Private Vegas (3 page)

THE LIVING ROOM was done up in silk and satin in the colors peach and cream. Logs flickered in the marble fireplace, and atonal music oozed from the CD player. Empty glasses, liquor bottles, and many articles of clothing littered the floor. A room-service cart had been tipped over, spilling food and broken china across the Persian carpet.

I served for three years as a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps. I’ve been trained to spot a glint of metal or a puff of smoke on the ground from ten thousand feet up. In the dark.

But I didn’t need pilot’s training to recognize the filth right in front of me.

The man called Gozan Remari sat in an armchair with the hauteur of a prince. He looked to be about fifty, white-haired, with gold-colored, catlike eyes. Remari wore an expensive handmade jacket, an open pin-striped shirt, a heavy gold watch, and nothing else—not even an expression of surprise or anger that cops were coming through the door.

A nude woman lay at his feet, bound with silk ties. Her arms and legs were spread, and she was anchored hand and foot to an ottoman and a table, as if she were a luna moth pinned to a board. I saw bluish handprints on her skin, and food had been smeared on her body.

There was an arched entrance to my right that led to a bedroom. And there, in plain sight, was Khezir Mazul. He was naked, sitting up in bed, smoking a cigar. A young woman, also naked, was stretched on her back across his lap, her head over the side of the bed. A thin line of blood arced across her throat, and I saw a steak knife on the cream-colored satin blanket.

From where I stood in the doorway, I couldn’t tell if the women were unconscious or dead.

Captain Warren yanked Gozan Remari to his feet and cuffed his hands behind his back. He said, “You’re under arrest for assault. You have the right to remain silent, you piece of crap.”

The younger dirtbag stood up, let the woman on his lap roll away from him, off the bed and onto the floor. Khezir Mazul was powerfully built, tattooed on most of his body with symbols I didn’t recognize.

He entered the living room and said to Captain Warren in the most bored tones imaginable, “We’ve done nothing. Do you know the word
con-shen-sul?
This is not any kind of assault. These women came here willingly with us. Ask them. They came here to party. As you say here, ‘We aim to please.’”

Then, he laughed.
Laughed
.

I stepped over the room-service cart and went directly to the woman lying near me on the floor. Her breathing was shallow, and her skin was cool. She was going into shock.

My hands shook as I untied her wrists and ankles.

I said, “Everything is going to be okay. What’s your name? Can you tell me your name?”

Cops came through the back door, and one of them called for medical backup. Next, hotel management and two guests came in the front. Bungalow six was becoming a circus.

I ripped a cashmere throw from the sofa and covered the woman’s body. I helped her into a chair, put my jacket around her shoulders.

She opened her eyes and tears spilled down her cheeks. “My daughter,” the woman said to me. “Where is she? Is she—”

I heard the cop behind me say into the phone, “Two females; one in her forties, the other is late teens, maybe early twenties. She’s bleeding from a knife wound to her neck. Both of them are breathing.”

I said to the woman whose name I didn’t know, “Your daughter is just over there, in the bedroom. She’s going to be all right. Help is coming.”

Clasping the blanket to her body, the woman turned to see her daughter being assisted to her feet.

A siren wailed. The woman reached up and pressed her damp cheek to mine. She hugged me tight with her free arm.

“It’s my fault. I screwed up,” she said. “Thank you for helping us.”

I DRAFTED BEHIND the ambulance as it sped the two assault victims through traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard toward Ocean Memorial Hospital. When the bus turned inland, I headed north until I reached Pacific Coast Highway, the stretch of road that follows the curve of the coastline and links Malibu to Santa Monica.

My Lamborghini can go from zero to ninety in ten seconds, but this car draws cops out of nowhere, even when it’s just quietly humming at a red light. So I kept to the speed limit, and within twenty minutes, I was within sight of home.

My house is white stucco and glass, shielded from the road by a high wall that is overgrown with vines and inset with a tall wrought-iron gate.

I stopped the car, opened my window, and palmed the new biometric recognition plate; the gate slid open. I pulled the Lambo into my short, tight parking spot and braked next to the blue Jag.

As the gates rolled closed behind me, I got out, locked up the car, checked behind the wall and within the landscaping for anything that didn’t belong. Then I went up the walk to the door.

I’d bought this place with Justine Smith about five years ago. Later, after we’d broken up for the third, impossibly painful time, I bought out Justine’s share of the house. It was comfortable, convenient to my office, just right—until a year ago last May.

On that night, I came back home from a business trip abroad to find another former girlfriend, Colleen Molloy, dead in my bed, her skin still warm. She’d been shot multiple times at close range, and the killer was a pro. The way he’d fixed it, all of the evidence pointed to me as the shooter.

I was charged with Colleen’s murder and jailed, but after some extraordinary work by Private investigators, I was free—if you could call it that. I still opened my door every night expecting that something horrible had happened while I was out.

I put my eye up to the iris reader beside the front door, and when the lock clacked open, I went inside.

A woman’s blue jacket and a sleek leather handbag were on a chair, and her fragrance scented the air as I walked through the main room. I followed the light coming through the house, crossed the tile floors in my gumshoes, then peered through the glass doors that opened out to the pool.

She was doing laps and didn’t see me. That was fine.

The door glided open under my hand and I went out again into the warm night. I took a chaise, and as the ocean roared at the beach below, I watched her swim.

Her lovely shape was up-lit by the pool lights. Her strong arms stroked confidently through the water, and her flip turns had both grace and power.

I knew this woman so well.

I trusted her with everything. I cared about her safety and her happiness. I truly loved her.

But I was unable to see my future with her—or anyone. And that was a problem for Justine. It was why we didn’t live together. And why we’d made no long-term plans. But we had decided a couple of months ago that we were happy seeing each other casually. And at least for now, it was working.

She reached the end of the pool and pulled herself up to the coping. Her skin glistened as light and shadow played over her taut body. She sat with her legs in the pool, leaned forward, and wrung out her long, dark brown hair.

“Hey,” I said.

She started, said, “Jack.”

Then she grabbed a towel and wrapped herself in it, came over to the chaise, and sat down beside me. She smiled.

“How long have you been sitting here?”

I put my hand behind her neck and brought her mouth to mine. I kissed her. Kissed her again. Released her and said, “I just got here. I’ve had a night you won’t believe.”

“I want to take a shower,” Justine said. “Then tell me all about it.”

THE HOT SPRAY beat on me from six showerheads. Justine lightly placed her palms on my chest, tipped her hips against mine.

She said, “Someone needs a massage. I think that could be you.”

“Okay.”

Okay to whatever she wanted to do. It wasn’t just my car that could go from zero to ninety in ten seconds. Justine had that effect on me.

As she rubbed shower gel between her hands, sending up the scent of pine and ginseng, she looked me up and down. “I don’t know whether to go from top to bottom or the other way around,” she said.

“Dealer’s choice,” I said.

She was laughing, enjoying her power over me, when my cell phone rang. My fault for bringing it into the bathroom, but I was expecting a call from the head of our Budapest office, who’d said he’d try to call me between flights.

Justine said, “Here’s a joke. Don’t take the call.”

I looked through the shower doors to where my phone sat at the edge of the sink. The caller ID read
Capt. L. Warren.
It could only be about the rapists the cops had just arrested at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“The joke’s on me,” I said to Justine. “But I’ll make it quick.”

I caught the call on the third ring.

“Morgan. We’ve got problems with those pukes from Sumar,” the captain said. “They have diplomatic immunity.”

“You’ve
got
to be kidding.”

He gave me the bad news in detail, that Gozan Remari and Khezir Mazul were both senior diplomats in Sumar’s mission to the UN.

“They’re on holiday in Hollywood,” Warren told me. “I think we could ruin their good time, maybe get them recalled to the wasteland they came from, but the ladies won’t cooperate. I’m at the hospital with them now. They wouldn’t let the docs test for sexual assault.”

“That’s not good,” I said. I put up a finger to let Justine know I would be just a minute.

“Mrs. Grove is very grateful to you, Morgan,” the captain was telling me. “I, uh, need a favor. I need you to talk to her.”

“Sure. Put her on,” I said.

Justine turned off the water. Pulled a towel off the rack. “She’s in a room with her daughter,” Warren said. “Listen, if you step on the gas, you could be here in fifteen minutes. Talk to them face-to-face.”

I told Justine not to wait up for me.

By way of an answer, she screwed in her earbuds and took her iPod to the kitchen. She was intensely chopping onions when I left the house.

It was a twenty-minute drive to Ocean Memorial and it took me another ten to find the captain. He escorted me to a beige room furnished with two beds and a recliner.

Belinda Grove was sitting in the recliner, wearing the expensive clothes I’d last seen strewn around bungalow six: a black knit dress, fitted jacket, black stiletto Jimmy Choos. She’d also brushed her hair and applied red lipstick. And although I’d never met her before today, now that she’d cleaned up, I recognized her from photos in the society pages.

This was Mrs. Alvin Grove, on the board of the Children’s Museum, daughter of Palmer Tiptree, of Tiptree Pharmaceuticals, and mother of two.

Now I understood. She would rather die than let anyone know what had happened to her daughter and herself.