“That’s going to be difficult.” Jacob winced as Kim stepped around the large pool to the edge of the door, bracing her hand on the knob.
She tapped her gun against the door. “Hello? Is anyone in there? NYPD, open up!”
No answer. She lightly turned the doorknob; the unlocked door opened inward, and Kim balked slightly as the dense fog of dust and cigar smoke hit her nostrils. Surveying the scene, she found she needed to radio Maria once again.
“Langley, put a rush on that request. We need your team right now.”
Maria tilted her head in concern as she called back. “What’s going on down there, Kim? Everything okay?”
“Everything’s great,” Kim responded. “That is, the room looks clear of suspects. But there’s no walking space in this casino with this much blood on the ground, so Newport and I are stuck outside until you guys bag some evidence.”
Kim looked once more around the musky room, her eyes continuously snapping back to the poor woman in the middle of the parquet floor, the woman who apparently put most of her chips on red.
The rest of the forensics team arrived within the hour, and more officers had to be called to hold back the growing crowd. Standing on a white tarp in the doorway, Kim sealed her lips in disgust; people in her city always seemed to be searching for free entertainment, even at the expense of human life. One of the younger officers, Craig Phillips, approached and held out a hand, which Kim simply stared at until he dropped it back to his side.
“Detective, I’m a big fan of your career. It’s an honor to assist you on this case.” He looked around at the scene. “So, um…what exactly happened here?”
“We can’t be certain yet, Officer Phillips. That’s what we’re here to find out.”
“It’s weird,” Phillips said. “There’s no sign outside, but when you do an internet search for the address, you come up with results for a casino company called Rat Pack Entertainment. They’ve got over three dozen reviews, all five stars, and all posted within the past six hours.”
Kim’s eyes widened. “Impressive, Officer. You got all that from one internet search?”
Phillips grinned. “They don’t call it a smart phone for nothing, Detective. Thing might be smarter than your partner over there.”
“Doubtful,” said Jacob without turning around. He was standing at the poker table nearest the deceased, inspecting every nook and cranny for something the forensics team couldn’t tell him. “One thing your phone probably can’t tell you is that the killer didn’t set this all up for show. While it may have only been in operation for six hours, this was, in fact, a working casino.”
He stopped talking. Kim had to probe him for more, something she was quite used to doing. “Pretend for a second, Jacob, that I’m not following you.”
Jacob raised his head and extended his pointer finger toward the wall as he paced from one table to the next. He kept his eyes on the floor.
“Working backward from the spot where she died, you can see the victim started from across the room. She was over here to begin with, as evidenced by the scratches left on the floor by her heels.” Jacob stopped at another table. The marks ended at a chair, which had been pulled out farther than the others. “Notice how every table has chips piled on top of it. They’re only missing from two spots. One pile fell to the floor when she died, presumably grasping for something to hold onto as something else caused her to fall. The other missing pile is right here, where she must have been sitting.”
Kim was by Jacob’s side at this point, trying to make the same connections as her partner. “So she lost her chips, got up to leave the room, and someone just compulsively murdered her?”
“And took her heart,” said Maria, finishing her inspection of the body. “She lost a few fingernails to the hardwood as well. Poor girl must’ve been struggling up to her last breath.”
Kim rubbed her forehead. She was getting tired of having to talk over this horrible music. She turned to Officer Phillips, who seemed dead-set on following her around like a puppy dog. “Phillips, you seem to be vying for a position as our bona fide tech guy. Want to go see if you can shut this crap up?”
“Sure thing, ma’am. But I wouldn’t call it crap. They didn’t call Sinatra the Chairman of the Board for nothing.”
“Just get to work. And don’t call me ‘ma’am’ ever again unless you want to lose your tongue.” Phillips went off to find the source of the music while Kim turned to Jacob. “Why did they call him the Chairman, anyway?”
“I’m not really a fan of music,” said Jacob. “But I would presume it had something to do with his prominence in Las Vegas. Considering his recognition, one might assume he had some pull with other entertainers at the time.”
Thinking over this, Kim looked again around the room. She looked at the pulled-out chairs, the large piles of poker chips. She inhaled the scent of cigar smoke, lingering as if there were still smokers in the room. She felt a light bulb going on above her head.
“Pull over entertainers. So in other words, pull over other people like him. So if there were, indeed, multiple people in the room—and if there were, as the wound in her back would suggest, a single killer—then whoever killed her knew people like him, people who could’ve written the reviews that Phillips found online.”
Jacob, still looking at the floor, noticed something for the first time. “That might explain why the blood leading up to the door doesn’t touch any of the chair legs.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Maria asked. She hadn’t even noticed the curiosity of the furniture remaining clean in such a bloody crime scene.
This time, Kim understood her partner perfectly.
“He’s saying, Langley,” Kim winced as the music started up again, “that our vic wasn’t alone with the killer when she died. There were people in these chairs, and they had the sense to pull their seats back when the blood got close enough to touch their shoes. Whatever happened here, it’s all part of some very real, and very sick, poker match. And since no one seems to have collected their chips, it’s probable that the tournament is far from over.”
Chapter Four
Allen Sampson lacked patience for unscheduled visits, especially from his clients. In his estimation, just about the worst thing that could happen to a psychiatrist is their patients actually needing help. Yet here was Alexander Kane, disheveled and rambling about a brilliant new plan. Unless his plan was to go on a shooting rampage, Allen planned on double-billing him for interrupting his lunch.
“Slow down, Alex, and talk like a human being. Pretend, for argument’s sake, that I actually want to hear what you’re saying right now.”
Having celebrated his fiftieth birthday with his wife the previous week—his wife being cruel enough to actually place fifty candles on the cake—Allen felt as if every second he spent with his clients was a second of personal time he could have used to sit back and enjoy his utter hatred of the world around him.
Stopping in the middle of the room, Alex could not calm down, but simply let the entirety of his new idea explode from his mouth in two simple words.
“Method acting.”
Allen blinked. “Great. Sounds golden. You go do that.”
Allen took his carefully prepared sandwich from the napkin laid on his desk. Alex smacked it out of his hand.
“You don’t get it!”
Eyeing the sandwich, tragically spilled across his antique Sarouk rug, Allen spoke without even looking at Alex.
“You’re right, I don’t. Here I was, thinking you were just an over-excited narcissist with a less-than-mild case of histrionic disorder.” He looked up. “But you come in today and tell me that you’re a genius method actor who’s found the solution to all of his own problems, yet still needs to share them with a psychiatrist. What you haven’t told me is why it’s my problem, and why I need to hear about it when I could be eating seasoned pastrami with Charroux mustard and coriander.”