I recognized the symptoms now. Blake had hit me harder than I realized at the time. I had a concussion. It was already starting to slow me down.
But even though I trusted Cassie completely, I wasn’t going to let Amy out of my sight even for a second—not until she was on a plane again, headed safely back to her mother. I stood and shook my head, squinting to see. Thankfully, my vision was clearing.
Amy and Cassie were walking toward the Peet’s Coffee kiosk together. My daughter was holding Cassie’s hand, which was really weird for me to see.
Amy looked up at Cassie, then back over her shoulder at me, and I couldn’t help feeling that I had let her down. Shaking off my weakness, I caught up with them and took her other hand.
“We don’t have time for a drink,” I said. I led them both over to the opposite wall, where posters advertised Nevada’s different tourist venues and destinations. “Amy… Cassie and I have something to discuss with each other now that’s very important.”
Stopping in front of the poster I had spotted earlier, I turned to face them both. “But our chat isn’t going to take long,” I said. “Because you and I have to get on another plane in twenty minutes.”
Amy suddenly focused on the wall behind my shoulder. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes got huge. Then she grabbed me and hugged me again, pressing her face against my bruised ribs. My shirt muffled her voice.
“You’re the best dad in the world,” she said.
Grinning, I put an arm around her and raised my gaze to meet Cassie’s.
“Trevor, no.” Cassie shook her head. “Bad idea. You
can’t
leave right now. Everyone will think you’re…”
Her voice trailed off as she read my answer on my face. I wasn’t planning on bringing Amy any closer to the mess at Pyramid Lake.
Then Cassie, too, looked at the poster behind me, where a troupe of gymnastic performers in zebra leotards posed chest deep in reflective water. The poster advertised the Cirque du Soleil extravaganza
O
, their signature show, at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
I squeezed my daughter against me, unable to stop grinning.
“Amy and I are going to the circus,” I said.
“Oh shit.” Cassie’s mouth opened and closed as she struggled for words. Then she relaxed her shoulders and sighed in resignation.
“Southwest, right? Wait here while I go buy a ticket. I’m coming with you.”
A
riot of irregular rainbow-hued blobs hung overhead: upside-down glass flowers stretching toward me from a swimming pool-size sculpture that spread across the ceiling of the Bellagio’s reception lobby. Carrying my drowsing daughter, I squinted up at the dizzying sight while Cassie and I crossed the marble floor toward the elevators. Even though it was after midnight, people milled all around us. Everything felt dreamlike, as if we were moving underwater. The day’s events were starting to catch up with me.
Ten minutes later, with Amy sleeping peacefully in one of the suite’s two bedrooms, I joined Cassie in the open-plan central living space. She stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows, her back to the dimly lit room, silhouetted against the fifteenth-floor view of the Las Vegas Strip.
Splashes of brilliant neon light flickered on her crossed arms and rounded shoulders. Hugging herself, Cassie stared silently at the choreographed fountains below.
Seeing how lonely she looked made me feel miserable, because there was something we needed to get straight.
“You take the other bedroom,” I said. “I’ll sleep right here, on the couch.”
She nodded without turning around.
I wandered past the black-lacquered dining table, dragging my fingers along the backs of the three low-slung couches, circling them to find the bar. Grabbing a couple of bottled waters out of the bar fridge, I opened one and drank it.
I carried the other water to the window and offered it to Cassie. She didn’t take it.
“This suite is bigger than your whole house,” she said. “It has five bathrooms.”
I shrugged. “I guess the rich, decadent assholes who normally stay here need lots of places to throw up.”
She spun and grabbed my upper arm. Her expression tight and apprehensive, she turned her unhappy face toward mine.
“What did you do with the money?” she demanded.
“What money?”
“Twelve million dollars. Don’t even
try
to lie to me, Trevor. The night McNulty died, you forged his signature to authorize a wire transfer—NCIS knows that now. They found it. But what I don’t get is why you went out of your way to call so much attention to it.”
She pulled me forward a step, so the neon brightness from outside shone across my face.
“Why did you forge a nine-million-dollar vendor payment afterward, when you knew the money was already gone? Are you
trying
to get caught—?” Her eyes suddenly widened in shock. “Oh my God... You
didn’t
know the money was gone.”
I jerked my arm away from her grasp, went over to one of the couches, and sat down. Hanging my head back across the cushions, I closed my eyes against the crushing disappointment I felt inside.
“Go home, Cassie.”
“I’m sorry. I thought—”
“I can see what you thought.”
“I made a mistake.”
My throat tightened. “No,
I
made the mistake.”
“Please don’t say that.” The cushions shifted as she settled carefully on the couch. But not too close. “Please don’t think that about me. Listen, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean…” She sounded forlorn. “Can we just start over, Trevor?”
I nodded, and she sagged into the couch with relief. Given how many other things I was hiding from her, Cassie probably had a right to distrust me. But it still hurt.
A lot.
Setting aside my disillusionment, I thought about what she had said.
“Why would I want to steal our grant money?” I asked. “Twelve million isn’t very much—it barely covered the hardware upgrade.”
“You’re only considering it from a government-spending perspective,” she said. “It
is
a lot of money if you think of it in other terms.”
“What—you mean like for buying fancy cars? Getting a huge house and decorating it”—I opened my eyes and waved at the opulent furnishings around us—”like this? Who even gives a shit about that stuff?”
Cassie bounded off the couch and went back to stare out the window. Crossing her arms again, she spoke quietly. “My school will cost less than a million a year.”
“Did
you
steal our money, then?”
“Not funny.”
I stretched, stood up, and walked over to stand beside her, taking in the view. At the south end of the Strip, a thick vertical column of white light shot up into the sky from the top of the Luxor’s glossy black pyramid. Within the unearthly column of light, brighter pinpoints swooped and sparkled like dust motes in a flashlight beam. Desert bats, I figured, coming to feast on the swarms of insects that the giant beacon attracted.
I could see what Cassie was getting at now.
Despite the cheerful exuberance of the Strip’s garish light show in front of us, the empty badlands surrounding Vegas were full of buried bodies: debtors who couldn’t pay their loan sharks, displaced mobsters, officials whom money could not corrupt—and gamblers too stupid to quit after they had already pushed their luck too far. All of them, like the moths swirling invisibly in the Luxor’s beam, had been drawn to the brightness again and again, heedless of the hungry predators. Now they populated unmarked graves in the desert.
The drab, dusty oil fields surrounding my hometown of Oildale, the ’08, were riddled with the same kind of unmarked graves. The Kern River
ate
gangbangers who stole from the wrong ’08er; the only time their bodies turned up was when searchers were looking for other bodies.
Cassie was right. People got killed over money all the time—most of them for a hell of a lot less than twelve million dollars. But stealing our grant funding still didn’t make sense to me. I frowned.
“That’s got to be the stupidest twelve million on the planet to touch,” I said. “If this is only about money, then whoever took it is a complete fucking idiot. Or suicidal.”
“Because they stole from a top secret military project?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then why?” she asked.
I stared at the distant column of light, watching the dance of prey and predator, and an ugly expression twisted across the reflection of my face.
“Because the project they stole from belongs to me.”
S
itting on a poolside chaise lounge at Mandalay Bay Hotel’s artificial beach, I unpinned Amy’s hair, which was frizzing all over the place. I started redoing it in a French braid, and my fingers snagged on yet another bobby pin. I pulled it out and temporarily slid it onto my collar, where it joined eight or nine others, so that I could keep both hands free while plaiting my daughter’s hair.
Jen always put in too many bobby pins. Using fewer than half of them, I tucked in the last strand of hair and then leaned back, pleased with the result.
Amy gave me a quick kiss and headed for the pool.
Peeling off my shirt, I leaned back and watched my daughter run down the sloping blue spillway in her brand-new swimsuit. Bursting with excitement, she slipped into the wave pool. Grinning, her eyes invisible behind her little sunglasses, she turned and beckoned to me. I shook my head. Then a wave crashed into her chest, foaming around her waist before it drained away. Her high-pitched laughter drifted back to my ears, and I settled against the soft plastic straps of the chaise, content just to watch her play.
The early-afternoon heat felt good on my chest and thighs, bathing my skin with a warm glow. I shifted my body, repositioning my sweating back against the slippery chaise straps. I still had a headache and felt nauseated and a little groggy, but I didn’t want to spoil Amy’s day.
Even here under the bright Vegas sun, the tangled mess back at Pyramid Lake seemed to loom over us like a dark, angry cloud. I wondered how much progress Frankenstein had made. I needed to call him to make sure he wasn’t slacking.
Cassie shifted on her chaise beside me.
“With your shirt off,” she said, “you look like an anatomy lesson.” Her long, cool fingers laddered down my stomach. “What’re these under your skin here—knotted steel elevator cables?” She poked me in the side. “Do you have
any
body fat at all?”
I shrugged, and she lay back, raising a slim knee.
After breakfast, Cassie had bought a white bikini that fastened with string ties at her hips. It contrasted with her copper skin and looked really good on her.
Too good.
I raised my gaze instead to the gold-glassed towers of the Mandalay Bay Hotel above. I didn’t want to make another mistake. Cassie and I were friends; that was all.
“You know, the Bellagio had a perfectly decent pool, too,” she said.
“Amy chose
this
particular one from the satellite images.”
“You put enough sunscreen on her, that’s for certain.”
“I didn’t want her to burn.”
“Watching you braid her hair was… I don’t know, surprising. I just didn’t expect it from you, that’s all.”
Feeling a dull sadness, I shrugged again. I knew how to do Amy’s ballet bun, too. And a few different pleats, pigtails, and braid styles for her—skills that I hardly ever got to exercise, nowadays.
The sun sparkled off the curving row of earrings dangling from Cassie’s ear. She scooted into an upright position, brushed sand from her toes, and waved to Amy, who waved back.
Cassie turned her oversize black sunglasses toward me. “The psychiatric taxonomy you had Frankenstein learn—it’s all about
her,
isn’t it?
She’s
the one you’re trying to help.”
I nodded. But I didn’t want to talk about this now, so I returned my attention to Amy. She stood near the front edge of the wave pool, where it connected with the shallower kiddie pool. Three younger kids, maybe five or six years old, stood just inside the kiddie pool, forming a semicircle around my daughter. Their body language signaled unhappiness, and all of them were trying to speak to her at once. Amy seemed to be reassuring them. She asked them a question and listened patiently to their answers.
“See how she’s taking care of the little ones?” Cassie said. “It’s impossible not to like her.”
“I really wish she had a brother or sister,” I said. “That might have changed things.”
One of the younger kids pointed, and Amy turned, following his chubby finger until her gaze rested on the lifeguard he was showing her. Then she said something to the kids that seemed to placate them. One of them gave her a hug; then all three returned to the kiddie pool, bouncing with happy eagerness.
“Amy reminds me of myself at her age,” Cassie said. “She can tell she makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It bothers her.”
“Especially adults,” I said. “She doesn’t understand why they react badly.”
Alone now, standing in the shallows of the wave pool, Amy took off her sunglasses. I watched her blue gaze track around the pool’s edges, from lifeguard to lifeguard. From a distance, her expression looked thoughtful.
“It’s not easy being as perceptive as she is,” Cassie said. She brushed my shoulder with her fingers. “I think she’s just lonely. She’ll find her place eventually.”
“That’s what I used to think, too.” I swallowed. “The rest of the world doesn’t seem to agree.”
Feeling light-headed, I lay back. I hadn’t really slept last night—playing it safe because of the concussion. Instead, I had spent most of the night pacing the room, checking on my sleeping daughter, and thinking.
Whoever had set the trap for me in Blake’s lab had not only faked the code time stamps, but had also mimicked Blake’s own programming style: his ridiculous thousand-line subroutines, his old-school memory allocation, his cryptic variable-naming conventions. It took an extreme degree of programming skill to imitate another person’s coding style that convincingly.