened each of the four stalls.
Then she went into the family restroom. One toilet, with a changing table, and a lockable door. Good for privacy. She checked the trash cans as she’d done in the other room. Then she looked up. Above the toilet, a ceiling tile was slightly out of place.
She stepped up onto the toilet. Her gloved fingers could just reach the tile. She went up on tiptoes and pushed up. A ball of fur fell out of the ceiling.
“Banks!” she called. “Banks!”
He poked his head in.
She said, “I think we have what you might call a clue.”
Luce didn’t unfold the costume, but she could tell that the white paws had been stained with blood—still moist. But what was more interesting was the pillowcase. Inside it were two metal contraptions. Two wristbands, each with a crossbar that fit in the palm—all the better for supporting the three metal claws. They looked handmade, like something welded out of rakes. The claws, too, were bloody.
Rudolfo was shocked. “Are these the murder weapons?”
“I dunno,” Banks said. “I think we should hold out for something more on the nose.”
Luce said, “Get the CSD crew in here and bag all this up. And Rudolfo—”
“Ma’am!”
“I need to talk to your security people—whoever was working last night. Evidently they had some interactions with people on the penthouse floor.”
“Of course. The men are supposed to fill out incident reports for any, you know . . .”
“Incidents.”
“Yes!”
“One more thing. Banks is going to bring you a list of names, guests who were at the party last night. I particularly want to talk to—what was the president’s name?”
“Shweta Wisniewski,” Banks said. “And her husband, Gordon.”
“Right, the zebra and the gopher. If they haven’t checked out yet, I’d like you to help me keep them here.”
“Keep them?” Rudolfo asked. “But how?”
“Entice them. I don’t know, offer them a discount in the restaurant. The LVMPD can’t pay you back, but it would be a great service to the community—and we’d of course mention all your help when we catch the murderer.”
The hotel manager nodded. “I have some discretionary power, Detective. I’ll do my best.” He hurried off.
Banks said, “So that totally screws with our case against Devin.”
“It doesn’t change anything.”
“What?”
“Devin could fit inside that suit.”
“An animal inside an animal.”
“Though it’s tricky,” Luce said. “How does a really famous bonobo not get seen when he walks out of the restroom?”
“A second disguise! Under the chipmunk suit is, I don’t know, a bear costume. That would be so great—Russian nesting mammals.”
“I need to talk to Mrs. M, but she’s still at the hospital. So who’s left?”
“Matt and Tim.”
“Well, Tim did attack Dr. M at the party. Let’s start there.”
“Right,” Banks said. “I’m sure we can get the pangolin to come out of his shell.”
“I’m not listening to you.”
* * *
Their knock on Tim’s door was answered by the small, brown-skinned woman they’d glimpsed earlier: purple hair, nose ring, and many dark tattoos marking her face and neck. She was wearing oversized gray coveralls and was yelling into a cell phone, “Well, where the fuck are they? Stack ’em by the loading dock.”
Luce couldn’t place her accent. It was as if Johnny Rotten had grown up in Australia. “Just get them the fuck off the stage,” the woman shouted, “or they’ll fucking bill us!”
She looked at Delgado and Banks. Her eyes narrowed. Those eyes and her wide mouth were the central features in a maze of geometric tattoos: black stripes across her cheeks and down her chin, zigzags across her forehead, dots and lozenges everywhere else. The tattoos continued down her neck. The look was both animalistic and architectural.
“I gotta go,” she said into the phone. “The fucking cops are here.”
“You must be Kat,” Luce said. “May we come in?”
The inside of the hotel room smelled deeply funky. Definitely not a human odor. The couch cushions had been moved to the floor, where they made a little fort.
“Hey, Timmy?” Kat said. “You want to come out of there? These detectives want to have a chat.”
“Tell them to go away,” Tim said.
“Aw, don’t be like that. You’re being rude.”
A snout pushed through the cushions.
“There’s a good boy,” Kat said.
The rest of him emerged. Luce had seen pictures of Timmy P and had watched him on TV, but it was a shock to meet him in person; he was definitely the most purely animal of the bunch. He looked exactly like a pangolin—which meant that he looked a lot like an armadillo, though one wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He was all curled up, but she doubted he was over four feet tall if he stood up on those clawed feet—and a good portion of his body length was due to the long, flat tail that jutted from a seam at the back of those jeans, and spooned around him. The tail was plated in overlapping gray scales, and his head and arms were covered in the same armor. His hands ended in long, curving claws. More than Bobby, or anyone else in the band, he had the natural weapons to carve Dr. M into pieces.
Tim blinked at her from beady eyes set far back behind his long snout. His tiny mouth frowned.
“Hi, Tim. My name’s Detective Delgado, and this is—”
“Nope.” Tim pushed back under the cushions.
“Tim!” Kat said.
He didn’t answer.
Kat sighed. “Just a sec. I have an idea.”
Track 9: “You Don’t Know Pop”
Featuring Timmy P
Tim had been dreading this moment. All morning he’d lain curled in the dark, quietly freaking the hell out. What was going to happen to Bobby O? If they freed Bobby, would they accuse Tim? Kat? Someone else in the band? What if they made everybody stay in this hotel and he never got to burrow? In times like these—and almost all times were like these, though admittedly, violent homicide was a fresh wrinkle—nothing chilled him out more than a good excavation session.
He’d gone to his backup stress management technique: contemplating future dooms. For years after escaping the barge he imagined all the ways the CIA could abduct the band and subject them to medical experiments, but when the government failed to materialize, that particular dread lost its sting. Most of last year he’d soothed himself with thoughts of Y2K, and it was a big disappointment when the digital apocalypse evaporated in January. Climate change was an up-and-comer, and planet-killing asteroids were good for a quick, comforting jolt. But when all other dooms failed, he contemplated the terror of Shell Cancer.
Shell Cancer had not yet been discovered, as far as he knew. But the problem with being a genetic one-off was that no one, absolutely no one, could tell you what pangolin-human-hybrid diseases and disorders were likely, and which predispositions to them were waiting in his genome. If there were a significant population of PHHs who’d been living on the planet for a couple hundred years and, even better, a community of American PHHs who’d immigrated in the 1800s to, say, Pittsburgh, attracted by the region’s many mining opportunities, and had turned its famous “Pangotown” into a vibrant community noted for its underground homes and termite restaurants, and who, despite having fallen on hard times when the steel industry collapsed in the 1970s, had nevertheless persevered and found work in the nascent knowledge economy thanks in part to the species’ obsessive focus, work ethic, and a tendency toward nearsightedness that made them perfect for screen work, why, if that had happened then there would be statistics on the rate of Shell Cancer, epidemiologists charting its spread, and teams of smart, highly educated Homo-pangolins working on a cure, or at least a treatment cream.
He heard rustling outside his cushions, and then Kat said, “I brought you breakfast.”
A tangy smell made its way through the gap.
“Come on now,” Kat said, her voice growing firm. “These detectives don’t have all day. Besides, you don’t want me to throw out fresh grub.”
Tim eased his snout back into the room. “Grubs?”
Kat extended her free hand. “Up and out, there you go.”
“This won’t take long,” Detective Delgado said.
Tim sat on the floor with the bag of snacks between his knees. Kat handed him his glasses and the sinister blurs resolved into a Hispanic woman and thirtyish white man whose head would soon be as hairless as Tim’s. He introduced himself as Detective Banks.
“I didn’t do it,” Tim said. Then immediately regretted it. Nothing made you sound guiltier than instantly denying it. “Bobby didn’t, either,” he added.
“Everybody seems to agree on that,” Detective Banks said. He pulled out a tape recorder. “You mind if I—oh God.”
> “You missed one, love,” Kat said. She pointed to the corner of her mouth. “Right here.” Tim used his foreclaw to push the white beetle larva between his lips.
“Can you tell me where you two were last night, from the time you left the party, till this morning?”
“I was here,” Tim said.
“That’s the truth,” Kat said. “He got under the cushions as soon as we got in, and hasn’t moved since.”
“And you?” Banks asked her.
“I took the bed. I was here until seven thirty or so. I took the elevator down and walked over to the venue to start on the teardown. Oh, stopped at the Starbucks to get coffee for my crew. Then I got a call from Matt saying Dr. M was dead, the cops were coming, and Tim wouldn’t come out.”
“Sorry,” Tim said quietly.
“It seems like you’ve been having a rough time,” Delgado said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“We heard that you attacked Dr. M last night,” Delgado said.
“Because Dr. M was being an asshole!”
“My knight in keratin armor,” Kat said. To the detectives she said, “If you’re thinking of accusing Tim of anything, forget it. I’ve already called the record company, and they’re sending a pack of lawyers. And they won’t be locals, like that guy they rushed over to help Bobby O.”
“We’re just trying to find out what happened,” Delgado said. “Some of you are already helping us. Tusk is being super helpful.”
“He is?” Tim said.
“Bobby’s the obvious suspect—he was there at the scene of the crime. But it may not be him. In fact, for my daughter’s sake, I really hope it’s not him, or any of you.”
“You have a daughter?” Kat asked. “How old?”
“She’s nine. Huge fan.” To Tim she said, “Just this morning, she was singing ‘Deep Down’ at the top of her lungs. She loves your songs.”
“I’ve written a lot of songs,” Tim said sadly. “But that’s the one they always bring up first.”
“Your words go so well with the music. The music’s so simple and singable, and your words—”
“What did you say? Simple?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, just that my daughter—”
The Album of Dr. Moreau Page 6