Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (12 page)

THIRTEEN

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

David. Pack your bags immediately. I need you to complete my spa retreat in Versailles. If one more person touches my body I will lose my mind and the exfoliant products here smell as if they were extracted from camels. In addition, I find the palace to be drafty, too crowded, the therapists undertrained, and the accommodations borderline pedestrian. I intend to discuss the matter with Forbes Travel because this location is, at most, four and a half stars. Certainly not five. In fact, you call Forbes. Immediately. Express my concerns. I’d call them myself, but like a prisoner, I do not have access to life’s necessities within these castle walls. No telephone, no news of the outside world, and I’m only able to send you this correspondence after paying one of the maids, a heavy girl named Griet, who has fingers so thick I insist she keep her hands in the pockets of her apron, two hundred American to smuggle in this ancient laptop computer, which is no doubt leaking high-frequency electrons and initiating some manner of malignancy within me as I type.

So I’ll make it brief:
S.O.S. Come immediately
. I will do you the favor of making your travel arrangements. I’m sure you will love it here. Think of it as a vacation, compliments of me. There’s much to do in the area—explore the Normandy Region, visit Mont Saint Michel, tour through the Castle of Vaux le Vicomte—all within a day’s walk, which is if you’re able to escape the tendrils of the overbearing staff. I know Richard meant well when he booked this, and I don’t want to upset him by shunning his kindness. So get here quickly, David. Right away.

B.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Mrs. Sanders,

I received an email from you with no content. Whatever you intended to say was blocked by the spyware on our system. I hope you’re having a lovely time and will see you in two weeks.

Davi
s

What a great idea, I thought, the spa. I logged in and found the only open appointment on the books at 11:00, an organic bull sperm hair mask. Dis. Gus. Ting. (Under what circumstances would bull sperm be inorganic?) The blurb on the spa menu said it would promote vitality and growth, both of which my hair could use.

*     *     *

@StrikeItRichers 10 eliminated from competition on opening day of play. Don’t be next! Get in there! #futureGaming #PlayersPlayOn! #GimmeMyChair

*     *     *

Flight Aware, and other Internet sites like it, have made it impossible for men to lie to their wives about where they are. If you know the tail numbers of a private plane, you can track it all over the map. “You said you were going to Boston.” “I am in Boston.” “You are not, you pathological liar. I’m looking at your flight. You just landed in Palm Springs.”

The most popular private plane tracked used to be John Travolta’s. Tail numbers N707JT. Until a year or so ago, you could go to flightaware.com, plug in the tail numbers, and track his Boeing 707. Someone spread the word, and Edna Turnblad fans began storming private airports banging on the gates with their We Love You, John! signs, which became somewhat of a security issue. If you plug in his tail numbers now, you get a message informing you that the owner/operator’s flight information is set to private.

As is Red Jennings’s. He doesn’t want anyone knowing his comings and goings, either.

It’s a safe bet that JT’s privacy requirements have nothing to do with hauling pot around for distribution, including to a richie-rich private boy’s school in New Hampshire. The boarder who was caught smoking a bowl behind laundry services squealed like a little girl, and after much interrogation of a parade of higher-than-kites boarding students, the evidence suggested the free-for-all weed party began exactly a week ago, ten minutes after Red Jennings’s Pilatus PC-24 landed bringing Quinn Jennings and Thomas Sanders back to school. Both boys denied knowing anything about any illegal drugs on the plane. So while the school tried to (stay out of the news) sort it out, both students, Quinn Jennings and Thomas Sanders, were to be in their parents’ custody on the weekends. No lazing around the dorms possibly selling and definitely smoking pot. The Jennings, having made the Bellissimo their home away from home while they (laundered drug money) played in Strike It Rich, sent the Pilatus to pick up the boys.

I tapped a knuckle on the back door of Mr. Sanders’s office at ten on Saturday morning, and walked in to help put a plan together that might keep us all out of jail. No Hair was staring out the window, Mr. Sanders was fuming at his desk, and Thomas Sanders was slumped in a chair in the corner. He looked up. “Dude. Your hair.”

Mr. Sanders was furious. On several levels. I walked in on one of the higher ones.

I’d missed the “Just Say No” part of the Little Sanders interrogation, arriving for the tail-end of Mr. Sanders’s extreme dissatisfaction with the school’s lax policies allowing fifteen-year-olds to hop on a private plane and jet across the country without parental permission.

“Mom said I could.”

“Your mother is out of the country, Thomas.”

“Dad.” (Just a hair off from “Dude.”) “I emailed her.”

“She doesn’t have access to a computer, Thomas. And I’d appreciate it if you’d stop lying to me.”

“She found a computer.” They all looked at me. “She did have computer access sometime during the night. I got an email from her.”

Mr. Sanders threw his hands in the air.

A funny thing about Richard Sanders: He ruled the kingdom that was the Bellissimo machine. We’d been named one of the top 100 hotels in the continental US and Canada by
Travel + Leisure
for seventeen years running, with gross gaming revenues of $690 million last year, $110 million of that net casino profit, and the property was valued at more than $890 million.  Every one of those bucks stopped here, at Richard Sanders’s desk. But his wife and his son? The two of them were forever bringing this man to his knees. This captain-of-industry leader-of-thousands powerhouse was all but helpless when it came to Bianca and Thomas Sanders.

“Thomas. Go upstairs and don’t move. Do. Not. Move.”

“When’s Mom coming home?” Little Sanders whipped his head up and back, his hair grooming routine.

“Go, Thomas.”

No Hair and I took seats in front of Mr. Sanders’s desk while he regained his authority. Mrs. Pader, a librarian-type who kept up with Mr. Sanders’s dry cleaning and daily calendar, brought in a tray of donuts and coffee none of us made a move for.

“Tell me everything you know, Davis.” Mr. Sanders settled in. “Everything.”

I cleared my throat. “When the Strike contestants were chosen and registered for the tournament six weeks ago, Mr. Sanders, they were given the options of applying for casino markers or depositing into a player account. Missy and Red Jennings opened an in-house account and wired what looks to be a substantial amount of money into it.”

“Do we know how much?”

What I said: “No. The banking software, like the rest of the Strike, is proprietary, and while I can guess, based on the daily numbers Strike reported to the Bellissimo system, I can’t get in and look at individual transactions.” What I didn’t say: I warned you six months ago they shouldn’t be allowed their own operating system. #FortKnox

“And the deposit wasn’t flagged?”

“There were multiple deposits, and none of them were flagged. There’s no record of a Suspicious Transaction Report filed on the Jennings, ever.”

“Do we know
why
they wired so much money into the account?”

“The Jennings are drug manufacturers and distributors, Mr. Sanders.”

His gaze shifted to the chair recently vacated by his only son. Who’d just flown on the drug manufacturer and distributor’s airplane.

“And I believe they deposited such a large amount of money into a Strike account for the sole purpose of withdrawing it, using the accompanying documentation to establish themselves as professional gamblers for tax purposes.”

“And we know—” he snapped his fingers, trying to come up with the name.

“Cassidy Banking,” I said.

“Cassidy Williams,” No Hair said.

“Cassidy.” Mr. Sanders decided for us. “The head of banking for the Strike casino is an accomplice.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “She’s Missy Jennings’s sister. She accepted the unusually large deposits and she’s personally processing the withdrawals.”

Mr. Sanders clasped his hands together and leaned in. “Who else? Who else in Strike is part of this? Levi Newman? Have we seen anything that would lead us to believe he suspects? Or anything to indicate my new casino manager is in on this?”

“That’s what we don’t know yet, Richard.”

“We may not know about Levi Newman,” I said, “but I believe Elspeth Raiffe is playing a major role.”

“Why does this woman’s name keep coming up?” Mr. Sanders asked. “She’s the one hired out of the New Orleans PR firm?”

I nodded.

No Hair helped himself to a glazed donut.

“Do we think she’s an accessory?” Mr. Sanders asked.

“Quite the opposite. I think she’s here to take them down,” I said, “but I don’t know who she’s working for. She could be federal; she could work for a Mexican cartel; it might be personal.”

“Pull something out of your bag of tricks, Davis.” No Hair brushed donut crumbs off his Daffy Duck tie. “Figure it out.”

“What do you have on her so far?” Mr. Sanders pushed away from his desk.

“The Jennings are in a Strike suite on the twenty-fifth floor,” I said. “Room twenty-five seventeen and I just found this.” I placed my phone on the desk between us displaying a screen shot showing Elspeth keying herself into a Bellissimo guest room. The ponytail was stuffed in a ball cap, her wardrobe bland and unremarkable, head down. But it was definitely Elspeth. The teeny diamond Monroe piercing gave her away. “She’s in the hotel. She’s booked in a guest room under an alias, room twenty-five nineteen, which makes her the Jennings’s next-door neighbor. She checked into the room ten minutes after the Jennings checked in.”

“She was waiting on them,” Mr. Sanders said.

“Yes sir.”

“And you’re tracking her? You have her under surveillance?”

I nodded. Actually, Baylor was tracking her. “Drop this in Hashtag’s bag at ballet, Baylor.” I passed him the James Bond Bic pen. He played with it for a while, then asked if he could have one. I told him if he’d be a good boy, we’d see. (He is so not ready for my job.)

“Where is she now?” No Hair adjusted the knot of his tie.

“I lost the signal on her an hour ago.” I looked at my watch. “Which means she’s at least ten miles away. Making this a good time to get in the room and nose around.”

“Don’t go up there and swipe yourself in wearing street clothes, Davis,” No Hair said. “She may be spying on us while we’re spying on her. Go under some kind of cover.”

“I’m going the spa route.”

“Is there anything else?” Mr. Sanders asked.

“One more thing,” I said. “Missy Jennings won a substantial amount of money last night, and she’s at the top of the leader board after the first night of tournament play.”

“You say that as if you don’t think it’s a lucky streak.”

“No, Mr. Sanders, I don’t.”

“What
do
you think?”

“I think the problems within Strike go further than banking. I think it’s possible the gaming might be tipped in the Jennings’s favor as well.”

Mr. Sanders closed his eyes and tapped three fingers against his forehead. “How?” He looked up. “How?”

“It all goes back to the programming, Mr. Sanders. Someone, somewhere, is pulling the strings for the Strike system. The Jennings marijuana business is at the heart of it.”

Something on Mr. Sanders’s phone beeped. “And you’re going to Paris in the middle of all this?”

“Excuse me?”

“Flight Aware says you have a Bellissimo jet scheduled to take you to Paris this afternoon, Davis.”

*     *     *

Baylor was on the sofa scratching. He looked up as I keyed myself in the basement bullpen. “Gold skin itches, Davis. You got the very good end of this deal. When can we play those Strike games?”

I pushed my hair back and showed him the line of burned skin and baby fuzz framing my face. “This itches, too, thank you. We have way bigger problems, go play your Xbox.”

Fantasy stood at the doorway to the office. “Stop. You two are making me itch.” She scratched her neck. “Davis? Let’s get in there and play those games.”

“Whose side are you on, Fantasy? We have work to do.”

“Oh, hell yes, let me play, Davis.” Baylor stopped scratching. “How cool is it they order drinks from the television? I waited on one guy last night whose whole game is Formula One. Every level he went up, the course got harder. He was throwing money at it to get to the bonus round. Coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Another guy was playing World War Two, shooting a submachine gun. Every time he gave the game more money, he got a bigger gun. Coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Where did these games come from?” Fantasy asked.

“That’s a very good question.” I found a seat. “Every single one of them is an individual microprocessor,” I said, “and the games are skill-based and personalized. I can’t imagine what kind of genius is behind this.”

“There’s a lady in there playing the piano,” Fantasy said. “Every level she advances, she plays a harder song. She started with Chopsticks and she’s advanced to Chopin. It’s crazy. Is anybody thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That Davis should let us play?” Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“No, Baylor. That we should’ve paid a little more attention to this before it got here.”

One of us was thinking that. Exactly that.

“What’s up with Little Sanders, Davis?”

Baylor slowed the scratching. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “Whatever that kid did, I had nothing to do with it.”

“Little Sanders is here because there’s been a pot party at his school, and the school suspects it has something to do with him and the Jennings kid.”

“Surely those people don’t have their kid dealing for them,” Fantasy said.

“They hired him a hooker,” Baylor said it like
best parents ever
.

“Let’s hope whatever that kid’s doing Little Sanders isn’t involved.”

“When can I play that game, Davis?” He said it like
when can I have another cookie?

“Baylor. Sit there and scratch. I have to go to the spa. I’ll see about sneaking us in before it opens tomorrow.” I’d like to take a crack at breaking into the Strike banking system. And I wanted to play the game too.

*     *     *

Vanity Fair
gave the Bellissimo Spa and Salon a five-star rating on the same day three lawsuits were filed against it—a slip-and-fall in the men’s steam room, a sexual misconduct charge against a masseur, and a pain-and-suffering complaint from a laser hair removal. The last one was tossed out of court, because the Sasquatch man bringing the charges had wall-to-wall shag carpet on his back, and obviously, the judge ruled, there’d be some pain and suffering involved in frying it off. The masseur under fire was accused of giving his client a full-on breast exam, not a service she’d asked for, but once in court, giggling, she got in the box and couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. She didn’t recall. Two weeks after the charges were dismissed, the defendant and the plaintiff opened a spa of their own. Happy Endings.

All this came down on the seventh day of operations at the Bellissimo. On the eighth day, Mr. Sanders, a younger and edgier CEO with a newborn casino-resort to tend to, sold it before anything else could hit his desk. He had enough to deal with.

The spa was now a leased venue, much like McDonald’s would be if we had one, which we didn’t. The Bellissimo Day Spa is owned, staffed, and run by an LLC, StatCo Enterprises out of Cincinnati, which somehow climbs up a long corporate ladder to the Nestle Corporation. As in teeny division of. It’s 30,000 square feet of Swedish massages, lime and ginger salt-glow body scrubs, congested skin facials, and I needed one of their uniforms. I had one of their old uniforms, but they’d recently redecorated and I didn’t have a spa suit in the new chocolate brown pink trim flavor. Since the Bellissimo didn’t own the spa, I couldn’t send Baylor to fetch one from uniform distribution, so a swiping was in order.

I walked in dressed in workout clothes, a Saints ball cap, and sunglasses.

The receptionist checking me in, Margarite, looked up from the desk. “Really?” she whispered. “The bull sperm? You’re brave.” She tapped on her keyboard. “Let us know how you like it.”

The spa smelled like essential oils, chlorine, and rich people. The piped-in music was crickets and pianos, the lighting low and subsidized with red candles in globes on every flat surface.

A girl at the next desk, Caty, passed me a robe, fuzzy flip-flops, and a locker key. “Enjoy your services.” She whispered too. I whispered back a thank you. I walked through a room full of naked women ignoring one another, found my locker, and stepped behind a curtain (thank you) to change into the robe, which was more like a down-filled comforter with a belt. I was stepping into the fuzzy flip-flops when I heard someone loud-whispering my name-of-the-day. “Justy? Justy Tanner?”

I pulled the dressing room curtain back. “I’m Justy.”

He was short, built like a tank, and had a Marine buzz cut. He was Popeye. “Semen mask?” A dozen naked women’s heads snapped up. I smiled.

“Let’s go, doll.”

(Why did Nestle allow men in the women’s changing room?)

We passed a lady with a tattoo of Tinker Bell on her butt.

“I’m Ricky,” he said over his shoulder, “I’ll be doing your semen mask today. This way.” He pushed open the door of a treatment room as I scanned for an employees-only door along the dimly lit hallway, spotting one all the way down on the left. He told me to take off the robe and get under the covers. “You don’t want to wear this stuff,” he advised. “It’s fragrant.”

And why wouldn’t it be?

The bed was heated, contoured, the blankets soft, and I was instantly ready for a nap. Ricky stepped back in.

“Girlfriend.” Hands on hips. “I can’t give you a hair mask with that hat on.” I felt him sit down and roll up behind me. He pulled the Saints cap off my head and we both yelped. “Oh shit, sweetheart! What happened?” He gingerly combed through what hair I had, examining the inch of fuzz at my hairline. “Your color is to die for.” My shoulder-length hair slipped through his fingers. “Who mixes it?”