“He’s a serial killer. You know the mind of that kind of man better than I do.” He couldn’t keep a small smirk off his face.
“If we knew why he was doing this, it might help us find him,” Stride said. “And I think you know why.”
“You already said it, didn’t you, Detective? He has some misguided ideas about what happened to Amira.”
Stride shook his head. “Look, I know you want him first. I know you want to get him and pay him back your way.” Stride paused and noted that Boni didn’t disagree with him. “But the main thing is that one of us catch him, soon, before he kills anyone else. If you catch him, okay, we’ll never know. But I don’t think there’s a downside for you if we get him first.”
“Think harder,” Boni said. The mask slipped. A glint of steel.
Stride knew he was right. It was a race, and Boni needed to win. Not just to squeeze Blake but to make him disappear quietly and quickly from the headlines. In custody, who knew what Blake might say? Or what he knew. His allegations alone would keep the heat on Boni and might drive investors away from his Orient project.
He wasn’t going to help them.
“What if you’re too late, Boni?” Serena asked. “What if he gets to Claire first? Is it worth the risk?”
There was silence as Boni chewed on that thought.
“Where did Kamen find him?” Serena asked.
“That won’t help you,” Boni said. “Wilde was a mercenary in Afghanistan. David used him sometimes for ops that weren’t on the books. He was good. Fearless. Ruthless. But that’s all shadow stuff. Fake names. No backgrounds.”
“Were there others Kamen worked with who might know him?”
Boni shook his head. “No way I’m giving you that. No way David gives you that.”
Stride knew there were military channels he could pursue, but if Wilde was a rogue player, the brass wasn’t likely to give them any more information than Boni. “Then tell us why,” he said.
Stride watched Boni grinding through calculations. It was all mathematics to him, debits and credits. The value of information. He thought at first Boni would stiff them again, but the old man leaned forward, his hands on his knees.
“I tell you this, and we’re done.”
They both nodded.
“Amira, she wasn’t celibate, you get the picture? She came to town, and she started sleeping with Moose. Smart girl. Moose had juice. Pretty soon she was lead dancer in one of our T &A shows. Then she went to Paris, okay? Special engagement. That’s where she came up with the idea for Flame.”
Boni seemed to enjoy the confusion on their faces.
“The thing is, she didn’t go to Paris,” he went on. “She was pregnant. She wanted to keep it under wraps. So I sent her away for a few months, and she had the kid.”
A baby, Stride thought. A secret baby. Sometimes the hardest problems were really the simplest. Blake Wilde was Amira’s son.
“What happened to the baby?” Stride asked.
“Adoption,” Boni said. “Amira couldn’t get rid of the baby fast enough. It killed her stuck up there all alone. She couldn’t wait to get back. She knew Flame would be a huge hit.”
“Moose didn’t know?” Serena asked.
“No one knew.”
Something niggled in Stride’s brain. A plate shifted, like in an earthquake, and a piece of the puzzle fell into place.
“You said ‘up there,’” Stride said. “Where did you send her?”
“An associate of mine had resort cabins in Reno near the lake,” Boni replied. “That was where a lot of the girls from Vegas went when they had problems like that.”
Stride and Serena looked at each other. “ Reno,” they said.
PART THREE. BLAKE
THIRTY
I get to see you twice in one week,” Jay Walling said, as Serena got out of her rental car outside the retirement home near downtown Reno. He was wearing his black fedora at a cocky angle. “How blessed I am.”
“Stuff it, Jay,” Serena said pleasantly.
She zipped up her leather jacket. It was cold in the city, with a stiff wind off the mountains and snow flurries in the air. A fall heat wave was firing up the temperatures in Las Vegas, but up here it felt like winter. The sky overhead was a somber charcoal, and the mountains looked angry.
“His name’s William Borden,” Walling said. “Alice Ford’s brother.”
Once they knew about Blake’s connection to Reno, it hadn’t taken them long to find what they had been missing from the beginning-something to tie the murder of Alice Ford at her Reno ranch to the deaths in Las Vegas. They discovered that Alice ’s brother had spent thirty years as executive director of a nonprofit organization that delivered family services in the northern half of the state. That included arranging confidential adoptions for knocked-up showgirls like Amira.
“Did you find out any more about the agency?” Serena asked.
“They’re saintly, as far as the folks in Carson City are concerned. Modest budget, lots of small annual gifts, no significant complaints. They do good work.”
“Was Borden running the agency when Amira Luz had her baby?”
Walling nodded. “He took over in 1960. Ran it until he retired. He’s terminal now, with a heart condition. Moved into this place last year.”
Serena studied the three-story senior facility, a concrete box in dirty white, and felt herself getting depressed. They weren’t far from the huge old homes that looked down on the rushing waters of the Truckee River, but they might as well have been in another universe. It got worse when they went inside. The nurses tried hard, decorating the walls with children’s art and wearing wide smiles, but it was still a place where used-up people went to die. They passed a diabetic man with amputated limbs. A woman trembling in the grip of severe Parkinson’s. People with empty stares, their minds gone. Serena felt a sense of claustrophobia.
They found William Borden in the lounge on the second floor. There was a television in one corner, and a dozen people were on sofas and in wheelchairs around it, watching a rerun of Friends. A nurse pointed out Borden for them. He was off by himself in an armchair on the far side of the room, a book in his lap.
They introduced themselves and pulled over chairs to sit in front of him. Serena took off her coat. The room was a furnace.
“I’m very sorry about your sister,” Serena told him. She noted that the book in his hands was titled Families Making Sense of Death. She wondered how anyone ever did make sense of it. Particularly violent death. Borden’s eyes were far away.
“I feel terrible guilt,” Borden replied. He had a professorial voice, self-reflective and somewhat pompous. He was a small man, with a gray beard and silver hair badly in need of a cut. He wore light blue pajamas and slippers. “I guess that was this man’s intention all along. To inflict guilt and pain. I haven’t seen Al yet. I wonder if he’ll even visit me now, since I took his wife away from him.”
“You didn’t do that, Mr. Borden,” Walling pointed out.
Borden shrugged “Didn’t I?”
“We’d like to see if you can identify the man we think may have killed your sister” Serena said. She began to hand him a copy of the police artist’s sketch, but Borden waved it away.
“No need. I know who it is. When Mr. Walling called me, I knew exactly who it had to be.” Despite the warmth in the room and a wool blanket over his legs, Borden shivered.
“He calls himself Blake Wilde,” Serena said.
Borden shook his head. “That name doesn’t mean anything to me, but I’m sure he’s changed it many times over the years. When I knew him, he was Michael Burton. That was more than twenty years ago.”