“For a little while. You sound surprised.”
“It’s just—you seem more the bachelor type.” It was true, she realized, but not because he wasn’t presentable. Because he seemed tired. Deep inside. Like he’d been putting on an act, doing a show, all by himself for years.
He said, “What about you? Have you ever been married?”
“No,” she said, and it felt a little like a failure. After a moment she said, “Do you think we made a mistake today on Melville? Going in like that?”
“You really asking my opinion, or just trying to change the subject?”
“Opinion.”
“No, I don’t. If there was any chance Rosalind was there, we had to take it.” She felt his eyes on her. “You don’t believe that.”
“I had a bad feeling in my stomach, which I ignored. But I would have had a worse one if Rosalind ended up dead.”
“Must be hard for you with Benton, both trying to take responsibility for everything. How are you dividing that up?”
“You really don’t like him. Why not?”
“I saw him cheat at cards once and deny it.” She looked at him, thinking he was making a joke, but he wasn’t.
As they were riding up in the elevator to her room, he said, “Be careful with Benton. He has a way of making people belong to him.”
CHAPTER 29
Imogen didn’t have time to think about J.D.’s strange warning because she could practically hear Lex shouting through the phone lines from the corridor outside her room.
“Why did you turn your cell phone off—” he started, then switched gears to “Do you know what I had to do to get that warrant for you?” It went on from there, no surprises, a little louder than she would have liked. J.D. and Rachel had followed her in and were standing together on the opposite side of the room, talking in low tones. She tried to catch what they were saying but Lex’s voice hummed on.
“—middle of a game . . . butter up a prosecutor . . . embarrass me—”
Imogen turned to study the map while he spoke, wondering if she could cross off Melville. Wondering why she had ignored all her instincts that told her this was a bad idea.
“And if you think my name on the warrant for some cheap drug lab bust—” she tuned in to hear Lex saying, and had to fight hard against the urge to tell Lex that no one would recognize his name so he didn’t have to worry.
Her fax machine started spewing out papers and she moved toward it, amazed that Lex managed to both fax and berate her on the phone at the same time. But the cover sheet said Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Not for her. She motioned J.D. to the fax machine.
Lex was still talking. “Not only that, but I also had to cancel a dinner at Morton’s to help you with this, and you know—”
Ah, Imogen thought, now we’ve mined the real matter. Lex had been inconvenienced. Lex had been so seduced by the idea of a big SWAT operation, lots of burly men in black suits, all doing it because he ordered them to, because of his name on a warrant, that he’d missed dinner at one of Washington’s best steakhouses. No doubt at someone else’s expense.
Imogen was getting ready to say something appropriately apologetic when she turned and caught sight of J.D.’s face. Instead she said, “Great, Lex, I’ll call you back,” and hung up.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This is a crime-scene report,” he said, holding out the fax. “Only homicide hasn’t gotten any calls that fit this description, and the case-file number doesn’t exist.”
“It’s probably a hoax,” Rachel said as she read it over.
“Weird hoax,” J.D. said. “We should check it out. Rachel, take someone with you and run up to this address.”
“3600 Las Vegas Boulevard, room 3518.” Rachel copied the address, then looked up. “That’s this hotel.”
Imogen moved to the door and pointed. “Room 3518 is just down the hall.”
“I hope this is a hoax,” J.D. said.
It took J.D. less than five minutes to convince security to unlock the door of 3518 rather than waiting for a warrant. The room was neat, the bed tousled, the strangled woman’s body floating in the bathtub, just as the report had promised it would be. It was not a hoax.
“What are you doing in—” Benton started, just arriving. He broke off when he got to the bathroom. “Oh. Oh God.”
Imogen looked from him to the corpse. “That’s the woman who winked at you yesterday at the bar. Care to tell us her name?”
“I don’t know anything about her,” Benton protested. “I’d never seen her before.”
“Do women frequently throw themselves at you that way in public?”
“It happens,” Benton stated, not bragging about it, just a fact.
“Benton is a very well known personality,” J.D. pointed out.
Imogen turned away. She did not want a lecture on Benton Arbor’s celebrity, even in the ironic tone J.D. was giving it. She wanted to take in as much of the crime scene as she could before a crowd arrived. She had just noticed one detail of the crime scene, a smell, that hadn’t been mentioned in the faxed report when she heard J.D. saying, “I’ll get some homicide detectives down here,” and turned back.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It was Loverboy. He did this.”
“Just because the fax was sent to your room?” J.D. asked. “That’s a little premature.”
“I’m telling you,” Imogen insisted. “It was him.”
“Why?” Benton wanted to know.
Bugsy walked in and handed Imogen three sheets of paper. “Your fax machine ran out of paper before it was done,” Bugsy explained. “These printed when I refilled it.”
The top two were a continuation of the “crime scene” report. The last one had a hangman’s gallows in the middle of it. Below it were twelve empty spaces. Below that, in the place for wrong guesses, someone had scrawled 1112 Melville.
On the gallows was a circle for a head.
“This is why,” she said.
Benton looked over her shoulder and said, “What does it mean?”
Before she could answer, the crime-scene unit arrived. She said to the lead analyst, “I need you to go over this place with a microscope. And take a sample of the perfume from the bed. I want to know what kind it is, and if it matches anything in the room.”
The woman nodded and got to work.
Then Imogen turned back to Benton. She pointed at the hangman’s gallows. “You want to know what it means? It’s a threat. He’s telling us that every time we guess wrong, someone will die. He’s telling us that this is our fault.”
She hoped her voice sounded normal. Her ears were ringing.
CHAPTER 30
“Ms. Page. Imogen—” Benton followed her back to her room.
“Don’t talk to me.”
“Look, I understand that you are upset, but—”
Imogen swung on him. “You understand nothing. That woman in there is dead because of me.”
“Because of Loverboy.”
“If I hadn’t agreed to get the warrant—”
“We made that decision together, you, me, and J.D.”
“How can you be so cool about this?”
“Not cool, just realistic. You cannot blame yourself for every person who dies.”
“If I had done my job better, this would not have happened.”
“That’s not true. If you go on like that, where does it end? Are you responsible for every homicide in America because you haven’t caught the killer?”
“If I had understood I could have prevented this.”
“Understood what?” Benton threw up his arms. “Talking to you is like talking to a brick wall. Do you ever listen to anyone else?”
“When they say something worth listening to. That woman died because of a decision I made. Period. You know what? I don’t want to argue with you. I want to work. We can talk philosophy another time.”
She turned as Bugsy came into the room. “Anything?”
>
“We’ve started canvassing downstairs, dealers, bartenders, that kind of thing. And I went down to get the security video for this hallway during the past four hours, but they said they’d already sent it up. Is it here?”
“No.”
“They said someone from Metro came and got it. I’ll go ask next door.” He looked from Imogen to Benton uneasily. “Unless you need me.”
Imogen shook her head and he left.
“This Melville Drive operation was wrong from the start. I could feel it and I let it go on.” She blew air from her mouth.
“At least we have another crime scene. Another body to work on. More evidence,” Benton pointed out.
Imogen’s stomach tightened. Not because she disagreed, but because he was right. Just like the press, she thrived on someone else’s misfortune.
She felt filthy all over. She’d been up for almost nineteen hours. She could use a stiff drink, a long shower, and sleep. She glanced at Benton and saw that he looked as beat as she did. And he had a race the next day.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” she said.
“And leave you to maul yourself with guilt?”
“Pretty much.”
Before Benton could object, the Metro team came through the door.
“News?” J.D. said.
“Nothing here,” Imogen said.
“No. I meant, anyone want to see how we played on the news?” He took the remote control and flipped the TV on.
Imogen stood off to one side, cupping her elbows with her palms. A news conference with the sheriff in which he announced an end to organized crime in Las Vegas—prompting a slew of “disorganized crime” jokes from the Metro cops—opened the program, but their “meth lab bust” got second billing.
“I thought you said it was so routine that no one would cover it,” Imogen said to J.D.
“They shouldn’t have. Must have been a particularly boring day here in Vegas.”
Rachel handled the questions well, Imogen thought, even the direct ones such as “What was Imogen Page of the FBI doing at a small-time drug bust?” and “We’ve heard rumors that this is linked to the Rosalind Carnow disappearance.” Imogen was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the cameras went wild and shifted onto a new target, and it was clear why the network was running the piece.
Benton stood there, his expression grim, as befitted a man whose girlfriend was being held by a serial killer. He hit every note just right, talked about how hard the last few days had been for him, how much he was looking forward to his race the next day.
“What are you doing at a meth lab bust, Mr. Arbor?”
Good question, Imogen thought.
“I came for the KFC. Always have KFC at SWAT operations. ‘Bye, everyone.” A wave and a tense smile and he disappeared into his shiny Thunderbird.
That was why he’d shown up so long after them at the hotel. That was what he’d been doing downstairs at the crime scene when they pulled away. Imogen had wondered how she and J.D. had been able to evade the press, but she understood now. Benton had wanted the limelight all to himself.
No wonder he couldn’t feel bad about the woman next door’s death. It would mean more publicity for him. More attention from the cameras. More chances to see himself on TV.
Keeping her voice low so that all the officers in the room wouldn’t hear, she swung toward Benton and said, “What did you think you were doing out there? Were you trying to advertise our connection to the raid?”
“I was trying to change the subject.”
“You sure were. Benton Arbor to the rescue. Thank you ever so much.” Imogen was seething.
Benton said, “I wanted you to be able to leave without having to deal with the press.”
“Everyone talks about how charmingly controlling you are—oh my, he won’t go in elevators. But you are not simply controlling, Mr. Arbor. You have, like, a pathological need to be worshiped. To be noticed. This whole thing, Rosalind’s disappearance, the death of the woman next door, it’s all some big publicity opportunity for you, isn’t it? To get that good-looking face on the cover of another tabloid.”
She thought she saw Benton flinch. He said, “Publicity opportunity? Are you listening? I was trying to help you. So you and J.D. could get away without being hounded.”
“The sad thing is, I think he believes it,” J.D. said.
“I think you’re right.” Imogen glared. “You do, don’t you, Mr. Arbor? Think you are so selfless, just trying to help. Because nothing can work without your assistance. When what you really want is for people to rely on you. So you can be the center of attention and adulation.”
Benton raised his voice. “At least I don’t lash out at people for no reason just because I feel like I screwed up my job.” By this time, all the officers and her team had turned to stare at them. “You need to get your priorities straight, Ms. Page. All you’ve done the past twenty minutes is say ‘I’m responsible,’ ‘I this,’ ‘I that,’ or ‘You’re an asshole,’ ‘You this,’ ‘You that.’ This isn’t about you or about me, about the job you are or are not doing. It’s about Rosalind. And if you’d stop wasting time feeling guilty and keep your mind on that, we would stand a chance of saving her.”
Imogen moved to the door of the suite and held it open. “Thank you for all your help today, everyone. I don’t think there is anything else for us to do now. Good night.”
She did not slam the door behind the last person. But when she turned around her fists were clenched. Even reminding herself of the twitch in Benton’s jaw could not make her feel victorious.
“He was not right,” she told Rex, who was swimming around the fancy tank Benton had brought. “That was not what I was doing. Lashing out. Thinking about myself.”
The fish stared at her.
He has a way of making people belong to him, J.D. had said, and she started to wonder if it extended to fish. She decided to move Rex out of his swank digs and into J.D.’s fishbowl in the morning.
As she lay in bed trying to sleep, her mind kept coming back to one image in particular—the welcome mat in front of Joe Smith’s apartment. That poor man. He’d probably never welcomed anyone in before in his life, and suddenly he had more visitors than he’d bargained for. Unwelcome visitors.
Her mind flipped to another welcome mat—
“Don’t step on that, your shoes are dirty. That’s only for invited guests.”
“Yes, Aunt Caroline.”
—and tasting sour cherry, she fell into a fitful sleep and dreamed that Sam and her parents were having a wonderful time. Without her.
CHAPTER 31
Frankie Valli singing “Oh What a Night” blasted from the speakers of the car parked in the corner of the top floor of the Rio parking lot. The man behind the wheel sang along, really feeling the lyrics tonight. Oh what a night!
He moved his head back and forth to the beat and looked at the view. He thought this spot had the best view of Vegas, the city lights spread out in front of him like a playland, all those people down there near him, but not around him. Not close enough to touch him.
He was feeling so good, so amped, that he decided to give himself a treat. Usually the rule was that he could only look at the book at the beginning and the end, but things were going so well he decided to make an exception. An exception wasn’t the same as cheating. He hated cheaters because they ignored the rules or broke them. An exception was stretching a rule, which was okay because it didn’t ruin the game.
It was the same if your opponent made a mistake. Like in a sports game, if a player for the other team tripped, it was not against the rules to take advantage of that and make them pay for it. That was what he had done tonight after Imogen’s mistake, and it felt great. He thought of it as collaboration, letting Imogen have some say in how things went, even if she didn’t know it. It raised the stakes for both of them. It was certainly true that he was feeling everything ten hundred times stronger this time than before, but whether that was because of
Imogen or because he’d finally found the ultimate victim, he didn’t know.
Rosalind made the best noises.
Carefully he lifted the scrapbook from the seat next to him and flipped through it until he found the page he wanted, the one he’d been thinking about that day. It had a gold-colored piece of newsprint on it, photos of a pretty girl, some boys. A group shot with him, fifteen years old, in the back. And in the center, a picture of a roller coaster with the words Big (Bad) Bess beneath it.
It was taken the summer he’d worked at a carnival, one of those traveling ones that set up in empty fields outside. He used to go in early, sneaking in illegally through the shrub border so no one would see him. He’d always gone to visit Big Bess, the largest roller coaster, but he wouldn’t get on. He’d use his key from work and go through the maintenance door, getting underneath the big machine.
He especially liked to go after the bad dinners with his father. The ones that started with his father saying, “Pay attention to me,” or “I’ll slap you silly if you don’t look me in the eye,” or “You are a disgusting shit,” working himself into a frenzy until the red-labeled bottle sailed through the air and crashed against the wall.
When he was younger he had tried to understand why his father was always so insistent on him looking at his eyes. It didn’t make sense, so he’d used a grapefruit spoon to take the eyes out of Snookie, the next-door neighbor’s cat, and see if he could find what was behind them. Maybe cat’s eyes were different, but as far as he could tell the only thing inside Snookie’s eyes was goo and stringy cords. Once he knew that, knew how it was like Jell-O back there, it was even harder to look his father in the eye. He’d always thought Jell-O was gross.
Most times when his father got like that the bottle just hit the wall, but this one time that summer it hit the TV and broke it. He remembered turning to face his father, and felt his cheeks go pink. That always happened when he was feeling silly, that and the sensation that his senses were all in overdrive, he could hear everything, see everything, particles of dust in the air, practically smell each molecule. This time he remembered the sound of pushing his chair back away from the table, lifting his plate and carrying it to the sink.
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