LITMIR.BIZ

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the huge tits, completely oblivious to everything else, even the guy with the knife in his back. Okay, right here he’s picked up on a new camera….” Cheever’s voice trailed off as he flicked the remote control, shifting to a scene in the casino. “He passed six cameras on his way to the craps table, but all you can see on any of them is him stumbling through the crowd—until he bumps into Miss Sparhawk and they both land on the craps table. And there you are, helping her back up.”

      Cheever was discouraged; his frustration that so many security tapes could yield so few clues was evident in his voice.

      “I’d like to run through them all again, if it’s all right,” Dillon told him.

      “Be my guest. I’ve been staring at them for the last three hours. I had a video tech in here trying to home in on Green, but it didn’t help. Someone’s head, an arm, whatever, is blocking part of the view every step he took.”

      Cheever tossed the remote to Dillon, who studied it for a moment, then hit a button to start the tape over. “It’s almost as if someone knew that outer drive was just out of the cameras’ useful range,” he mused.

      “Just like,” Cheever agreed. “So what do you think it means?”

      “I think it means our killer has to be someone involved with the casino, or who knows someone who is.”

      “God only knows how many people that could be,” Cheever muttered.

      Dillon turned in his chair and looked at Cheever, who was perched at the edge of his desk. “What’s happening with the knife?”

      “The lab has it. But preliminary reports aren’t giving us a thing. It’s a short-bladed work knife, sold—literally—in the thousands here in town. It’s a popular blade for breaking the plastic bands on stacks of money. Every casino in Vegas has a few of them. And of course there’s not a hint of a fingerprint on the hilt. The killer probably wore gloves. Green was stabbed with considerable force, and the blade was just long enough to pierce the heart, which caused Green to bleed out. Because it was a short blade, he made it through to the craps table before he died.”

      “Strange,” Dillon said, rewinding the tape. “Any possibility I could get a vid tech in here to look at this with me?” he asked.

      Jerry Cheever stared at him, his eyes narrowing, as if his first instinct was to defensively tell him to go right to hell. But then he shrugged. “Sure. If you can find something I didn’t, that will be great. I’ll go grab someone.”

      The minute he left the office, Dillon was out of his seat, looking at the files on Cheever’s desk. Tanner Green’s was right on top. He leafed through it quickly, but Cheever had nothing more than he had said.

      A minute later a young woman from the video department came in and introduced herself as Sarah Clay. She had a controller with her that made the remote look like a kiddie toy. Dillon started with the first tape, and they went through it frame by frame, but Cheever had been telling the truth. It wasn’t that the security equipment wasn’t high quality, because it was the best. But the car from which Tanner Green had been expelled was just far enough out of range, of both the cameras and the neon lights, that making out details was impossible.

      A white limo. That much was obvious, and also useless. As Cheever had said, Vegas was thick with the things, especially white ones. Every casino owned limos, the casino bosses owned limos, the rental companies owned limos, even half the high rollers in town had their own.

      There was no way to tell the make or model, but even once the tapes were enhanced, there didn’t seem to be any markings on it, nothing to indicate where it might have come from, which didn’t help him now but might mean something when they moved on to the process of elimination.

      They went through the other tapes in order, with Dillon asking the tech to freeze certain frames and enhance them, but once again, Jerry Cheever had been dead-on. The crowd in the casino that night had worked heavily against them. The best video tech in the world couldn’t remove a body blocking a body, and even though the different angles caught by the different cameras usually helped with that kind of problem, this time they were shit out of luck.

      “Are we through?” Sarah asked him politely, glancing at her watch.

      He knew she probably had a half-dozen other cases she was supposed to be working on, so he smiled. “Just about, and thank you. The last tape…could I see it one more time?”

      “Sure,” she said, but her voice was faint.

      He let the tape run until he got to Green staggering up to the craps table, then had her home in on Tanner Green falling forward, pinning Jessy Sparhawk beneath him. Even caught in a moment of pure surprise and horror, she was striking. He had to wonder about that last name. She was a redhead, with huge blue eyes, and he found himself fascinated with her all over again.

      “Mr. Wolf?” Sarah asked politely.

      He gave himself a mental shake. “Zoom in on Green’s face for me, will you?”

      She pushed a button, and in seconds Tanner Green’s bulging eyes filled the screen.

      Hell, the man was dying.

      But his expression was surprised, as if he couldn’t believe it. Believe he was dying? Or how he was dying? Dillon wondered.

      Green’s lips moved slightly. Dillon replayed the moment and leaned in, trying to discern what the man had been saying. Nothing, maybe. Or maybe he had been begging for help. Maybe he had found God at the moment of death and was praying.

      Dillon had Sarah widen the view and surveyed the immediate area. The air had been filled with a cloud of smoke, despite the casino’s expensive air filters. Sometimes it seemed as if even people who didn’t smoke decided they needed to in Vegas.

      He stared intently at the screen for a minute longer.

      Then he sat back. “Thanks very much, Sarah.”

      She might have been aggravated at the time she’d been asked to give him, but she smiled. She probably didn’t often get thanked for what was, after all, just her job.

      “Sure. Anytime,” she told him.

      “I mean it.” She reached into her shirt pocket and produced a card. Her name and rank were on it, along with a phone number and an e-mail address. “I’ve heard about you, about what you do, what you…see. They say you’re the real deal. I meant what I said. Whatever you need—whatever—you can call me.”

      He took her card, nodding gravely. “Now that, I really appreciate.” He left her feeling very grateful indeed.

      She had pretty much just told him that she would work for him on the q.t. That was priceless.

      But right now he had to find Jessy Sparhawk. She was the only one who might know what Tanner Green had said right before he died.

      

      There had been a recent period in Vegas’s history when—the tourist board had decided to turn Sin City into a family-friendly resort. The plan hadn’t worked, and the city had soon reverted to its old image, but the aftereffects lingered, and some parents still brought their children along when they came to gamble. As a result, a lot of the casinos provided diversions aimed toward the kiddie set, because the problem with Vegas was that parents could be distracted—maybe only momentarily, but still with frightening repercussions—by bright, blinking lights and a sudden insistence that the next dollar shoved into a beckoning slot machine would be the one that hit the jackpot.

      At the Big Easy the problem had been solved by offering an afternoon of pirate-themed entertainment, food and drink for the younger crowd.

      It was glorified babysitting.

      But Jessy had never minded that. She liked kids. Sure, every once in a while they wound up with an obnoxious little twerp who wouldn’t stop tugging on beards, dumping the treasure chest or trying to look up the skirts of the pirate “queens” or the servers. But all in all, it wasn’t a bad gig. It was actually

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