the Ozone Dome. Everything would have to be licensed, though."
"These hotel-casino outfits have billions to burn." Tallgrass was cruising his Favorites menu for visuals. "Munchkins, flying monkeys, talking scarecrows and tin men, witches and wizards. They all fit in with the times. Sort of a metaphor for who we've got representing us in Congress these days."
"Still the same old cynic," Ric said, laughing. "Why hasn't there been national news on this new gambling Mecca on the prairie? I can see there's not much between Vegas and the Gulf Coast and Atlantic City, but aren't you Wichita folks right on top of Branson, Missouri, and all the established country music theme parks?"
"One word," Tallgrass said. "It almost sounds Native American. Old theme parks are 'hokey,' amigo. This new stuff that's going up is big, slick, costly, and tapping into the American Dream."
"What dream?" I asked.
Tallgrass winked at me. "About little country girls making it in the big city."
"Like Dorothy Gale in the Emerald City. I get it," I said. "What's your involvement with this project?" I asked, sniffing a story.
"Me?" he said, spreading palms so dark and seamed I couldn't even detect the major head, heart, and life lines scribed on them. They had to be there. Didn't they?
I wouldn't let his pseudo-innocence and time-inscribed palms distract me.
"Like you said, Tallgrass," I went on, "the Kansas tribes are reduced and scattered, and the reservations are handkerchief-size. What's left of the Kickapoo and Kiowa would need someone they could trust, but sophisticated to the ways of the white man's chicanery. Someone with native blood - and FBI experience - to investigate the big boys so their fringe casino project doesn't get taken or fail to pay off the tribe."
Ric was eyeing our negotiation-cum-mutual interrogation, and enjoying it. Watching allies from his past and present interact, even spar with each other, said a lot about each of us.
I was not about to let him down by looking gullible.
"Yeah," Tallgrass conceded. "I looked more than anyone expected into the major backers. And you."
That had both Ric and me taking deep breaths.
Tallgrass picked up his remote control. "Ricky here told me he was bringing you back."
Ricky?
I knew I looked offended, and I felt offended. My spine stiffened as I sat up straighter in the cramped backseat. Ric had been telling other people about me, and not me about them? He didn't trust me, after I'd beaten down the gates of mortality and thrown the dice on my soul with Snow to save his life?
Tallgrass's red-brown eyes on my face drove as deep as rusty railroad spikes.
"You understand," he said softly, "we all have blood family, and some of us have foster family, but the wisest of us have chosen family. I have no children but one, and now maybe two, and possibly three."
Wow. I was feeling adopted again. Was he saying Ric - and me and Quick - had a foster father?
"And now," Tallgrass said, looking only at me, "I'll show you what's been running on WTCH-TV in the week before you two showed up here."
Ric reached for my hand over the seat back. Stiffly, I extended it. It had been a rough couple of days. Holding hands like rapt teen lovers at a drive-in, we watched the tape Leonard Tallgrass had recorded from local TV.
A discordant synthesizer caught the ear. A streak of camera pan teased the eye.
"The mystery woman was first seen as an anonymous corpse on a Las Vegas autopsy table," a deep male voice-over announced.
The camera panned over a naked Lilith from black hair to Glitz Blitz Red - polished toenails, pausing on her nostril pierced by that damn tiny blue topaz stud I used to wear. I flinched to see those staring blue eyes identical to mine. Tattoos would have added some visual interest and helped cover all that dead-white motionless flesh. Where had that adolescent ink gone? Body makeup? Or had it been removed?
I was cringing at Lilith's exposure, which was my own.
Then the ad spot featured reflections of a faint face seen through a plastic visor. Mine, filmed far more recently. Hector Nightwine wasted no time, or no wine before its time. I could see the fat-cat bastard sipping a rare vintage as he previewed this totally unauthorized footage in his office.
"But ..." his voice-over announced, "the drama continues on CSI Madame X, as this bewitching mystery woman lures a crack forensics team into deciphering the enigma of her life ... or death, and finding that every