“‘Major recruiter’ is probably what you’d call him,” Max put in. “And he wasn’t too persuasive if he left a killing trail of would-be recruits that turned him down.”
“Effinger talked to somebody with mob connections,” Matt said. “The events in Chicago proved that.”
Temple was starting to see the light. “Santiago probably got something out of Sparks. The body had what the coroner calls ‘hesitation marks.’”
“What was the weapon?” Matt wanted to know.
“Ice pick.”
“Cold,” Matt said. “And he hasn’t been indicted?”
“He confessed, but without a lawyer present, so he retracted it.”
“He confessed?” Now Max was incredulous.
Temple grinned. “The Fontana boys took him for a ride from hell, and he wasn’t too rational after that.”
“So now he is in hell,” Matt said, nodding. “According to Dante, there’s a whole circle of hell with murderers being harried in a river of blood.”
“Gosh,” Temple said, “we encountered a few of those killers.”
“Think Kathleen O’Connor will go directly there?” Max asked Matt with gusto.
Matt looked troubled. “I think that’s not up to us. There still may be the soul of a lost child within her.”
Temple hadn’t been following the interchange. She was busy writing Santiago in as the last corpse on her Table of Crime Elements.
“Why was Santiago killed? By whom? And why there?”
Both men opened their mouths to speculate, but Temple suddenly jumped up. “Hold the fort and the mayo. I’ve got an idea.”
She grabbed Professor Mangel’s map and the Ophiuchus map and ran for her office, to rev up the copier. There was some murmured conversation between the guys but the noise from the rackety copier kept Temple from hearing what they were saying.
“I’m back!” she announced breathlessly from the doorway to the main room. “I reduced and enlarged until I went through fifty pages, but I finally herded these two images into cowering submission and they are one. Now I know why Santiago was murdered and why it happened where it did.”
“And who did it?” Matt and Max asked together, in concert for the second time in the history of their sessions.
“Well, no. On that, I haven’t got a clue. Specifically.”
“Specifically is kind of important,” Matt said.
Max nodded.
“So are maps,” Temple said, slapping two pieces of paper to the tabletop. One was copied at a very dark setting.
Both men leaned close to view the usual guidebook map of Las Vegas Boulevard from Downtown to McCarran Airport on the south end, the footprints of all the major hotels and landmarks drawn in and named.
Temple lifted a faint reproduction of the Ophiuchus figure from Effinger’s file box, only a few dark spots inked in: the major stars that formed the crude shape of a kindergartner’s askew house outline.
Matt reared back so abruptly, he almost butted skulls with Max. “It’s the Vegas Strip. The star sites are places that could be hiding the IRA hoard. Why so many, though?”
Max’s forefinger pinioned a dark spot. “The Synth was the keeper of the hoard for outside interests. It’s like Cosimo Sparks kept the map to himself, but some map site points may have been phony to confuse other seekers, perhaps even the intended keepers of the hoard. Or the ‘star spots’ may indicate an order in which the hoard could be moved if in danger.”
“This one,” Temple said, “is right under ‘Area Fifty-four’ Now we know why Santiago was snooping around that site. He’d tormented another copy of the map out of Sparks before the magician died: then he in turn was killed to keep the hoard safe for somebody else.”
“Somebody who may have moved it,” Matt said.
“Doesn’t this feel like an outtake from Treasure Island?” Temple said. “A hidden hoard wanted by many parties, as in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and, for drama, ‘the Black Spot,’ only several of them.”
“The Black Spot was note delivered to pirates, warning they were marked for death, not geographical markings,” Matt said.
“Death has followed this ‘treasure,’” Temple pointed out. “It we find it, we can end the mayhem being wreaked by the factions fighting over it.”
Max had been silent while Temple and Matt went into their pirate-treasure riff.
“Max?” she asked. “What do you think?”
“More than I’m willing to say yet.” He ran his hands through his hair, looking troubled. “My balky brain isn’t running on high octane, but I do believe I’m … we’re finally on the right trail.”
Max sighed. “And who knows what unlikely suspect we might find at the end of it.”
His intonation hadn’t made that speculation a question, but a statement.
Poor X-man, Temple thought, ex-spy, ex-magician, ex-main man and now operating with an X-factor memory.
Chapter 46
Max’s Midnight Hour
Max wondered what Matt Devine was doing right now. Probably talking down some depressed ex-boyfriend on the radio and preparing for another wrongheaded but good-hearted attempt to deal with and deflect Kathleen O’Connor. She’d always found the ex-priest a favorite second-best target.
Max couldn’t worry about that now. Last night he couldn’t believe where the trail of Kathleen’s follower had led. Once again the hulking high skyline of a major strip hotel loomed over him. Max had dodged around Ford 150s and Tacomas and Expeditions in the farthest area of the hotel parking garage to track his prey to an unlighted wall in the structure’s top level.
Max had heard the soft wheeze and snick of an elevator door closing and rushed to find only a concrete block dead end. Several dark gray metal doors promised to lead somewhere, but all were hinged and locked. A very private elevator must lurk behind one of them. They all had security pads, not locks to pick.
Max had pressed like a lover against each in turn, seeking some slight warmth or tremor from the only operative one.
Nothing. The elevator was elaborately camouflaged. Max could, and would, get inside the hotel to find whatever was on the other side of this wall there, but he expected to encounter another dead end.
What that said about the man he’d been following was chilling.
Talk about a cloak of invisibility. Silas T. Farnum’s technologically invisible Area 54 hotel-casino had nothing on this guy.
And here Max himself had made what he needed to do next even harder than it was before.
* * *
“Darlin’ girl,” Max told the stunning New Millennium cocktail waitress wearing a liquid silver catsuit over a silver-paint full body and face job. “I need you to assist me in a street magic illusion. First, who is your favorite president, William McKinley or Grover Cleveland?”
“Grover Cleveland,” she answered promptly, proving she was no babe in the woods.
Max rolled the fingers of his right hand, and a thousand-dollar bill materialized. He’d already expected to dip into his emergency stash. Big bills were easier to conceal.
“All I need is you,” he said, “with a tray of two vodka martinis and a cool head. Follow me and I will follow you later.”
She cocked an inquiring silver eyebrow, but Vegas casino workers were used to eccentric big spenders and often shared in the bounty.
On his order, the bar produced two princely looking, and costing, martinis embellished with gourmet onions, and more of Max’s big bills went to the cause.
“What flavor martinis are those?” the cocktail waitress asked.
“They’re called Open Sesames.”
“That’s a new one,” she commented, shrugging.
“Now, head backstage,” he told her.
She raised both eyebrows. “We only go there on orders.”
“These are my orders, and we’ll be as welcome as whales … once we get in.”