“No,” I said, “I really don’t want a lap dance,” though that was no longer quite as true as it had been two minutes before. “Thank you, though.”
Suddenly she looked embarrassed. She took two steps backward. With one hand she pulled her blouse closed, then stooped to pick up the skirt with the other. She wrapped the fabric around her hips and fastened it, then smoothed the blouse’s Velcro fasteners into place
Just then the curtains in the doorway flew open. I was expecting — hoping — that Rankin and the rest of the FBI cavalry was riding to my rescue, but I was wrong, and disappointed, and very nervous: The burly man from the club’s entrance rushed toward me. Planting himself between the dancer and me, he held a meaty hand six inches from my face, opening and closing his fist like some beating heart of violence and menace. “What’s going on, Brenda? Is this guy giving you trouble? Did he paw you?”
“No, it’s okay, Vic,” she answered.
“I heard shouting,” he said. “What happened?”
“Really, it’s okay, Vic,” she said. “He…he was on the phone, talking loud over the music.”
Vic looked dubious. He lowered his hand, though it continued to clench and unclench.
“Really. He didn’t do a thing. He’s a good guy.” Her face filled with sadness suddenly — sadness about this misunderstanding? sadness about the things she had to do for money? — and in her sadness she seemed more exposed than ever. “He’s a good guy,” she repeated with a shake of her head, making for the doorway.
Just as she reached it, Sinclair walked in, carrying a drink in each hand. He stared at her as she brushed past, then stared at the bouncer, then at me. “What the fuck just happened?”
“Nothing,” I said, and when I said it, I realized that Sinclair must have arranged the whole thing. When he’d gone to get the drinks, he must have told the waitress I’d requested the dance. I had the distinct feeling that I was in over my head. “Nothing happened. I just got a little woozy, and I need to go. I’ve got to get up in six hours to catch my flight anyway.”
I sidestepped the bouncer and headed for the doorway. Sinclair made to follow me, but I waved him off.
“You stay and enjoy yourself. Don’t let me put a damper on your evening. Give Melissa my regards.” As I parted the curtains, I looked back over my shoulder. It took everything I had to add, “Call me when you have a final head count for the training.”
Would he call, or had I just lost the fish I’d been sent here to reel in? I didn’t know, and I didn’t much care.
I snagged a cab that had paused at the club’s entrance to disgorge three rowdy young men sporting military haircuts. I hoped they were generous with their applause and their tips. I hoped they were good guys. I yanked off my tie, halfway hoping that I’d banged the microphone a few earsplitting times in the process.
Rankin called to praise my performance, but I cut him off quickly. I went back to my tacky turreted hotel, stripped off my smoky clothes and the FBI’s recorder, and stood under a long, hot shower, trying to wash away the shame of having put out on my first date with Ray Sinclair.
CHAPTER 26
“So how was your Vegas trip?” Miranda’s tone was casual. She was hunkered over a table in the bone lab, touching the tip of a 3-D digitizing probe to landmarks on the skull from donor 77–08, a skeleton that had spent the fall of 2008 by the foot of an oak tree at the Body Farm. Her back was turned to me, and she didn’t even bother to look over her shoulder at me as she asked.
Her casualness, I suspected, masked something serious. Normally Miranda was the queen of eye contact. She could ask the most trivial question—“What’d you have for lunch?” or “What time is it?”—and the directness of her gaze would make the question seem profound. Asking about my abrupt departure and swift return without so much as glancing in my direction was a storm warning.
“Quick,” I said. “Strange. Las Vegas — at least the parts I was in — is a bizarre place. A theme park disguised as a city. I’m sure hundreds of Ph.D. dissertations have been written about the odd cultural anthropology of Las Vegas.”
“And wouldn’t that be a waste of perfectly good trees.” She glanced at the numbers that the probe was feeding into her laptop computer. “Man, this guy had some wide-set eyes. The intraocular distance is eighty millimeters. That’s way wider than anything I’ve measured before. His depth perception must’ve been incredible.” She touched the probe to other landmarks on the skulclass="underline" the high points of the zygomatic arches, the widest points of the nasal opening, the contours of the chin. “That’s a long haul to make in a day and a half. Was it worthwhile?”
Worthwhile. Her echo of Sinclair’s word gave me a pang. “I hope so,” I said.
She didn’t respond, and in the silence a host of unasked questions and withheld explanations seemed to hang in the air.
“Glen Faust was giving a paper at a tissue-bank convention,” I said.
“I know.”
“You know? How do you know?”
“Peggy said you’d gone to a conference in Las Vegas on short notice. I Googled to see what was going on there this week, conference-wise. I figured you must be at either the cosmetology convention or the tissue-bank meeting.”
“Cosmology? What do I know about cosmology?”
“Not cosmology, the nature of the universe,” she said. “Cosmetology. Hair and makeup. A thousand cosmetologists are in Vegas this week.”
“Hair and makeup? What do I care about hair and makeup?”
She finally looked in my direction, sizing up my appearance. “Not much, clearly.”
I laughed. I’d lobbed that one right over the plate for her.
“I was hoping maybe you’d pick up a few style pointers,” she added, meeting my gaze for the first time. “Then I saw Faust’s talk on the agenda for the tissue-bank meeting, and I abandoned all hope for your stylistic salvation.” The sarcasm, like the eye contact, was a relief — a hopeful sign that the invisible electrical charge in the air between us might dissipate, the way the static in the sky eases after a thunderhead passes over.
“He’s a good speaker,” I said.
“The abstract looked interesting. I can see why you felt moved to spend a thousand dollars and thirty-six hours to hear the talk, live and in person.”
Ouch, I thought. The thunderhead appeared to have circled back.
“I didn’t really go to hear his talk,” I admitted. I vaguely recalled an old saying about the best lies being partly true. I’d never aspired to be a good liar, but at the moment I wished I felt slightly more fluent in falsehood. “I wanted to talk to him face-to-face about expanding their research funding, because we’re looking at more budget cuts.”
That, too, contained truth. The UT board of trustees had met six days earlier in emergency session to deal with the worsening budget crunch. Higher tuition — an increase of nearly 10 percent — had been expected to raise an additional $20 million in revenue for the current academic year. Unfortunately, the same economic bind that was squeezing UT itself was also squeezing the families of students; as a result the higher tuition had been largely offset by lower enrollment, and so more cuts were required. Miranda looked pained, and I felt bad for pressing on a sore spot — she knew I’d been struggling to protect the funding for her assistantship, and she was already feeling stress about that. But short of disclosing my role in the FBI’s investigation, I could come up with no other credible pretext for my trip.
“He didn’t make any guarantees,” I added, with as much cheeriness as I could muster, “but he promised to try.”