“Luke, what are you doing here?”
Francesca’s head spun as she jumped up off the hard cement, McDonald’s cup in hand. The day’s lethargy had already begun.
His eyes were wide as he gave her a once over. “My God, you weren’t kidding!”
“What?”
“The homeless bit. I would’ve walked right past.”
“You seem to have a habit of doing that.” After several hours in the hot sun, and on a street filled with busy and largely dissatisfied people, she was relieved to see a familiar face. Relieved and hopeful… “Did you find out something, after all? You could’ve called. I always have my cell.” She pulled it out of one pocket of the torn and dirty denim bag she carried.
“I wouldn’t let too many people see that,” Luke said. “Kind of blows the image.”
He stood there, hands in his pockets, a friend in a very troubled world.
“And no, I don’t have any new information. I guess I was just curious.”
“About how the homeless half live?” She held up her battered cup with fingerless gloves.
It was a good thing she wasn’t trying to impress this man.
“No, although I guess I should be.”
She couldn’t really read his expression. Not only was he squinting against the sun’s brightness, but he was wearing a pair of expensive-looking sunglasses.
Like the ones floating around somewhere in her duffel at the Lucky Seven. From what she’d observed, homeless people just squinted a lot.
“Curious about what then?”
“You.”
Oh.
“Luke,” she started, thinking quickly. She didn’t want any emotional complications. But now was not the time to offend him. She needed his help.
And then there was Carl….
“I’m only in town long enough to find my sister and then I’ll probably never come back here again,” she said, watching as a young couple walked by so engrossed in each other it was as if they were on another planet. Who could stand to have their arms around each other and cuddle so close in this heat, she had no idea. “I have to admit I’m not particularly fond of your town.”
“I’m not all that fond of it myself.” If his grimace as he glanced toward the Strip was anything to go by, he wasn’t just sparing her feelings. “And I also don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I wasn’t putting any moves on you.”
“Oh.” Well, take that, Francesca. “Okay. Good.”
“Not that I wouldn’t want to, mind you, but my life is complicated right now. And so, as you’ve said, is yours.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“I’d like to help you, though, if I can,” he said, glancing around her nesting place. “I’ve never met anyone like you, with no limit to what you’ll ask of yourself for someone you love.”
Or was her quest to find Autumn just a reason to survive?
If she’d been so selfless two years earlier, or even before that, could she have made a difference?
“You having any luck?”
She jiggled her cup. “A couple bucks.” Which she’d pass on to the first homeless person she saw later that afternoon.
He grinned. “That’s not what I meant.”
The traffic on the corner was heavy today, with a backup of two to three cars at any given time. They were mostly older cars, typical of the neighborhood. So far this morning, the only happy people she’d noticed had been that young couple.
“Not here,” she said, backing up to the wall where, days ago, she’d discovered an illusion of shade offered by a six-inch overhang of roof. “Last night I sat with a group of girls at the bar.” She told him about the conversation she’d overheard.
“Sounds like Bishop’s a gynecologist.”
“Yeah.” She’d wanted to be wrong. “The talk was all pretty generic once I joined the group, but I caught a few comments made quietly at the table, between two of the women when they thought no one else was listening.”
The young couple was still there. Down the street. Sitting on a metal bench at the bus stop. The guy, wearing baggy jeans and a white muscle shirt, held the girl as though she were the most fragile thing on earth. Her hair, a mixture of blond-and-brown streaks, appeared to be hastily chopped; it almost matched the young man’s deeply tanned skin as it rested against his shoulder.
“They were talking about some guy getting them jobs,” she said, glancing back at Luke. “From what I could gather, the jobs take the girls away for a while and then they’re back, waiting to be called again.”
He acknowledged what she was saying with nothing more than a slight bending of his head. But it was enough.
“The guy’s their pimp, isn’t he?” She didn’t really need his confirmation.
“Or he could be an agent looking for dancers or some other part in a show that’s only running for a short time.”
“Dancers who all use the same gynecologist?”
Sweat trickled down between her breasts. She ignored it.
“And what about the girl who had to be cleared because they thought she had a sexually transmitted disease?” Didn’t seem much point in maintaining decorum in this conversation after the things she’d seen with him the other night.
“That’s a little harder to explain.”
“I think Autumn used to be one of them.”
“Why?”
“She was there. Had a job. Left. Came back. And now she’s gone again. It makes sense that she’s…working.” Her voice didn’t quite break, but she couldn’t stop the tears that rushed to her eyes.
She’d thought she’d cried them all last night. Alone in her bed at the Lucky Seven. Nothing she did could wipe away the images of her baby sister, naked with some man, allowing him to do any number of demeaning and damaging things.
“Hey.” He tilted her chin with the side of his hand, rubbing lightly before letting her go. “No point in torturing yourself with what you don’t know yet.”
She nodded. Took a deep breath. He was right, of course.
A group of giggling college-age girls walked by, bumping into Luke. “Sorry,” one said, and then looked up at him. “Really,” she said, as her entire demeanor changed from self-absorption to interest.
“It’s okay.”
One more quick look and then she was past, her long exposed legs firm and young, saying something to her friends that had them all turning around.
“You get that reaction a lot?” Francesca asked.
“Some.” He wasn’t watching the girls depart; he was watching her. “So did you learn anything else last night?”
Yeah. She didn’t want to do this anymore. “One of the girls looked barely old enough to drive, let alone drink beer,” she said, remembering the girl they’d called Chancey. “I asked Carl about it later, after they’d all gone home, and he said they all have IDs that say they’re of legal age to drink. He always checks.”
“Which is all he’s required to do.”
“There’s no way she was eighteen, let alone twenty-one.”
“He could call the cops.”
Carl wouldn’t do that. They’d all just go somewhere else. Someplace less safe. She understood that.
And was actually glad. Picturing Autumn at Guido’s was a comfort compared to the rest of the images she’d encountered since arriving in this town.
“The same girl, she’d apparently just finished a job,” Francesca said, wishing she could slide back down to the ground. She was tired. “Somebody asked her something, I didn’t quite get it, but I think it was about a recent job.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing.” Francesca pictured again the vision of little Chancey sitting there, looking so young and lost and alone. “Her eyes filled up as if she was going to cry, but she didn’t. No one said anything, but it seemed they were all watching out for her the rest of the night.”
Francesca had wanted to take the little redhead home with her. But then she’d need to ferret out every bit of information she could, call the girl’s mom and deliver her safely home to bed.
Life didn’t work that way.
And these days she could barely get herself home to bed.
“I think some guy abused her.” She hadn’t really meant to say the words out loud. Didn’t want any validation for them.
For once, Luke’s silence wasn’t reassuring.
She hadn’t thought about suicide in a long time. Not since she was thirteen. She remembered because she’d just gotten her period for the first time and Cesca had been home and helped her get all the stuff she needed. She’d taught her how to use tampons.
And after Cesca had left that night, her father had found the box of them in her bathroom. She’d been in her bedroom when he’d come storming in, hollering horrible things about her and her morals, and her desire to stick things up there. Scared to death and grossed out, she’d made the mistake of telling him she hadn’t bought them, Francesca had.
She couldn’t even think about what he’d done then—except to thank God that his abuse had never involved him taking off his pants. All she remembered was that when he’d finally finished hitting her, she’d wanted to die. She’d spent hours considering options, might even have taken one of them if she hadn’t been too beat up to move. But sometime during that night, something inside her had changed. She’d been thinking about her big sister. And the way Francesca could always make something horrible look better.
Though they never talked about it, probably because Cesca had some crazy idea of protecting her, Autumn knew that her father had beaten Cesca worse than he’d ever beaten her. She’d come home from next door one time when they’d thought she was at a party.
She’d seen them in the living room, the belt flying, Francesca bleeding.
Right after that, Cesca had left.
Autumn had known on her thirteenth birthday that she had to do the same thing. She’d started saving that very day. Every bit of her birthday money—which she’d been planning to use to buy herself the coolest clothes on the planet—had been carefully hidden. As had every other dime she could get her hands on.
She’d just never realized how much it cost to live. Everything cost money. Hell, even going to the toilet cost money ’cause you had to pay the water bill and buy toilet paper.
As Autumn lay in her bed that hot Wednesday night in July, it all seemed too much for her. She couldn’t even go to the toilet for free. If she said that to Chancey, her friend would’ve had something smart to say—something that would’ve made them both laugh.
But Chancey was gone, the job cut prematurely short. Autumn hoped the other girl was okay. No one would tell her anything.
She’d seen blood, though. Lots of it. Coming from the other girl’s shorts when they’d carried her out of the apartment. Any way you looked at it, that couldn’t be good. And she couldn’t even tell Matteo about it.
Rolling over, cradling her body against the mattress, Autumn thought about ways to die.
That next week, life took an upward swing for Luke. Or at least, it didn’t head down. His mother, busy looking through catalogs of nursery furniture, hadn’t had a single episode. She’d even responded affirmatively to a frequently offered but never before accepted invitation to the clubhouse in their gated community for a monthly ladies’ luncheon. Betty Allen hadn’t gone. But one of the members of the homeowners’ association had come to get her and she’d actually had a good time.
She’d been agitated later that night, but Luke had been home and able to get her medication in her before she’d had a breakdown.
There’d been no other big wins anywhere on the Strip. Arnold Jackson, who’d turned up nothing on the streets, was fairly certain that whoever had been behind the wins had decided to call it quits.
Amadeo wasn’t going to be satisfied with that. But if Luke could at least have a break from further incidents, he was certain he’d get to the bottom of it. He always did.
He’d just prefer to do so before Amadeo returned from his summer travels.
He intended to get to the bottom of Autumn Stevens’s disappearance, too. It had taken four days longer than he’d expected, four days in which he’d either seen or spoken to Francesca at least twice daily, but he finally had some information for her.
He’d asked her to meet him in the lobby of the Bonaparte on Thursday and was taking her to dinner before her nightly stint at Guido’s. He was half an hour late, having been waylaid upstairs by a possible room theft that turned out to be a husband taking more than a thousand dollars from his wife’s purse and heading downstairs to the tables.
What kind of woman left a thousand dollars lying around in a hotel room?
Francesca wasn’t in the lobby. Which meant she’d wandered into the casino. In all the time he’d spent with Francesca Witting during the past week, the only thing he’d found out about her that he didn’t understand was how attached she was to slot machines.
The Thursday-evening crowd was thin and it didn’t take him long to find her. Completely engrossed in spending two dollars and twenty-five cents with every push of the button.
She’d said she was a photojournalist on leave. She must have been a reasonably successful one. Not that that surprised him.
She pushed again. The video reels turned. She’d won bonus play.
That didn’t surprise him, either. There was something else he’d learned about Francesca this week. When she wanted something, she made it happen.
“You said you’re on leave from your job,” Luke said as they left the casino after she’d collected her hundred-dollar win. “Do you work for a Sacramento paper?”
Shoving the money inside her black leather bag, she shook her head. “I’m not working at all right now. But when I did, it was freelance.”
His estimation of her rose another notch. And it had already been pretty damn high. “That’s not an easy thing to do.”
“Not and make a living at it,” she said. “I sacrificed a lot.”
Like what?
“Was it worth it?” he asked.
They were heading out to his car and then to a quiet restaurant in Las Vegas proper. The city where the real people lived.
“Mostly, it was.”
It wasn’t like her to be hesitant. Was it because of those sacrifices she’d mentioned?
“What did you find out?”
She’d waited until they were in the Jag. Francesca had a way of gearing herself up to take bad news.
“I told you it wasn’t much.”
“I know.”
“There’s absolutely no record of anyone with your sister’s social security number ever having worked at Biamonte. Nor is there an Autumn or a Joy listed in the employment databases.”
He was only repeating what he’d already told her. To remind her of the limitations.
“And?”
“Remember I told you we have an imaging system at the Bonaparte that uses computer software to find likenesses in a database? In real time, the cameras can pick a face out of a crowd in a casino and match it to a known card-counter or other counterfeiter in a national database.”
“She didn’t come up on a national database.”
He turned onto the freeway. “No. I just used the imaging equipment to run a match on her photo.”
“And?”
Her entire body, from four-inch black sandals to black shorts and white blouse tied above her belly button, was absolutely still.
“I might have found a match.”
“Where?”
“Biamonte’s big on photos,” he said. He’d debated even mentioning the day’s findings. They were about as weak as they could be without being absolutely nonexistent. But Francesca wasn’t a woman you sheltered. “They not only have photo images attached to all employment files, but to all tenant and most contact files, as well. My boss is of the belief that you can’t be too careful in this city. He’s Italian and figures that in this town, that makes him suspect. He covers every single base to be able to prove at any moment that he and his businesses are on the up-and-up.”
Or at least that was what he said, and Luke had no cause to disbelieve him. And just in case he was wrong to trust the older man, Luke had certain key files on his home computer.
“You said you found a match.”
“I said I might have.” He’d had some images scanned—a common practice in his job. It was completely his call, something done when he deemed it appropriate. Possible assistance in locating a runaway, who might or might not have been in the company’s employ, was a reason he deemed appropriate. Today they’d shown him a particular picture.
“Where?” She was looking at him, but otherwise still hadn’t moved.
“In a file of old tenant photos marked for the shredder.”
“How many apartment buildings does Biamonte own?”
“Quite a few. But I have a feeling she wasn’t renting from Biamonte, anyway.” He signaled, exited the highway. They were in one of the few parts of town he honestly appreciated. A quiet winding road through desert and palm trees eventually wound its way up to a hill-top restaurant.
“I know she wasn’t renting under the name of Joy or Autumn. But—” she drew in a deep breath “—aside from the name match, which means nothing since we have no idea what she’s really calling herself, why don’t you think she’s a tenant?”
“From what I could tell in the hour or so I had to poke around this afternoon,” he continued, “sometime in the past year and a half, Biamonte bought a series of run-down complexes, evicted the current tenants and renovated the places. Now they’re rented out for three times what they’d been making. I think these photos were of the old tenants.”
“They took pictures of the people they kicked out?”
“Apparently. They were asked to sign a form releasing Biamonte of any future liability, which is all a new owner needs. So I’m not sure why pictures were ever taken. My guess is, someone did it simply because it’s Biamonte policy to photograph the parties in any and all business dealings.”
“Did you see the forms?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t found them yet.”
“She’s here, you know.”
“I—” Luke started to speak, hedging his words, and then realized he didn’t have to protect her. Not from the world. And particularly not from herself.
“If I had to place money on it, I’d say you’re right.” Not that he was a betting man. “And she’s been here a while. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to find her.” He glanced over at her. Had to resist the natural inclination to take her hand. “Or that you’re going to like what you find if you do.”
“I know.”
She was staring straight ahead again, her short black hair spiky and cute.
“Can I ask you something?”
She glanced his way and then back. “Of course.”
“Do you, by any chance, have Italian ancestry?”
Her head turned and he was driving slowly enough to be able to catch her frown. “Yeah, why?”
“It’s something I’ve wanted my whole life and this damned blond hair never even let me pretend.”
She laughed. “Why on earth would you want Italian ancestry?”
At the top of the hill, he pulled into the parking lot. “It’s a long story, but it has to do with wanting to be Amadeo Esposito’s son.”
“You said he’s Italian?”
“One hundred percent.”
“My father was, too.” Her voice was softer than he’d ever heard it.
“Was?”
“He died when I was five.”
Luke would have said more, probably crossing a line neither of them was willing to cross, but she saved him by asking, “So why didn’t you want to be your own father’s son?”
“I did,” he said. “My dad was the best. He just had other…responsibilities…and Amadeo, his best friend, always seemed to have whatever time I needed.”
Amadeo had been a good friend to Marshall Everson. Marshall had saved Amadeo’s life in the Korean War and had a servant in him ever since.
“So what does Amadeo do for a living?”
“He owns Biamonte.”
“He’s your boss?”
He nodded.
His boss. And although only the family knew it, his godfather.
He opened his door, ready to go in, to finish this conversation.
“Luke?” She brushed his upper arm, the lightest of touches and not meant to raise any reaction at all. So he would make sure it didn’t. “How much trouble are you going to be in if your boss finds out you’re doing this?”
“None.” It would just mean answering some questions he’d rather not answer. Another reason to be grateful that Amadeo couldn’t tolerate the summer Vegas heat.
Amadeo would make far too much of his willingness to go to such lengths to help Francesca. The old man was almost as eager as Carol to get Luke married off.
And settled permanently in this town.