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I had this notion from watching too many movies and cop dramas that they were going to ask me to stay in town. Instead, Felicia said, “Any chance there are tickets available? I’ll pay for them. I would insist, in fact, so it could never be construed as a bribe. But my parents just loved the show when they saw it a few years ago, and I think it would be a real hoot to surprise them with a pair. I know they’d love to see it again.”
“Which show? Early or late?”
“They won’t care.”
“I’ll make it happen,” I said.
“No comps.”
“Got it,” I agreed. I was about to ask for a business card, but already she was handing me one. Then Patrick flipped shut his notebook and handed me his card, too.
* * *
People kill themselves a lot in Las Vegas. They do it all the time. Fun fact: you have a 50 percent greater chance of offing yourself here than in the rest of the country. Not hyperbole. People have studied us, and that’s the reality. That’s the statistic. Some researchers even suggest we are a suicide terminus: people actually come here to kill themselves.
But that wasn’t Yevgeny Orlov.
And now I was more confident than ever that this wasn’t the Morleys. Artie was correct about his brother, Richie, and Eddie was right about Artie.
Once I was alone, I drew myself a bubble bath and listened to my “make me sob” playlist—some Elvis, some Karen Carpenter, lots of Marvin Hamlisch, especially three weepers from Sophie’s Choice—and the tears flowed freely. I had been in there half an hour when, once again, I was adding more hot water, reaching for the faucet with the toes on one of my feet, when a name came to me. Instantly, I grew alert. Cleo Dionne. That person who’d worked with Frankie Limback and died in a bathtub in Grand Cayman. And, just like Yevgeny, it was either a tragic accident or a deeply sad suicide.
Or, as Nigel had suggested about Cleo, a murder carefully crafted to look like one or the other.
When you added them up, there were now four corpses linked to either Futurium or the BP—the casino that Futurium wanted to buy.
I thought of that group Yevgeny had told me about, the Mastaba crime family, and wondered what in the name of God my sister had gotten herself into now.
Or, when I had rung Erika Schweiker, what I had gotten myself into.
Of all the extinction-level meteors roaring toward Planet Crissy, I had a feeling that was the one most likely to crater my world.
* * *
When I emerged from the tub, I got dressed and went for a walk. There was no obvious connection between the deaths: Yevgeny hadn’t worked for Futurium, and Cleo hadn’t worked for the BP. But there were plenty of reasons why one could intuit links. After all, Yevgeny’s calendar had opened rather suddenly, he’d come to Las Vegas, and now he was dead. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that I wasn’t the only reason—or even the main reason—why he was back in town.
I phoned Eddie Cantone, and the call went straight to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. Next I rang my sister.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Betsy said. She sounded happy to hear from me.
“You alone?”
“Except for Marisa, yes. Why?”
If I had answered honestly, I would have said because I wanted to talk to her without Frankie Limback nearby. But I didn’t have to go there, and so I didn’t. “A friend of mine was found dead out at Red Rocks this afternoon,” I told her. “His body was discovered at the bottom of a cliff.” I was gazing at the strip as I walked, and Las Vegas was well along its nightly transformation into a pinball machine, the last, lingering light from the west giving the thousands upon thousands of casino windows a golden cast. Though it was Sunday, there was traffic, and the asphalt grew congested.
“No! I’m so sorry. What happened?”
There was concern for me in her voice; she supposed I was calling her for comfort, as if our history had gone up in steam and no longer mattered. She also sounded surprised by the news, which I expected. The people around her carried guns, but she didn’t. At least not yet. But she was, it seemed to me, bringing her own brand of chaos and disorder into my life in Nevada, just as she had in Vermont.
No, this was worse than chaos and disorder. This was corpse-in-a-canyon shit.
“A fellow I’d seen a couple of times,” I answered. “He lived in New York—”
“Let me go into the bedroom,” she said, and I heard Marisa asking her what was up and Betsy telling her that it was her aunt on the phone and she needed privacy. I knew when she returned to her daughter that the child was going to interrogate her, and I considered how much I should reveal. Then I decided that was bollocks; withhold nothing.
“Okay, go on,” she said.
“The police don’t know for sure what happened. But I just had two detectives here in my suite asking me questions.”
