Noise assaulted us halfway between the elevators and the suite—music pulsing, male voices raised above it punctuated by excited shouts. Gales of female laughter. My father frowned in a worried sort of way.
I shot him a benign look as I raised my hand, fisted it, and pounded on the thick wooden door. We waited and, as I raised my hand to bang again, the handle turned and the door swung open. Quickly, I pushed the door further open and came face-to-face with a completely naked young woman.
“Hey.” She waggled her fingers at me. Long blond hair, not a wrinkle in sight, and a figure so long and lean if she turned sideways she’d be hard to see, well, except for the requisite Vegas enhancements, those stood out like flags in a gale-force wind. She had the face of an angel and a body built for sin—a combination that could command at least a thousand a night. “Do you have the duct tape?” The way she asked made me think duct tape was part of her normal fun and games. Probably more than I needed to imagine.
“On the way,” I lied. Leaning in, I looked over her shoulder.
The furniture had been moved to the sides, piles of priceless antiques stacked to make room for the crowd gathered in the middle of the large room. I counted ten young men, shaggy-maned, ubiquitous facial hair carefully trimmed in a variety of coverages, wearing trim designer jeans and stylish collared shirts—they didn’t look like nerds. In fact, not one of them looked like they’d had enough time on this planet to have graduated from high school, much less earned the title “doctor”—the oldest looked to be barely thirty. They had convened in a knot in the middle of the large room, their heads pressed together. Bent over a laptop, the ones in the back of the pack on their toes, craning to see the screen, they all tried to outshout each other and the thumping music.
The naked girl shivered and rubbed her arms briskly—I didn’t feel sorry for her.
“There’s a nice robe in the bathroom.” She gave me a blank look, and I pointed her in the right direction. I watched her walk away, her perfect, perky, tight little ass taunting me with its lack of jiggle and cellulite. The only way my ass would look like that would be to take a picture and Photoshop the hell out of it.
“What is going on here?” my father growled, his face flushing red.
I put a hand on his arm and my mouth next to his ear. I still had to raise my voice. “Let me handle this.” Amazingly, he stepped to the side, crossed his arms, and relinquished the floor.
The boys had yet to acknowledge our presence. Turning down the music did the trick. The sudden silence hit them with the subtlety of a cattle prod to the butt. They bolted upright, heads swiveling, eyes searching, their expressions confused as if they’d just landed in a parallel universe.
“Is there . . . ?” My voice still raised, I stopped—without the music, I didn’t need to shout. I regrouped and modulated my rising irritation. “Is there a Dr. Phelps here?” I asked in a normal tone.
The youngest-looking of the group separated himself from the gaggle. “That would be me.” He wore huge, dark-rimmed, square-framed glasses in the current style. They slipped down his nose, and he looked at me over the top of them. Shaggy hair, goatee, and bedroom eyes, he looked cute enough to be accustomed to having his every demand met. “Do you have the things I requested? I called down to the front desk hours ago. I can’t imagine what is taking so long.”
Yes, every demand . . .
He had the glassy-eyed look of too much firewater. In fact, the whole group looked over-amped, not that that came as any surprise.
“Your list was rather . . . unusual. Would you mind telling me what you need all of that for?”
Before he could answer, two separate screams split the air—a female one from the direction of the bathroom, and a male one from high above. While the men turned and charged en masse toward the female in distress, my eyes turned upward . . . just in time to see a body peel away from the twenty-foot ceiling and plummet to the floor with a thud.
Dr. Phelps paused his charge and turned. Gesturing to his fallen comrade writhing on the floor, he gave me the look a brilliant man saves for fools. “The duct tape,” he said, as if that was sufficient explanation.
My eyes grew slitty, but he didn’t see the warning—he had turned and bolted after his friends.
I dropped to my knees next to the man on the floor, my father dropped in next to me. “Where’s Mona’s shotgun when you need it?” he growled.
“Shooting the guests would be a bit of a disincentive, don’t you think?” Before I touched him, I let my eyes wander over the man who had landed in front of me. No odd angles to his limbs. His ribs expanded and contracted—I took breathing as a positive sign. I felt my father watching me. “Would you go check on the woman in the bathroom? And, just don’t hit anybody, okay?”
“I’m not sure you should touch him,” my father offered, as if he had experience with this sort of thing, which I doubted. He was like most of his Y-chromosomed brethren: the less they knew, the more positive they sounded.
The man had landed face first—his back covered with long strips of duct tape. I was afraid to roll him over.
My father gave me a condescending look as he pushed himself to his feet—apparently, there was an epidemic of stupidity going around. “For the record, I would never hit one of our guests.” He retreated toward the bathroom before I could offer an opinion. While he sounded confident, I wasn’t so sure—experience had taught me that if there was a scream-worthy problem in a bathroom it usually involved rodents, insects, or wild animals. How my father would handle that was anybody’s guess, but it would be entertaining for sure. Hey, I’m shallow that way—I take my jollies where I can find them.
On my knees, trying to decide whether my father was right about not touching the fallen man, I called for the paramedics, then set my phone on the floor.
The man in front of me groaned. As he rolled over onto his back, he clutched his stomach and started laughing. His lip was bloodied and he’d lost at least two teeth, pieces of which he spit out with a wad of bloodied spit that dribbled down his right cheek as he turned to look at me. He blinked rapidly, then squinted, working to bring me into focus. “You’re pretty. Are you the one they bought for me?”
“If I am, you got robbed.”
He reached up and curled a strand of my hair around his finger, then gave me a shy smile. “You’re my prize.”
“For this little stunt?” I tugged at the duct tape. A short nail stuck through the end of one of the pieces. I pulled on a few other strands; they, too, held nails.
Letting go of my hair, he looked around and seemed confused to see the room empty. “Did they get it?”
“Get what?”
Before he could answer, shouts echoed through the room. My father’s voice. Livid, with a hint of hysteria . . . not good. Perhaps I had overplayed my hand.
“Stay right there,” I ordered the duct-taped man as I pushed myself to my feet, grabbed my phone, and bolted toward the bathroom. The lists of felonies already committed was long enough to land us all on Nancy Grace.
As I rounded the corner, I skidded to a halt.
The scientists huddled in the corner next to a shower stall large enough to rain on a serious parade. Dr. Phelps had a bloody lip, a hurt expression, and a growing red welt on his jaw, which he massaged tenderly. “He hit me.” He nodded toward my father.
I was batting a thousand, which didn’t make me happy. Turning, I growled at the donor of half of my DNA—a fact I wasn’t too thrilled about right at the moment. “The one thing I told you not to do.”
He glared at me thorough narrow slits as he cradled two white tiger cubs in his arms. Blood oozed from a line of scratches on one cheek, and he looked a bit shell-shocked. And pissed as hell.
When he took a menacing step toward the scientists, I put myself in his path. “Let me handle this.” I turned to Dr. Phelps, stepping on my own urge to get physical with the twit. “Consider yourself lucky, I would’ve broken your nose.”
I took a deep breath and counted to twenty. Then I counted to twenty again for good measure. I turned to my father. “I told you not to hit anybody.” Like that was really going to help.
“He asked for it.” When his eyes met my slitty ones, he backed down a bit, the red flush in his cheeks pinkening. He had the good sense to look remorseful as he proffered the cubs. “What should I do with these?”
“Just tell me their mother isn’t within striking distance.”
He shot a worried glance at the closed door to the steam room. A low, threatening growl answered my question.
“Great.” I pulled my phone and hit Jerry’s speed-dial. As it rang, a thought hit me and my heart jump-started. “Where’s the girl?”
All the men in the room looked at the closed door to the steam room.
Still holding the phone to my ear as it rang, with two strides, I crossed the marbled expanse, then grabbed the handle and tugged open the door.
“Yo, girlfriend. Whatcha got?” Jerry said when he picked up—he sounded bored.
I tried to answer, but words failed as I stared at the young woman, now wrapped in a robe, cradling a large, white tiger across her lap.
The woman cast a beatific smile at me. “Isn’t she sweet? Look, she loves to be rubbed behind her ears.” Like an overgrown housecat, the tiger tilted her head and leaned into the scratching.
“Lucky? You there? What’s the story?” This time, Jerry’s voice held a bit of a worried edge.
As the wave of emotion receded, carrying my panic with it, I let out a huff. “Ah, Jerry. Where to start? To begin, I need an exotic animal vet to the S and G suite, probably a tranquilizer gun with enough juice to tame a wild tiger, although she’s looking pretty happy at the moment.”
Jerry started laughing. “If she’s hungry, I got a thousand turkeys we could feed her.”
I almost said a thousand and one as Teddie flashed through my mind, but I resisted. “That’s a thought. Why don’t you suggest that when you call the Secret Garden and see if they are missing some mammals?” Siegfried and Roy kept a full animal farm behind the public version of the Secret Garden at the Mirage. Replete with in-house vets and special organic food prepared on the premises, the huge building housed a multitude of white variants of several species—tiger, lion, and jaguar among them. The last time I was there, I thought there was also a bear, but it’d been a while. “And, since I’m sure they’ll be grateful to get their man-eaters back with no public fanfare, see what you can get in trade.” I couldn’t imagine how the idiots broke in to steal the felines, but to be honest, I didn’t really want to know.
“You got it, girl.”
“And send the doc up here. We got a guy who took a nasty fall. Luckily, he’s so shellacked, I think he just bounced, but I’d like him checked out, anyway. I’ve scrambled the paramedics.”
“Sounds serious. Where’d he fall from?”
“The ceiling.”
Silence greeted that admission. When he’d collected himself, Jerry added, “I’m not going to ask.”
“Probably better that way. But you might want to let Sergio know we won’t be needing the duct tape, nail gun, nor probably the radar gun.” I rang off at his stunned silence, reholstered the phone, then addressed my father. Pointing to the shower stall, which was roomy enough to accommodate a large party, I ordered, “Put the cubs in there, but make sure the mama tiger can still see them. And if you cause me any more trouble, I’ll give Mother another explanation as to how you came by those scratches.”
My father shot me a grin and let me have my bit of fun—we both knew he deserved it . . . and that while I might have the bark, when it came to him, I lacked the bite. He rushed to the shower, set the cubs inside, and closed the glass door as he shot the mother tiger a glance.
My anger spiked as I turned on the huddled group of geeks. “Explanation? And it had better be good. You do not even want to think about how much jail time you’re facing, not to mention a nice little bill for damages.”
Dr. Phelps stepped forward. “My lip and my jaw.”
I stepped in close to him—I had him by a couple of inches, which I could see made him nervous, so I went with it. “You don’t want to call my bluff, really you don’t.”
As realization dawned, guilty school kids replaced the smug eggheads. “It’s all really innocent. Really,” one of the guys started.
Dr. Phelps shut him down with a stare. “This is my fault.”
“Amazingly, that much I figured out all by myself.” My anger fled as quickly as it had come—and to be honest, I doubted it had much to do with this whole silly scenario. I could handle this sort of thing in my sleep, and had hundreds of times. No, Teddie’s reappearance and my family’s complicity had me hardwired to pissed off. Then that simmering murder thing and Jean-Charles on the lam. At least the goods doctors gave me a problem I could solve. I crossed my arms and fought back a derisive snort.. Just to make sure my father wasn’t going to complicate things now that I was getting them under control, I snuck a glance at him. From the look on his face, he didn’t see the humor, but he no longer looked ready to take a chunk out of someone. “What were you going to do with these animals?” I asked the assembled group.
“Chip ’em.”
“Explain.”
He vacillated a bit, but then gave me most of what I wanted. “I developed some new chip technology. Actually, it’s been around for decades—I’ve just refined it a bit. It’s used to track animals, shipments, that kind of stuff.”
“RFID?” I said as if I knew what I was talking about.
“Yeah.” A look of respect lit in his eyes, which was different. “I’ve developed a way to make it more economical while making it more useful, incorporating different kinds of data. It’s all a bit esoteric.”
I agreed with him—he had just exceeded my knowledge base by many multiples, but I faked it. “Impressive. Did you happen to know a Richard Peccorino?”
“Pecker? Sure. He’s supposed to be here.” All of a sudden, reality broke through his haze, and he looked wildly around the small room. “Where is he?”
I stepped closer to him and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Dr. Phelps, you and I need to have a chat.”
* * *
Telling somebody his friend and colleague was dead, even though I spared him the specifics, had me feeling drained and my stomach queasy—of course, no food and too much firewater didn’t help. All things considered, he was coping pretty well, although he looked a little green. We had left the others under the direction of my father, to sort things out while we repaired to the living room and parked ourselves in facing wing-backed chairs, a good distance form where the paramedics and the doctor tended to Dr. Phelps’s fallen comrade.
When Dr. Phelps leaned back, the two rear legs of the very expensive chair holding his weight, I didn’t even cringe. But I leaned forward, and when he moved to put a booted foot on a delicate antique table, I eased it to the side. Dr. Phelps gave me a distracted look.
“Do you have any idea what Mr. Peccorino might have been doing in Chef Bouclet’s kitchen at a hotel that isn’t even open yet?” I put my elbows on my knees and rested my forehead in my hands.
“Not sure, exactly.” Dr. Phelps pushed off with one foot, rocking further back in the chair. When he returned forward, he caught himself with the same foot and pushed off again. One hand clutched the arm of the chair. The other hand shook as he rubbed his eyes, then ran his fingers through his hair. The effects of the alcohol evaporated quickly under the assault of reality. Shell shock replaced the arrogance I’d seen in his eyes earlier.
Conjuring control I didn’t know I had, I resisted making him stop rocking—if the chair broke, we’d add it to his tab.
“Pecker was working with JC . . . Chef Bouclet. . . . They were testing our new RFID chip.”
“Testing?”
“Yeah, tracking various shipments, see how the chip held up, especially the power source.” Dr. Phelps laced his fingers behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling and continued his rocking, like a kid with ADHD.
“Any idea why?”
That stopped his rocking—the front legs of the chair banged on the hardwood. Placing his hands on his knees, the kid leveled his stare at me. “To see if it works.” He gave me one of those you-can’t-be-that-stupid looks, which I chose to ignore, primarily because he was wrong—I could indeed be that stupid.
“And how did they hold up?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I sure wish I did—the project is expensive, and our research funding hangs in the balance. Pecker was over at JC’s to collect the chips and grab the data off them. God, I can’t believe somebody killed him.” With the back of his hand, he swiped at the tear that trickled out of the inner corner of one eye. “The guy wouldn’t hurt anybody.” He looked at me with haunted eyes. “He’s really dead?”
I reached over and squeezed his knee. Stupid, I know, I just couldn’t think of anything else to do or say. “How do you guys know Chef Bouclet?”
“I introduced them.”
I whirled at the female voice. “Chitza?”
The chef moved with the grace and subtlety of a feline hunting dinner as she stepped over to Dr. Phelps, looking as if she wanted to bend down and give him a kiss. The almost imperceptible shake of his head stopped her and she recovered nicely with a hand on his shoulder. “I heard about Pecker. Are you okay?”
“Me? How about you? The two of you go way back.” Dr. Phelps patted her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s a shock.”
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Dr. Phelps continued. “What could he possibly have done to deserve this?”
Chitza turned her cold eyes in my direction. “Do the police have the killer?”
“Not that I know of. They’re working on it. I assure you they will do everything possible . . .”
She cut me short with a curt gesture. “Right. If there is a way to screw up an investigation, Metro will find it.”
Even though I harbored an equally low opinion of the bulk of the police department, I didn’t think trotting it out now would be a good idea. “Do you mind me asking how you two know each other?” I couldn’t fathom how a chef would cross paths with science guys.
Chitza gave me a flat stare—she could probably turn me to stone if she wanted. She let a couple of beats pass before answering, as if to tell me she did in fact mind my asking. “I have taught some courses at Berkeley. The new science of food preparation has a basis in chemistry.”
“Acids and alkalines and all of that?”
“To put it simply,” she purred.
If the cooking gig went south, she could get a job writing thinly veiled insults.
“And you knew Jean-Charles?” I arced a questioning eyebrow at her.
She shrugged in a nonchalant sort of way. “The culinary world is small.”
* * *
Sadness overrode any lingering sizzles of anger as I rode the elevator down to the lobby, changed wings, then rode the elevator back to the penthouse floor, this time in the west wing, the private wing. With all current crises dealt with, or at least tamed for the moment, Dr. Phelps and his gang itched like a burr under my saddle. Boys will be boys and all of that. Personally, I thought that little maxim provided an excuse for the male of the species to continue acting like idiots long past the single-digit years, the only acceptable age range for idiocy, but nobody had consulted me and apparently, my opinion wasn’t widely held.
My small, temporary abode was halfway down the hall on the right. The double doors at the end guarded the entrance to my parents’ permanent address—they also had an elevator entrance inside, so they rarely used the hall past my place, unless they came for a visit.
The door to my apartment stood open, which didn’t alarm me. Access to the floor was limited, and Mona and the Big Boss regularly availed themselves of my stocked bar while waiting for me to share news of the day. Although, since her pregnancy Mona had limited herself to club soda, amazing me with her selflessness. However, I didn’t allow my guard to drop—I knew her newfound virtue would expire when those babies took their first breaths.
Today, my father and I had already shared enough, so I expected I’d find Mona curled on the couch, wanting to hear my side of the adventure.
I was wrong.