As I approached my desk, I spied Connor sitting across at his, flipping intently through some books.
“Hey,” I said in greeting. I looked at my desk in disgust. It looked like a filing cabinet had thrown up all over it.
Connor smiled. “How ya feeling, kid?”
He didn’t seem to mind me strolling in midafternoon so I assumed that the Inspectre must have talked to him.
“I’m better,” I said, not wanting to get into all the dark details of the past twenty-four hours. “Long night.”
“So I heard,” Connor said, closing the book before him. “Don’t worry. I won’t make you recount the whole thing to me. I’m sure you’ve gone over the good, the bad, and the ugly of it with the Inspectre. Unless you want talk about it…?”
I appreciated the buddy-buddy effort Connor was extending, but I hadn’t told the Inspectre everything that had happened last night, and I wasn’t going to share it with Connor either.
Acting all touchy-feely wasn’t something Connor did too often. Usually, he’d give a lecture on objectivity or professionalism, about staying detached from my coworkers and our clients. He took a while to warm up to people. He didn’t talk much about his previous partners in the Department, and he had given me enough of a cold shoulder on the subject that I was smart enough never to bring them up. But suddenly he was being a regular Chatty Cathy. I wondered what exactly the Inspectre had told Connor about last night.
“Thanks,” I said, “but nah, I don’t need to talk about it. I’d rather we got down to business.”
“Fine by me,” Connor said. He grabbed up another book and buried his nose in it. After a few minutes, he gestured for me to join him, so I scooted my chair around. He had been a busy little researcher during my slumber this morning, and his desk was cluttered with travel brochures for Las Vegas, printouts of topographic maps, gambling guides, and a plentiful array of playing cards. Anything that might give us a clue to make sense of what we had heard from Gaynor.
“Any progress?” I asked. “What was it Gaynor said on the train again?”
“‘Follow the Vegas trail and all will become clear,’”Connor repeated, trying to sound like the mystic, but failing completely. “As you can see, I ransacked the resource room to find out everything I could about Vegas. Even brought in several decks of playing cards my grandmother brought back from a trip there several years ago. I called down to Lesser Arcana, hoping for some help tarot-ing up the cards. All they could spare was a lousy intern and she wasn’t very much use. She was able to tell me some secrets about where my grandmother hid our Christmas presents, but she didn’t give me anything useful about Irene.”
“Think the Department would spring for two plane tickets?” I asked hopefully. A little investigative work mixed with sun, spectacle, and the gaudy neon paradise of the Strip might be just what the doctor ordered to clear my head.
“Have you seen the revised budget the Mayor’s Office sent to us?” Connor said. “Davidson dropped off the newest cuts this morning.”
“Davidson was here?” I asked. “Today? You’ve got to be kidding. The man practically betrayed us at the Sectarian Defense League and now he has the unmitigated gall to show his face here?”
Connor shook his head. “Look, kid, I need you to keep an open mind…the verdict’s still out on Davidson. He’s been a good friend to the Department in the past. You weren’t here last October, but he cleared up this huge fiasco when the Chrysler Building was overrun by a legion of undead from a pet cemetery down by the East River. Things That Go Bump in the Night Division had us all working overtime on the cleanup, but it was Davidson who took the heat for us back at Town Hall. He did his politiciany magic and plausibly denied the whole thing when the media came sniffing around. He’s done well by us in the past.”
I rose and wheeled my chair back over to my desk.
“But he’s working with the Sectarians!” I shouted.
“Easy, kid, easy!” Connor said. “You’re gonna blow a gasket. Look, don’t be such a purist. Okay?”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning thatobviously Davidson isn’t a saint,” Connor said. “You wanna know the first clue? He’s a cog in the political machine! That means he’s already tainted. Working as the Mayor’s liaison means working both sides of the fence. He’s probably seen things that would make a hard case like Wesker weak in the knees. Government work is a dirty game, Simon. If we want to stay in it, we gotta step up to the air-hockey table, you know?”
I nodded resolutely, acquiescing to Connor’s take on the bigger picture. What looked black-and-white to my eyes looked different through his. I had trusted him these past months with my life, and I supposed I would have to trust him on this, too. For now, at any rate.
Connor picked up one of the Las Vegas guidebooks and thumbed through it. “Care to get back to business?”
“Any leads popping up with any of the guides?” I asked, settling in at my desk. I opened the left-hand drawer and readied a roll of Life Savers.
Connor shook his head. “Let me give it a try,” I said.
I took off a glove, popped half a roll in my mouth, and then reached across the desk for a colorful-looking guide that sported a neon cowboy hitchhiking on its cover.Weller’s Guide to Losing Your Shirt in Las Vegas, the cover read.
Focusing my will on the book, I felt the electric spark of divination kick in.
My mind flashed through a series of disconnected images that I had trouble focusing on-book binderies, type-setting machines, paper mills-all images to do with making the book itself but nothing else. As those images threw themselves at me, I let them fall away. Finally one forced itself forward and I had no other choice except to embrace it.
The vision put me in a mom-and-pop bookstore. Several fixtures of well-thumbed paperbacks sat askew in a metal spinner rack along one of the aisles. Suddenly a figure carrying a tall stack of books blocked my view. I pulled my focus to the details of the figure and he came into resolution. The face was that of a young man, awkward looking with a bad spot of acne across his forehead. He was absolutely unfamiliar to me.
What else was noticeable? There had to be something useful.
I soaked in everything around the teen. The details. The clerk’s clothes, for instance. Parachute pants, skinny leather tie, and aFRANKIE SAYS RELAX button just above his nametag. The Weller book sat at the top of his pile and he slipped it off to shelve it. I double-checked his face, noticing the telltale mullet flaring out from behind his head, and I had all the information I needed to know I had hit a dead end.
I shook myself free from the vision. Connor had given up his book and was watching me instead.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing linking to the case directly, no,” I said, “but maybe indirectly. I think I might have found an error in our approach.”
I felt the hypoglycemia kick in and helped myself to the other half of the Life Savers roll. I replaced my glove and picked my way gingerly through the rest of the pile of books, confirming my suspicions.
“All I got off the Weller book was some image from the mideighties of the book itself being shelved. Most of these books you pulled are seriously outdated. They’re useless to us.”