Two suits appeared at the other end of the passage. Security. The men started to move toward them.
Lex had to force a smooth, casual pace. He pressed the elevator button, watching the men nearing in his peripheral vision. The elevator bell pinged, doors opening painfully slowly. He ushered Jenna in, jabbed the lobby button, pulse accelerating.
The elevator doors closed just as the security men passed by.
Two floors down, another security employee got into the car, but so did a middle-aged couple. Lex positioned Jenna behind the couple, using them as cover. Tense, they stood in silence as the car hummed slowly down. The doors opened. Lex put his arm around Jenna, sticking very close to the middle-aged couple, keeping them between the security employee and Jenna.
They exited the massive hotel doors and were hit by a wall of dark, damp heat. Perez was there, in her SUV, engine running. She leaned over and flung open the passenger door.
“Do you think any of this has anything to do with The Tears of the Quetzal, or Candace’s death?” Jenna asked quietly as Lex held the door open for her.
“All I know is that ring led me down this road, Jenna.” In more ways than one. Lex glanced at his partner, his eyes saying it all: Be careful. Candace Rothchild’s killer is still out there and someone still wants to hurt Jenna.
“Lex—” Jenna’s eyes were big, dark. A man could lose himself in those eyes “—be careful, okay? I…I have plans for us.”
“Hey, I’m not going anywhere,” he bent down to kiss her quickly. “I’ve got some plans of my own.”
“Agent Duncan forgets—” Frank Epstein said quietly, observing Lex and Jenna exit his hotel “—that everyone watches everyone in Vegas, all the time. And,” he added, “some men even watch their wives.”
Roman Markowitz studied his boss in silence, his posture rigid.
Frank pinched the bridge of his nose, replaying in his mind what he’d witnessed on the monitor through the private feed into his own living room. None of what had transpired between Mercedes and Lex Duncan was news to him. Frank knew his wife was dying—he was in touch with Mercedes’s doctor and paid him very well to keep him informed. He’d also known from day one that Tony Ciccone had been screwing his wife, that she’d tried to hide the pregnancy from him. He’d have whacked the little Italian bastard himself if Mercedes hadn’t done it for him. And he loved her for it.
Besides, it had solved a very thorny little problem for him. Ciccone’s mysterious vanishing act had kept the FBI off his back.
He’d always wanted Mercedes to have an illusion of freedom, but in effect, he controlled every aspect of her life. His sleight-of-hand, his trickery, had always been for her own good. He’d always protected her. Yet to the world she was independent, proud, regal—his Vegas queen. And he wanted her to die proud. On her terms. Under her own illusions. He loved her that much, that fiercely.
She’d become much more deeply religious and spiritual since she’d learned of her terminal illness. And in doing so, she’d become even more poignantly beautiful to him. So fragile in so many ways.
But now Lex Duncan knew her truth.
He knew Mercedes had shot and killed a man.
And the look Frank had glimpsed in the agent’s eyes when Mercedes had confessed this—he’d seen that intent look before in another man. In the eyes of mob enforcer Tony Ciccone.
A bit of the father in the son, he thought to himself. You can’t get away from that, Lexington.
A man like Lex Duncan, Frank could use on his side. On the wrong side…“He’s dangerous now,” he whispered.
Markowitz held his hand toward the monitor. “He still doesn’t know who whacked his mother,” he rasped. “You saw him on camera, and I saw him in that elevator. He doesn’t know who I am. He has no idea.”
Frank whipped to him, fury expressing violently through his blood. “It’s not you I’m worried about, Roman,” he said calmly. He looked at his nails, trying to defuse the pressure fizzing inside him. “You might have been working for Ciccone as my spy into his inner machinations at a time I really needed to know the extent of his operations, and what he might use against me. But—” he looked up “—you never should have killed that woman when he chose to send you to kidnap the boy.”
“The bitch shot me.”
“And your temper remains too short for your own good. No, Roman, it’s not you I’m concerned about, it’s my wife. It’s me— I don’t want this ancient Ciccone crap coming back to sit on me now. And I simply cannot allow my wife to suffer at the hands of the FBI, be taken in, interrogated, possibly charged for murder in her last days.”