Zoe’s eyes picked up different state plates, more Missouri and Kansas than any other. The tally ran on in her head without her bidding, the numbers appearing next to each vehicle. None of them the right one.
There was a crackle on the radio in Zoe’s hand, and she lifted it to hear the message. “We’ve got it. Far left row, mid-level. Vehicle is unoccupied.”
Zoe and Shelley looked up, the heads of the two other teams swinging in unison toward the furthest row in the lot. One hand waved in the air briefly, indicating the position of the car.
Zoe lifted the radio to her mouth. “We go in,” she said. “You two stay with the vehicle in case of his return. If that happens, communicate with us immediately. The rest, with us.”
They met at the entrance in a rush, all on the alert, wide eyes and stiff postures. There was a tension in the group, the kind of nervous energy triggered by the knowledge that the confrontation was soon to come.
“What do we do?” Shelley asked, yielding to Zoe’s superior experience and knowledge. Moments like these reminded Zoe that her partner was not as seasoned as she sometimes came across.
“Two groups,” Zoe said, looking around to check that everyone was listening. “Half with me, half with Special Agent Rose. I will go in the front entrance, the other team in the back. From there, we fan out. Leave one person behind at each exit. You all have your printouts?”
There were nods from all four of the local cops, and from Shelley.
“Take one last moment to study his face again before we enter,” Zoe instructed them. “As soon as you see him, get on the radio and let us know his precise location. We will converge on him for arrest.”
There were murmurs of assent and understanding all around as they each opened their phone screens or pulled out folded pieces of paper from their pockets to check Jimmy Sikes’s image.
As they did, Zoe approached a member of the security staff belonging to the casino, flashing him her badge quickly in a way that concealed it from the view of passersby. After a few exchanged mutters, he took a spare radio from her hands and rushed it to his own control center.
Then they parted ways, three bodies in each direction, Shelley looking back at Zoe for a brief moment as if for reassurance. Zoe nodded to her, and Shelley turned to carry on.
Zoe steeled herself with a deep breath as she approached the entrance. The other team would need more time to get to the back of the building. They did not need to rush, not yet.
But that was not why she hesitated. She hesitated because she had been inside a casino before, and she knew what it did to her. What was about to happen to her mind.
She glanced quickly at the two cops beside her to check they were ready, and walked forward, pushing through the wide wooden doors and into noise and dim chaos.
The lighting was low, deliberately murky to hide the stains and to trick customers into losing track of the time of day. The room was wide and long, set up in different divisions, some beyond her view. The slot machines, some of them tall and showy, blocked almost everything on the right side. To the left were card tables and other games, and a bar stretching along it all that allowed patrons to walk up and get a drink whenever they wanted.
And, of course, the old casino classic: a meandering path which only ever led straight to the next gambling opportunity, rather than giving them a clear direction across the room.
Zoe took a breath, trying to keep her bearings. Trying not to let the numbers, the noise of machines and people and low lounge music, and the heady atmosphere of evening that almost immediately overwhelmed memories of the bright morning outside, get the better of her. They were everywhere she turned. She strode past a blackjack table, calculations appearing in her head as she saw all five sets of cards on public display and knew that the player seated to the right should hit, because there was an eighty percent chance of him getting the low-value card he needed to top up his score of sixteen.
On her other side, the glowing numbers above a slot machine declared a jumbo jackpot available across an interstate network, almost up to a record figure. The woman sitting there, playing a dollar at a time with resolute determination, must have known just as Zoe did that the machine was ripe to pop.
She looked ahead at the layout of the room, saw which slots were the ones that would pay out more often, placed in strategic locations to excite and encourage other gamblers. The harsh grating noise of a roulette ball rolling across the spinning wheel caught her attention, and she knew without having to wait for the result that the man with all of his chips on black fourteen was not going to get a win.
Zoe knew she would be able to clean up in a place like this. At the blackjack tables alone she could make a fortune, but the poker tables—to her left, four serious men in suits staring intently as the dealer flipped over an ace of clubs, giving the second player from the right around a seventy-five-point-five percent chance of getting a flush—there, she could take the lot of them.
Once, she almost had. Years ago, before she even entered the Bureau. She had been invited to a casino with a group of people she had known from work; acquaintances, really, since she had never been close enough to many people to call them friends. She had hit a few different games, always walking away with her chips at least doubled.
The first time, they laughed and clapped her on the back and congratulated her on her luck. The second time, she was apparently on a lucky streak.
By the fourth, they were giving her strange looks.
It was after her sixth game that she walked away, cashing in the chips so that she could leave and never have to spend leisure time with those people again. She had burned her bridges well enough. Once they looked at her like she was a freak, and even began to accuse her in whispers of cheating, she knew it was done.
There were things that she could not do, things that drew too much attention to her and the skills that she was trying to hide. Gambling was one of them. She had gone home after that and donated the money to a hospital, hoping that the benefit it gave the children’s ward would stop the guilt she felt at using her power for something like that. It was wrong to cheat, and she had most definitely been cheating.
It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have liked to play again. It had been a fun night—very fun, until it started going sour. No, it was the risk and the guilt that stopped her. She had vowed that night never to gamble again, and she was not going to break that vow today.
Not that there was any time for something like that, when you were a special agent tasked with tracking down a mass murderer.
That knowledge did not mean that she could turn the numbers off. She tried to focus on faces and bodies, not cards and bets. There was no point in knowing that there was going to be a payout on the next spin of the roulette wheel, or which of the poker players was a shark and which genuinely had no idea how to bet. None of that would save the killer’s next target.
Zoe followed the twists and turns of the path, alone now, her two shadows having slipped away—one to remain at the entrance and the other to her right, stalking through the maze of slots. She wound through the card tables, trying to look less like an agent and more like a seasoned gambler seeking the right game, though she hardly knew how to make the difference. So long as she looked at the faces, it was all right. But when she let her gaze dip to the tables to keep up appearances, the numbers flooded in, almost to the point of distracting her from her mission.
A movement caught her eye up ahead, and her gaze was drawn to another roulette table, this one served by an attractive blonde croupier. The woman was scraping chips toward winners, scooping the losing bets toward her, announcing the next game. A number of people were gathered around her, four—no, five—all with their attention on the betting grid.