Rae: “Ah, jeez, I don’t want to think about that.”
* * *
—
LUCAS SAID, “Somebody’s lying to us, and I don’t think it was that kid. I think it’s the manager. Though I can think of some complicated ways that it might not be.”
“Tell me,” Bob said.
“Well, we set off an alarm back at the Forum. Somebody spotted one of us—probably me—and made a call here, where the phone was answered. That means there’s a connection here. And I don’t think it was the kid.”
“She’s got the cheap rent,” Rae said.
“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s her. I don’t think she’s that good a liar. And I doubt they’d consider her reliable. I think it’s probably the manager. I think she takes messages and relays them. Somebody spotted me in the Forum and called her. Then, she waited to see if we’d show up. That would tell them that we’re watching the phone and we know about this place. So she’s probably got another burner phone that we don’t know about that goes directly to Beauchamps or one of the others. And Beauchamps probably dumped that phone immediately after she called.”
“If you’re right, we’ve gone backwards.”
“Unless Earl, the phone guy, can pull up the call she made. She probably called right after she took the call from the Forum and right after we showed up. If he can find it, we could still be hanging in.”
“We could try for a warrant to search her trailer,” Rae said.
Lucas shook his head. “We wouldn’t get it. We don’t have anything like what we’d need for a warrant. For one thing, it could be the kid. But it could be somebody like the manager’s neighbor. She’s home all day with the baby, nothing going on, then three marshals show up at her front door. She’s gonna talk about it.”
“I asked her not to,” Rae said.
Bob: “Right. That was a half hour ago. I bet she’s told only eight of her closest friends, after having them double-swear to keep it secret.”
Lucas said, “I’ll call Tremanty and have him call Earl. I don’t think he can do what we want him to without any phone numbers, but we can try.”
“Maybe get some dessert over at the Cheesecake Factory?” Bob said. “You know, while we wait for Earl to call back.”
“I think we need to go talk to this Toni and Calvin Wright, see if they have anything interesting to say about the home invasion,” Lucas said.
Bob groaned. “We’re not going to get to the Cheesecake Factory, are we? Ever?”
“It’s open late,” Rae said. “And I want to talk to the Wrights, too. If I gotta be there, so do you.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CALLED the Wrights using the number he’d gotten from Mallow, the Las Vegas cop. Toni Wright answered, said that Mallow had told them that Lucas would be calling. Lucas said, “I know it’s getting late . . .”
“Not in Vegas. Come on over,” Wright said.
The Wrights lived in a walled residential community called Kensington Gardens, in what would be the shadow—in the daytime—of two bland condominium towers northwest of the Strip. On the way there, Rae said, “Oh my God,” and pointed. “Another Cheesecake Factory.”
“I’m being taunted by God,” Bob said, as they drove past.
“I don’t think you’re important enough for that,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
TONI AND CALVIN WRIGHT resembled each other: dark-eyed with short dark hair, gym-conditioned, sleek as otters. “These men were all over us,” Calvin said. “They knocked down the door one minute after we came in, we never had a chance. Toni and I study tae kwon do, so we can take care of ourselves in a straight-up fight, but they had guns. They knew what they were doing. Never had a chance.”
“They said if we didn’t open the safe, they’d rape me until I did or I couldn’t,” Toni said, and she started to cloud up. “There was nothing Cal could have done, either. They’d have killed him.”
The men wore ski masks, but the physical descriptions fit Beauchamps, Deese, and Cole: Beauchamps, large and blocky; the other two, mid-height and thin. “Somebody else drove their car, but we didn’t see him,” Calvin said. “We know because when they went out the door, the car started up before they could have gotten to it.”
“Could be the woman,” Rae said to Lucas.
Toni Wright said her loss in jewelry would be over a half million dollars. “I had a collection of vintage Indian jewelry made by Charles Loloma, the most