CHAPTER SIX
“Is everything all right?” Christopher asked.
“Yes, everything’s fine,” Paige assured him, possibly a little too quickly.
Paige wasn’t sure what to say to Christopher as the two of them drove over to the Illustrious. She knew that she ought to talk to him about the case, go through all the possibilities that might allow them to find the killer they were looking for.
It should have been easy; instead, Paige was wary of saying anything in case she said the wrong thing, in case she said something that crossed one of the invisible lines that were suddenly there between her and Christopher. Lines that she’d put in place the moment she knew he was taken.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s just that you’ve been pretty quiet ever since we set off from D.C.”
“I’m just thinking about the case,” Paige said. It was hard to pretend that everything was normal. “Do you think Lucas Francisco is a good suspect for this?”
“Do you have doubts?” Christopher asked. “He’s one of two people with after-hours access to the theater, and if he’s worked there on their magic shows, he might have the connections to get what he needs for the tricks.”
“He might,” Paige said. “And we have to follow up, but isn’t it possible that there were other ways someone got into the theater? If someone is really that into escapology, wouldn’t they be able to pick a lock?”
“They would,” Christopher agreed, and that meant that none of this was certain. “But we still need to run this down. Lucas might be our killer, and if he is, then we need to get to him before he has a chance to kill again. At the very least, we need to talk to him and eliminate him as a suspect.”
That was true. They needed to follow whatever evidence there was. Maybe Lucas was the killer. At the very least, he might have seen something. A guy who was often there late at night? Maybe he’d swung by last night and spotted the killer, or a piece of evidence that might lead them to him.
The Illustrious was a significant move up in class from the theater where Lucas worked at night. Its broad front dominated a large section of the strip, lit up even during the day as if any pause in the brightness would lose it customers. It rose high above, a hotel sitting there above the casino on the ground floor, rising up to blot out the sky. The whole place was made to look almost deliberately old-fashioned, like some high class French hotel, while the grounds in front had been turned into something like an eighteenth century formal garden.
Paige and Christopher pulled up in front and a valet went to take their keys. Paige saw Christopher hesitate, obviously not wanting the car to be far away if they needed it, or not wanting the government vehicle to be in the hands of someone else, but there didn’t seem to be any other real choice here.
“Keep it close by,” he said to the attendant, flashing his badge.
“Yes sir,” the attendant said, and the two of them headed inside.
The interior was, if anything, even more opulent than the exterior had been. The whole place gave the impression of having been intricately carved from walnut and marble, forming a seamless whole. The reception desk looked not so much built from marble as almost extruded from the shining gloss of the floor. Signs pointed the way to half a dozen different convention rooms and auditoriums, while a broad casino floor spread out in every direction, so that it would be necessary to walk through it to get anywhere there.
There were displays set up around the floor of the casino, obviously designed to catch the eyes of anyone there so that they would stop long enough to get caught up in the gambling. There were modern looking statues and art installations, chandeliers that looked as though each had been individually designed, even a large tank with a walkway running around it, in which swam what appeared to Paige to be small sharks. Each gaming table featured a dealer dressed in black slacks, a white shirt, and a waistcoat that featured gold swirls on a black background, all dressed identically, so that it was hard to tell one from another at a distance.
It was about then that Paige realized that finding Lucas would be anything but simple, even when they had a photograph to work with. A place like this would have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of guests and gamblers. Finding one man in all of this would take forever.
“We’re looking for Lucas Francisco,” Christopher said to the receptionist on the front desk and showing his badge. “We’re told that he works here.”
“I can check for you,” the receptionist said, in a polite, professional tone. “What’s all this about?”
“We need to talk to him in connection to an ongoing investigation,” Christopher said. Obviously he wouldn’t mention the murder. That would only cause the kind of trouble that they didn’t need.
“I have him on the system now,” the receptionist said. “The locations for all of our dealers are logged, for security.”
“For security?” Paige said, not quite understanding.
“If there are losses, the house likes to know what table they’re coming from,” the receptionist explained. “Anyway, it looks like he’s dealing blackjack on table 15, over that way.”
She gestured to a spot in the casino, with its rows of tables and slot machines filled with gamblers.
There was still the matter of covering the space between where they stood and the table at which Lucas was dealing. Stepping into the casino was like plunging into an overwhelming sea of light and noise, with dealers calling out wins and losses, slot machines ringing out with wins and losses, customers cursing their luck. It was so all consuming that it was almost impossible to keep track of which direction they were moving in.
Paige’s eyes weren’t on the tables as she passed. Instead, she found herself watching the faces of the people there, taking in the hope, the elation, the pain and the desperation there, reading their expressions and their body language automatically. She saw the tired expressions of people who had obviously been in there for hours at a time, gambling without stopping, and picked out the ones who were probably slightly tipsy on free drinks to make any kind of good decisions.
She watched Christopher’s eyes roving the room and guessed that he was looking for very different things from her. She saw him glance over to where the casino’s security guards stood here and there in the crowd, watching over proceedings as discretely as possible. She also saw him glance towards the dark domes of security cameras set around the room. He was obviously watching for threats, assessing the extent of the security in the place, and trying to pick out Lucas from the other dealers.
He led the way, his larger frame forging a path that Paige could follow across the casino floor. She had to sidestep as a particularly bulky man eased his way from one slot machine to another, but quickly caught up again, falling into step behind him.
Paige could see that each of the tables had a discretely placed number on its side in raised gold lettering. They offered a mixture of different games, as if set up to allow people bored with one table to move quickly and easily to spend their money at another.