Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(64)

THE GOLF-SHIRTED COP introduced himself as Chuck Armie, and he walked them through the scene, staying away from a couple of technicians who were working through the bedroom. Harvey and Armie, with the head crime scene tech, had worked out the probable sequence of the shooting and laid it out for the marshals.

“Any of the shooter’s blood anywhere?” Lucas asked.

“Nope. But there are all kinds of bullet holes in the living room wall, behind where he was probably standing. It’s like the dead guy missed him six or seven times.”

“That can happen,” Bob said. “The unknown shooter didn’t pick up his brass?”

“No. It’s still here.”

“Prints?” Rae said.

The cop nodded. “Of course.”

“You know how he got out of here?” Lucas asked. “Anyone see a car? How about the woman?”

Armie bobbed his head. “The shooting got some attention, even with all the neighbors’ windows closed and the air-conditioning on. Two cars left after the shooting: a small sedan, maybe a Corolla or a Civic or a Passat, silver in color, and then an SUV. In that order. We got no plates. Your friend Santos is probably in the sedan, the woman in the SUV.”


HARVEY CAME BACK. “We’ve got a fleet of uniforms coming in. We’ll walk through the neighborhood, talking to everybody we can about newcomers. We’ve got guys on the way to Caesars.”

Lucas handed him a card and said, “Call us if anything happens. We’re really scratching around here.” He looked at Bob and Rae and tipped his head toward the door. “We gotta make some calls ourselves.”

On the way back to the cars, Lucas told Rae to call Tremanty. “We need to register the phone calls going to Smith. I’ve gotta believe that Deese will call him. And Santos, probably, too. You gotta get Tremanty to set it up.”

Rae nodded.

Bob: “What else?”

They talked about it. The Las Vegas cops would be all over Caesars, but they didn’t know Santos’s face as well as Lucas did. They needed to find out where he’d gotten a second car and where he might be staying, if he’d checked in anywhere.

But Santos wasn’t the problem. Deese was.

“Deese might be on his way out of town. Gotta believe the blonde called him and told him about Beauchamps,” Lucas said. “We might’ve missed him.”

“Don’t say that,” Rae said. “We got this. We got it.”


THEY WENT BACK to the Bellagio. Bob said he was going to stand in a cool shower for ten minutes, Rae was planning to lie down to think until they moved again. Lucas got online. The first thing he found was a Hertz agency at Caesars Palace.

He called Rae. “I need to get over there. I’ll walk. When Bob gets out of the shower, self-park the Tahoe at Caesars and call me. We might need wheels in a hurry.”

At Caesars, he showed his badge to the manager at the Hertz booth and learned that a man who met Santos’s description had returned a silver Corolla but had paid for it with an American Express card carrying the name Thomas R. Hobbs. The manager said, “The card went right through. He walked back around the corner. There.” He pointed to the end of the hall. “He was either going down to the Forum Shops or he has a room here. Or, I dunno, maybe he was going to gamble. But if marshals are looking for him, that seems kinda unlikely . . . that you’d find him sitting in front of a slot machine.”

Lucas scratched his head, nodded, said, “I’ll look anyway. If the guy tries to rent another car, call me. Right away.”

He gave the manager his card, and as he turned away, the manager said, “You know . . . if he’s, like, a fugitive . . . I don’t know, this guy was carrying a whole bunch of FedEx boxes, like he was delivering them. Does that sound right?”


LUCAS CHECKED with the front desk, and one of the security men came out and told him that he’d already been talking to the Vegas cops and that there were three people named Santos staying at the hotel. They’d checked in two days earlier and appeared, from the registry, to be a husband, a wife, and a child. There was no one in the hotel named Hobbs.

“So if he’s here, he’s under a different name,” Lucas said.

The security man nodded. “I’ve got no idea how you’d find him. If you could give me a photograph, I could show it around to the cleaning staff, see if they remember him. Kind of a long shot, though.”

“Why is it a long shot? If he’s in the hotel—”

“We’ve got almost four thousand rooms here, in six towers. Ninety-nine percent of the rooms have closed doors. Twenty percent have “Do Not Disturb” cards on them. What can I tell you? It’s like finding one guy in a small city.”

“Goddamnit.” Lucas looked around the crazy place; he could probably see five hundred people of all sizes and shapes, scurrying through the lobby and in and out of restaurants and the casino, and he wasn’t even in the main part of the building.

He went out and talked to the head valet, who said, “Man, I got ten people a minute coming through here. I don’t remember the guy. Sorry. We could go down and look for the car.”

Lucas gave him a card with his number on it, and Santos’s car’s license number, and asked him to look for it and to call him when he found it.