"Gotta pull it," Lucas said. To Hoffman: "Let's go see the tapes."
Hoffman took them to a surveillance room-on the way, he asked, "You really think your info on Terry might be good?" and Lucas said, "Jeez, I hope not"-where a half-dozen women roamed along twenty monitors, watching the activity on the floor below. There were good overhead shots of all the blackjack tables, but most of the cameras over the slots looked straight down. Only a few looked at the slots from shallow angles, and those were farther back.
"The main problem with the machines is theft-guys dipping coins out of other people's coin buckets," Hoffman explained. He pointed at a monitor showing a woman who was sitting in front of a machine feeding in quarters. All they could see was the top of her head, her shoulders, and her arms. "See, like this lady, she's pushed her coin bucket halfway around the machine. If you're on the next aisle over, you can reach across and dip her. We get one of those a week, guys who never think about cameras. Dumb guys. But you can't see them dipping from the side. You can only see them reach from the overheads."
He led them to a cubicle at the back of the room, where an Indian man with two careful red-ribbon-tied braids was poking at a computer. "Les, are we still on last night's tapes on Number Twelve?"
"Yeah. That's good for another couple of days." The man looked curiously at Lucas and Del.
"State police," Hoffman said. "Looking into the Jane Warr thing."
"Hanged," Les said. He toyed with the end of one of his braids. "That sort of freaked me out when I heard it. She won't be on Twelve, though… "
"We're looking for another fella. Go to ten o'clock. Start there."
The computer guy typed in a group of codes, and they waited, fifteen seconds, then twenty, and finally a wide-angled color film came up. The people in the film moved in a herky-jerky motion, indicating that the camera was shooting at a super-slow rate. "There he is," Hoffman said, tapping the camera.
The camera was looking down a long row of slots from slightly above. Two-thirds of the way down the row, a tall man in a dark coat, watch cap, and glasses was playing one of the machines.
"Can we get a closer shot of him?" Lucas asked.
"Not from that camera-we could have zoomed in if we thought he was up to something, but he never did anything," Hoffman said. "I just noticed him when I was down there because he didn't seem right. I forgot about his glasses, though."
"How about another camera?"
"The overhead won't help, but we've got a camera coming across from the side, but it's gonna be partly blocked by the machines."
"Number twenty-eight," Les said. "I can get it if you want it."
"Get it," Lucas said.
Number twenty-eight showed slices of the man's face, only marginally more clearly than the first camera. "Is that the best there is?"
"Probably got him walking in or out on number thirty-six, but I don't know when he arrived. Leaving, we'd only get the back of his head… It'd take some time. I don't know how much better the shot would be," Hoffman said.
"We could take the flashes we got of him on twenty-eight, freeze the shots, and then stitch them together and we'd have his whole face," Les said. "I could do it in Photoshop."
"How long would that take?"
"I don't know. I've never done it, but I think I could. I could print the best partial shots, too."
"Let's try it all," Lucas said to Hoffman. "We can get a subpoena to make it all legal."
"That'd be good," Hoffman said. "It'd help publicity-wise, if somebody asks-but we could get started right away. Look, look where he keeps looking."
"What?"
Hoffman tapped the monitor. "See, he keeps looking over the top of the machine, sideways. That's where Jane is. She's out of the picture, but he keeps looking over there. Here comes Small Bear… "
A woman pushing a change cart moved into the picture. When she got to the man, she stopped and spoke to him. He nodded, took out his wallet and gave her a bill. She gave him a stack of coins, said a couple more words, then pushed on down the aisle.
"Who's that?"
"JoAnne Small Bear. Been working here since we opened."
"We need to talk to her," Lucas said. "We're gonna need all the tape you've got of this guy. Even the overheads. He might be wearing a ring or a watch, and that could be a good thing to know."
Hoffman nodded. "Sure. I'll have Les pull out everything we've got. You're a hundred percent sure it's him?"
"No. Only about ninety percent," Lucas said. "Ninety and climbing."
"How about this Small Bear?" Del asked. "Where can we get her?"
Hoffman looked at his watch. "She's gotta be checked in by now-she works the three-to-eleven. Let's go find her."
JOANNE SMALL BEAR looked nothing at all like a bear-she looked more like a raspberry. Barely five feet tall, she was jolly and fat, with black eyes and brilliant white teeth; she wore boot-cut jeans with a western shirt and a turquoise necklace. She remembered the man in the watch cap. "He looked lonely and sad," she said. "Pretty good-looking, though. Polite."
"Any particular characteristics that might tell us about him?" Del asked.
"Maybe," she said. "You think he killed Jane Warr?"
"We need to talk to him," Lucas said.
"Jane was a big pain in the ass," Small Bear said.
"You don't hang people for being a pain in the ass," Del said. "You wouldn't have wanted to see her this morning when they cut her down."
Small Bear exhaled and said, "I know one thing that might be important. When he opened his billfold to give me some bills, I saw that he had a black card. One of those American Express black cards."
Del looked at Lucas and Lucas shrugged.
Small Bear looked from Lucas to Del to Lucas and said, "You don't know about the black cards?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Lucas said.
"We get every card in the world in here," Hoffman said. "The black card is called the Centurion Card. To get one, you gotta spend a hundred and fifty thousand bucks a year with American Express. I bet there aren't a hundred of them in Minnesota."
"You're kidding me," Lucas said. "A hundred and fifty thousand a year?"
"That's what I hear."
Del said to Lucas, "That ought to narrow the list."
LUCAS STEPPED AWAY, took out his cell phone, found a slip of paper with Neil Mitford's personal cell-phone number and punched it in. Mitford answered on the second ring: "This is Davenport. Things are moving here. We could have a photo and maybe a name pretty quick-but we need some help."
"What?"
"We need somebody to get to American Express. Maybe there's a local office or a local official we can give a subpoena to, but we need all the names of all the Centurion Card members from Minnesota and the Kansas City area. Maybe somebody could feed them a list of ZIP codes. We need it quick as we can."
"Wait a minute, let me jot this down." After a second of silence, Mitford said, "What the fuck is a Centurion Card?"
"Some kind of exclusive card," Lucas said. "The casino people say they're pretty rare."
"I'll find out the fastest way to do it, and get it to you."
"See if you can get a printable list from them, and fax it to the sheriff's office here. And tell them, you know, it involves a multiple murder. Put a little heat on them."
"I can do heat," Mitford said. "I'll call you."
HOFFMAN HAD WALKED away while Lucas was talking; when he got off the phone, Del said, "Hoffman's gone to get Anderson. His brother-in-law."