Jenna double-checked that the doors were locked.
But after a few minutes, she was feeling real uneasy. The streets were growing eerie with the dusky dark orange glow of the coming storm. Heavier drops of rain bulleted down onto the car.
Jenna reached for the door handle. There was no way she was going to sit here alone in a full-blown storm. Then she hesitated. Few places in the world had tighter security than the big resort hotels clustered in downtown Vegas. But outside those populated tourist areas Sin City had the same urban ills and muggings as any other big metropolis. Common sense had always had Jenna sticking to the busy parts of town, the well-lit streets.
These were not.
She removed her ostentatious emerald bracelet and the diamond pendant around her neck, then opened Lex’s glove compartment. But as she was about to stuff them in, she saw a plastic sleeve containing old newspaper cuttings. One headline immediately caught her eye: “Reno Mother Brutally Slain While Son Hid in Closet.”
Curiosity quickened through her. Wind rocked the vehicle slightly, and Jenna grew edgy as she scanned the news cutting. But as the words of the report sunk in, her blood turned to ice.
It was a story printed in the Reno Daily thirty years ago about a croupier named Sara Duncan—a single mother aged twenty-seven who’d been slain in her own home while her five-year-old son, Lexington Duncan, had hidden in the bedroom closet.
Jenna quickly read the second article contained in the plastic sleeve. Sara’s child had actually witnessed his mother’s throat being slit through the louvered slats of the door, but had not been able to speak for well over a year. And when he had started speaking again, Reno police learned he was unable to identify his mother’s killer. He’d only seen the man’s pant legs and hands. And the knife—the murder weapon used to cut Sara Duncan’s throat.
Jenna sat back in her seat, numb.
Lex wasn’t just an orphan. His mother had been taken from him in the most brutal way possible.
And he’d seen it.
Suddenly she felt scared. Alone. And beyond curious. She opened the car door quickly. Rain was coming down hard now, the kind of torrential summer downpour that flash flooded Vegas streets notorious for bad drainage, snarling traffic up along the city arteries.
She ran across the street and ducked down the alley.
Chapter 6
Small bells chinked as Lex entered the Lucky Lady psychic store, tendrils of incense smoke curling in the wake of his movement. It was dim inside—no air-conditioning. Shelves cluttered with silver dragons, cards, dice, engraved boxes, fetishes, crystal balls and fat little Buddhas lined the walls.
This was obviously the Lucky Lady’s game—peddling fortune, fate, magic. Selling a chance to beat the odds, win the dream. Parting cash from those who believed they could control such things. Lex’s eyes adjusted to the light, his gaze settling on a faded old poster that hung on the far wall. It promoted a topless, psychic act at the old Frontline Casino circa 1970s, the same casino his mother worked at. The “psychic” on the poster was a busty, leggy redhead in a belly-dancer costume, shown seductively stripping copious veils.
“Hello!” Lex called out. “Is there anyone here?”
A parrot squawked somewhere in the back. Lex tensed. “Hello?”
Suddenly, from behind a heavy curtain sewn with a myriad of tiny silver stars, the old gypsy woman he’d seen on the street materialized. Lex’s pulse quickened. She came slowly forward, huge false eyelashes making her unblinking eyes seem surreal. Gold hoop earrings dangled from her ears and small spots of rouge looked comical on her parched cheeks. Her wrinkled eyelids were heavily lacquered with blue-green eye shadow, the color collecting into darker rivers in the creases of her aging skin. Lex realized with a start that she was the woman depicted in the old poster, faded and crumpled and made sadly comical by time as she tried to hold on to the thinning threads of the past.
“Marion Robb?” he asked.
She blinked. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m Lex Duncan,” he said, wondering what this woman could possibly tell him. “A friend of mine, Tom McCall—the old Washoe County sheriff—said I might find you here. He…suggested I come talk to you.”
Her features grew guarded. “What does the sheriff’s office want?” Her voice was husky, the sound of possibly too many cigarettes, cheap whiskey and loud bars.
“McCall is retired. He doesn’t want anything, it’s me who—”
“You a cop?”
“I’m here for personal reasons.”
“You are a cop then.”
“FBI.”
“What? You want a reading?” She jerked her head toward her rate board. “I’m about to close up shop, but I can maybe do a fifteen-minute session.”