Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2)

by Stephanie Caffrey

  The rush-hour traffic was moving at about half speed. "Okay, so you both owed the same guys money. He was in deep too?"

  He whistled softly. "As deep as I am. Or more. Five, six hundred, something like that." Mayfield's aunt had told me about his money problems, but I hadn't known the extent of it.

  Weber coughed softly. "So a few months ago these folks realized I was never going to be able to pay them back. God knows why it took them so long to figure that one out. And Mayfield wasn't any better. He made more than I do, but he spent a lot more too. But then I got that bright idea, which I thought was a genius move at the time. You ready for this? Here it is. I could force Jerry Conn out and say he was retiring or something like that, and then I could hire Mayfield to take his spot. Mayfield would get a huge raise, and he and I could split it. It was a way we could both make some money and maybe dig out from the giant hole we'd dug ourselves."

  I was nodding along, fascinated. I didn't see what this had to do with Mayfield's murder, but the information about his massive debts would be another layer to add to the portrait we were going to paint of him in court. Weber had grown silent, and suddenly everything fell into place.

  "So Mayfield's murder was pretty bad for you," I said softly.

  He nodded silently. "That was kind of my last hope, and now it's just me versus some guys who know they're never going to be paid back."

  "But they're not going to get a dime if they kill you, right?"

  "You'd think that. But they're smart. Guess who just took out a three-million-dollar policy on my life last year. My ex-wife. Guess who the real beneficiary is. It's in her name, of course, but they've made it clear to both of us who gets the money in the end. They actually make a profit if something would happen to me."

  I couldn't think of anything comforting to say, so I kept my own counsel.

  "That's why I wanted the ride home. I can't believe they'd put a bomb in my car—that's too old-Vegas and too obvious. But I'm still just a little, well—"

  "Paranoid? I would be too."

  He sighed again as we slowed down with the traffic. "It's just that yesterday was the big day. I was supposed to pay them fifty grand, but I could only get my hands on twenty. I don't have a feel for how much patience they're going to have, especially now that my ace in the hole got himself shot."

  I was thinking good luck with all that, but I didn't say it aloud.

  "And now," he muttered, "my job is on the line. They're not very happy with me, and I'm running out of casinos! I've already worked everywhere else." He laughed weakly at his little joke.

  I wasn't especially skilled at making reassuring utterances, especially when they would be so phony, so I kept mum for most of the rest of the ride to Bob Weber's house. When we pulled into his subdivision, he tensed up and began scanning the neighborhood attentively. I guessed that he hadn't only been worried about his car being rigged with a bomb—he wanted some company in case someone was waiting for him at home. That would explain his earlier question about whether I was carrying a gun.

  As it turned out, there were no creepy goons waiting on his doorstep.

  "This is next," he said, pointing to his house. "There's no equity in it, of course, but they're not going to let me keep making mortgage payments to live here."

  I gave him my card and told him to call me if he thought of anything that might be useful.

  Something about his behavior had me worried, and a little voice inside me was telling me he was desperate enough to do something awful. I didn't know what I could do to stop it, but I made a mental note to check up on him at some point. It couldn't hurt.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I got home from Bob Weber's house around six and unwound for a few hours before heading off to dance at Cougar's. With my new career picking up a little steam, I was planning to ease out of my dancing gig gradually, but I needed to keep myself in the game a couple nights a week, or my regulars would dry up and find new girls to keep them happy. I wasn't quite ready to risk that.

  One Wednesday evening a month, my church offered confession, an old-fashioned habit I had kept up since grade school on the theory that if I didn't go to confession, no one should. The church was only a two-block detour from my route to Cougar's. If I snagged Father Sweeney, it would be like getting ten minutes of free counseling from an old friend. But if Father Skowronski was presiding, there would be fire and brimstone. When he was hearing confessionals, I tended to use the screened confessional, where I could cower in privacy.

  I sat quietly in the pew waiting for two people ahead of me. In most churches, a girl in tight-fitting yoga clothes and tennis shoes might draw a few unwelcoming glances, but not at St. Christopher's, where a large, vibrant congregation celebrated with an equal amount of tourists under the auspices of the patron saint of luck and travelers. Most weeks, casino chips outnumbered currency in the collection baskets.

  The confessional door opened, and a little old lady in a pink jumpsuit strode out with a smile on her face. She leaned down and winked at me. "Don't worry, hon. It's Father Sweeney tonight."

  I breathed a sigh of relief and waited my turn. When it came, about five minutes later, I walked into the open confessional and faced Father Sweeney face-to-face. With jet-black hair, a pallid face, and kindly blue eyes, the middle-aged priest looked like more than a few of my uncles.

  "Raven," he whispered, waving his finger at me in a mock scold. "Have you quit yet?" He didn't spend much time on small talk.

  "Working on it, Father. I have a new case that might help things along in that department."

  He perked up, and we discussed the case in broad strokes, with him prying ever so politely for a little more information, making me wonder if he fancied himself a modern-day Father Brown or Father Dowling. After a little pep talk, he blessed me and asked me to say five Hail Marys at my earliest possible convenience. I didn't think that was nearly enough penance to atone for my sins, but he was the expert. I said four of the Hail Marys on my walk to Cougar's, hoping Mary would forgive me for praying to her on my way to work at a strip club.

  I still had the uneasy feeling that Weber was in so deep that he might try to do something rash, but he wasn't exactly my responsibility. I was more focused on Ethan's mom. None of that would matter to Ethan, though, if he decided he wasn't going to defend himself by pointing the finger at his own mother. I had a meeting with Ethan and his lawyer scheduled for Friday, so we could discuss the various options he had at his disposal. If he decided to leave his mother out of it, Plan B was to paint Mickey Mayfield as a creep who had lots of enemies. For starters, he owed half a million dollars to loan sharks, and I had video evidence of him having sex with a minor at the brothel in Pahrump. And he wasn't even very funny. The hope was that a jury would conclude it was more likely that any number of people could have killed Mayfield than the sweet-faced Ethan Longoria, who had merely uttered a vague threat against him in a moment of jealous passion. It could have been an angry father, someone Mayfield owed money to, or someone his caustic personality had rubbed the wrong way. We didn't care, so long as it was enough to create reasonable doubt.

  I couldn't fool myself that Plan B was a great plan. All we had on our side was general speculation, when the evidence against Ethan included a specific threat he'd made. Even so, there was nothing physical to connect Ethan to the gun, which was never found, and there were no direct witnesses. If he wanted to roll the dice and protect his mother, he wouldn't be the first. But it would be clear that Plan B was a gamble, while Plan A appeared much safer, at least as far as we knew. In fact, if Andrew got anything more on Devine, we might be able to convince the DA to drop charges entirely rather than waiting for a trial.

  Wednesday night at Cougar's was not a lucrative one. I saw at least one of my regulars getting some up close and personal treatment from a younger girl named Chastain. Five years ago, that would have bothered me, but I realized now that I was actually looking for an excuse to get out of the business entirely. The money
was still too good, and until I built up a bigger detective business, I wasn't going to jump ship entirely. Father Sweeney would call that a cop-out, and he'd be right.

  The next morning a call from Andrew woke me up. He was back at the Chicago airport but would be back in Vegas in the early afternoon. He said he'd take me out for an early dinner to fill me in. The short version was that Devine got away somewhere in a suburb of Frankfurt, but Andrew had managed to snag his bag somehow.

  I pondered the situation over a mango breakfast smoothie. What we had so far was suspicious behavior by Ethan's mom and her boyfriend: large cash withdrawals, the obtaining of a fake passport, and a hasty trip out of the country. On top of that, we had the obvious motive. Patty Longoria had hitched her star to her son's musical career and was overprotective to the point that she would hire a hit man if it cleared a path to stardom for her only son, who had been insulted by the selection of the crass and unpopular Mickey Mayfield. I wasn't sure if Andrew had turned up anything more, or if we even needed it: the story was certainly as plausible as the prosecutor's story that Ethan had killed Mayfield.

  But if we were going to be naming Mrs. Longoria and her boyfriend, James Devine, in the murder (a big if), I wanted something more to bring to Ethan. I figured he might balk if our evidence wasn't airtight—if you're going to claim your mother is a murderer, you want to be pretty certain a jury will agree with you. If we could connect Devine to a gun, or to the crime scene, an acquittal would be a lock, and we'd probably even get the district attorney to drop the charges against Ethan.

  I doubted we'd be able to find the murder weapon, given that Devine had disappeared into Europe. But if I could somehow connect him to the Copacabana near the time of the murder, it would tie everything together with a bow on it. I needed to see the casino's security tapes.

  It wasn't like Copa execs just handed out old security tapes to anyone who asked for them. I knew I'd have to wheel out the big gun, so I called up Charlie Frank, Ethan's high-powered lawyer, and made some inquiries. Jason, his paralegal, got back to me within the hour. The lawyers had already requested the security tapes from the night of the murder, so I could come and view them whenever I wanted, although Jason hinted that an appearance during the lunch hour would be frowned upon.

  I arrived at the lawyer's office just after ten. Suffice it to say that it wasn't what I expected. Given Frank's fame and the large retainers he took in, I was picturing a modern, wood-paneled suite of offices with some kind of water feature and a bevy of attractive, young professionals fluttering about while talking into Bluetooth earpieces. Instead, the law office occupied the second floor of a former warehouse about three blocks from my own office on the outskirts of respectability. The receptionist was an unkempt woman with a 1980's bouffant and a phone presence somewhere between hostile and surly.

  Jason greeted me in what passed for the lobby. I could tell he wasn't a poker player, because his face was telling me in no uncertain terms that I was not what he was expecting. He tried to make a little small talk, but my thin, lifeless smile told him I wanted to get down to business.

  Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. The "multimedia room" consisted of little more than a bare conference room with an ancient TV and a clunky-looking DVD player attached. On the table sat a large cardboard box marked EVIDENCE.

  "This one's the one with Ethan on it. Might want to start there," he suggested, pointing to a DVD on the table.

  "Thanks. Has anyone looked through these yet?

  He smiled. "You're the first. Except for the DA, of course."

  "Of course," I muttered. Jason left me alone with the box, which held about eighty DVDs. The one he'd pointed out had the word SUSPECT scribbled on it in black marker and a smaller notation reading 11:22. The computer-printed label read NW 2 CAGE / SLOT 8A, whatever that meant. I wasn't going to sit there and watch hours of casino tape footage, so I took Jason's advice and popped the SUSPECT DVD into the machine. It fired up with a loud hiss, and when the video finally came on, I fast-forwarded to the eleven-minute mark.

  The video was surprisingly dim, which was probably a function of the low-level lighting inside the Copa's casino floor. It showed a couple of people leaning over the side of a slot machine, and foot traffic passing along the walkway that hugged the wall. Just at the 11:22 mark Ethan's figure passed down the walkway. He was wearing a simple gray T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops, but that was all I could observe in the two seconds he was on-screen. I backed it up and replayed it a half-dozen times. That was it. It was hard to believe a man's freedom could turn on such an innocent-looking, two-second video, but in this case it might. That was all the cops had to link Ethan to the crime scene, and it might be all they needed. Mickey Mayfield was killed between ten and fifteen minutes later, and Ethan didn't have a great reason for still being at the casino so long after his act ended.

  I pulled out a few more DVDs at random, making sure to keep them in their proper order, if there was one. They all had similarly esoteric labels on them, such as CRAPS 4B / PIT or BUFFET W-3. What I was looking for was the employee entrance or exit. That was the key link between the casino floor and the employee parking lot where Mayfield was killed. The cops didn't have Ethan on that security video, but that wasn't especially helpful, because the cameras roamed back and forth and therefore didn't catch absolutely everything that happened on the casino floor.

  After pawing through a few dozen DVDs, I came across a pair that said EMP EXIT / BJ-1. I put one of those in the DVD player, and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. On the left side of the screen lay a walkway covered in the Copa's god-awful peach-and-brown carpeting. A white double door stood at the top end of the screen, and I assumed that was the employee exit. When the camera panned to the right, a blackjack table came into view. The idea was that the casino could zoom in close enough to see a player's cards and hands if it had reason to believe he was cheating, but at the wide angle all I could see were the hunched backs of the two guys at the table.

  Jason came in to check on me. "Everything going okay?"

  "I think so. Hey, I don't suppose I could get copies of these two, could I? Then I'll get out of your hair."

  He grimaced faintly but then came around. "I'm sure I can burn those for you. Just give me ten minutes. I'll meet you back in the lobby."

  I wandered out back to the lobby and eased myself into an overstuffed leather chair, where I frittered away the time on my phone while casting furtive glances at the receptionist's hair, trying to figure out exactly which laws of physics it was transgressing.

  Jason returned with the two DVDs and left wearing a goofy Mona Lisa half grin on his face, the kind where I couldn't tell if he liked me or if he was internally mocking my very existence. I guessed the latter. I decided to enlist help in viewing the DVDs, so I went back to my office, where, as I'd predicted, my suite-mate Mike Madsen wandered into my office trying to disguise his curiosity about the case.

  "Any luck?" he asked oh so casually.

  "Yes. But it depends on Ethan. If he wants to go down this route, I think we can get his mother for the murder. At least, for hiring the murderer."

  His eyes got wide. "Didn't see that coming."

  "I'd love an hour or two of your time, if you have it. You can bill it to Ethan." Mike was always underemployed, so I figured he'd snap at the opportunity.

  "I suppose," he said, playing it cool. "What for?"

  "Got some DVDs to look at." I pulled open my laptop and popped one in the drive. "Can you bring yours in here?"

  He nodded and returned with his own computer, and I handed him the other DVD.

  "What are we looking for?" he asked.

  I frowned. I didn't have a photo of James Devine to show him. "How many James Devines do you think are on Facebook?"

  "Couple thousand, probably. Why?"

  "It would be helpful if you had a photo so you could ID him in the video. I don't think I can describe him to you very well."

  Mike thought
for a second. "Does he have a record?"

  "Yeah."

  "He'll be in the state database. We've got access to that, you know. Do you have a middle initial or birth date?" He punched some keys and pulled up a website I'd never seen.

  "No. But he's late forties, so that would put his birth date around the mid - sixties."

  "That should be enough. Turns out there's only thirty-two James Devines with criminal records in Nevada. Here we go. Is this the guy?" He showed me a bald, fat guy with no eyebrows.

  "Not even close."

  "How about him?"

  I was staring at a younger version of the man I had tailed to Chicago. He looked the same except that the mug-shot photo was less menacing, somehow. "That's our guy. Might as well print it out."

  "This is the killer? He looks more like a thief, or a scam artist."

  "We think so. He ditched town with a bunch of money and wound up in Europe."

  Mike looked up from his screen. "Who's we?"

  "Ethan's lawyer hired the LaGarde firm to work on this. One of their guys has been working with me."

  "Ahh," he said noncommittally.

  We watched our laptop screens in silence for several minutes.

  Mike perked up. "What about this guy?"

  I squinted over at his screen.

  "Rewind a few seconds."

  I pulled the laptop closer and watched. "I don't think so. He's not that big."

  We resumed our beady-eyed stares at our small laptop monitors. I was meeting with Andrew later and with Ethan and his lawyer the next morning, and I knew it would be a big deal if we could nail down James Devine as our guy.

  There were a few guys who looked like Devine, but no hits. "Of course, he could be wearing some kind of disguise," I said. "He's gotta know there are cameras all over the place."

  Mike nodded. "Maybe, maybe not. He's a totally random guy out of the blue, so anyone looking at these tapes wouldn't think twice about seeing him. No one's looking for anyone named James Devine. Some kind of bad disguise might actually draw attention to himself."