“An hour ago…” Stitts muttered. “An hour ago…”
Something felt wrong about that, but it wasn’t until he pulled away from the window that it clicked.
The window cleaners were on the list of people they had to interview because they’d cleaned the windows the day before the murders.
And now they were back again, the day after.
“Shit,” Stitt swore, hurrying from the room. He had to catch the window cleaners before they took off like the man with the cigarette in the parking garage.
“You okay?” The tech hollered after him. “Is it—holy shit!”
Stitts was almost out the door when the man’s inflection drew him back.
“What? What is it?”
The tech extended a gloved finger to an area just off the strip.
“I think… I think a bomb just went off.”
Chapter 31
Gridlock. Absolute, utter gridlock.
At first, Chase thought that this was the norm for the Las Vegas strip on a busy Friday night. But when the sky erupted in a mixture of red and white and blue lights, Chase knew differently.
Something had happened.
It took Chase a few moments to realize that the traffic on the strip was being caused, at least in part, by the fact that all the side streets seemed to be blocked by police cruisers. It took her fifteen minutes to finally make it to the next side street and when she did, she took it. Before she’d even made it to the police car, an officer approached, his hands held out in front of him as if he were trying to push her back using only air pressure.
“You can’t come down here; street’s close.”
Chase quickly flashed her badge.
“What’s going on?”
“Looks like there was another bombing,” the officer said, leaning in close to her open window. “This time at a church.”
A Church? First the Planned Parenthood building and now a church? Wasn’t it usually those who frequented churches that bombed Planned Parenthood? Someone’s ideology is mighty messed up.
“For real? A church?”
“Yeah, the church is known around here as the Queer Jesus church. Apparently, it’s one of the few that supports gay rights and gay marriages.”
And that explains that, Chase thought.
“You want to go through?”
Chase looked at the officer for a moment and then turned her attention to the commotion in the distance.
She didn’t want to go in. The truth was, Chase didn’t give a shit about this, especially if it, like the bombing at Planned Parenthood, resulted in zero injuries or deaths. But going back the other way, fighting traffic for another hour was even less desirable.
“Yeah, I’ll take a look,” she said at last. The officer stepped aside, making his way to his car and reversing so that Chase’s vehicle could squeeze by.
She was stopped twice more on her way to the church, both times she showed her badge and got through without any difficulty.
Eventually, when she could continue no further by car, Chase parked and got out, pressing her hands deep into her pockets. To her right, behind a large bomb squad van, was the church, the front door of which had been reduced to a char. The damage seemed limited to the front stoop, however, as the interior looked barely touched. And, judging by the three empty ambulances to her left, Chase was fairly certain that this, like the previous bombing, hadn’t intended to injure.
“First Planned Parenthood, now the Church of Gay Jesus,” she muttered under her breath. “What the hell is the point of this?”
Chase was in the process of turning back to her car when she froze.
Jeremy Stitts was standing not fifteen feet from her, his eyes locked on hers. He wasn’t smiling.
Stitts had every right to be angry with her, given that, once again, she’d taken his car and left him for hours. Not to mention the fact that it was nearly nine now, and they had planned to eat dinner together at 6:30. And yet, all she felt in that moment was anger.
How dare he judge me? He’s just a condescending prick like the rest of them. Like Agent Martinez, like Director Hampton, like those assholes in Alaska and Chicago and Boston. It’s only a matter of time before he starts calling me ma’am.
Gritting her teeth, Chase turned away from her partner and hurried back to her car. She was just pulling the door open when Stitts’s voice reached her.
“Chase! Chase, wait!”
Chase took a deep breath and stood with one foot in and one foot out of the vehicle as Stitts approached.
“Where were you?” He demanded.
Dusk had transitioned into night and in Las Vegas the millions of tiny suns that made up the strip, cast Stitts in an eerie, twinkling glow.
“I told you,” Chase snapped. “I went to see Stu Barnes, to see if he knew anything about the game, if he was involved.”
Stitts’s face twisted.
“That was more than five hours ago.”
“No shit,” she spat back.
Stitts recoiled as if he’d been struck and for a brief moment, Chase regretted her words. He wasn’t like Martinez, he wasn’t like any of them.
He was different.
“Did you… do you need help?” Stitts asked under his breath.
Any regrets Chase felt in that moment dissolved.
“That’s none of your fucking business, Stitts. I don’t need you to look after me, look out for me, protect me, or any of that bullshit.”
But that was a lie, too. It was his business because she was certain that his ass was on the line this time as well. And she did need somebody to look out for her. But this understanding did nothing to stem her anger.
“I’m sorry, it’s just… I was worried.”
“Worried about what? About your job? About whatever alt-right asshole blew up this church? Or are you worried about finding the bastards who murdered eleven people last night? Is that what you’re worried about? Because if not, if you’re worried about me, don’t waste your damn time. It’s not worth it.”
Stitts said nothing.
“Stop doing that,” she snarled. “I’m not one of your fucking suspects.”
Stitts just stared, and Chase was helpless to stop herself from venting.
“You worried that I won’t be able to help you by touching the dead? Well, let me tell you something, Stitts. You really want to know what I felt when I touched the bartender’s arm? When I grabbed Mike Hartman’s tattoo? Hmmm?”
She waited for him to react, but Stitts just remained stone-faced. Sweat was not just forming on her brow now, but was leaving wet streaks down her face.
“Nothing. That’s what I saw, Stitts; absolutely fucking nothing. I touched his arm and nothing happened. I have no clue what went on in that room, and if I can’t… if I can’t…” her voice hitched and it took considerable effort to finish that sentence. “…and if I can’t do that, Stitts, I can’t do anything.”
The tears started to flow then, tears not just because whatever strange ability she once had was gone, but tears because of what she’d done with Stu Barnes, the drinks she’d had at his place, missing another rendezvous with Stitts.
Her tears were her shame, her anger at herself most of all, manifested.
“I know,” he said softly. “I know.”
Despite the way she’d treated him when Chase collapsed into his chest and sobbed, Stitts wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.
Chapter 32
“Is she going to be all right?” Greg Ivory asked, leaning into the window of Stitts’s car. They had separated at the bombing, with Greg taking his squad car back to the station, while Stitts and Chase had taken his.
Shortly after they’d left, Chase had dozed off in the passenger seat. She looked exhausted and Stitts smelled alcohol on her breath at the scene, but there was something more alarming about her than that.
It was the way she’d reacted to him, the visceral, misplaced aggression that was most telling. Even though before her br
eakdown Chase had been shouting at him, he wasn’t the target; she was.
Stitts cleared his throat.
“She’ll be okay,” he said, even though he was far from certain. No matter how hard he tried to help her, there was no guarantee that she would ever be okay.
Chase roused at the sound of his voice.
“Georgina? Is that you?” she asked sleepily.
Stitts swallowed the lump in his throat and silently indicated to Greg that he would meet him inside the station.
“No, Chase, it’s me, Stitts.”
Chase blinked once, twice, and then sat up straight.
With a sigh, she looked around, her eyes eventually falling on the LVMPD station.
“Well, what are we waiting for, then? Let’s get in there and figure out who our Houdini is.”
***
“So, care to give me an update, or what?” Chase said.
Stitts stared at her for a moment, wanting to ask her the same thing, to inquire about her meeting with Stu. Fighting this urge, he turned to Greg instead.
“Greg? Did you find out about the food?”
Greg looked at them both with a curious expression on his face and shifted his weight onto the cane before answering.
“Mike Hartman ordered the food to the room.”
Chase made a face.
“The bartender ordered food? Really? That doesn’t make sense; what bartender orders food for himself at a high-stakes poker game?”
“Maybe he ordered it for one of the other players,” Stitts offered.
Greg quickly quashed that idea.
“I’ve got it on pretty good authority that it was for him. In fact, it was the same meal he ordered pretty much every night when he was on break: hamburger and fries, no onion, no pickle.”
“But he didn’t eat it.”
All eyes were on Stitts now.
“I went back to the scene—the meal was untouched.”
“That’s strange,” Chase said, summing up their collective thoughts. “Anything else?”
“Neither the waiter who delivered the food to the room, a Tony Ballucci, nor the window washer, Peter Doherty, clocked into work today.”
At the mention of the window washer, Stitts’s eyes flicked to the board.
“Fuck,” he said under his breath. “That’s him.”
Chase turned to face him.
“That’s who? Who’s who?”
Stitts walked over and tapped Peter’s face.
“This is the guy that ran from me at the casino. His hair is blond now, but I’m sure of it.”
“Ran from you?”
Stitts shrugged.
“Long story. Never caught him.”
“You can blame your new habit for that,” Chase said.
Stitts frowned.
“Peter may not have clocked into work, but he was definitely there. And there’s something else. Someone washed the windows on the seventh floor today.”
Chase looked incredulous.
“Really? How often do they clean the windows at The Emerald? The hotel must have… what? A thousand of them? Is the manager OCD or something?”
Stitts pictured Shane’s hand, covered in splotches of ink.
“Definitely not.”
“So why would the cleaners clean the same windows two days apart?”
“Maybe they were snapping pictures? Videos for TMZ, maybe?” Greg suggested.
Stitts rocked his head side to side and said as he contemplated this.
“Maybe. But you’d think that it was highly regulated. I mean, they have to set up the carriage on the roof, etc.”
Chase threw her arms up.
“Oh, great. So now we’ve got a starving bartender who doesn’t eat his meal and an overzealous window cleaner who may or may not have been at work today. Fucking Sherlock Holmes, we ain’t.”
Chase’s words hung in the air of the small, cramped office for several minutes before she broke it again.
“And we’re no closer to solving the most important question.”
“Which is?” Greg asked.
“How the fuck our killer got into, and out of, the room. If we can figure that out, I’m pretty sure we’d be able to narrow down our pool of suspects.”
“Well,” Stitts replied. “Unless someone managed the unlikely task of somehow altering the video, nobody entered or left that room within an hour and a half of the murders. And unless the guns were somehow dissolved, it can’t be a warped murder/suicide, either. The only thing that entered the room was the—shit.”
He hurried over to his laptop on Greg’s desk.
“What is it?” Chase asked. “What?
Instead of answering, Stitts brought up a grainy video of the seventh-floor hallway. He skipped forward until Tony Ballucci appeared on screen, pushing the food service cart.
“The cart…” Stitts said at last. “The cart is the only thing that entered and exited the room.”
Chapter 33
“See that?” Chase asked, leaning close to the computer monitor. “See how he has to shift his hips to get the cart moving? If it really is just a hollow cart covered in the tablecloth, with a burger and fries on top, why is he straining to get it out of the elevator?”
Chase looked to Stitts, who nodded.
“Yeah, I see it. Now watch as he goes down hall, knocks on the door and then one of Luther’s men brings it in.”
On screen, the video played out exactly how Stitts described it. He fast-forwarded until the hotel security — a cube of a man with a long ponytail that ran down his back — exited the elevator and made his sweet ass time toward the room in question.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Stitts asked.
“I’m sure as hell not; I don’t have a fucking clue what you guys are talking about,” Greg said.
Chase ignored him and focused her attention on the monitor.
“You think this is some sort of Trojan horse type thing? The killer was brought in on this trolley, shot up the room and killed everybody, and then escaped somehow?”
Stitts shrugged.
“It would explain why the security guards were caught off guard.”
“Keep going, keep it running.”
The security guard knocked on the door and then waited. A minute or so later, he used his card to open the door and stepped inside. Almost immediately, he reappeared, stumbling down the hall toward the elevator, walkie pressed to his lips. After he was gone, Stitts fast-forwarded until the police arrived, then kept the video going in double-speed until CSI appeared on the scene.
“There’s no way our killer hid under the cart in the room the whole time. Not with all these cops and CSI coming back and forth. There’s no way; that’s ridiculous,” Chase said.
“Not unless maybe one of the techs or officers were in on it,” Stitts replied with a grin.
He slowed the video to real-time when a CSI tech rolled the cart out of the room and pushed it against the wall just outside the door. Even though Chase thought that Stitts was grasping at straws, she waited with bated breath as the video continued.
“There,” Stitt exclaimed, pausing the video.
The same tech who had pushed the trolley out of the room appeared to look around before reaching down and lifting the tablecloth. Despite how unlikely Stitts’s theory was, Chase wanted to see a man under there, perhaps one dressed in army fatigues, an AR-15 in his lap. That would at least be something to go on, solve at least part of the mystery. But the area beneath the cart was empty.
“Shit,” Stitts muttered under his breath. “Where the fuck did they go? How did they get out of the room?”
Chase noticed that he was still using they based on the greaseball manager’s slip of the tongue. She, on the other hand, wasn’t so certain that it was more than one person.
“The windows. It has to be the windows,” Greg said. “Unless they pulled an Inside Job and built a false wall.”
Stitts sighed.
“The room matches th
e schematic. Besides, the cops have been over every square inch of the place. As for the windows, I checked them myself. They don’t open, and they are in perfect condition — they’re solid.”
Drawing Dead (A Chase Adams FBI Thriller Book 3) Page 12
