Ellery twitched herself awake just before dawn, momentarily on high alert until she remembered where she was. When the shadowed hotel room came into focus, she wriggled around under the whisper-soft cotton sheets in unadulterated corporal pleasure. The high, cushioned bed was so vast she felt like she could swim laps in it. Her phone buzzed on the nightstand, and she retrieved it to see she had a text from Liz Simmons, her neighbor back in Boston. Ellery smiled when she saw the picture Liz had attached: Speed Bump, his muzzle covered in snow, frolicked at the local park with a perky-tailed dachshund in the background. The boys are having a great time together! Liz wrote.
Ellery texted back her renewed thanks for Liz’s kindness in taking Speed Bump as a boarder while Ellery was away. Ellery had rescued Bump from an animal shelter where he’d been well treated but long-faced and palpably sad, shut in a cage most of the day. Never again, she had vowed when she took him in her arms that first day. No more locks. No more cages. She wasn’t about to board him in a kennel while she followed Reed across the country. Instead, she could rest easy knowing Speed Bump was having the time of his life with his little buddy from the apartment next door—even if he might have preferred to be flopped out with Ellery on the king-size bed with its Egyptian cotton sheets.
She forced herself out from under the warm duvet and reluctantly put on her running clothes. The fancy hotel Reed had picked no doubt had a state-of-the-art workout facility somewhere on the premises, but Ellery avoided gyms whenever possible. They always featured floor-to-ceiling mirrors so you could watch yourself huffing and puffing. Ellery maintained a perfunctory relationship with mirrors, glancing once per day to make sure her hair was properly combed and that she hadn’t left toothpaste on her chin. It had taken her more than a month to look at herself after Reed had yanked her free from Coben’s closet, and the image of that sunken-eyed girl with her raised scars and ragged scarecrow hair had haunted her ever since.
That girl, that helpless little wraith, she was the reason Ellery took up running. Running, jumping, throwing, and shooting—she racked up as many physical skills as she could because they let her make friends with her body again. Her hands, the ones with the scars on them, they shot free throws with 91 percent accuracy on her high-school team. They passed the Handgun Qualification Standard with top marks on the first try. Finally, last summer, those once-broken hands had stopped a murderer dead in his tracks. She couldn’t resent her body anymore for what Coben did to it; she no longer pretended it had happened to someone else. Her body, it turned out, was strong enough to carry the weight.
She slipped silently from her bedroom into the living area and saw across the suite that the door to Reed’s room remained shut. The pink light of dawn shone in through the large balcony doors, the sun just beginning to climb over the hills. She crept up to the long dining table, which now sat littered from end to end with files and notes, proving Reed had continued working the case long after she’d retired for the night. He had sketched out the murder scene and created a timeline of known events leading up to Camilla’s death, including the new detail that someone had slashed Camilla’s tires. She flipped through some pages and found an outline of Camilla’s apartment building, with neighbors identified and cross-referenced with the statements they gave at the time of the homicide. She set the notepad down gently and trailed her fingers over Reed’s handwriting on the top page, feeling the indent of every painful word. He’d sorted stacks of folders and photographs into some sort of attempt at ordering the chaos. She hoped the organization gave him some comfort, because what she saw was a life blown to smithereens and a man convinced he could somehow piece it back together.
Outside, the brisk winter air hit her harder than she expected and a nearby bank clock advertised the temperature as a chilly thirty-nine degrees. Still warmer than Boston, she encouraged herself as she started her jog. As much as she loved music, Ellery refused to wear earbuds while running because they cut off one of her senses. She always cast a dubious eye at joggers and pedestrians lost to their electronic worlds, totally vulnerable to someone wishing them harm in the earthly terrain. The downside of her decision was that it often made running a deathly boring activity, with the repetitive slap, slap of her sneakers against the pavement and the same scenery every single day, so the novel Las Vegas landscape provided a welcome distraction.
She ran up East Flamingo Road toward the casinos, which had flicked off most of their overpowering neon shells to greet the light of day. At this hour, they looked like peculiar temples from another world, hulking relics with no signs of human life. Ellery wondered what it would be like to live every day in a city known for its sin. Did you just ignore the blazing lights after a while? Did you snicker at the gullible tourists coming with their suitcases full of dollars, thinking it’s true that a fool and his money are soon parted? Or maybe you were someone like Camilla, who came here hoping to cash in on that blinding financial promise and then got stuck living on the outside of the city, close enough to see the cash but with no way to grab it for herself.
Ellery’s run took her past the backsides of several casinos, which revealed less glamorous concrete parking structures and half-mile-high hotels. She admired the pink-and-white Flamingo and glimpsed the enormity of the High Roller Ferris wheel. Interspersed were signs of ordinary city life: a sub sandwich shop, coffeehouses, a UPS store. Still, The Strip promised the good life, with big winnings and lots of expensive stores to spend them in. There was no sign here of what happened to people when the money ran out.
She turned around and ran back to the hotel where Reed’s money kept them ensconced with the glitterati. Reed was awake when she returned, wearing one of those amazing robes and holding a cup of coffee as he studied his notes from the night before. He looked up as she entered and indicated the mug in his hands. “I’d offer to make you a cup, but I know how you feel about such things,” he said.
Ellery’s body, already humming from the exercise, grew a little warmer at the sight of his naked legs, and she ducked her head into the refrigerator in search of a cold bottle of water. She had a more intimate relationship with Reed than any other man she’d ever known, and yet they had barely touched. Maybe this disparity explained her constant physical reaction to his presence. “What’s your plan for the day?” she asked when she’d unscrewed the top of the bottle and taken a long drink.
“I want to visit the sheriff again and initiate that DNA test we talked about. We can also ask him about the blond woman in the picture with Angie and Camilla. Maybe he knows who she is.”
“What about that other murder Amy mentioned? The one with the girl who got stabbed in her own apartment the year before Camilla was attacked.”
Reed frowned, an indication he didn’t think much of her lead, but he said, “Sure, we can ask him about that, too.” He set the mug on the only empty corner of the table and regarded her with a serious gaze. “I should warn you that the secret’s out—my sister told my father that I’m in Vegas working a cold case, and he didn’t have to think very hard to figure out which one.”
Ellery pulled out one of the heavy chairs from the table and took a seat next to Reed. “Since we’re in Vegas, I’m going to make a bet. I wager he wasn’t happy with the news.” She glanced at Reed for confirmation.
“That’s safe money,” Reed agreed. He leaned back in his seat and let out a weary breath. “He denies killing her, of course. Says he only ever wanted to protect me.”
“What do you think?” Ellery asked him softly.
Reed took a long time with his answer. “I want to believe him. I want to believe him almost more than anything I’ve ever wanted.” He paused. “So that’s why I can’t. Not yet.”
Ellery nodded, trying to figure out how she could be most useful in this situation. Maybe she could be the believer. “I won’t tell you,” she said slowly, “that keeping the truth from you all these years is okay, because it’s not. But I speak from experience that once you decide to keep a secret, once you’ve architected your whole life around it, it’s hard to let it go. It can seem like its own kind of truth.” She wondered sometimes if she had come forth with her true identity back in Woodbury when the disappearances first started she might have been able to stop the killer sooner.
“Yes, I gather that’s the story Angus told himself. He was already my father, so it didn’t matter how he got that way, whether by birth or by some sort of legal documentation. He claims he acted immediately to start the adoption process as soon as he heard what had happened to Cammie. I can’t even imagine what he told my mother to get her to sign on.”
“Did you ask him?”
Reed replied with a curt shake of his head. “No, it was your average, run-of-the-mill late-night conversation between father and son. I accused him of murder. He proclaimed his innocence. The usual stuff.”
Before Ellery could answer, her cell phone buzzed in the pocket of her fleece pullover. She took it out and saw the caller ID gave an unfamiliar number and no name. Her mother and Reed were the only ones who ever called her, outside of the occasional hungry reporter who somehow managed to dredge up her unlisted phone number. She accepted the call, ready to tell off the latest media hack. “Yes?”
The odd beat of silence on the other end, rather than the usual hearty, pleading sales push, made her blood run instantly cold. “Abby? It’s Dad.”
He got no further because Ellery immediately ended the call. She shoved the phone back in her pocket and out of sight.
“Who was that?” Reed asked.
“Wrong number,” Ellery muttered as she jumped up from the table, moving around so he couldn’t see her shaking. “Is there anything to eat in this place?” She opened and closed the barren cabinets one after another while Reed looked on.
“There’s a coffee shop in the lobby. I thought we might stop there on our way out to see the sheriff, but I figured you might want to shower first.”
Shower, yes. A perfect escape. “Okay, I’ll do that.” Heart pounding, she fled to her bedroom and stripped the clothes from her clammy skin. She had learned long ago not to make noise in her distress, and the roar of the shower covered her turmoil. Who the hell did John Hathaway think he was, stalking back into her life twenty years later—like he could just call her up and just say, Hi, how’s it going? Apparently, he hadn’t taken the hint when she failed to reply to his letter. Didn’t he understand that silence meant no? Ellery sure got that message when he’d walked out and never said a word, not when she was abducted and tortured, not even when Daniel had died. Her brother went to his grave thinking his father no longer gave a damn about him. Daniel wasn’t around to forgive him, so hell would freeze before Ellery ever would.
The water ran down her face like tears, and she banged her fist on the tiled wall until her hand hurt and she collapsed in the corner, curling her arms over her head. Maybe she wasn’t the best person to stand up for Angus Markham and his chosen narrative after all. In the best version of the story, Angus was a loving father who moved heaven and earth to rescue his baby boy, risking family and career just to be with him. I want to believe, Reed had said, and this was Ellery’s problem: she wanted it, too, maybe more than she’d realized. Because if your father was a piece of shit, what did that make you?
The desert warmed up with the rising sun, and Ellery seized on the brightening sky as the opportunity to hide her red-rimmed eyes behind a pair of dark shades. She could feel Reed’s curious gaze on her as he started the car, but he kept any remarks to himself. At LV Metro headquarters, Sheriff Ramsey gave them a cordial welcome, although he seemed more distracted and hurried than the day before.
“I’m afraid I’ve got a nine A.M. meeting today, Agent Markham. I trust that Don Price should be able to help you with any remaining questions you might have. He told me that you’ve already made copies of all the available files, and, though it pains me to say it, that is pretty much the sum total of our information on your mother’s case.”
“I appreciate that, Sheriff, and won’t take up much of your time. First off, I’d like to run a DNA analysis on the knife—specifically the hilt. If the killer injured himself in the attack, he may have left a sample behind.”
Sheriff Ramsey leaned back in his chair with a frown. “That was a theory at the time, which is why Thorndike’s cut got everyone so interested. Sure, a DNA test is possible. Why not? Maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ll put in the request myself today.”
“Great, thank you,” Reed replied. “I was also wondering if you might be able to identify the young woman in this picture with Camilla and Angela.” He took out the photograph and handed it across the desk. “I’d ask Sergeant Price about it, except I think he was probably in nursery school at the time it was taken.”
The sheriff grinned and took up the picture. “Boy, you’re right about that. The new recruits look younger every year.” He put on his reading glasses and studied the photograph for a moment. “She doesn’t look familiar to me. I’m sorry, but as I’ve mentioned, my role in the investigation was limited to discovery of the body. Her name isn’t in the murder book?”
“It may well be. We just can’t tell. There must be a hundred names in there.”
Ramsey nodded and leaned back in his chair. “We beat every bush we could think of and then came around to whack ’em again. If this woman isn’t easily identified in the records, it’s probably because the initial investigation didn’t suggest she was of any importance. Why the interest? Do you have reason to think she knows something?”
Reed took the picture back and tucked it away. “Just covering all the bases. Speaking of, I’d like to talk to Billy Thorndike if possible. Do you have a current address for him?”
Ramsey held up one finger. “I had a feeling you were going to ask me that, so I had my boys look him up for you. Last we heard from him, Thorndike was living out in Summerlin with his daughter, drinking her hard-earned money. I’m amazed he hasn’t drunk himself into the grave by now. I’ll give you the address for his daughter if you’d like it.”
“Thank you.”
Ellery glanced at Reed while the sheriff wrote out the information on a slip of paper. Reed made no mention of the lead she’d uncovered, so she raised the issue herself. “Sheriff, was there another woman stabbed to death around the same time Camilla Flores was attacked? Maybe a year or so earlier? The name we heard was Giselle or Danielle.”
The sheriff looked up, pen still in hand. “Giselle Hardiman, yes. What about her?”
“Well, it’s just that we heard that case was also unsolved. Two young women, murdered in a similar way…”
“They weren’t that similar. Yes, it’s true that the Hardiman girl died from a stabbing attack that took place in her bedroom, but that’s almost the extent of the similarities.” He held up his hand to tick off the differences. “Giselle Hardiman was sexually assaulted, but Camilla Flores was not. The Flores apartment was either the scene of a burglary or staged to look like one, but we found nothing missing or out of place at Hardiman’s apartment. Flores was attacked with two weapons, the knife and the metal bookend. Furthermore, the two victims lived at opposite ends of the city and there was no evidence that they knew each other or that their lives otherwise intersected.”
“Still,” Reed said, “we’d like to see the case.”
Ellery nodded, pleased he was backing her up, at least. “Yes. What could it hurt just to take another look?”
Sheriff Ramsey shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. You have to trust me that we’ve looked into this possibility before and come up empty. I appreciate your personal interest in the Flores case, and I stand by my offer of full cooperation on that score. But I can’t have you digging around willy-nilly in all of our old cases. Sergeant Price has actual work to do and can’t be trucking boxes back and forth from storage all day. Besides, we have rules and procedures to follow.”
Reed sat forward, mounting a rebuttal. “Yes, but if the two cases could be related—”
“They’re not,” Ramsey cut in.
“With all due respect, Sheriff, the FBI likes to make those kinds of decisions for itself.”
“Then the FBI can petition for jurisdiction,” the sheriff answered with a new trace of steel in his voice. “And if you go down that road, I’d advise you to make sure she isn’t the one signing the forms.” He pointed at Ellery. “Because I looked it up, and she’s not FBI. She’s not even on the job.”
Ellery felt her face flame hot, but Reed didn’t flinch. “I never said she was. She’s here at my discretion as a consultant.”
“Call it whatever you like, we both know it ain’t exactly kosher. Like I said, we’ve been cooperative with you on account of your personal interest in this case, and because we’re officially deactivating our own investigation. Whatever leads you find that pertain to Camilla Flores, you have my blessing to follow them however you see fit.” He glanced at Ellery as if deeply skeptical and then shook his head to clear it. “Now I’m sorry, but I’ve got to run to that meeting. Good luck tracking down Thorndike. I hope he has something useful for you. Hell, maybe the SOB will shock us all by up and confessing after all these years.” He gave them a tight smile as he rose to his feet and gestured toward the door.
Ellery and Reed took the hint and showed themselves out. In the hall, they stood and watched Sheriff Ramsey stride away toward his meeting. “Well, that took a strange turn,” Ellery murmured as he disappeared from sight.
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” Reed agreed, his gaze thoughtful. “If we’re getting any information on Giselle Hardiman’s case, it won’t be from Sheriff Ramsey.”
“Reed…”
He returned his attention to her. “Hmm?”
She hesitated, unsure of how to phrase her concern. “I’m not getting you into trouble, am I? By being here with you on this case?”
“I brought you here because you know how to make trouble.” He touched her arm briefly and smiled. “Teach me your ways, Secret Agent Hathaway. I’m here to learn.”
She ducked away, warm from his touch. “My ways usually end up in front of a disciplinary committee,” she warned him. “If I were doing this on my own, I’d probably use Ramsey’s meeting as a convenient cover to convince Sergeant Price that Ramsey told him to give us the files on the Hardiman murder.”
“A bold strategy. Damn the torpedoes and all that.”
“Right. It’s risky. Ramsey would stop cooperating with us entirely when he found out, and we might still need him later.” She considered. “Let me see if I can find another way in.”
“This other way,” Reed said as they began walking for the main door, “it’s not going to get us arrested, will it?”
Ellery smiled and put on her sunglasses as they hit the outside again. “You’re the one who wanted trouble.”
“I’m just trying to determine if I brought enough bail money.”
The SUV chirped as Reed unlocked the doors, but Ellery veered off suddenly as she spied a soda machine near one of the buildings. “I’m going for a caffeine hit,” she said, jerking her thumb at the machine. “You want anything?” Reed declined, so she jogged lightly across the near-empty lot on her own.
She inserted the bills and waited for the Coke machine to dispense her drink. It whirred and the soda bottle landed with a thunk. As she leaned down to retrieve it, Ellery saw a flash of movement from the corner of her eye, coming from the direction of the sparsely parked cars. She stood up quickly and took a few steps in the direction of the figure she’d seen. Nothing moved. She scanned the cars but saw no one inside them. Neither did there seem to be anyone walking beyond the lot on the sidewalk. She waited a beat longer to see if the motion would repeat, but the scenery did not change. Eventually, she decided she’d imagined it and returned to the SUV, which Reed had idling as he entered the GPS information for Billy Thorndike’s last known address.
Only three blocks later, when she happened to glance in the side mirror, she caught sight of a silver BMW sedan that looked just like one she’d spotted in the LVMPD parking lot. She held her breath as Reed made the next turn. The silver BMW popped up again, two cars behind them. It trailed them all the way down the road, and Reed flipped the signal to follow the signs marked SUMMERLIN. “Reed…”
“What?”
“I think—” She looked again, and the BMW had vanished. “Never mind.” She kept her eyes on the mirror for the rest of the trip but did not glimpse the silver car again.
Billy Thorndike’s black-and-white mugshot dated to 1974, and he looked the part, with his extended sideburns, a slick, receding hairline, and a striped, wide-lapel shirt so loud it screamed. His jowly cheeks were coated in stubble, and he had small, bleary eyes. Ellery knew he had to be twenty-seven years old in the photograph, but he looked like he could’ve been pushing forty. She did not hold out a lot of hope they would find Thorndike still coherent or even alive.
Reed glided the SUV to a stop in front of a small but unexpectedly nice house the color of concrete, with a teensy yard and a cracked driveway. “This is the place,” he said, checking the address slip that the sheriff had given them.
They walked the short path to the front door and Reed rang the bell. Apart from them, the street was deserted and silent. Ellery heard someone moving around on the other side of the door, and eventually it parted about three inches and an old man’s face peered out at them. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Thorndike?” Reed ventured.
The crack did not widen. “Who’s asking?”
“Reed Markham,” he replied, and pulled out his FBI credentials. “I’d like to talk to you about Camilla Flores, if I may.”
“Don’t know her.”
He started to close the door, but Reed blocked it with his foot. “She was murdered—stabbed in her apartment to death forty-four years ago. Right before she could testify against you in open court.”
“Oh, her. Yeah, she’s dead. Been that way a long time now. What do you care, anyway? Ain’t you government people got better stuff to do? Like terrorism. I seen on the TV just today how we got sleeper cells of them Arabs living right here in Nevada. They could be right next door for all I know. Why don’t you go knock over there?”
He moved again to shut the door, but Reed pushed back and even widened the gap. Ellery caught the stench of beer and cigarettes flowing from the inside. “Give us fifteen minutes,” Reed said. “If you convince me that Camilla Flores’s murder is old news, we won’t come back to bother you again.”
“You have a warrant? I don’t gotta talk to you without a warrant.”
“You just got done telling me there’s no case,” Reed said reasonably. “Why would I need a warrant?”
Thorndike swayed and scowled, as though he knew there was a trick in the logic somewhere but couldn’t quite place it. “Fifteen minutes,” he groused, backing up so they could enter. “That’s all you get. Judge Judy comes on at ten, and I love that bitch. She doesn’t take shit from anyone.”
Ellery stepped over the threshold and saw Thorndike had now lost almost all his hair, leaving just a gray fringe around his ears. His nose had grown longer and taken on a reddish color, while his cheeks caved in. The stubble remained, as did the curl of chest hair, which peeked out from under his white muscle shirt. In his weakened state, Thorndike didn’t seem a threat to anyone. He even used a walker. He leaned heavily on it as he led them back to the living room, where, as advertised, he had a morning court show playing at full volume. He grabbed the remote and stabbed angrily at it to silence the television before collapsing, like a deflating balloon, into a nearby stuffed recliner. He picked up a cigarette and tapped the lengthening ash into the tray. “Tick tick,” he reminded them. “You wanna talk? Then talk.”
Ellery and Reed took a seat on an overstuffed floral sofa. “Camilla Flores,” Reed began, but Thorndike cut them off with a wave of his hand.
“The cops have been trying to pin that bitch’s murder on me for decades. It never stuck. You know why? Because I didn’t do it.”
“She was going to testify against you,” Reed reminded him. “But that never happened.”
“Yeah,” Thorndike said before taking a drag on his cigarette. “Shame about that.”
“Tell me about the afternoon she was killed,” Reed said.
Thorndike looked them over with dead eyes. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“You must have heard about it.”
“Sure, everyone heard about it. The story was that some guy broke into her place, maybe to steal some of her piddly shit. But then she turned out to be home and caught him piling up her stuff. So he gutted her like a fish.”
He made a slicing motion to underscore his point, and Ellery’s stomach tightened. Something about the way his face brightened with the pantomime reminded her of Coben and Willett, and she remembered that this dissembling wretch of a man had no doubt killed someone, even if he happened to be innocent of the Flores murder. “Where were you when all this was going on?” Reed asked.
“Home with Ma,” he replied coolly, blowing smoke. “She wasn’t feeling so good and I brought her some groceries. Cooked her an early supper.”
“What did you make?”
“Fried sausage and potatoes. Her favorite.” He added a cheeky smile after this answer, like he’d had it ready in his back pocket. “I stayed and watched her programs with her while she ate it. So you see? I couldn’t have done it. My ma, she swore on the Holy Bible to the cops that I was with her when that bitch got popped.”
“And of course your mother would never lie for you,” Reed said, and Thorndike replied with a wide smile that showed off a row of yellowed teeth.
“Course she would’ve. Wouldn’t your mama take a bullet for you if it came to that?” He coughed and then grinned at his own remark. “Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe you cops all have tight-ass, pussy mamas who don’t care about you. But it don’t make no difference, not after all this time. Ma’s been gone twenty years now—you want to dig her up and ask her again?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Reed replied.
Ellery could feel the window closing. “What about Giselle Hardiman?” she blurted out, and both Reed and Thorndike turned to look at her.
Thorndike puffed away on his cigarette for a moment. “Who?” he asked pointedly, and Ellery could tell it was for show. He knew the Hardiman name straightaway. He just wanted her to work for the information. She practically rolled up her sleeves, relishing the job. I’ve got your number now, you little creep, she thought. Forget his grand proclamations about how they had to be leaving in fifteen minutes—this man would let them sit here and grill him all day. Hell, he would probably try to block the door if they left too soon. He’d been rotting in that recliner so long it’d taken on his shape, and then along came two investigators to ask about the time when he might have been big and bad enough to murder someone. No TV program would give him that.
“I’m sorry,” Ellery said as she leaned forward, feigning innocence. “Are you hard of hearing? I can speak up if you need.”
“I heard you the first time,” Thorndike snarled in return. “Hardiman, right? I just don’t know the name.”
“Giselle Hardiman, that’s right,” Ellery repeated for him. “She was another young woman killed the year before Camilla Flores. She was also—how did you put it?—gutted like a fish.”
Thorndike’s chuckle devolved into a wheeze. He reached for an inhaler and sucked on that for a couple of breaths. “Giselle, okay. Yeah, I remember her now. Working girl, and she could work it. Pretty little bow-tie mouth. Big tits.”
“So you were a client.”
“Honey, I didn’t have to pay for it.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” Ellery replied, sounding bored. “But the working girls—the smart ones, like you say—they don’t just give it away. Maybe you don’t pay in cash. But you pay. Am I right?”
He laughed and wheezed again. “I like this one,” he told Reed, pointing at Ellery. “She’s got spunk. And nice tits, too. Back in my day, the cop shop was always full of dicks. We didn’t get anything near this tasty.”
“Back to Giselle Hardiman,” Ellery said.
Thorndike licked his lips. “Like I said, tasty. Why you asking me about her? You think I killed that one, too?”
“Did you?” Ellery asked, just to stroke his ego a little.
“Fuck no. I got no beef with Giselle.”
“Any idea who did?”
Thorndike waved both hands in their direction, dismissing them. “What do I care?”
“Maybe the person who killed Giselle also killed Camilla Flores,” Ellery said. “If that person isn’t you, it means you’re off the hook.”
“I look like I’m on some sort of hook to you?” He spread his arms. “You cops got jack shit on me.”
Ellery waited a moment and then slapped her hands on her knees. “I guess you’re right,” she said, rising from the sofa. Reed glanced up in surprise but scrambled to follow her lead. “We should be moving along then, and leaving you to your daytime television.”
“Wait just a damn second.”
Ellery turned around again, showing impatience. “What is it, Mr. Thorndike? We don’t have all day. We have other leads to investigate, you know. We can’t be wasting time with dead ends.”
Anger flared in his cheeks. “Hey, honey, you rang my bell, remember?”
“And what a bore that turned out to be.” She practically yawned as she said it. “We should go.”
“Wait. Just wait.” She could see his mind spinning. “You guys are FBI, you said.”
She let Reed take that one. “That’s right.”
“What’re the Feds doing with a forty-year-old case?”
Reed and Ellery exchanged a glance. “We have some new information that’s taken the case in a different direction,” Reed answered carefully.
“What new information?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say.”
“It’s corrupt cops, isn’t it? It’s gotta be. Those cocksuckers think they can get away with anything.”
“What makes you say that?” Reed asked, and Thorndike’s thin lips curled into a frown as he pointed a shaky finger at Ellery.
“She said it. She brought up Giselle Hardiman.”
“What about her?” Reed said.
“Come off it, man. I saw what was going down with her. We all knew the score—which cops would bust your balls and which would look the other way if you made it worth their while. Giselle knew it better than anyone.”
“You’re saying Giselle bought off police officers.”
Thorndike gasped and coughed again at the humor of it all. “Yeah, she bought ’em off, all right—with her pussy. She’d give it up anytime, anywhere, for the boys in blue.”
“Can you prove that?” Reed asked quickly.
Thorndike looked offended. “What, you think I got pictures or something? What sort of sick freak do you think I am? I don’t gotta prove it. We all knew it. Just no one wants to talk about it, especially after Giselle got whacked. Bet she had some familiar names in her little black book.”
He shot Ellery a sly look and winked at her. Ellery repressed a shudder.
Reed was a terrier with a rat in his teeth. “There was a book? What happened to it?”
“Hell if I know. Maybe there ain’t any book. Like I told you—I wasn’t a client. I just know the cops were boffing her and it got real awkward when she turned up dead.”
Ellery and Reed regarded each other silently, and she gave the tiniest shrug. It didn’t seem like Thorndike would be of much additional use at this stage. “Okay,” Reed said, taking a breath. “Thank you for answering our questions. We can show ourselves out.”
“That’s it?” Thorndike sounded wounded. “You don’t want to take me downtown or something?”
“We don’t have a downtown,” Reed reminded him. “FBI, remember?” Then he paused and withdrew the picture he’d shown to Sheriff Ramsey earlier. “But maybe there is one more thing you can help us with. Do you recognize the blond woman in this picture?”
Thorndike snatched up the photograph with eager fingers. “That one is the lying bitch, Cammie. That’s her friend, Angie something. Always screeching at each other in Spanish, those two.”
“Yes, but what about the woman on the end?”
“I recognize her. She hung around with these two putas—stuck out like a sore thumb. Her name was, uh…” He seemed to be searching back through the ages for a memory. “Wendy. No, Wanda. Yeah, that was it. Wanda. My boy Jeff, he had a real hard-on for her, you know what I’m saying? Used to yell out after her sometimes, ‘I Wanda fuck you.’”
“Wanda,” Reed repeated. So the name on the back of the photo was genuine. “Got it.” He took back the picture. “You know her last name?”
Thorndike adopted a philosophical expression. “I’m trying to think about a time I cared about some chick’s last name. Nope. Never.”
Ellery rolled her eyes. “Good day, Mr. Thorndike,” she said, heading for the exit.
From his chair, Thorndike yelled after them, “I’ll make an exception for you, honey. Come sit on Daddy’s lap for a minute and I’ll call you anything you want!”
Reed stepped out with her into the sunshine. “Would you care to do the honors?” he asked, looking amused.
“With pleasure.” She reached back and slammed the door behind them. “Gah. I think I need another shower after being in the presence of that creature.”
“Good thing we’re heading back to the hotel then.”
“We are? Why?”
“The name Wanda must be in the case file somewhere. I just have to find the context.”
At the hotel, Reed sat down at the long table to start poring over the files, looking for Wanda. Ellery decided to look in a different place, going further back even than Reed dared to venture. “You mind if I borrow the car for a bit?” she asked him, and he tossed her the keys without even looking at her, so focused as he was on the murder book in front of him.
“Knock yourself out.”
Ellery ventured to the UNLV library, which she had looked up online, to determine that this was the home for the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper archives. The newspaper’s records had been digitized and were searchable back to 1970, so it didn’t take her long to find the articles pertaining to Giselle Hardiman’s murder, scant as they were. Her search returned just five items, which seemed to Ellery to be a low total, given the brutality of the crime. She clicked on the first and longest story, which was dated November 12, 1974. Giselle Hardiman, age twenty-four, had been found stabbed in the bedroom of her apartment sometime past nine o’clock at night. A neighbor reported hearing screaming, but by the time the cops arrived on the scene there was no trace of Giselle’s attacker. She had been taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. No witnesses came forward to report any clues that might have led to Giselle’s killer.
Ellery read the disappointing text, which offered not much else in terms of new information. The next article mentioned Giselle’s history of prostitution and drug use. Apparently, she’d been arrested for possession of cocaine two years prior to her death but was released with time served. The cops said they were looking into the drug angle, but they did not sound optimistic. The other three articles were more of the same, each one shorter than the next, until Giselle Hardiman vanished from the official history altogether. Ellery made copies of each story just in case they might prove useful later, but they had not proven to be any sort of gold mine so far.
When she returned to the hotel, she didn’t see Reed at the table where she’d left him, so she wandered the suite until she located him out on the balcony. He squinted at her in the mild sunshine and held up the legal pad he’d been writing on when she appeared. “I’ve found it,” he said. “Wanda Evans worked with Camilla Flores at the Howard Johnson’s. She’s on the list of coworkers interviewed during the initial investigation. But get this—she says she didn’t know Camilla well at all and couldn’t offer any insight into who might have killed her.”
“So she lied,” Ellery said, thinking of the picture of the women with their arms around each other.
“She definitely lied. The question is why she lied.”
“I don’t suppose we can just drive on over to the Howard Johnson’s and ask her.”
“Pretty sure they tore down the place years ago,” Reed said. “But there’s a Wanda Evans, age sixty-seven, living over on Lakeview Street. That’s got to be her, don’t you think?”
“Great, let’s go try to talk to her.” Her stomach grumbled at the idea, and Ellery touched her middle. Back in Boston, it was way past lunchtime. “Maybe after we get something to eat?”
Reed’s reply got lost in the buzzing of her cell phone. Reluctantly, Ellery pulled out the phone to check the ID, and her heart seized up when she saw the same number as earlier that morning. She punched the phone emphatically with her thumb to end the call before it could go to voice mail.
Reed lifted his eyebrows at her. “Another wrong number?” he asked lightly.
She let out a shaky breath as she tucked away the phone. “It’s my father,” she admitted as she lowered herself into the other lounge chair. “He’s been trying to reach me.”
“What?” Reed dragged his lounge chair closer and swung his legs over the side so that their knees were nearly touching. “What does he want?”
“I don’t know. He wrote to the Woodbury PD looking for me, and they forwarded me the letter. I didn’t read it and I didn’t answer. I hoped that would be the end of it, that he’d get the message I didn’t want to talk to him. But somehow, he’s got my phone number. Maybe my mom gave it to him, I don’t know.” Her mother had no love for John Hathaway, but she had a price and the price was low.
Reed was quiet for a long moment. “Are you going to talk to him?”
Ellery looked away toward the shiny casinos, glinting in the high midday sun. “I’m afraid I may have to talk to him long enough to tell him to leave me the hell alone,” she said finally.
“You’ve never really said much about him.”
She shrugged. “There’s not much to say.” John Hathaway had loved eighties music and the 1985 Chicago Bears—she’d laughed ’til she fell over whenever he did the Super Bowl Shuffle—and when he’d set her on his shoulders she’d felt like she was on top of the world. He drove a truck when he wanted to, but mostly he liked to sit around and think up quicker ways to get rich. Selling vitamins. Selling T-shirts. Selling fancy coffee packets that sat rotting in their storage closet years after John hit the road for good. He’d blow through a bunch of money on his schemes, then work overtime for a year to pay them off. The children he’d bribed with candy, always enough to cover the tears and the arguments.
Ellery felt her eyes watering. He’d brought her Reese’s Pieces because they were her favorite. Daniel had preferred Mike and Ike. Once her father had left, there’d been no money for candy. “When I was little, he used to sing me this stupid song at bedtime,” she told Reed, struggling to talk around the lump in her throat. “It was about these bears all sleeping in the same bed. Only the little one would say, ‘I’m crowded; roll over.’ But when the bears rolled over, one fell out. At the end of the song, the littlest one is there all by himself, and he says, ‘I’m lonely,’ and I hated it. I used to make him stop before he got to the end—‘Don’t sing the lonely part, Daddy!’—and so instead he made up a verse where all the bears come bouncing back into the bed. He knew I couldn’t stand for that tiniest bear to be all alone.”
She blinked her eyes rapidly, but she couldn’t make them clear. She felt Reed reach out and take her hand. “He knew I couldn’t stand it,” she whispered brokenly. “He knew, and he left anyway. So no, I don’t care what he has to say now.”