Stripped (31 page)

“I know.” She hesitated. “I’m wondering about going back on the force. I didn’t really want to leave, you know. It was Eric’s idea.”

“Is that what you want?” Stride asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not the same without you.”

Stride didn’t know what to say to that, so he kept quiet. He didn’t know where Maggie was going. Once upon a time, there had been history between them. Maggie had been in love with him for several years, and she had made a play for him shortly after Cindy died. It didn’t work out. She didn’t hold a grudge, not even when Serena entered the picture, but Stride always wondered if the emotions were entirely dead. Even after Maggie married Eric, there were hints sometimes that she would have gone over the edge if Stride had ever given her a reason.

“But I suppose you’re happy in Sin City,” Maggie continued.

“Oh, yeah. I fit right in here. You’d expect that.”

She ignored the sarcasm. “What’s it like being a working stiff again and not the big boss?”

“I just do what you always did. Complain about the lieutenant.”

“Nice. Good one. How’s Serena?”

“Okay.” He knew his voice sounded like lead.

Maggie took a long time to reply. He could never fool her. “You guys having problems?”

“I don’t know what we’re having,” he admitted.

“Serena’s got ghosts, boss. You knew that going in.”

“This isn’t a ghost.” He took a deep breath and told her about Serena and Claire—and about his secret fear, which he had barely expressed to himself, that this would all end in him losing her.

“She says she still loves you?” Maggie asked.

“She says that.”

“What about you? How do you feel?”

Stride thought about the old joke. Ask a Minnesotan how he feels on the day his dog dies, his wife leaves him, and he loses his job. “Fine,” he said.

“Real funny.”

“I love her, Mags. You know that.”

“So what’s the problem? Hell, boss, this could be your ticket to a threesome.”

Stride laughed. “Sure.” He added, “Okay, the thought of it did cross my dirty mind. But come on. Me?”

“It’s a lot stranger world than you know,” she replied, in a voice that didn’t sound like Maggie at all.

“Don’t tell me that you would get into anything like that.”

“Let’s not go there, boss,” she retorted.

He felt as if he were walking in quicksand and decided to change the subject. “So what about you? Are you going back?”

“I haven’t decided. It’s too soon after the baby, you know?”

“I know.” He was so accustomed to thinking of Maggie as a rock that it was difficult to hear pain radiating from her. “I really am sorry, Mags.”

“Thanks. You know, there was another reason I called.”

“Oh?”

“K-2 asked me to do it. He was too chicken to call himself.”

Deputy Chief Kyle Kinnick was Stride’s old boss in Duluth. “What does he want?” Stride asked, feeling a tingling in his chest.

“The search for a new lieutenant in the Detective Bureau washed out,” Maggie said. “He wanted me to feel you out. See if you might be interested in coming back.”

Libraries,” Amanda said. “I think that’s our best bet.”

She stood by the open window in Sawhill’s office. There was barely a whisper of a breeze. A portable fan whined on his desk, directing its air at the lieutenant’s face. Part of the downtown area had lost power earlier in the afternoon, and though the station had a backup generator, it didn’t extend to air-conditioning. The office was stifling.

“This guy had to find out about Amira somewhere,” she went on. “We’re talking about Vegas forty years ago. Sure, he could surf the Web, but wouldn’t he go to the library, too? That’s where he’d find old newspapers, old magazines, anything like that. It may be one way he built his list of targets.”

“Check it out,” Sawhill said. He had a glow of sweat on his face, but his tie was tightly knotted at his neck. His one concession to the heat was removing his black suit coat. “We’ve got this guy’s description all over the papers and television, but we can’t find him. And he still manages to gun down Gino Rucci and his bodyguard right on the Strip. Explain that to me.”

“We know he can disguise himself,” Stride said. “If he doesn’t want to be recognized, he won’t be, but we’ve got uniforms and casino security people on the lookout for him. Witnesses last night pegged him in a brown sedan, but no one got a plate. We’ve added that to the profile.”

“Are we getting calls to the hotline?”

“Lots, but nothing you could call a break,” Stride said.

“What else do we know about this guy?” Sawhill asked.

“He’s pretty much an unperson,” Serena replied. “He was called Michael Burton in Reno until he was sixteen. Jay Walling dug up some school records, but nothing that will help us here. After he torched his parents, he fell off the grid. There’s no record of who he became or where he went.”

“I checked with the military,” Stride added. “I was able to contact two other men from David Kamen’s unit in Afghanistan. One of them remembered Wilde and confirmed Kamen’s story that the guy was essentially a mercenary, but he didn’t know anything that would help us find him.”

“We haven’t gone public with the connection to Amira,” Serena said. “Maybe we should.”

Amanda watched the political wheels turning in Sawhill’s mind. “How would that help us?” he asked.

“Wilde might have talked to someone about Amira or the Sheherezade. They might remember him or know something about him.”

Sawhill shook his head. “Not strong enough. The casino connection would generate a lot of headlines, but I don’t think it will help us catch this guy. It’ll just be a distraction.”

In other words, people might start asking Boni Fisso some embarrassing questions
, Amanda thought. “Someone’s going to make the connection soon,” she said. “Either it will leak, or some writer like Rex Terrell will put it together.”

“Let them worry about that, and we’ll worry about catching this guy before he kills someone else.” Sawhill pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped his brow. “What are we doing to prevent another hit?”

Serena glanced over her shoulder at Cordy. “Did you get the list?”

Cordy nodded. “Uh-huh. We got another ten people who worked at the Sheherezade back then and had jobs that had something to do with Amira and her show. Dancers, choreographers, the kind of folks this Wilde thing might decide to have a grudge against, you know? We’ve told them to make sure their relatives keep an eye out.”

“But Wilde seems to be moving up the food chain,” Stride said.

“Meaning?” Sawhill asked.

“Meaning Boni,” Stride said. “Wilde wouldn’t let us know what he looks like if he wasn’t in the last stages of his game. He wants Boni to know he’s coming after him.”

“Why announce his intentions?”

Stride shrugged. “Pride. Ego. Confidence. He wants Boni to squirm.”

Sawhill rocked back in his seat and frowned. “Except he’s not likely to tackle Boni directly, is he? In every other case, he’s gone after a relative. His daughter—Claire—she’s got to be at the top of our list, doesn’t she?”

“No question about it,” Stride said.

Sawhill leaned forward, jabbing a finger at Serena. “You know her, don’t you? I want you to take charge of her protection. I want you all over her, Detective.”

“I’m not a babysitter, sir,” Serena said.

“No, you’re a detective trying to save a life,” Sawhill retorted. “Do you have a problem here?” He didn’t wait for an answer but added immediately, “I want you to oversee security for Claire Belfort. Under no circumstances are we going to let Wilde get near her. You got that? I want you with her now, and I want you glued to her side until we catch this guy. Have her stay at your place.”

“Understood,” Serena said. She looked like she was wilting in the heat. Amanda was surprised. She had always thought of Serena as cool and unflappable.

Amanda’s cell phone vibrated. She quickly excused herself, left the office, and ducked into an empty cubicle. “Gillen.”

“It’s Leo Rucci.”

Amanda sat down. Even the seat felt warm, as if the heat wave had worked its way inside the cushions. “I’m sorry about your son,” she said.

“Save it. I’m not looking for sympathy.” Gino’s death hadn’t softened Rucci at all.

“I’d like to talk to you about the murder,” Amanda said. “Maybe you can help us find this guy before he kills anyone else.”

“I got nothing to say to you. I’m not talking about the past, okay? And what happened to Gino is between me and this Wilde fuckhead. I don’t need any help. I just wanted to tell you that if you want to catch this guy, you better do it quick.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” Rucci growled. “Because I’m coming after him, too.”

Blake blew out a lungful of acrid cigarette smoke that billowed in a cloud around his face. Picking up his drink, he took a hit of salt from the rim and a sweet-sour sip of margarita. In reality, he despised the lime drinks that all the tourists sipped in Cancún—he preferred beer or scotch—but a red-headed lawyer from the bankruptcy attorneys’ convention in town, with shades, a name tag, and a margarita, didn’t attract special attention. He was just another shyster soaking up the blues and hoping to get lucky by flirting with the twenty-something waitress.

He sat at a circular table in the last row of the Limelight showroom. Other people squeezed around him, clinking ice, talking too loudly, coughing, and passing gas. It was hard to see faces with the lights low and bodies shifting in their seats, blocking his view, but he had already pegged the security before the show began. Two bulky detectives squirmed at a table in front of the stage, painfully obvious in suits and ties. A Hispanic cop, a smooth piece of work with slicked black hair and a permanent leer, hovered in the back, constantly scanning the crowd. He was almost close enough to touch. On the east and west walls, standing, were two of the boys from Premium Security. Blake knew them. Enormous, probably part gorilla. Walnut-sized brains. He had actually waved at one, and the man just stared dully back, not penetrating the disguise. Blake couldn’t help but laugh.

Claire was onstage. It was her second show, and midnight had already come and gone. He didn’t usually care about music, but he enjoyed her voice. She had a throaty country drawl, and there was something sad about the way she sang that made him remember the suffering he had experienced as a boy. He rarely visited that room in his soul, but Claire’s voice made it seem like a good thing to do, as if she could march you inside and make you believe that loss was what made you alive, that yearning for something could be more beautiful than having it

Not that he really believed it

He thought about his adopted mother. Bonnie Burton. She could still make his flesh crawl two decades later. It was crazy back then, how he had loved her and wanted to please her. He had actually hated his adopted father more, because he was the one who let it all happen and did nothing to stop her. Blake even enjoyed cuckolding him at first, when he began having intercourse with Bonnie. He could still feel her hands. It infuriated him that when he thought of her, he sometimes got an erection. That she still controlled him like that. She used to tell him that he was her best lover, that she would never hurt him, that her body belonged to him. Her body with its drooping breasts and doughnut-shaped middle.

Once, she told him what a good idea it would be if he killed his father and the two of them could be alone. His father, who knew what went on in the bedroom, who didn’t care or was too scared to do a damn thing.

He said yes, that would be a good idea, and didn’t add that the best idea of all was to kill them both. A month later, he stood in the dark yard and watched the fire consume them.

He thought about the boy in the Summerlin street. Peter Hale. That was a lesson for him—that he wasn’t the rock he imagined himself to be, that the fury could come back and temporarily blind him. He had watched the boy throwing the ball against the garage door. Hypnotic, the ball going back and forth, bang bang, over and over. It wouldn’t be hard to smile at the kid, go inside, slit Linda Hale’s throat and go back to the car. Maybe toss the ball a couple of times with the boy. Then he thought about leaving this kid with no mother, and he realized he couldn’t do that. He sat there, paralyzed. Bang bang, back and forth. Happy kid. A kid who had everything Blake never had, for no reason at all, who didn’t have any Bonnie in his life, who hadn’t had his real mother stripped away and killed by Las Vegas. The anger rose up like a dust devil, spinning out of the sand. Insane jealousy. Disgust. It grabbed him so hard he thought he would break the steering wheel in half. That was when, without any more hesitation, he put the car in gear and slammed the accelerator down, gunning for the boy, wanting to erase him, wanting to see him disappear into nothingness under his tires.

Sometimes nothingness was a blessing.

In the Limelight showroom, Blake blinked. He had been gone for too long, not concentrating. The memories did that to him. He blamed it on the seduction of Claire’s voice, which was somehow both lazy and still as sharp as a razor blade on his wrist.

Focus, he thought to himself.

Amira.

Blake had to move quickly. He had been to Claire’s show several times, and he knew there were three songs left in her second set. He had to go now or risk getting caught in the sweaty mass of fans elbowing their way for the exits. In a few minutes, he could use the chaos of the crowd to spring Claire loose from the blanket of security protecting her.

He knew how to do that. With Claire’s help.

When she finished her next song, a searing cover of Mindy Smith’s “One Moment More,” Blake stood up during the applause and picked his way through the tables to the nearest door. He wore a sport coat, shirt and tie, jeans, and dress shoes. Back in the casino, he stubbed out his cigarette at one of the slot machines and proceeded to the glass doors that led to the parking lot. He surveyed the small lot quickly. The Boulder Strip was on his left, and a two-way middle lane in the lot led to a series of rows where the cars parked diagonally. His own brown sedan was in the rear, where he could jump the divider and head straight to the highway.