“Nope. Just a lot of faces and bodies milling through the casino and lobby area.”
“I’ll take another look. New eye, new ideas. Say from six to eight P.M. You make that look so easy,” Molina said, envying the ease with which Chet played his electronic game board. “I had to let my twelve-year-old daughter take over the VCR at home. She’s teethed on computers since third grade.”
“That’s cool. We can’t afford any more computer-phobic generations. Do you know my folks don’t e-mail?”
Chet was on the cusp of forty, Molina figured, so his parents must be senior citizens baffled by debit cards at the grocery store.
“At least I have a job where I have to keep up on some modern improvements,” Molina said. “Try the hotel registration area first.”
“Okay. There’s the time in the lower right-hand corner.” Molina watched the broken LED numerals flick through their predictable round.
If Su and Barrett had seen nothing, maybe nothing was to be seen. Certainly Vassar hadn’t checked in at the front desk. But Matt Devine had, and she wanted to know if he had been caught on tape. It was possible he hadn’t. The tapes were pervasive but general. It would be easy to miss one person in the constant flood of bodies through a major hotel during the evening hours.
And, of course, Su and Barrett only knew to look for Vassar and anything “unusual.”
She forced herself to focus on the front desk clerks. Mattwould have had to pass through the lines leading to one of them.
That was the one given she knew, that no one else did. Who the man was that Vassar had met.
The tape was black and white; no point wasting color on pure surveillance. It made finding Matt’s very blond head harder. A lot of silver-tops came to Vegas and in black’ and white blond was white.
Something familiar flashed past her eyes. “Stop!” Chet froze the screen instantly.
“Can you go back in slow motion?”
“I can make this thing do everything but cook, Lieutenant.”
“Slow motion is good enough, Flyboy.”
Chet grinned. The images began running backward in a staccato fashion, as jerky as if a strobe light were flashing somewhere above them.
A man who had walked out of the camera’s view back-stepped reluctantly into focus again.
“Stop there.” Molina leaned inward, studied the figure from the same bird’s-eye view as the camera. His face was foreshortened, his shoulders exaggerated. She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Rafi Nadir? She’d only seen him close-up once in recent years, and a lot of Middle-Eastern men came to Las Vegas, enough that the security lines at McCarran Airport snaked through half the terminal nowadays. Was it him, or just your average possible terrorist?
“Want a close-up?”
“Yeah. Lower left-hand quadrant.”
Magically, the screen expanded to a larger blur of bodies.
Rafi? Rafi had been at the Goliath that night? It was possible. He was quite the man about Las Vegas, from what she had gleaned.
“That enough, Lieutenant?”
“Quite enough. Go back to the overview and run the tape forward.”
“Nobody good, huh?”
“Nobody good, right.”
No good, period. Molina brooded. He had gone downhill since L.A. Downhill and edged into quasi-legal territory, at the least. Not all cops stay the course, but they don’t have their futures written on their foreheads either. She had the uneasy feeling that Rafi’s downward slide, if graphed, would exactly parallel her upward climb, in rank at least. It had not started out that way.
All the while her eyes were scanning the images flowing past the registration desk. The time read 6:10, the seconds fleeing like suspects.
Ten minutes, then she sat forward again.
Chet read her body language and immediately stopped the tape, reversed it, froze it.
Molina checked the time, then noted it down in the small notebook she carried in her jacket pocket: 6:23. And Matt Devine waiting at the brass stands that kept people from rushing the desk clerk.
What had nailed him was that he was looking around, constantly. Hunting Kitty the Cutter. If you knew to look for a hunted man, and Barrett and Su had not, it was easy to spot that bobbing head amid the sea of bored, nodding heads.
She nodded at Chet herself, okaying him to continue the tape, and watched Matt approach a desk clerk, chat, flash a roll, wait, study the page her computer spit out, hesitate, chat some more. The woman smiled. He was changing his room number and the woman smiled. What an operator! Mr. Charm. Irritate an overworked functionary and have her eating out of your hand anyway.
He did everything she had suggested.
“Stop.”
Again the taped world obliged thanks to Chet’s quick trigger finger. Molina studied every single soul in the frame, maybe seventy people. Nobody recognizable. No Vassar. No Kitty. No Rafi.
Nobody to see Matt Devine check into the Goliath Hotel for a date with death.
Nobody but the eternal Eye in the Sky and anybody with access to studying the tapes.
“Forward,” Molina finally ordered.
Docilely, everyone on-screen sprang to life again, shuffling forward in line, slapping credit cards to marble, jostling each other, hanging back behind the registration line watching. .
Son of a biretta!
Molina’s hands tightened on the hard plastic arms to keep herself from leaping out of her chair, but the control geek at the monitors sensed her excitement.
“Got it!” Chet caroled.
Even in black and white, there was no mistaking that head. Black as night, towering over the common crowd.
Max Kinsella had been at the Goliath Hotel the evening that Vassar had died, long before she and he had tangled in the Secrets parking lot and before Temple Barr had met the Stripper Killer face-to-face in another parking lot.
The ultramodern letters on the frozen tape read 6:26.
Molina was doing some fast mental math.
Was there any way Kinsella could have escaped her custody and gotten back to the Goliath in time to interfere with Vassar in a fatal way?
Yes. And the bastard would even have had time to visit his heroic ladylove on the way.
If Kinsella could fly as a suspect, Matt was off the hook, and so was she.
But no. She and Matt would still have to reveal their roles in the whole charade, and who would believe the tale of Kitty the Cutter, woman of mystery?
Still. Kinsella had been there. She knew it. She had evidence. It would be worth something. Sometime.
Chapter 24
… Gone for Good
Matt awoke, so early that the light wasn’t sluicing through his bedroom miniblinds, and panicked.
Yesterday had been Sunday and he had missed mass. The instant overpowering, guilty surge was an old altar-boy reflex.
Matt knew it had been Sunday. He knew he had missed mass. He had deliberately missed mass.
After the Saturday night he planned had turned out, he hadn’t figured out how to go back to church. Was he a lamb of God or a leper? Did he need confession, and if so, exactly what sins should he confess? For the first time, Matt understood the constant internal agonies of overscrupulous Catholics caught up in an obsessive-compulsive round of self-doubt.
Father, forgive me, for I may have done something wrong sometime, like maybe now by debating just what is confessable and what is not.
Often Matt had been secretly impatient with their endless, tiny, tedious venial sins, then had joined their self-abasement and assigned himself penance afterward. Now that his mind was splitting hairs, too, he began to see the torturous thumbtacks of self-incrimination that pinned these overanxious souls to a rack of worry and insecurity.
Okay. Yesterday had been Sunday. Today was Monday. A new week. Vassar was two days dead instead of one. Molina was digging into a new week’s worth of investigative work. He was, what, eight hours into being promised release—paroled but not pardoned, if you will—by the call-in lips of Kathleen O’Connor? Could you believe a psychopath? Wasn’t the impulse to want to believe them just another way they wrapped you up tighter in their own sick scenarios?