Nightwalker

3

“I see them dancing in the sky,” Timothy told Jessy.

She was driving him back to the home, and she felt torn. Worried about leaving him alone, she’d had Sandra come over to watch him this morning while she’d returned to the casino to turn her chips into cash—later exchanged for a cashier’s check made out to the home—and fill out the IRS forms. She’d never had to fill them out before, because her winnings—the few times she’d played a few dollars for fun—had never been close to enough to report to the government.

She didn’t mind. The government was welcome to its share.

She was concerned now because she had to work that afternoon, and even her sizable winnings weren’t enough to keep her job from being very important to her ongoing well-being. But Sandra had met her at the door when she’d returned and suggested she might want to talk to someone at the home before she left Timothy there.

“Why?” she’d asked.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as I think, but…” Sandra hesitated. “He’s having conversations with imaginary people. And when I asked him who he was talking to, he gave me a sly look and said they were people in the walls, and that they were his friends and they made him happy, so I shouldn’t worry. And maybe, if he’s happy…”

Now it seemed that his friends were in the sky.

Maybe she was just nervous because she’d woken up in the night, certain that someone was watching her again. That kind of feeling usually vanished with the coming of day, though, and this time it hadn’t…. This morning, as she’d been brewing coffee and tossing raisin bread into the toaster, she’d paused again, feeling eyes on her before telling herself that you couldn’t feel someone watching you. Except that you could. Somehow people knew when they were being observed. Maybe it had to do with that huge part of the brain scientists said went unused.

But there hadn’t been anyone there. Not last night, and not this morning.

But this morning Timothy had been talking to people in the walls, and now he was seeing dancers in the sky.

Which one of us is actually going crazy here? she asked herself.

The Hawthorne Home was just outside Las Vegas proper. She parked in front of the administration building, and Timothy frowned. She usually parked by Building A, his building, when she was bringing him back from a visit or an outing.

“I have to go in and pay Mr. Hoskins,” she told him.

“Pay him?” Timothy asked indignantly.

She patted his hand. “Yeah, that’s life, Timothy,” she said, and leaned over to kiss his cheek. Once upon a time he’d been the best guardian in the world, and she still loved him so much.

“We all have to pay the rent, you know,” she said.

“Not in the day of the ghost dancers,” he said.

“Maybe, but that was a long time ago. And there’s no such thing as ghosts, anyway,” she added.

“But if there were,” Timothy said, cracking a dry grin, “they wouldn’t have to pay rent, would they? They’d just phase in, and phase out, huh?”

She was pleased by the pleasure Timothy took in his small joke. “I’m not so sure this would have been reservation land,” she said, grinning back. She started to tell him to wait in the car while she went inside to pay, then thought better of it. He still knew how to drive. His imaginary friends might suggest that he needed to run over to a convenience store for something.

“Why don’t you come in with me,” she suggested.

“I suppose that idiot Mr. Hoskins will be there?” he asked tartly.

She almost laughed aloud at his indignation. He was half Lakota, which had given him straight black hair—faded to white now—but those genes hadn’t reached his eyes. They were blue. He was still a handsome man, she thought, when he was standing straight and proud, as he was now, his face set in firm lines.

“Yes, I need to see him. And don’t say anything rude to him, okay? At least we only have to see him once a month or so….”

“I’ll be perfectly courteous,” he assured her.

She wasn’t at all certain about that. Hoskins was a man who didn’t just find himself uncomfortable around the aged, he flat out didn’t like them, and he let it show—which made her wonder why he’d taken this job to begin with. Well, like all people, he would get there soon enough, she thought. Or maybe he wouldn’t. There was always that alternative. But she hoped he would lead a long life, until one day he needed care himself, only to discover that the younger generation wanted nothing to do with him.

They got out of the car, and she linked arms with him as they walked inside together. The receptionist was pretty and young, and she looked at Jessy with surprise. “Miss Sparhawk! Good morning. We thought perhaps you’d decided to keep your grandfather at home with you. We…we weren’t expecting to see you.”

“Oh? Why not? I always enjoy having Timothy at home for a visit—” she turned to smile at him “—but it wouldn’t be practical for him to live with me, seeing as I have to work. I’ve brought the rent for the next few months,” she added, giving the other woman a saccharine smile.

“Oh. Well, if you’ll just excuse me…I’ll get Mr. Hoskins,” the girl said.

She didn’t ring his office, she jumped up and went in. A moment later Hoskins appeared, frowning. “Miss Sparhawk, Mr. Sparhawk. I hadn’t expected to see you. I was assuming that you’d be making other arrangements today.”

“Well, as you can see, we’re not. I’ll be taking Timothy back to his room now,” she said, handing him a cashier’s check.

He stared at her as if she were a ghost herself. “He was paid up through today,” Jessy said. “Now he’s paid up for the next three months. Everything is in perfect order, contractually speaking.”

She didn’t know why Hoskins looked so distressed, and she didn’t care.

“Good day, Mr. Hoskins,” Timothy said, then turned to head out. Jessy said her own rather more triumphant goodbye, and followed him.

As they walked back to the car, Jessy saw a luxury sedan pull up a few spaces away. A young guy got out, then went around to help an elderly man from the passenger side, and the reason for Hoskins’s white face became suddenly clear. He’d been all set to rent Timothy’s room to someone else. She laughed as she and her grandfather got back into the car, sharing the joke as she drove over to his building.

They checked in downstairs with the young male orderly on desk duty during the day—every building had someone at the entry day and night since they weren’t taking any chances with wandering seniors—and headed up to Timothy’s room. In the upstairs hallway they ran into another orderly, Jimmy Britin, a tall African-American with a wide smile. “Timothy, Jessy,” he said, his surprised pleasure evident.

“Hoskins was about to rent my room right out from right under me,” Timothy said. “But he underestimated my granddaughter. And the ghosts, of course.”

“Well…” Jimmy said, obviously unsurprised by what Timothy had said. He looked at Jessy, a question in eyes. What did you do? Rob a bank?

As Timothy headed straight for his room, Jessy smiled ruefully at Jimmy. “I don’t know about any ghosts, but someone must have been looking out for me. I won a small fortune at the craps table.”

“That’s wonderful,” Jimmy told her.

“I never gamble, but…” She shook her head, as if puzzled by the whole thing.

“You were desperate. And you got lucky,” Jimmy said.

“Listen, I’ve got to get to work,” she told him.

“No sweat. I’ll get him situated. And stop looking so guilty. You take him home lots of weekends. Meanwhile, I’m here, and Liz Freeze, his favorite nurse, is on today, too. He’ll be fine. Now out of here.”

“I just wanted to let you know, he’s…”

“He’s what?” Jimmy asked.

“He’s hallucinating. A lot. About ghosts. They’re in the walls, in the sky…. He even talks to them.”

“Nothing I haven’t seen before. It’ll be okay, I promise,” he said, giving her a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

With a grateful smile, she hurried into Timothy’s room and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’m off to work now, okay?”

He nodded gravely. “Don’t worry. The ghosts are busy dancing in the sky. Things are going to be all right.”

“Of course they are,” she said, then gave him another kiss and hurried out. Glancing at her watch, she realized she was going to be a bit rushed getting into costume, but she would manage. Things will be all right, she told herself. She had the routine down pat.

She hurried back down to her car, but before she unlocked it, she paused and looked around, certain that someone was watching her again, but she couldn’t see anybody.

She checked the backseat.

No one.

She looked around one last time, then gave herself a mental shake and told herself to stop being ridiculous. It was a bright, sunny day. If anyone was watching her, it was Hoskins, no doubt ruing the fact that she had made the payment, so he couldn’t rent Timothy’s room to someone else—probably at a higher rate.

But the sensation of being watched followed her as she wove through traffic and all the way into the casino.

It was almost as if someone were sitting right next to her in the car.

“See? Two cameras, but notice the range,” Jerry Cheever told Dillon. “There’s Tanner Green, though it’s difficult to see him because there were a dozen other cars in the entryway at the same time. It looks as if he got out of a white limo. Can’t see the plate, though, and there must be a hundred of those things in town,” he said in frustration. “And Green looks like half the other drunks coming out of the woodwork at that time of night. He staggers there—” Cheever pointed at the screen “—but the guy ahead of him just shoves him away. See his look? Probably just thought it was a drunk falling on him. Then watch Green moving through the crowd. Everyone is talking to someone, no one is paying him the least bit of attention. Not even the doorman. He’s just holding the door open and watching that brunette with the huge tits, completely oblivious to everything else, even the guy with the knife in his back. Okay, right here he’s picked up on a new camera….” Cheever’s voice trailed off as he flicked the remote control, shifting to a scene in the casino. “He passed six cameras on his way to the craps table, but all you can see on any of them is him stumbling through the crowd—until he bumps into Miss Sparhawk and they both land on the craps table. And there you are, helping her back up.”

Cheever was discouraged; his frustration that so many security tapes could yield so few clues was evident in his voice.

“I’d like to run through them all again, if it’s all right,” Dillon told him.

“Be my guest. I’ve been staring at them for the last three hours. I had a video tech in here trying to home in on Green, but it didn’t help. Someone’s head, an arm, whatever, is blocking part of the view every step he took.”

Cheever tossed the remote to Dillon, who studied it for a moment, then hit a button to start the tape over. “It’s almost as if someone knew that outer drive was just out of the cameras’ useful range,” he mused.

“Just like,” Cheever agreed. “So what do you think it means?”

“I think it means our killer has to be someone involved with the casino, or who knows someone who is.”

“God only knows how many people that could be,” Cheever muttered.

Dillon turned in his chair and looked at Cheever, who was perched at the edge of his desk. “What’s happening with the knife?”

“The lab has it. But preliminary reports aren’t giving us a thing. It’s a short-bladed work knife, sold—literally—in the thousands here in town. It’s a popular blade for breaking the plastic bands on stacks of money. Every casino in Vegas has a few of them. And of course there’s not a hint of a fingerprint on the hilt. The killer probably wore gloves. Green was stabbed with considerable force, and the blade was just long enough to pierce the heart, which caused Green to bleed out. Because it was a short blade, he made it through to the craps table before he died.”

“Strange,” Dillon said, rewinding the tape. “Any possibility I could get a vid tech in here to look at this with me?” he asked.

Jerry Cheever stared at him, his eyes narrowing, as if his first instinct was to defensively tell him to go right to hell. But then he shrugged. “Sure. If you can find something I didn’t, that will be great. I’ll go grab someone.”

The minute he left the office, Dillon was out of his seat, looking at the files on Cheever’s desk. Tanner Green’s was right on top. He leafed through it quickly, but Cheever had nothing more than he had said.

A minute later a young woman from the video department came in and introduced herself as Sarah Clay. She had a controller with her that made the remote look like a kiddie toy. Dillon started with the first tape, and they went through it frame by frame, but Cheever had been telling the truth. It wasn’t that the security equipment wasn’t high quality, because it was the best. But the car from which Tanner Green had been expelled was just far enough out of range, of both the cameras and the neon lights, that making out details was impossible.

A white limo. That much was obvious, and also useless. As Cheever had said, Vegas was thick with the things, especially white ones. Every casino owned limos, the casino bosses owned limos, the rental companies owned limos, even half the high rollers in town had their own.

There was no way to tell the make or model, but even once the tapes were enhanced, there didn’t seem to be any markings on it, nothing to indicate where it might have come from, which didn’t help him now but might mean something when they moved on to the process of elimination.

They went through the other tapes in order, with Dillon asking the tech to freeze certain frames and enhance them, but once again, Jerry Cheever had been dead-on. The crowd in the casino that night had worked heavily against them. The best video tech in the world couldn’t remove a body blocking a body, and even though the different angles caught by the different cameras usually helped with that kind of problem, this time they were shit out of luck.

“Are we through?” Sarah asked him politely, glancing at her watch.

He knew she probably had a half-dozen other cases she was supposed to be working on, so he smiled. “Just about, and thank you. The last tape…could I see it one more time?”

“Sure,” she said, but her voice was faint.

He let the tape run until he got to Green staggering up to the craps table, then had her home in on Tanner Green falling forward, pinning Jessy Sparhawk beneath him. Even caught in a moment of pure surprise and horror, she was striking. He had to wonder about that last name. She was a redhead, with huge blue eyes, and he found himself fascinated with her all over again.

“Mr. Wolf?” Sarah asked politely.

He gave himself a mental shake. “Zoom in on Green’s face for me, will you?”

She pushed a button, and in seconds Tanner Green’s bulging eyes filled the screen.

Hell, the man was dying.

But his expression was surprised, as if he couldn’t believe it. Believe he was dying? Or how he was dying? Dillon wondered.

Green’s lips moved slightly. Dillon replayed the moment and leaned in, trying to discern what the man had been saying. Nothing, maybe. Or maybe he had been begging for help. Maybe he had found God at the moment of death and was praying.

Dillon had Sarah widen the view and surveyed the immediate area. The air had been filled with a cloud of smoke, despite the casino’s expensive air filters. Sometimes it seemed as if even people who didn’t smoke decided they needed to in Vegas.

He stared intently at the screen for a minute longer.

Then he sat back. “Thanks very much, Sarah.”

She might have been aggravated at the time she’d been asked to give him, but she smiled. She probably didn’t often get thanked for what was, after all, just her job.

“Sure. Anytime,” she told him.

“I mean it.” She reached into her shirt pocket and produced a card. Her name and rank were on it, along with a phone number and an e-mail address. “I’ve heard about you, about what you do, what you…see. They say you’re the real deal. I meant what I said. Whatever you need—whatever—you can call me.”

He took her card, nodding gravely. “Now that, I really appreciate.” He left her feeling very grateful indeed.

She had pretty much just told him that she would work for him on the q.t. That was priceless.

But right now he had to find Jessy Sparhawk. She was the only one who might know what Tanner Green had said right before he died.

There had been a recent period in Vegas’s history when—the tourist board had decided to turn Sin City into a family-friendly resort. The plan hadn’t worked, and the city had soon reverted to its old image, but the aftereffects lingered, and some parents still brought their children along when they came to gamble. As a result, a lot of the casinos provided diversions aimed toward the kiddie set, because the problem with Vegas was that parents could be distracted—maybe only momentarily, but still with frightening repercussions—by bright, blinking lights and a sudden insistence that the next dollar shoved into a beckoning slot machine would be the one that hit the jackpot.

At the Big Easy the problem had been solved by offering an afternoon of pirate-themed entertainment, food and drink for the younger crowd.

It was glorified babysitting.

But Jessy had never minded that. She liked kids. Sure, every once in a while they wound up with an obnoxious little twerp who wouldn’t stop tugging on beards, dumping the treasure chest or trying to look up the skirts of the pirate “queens” or the servers. But all in all, it wasn’t a bad gig. It was actually a lot better than performing at a bachelor party for a bunch of drunks who seemed to think that anyone under thirty and wearing a skimpy costume was for sale.

In contrast, working the babysitting detail was usually fun, and that day it was going very well.

They had almost three hundred kids, some of them there gratis for guests of the casino, others had been enrolled at a steep price tag by parents staying elsewhere, though compared to the hundreds—even thousands—that could be dropped at one of the gaming tables or in slot machines in a matter of minutes, it was still small change.

The audience ranged from age two up to twenty-one. The older kids were usually there because they had younger siblings—and because eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds still couldn’t legally step out onto on the casino floor or drink.

The show itself was mostly improvisational banter punctuated by carefully choreographed dance numbers. The cast played pirates who had somehow wound up stuck on Lake Mead, and they sang traditional pirate songs as they searched for treasure.

It was when the kids were shouting, trying to point out to her rather ditsy pirate queen that the treasure chest was right beneath her nose, and she was spinning around searching, that she saw him.

He was standing just outside the room, leaning against a wall painted with a mural of the high seas and pirate ships flying the Jolly Roger, and he was staring through the glass wall that surrounded the theater space, watching her. He was wearing a suit, and he somehow managed to look both real and not real…

He wasn’t even a foot away from Grant Willow, one of the four security men—all of them highly skilled but able to relate to the kids without intimidating them—who took turns standing watch in the vestibule, and he seemed totally oblivious to the other man.

She knew the watcher’s face. She had stared at that face in the most uncomfortable circumstances imaginable. He couldn’t possibly be there—and yet he was.

She blinked.

And then he wasn’t.

She must have come to a dead halt, stunned, because Aaron Beaton, playing the role of Captain Gray-specked Blackbeard, started prompting her. “Bonny Anne, Bonny Anne, have ye found it? Have ye found me treasure?”

She stared at him without any idea how to respond as her blood grew cold.

He hadn’t been real.

She had simply conjured him up in her mind’s eye.

Or he had been real, just someone else. Someone who only looked like a dead man.

After all, a man had died on top of her last night; she had a right to be traumatized. To be seeing things. There was nothing odd about it at all.

“Bonny Anne?” Aaron said sharply.

“Your treasure? My treasure!” she insisted, dragging herself back into character.

Her declaration started a mock battle that was really a carefully choreographed dance piece. She battled gamely, whirled and jumped, then looked back to the doorway and almost missed a beat.

He was back.

And he was watching her with huge eyes and an expression filled with both tragedy and remorse.

Since the promo poster Dillon had seen the night before pictured Jessy Sparhawk, it was a reasonable assumption that if he headed to the Big Easy she was likely to be working.

She was.

The pirate party was scheduled daily from one to six, giving the parents a full afternoon of worry-free gambling. Dillon wondered how many of them forgot to come back at closing time, but he assumed the casino had a plan for dealing with that.

The theater was surrounded by glass walls, and the outer vestibule was decorated with pirate paraphernalia and wall paintings. Inside the room, the stage held an impressive pirate ship that seemed to float above shimmering blue water, an effect caused by lighting under a glass stage floor. There were interactive areas for the kids, and each seating section sported a different-colored pirate flag, dividing the kids into teams so they could root for their color-matched “champions” onstage. There were huge treasure chests around the room that held soda, candy and chips, along with healthier soy snacks and natural iced teas. It was a top-quality production, designed to appeal to kids of all ages—along with the occasional adult he saw in the audience. He noted that the smaller children were together in one area, and there seemed to be at least three employees wearing pirate-themed casino uniforms to attend to every nine or ten children.

Onstage, the pirates were going at it.

He recognized Jessy right away, despite her wig and makeup and pirate attire. The kids were shouting to her, laughing, and even the almost adults in the room were having fun and shouting right along with everyone else for her to find the treasure.

Then she froze. Just…froze, staring at the doorway.

It was only for the blink of an eye; then she jerked her gaze away and responded to one of the male actors. A sword battle ensued, then somehow turned into a dance.

Then, once again, Jessy Sparhawk froze.

Dillon felt a tap on his shoulder and thought it might be the big security guard who was keeping an eagle eye on the room.

But it wasn’t. Ringo was at his side.

“Over there,” Ringo said quietly.

Across the lobby, standing near the guard, stood another man. A big man in a suit.

Tanner Green.

Dillon started toward him, moving quickly but casually, keeping his eyes focused on the guard, as if he was just going over to ask him a question about the show.