The next morning I woke just before seven. I’d only slept for five hours, but I’d done it in a single stretch and immediately felt better, despite the tug of jet lag. I showered, changed and headed downstairs to the Pool Café. It was early and only fifty-five degrees, so there was no one in the water yet, and no one on the sun loungers either. But the sun was out and there was a high of seventy-three later, so it was unlikely to stay that way for long.
I ordered some steak and eggs and some extra toast, then finished my first cup of coffee while looking at a picture of Annabel. I had pictures of both the girls inside my wallet now, cut down to passport-photo size. Olivia was next to her sister, clutching the Mickey Mouse that Barry Rew had seen her with as Prouse had been driving them both to London City Airport. I’d put their photos in as a reminder of why I was here. I didn’t need the motivation, but I needed the fortitude. I didn’t know how long this would go on. It might be a day. It might be a month. I might leave without ever having found them.
After my breakfast arrived, my appetite began to wane, moments flashing in my head, imagined images of their final days, and when I’d ripped those away, echoes of what Cornell had said to me. I cut them both into pieces and buried them in the desert.
I got out the map I’d bought the day before, and opened it out. It was the greater Las Vegas metropolitan area, east as far as Lake Mead, north as far as Gass Peak, west to Red Rock Canyon state park and south to Sloan Canyon. The Mojave desert ran through to California, Utah and Arizona beyond that, but this was going to be ambitious enough for now: about seven hundred square miles of relentless, alien terrain I didn’t know.
I buried them in the desert.
Something vaguely resonated with me, something in what Cornell had said, but as I tried to pull it out of the dark, it seemed to slip further away.
“How are you doing today, sir?”
I looked up.
A man was standing next to my table, nodding at my unfinished plate of steak and eggs. He was about forty, slim and well dressed in a green check shirt, denims and a pair of brown shoes. He was wearing sunglasses, but the sun was arcing in behind him—along the edge of the hotel’s thirty-three-story south tower—and down through the lenses; so, even as they wrapped around his head, his eyes were visible, his gaze moving from my breakfast to the map and then, finally, to my wallet, open on the pictures of the girls.
I flipped it shut.
“I’m doing fine, thanks.” I looked around, spotting waiting staff serving at other tables. He wasn’t one of them. “How are you?”
Behind him, the three curved arcs of the Vdara hotel clawed at the sky, sun winking in its windows. “I’m good,” he said. “Do I detect an English accent?”
I nodded.
“Cool. So, are you over for a convention?”
I started folding up the map. “Something like that.”
“Sounds mysterious.”
“Not really. I just have some business to take care of.”
“Of course you do.” But he didn’t attempt to move. “You’ve got your map and your photos, now all you need is the location.”
I shot a look at him. He’d shifted slightly and turned to his left, the sun arrowing past him at a different angle, his sunglasses dark and opaque. I couldn’t see his eyes now.
“What did you say?”
He looked around him, as if he was making sure no one was close enough to hear, then pulled out a chair and sat down. “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Raker.”
He knows my name. “Who are you?”
“An interested party.”
“Interested in what?”
“You know,” he said, ignoring the question, “this isn’t your backyard now. This tough-guy thing you’ve got going on, it won’t work here. I don’t know how things play out over in England, but here we don’t go sticking our noses in where they’re not wanted.”
“It’s America. Everyone sticks everything everywhere.”
He smiled for the first time. “Very good.”
“Do you work for Cornell?”
He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t seem confused by the name.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” I pushed the plate of steak and eggs to one side and leaned across the table toward him. “I wouldn’t go expecting a call from him anytime soon.”
A frown formed on his face.
“In fact, about now he’s probably having his heart weighed.”
As the man remained still the hotel continued its forward rhythm, like a heartbeat: women on hen weekends, couples hand-in-hand, businessmen checking their phones.
“It’s over, my friend,” I said to him. “Your boss isn’t coming back. Your wages aren’t going to get paid this month. So, why don’t you tell me where the girls are buried?”
For the first time he moved, reaching up and removing his sunglasses. He looked to have regained some of his composure, his dark eyes impassive, not betraying a single thought in his head. He placed the glasses on the table and then looked off, out across the pool area, toward the southern limb of the main hotel tower. I could see he was thinking about his next move. The king was dead, now his jesters were running around in a panic.
“You’re going to tell me,” I said to him, and he seemed to flinch when I spoke, as if all the noise around us—the people having breakfast, the whine of planes in the sky, the drone of cars on the freeway—had all faded into nothing. “One way or another.”
Finally, he looked back at me. “You’re just one man.”
“But I’ve got all the motivation I need.”
“What are those girls to you?”
“Since two days ago, they’re everything.”
He nodded, staring at me, an acquiescence moving across his face. I thought I saw a moment of conscience play out, a flicker of self-reproach, as if he saw—in that second—all the torment he’d brought to his victims’ lives, on the orders of a man out of control.
But it wasn’t that.
Because he didn’t work for Cornell.
“Mr. Raker,” he said. “I’m Carlos Soto.”