Never Coming Back (20 page)

“You need to find it,” the old man said.

“I know what I need to do.”

“No loose ends.”

“I know what I need to do, okay?”

Silence. “I hope you do, Jeremy. I really hope you do.”

•   •   •

Behind an unmarked door in the basement of the Bellagio, Carlos Soto sat alone in the security room. The men and women under his supervision, the ones still working the night shift, were out in the casino; he could see them on a bank of monitors on the other side of the office, on the casino floor, at the entrance, on the edges of the bars and communal areas. He swiveled slowly in his seat, eyes drifting from the screens to the certificates on the wall behind him, every framed piece of paper a map of his progress through Las Vegas Metro. He'd been heading up Robbery-Homicide when he'd left the force and taken the job at the Bellagio—but he'd done it for a reason.

Not because he couldn't do his job anymore. His star had still been on the rise after fifteen years—the sheriff himself had said as much when he'd begged Carlos to stay. Not even because of the bodies he'd had to look at, the blood he'd had to walk through, the faces of the families he'd had to break life-changing news to. Not the tragedy, or the darkness, or the hopelessness of some of the crime. Not even for his family—because he didn't have one. His mom and dad were long gone, and there was no wife or kids to come home to, although he'd always desperately wanted both.

No, the reason he'd left wasn't any of those things.

He leaned forward in his seat to where a black-and-white printout of two
people—a man and a woman—was sitting on the desk in front of him. The picture was frozen as the couple emerged from a hotel room on the thirty-second floor. The woman was in her late thirties, the guy probably around ten years older. The man was holding a duffel bag. In the corner of the shot was a digital readout. 32-CAM4
A / 11:12 /08/13/11
.

This was the reason he'd left. Things like this. Things that didn't feel right, didn't make sense, didn't fit together. Things that chipped away at him constantly because he knew some secret was being buried in the ground while he stood on the periphery looking for answers. He'd left the police because he had an obsessive, almost damaging need for the truth.

And because, basically, he could never let things go.

Lee Wilkins looked at me: thinner than I remembered, out of condition. Sweat beaded against his hairline and his skin was a mess. If he ever got outside, it could only have been for snatched moments. He had the look of a man on the run; one frightened enough not to venture too far from the only place he felt safe.

“What the hell are you doing here, Lee?”

He didn't reply.

“
Lee?
”

He looked from me to the door, and I saw what he was contemplating: making a break for it. But he quickly realized the plan would fail, and as he did so he seemed to shrink in his skin. “You shouldn't be here, David.”

“Why not?”

“You don't know what you're getting yourself into.”

“Why aren't you in the States?” I waited for a response that didn't come. “Are you on the run from something? From someone?”

He just eyed me.

“Does it have to do with the Lings?”

He became very still, his face a mix of resistance—born out of his time alone; of a fear of whatever he was running from—and relief that he could finally talk about it. “A month after they all went missing, the cops turned up here. I thought maybe Paul had written down the address of this place and left it lying around at home somewhere.”

“He didn't need to write it down.”

“Because they traced my calls.”

I nodded. “Why were you calling him?”

“I was lucky with the cops,” he replied, as if he hadn't even heard me. “I was on the way back from the shops and saw them snooping around the house, so I just walked on past. The house was locked, and I knew they'd have to get a warrant to get inside. When they came back, a day later, I'd cleared everything out. All this shit.” He paused, looked at me, then at what surrounded him. “I wasn't as lucky with you. You caught me with my pants down. I guess I've got sloppier the longer I've been here.”

I looked around the room. He'd been living in a decaying shack and eating out of tin cans for months, so he'd already hit rock bottom. The
effect was obvious: he had a fearful, almost frenzied expression, as if the loneliness was getting to him. Really, there were only two places to go from here: to get to this point, he'd probably already seen his fair share of violence, so I could threaten him with more until I got what I wanted; or I could try to talk him around and guide him to where I needed him.

“Lee, listen to me.” I dropped to a whisper, the change in tone immediately pulling him from his thoughts. He looked across at me. “I need you to explain to me what happened to the family. Don't assume I know anything. Don't leave anything out.”

Before, he'd seemed dazed, punch-drunk, but for the first time his expression cleared, like a fog being carried off. “I don't know all the details,” he said quietly.

“Just tell me what you
do
know.”

He sniffed; rubbed an eye. “I know that, this time last year, things went wrong in the States for me.” He shifted position, dropping fully on to his backside, arm resting on the corner of the box full of supplies. “You remember you and me bumped into each other in the Mandalay Bay that time? When was that—November, December 2007?”

“December.”

“Right. What are the chances of that, huh? Two guys from a tiny village in south Devon running into each other in a city on the other side of the world?”

“It was weird.”

He frowned. “Weird?”

“Luck. Chance. A quirk of fate.” I shrugged. “What do you think it was?”

He smiled, but there was no humor in it. “I think it was some kind of sign, one I should have taken more notice of.”

“What are you talking about?”

“After I saw you, that's when it hit home.” A breeze stirred inside the house, and the loft hatch began to swing. Lee eyed it, probably wondering what would have happened if he'd stayed up there, hidden properly, never called the pay phone. He'd got desperate trying to ward me off—and instead all he'd done was draw me to him. “When I first moved to Vegas, it was for a job as a compere at a comedy club just off the Strip. You know that. I told you when we met five years ago. Things got bigger and better fast. People found me funny, I was being asked to perform for longer, the pay was improving.”

I gave him a look that said I didn't get the relevance.

“Anyway, sometime in 2007—this was probably, I don't know, May or June—this guy knocked on the door of my dressing room and asked me if I ever did private gigs. I said I hadn't done them before, but if the money was right I'd think about it. I mean, I didn't have a routine, really. I just filled the gaps between acts; riffed on what was in the news, on being an Englishman abroad, on the people in the audience. I improvised.”

“Who was the guy?”

“His name was Cornell. He never offered me his first name, and . . . I don't know, he just wasn't the sort of guy you asked. He said he headed up this group; looked after this bunch of high rollers that flew in to the Strip four times a year to gamble, drink and screw a few whores.” He stopped briefly, his voice becoming softer. “So I said yes. To have said no would have been insane. I was earning good money, but Cornell offered me more for one night than I made in a year. He made it impossible for me to turn down.”

“What does this have to do with the Lings?”

He held up a hand, telling me to wait. “I did the gig. It was in the most expensive villa at the Bellagio. This place was, like, four thousand square feet. I'd never seen anything like it. I got introduced to these guys by Cornell, these CEOs, oil tycoons, industrial magnates, surgeons, Silicon Valley billionaires, and I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is going on here? How did I even get to this point?' By the time the introductions were done, I was absolutely shitting myself. Most of them were so pumped up on booze and pussy they didn't even notice . . . except for this one guy. He came over to me, put his arm around my shoulder and asked me what the matter was. I said to him, ‘I stand up in front of eight hundred people a night—I never get nervous about crowds, but I'm nervous in front of this one.' I told him, ‘If I screw up, I leave and you instantly forget me. If I get it right, these are men that could make things happen for me. Big things.
That's
what I'm nervous about.' But this guy just patted me on the back and said, ‘Everyone will love you, Lee.'” Very briefly, Lee's eyes lit up. “And he was right. They did. By the end of the evening, I had them eating out of the palm of my hand. I felt untouchable.”

I pushed again. “What's this got to do with the Lings?”

“Afterward, it was like I was one of these men,” he said, another hint of a smile. “One of the high rollers. We gambled and drank, and they paid for everything—casino chips, booze, call girls, everything. When
the sun came up and they began to drift away, they gave me their numbers and told me to call them if I was ever in their city. I mean, these were men so far out of my league their cars were worth more than my apartment.” The smile became fully formed. “And then there was just this one guy left, the one who had come up to me. Cornell had introduced me to everyone, told me what they did, and I just lost track of the names and job titles. I couldn't remember the guy's name, and yet he was treating me like his long-lost son. He said he was going to try and get me a better gig—across
all
the MGM hotels. He said he knew the group CEO. This guy was
amazing
.” He shook his head. “Inside a couple of months, he'd organized it: I was working across the entire group, earning a ton of money, and living out at The Lakes.”

I studied him. “Why you?”

“You mean why'd he take such a shine to me?” Lee shrugged. “We went for breakfast. I didn't ask him ‘Why me?' to start with because I didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth. But eventually it all seemed too good to be true—so I just came out with it.”

“And what did he say?”

“He started telling me this story about my stepdad.”

I looked at him, confused. “What?”

“He said they were friends, that they'd grown up together.”

“Where—in
Devon
?”

“Yeah. My stepdad ended up working for him.”

That stopped me. “Wait, what was the name of your stepdad?”

“His name? Ray Muire.”

They'd grown up together.

Suddenly I understood. “Which meant the other guy was . . .”

“Carter,” Lee said. “Carter Graham.”

Just for a moment there seemed to be no sound in the farmhouse. Lee looked across at me and must have seen something in my face. “You sound like you know them both already.”

My mind turned back to the conversation I'd had with Martha Muire earlier.
Have we talked before?
She recognized my name, from when Lee and I had been at school, but twenty-five years and ill health had dimmed her memory. I hadn't made the connection between her and Lee because of her surname. But now, finally, it started to make sense.

“David?”

I looked up at him.

“Do you know them?” he said.

“I know
of
Graham. I spoke to your mum about Ray this morning.”

He shifted against the bed, shivered almost, as if he were reawakening from some terrible dream. “
Really?
How is she?”

There was a flash of expectation in his face, and I realized that I was his only remaining connection to her. He wouldn't want to hear the truth. “She was fine.”

“That's good.” He nodded. “That's really good. I e-mail her occasionally. I rarely use my phone—it's too risky—but I sometimes catch the bus into Yelverton; there's this place with the internet.” A small, sad smile. “I have to lie to her, though. I wish I could see her but . . . I just tell her I'm touring the MGM hotels in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.”

“Why lie to her?”

“I don't have a choice.”

“Why?”

He looked at me but didn't say anything.

“If you're in some sort of trouble, why the hell come back here? You're only an hour from where you used to live. Why not disappear to the other side of the world?”

“I know this village. We used to come to Dartmoor all the time with Mum when we were growing up. This house has been derelict for years. I can protect myself here.”

“Protect yourself from who?”

Again he didn't answer; cautious, frightened.

I backtracked. “So Graham and your stepdad were old friends?”

“Oh yeah. They went
way
back. I'd never met Carter before. Not face to face. I'd seen photos of him, old photos that Ray had, but I didn't recognize him when I met him in Vegas.” He gazed off into the emptiness of the room. “That morning I had breakfast with him, he just kept on and on about Ray, spinning these endless stories about them growing up, about the things they did together. Don't get me wrong, Ray had his faults, but he was special. He wasn't my dad, but I loved him like one. I never had to worry about Mum because he treated her so well. But by the end of that conversation I was sick of hearing his name. That's how ridiculous it got. To Carter . . . well, he was a brother.”

In the silence that followed, the wind picked up, whistling through the gaps in the house. “So Graham promised Ray that he'd look out for you?”

The idea seemed to distress him. “Yes.”

“What was the problem with that?”

“It meant I became tethered to Carter Graham, to the high-rollers group—and, worse than all that, I became tethered to Cornell.”

I sensed a change in him now. “You didn't like Cornell?”

“He called me a week after Carter got me that new job, and said to me, ‘Don't ever talk about the high-rollers group, any of the men who attend it or anything you hear.' I got the impression early on that Cornell didn't like me being there. He'd invited me as entertainment, a one-time-only thing, and then, thanks to Carter, I ended up with this amazing new job and became part of the group—permanently.”

“You said the group was just a bunch of rich men letting off steam. That's what that entire city is built on. Why did Cornell even care whether you talked about it or not?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “But it didn't really matter to me either way. Not talking about that group while I was house-hunting for million-dollar properties seemed a pretty good trade-off.”

Somehow that sentiment didn't sit right, and we both knew it. Lee shuffled again, straightening his back against the bed frame, and turned to face me. Money could only hide so much curiosity. Being told you couldn't talk about something, without a proper reason, just made you more inclined to find out why. It was basic human psychology.

“So you just went along with it?”

“Yes.” But he looked down at the floor to avoid my gaze. “Every three months, when the high rollers returned to Vegas, Carter would phone me
up and invite me along, and in the days afterward I'd always get the same call from Cornell, and he'd always tell me the same thing: don't talk about anything you heard at the high-rollers group. Weird thing was, I generally didn't hear
anything
. Most of those men spent the night whacked out on booze, disappearing into side rooms to screw anything that moved.”

“So who does this Cornell guy work for?”

“As far as I can tell, himself. He brings all these powerful men together every February, May, August and November, and probably gets a kickback from the casino for it. A cut of whatever gets spent. But I never figured out if that was the only job he had, what his profession was or how he knew those men. You don't ask him things like that.” A sudden despondency seemed to wash over him, quickly and overtly: in his eyes, in his physicality, like something—some memory—had left the room and taken a part of him with it. “One time, I'd been seeing this woman for a couple of weeks and we'd been getting on great. I'd booked us a table at this amazing French restaurant and gone to her house to pick her up. When I got out of my car, this black SUV pulled slowly into the road and started coming toward me. It was him.”

“Cornell?”

He nodded. “He stopped next to my car, slowly looked from me to this woman's house—and then he just sat there and stared at me. Literally, just stared at me. I'll never forget that. When I try and put that moment into words, it sounds like nothing, but I
swear
to you, the way he looked at me . . .” He stopped. Swallowed. “My knees nearly went. I had to lean against the car for support. I thought I was going to puke.”

“He was insinuating you shouldn't be seeing her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Later, I found out that she worked for a tech firm that was in direct competition with one of the guys in the high-rollers group.”

“So he's mopping up for them?”

“That's what Cornell's job is: he uncovers things, and he shuts things down.”

As I tried to figure out how to loop the conversation back round to the Lings, I remembered something he'd said to me earlier:
After I saw you, that's when it hit home.
He meant that night in the Mandalay Bay, when we'd run into each other.
I think bumping into you was some kind of sign, one I should have taken more notice of
.

“What happened that night at the Mandalay Bay?”

A long pause. “Meeting you there was the first time I realized what I'd got myself into. I went to the toilet, I was washing my hands, I looked up . . .” He glanced at me, the color draining from his face. “And Cornell was standing there. It wasn't one of the high-roller get-togethers, so I never expected to see him. I hadn't seen him at the casino that night. I never even heard him follow me into the bathroom.”

“What did he say?”

“That's the thing. He didn't say anything. All he did was stand there. When I tried to talk to him, he refused to even speak. He just stared me down, that same look on his face. Everything about him . . .” He glanced at me again, unable to articulate what he felt. But he didn't need to. I understood. Men like Cornell rarely had to say a word, because everything they were was already written in their eyes. “Eventually, when I got nothing from him, I went to leave the bathroom—and that was when he asked me who you were.”

“You told him?”

“I told him you were a journalist. I had to.”

“And then?”

“And then he said there was a cab waiting for me out front.” His face filled with a mix of dread and fear. “It wasn't a negotiation, believe me.”

He didn't need to fill in the blanks. As a hush settled in the room, I recalled that night at the Mandalay Bay—and then the man who had come up to me at the bar after Lee had failed to return.
You're just flesh and bones like everyone else
.

Cornell.

“Tell me how all this connects to the Lings.”

He eyed me, teetering on the brink of committing, but it felt like he was most of the way there already. The knowledge of what had happened to the family was starting to weigh heavy, and with secrets, most often, came guilt. The high-rollers group, its protector Cornell, the deaths of Ray Muire and Barry Rew, they were all orbiting the family; I could sense it even if I didn't have a clear sight of the links. And I could see it in Lee's face too: a subtle recognition that this confession had to come. Innocence soon turned into collusion when you found yourself chained to men you were scared of.

“After Annabel had her accident in 2010,” he started, almost in a whisper, “the pain Paul was in, it was just there in his face the whole
time. So, in February 2011, I offered to pay for them. I didn't think anything of it. All I'd be doing is helping Annabel.” As the wind picked up again, the loft hatch started swinging in the shadows. He glanced at it and then back to me. “Even so, I was careful.
So
careful. There was this orthopedic surgeon I'd met through the group. He'd come up from Palm Springs and gambled a ton of money. I'd heard from a couple of the high rollers how brilliant this guy was, but Carter especially sang his praises. He told me they were old, old friends, that he, Ray and this guy had known each other since they were kids. He said he trusted this guy like he trusted Ray, and that was good enough for me. That was the kind of doctor Annabel needed. So I called this guy up and asked him if he'd see her. He told me it would be his pleasure. All I had to do was get Annabel out to Schiltz.”

“The doctor's name was Schiltz?”

“Yeah. Eric Schiltz.”

“Schiltz was English?”

“Yes. But he'd spent most of his life in the States. He moved there to study when he was in his early twenties, and just stayed. He helped Carter set up his first international office in LA—put him in touch with builders, planners, all that kind of thing. Then, later on, he moved from LA to Palm Springs, to work at a hospital in Cathedral City.”

Parker. Cathedral. Dicloflex
. I had two out of three now.

“Schiltz became this massively celebrated surgeon,” Lee continued. “Did all the sports stars and celebrities, and then retired early with a mountain of money. Like,
really
early, at fifty-three or fifty-four. He'd been on the golf course for ten years at that point. He did some consultation, lectured a little, but he didn't run his own practice. He agreed to see Annabel, though. It probably helped he knew me through the group. If Cornell did one good thing, it was introducing me to Eric.”

“What happened next?”

I could see a memory form in his eyes. “I flew the Lings into LAX, organized for them to be picked up at the airport and driven down to Palm Springs, and then met them down there. I put them up in this amazing two-bedroom villa at the Parker.”

And now I had all three names.

Paul must have written the list while speaking to Lee over the phone or on Skype—Lee passing on the message about Dicloflex from Schiltz—and I suspected the police would have come to the same
conclusion. But without Lee and the connection to the high-rollers group, it would have been hard for the cops to piece it all together: the Parker was a hotel one hundred and thirty miles away from LAX, Cathedral City was another four miles away, and the whole family had returned safely in May 2011 and remained that way until their disappearance. It must have been the reason police kept hold of Paul's wallet for so long—because they were never able to narrow down the names he'd left inside. Most likely, eventually, they wrote the U.S. trip off as an irrelevant side-note.

“Okay,” I said to him. “Go on.”

Lee shrugged. “Carter and Eric were both members of that group, and I knew Cornell wouldn't approve of me using them, of bringing a bunch of outsiders into contact with them like that. So I told Paul not to mention anything to anyone. I wanted the whole trip contained. Paul and Carrie probably thought I was losing it. Sometimes I thought I might be losing it myself. I was paranoid, I knew that. But I didn't want to have Cornell turn up on my doorstep, and I didn't want the Lings involved with him. All I cared about was getting Annabel there, getting her fixed and then getting them back home again.”

I recalled how Emily had known nothing about the trip: no details, nothing of the clinic, nothing of the doctor that had operated on Annabel. It made sense now.

“Paul agreed to keep things quiet?”

“He was happy to oblige me—I was paying for everything, after all. Even so, I was cautious: I booked the Parker under my name, gave them cash and pre-paid mobiles.”

“But it didn't work?”

“No,” he said, and his voice tremored. “Everything was going fine: Annabel went in for two consultations, she had the operation, she was doing brilliant things in recovery and the four of them were having an amazing time in Palm Springs. After a month in the States, Paul and Olivia had to get back to the UK, so I stuck them on a plane and after they were gone there was no blowback. No contact from Cornell. I gave Schiltz a call and asked him how long he needed Carrie and Annabel to remain in Palm Springs, and he was relaxed about it too. A few weeks, he told me, so I extended their stay at the Parker, and a week before they were due to go home, Schiltz invites them both to his home. He lived in this suburb where all the Hollywood stars used to stay. This beautiful
old place. It was a two-birds-with-one-stone thing for him, I guess: Annabel was due a final consultation and needed sign-off from Schiltz to travel back home, and Schiltz had really grown to like them and wanted to have them both around to dinner—see his home, get to know them away from the hospital. Eric . . . he was always a nice guy.”