Raoul didn’t know about the thing at The Palms, and preferred it that way. He’d read it fresh in Norm’s column the next morning.
Norm listened for a moment, stood up from the table, faced the window, and said, “Of course, yes.” He listened for a longer period, almost a full minute, before he said, “He’s with me right now.” Beat. “Okay, you know that… You want me to ask him?”
Norm set the phone on the table between himself and Raoul. He nodded at it and with an extended thumb and pinky held up to his face, he mimed that the telephone conversation was continuing.
“It’s one of Canada’s… people. If you agree to leave the police out of this, totally out of this, Canada will talk with you.”
In a heartbeat Raoul said, “Agreed. Is my wife safe? Can he tell me that? Please?”
Norm shrugged. He didn’t know the answer. He picked up the phone and placed it against his ear. “You heard?” he said. Norm listened some more, nodding, and finally added, “It shouldn’t be a problem. He’ll be there.” Norm folded his phone shut.
“I’ll be where?” Raoul asked.
“The tram platform at the Luxor at seven o’clock. That’s only twenty minutes from now.”
“Is it far?”
“If we could get a real good running start, and if we could jump out those windows over there, we could probably land on it. But from way up here, without flying? It’ll take us most of that twenty minutes to get over there.”
“You know the way?”
Norm stood up. “Of course.”
Raoul threw twenty dollars on the table and they ran.
“We had to hustle,” Raoul said to me. “Down the elevator, all the way across the casino, which is like the size of Luxembourg, over to the monorail station. Wait for the train, get onto the train, ride it over to the Luxor. It’s a turtle. The thing moves so slowly, you wonder why they bothered to build it. My mother has a cane; she walks faster than the damn tram moves. We finally made it to the platform with only a couple of minutes to spare.”
He stopped.
“And?” I asked.
“And nothing. We stood there for half an hour. Nothing. Nobody. Trains came, trains left. Nothing.”
“Nobody met you?”
“No.”
“Now what?”
“I don’t know,” Raoul said. “I suppose I’ll continue to try to reach out to Canada some other way.”
I’d grown increasingly discomfited listening to Raoul’s recanting of his meeting with Norm Clarke, especially the parts about the man called Canada. I stood up and began to pace in front of the big windows that faced the mountains. My movement caused Emily to stir. She was so exhausted that it appeared as though the simple act of lifting her big head to see what I was up to required a monumental effort.
“When I got back here a little bit ago?” Raoul said.
“Yes.”
“Marlina had dropped off an envelope. A single grainy screen shot from the casino security tape. Diane with the two guys who walked her out of the casino. They’re all in profile.”
“How does she look?”
“Fine.”
“Any idea who they are?”
“No.”
“It’s something, right?”
“It’s something.”
“Raoul, I have some news that I originally thought was good news, but may now be bad news.”
“What?”
“The Boulder police are involved. They’re asking the Las Vegas police to take Diane’s disappearance seriously.”
In my ear, I heard one of the familiar Catalonian profanities. Then he said, “I’ll have to call Norm, so he can tell Canada.”
45
What if this is why she died?… What if somebody killed Hannah because she met with Mallory that one time?
As my head hit the pillow and I tried to find the sanctuary of sleep, Diane’s original conspiracy theory about Hannah Grant’s death-a hypothesis I recalled I’d dismissed out of hand at the time-bounced back and forth inside my skull like the digitized ball in a game of Pong.
What if this is why she died?… What if somebody killed Hannah because she met with Mallory that one time?
It didn’t take long for my sleep-depriving musing to move on to cover fresh ground: If Diane had been right, and Hannah had been murdered because of something she’d learned from Mallory, could Diane and Bob somehow have suffered the same fate, too?
I shuddered at the thought.
The links were there. Diane had consulted with Hannah about Mallory; Bob had talked to Mallory across the backyard fence.
It was a far-fetched stretch, but could everything-Hannah’s death, Mallory’s disappearance, Diane’s disappearance, and Bob’s disappearance-really be related? Could some immense ball have started rolling the December afternoon that Mallory decided she just had to see Hannah Grant?
But why?
And how?
I gave up on sleeping and stumbled back out to the living room in search of a common denominator.
If Diane’s theory was true, there had to be a secret in the Miller household. Something that Mallory had revealed during her single session with Hannah. Or at least something that someone thought she’d revealed.
What was it?
During that week after Christmas, the week after Mallory disappeared, Diane had said, “She said her father was ‘up to something,’ remember?”
So what had Bill Miller been up to?
Had he been up to something at home? At work? Planning a career change? Planning a major change in his parenting?
And why, I wondered, was Bill Miller so curious as to why I had been at Doyle’s house?
Yeah, why?
During the psychotherapy session I’d had with Bill Miller earlier that day, I’d been so busy feeling guilty about being caught snooping around at Doyle’s house that I’d missed the obvious: Why had Bill Miller been so damn curious about the fact that I’d been looking at the house that was for sale next door?
46
I woke Sam. He wasn’t happy that I woke him. Once we managed to blunder past his unhappiness I began to explain to him why I’d interrupted his sleep. I tried to ease into it but his impatience forced me to admit earlier in the conversation than I wanted to that I had been inside Doyle’s house. “I pretended I was interested in buying the house; I got the agent to show it to me last night after work.”
“You woke me up to talk real estate?”
For a long moment he’d fooled me; I’d thought he’d sounded genuinely befuddled. “Sam, please. That house is at the center of something. It is.”
He wasn’t done poking at me. “You liked it? I found it overpriced, personally. Kitchen’s hardly bigger than mine. I don’t think Lauren would go for it, anyway. She’d be fretting about Grace and all that water in the backyard. And that bridge? With a toddler? Alan, you’d never have a moment’s peace.”
“Come on, Sam.”
“Okay, okay. Just remember that you’re the one who woke me up. So why did you feel this compelling need to sneak into the house next door to the Millers? It’s an empty friggin’ house. We’ve been in there.”
“Given all that’s happened, it seemed important to see it. I have this feeling that the Millers’ neighbor is key to all this.”
“All what?”
“Everything. Mallory, Diane, the guy Bob with the Camaro. The BOLO? Why are all these people missing, Sam? Three people are missing. Don’t you wonder about that? I mean, even-” I almost said, “Even Hannah Grant,” but I caught myself. The only link I could make to Hannah in all this was through Diane, and that wasn’t my privilege to abrogate.
“Three people are missing? Could be two. Could be one. Could be zero. But assuming I buy your premise that three people are missing, what does the neighbor’s house have to do with Diane?” Sam asked.
Sam wasn’t easily tricked. My obfuscation-by-shotgun-blast hadn’t fooled him for long. I stammered, “I don’t know. That part is once removed. But there’s a connection, there is. I can feel it.”