Naked Prey (9 page)

“You know him?” Lucas asked. “Who he is?”

“Not who he is, but I looked at him pretty good. He’d be on the tapes, though most of what you’d see is the top of his head. The camera coverage on the slots isn’t as good as it is on the tables, because the slots aren’t as much of a problem.”

“When can we see them?” Lucas asked. And, “How do you know it was him?”

“Right now. And I know who you’re talking about, because some people don’t act right, and you tend to notice them. This guy wasn’t interested in gambling. I couldn’t
tell
what he was interested in. I noticed him the night before last, and then he came in again last night,” Hoffman said. “He was plugging dollar tokens into the slots, but slow, and he hardly paid attention when he won, like he didn’t care. People don’t act like that in casinos. They’re always walking around counting their coins and looking at machines, or they get perched up on a chair and they start pounding away. One thing they don’t do, is they
don’t
not give a shit.”

Del looked at Lucas. “Hell of a long thread, from the motel guy to here.”

“Gotta pull it,” Lucas said. To Hoffman: “Let’s go see the tapes.”

Hoffman took them to a surveillance room—on the
way, he asked, “You really think your info on Terry might be good?” and Lucas said, “Jeez, I hope not”—where a half-dozen women roamed along twenty monitors, watching the activity on the floor below. There were good overhead shots of all the blackjack tables, but most of the cameras over the slots looked straight down. Only a few looked at the slots from shallow angles, and those were farther back.

“The main problem with the machines is theft—guys dipping coins out of other people’s coin buckets,” Hoffman explained. He pointed at a monitor showing a woman who was sitting in front of a machine feeding in quarters. All they could see was the top of her head, her shoulders, and her arms. “See, like this lady, she’s pushed her coin bucket halfway around the machine. If you’re on the next aisle over, you can reach across and dip her. We get one of those a week, guys who never think about cameras. Dumb guys. But you can’t see them dipping from the side. You can only see them reach from the overheads.”

He led them to a cubicle at the back of the room, where an Indian man with two careful red-ribbon-tied braids was poking at a computer. “Les, are we still on last night’s tapes on Number Twelve?”

“Yeah. That’s good for another couple of days.” The man looked curiously at Lucas and Del.

“State police,” Hoffman said. “Looking into the Jane Warr thing.”

“Hanged,” Les said. He toyed with the end of one of his braids. “That sort of freaked me out when I heard it. She won’t be on Twelve, though . . . ”

“We’re looking for another fella. Go to ten o’clock. Start there.”

The computer guy typed in a group of codes, and they waited, fifteen seconds, then twenty, and finally a
wide-angled color film came up. The people in the film moved in a herky-jerky motion, indicating that the camera was shooting at a super-slow rate. “There he is,” Hoffman said, tapping the camera.

The camera was looking down a long row of slots from slightly above. Two-thirds of the way down the row, a tall man in a dark coat, watch cap, and glasses was playing one of the machines.

“Can we get a closer shot of him?” Lucas asked.

“Not from that camera—we could have zoomed in if we thought he was up to something, but he never did anything,” Hoffman said. “I just noticed him when I was down there because he didn’t seem right. I forgot about his glasses, though.”

“How about another camera?”

“The overhead won’t help, but we’ve got a camera coming across from the side, but it’s gonna be partly blocked by the machines.”

“Number twenty-eight,” Les said. “I can get it if you want it.”

“Get it,” Lucas said.

Number twenty-eight showed slices of the man’s face, only marginally more clearly than the first camera. “Is that the best there is?”

“Probably got him walking in or out on number thirty-six, but I don’t know when he arrived. Leaving, we’d only get the back of his head . . . It’d take some time. I don’t know how much better the shot would be,” Hoffman said.

“We could take the flashes we got of him on twenty-eight, freeze the shots, and then stitch them together and we’d have his whole face,” Les said. “I could do it in Photoshop.”

“How long would that take?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done it, but I think I could. I could print the best partial shots, too.”

“Let’s try it all,” Lucas said to Hoffman. “We can get a subpoena to make it all legal.”

“That’d be good,” Hoffman said. “It’d help publicity-wise, if somebody asks—but we could get started right away. Look, look where he keeps looking.”

“What?”

Hoffman tapped the monitor. “See, he keeps looking over the top of the machine, sideways. That’s where Jane is. She’s out of the picture, but he keeps looking over there. Here comes Small Bear . . . ”

A woman pushing a change cart moved into the picture. When she got to the man, she stopped and spoke to him. He nodded, took out his wallet and gave her a bill. She gave him a stack of coins, said a couple more words, then pushed on down the aisle.

“Who’s that?”

“JoAnne Small Bear. Been working here since we opened.”

“We need to talk to her,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna need all the tape you’ve got of this guy. Even the overheads. He might be wearing a ring or a watch, and that could be a good thing to know.”

Hoffman nodded. “Sure. I’ll have Les pull out everything we’ve got. You’re a hundred percent sure it’s him?”

“No. Only about ninety percent,” Lucas said. “Ninety and climbing.”

“How about this Small Bear?” Del asked. “Where can we get her?”

Hoffman looked at his watch. “She’s gotta be checked in by now—she works the three-to-eleven. Let’s go find her.”

J
OANNE
S
MALL
B
EAR
looked nothing at all like a bear—she looked more like a raspberry. Barely five feet tall, she
was jolly and fat, with black eyes and brilliant white teeth; she wore boot-cut jeans with a western shirt and a turquoise necklace. She remembered the man in the watch cap. “He looked lonely and sad,” she said. “Pretty good-looking, though. Polite.”

“Any particular characteristics that might tell us about him?” Del asked.

“Maybe,” she said. “You think he killed Jane Warr?”

“We need to talk to him,” Lucas said.

“Jane was a big pain in the ass,” Small Bear said.

“You don’t hang people for being a pain in the ass,” Del said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to see her this morning when they cut her down.”

Small Bear exhaled and said, “I know one thing that might be important. When he opened his billfold to give me some bills, I saw that he had a black card. One of those American Express black cards.”

Del looked at Lucas and Lucas shrugged.

Small Bear looked from Lucas to Del to Lucas and said, “You don’t know about the black cards?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucas said.

“We get every card in the world in here,” Hoffman said. “The black card is called the Centurion Card. To get one, you gotta spend a hundred and fifty thousand bucks a year with American Express. I bet there aren’t a hundred of them in Minnesota.”

“You’re kidding me,” Lucas said. “A hundred and fifty thousand a year?”

“That’s what I hear.”

Del said to Lucas, “That ought to narrow the list.”

L
UCAS STEPPED AWAY,
took out his cell phone, found a slip of paper with Neil Mitford’s personal cell-phone number and punched it in. Mitford answered on the second
ring: “This is Davenport. Things are moving here. We could have a photo and maybe a name pretty quick—but we need some help.”

“What?”

“We need somebody to get to American Express. Maybe there’s a local office or a local official we can give a subpoena to, but we need all the names of all the Centurion Card members from Minnesota and the Kansas City area. Maybe somebody could feed them a list of ZIP codes. We need it quick as we can.”

“Wait a minute, let me jot this down.” After a second of silence, Mitford said, “What the fuck is a Centurion Card?”

“Some kind of exclusive card,” Lucas said. “The casino people say they’re pretty rare.”

“I’ll find out the fastest way to do it, and get it to you.”

“See if you can get a printable list from them, and fax it to the sheriff’s office here. And tell them, you know, it involves a multiple murder. Put a little heat on them.”

“I can
do
heat,” Mitford said. “I’ll call you.”

H
OFFMAN HAD WALKED
away while Lucas was talking; when he got off the phone, Del said, “Hoffman’s gone to get Anderson. His brother-in-law.”

“Damnit. I would have liked to have been there, see how the guy takes it.”

“He went over there . . . he said he’d be right back, maybe we could catch him.”

T
HEY FOUND
H
OFFMAN
and Anderson just outside an employee’s canteen off the main floor. Anderson was a thin, dark-haired white man with big crooked teeth and a small narrow mustache. He was waving his arms around,
his face harsh and urgent, as he talked to Hoffman, who leaned against a wall with his arms crossed. Lucas heard, “Goddamnit, Clark, you know me better than that, I just ate lunch . . . ”

Lucas came up, with Del trailing, and said, “There you are.”

Hoffman turned and pushed away from the wall. To Anderson he said, “These are the cops.”

Anderson pushed a finger at Lucas: “What the hell are you doing, telling Clark that I’ve been cheating on Suzie?”

“Didn’t exactly say that,” Lucas said. “We heard from a guy in town that you were pretty friendly with Jane Warr.”

“What guy?”

“Can’t tell you, unless we bust you. Then you’d have a right to know,” Lucas said, hardening up. “Your lawyer could get the name.”

Anderson shriveled back. “My lawyer? What the hell is going on?”

Del edged in, the beat-up good guy. “Listen: just tell us—how well did you know her?”

“I wasn’t screwing her, if that’s what you mean.”

“How well?” Del pressed.

Anderson took a step back, and the stress in his voice dropped a notch. “A little bit. She used to deal in Vegas and I worked out there for a while, years ago. I didn’t know her then—we weren’t even there at the same time—but you know, working in Vegas was sort of a big deal for both of us. When we were both off at the same time, we’d eat lunch together, here in the canteen, sometimes. But most of the time, just in a group, only once or twice, when there was just the two of us.” He looked at Hoffman: “Clark, I wouldn’t bullshit you.”

“All right,” Hoffman said.

Del said, “Did you ever meet any of her friends, Deon Cash or Joe Kelly?”

“I didn’t really meet them, but I knew who they were, because they were black,” Anderson said. To Hoffman: “That’s another reason I wouldn’t do it, Clark. Even if I’d wanted to. You ever see her boyfriend? The guy was like some kind of ghetto killer or something.”

“All right,” Hoffman said again.

“She ever say anything about them?” Lucas asked. “Or was she worried about anything? Did she seem apprehensive, or scared?”

“A few weeks back, I don’t know, three or four weeks, the Joe guy took off. Or disappeared. She didn’t know where he went, she said he just vanished. She was pretty worried about him, but that’s all I know. She never did say if he ever showed up.”

“She seemed scared about it?”

Anderson dipped his chin, thinking, scratched his head, straightened his hair—a little relieved grooming, Lucas thought—and said, “Maybe scared. Sort of more
freaked out,
like when you find out something weird about someone. Like if somebody told you your best friend was a child molester, or something.”

“Did you see a guy watching her last night? A big guy.”

“Wasn’t here last night. I was out with my
wife,”
Anderson said, leaning on the
wife.

“Okay,” Lucas said. “Tell me this: how much coke was she pushing out on the floor here?”

“What?”

“Cocaine,” Del said.

Anderson looked at them like they were crazy. “She wasn’t dealing cocaine. No way. I woulda known about that. You get a bunch of dealers and one of them is pushing, everybody knows. There was nothing like that about Jane.”

“She use it?” Lucas asked.

Anderson’s eyes flicked away. “Maybe . . . I never saw her use it.” He unconsciously rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “But she used to get a little cranked, and once or twice I thought she might’ve gone back to the ladies’ can and done something.”

“You didn’t tell us,” Hoffman said.

“I didn’t
know,”
Anderson said. “Hell, you even hint at something like that around here, and the next thing you know, somebody’s looking for a job. And I kinda liked her.”

“But not too much,” Hoffman said.

“No. Jesus, Clark.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he turned to Lucas. “Did that asshole Bud Larson put you on me?”

Lucas kept his face straight and shook his head. “Haven’t heard any Larsons mentioned,” he said. “Why?”

“Nothin’,” Anderson said. To Hoffman: “He was the guy who complained that we cold-decked him. Last week? Mean-looking guy?”

Del looked at Lucas and shook his head.

W
HEN THEY WERE
finished with Anderson—still a worried man, despite Hoffman’s assurances that he believed him—they went looking for other employees who remembered the big man. Les, the computer operator, brought down the first printout of the man’s face: it was fuzzy, but would be recognizable in context.

Nobody else remembered talking to him.

By the time they finished talking with other employees, Les had saved a dozen shots of the man, and two stitched-together composites, to a CD that could be opened on any PC with the Imaging program, which he said was most of them.

“We still need the actual tapes,” Lucas told him.

“We’re pulling them; we’ll hang on to them,” he said.

T
HEY’D BEEN IN
the casino for an hour and a half when Mitford called back. “We’re running with Amex. They accepted a faxed subpoena and they’re putting the list together now. They say they’ll have it in half an hour. I’m having copies faxed to the sheriff’s office up there, and another one down here. They say there might be a couple hundred names.”