Her 24-Hour Protector(60)

Lex froze. He turned slowly, stepped back into the living room. “How do you know where he is? Did Frank kill him?”

“I did. I shot and killed the father of my child.”

Lex stared at her, heart pounding. “Why?”

“Because of what he did to Sara,” she said, the steel returning to her eyes, her neck corded tense. “And because his henchman allowed you to witness the horror. Because he allowed my son to become an orphan. The remorse, the guilt, it has been horrific to bear. It’s why I have always supported the Nevada Orphans Fund, Lexington. And until you left Reno, I always knew where you were. And then when I saw your name in the paper in connection with the Rothchild homicide case, I knew you’d come back to Nevada.”

She inhaled deeply. “Then I saw your name on that bachelor auction list, and I…” Her voice faded and tears began to stream down her cheeks. “It’s why I came to see you with my own eyes and why I bid on you that night. I pushed the bidding sky high because…because I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted that young Rothchild heiress to know just how much my boy was worth, and I wanted the orphans fund to get as much of her cash as she could give.”

Lex shook his head, staring at the woman who said she was his mother.

“You can’t put a dollar value on a person, on a baby.”

“This is Vegas, Lexington. People can buy what they like.”

Including a fake mother.

“Where’s Ciccone’s body?” he said coolly. “What did you do to him?”

Mercedes steadied herself by reaching for the back of a chair. “When I read about Sara’s murder in the paper, I phoned Tony right away, and I learned what he’d done. I set it up to meet him at a place in the desert, an isolated spot that Tony and I had been together before, a ghost town where they used to mine silver. I said I had something important to tell him about Frank, and that I was worried about being followed, so he had to be careful not to tell anyone or bring anyone. He trusted me, Lexington. Tony, in his way, adored me, and he had no idea just how much hatred he’d put into me. I shot him, out in that desert. I rolled his body down the mine shaft. He didn’t see it coming.”

The words of the Lucky Lady psychic sifted into his mind. A past…death…buried in the Mojave sands…sands of time…death to be avenged…

Lex tried to swallow, trying to absorb what she was telling him—that she knew the answer to a mystery that gripped the nation thirty years ago, that she had killed a notorious Vegas gangster…and that gangster was his father.

“Why should I believe this?”

“Because I’ll tell you exactly in which mine shaft you will find Tony Ciccone’s remains, if there’s anything left of him.”

“Then, Mrs. Epstein, I’ll see that you are brought in and charged with homicide.”

A sad smile curled over her mouth. “I very much doubt, Lexington, that I will live long enough to see that.”

“Where’s the body?”

“At a small ghost town thirty miles southwest of Vegas, down a shaft in the old Conair silver mine. There’s a main headframe, easy to spot. Next to it is an old metal-sided building. If you go about two hundred yards east of that, you’ll find another shaft opening covered with a metal grate. He’s down there.”

Lex studied her. This woman, this proud Vegas matriarch, an ex-showgirl, was supposed to be his mother and a cold-blooded murderer?

“Why’d you sleep with him, with Ciccone?”

“It was a wild time, Lexington. We were all young, flush with cash, liquor, drugs. We felt like gods. We were gods, in our world. Las Vegas was our oasis, our desert kingdom. And Tony was rough, sexy. He had an edge that women liked. You have his Mediterranean complexion—”

Lex shot up his hand. He didn’t want to hear that he resembled Ciccone in any way whatsoever. “One thing I still don’t understand is that you have so much to lose by telling me this. And so little to gain. Why? Why tell me at all? Maybe you’d have done me a favor keeping quiet.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think you’ll ever understand just how much I have gained, Lexington. Looking at you, right here, in front of me, in my home. My son. Whom I have thought about every waking day for thirty-five years. It clean broke my heart, Lexington, to hand over that small, warm bundle the day I gave birth. I have never, ever felt so proud as when I bore you into this world. The sky had never looked brighter, and I had never grasped so keenly the meaning and sense of life.” She wavered. “And I’ve never, ever felt so lonely, so hollow and empty, as when I had to place you into the hands of another woman.”