“She says that.”
“What about you? How do you feel?”
Stride thought about the old joke. Ask a Minnesotan how he feels on the day his dog dies, his wife leaves him, and he loses his job. “Fine,” he said.
“Real funny.”
“I love her, Mags. You know that.”
“So what’s the problem? Hell, boss, this could be your ticket to a threesome.”
Stride laughed. “Sure.” He added, “Okay, the thought of it did cross my dirty mind. But come on. Me?”
“It’s a lot stranger world than you know,” she replied, in a voice that didn’t sound like Maggie at all.
“Don’t tell me that you would get into anything like that.”
“Let’s not go there, boss,” she retorted.
He felt as if he were walking in quicksand and decided to change the subject. “So what about you? Are you going back?”
“I haven’t decided. It’s too soon after the baby, you know?”
“I know.” He was so accustomed to thinking of Maggie as a rock that it was difficult to hear pain radiating from her. “I really am sorry, Mags.”
“Thanks. You know, there was another reason I called.”
“Oh?”
“K-2 asked me to do it. He was too chicken to call himself.”
Deputy Chief Kyle Kinnick was Stride’s old boss in Duluth. “What does he want?” Stride asked, feeling a tingling in his chest.
“The search for a new lieutenant in the Detective Bureau washed out,” Maggie said. “He wanted me to feel you out. See if you might be interested in coming back.”
Libraries,” Amanda said. “I think that’s our best bet.”
She stood by the open window in Sawhill’s office. There was barely a whisper of a breeze. A portable fan whined on his desk, directing its air at the lieutenant’s face. Part of the downtown area had lost power earlier in the afternoon, and though the station had a backup generator, it didn’t extend to air-conditioning. The office was stifling.
“This guy had to find out about Amira somewhere,” she went on. “We’re talking about Vegas forty years ago. Sure, he could surf the Web, but wouldn’t he go to the library, too? That’s where he’d find old newspapers, old magazines, anything like that. It may be one way he built his list of targets.”
“Check it out,” Sawhill said. He had a glow of sweat on his face, but his tie was tightly knotted at his neck. His one concession to the heat was removing his black suit coat. “We’ve got this guy’s description all over the papers and television, but we can’t find him. And he still manages to gun down Gino Rucci and his bodyguard right on the Strip. Explain that to me.”
“We know he can disguise himself,” Stride said. “If he doesn’t want to be recognized, he won’t be, but we’ve got uniforms and casino security people on the lookout for him. Witnesses last night pegged him in a brown sedan, but no one got a plate. We’ve added that to the profile.”
“Are we getting calls to the hotline?”
“Lots, but nothing you could call a break,” Stride said.
“What else do we know about this guy?” Sawhill asked.
“He’s pretty much an unperson,” Serena replied. “He was called Michael Burton in Reno until he was sixteen. Jay Walling dug up some school records, but nothing that will help us here. After he torched his parents, he fell off the grid. There’s no record of who he became or where he went.”
“I checked with the military,” Stride added. “I was able to contact two other men from David Kamen’s unit in Afghanistan. One of them remembered Wilde and confirmed Kamen’s story that the guy was essentially a mercenary, but he didn’t know anything that would help us find him.”
“We haven’t gone public with the connection to Amira,” Serena said. “Maybe we should.”
Amanda watched the political wheels turning in Sawhill’s mind. “How would that help us?” he asked.
“Wilde might have talked to someone about Amira or the Sheherezade. They might remember him or know something about him.”
Sawhill shook his head. “Not strong enough. The casino connection would generate a lot of headlines, but I don’t think it will help us catch this guy. It’ll just be a distraction.”
In other words, people might start asking Boni Fisso some embarrassing questions, Amanda thought. “Someone’s going to make the connection soon,” she said. “Either it will leak, or some writer like Rex Terrell will put it together.”
“Let them worry about that, and we’ll worry about catching this guy before he kills someone else.” Sawhill pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped his brow. “What are we doing to prevent another hit?”
Serena glanced over her shoulder at Cordy. “Did you get the list?”
Cordy nodded. “Uh-huh. We got another ten people who worked at the Sheherezade back then and had jobs that had something to do with Amira and her show. Dancers, choreographers, the kind of folks this Wilde thing might decide to have a grudge against, you know? We’ve told them to make sure their relatives keep an eye out.”
“But Wilde seems to be moving up the food chain,” Stride said.
“Meaning?” Sawhill asked.
“Meaning Boni,” Stride said. “Wilde wouldn’t let us know what he looks like if he wasn’t in the last stages of his game. He wants Boni to know he’s coming after him.”
“Why announce his intentions?”
Stride shrugged. “Pride. Ego. Confidence. He wants Boni to squirm.”
Sawhill rocked back in his seat and frowned. “Except he’s not likely to tackle Boni directly, is he? In every other case, he’s gone after a relative. His daughter-Claire-she’s got to be at the top of our list, doesn’t she?”
“No question about it,” Stride said.
Sawhill leaned forward, jabbing a finger at Serena. “You know her, don’t you? I want you to take charge of her protection. I want you all over her, Detective.”
“I’m not a babysitter, sir,” Serena said.
“No, you’re a detective trying to save a life,” Sawhill retorted. “Do you have a problem here?” He didn’t wait for an answer but added immediately, “I want you to oversee security for Claire Belfort. Under no circumstances are we going to let Wilde get near her. You got that? I want you with her now, and I want you glued to her side until we catch this guy. Have her stay at your place.”
“Understood,” Serena said. She looked like she was wilting in the heat. Amanda was surprised. She had always thought of Serena as cool and unflappable.
Amanda’s cell phone vibrated. She quickly excused herself, left the office, and ducked into an empty cubicle. “Gillen.”
“It’s Leo Rucci.”
Amanda sat down. Even the seat felt warm, as if the heat wave had worked its way inside the cushions. “I’m sorry about your son,” she said.
“Save it. I’m not looking for sympathy.” Gino’s death hadn’t softened Rucci at all.
“I’d like to talk to you about the murder,” Amanda said. “Maybe you can help us find this guy before he kills anyone else.”
“I got nothing to say to you. I’m not talking about the past, okay? And what happened to Gino is between me and this Wilde fuckhead. I don’t need any help. I just wanted to tell you that if you want to catch this guy, you better do it quick.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Rucci growled. “Because I’m coming after him, too.”
THIRTY-THREE
Blake blew out a lungful of acrid cigarette smoke that billowed in a cloud around his face. Picking up his drink, he took a hit of salt from the rim and a sweet-sour sip of margarita. In reality, he despised the lime drinks that all the tourists sipped in Cancún-he preferred beer or scotch-but a red-headed lawyer from the bankruptcy attorneys’ convention in town, with shades, a name tag, and a margarita, didn’t attract special attention. He was just another shyster soaking up the blues and hoping to get lucky by flirting with the twenty-something waitress.