The Rivers Run Dry (16 page)

I wrote down the names she offered and tried to guess how many years she'd been clawing her way to the top. Surgical updates made her face appear close to forty-five, but the liver spots on her hands were the size of nickels. Nearer to sixty-five, I guessed.

“Let me offer a wager,” she said. “The FBI thinks one of these players had something to do with Courtney's disappearance.”

I didn't reply.

“And odds are you don't suspect me, or you wouldn't be here asking the early questions. You could be tailing me or bugging my phone or putting the squeeze on one of my bodyguards, perhaps with incriminating photos from my private life.” She tapped the cigarillo against the cut crystal ashtray. “You'd be right to suspect the men. They're pigs, every last one.” She smiled. “Of course, I've made a fortune playing with swine. But they're still pigs. All men are.”

“When's the next game?”

“They called me this morning, after the story ran in the paper. They're assuming Courtney won't show. The game must go on. Swine, I tell you, pure swine.”

“The game?”

“Tomorrow night.” She arched an eyebrow, a painted feature resting above her eye as though applied by template. “I will gladly forfeit my place so you can stare into the trough.”

“I've never played poker.”

“Are you good with numbers?”

“Not particularly.”

“Pity. You're cute enough to make a killing.” She revealed the perfect teeth again. “Bad choice of words. But the offer stands. I'm not particularly eager to play. I leave for Monte Carlo later this month.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“There's a difference?”

When I stood, offering my business card, Kit Carson remained seated on the white couch. She looked up at me, placing the cigarillo in the ashtray, tilting her head coquettishly.

“Have you ever shot anybody?”

“No.”

“I'm disappointed,” she said, almost pouting.

The female bodyguard escorted me to the elevator, the rattling metal dropping to the lobby. She held the door for my exit, bracing the brass lattice with her forearm, where a blue tattoo shaped like a cross stretched down her arm. As I passed the desk, the security guard wished me a good afternoon.

The light on Denny Way felt dreamlike, intangible. Traffic roared down the street, but the sound was muted, as though the automobiles were nothing more than schools of fish passing silently underwater, the metallic doors flashing like scales. I climbed into my car, the surreal sensation pervading my mind, as though I'd just stepped off a legendary Greek island where all the warrior women had perished.

At 2:40 p.m., Lucia Lutini whipped the Italian wool cape around her shoulders and walked past the dusty cubicles, the stacks of worn paper, the bulletin boards layered with curling memos. She looked like Mediterranean nobility gliding through the bean fields full of serfs.

I shrugged into my blazer and followed her out to Spring Street. In front of us, two administrative clerks walked twenty-five feet from the building's entrance, per the law, and stopped where crushed cigarette butts littered the sidewalk.

“Ah,” Lucia said as we passed. “They're gone.”

“Smoke bothers you?” I asked.

“On the contrary. I enjoy a good cigarette now and then. What I don't care for is the company of young female smokers. They smoke cheap brands, use cigarettes for dieting, and it's tire-some watching such a futile struggle.”

I glanced over my shoulder. One of the clerks was leaning against a parking meter, the other crossed her arms over a paunch of stomach. They were squeezed into straight skirts, their stretchy blouses gripping all the wrong places. They puffed like locomotives.

“This is what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

“Smoking?”

“Profiling.”

As we crossed Pioneer Square, I told her about the poker game and that a seat was open for us in tomorrow night's game. The wind was swirling dry leaves, stirring, stopping, stirring again. We crossed South Jackson Street where the sign in Danato's window said closed. But Lucia keyed open the side door, waving to the Italian dishwasher with the smoldering eyes, and called out to her father.

“Lucia!” He said her name with five syllables. “And you bring your friend with you. So good, so good!”

In the back room, we sat on the upturned buckets. Lucia's elderly uncle shuffled past, a gaunt man with the bent posture of perpetual suffering. After she introduced me, the two of them spoke in rapid Italian while I wondered about my experience with great meals. They could never be repeated. And yet when Danato Lutini carried in the sausage sandwiches, the sheer fragrance caused me to reconsider.

“Mangia!”
he said.

The first bite closed my eyes. A hum fluttered from the back of my throat, involuntary as a moan. Danato laughed, then left, and Lucia and I ate without words. When we finished, he brought espresso and almond biscotti. I tried to beg off. But he lifted his hands, the fingers gathering on each thumb, the wrists circling the air. A small emphatic gesture.

“Eh, Raleigh,” he said. “You gotta eat for the hunger that's coming.”

I snapped the biscotti, hints of lemon and cinnamon dancing on my tongue. I watched Lucia, elegant even on an upturned plastic bucket.

“You know who Kit Carson is?” I asked.

“First female to take the World Poker Championship. May 1989.”

“One night at that poker table, Lucia, you could read all those guys. You'd have them profiled before the first hand was over.”

“You really believe they have something to do with the girl's disappearance?”

“She's a gambling addict, from what I can tell.” I pulled out the green plastic disk from the casino, telling Lucia about the roommate's reaction when she saw me, what the ex-boyfriend said about Courtney playing the big leagues. “There's something wrong here, I just can't figure out what.”

“So, why not check out the casino?” Lucia said. “Why bother with this high roller game?”

“I put in a request for a search on the casino,” I said. “But the poker game is tomorrow night and there won't be another for two weeks. Kit Carson might not be in that game. And after that, she leaves for Monte Carlo. In the meantime, the girl is still missing and I've got nothing else. Lucia, it has to be this game, this week. I can't play it. But you can.”

We finished our espresso and walked back to the kitchen. Danato was scraping down the wide steel grill with a metal brush, his short thick torso working under the chef 's jacket. Lucia leaned down, kissing his forehead.

“My Lucia.” He looked at me. “She needs a good friend.”

“Papa!”

“The truth, Lucia. You work too much crime, nobody gets close. You gonna wind up a rose with only the thorns. And Raleigh, she got the same problem.”

Lucia's uncle sat on a kitchen stool beneath the pot rack, scorched pans and old tongs hanging over his head. He read a folded newspaper in his lap and Lucia stepped over to him, kissing his cheek. He didn't react, except to mutter under his breath, his eyes remaining on the newspaper, his thick brows pulled down in concentration.

Danato shrugged his shoulders.

“Family,” he said, “what're you gonna do?”

chapter thirteen

Y
ou, my dear, will have an enormous advantage at the table,” Kit Carson was saying to Lucia. “These men either idolize you or hate you, or they want you in bed. Any of those motivations will help you beat them. Are you with me?”

It was Tuesday night and Kit Carson had changed from her aqua pajamas into a black tuxedo with a satin cummerbund red as polished rubies. A full-size poker table was set up in her loft, and Kit Carson stood in the divot of the dealer's position. Behind her the windows framed the night, the saltwater below spreading like ink, the city lights twinkling along the waterfront.

My cell phone rang.

She glared at me.

My aunt's number was displayed on the caller ID. I silenced the phone's ring. “Sorry.”

“As I was saying,” Kit Carson growled, giving me a sharp look before turning to Lucia. Her expression softened. “You're going to manipulate their emotions.”

Lucia was sitting next to the bodyguard with the bleached hair. Next to her was an Asian girl introduced as Jonna. She wore a tank top with a yellow road sign advertising “Bad Girl on Board.” I sat at the other end of the table's crescent.

“Now, let's talk money,” Kit Carson said. “One reason that Courtney plays this table so well is because whatever happens, it doesn't change her financial status. If she wins $200,000, so what? She loses that much, big deal. Act like that, like the beloved sister of Bill Gates. Or maybe cousin. You're too good-looking to be his sister.”

Jonna laughed, exposing teeth like canine incisors. Kit Carson threw her a glance, silencing her before dealing a round. The cards sifted from her manicured hands and after two hits, I folded with a pair of threes. Jonna and the bodyguard remained. But Lucia finally took them out with a “wheel”—Ace, 2, 3, 4, 5.

The skin on Kit Carson's face relaxed, as much as it could after years of tightening. She dealt another game. None of my cards matched, and when I tried to bluff, the bodyguard called my hand.

Kit Carson looked at Lucia. “Did you see it too?”

Lucia turned to me. “You're a terrible liar, Raleigh. You looked at your cards, hesitated, then made the bet.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“The hesitation means you don't like to lie. After you made the bet, your hand went up, resting near your mouth. Women who don't like lying always put a hand near their mouth when they're forced to do it.”

Kit Carson restrained her smile. “I'm glad you didn't try to read it in her eyes. Half these guys are going to wear sunglasses all night. You'll be forced to look for other tells.” She described the player whose pulse throbbed in his neck when he bluffed; the one who pretended to check his cards incessantly, but only when he wasn't bluffing. “And if Pusan Paul starts to exaggerate, be careful. Like all male exaggerations, it's about seduction. I bat my eyes, but the seduction doesn't work on me.”

The bodyguard nudged Jonna. Jonna grinned. Lucia's expression remained implacable.

“That's what I thought,” Kit Carson said. “Seduction won't work on you either.” She sighed. “I wish I could be there. It's like sending Mona Lisa to the table.”

The next day, after our late-night tutorial with Kit Carson, my nerves jangled as a half-dozen chairs scraped across the linoleum in the Violent Crimes conference room.

At the front of the room Brian Basker, our SWAT team coordinator, stood like a bulky ninja, his black Kevlar armor and leather boots matching those of six more SWAT guys, all of whom stood along the back wall. Basker waited while the agents sat down at the conference room table, among them Lucia Lutini, Jack Stephanson, and Byron Ngo, who was part of the organized crime squad.

Allen McLeod stood to my right, wearing his usual outfit of pious bureaucracy—white shirt heavily starched, dark slacks, red suspenders, red tie. But the expression on McLeod's face showed focused concern and his eyes continually drifted toward the one person at the table I didn't recognize—a lean, midthirties guy wearing a similar climb-the-ladder outfit. Nobody introduced him either, although he was taking notes, shielding his tablet from the agents around him.

Basker, lantern-jawed and large, clasped muscular hands at his waist, a soldier's version of “at rest.”

“We sent Harford down to the warehouse with some business cards this morning,” he said, referring to one of the SWAT guys. “He posed as a carpet wholesaler and they gave him a tour of the warehouse. It's standard-issue commercial space downstairs, concrete floor, twenty-five foot ceilings.” He turned to the white board behind him, picking up the marker that rested on the ledge, stabbing at a blue rectangle on the board. “Our biggest issue is the stacks of rolled carpet on the main level. They run in a north-south pattern.”