Daniel called Sarah.
“She’s angry with me,” he admitted. “Would she decide to stay another day in Vegas on a whim? That sounds like her.”
“Yeah, she might,” Sarah said. “But not when she’s been in so much trouble here lately. She loves this job more than life itself.”
“So she said,” Daniel murmured. “And if she did decide to stay an extra day, she would call you and tell you that, wouldn’t she?”
“See, you know her pretty well.”
“I do,” Daniel said. “And no matter how mad she was, I don’t think she’d disappear without checking in, especially because we got married, and—”
“You did what?” Sarah shrieked through the phone.
“Two nights ago we got married, with Lorelei and Colton at the ceremony,” Daniel explained, “so the media would assume it was Lorelei and Colton tying the knot. Things were going okay, but this afternoon we had an argument and decided to get divorced. I didn’t mean it, and I hope she didn’t, either.”
Sarah was silent so long that Daniel was about to ask if she was still there. He couldn’t afford a dropped call right now—
“You got married?” she yelled. “Is that why she made Tom and me leave town, because we would have stopped her?”
“Yes, but—”
“You manipulative ass! I knew she was up to something. I let her get away with it because she hates my husband, hates him, and she’s never said a word about it. We don’t have to agree about everything just because we’re friends. But I thought you were going to screw her, Daniel. I never would have left her alone if I’d thought you were going to marry her!”
Daniel rubbed his brow. “So you don’t have any idea where she would have gone or who she would have contacted—”
“What if Rick really is after her, like you guys were thinking at first?” Sarah insisted. “Do you know how terrified she is of that guy? Do you know how hard she is to terrify?”
“Yes,” he said, jogging through the airport with his suitcase rolling behind him. “I’ll find her.”
Back in the taxi, he phoned Detective Butkus, who dutifully took down the latest details of the saga but said he couldn’t file a missing persons report until Wendy had been gone twenty-four hours. It sounded to the detective like Wendy was furious with Daniel and would come back when she was ready. If Daniel had been Detective Butkus, he would have thought the same thing. But as Sarah had said, Daniel knew Wendy pretty well. And he was scared for her.
Then he phoned his father and said he couldn’t go to L.A. Someone else could go, or his father could go. When his father predictably started yelling, Daniel shouted back, “I am having a family emergency!” then hung up and blocked his father’s calls.
The taxi dropped him off in front of the Paris casino. He wheeled his suitcase just inside the door, slipped the security guard he recognized from that afternoon a hundred-dollar bill, and showed him Wendy’s picture on his phone. “Long blond hair,” Daniel added. “Beautiful woman.”
“Yeah,” the guard said. “She left with some movie star, the one who’s in town because he was on that TV show last night? He had his arm around her.”
Daniel swallowed. “Colton Farr?”
The guard snapped his fingers. “Exactly!”
Daniel ran across the street to the casino where he’d been staying, dragging his suitcase, cursing the whole way. Just inside the door, he handed his suitcase off to a bellhop, along with another hundred and his business card, and asked him to call if Wendy was in the room or her suitcase was gone.
He hurried across the casino floor to the blackjack tables. Maybe Rick had been following Wendy around town. More likely, Colton himself, boor, emotional abuser, asshole, who’d wanted her from the very beginning, had taken her.
Daniel assumed what was becoming his usual position on the periphery of Colton’s blackjack table and waited for Colton to notice him. Colton did his usual double take. He cursed with a vehement shake of his head, scooped up three ten-thousand-dollar chips and some change, and slammed away from the table. All his former deference to Daniel was gone. He approached him with his own arms crossed and demanded, “Now what?”
Daniel nodded toward a door at the back of the huge room. “We need to talk in private.” He led the way into the service corridor. He’d worked in this casino enough times to know that the hallway where they were headed had no traffic and no security cameras. After he’d closed the door behind them, it was the perfect place to ball his fist and sock Colton in the eye.
“Hey!” Colton hollered, holding his cheekbone. “What the fuck, man?”
Daniel hadn’t hit anyone since high school. The searing pain in his hand just made him madder. “I’ll tell you what the fuck.” He lunged at Colton, knocking him into the wall, and pressed his arm across Colton’s throat. “Where’s Wendy?”
“With you!” Colton choked out.
He sounded sincere. He was also an actor. Daniel eased some of the pressure off Colton’s neck, making him think he was being released. Then, while he was still off balance, Daniel slammed him into the wall again. “Tell me where she is and I’ll walk away. If I find out later that you know where she is and you lied, I will fuck you over so hard that you’ll wish you were still doing community theater in Des Moines. You know I can do it.”
“I have no fucking idea! Get off me!”
With a final curse, Daniel threw Colton to the floor and paced a few steps away, running his hands through his hair. He was out of ideas. If Colton wasn’t lying, Rick must have Wendy after all. And Daniel had no clue how to find them.
“Have you lost your mind?” Colton exclaimed from the floor. “You sound British all of a sudden, like you’ve always secretly wanted to play Hamlet.”
Daniel’s pesky British accent had come back, which made sense. He’d never been so stressed in his life. He asked Colton, “Have you ever heard of a guy who looks like you getting into parties or hanging with the paparazzi?”
“No,” Colton said, sitting up against the wall and touching one finger to the bruise under his eye. “But if you have a question about those prying assholes, you should ask Lorelei. She makes friends with them for some damn reason.”
“Call her,” Daniel said. “Right now.”
Colton coughed, spat blood on the floor, and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. He glared at Daniel as he waited for Lorelei to answer, but as soon as she did, his voice was friendly. “Hey! Listen, strange question. Ever heard of a photographer who looks like me?” His fair countenance grew darker, and the fluorescent lights of the hall seemed to dim as Daniel watched.
“Hold on,” Colton said. “I’m going to give you to Daniel. Tell him everything you just told me.” As he handed the phone up to Daniel, Colton said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but it doesn’t sound good.”
Taking the phone, Daniel noticed in passing that his hand was shaking. “Tell me,” he demanded.
“He’s been hanging with the crowd outside my house for a few years,” Lorelei said. “I thought that was creepy at first, because he showed up right about the time I started dating Colton, like he was trying to take advantage of looking like Colton, planned it or something. He seemed really nice, though. We joked about his looks. I got comfortable with him, I guess because he reminded me of Colton so much, and then—come to think of it—he’s the one who told me last weekend that I should call Wendy.”
Daniel took one pained breath. “What do you mean?”
“I was just talking to him outside when I was on my way to a club, because sometimes I tell the guys where I’m going to help them out a little, you know? And he said if I was having image trouble, he’d heard of this kick-butt girl at Stargazer who seemed to be saving ass for everybody he’s been taking pictures of lately.”
“What’s this guy’s name?”
“Rick.”
Daniel put one hand to his forehead. “Have you seen him in Vegas this week?”
“No, b
ut that doesn’t mean he’s not there. I haven’t been looking. You know what, though? I’ve seen a friend of his, Billy. He’s probably still out in front of the casino. He has a handlebar moustache and he always wears a hat. The paparazzi dress a little weird—”
“Thanks. Bye.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed. “Why do you sound British?”
Daniel hung up on her and tossed the phone down to Colton. “Sorry.” He barged through the door, back onto the glittering casino floor.
“Hey!” Colton called. He was out of breath when he caught up with Daniel. “If Wendy’s in trouble with this guy, let me help you.”
Daniel didn’t want Colton’s help, but he might need it. As they wound their way through the banks of slot machines, he told Colton about the attacks on himself and Wendy.
“You’re kidding!” Colton exclaimed as they pushed open the exit to the Strip, neon glowing everywhere in the night. “We thought you guys kept leaving the party early to screw.”
“I wish.” Daniel led the way down the sidewalk to where the paparazzi sat on folding chairs. They all jumped up as Colton approached. Cameras blazed as they took his picture. Daniel’s instinct was to guide Colton calmly away, because every bit of what they did next would be at the top of the gossip blogs tomorrow. It didn’t matter anymore.
Blinking into the flashes, he called, “Is Billy here?”
“I’m Billy.” Sure enough, the old man stepping forward wore a Wild West moustache and a floppy fishing hat.
Daniel drew him out of hearing of the other photographers, though they had no time to get out of shooting range. As the cameras flashed on, he handed Billy his last hundred, then asked, “You have a colleague who looks like my friend here?” He put a hand on Colton’s shoulder.
“Sure,” Billy said, folding the bill into his pocket. “Rick.”
“Do you know where he is?” Daniel asked, trying hard not to sound like he was afraid for his wife’s life.
Billy gave the worst possible answer to a man whose wallet was empty. “I might, if I didn’t have to work for a living.”
Daniel had no idea what to do now. He thought Detective Butkus might finally help him, but by the time the detective took Billy to the police station and pressed the truth out of him, it might be too late for Wendy. Daniel glanced toward the paparazzi, then back toward the security guards at the entrance to the casino, and calculated how quickly the two groups might come to Billy’s aid, and therefore how long Daniel could kick the shit out of him.
Colton reached into his pocket and drew out the three ten-thousand-dollar chips. “Would this pay your salary for a few days?”
Billy looked over his shoulder at the other photographers, grabbed the chips, and threw them under his hat. “I been drinking beer with Rick at his hotel room all week. Him and his friend Paul.”
“Paul’s balding?” Daniel guessed. “Likes Hawaiian shirts?”
“That’s the one.” Billy gave them the address and room number of the hotel.
While Billy was still talking, Daniel walked into traffic on the Strip and hailed a taxi. Colton called over his shoulder to Billy, “If you’re bullshitting us, I’m coming back to find you, because that was some expensive bullshit.” He climbed into the taxi behind Daniel.
Daniel gave the driver the address. “Step on it.” Then he realized he had no bribe to get the driver to go faster. He had a credit card to pay for the fare, but plastic didn’t talk like cash.
Colton produced a hundred and tossed it into the front seat. The engine revved higher.
“Thank you,” Daniel told Colton sincerely.
“When we get there,” Colton said, “I’m coming in with you.”
“All right.” One more time, Daniel pressed the button on his phone to call Detective Butkus. The detective would maintain that Daniel had no proof of what was happening and nothing to go on.
Daniel Blackstone was about to lose his cool.
* * *
“Take your clothes off, Wendy,” Rick said smoothly. “Nice and slow, so we can enjoy it.”
Wendy had heard those words from him before. She’d been eighteen and excited that he considered her an alluring grown woman. When they’d had sex, they’d been in her bedroom or his tiny apartment. Both places were shabby and poor. Either would have been an improvement over this seedy dump of a hotel room five blocks from the Strip.
Paul, a stranger to her with a receding hairline, hadn’t been in the room back then to take pictures of them with a state-of-the-art camera and a special lens. Rick hadn’t relaxed in a chair, watching her, with a gun and a hunting knife beside him on the table—the same knife he’d shoved against her side in the Paris casino, and which he must have used to hack her hair off three times that week. And Rick’s own camera bag hadn’t waited on the floor, the padded canvas handle replaced with a sturdy braid of three thick hanks of Wendy’s hair.
When she’d known Rick before, he’d been a possessive bully. Now he was out of his mind.
“How much money did you make from the picture of Lorelei on Colton’s phone?” she asked as she pulled her blouse off over her head. She wished she knew some kind of stealth move to catch two men by surprise and overpower them while she was taking her shirt off, but her mind was a blank.
“We made a lot of money,” Rick said. Paul echoed Rick’s satisfaction by laughing.
“This gig has cost me, though. I had to dip into the funds when Colton changed his style,” Rick said, fingering his suit, a cheap version of the outfit Colton had been sporting since he traded in his usual trucker hat. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
“We knew you were here in Vegas,” she told Rick. “People kept sighting Colton when he wasn’t there. We figured out it was you. We told the police about you. If you’ve made so much money already, why are you taking the chance of hanging around and kidnapping me to take another picture?”
“It’s what we do,” Paul said without emotion, adjusting a dial on his camera.
“And the opportunity was too perfect,” Rick said. “I think I might have a little leeway, don’t you, since we’ve been here all week and a cop hasn’t so much as questioned me?”
Wendy agreed. Detective Butkus had pretended to listen to her and take notes, but he might as well have laughed at her for all the following up he’d done.
“Besides,” Rick said casually, “the risk is worth the reward. Ten years ago your little bitch friend called the cops on me in New York, Wendy, when all I wanted was to talk to you. I told you that.” His voice cracked, but he maintained his charming, wisecracking demeanor like nothing had gone wrong. “Because of the warrant, I haven’t been able to work for the movie studios like I planned. Like both of us planned, remember?”
She nodded solemnly, heart racing, skin cold, stomach turning flips. She wanted desperately to tell him that if he’d dreamed of a Hollywood career, domestic violence and evading arrest weren’t his best course of action. But his fingers drummed impatiently on the arm of the chair, dangerously close to the gun and knife beside him on the table. She didn’t dare speak.
“You ruined my job for me,” he said, “so I’m going to ruin yours for you. I’ve been to your fancy parties. I’ve seen Colton Farr coming on to you. I know he’s still in town. So Paul will take a couple photos of you blowing me, from just the right angle so I look like Colton and you look like . . . you.” He smiled at her. “Lorelei will break up with Colton again. Your company will kick you out on your ass for ruining your star’s publicity just to satisfy your own lust. That bastard you’ve been fucking will see you for the whore you really are, if he didn’t figure it out already when you were dry humping that pole at the strip club.” He picked up the gun from the table and waved it at the waistband of her jeans. “Keep going. You obviously remember how to strip.”
She swallowed and shook her head no.
He burst up from the chair. Before she knew what was happening, she was sliding down the wall, head exploding with pain, fing
ers pressed to her cheek. He’d only slapped her, she realized as she moved her jaw, noting that it still worked. But the ache in the back of her head, which had faded over the last few days, had worked its way loose again.
The guilt was worse. The embarrassment that Paul had seen Rick hit her. The feeling that she must have done something to deserve all this. Those emotions from ten years before rushed back at her and settled like a weight in her lap.
“Sorry, baby,” Rick whispered, holding a hand down to her. “I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.” Unlike ten years before, he was grinning as he said it.
She reached for his hand. Her hand trembled.
He pulled her up to standing, then backed across the room to sit in his chair again. “Now.” He sounded exasperated, as if their fun game kept getting interrupted. “Take your pants off.”
With shaking fingers, she unfastened her jeans and pushed them down her legs and off—carefully, so that her ring stayed in her pocket, just in case she made it out of this alive. For once, she wished she was wearing crappy granny panty underwear like Sarah favored. When Rick saw that, if he hadn’t canceled the photo shoot and sexual assault, at least he would have delayed them until he could make a side trip to buy her better lingerie. But her bra and panties were red and matching for Daniel, damn it.
Kicking her jeans aside with one stylish high-heeled sandal—again, she looked like she’d dressed up especially for this nightmare—she thought of another argument she could make to stall Rick. “What tabloid would believe these pictures are real?” Her cheek felt stiff where he’d slapped her, but she had to keep talking. Anything to put off the inevitable. “Nobody will buy photos that are obviously fake. Colton might get drunk and let someone take pictures of him with a girl in a hot tub, but he wouldn’t let someone take pictures of him getting a blow job. Even he is not that stupid.”
“It’s not about stupidity,” Rick explained. “It’s about jealousy. I can tell by what he’s been saying about Lorelei online. He loves her. She’s beautiful and she left him. He would do anything, anything, to fuck with her and ruin her, even if it ruined his own life, even if it took him ten years. Come here and kneel down in front of me, Wendy.” He laughed. “I like the sound of that.” He sat up on the edge of his chair and unzipped his pants.
Star Crossed Page 26
