Factoid 3: Las Vegas can be a real shitty place to die.
Ask Luke Cox.
Not that’s he’s likely to tell you much. Nine-millimeter bullets have a tendency to shut up even the most loquacious among us, especially when they’re fired point-blank into your skull. Four of them, especially. Has a serious impact on the sheets as well.
“He was shot right here,” said Danny, as we waited in the hotel room for the Vegas PD to arrive early Saturday morning. Danny stood by the side of the bed and showed roughly where Cox would have been when the first bullet hit. “He started to spin back. Must’ve realized there was a person there on the side in that chair whom he’d missed when he came in. First shot probably killed him; the rest were to make sure. I’ve seen pumpkins in better shape than that skull.”
“Wrong season for trick or treat.” We took a quick peek around the hotel room. Cox’s suitcase sat near the end of the bed; it had been rifled through and the clothes strewn nearby. The cop in Danny wouldn’t let him touch anything, but I had no such qualms. Cox’s license and credit cards were still in his wallet, which was in his back pocket. Otherwise, his pockets were empty.
“So I guess he wasn’t the mastermind,” said Danny. “Not Shadow, either.”
“You’re still thinking like a policeman, Danny. Jumping to conclusions.”
“Just interpreting the evidence.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Jumping to conclusions.”
The body was cold. We’d have to check with the maid to find out when the room had been made up last, but it was a good bet that the DO NOT DISTURB sign had kept her out the day before. The room had a certain stuffy smell to it.
“Police on the way, Dick,” said Sean over the commo system. He was downstairs in the lobby.
“You all right with handling this on your own?” I asked Danny.
He nodded. Danny had been the one to call the cops. He had a straight rap for them, which hinged on his official position in Homeland Security. The local police wouldn’t know the organization well enough to realize that the Office of Internal Security Affairs (Danny) and Threat Data, Polling and Logging/Intelligence (Cox) barely existed on the same planet together, let alone had any real dealings. Danny wasn’t likely to have to get all that exact, anyway. As for myself, while there are only a few things I like better than talking for hours to cops, I generally prefer that such interviews take place in the company of a good bottle of Bombay Sapphire, or perhaps a few cold Buds at a lobster bake. I had a hell of a lot of work to do, beginning with some phone calls to make back East. I was about to ruin the holiday weekend for a whole slew of people.
I began with Karen, who’d already told me her weekend was ruined, anyway, since I wasn’t around to share it.
“What do you know about Cox?” I asked when she picked up the phone.
“I’d hang up if it were anyone but you, Dick,” she said.
We traded a bit of that back and forth, and then I told her what we’d found. She didn’t think Cox could be a scumbag—a dupe, maybe, but not an active member of any sort of terrorist network or cell. I trust her judgment of people, but trust wasn’t the issue, nor was judgment. I left it to her to start hitting the phones at the agency, alerting the different pooh-bahs to the problem. She promised to get back to me with as much intel on Cox as she could by the end of the day.
I called Rich Armstead myself. I hate being the bearer of bad news but it is one of the unshirkable duties of a commander, and even if I hadn’t felt it was my job, on a personal level I owed it to him. Rich, who was still in Argentina, took it about as well as you’d expect, with a few “all rights” and clipped sentences, and maybe one or two four-letter words thrown in. The sailor in him had not died, and Annapolis had never purged those four-letter descriptive adjectives from his vocabulary, especially when he got a little emotional.
I met with Mayor Oscar Goodman later that day. By then, the local news people had found out about Cox’s death, and he’d been bombarded with questions. He’d already gone on record saying that it had nothing to do with the Independence Day Parade. I can’t blame him. For one thing, no one, including me, knew that it did. More important, one of his jobs as mayor is to reassure people, and that’s what he was doing.
Oscar is the consummate politician, and Las Vegas is his baby. I had been the grand marshal for the Veteran’s Day Parade in 2003. Oscar held the parade in downtown Las Vegas to give the area a “rebirth” economically. The major casinos on the strip bitched a little, and Independence Day was the payback. Oscar was in the “I will not fail” mode, which I admire, since I have been placed there myself more than once.
At the same time Oscar was playing easygoing papa for the media, he was kicking butt behind the scenes to make sure he was right. He even gave me a tenacious bulldog grilling when I saw him later that morning, as if I were responsible for Cox’s demise. Oscar can get downright vicious when it comes to protecting Vegas; he’s a homer in the best sense of the word, and I wouldn’t want to cross swords with him—at least not in a fair fight. I had to be honest with him. I had no idea why Cox had been killed or whether it was related to a terrorist operation targeting the city. He asked me point-blank if I thought he ought to call off the parade, and I told him no. There’s a fine line between security and paranoia. You can’t completely screw up your life just because someone’s determined to mess with it; if you do, you’ve let the assholes win. Oscar asked if I’d lend a hand reviewing the security arrangements. I told him it went without saying.
“Well thanks for coming out,” he said. “When I heard you canceled, I was thinking of sending a few police officers out to arrest you and drag you here.” The mayor smiled, and so did I.
“That would have beeen interesting.”
We walked downstairs to a command center to meet the police chief and some of his security directors. I made a few small suggestions over the next hour and a half, but overall their plan was a solid one. The majority of the security directors are old street warriors who have been there, done that. Their experience allows a certain amount of common sense to flourish beyond the gadgets and glimmer of the strip.
The parade was taking place up on the strip near the large casinos, ending right near the newest extravaganza, Starship Vegas. All of the major casinos had gotten together and worked with the local authorities on a specific security plan for the event. Vegas is pretty unique when it comes to security. It’s always been a major concern for the gambling industry, and there’s not a technology or method that they haven’t tried. Some of the casinos use pretty sophisticated methods to track individuals considered personae non grata, and I’d venture to say that Vegas is ten times as secure as any other city in the world. That doesn’t mean that bad things can’t happen there. The security people and police will tell you that right out. But they start from a much more effective base when they gear up to protect their family jewels. They spared neither expense nor effort in this case. Besides thousands of private security people, police officers, and National Guardsmen, the Air Force had supplied a JSTARS surveillance aircraft and its attendant sensors to help keep track of the area. The airplane had been equipped with some new systems designed to work in an urban warfare environment, and they had Army Delta threat specialists aboard and hooked into the network. A full-scale fighter patrol covered the sky, with rapid response helicopters to hit trouble areas. The casinos donated their own helicopters to the cause for additonal surveillance and response assets. These birds are normally reserved to transfer the high rollers from the airport and their private jets to their suites without the aggravation of the limo ride through all the daily traffic in Las Vegas. There were undercover security people in the crowd and enough video and high-tech sensors to keep Motorola in business for another twelve months.
I rendezvoused with Danny and Shunt late Saturday afternoon at a little shooting gallery off East Tropicana, where we took turns puncturing paper with vintage tommy guns. Nothing like the loud rip of an ancient submachine gu
n to calm your nerves. Shunt had never fired a Thompson before, and between that and the women walking around underwear-optional, I think the poor boy was about to overload. Put a dweeb in the City of Sin and powerful things start to happen. Appetites whetted with gunpowder, we crossed over the Strip to West Tropicana and a little Italian restaurant near Dunville. You won’t see the place written up in any gourmet magazines, but that’s their loss.
“Police have been watching the railroads for the past few weeks,” said Danny. “Cox sent some intelligence their way that indicated that something was up. Which must mean that the action’s somewhere else.”
For just a second I had a paranoia attack: maybe the LNG port really was the main show. But I couldn’t see how that would fit with Cox’s murder. Nobody arranges their own demise to divert attention from a terrorist attack.
According to Danny, the detectives investigating Cox’s murder theorized that he had been killed by another hotel guest who’d managed to hack the computerized card key and gotten into his room. Danny thought it was more likely to have been an employee or someone posing as an employee, since it would have been easier for him or her to grab a master key. All of the employees’ whereabouts, however, were accounted for, as were their cards. The police had interviewed most, though not all, of the employees with no results.
The way Danny reconstructed it, Cox had arrived sometime around three P.M. Friday, gone into his room, then left, possibly to get some dinner. When he came back—around twelve, though until the autopsy it would be impossible to say—he was murdered by someone already in the room, or by someone he let in.
“They have surveillance cameras near the elevators. No one came or went around that time,” Danny added. “He didn’t use the steps, at least not all the way down to the lobby, because there’s a camera in the lobby that covers that door, and no one came out around then.”
“Down or up the steps to another floor, where he caught the elevator?”
“Maybe. If he did that, once they have the time of death, they’ll be able to check better.”
Or maybe not. My guess was that the stairs opened into at least one place not covered by a video camera—the basement, say.
“Where’d he go after he checked in?” I asked.
“The ten-million-dollar question. He didn’t use a credit card, and he didn’t charge anything to his room. He’s on the elevator-area video at eleven fifty-four. Alone.”
We had some dinner and then checked in with Trace, who’d taken charge of settling the rest of the team into their various hotels and getting them to bed so they’d be fresh in the morning. She told me she was going to bed—and that I ought to check in early myself.
“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” she mocked.
“Words to live by,” I shot back. “Especially in Vegas. Pleasant dreams.”
“My ass.”
“Maybe you’ll see those walking coyotes again.”
I expected her to say something sarcastic, but instead she nodded very seriously. “I already have,” she said, touching the stone on the necklace around her neck.
“They come from that thing?” I asked.
“This?” She hadn’t realized she’d pawed it, I guess. She glanced down and then laughed at herself. “No, this is just a rock.”
“You see your relatives when you were away?”
“They’re out in Oregon, Dick.”
“Just asking.”
“I decided to accept.”
“The godmother thing?”
“Yeah. It’s more than that.” She reached into her pocket and took out a small rock about the size of a very large jawbreaker. It looked similar to the stone around her neck, except that it was bigger and neither as polished nor as symmetrical. It also didn’t have a hole in it. “You see anything in the stone, Dick?” she asked, handing it to me.
Gray veins slanted through the red glint of the rock in an odd starburst pattern. If it was supposed to be a crystal ball, the reception was particularly cloudy tonight.
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Feel warm or cold?” she asked.
“Warm. Because it’s been in your pocket.”
She smiled at me, as if that weren’t so. “Certain members of the nation are chosen to feel the power,” she said. “It’s not up to them—it just comes. They can choose to go with it, to accept it or not. Geronimo—he’s probably the most famous Apache to people outside the tribe, him and Cochise, maybe. The power was very strong in him, and he accepted it. He was a great medicine man. That’s how he could lead the people.”
“Into a big slaughter with the U.S. Army.”
“No. The Army fought him but never could defeat him. The general who tracked him made a deal, but the President reneged later on. Geronimo lived as a prisoner, but only because he was tricked. He was never defeated. He couldn’t be.”
“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say; it sounded pretty New Agey to me. Not that I don’t have great respect for Indians; on the contrary. But when some of their spiritual beliefs get translated, something gets a little screwy in the translation. “So, you still have those dreams then, huh?”
“I want you to be very careful.”
“You believe in talking coyotes, Trace?” I was half-kidding, half-serious. We’d never had this deep a talk about her beliefs.
She explained that, according to Apache legend, coyotes had once been a tribe of people who’d been transformed into animal shapes. They were important omens, but their meanings could be mysterious. She didn’t understand everything that was involved in the dream, except for the most obvious part—that I was in danger.
“The battle between good and evil continues every day. The forces are stark in the desert,” she added. “Apache warriors understood this. Show no mercy.”
“Pretty much the story of my life,” I told her, bidding her a good night.
Danny, Shunt, and I hit a bar where the girls worked with G-strings and nightsticks. Shunt’s eyes rolled back into his head and we took him back to his hotel, hosed him off, and put him to bed. With the night still young and nubile, Danny and I found our way over to Caesar’s on the Strip. While Danny threw away some of his money at the blackjack table, I slipped back to the security office, where I made contact with an old friend. I was interested in seeing whether I was being tailed. I’d decided to dispense with Capel’s shooters since that hadn’t brought any results. Danny and I double-backed several times en route to the hotel and even split up but didn’t come up with anything. The video cameras covering the game rooms didn’t reveal any noticeable trail team. Maybe Shadow had taken the night off.
My cell phone rang as I was leaving. It was Karen burning the midnight oil back East.
“Can you get to an Internet connection?” she asked.
“Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Check your email. I’ll forward you a URL.”
A few minutes later, I logged onto my email server from the office of the casino’s security director. The URL Karen had sent had slashes and backslashes, question marks, and numbers. I had no idea where the hell I was going until I ended up there: the electronic morgue of a newspaper in Port Hammond, Delaware. A story popped on a screen of a murder-suicide that had taken place in 1972. A man had killed his wife and three kids, apparently because of financial problems. The weapon was a .38 revolver; everyone had been shot at very close range.
According to the story, one of the kids had survived, though he was reported in critical condition.
His name was Luke J. Cox.
Chapter
18
There were a half-dozen other articles about the Cox family in the newspaper morgue. The longest ran several screens and had been written about a month after the murder-suicide. The crime had been the most shocking thing that had happened in Port Hammond since the town had been incorporated in 1710, and the local newspaper had assigned two reporters to try to figure out what had happened and wh
y. According to the story they wrote, the Coxes had been pretty much your typical American family at the time. Mr. Cox, whose first name was Harold, had been in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War; he’d spent a lot of his time on the aircraft carrier Coral Sea and had gone out as a petty officer at the end of his hitch. After the usual period of post-service adjustment, he’d found his way to commercial fishing. There was a gap there, but somehow he’d become a mate on a tugboat, soon managed to get a post as a captain, and eventually bought his own tug. He’d spent perhaps a decade building up the business, and according to the stories had become pretty successful.
Along the way, though, he’d developed a taste for gambling. He’d indulge in his hobby by taking trips to Las Vegas once a year, then more often as his business grew. Vegas was a different place in those days, but human nature wasn’t. The reporters couldn’t say how well he’d done in the early years—they seemed to believe he’d gotten his first tugboat after a trip to the old Caesar’s Palace—but if Lady Luck had been a particularly good friend at first, she’d soon turned fickle. Two weeks before he killed his family, he’d filed for commercial and personal bankruptcy.
Back in those days, bankruptcy was a pretty shameful thing, but there seemed more to it than that. The reporters found that Mr. Cox had been visited by “unnamed employees” of a small casino after he’d filed for bankruptcy.
“More likely they weren’t connected with the casinos at all,” said Danny, who by this time had found me and was reading over my shoulder. “They’re probably connected to debt that’s not covered by bankruptcy laws.”
The reporters carefully quoted from the police report, which said there was no sign of forced entry, and they were pretty conclusive that Mr. Cox had done the shooting. But anyone reading the story might wonder whether those “unnamed employees”—who’d been seen around town the day before the homicide—might have helped him out a little. Mr. Cox was not known to own a .38, and there were no records indicating where the gun had come from.
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