Mr. Kiss and Tell (25 page)

The Stardust Restaurant was a high-ceilinged, glittering cavern a floor above the Mercury Resort’s casino. The walls were covered in purple velvet, and the Deco-style chandeliers were hung with multicolored crystals, sending tiny pinpricks of purple, red, blue, and green light dancing all over the room. The tables were crowded with late diners. It was after ten, but the Strip was just warming up.

Veronica sipped her Merlot and glanced around the room. Across the table from her sat a man with heavy, horn-rimmed glasses and a full black beard, cutting continental-style into his filet mignon. He looked almost professorial in a tweed jacket. It was all she could do to keep from laughing.

“What?” Leo asked. “What’s so funny?”

“Just, you know, the whole effect.” She stroked her own chin. “You grew that in a few weeks?”

“Hey, the D’Amatos are a hairy people.”

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind Leo’s head. She was every bit as disguised as Leo was: Her hair was tucked under a wavy brunette wig, and she’d caked on pink blush and dark lipstick that aged her by at least five years. It wouldn’t fool anyone looking very closely, but no casual observer would be able to identify them either. Maybe it was overkill but she hadn’t wanted to run the risk of anyone in the hotel recognizing them.

It was the end of October—two weeks after the fruitless search of Bellamy’s apartment, and two months since Veronica had last been at the Mercury. Veronica and Leo had been on the road since ten a.m.; he’d picked her up at her apartment in his vintage Mustang, and they’d cut across the desert with the top down. This time he wasn’t along as Leo D’Amato, SDPD Detective; he was along as Leo D’Amato, heavily bearded private citizen.

“So, are we doing dessert, or…” She raised an eyebrow meaningfully. He grinned.

“You minx,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

As they passed through the casino they had to weave carefully between middle-aged women with fanny packs and sweaty, red-faced men. A few statuesque women in sequins drifted through the crowd like sea creatures, and Veronica wondered fleetingly if they were escorts.

They took the elevator up the tower to their room and locked the door securely behind them. She kicked off her shoes and took the wig off her head. It’d been hot underneath; her scalp was sweaty, her hair mussed. She sat on the edge of the bed, putting her laptop on her knees and opening it.

“Well, Coach D, as college hoops excitement builds here at SportsCrime Central, let’s check in with Kestrels’ coach Mitch Bellamy, who seems to have his own unique pregame ritual,” she said, channeling Greg Gumbel.

The grainy image from a video camera suddenly filled her screen. It showed a room just like theirs, down to the purple bedspread and the strange geometric paintings on the walls. Lying on his back, propped up against a half-dozen pillows, lay Mitch Bellamy.

“Looks like he’s still alone,” she said.

Leo shrugged off his jacket and sat down next to her. “What time did he check in?”

She checked the text Mac had sent her that evening. “Nine thirty-five. After dinner with the team, I’m guessing.”

The Pacific Southwest Kestrels were in Vegas for a preseason Invitational. That afternoon, they’d been slaughtered by the Oregon Ducks. Veronica and Leo had watched it on the hotel TV, resting from the long drive. Zabka had stormed the sidelines, purple in the face. But every time the camera showed Bellamy he looked calmly focused. It made Veronica bristle. She still remembered his mad fury when he’d found her in his office.

So it’s just women you let loose on. Just women you think you can brutalize,
she’d thought.

The team wasn’t staying at the Mercury. They were set up at Caesars, along with all the other teams playing in the tournament. Bellamy had a room over there too, but a little over a week ago, Mac had discovered that he’d secured a second room at the Mercury—the same hotel where he’d met with Madelyn Chase almost a year ago—on his personal credit card.

That could mean only one thing—he was planning to “order in,” and didn’t want to risk the university finding out.

She watched Bellamy flip through channels on his TV. Every so often he glanced at the clock, his fingers tapping impatiently. He sighed heavily. When a knock finally came at his door, he jumped up from the bed.

“About fucking time.”

Veronica felt Leo tense next to her as Bellamy lumbered across the hotel room. The camera was angled to catch most of the room—it’d been tucked behind a strategically draped curtain valence near the ceiling—but the small hallway leading to the door was cut off from view. For a moment all they had was audio.

The door opened. Bellamy’s voice came, low and surly. “You’re late.”

A female voice answered. “Sorry, baby. I got here as quick as I could.”

A short pause, and then Bellamy’s voice again: “You’re Morgan?”

“I can be.” Her voice was teasing, somehow simultaneously insolent and sensual.

“What does that—”

“Can we discuss this in your room? I don’t like to linger too long in doorways, you know?”

Veronica was willing to bet Bellamy hated being interrupted almost as much as he hated tardiness in his prostitutes. But after a moment, the door shut, and both of them moved back into view.

The girl was tall and amply curvy with full, voluptuous features. She wore a form-fitting cocktail dress and high silvery heels, and her thick, dark hair was pinned up behind her head. She stood with her legs slightly parted, leaning on one hip.

She glanced around the room approvingly. “This is nice. Real nice room.” Then she turned to face Bellamy. “I’m sorry, baby, Morgan’s not coming tonight. She got in a car accident on the way. She’s okay, don’t worry, but her car is totaled. She called me begging to come and see if there was any way you’d take me, instead. I’m Kenzie.”

Veronica saw Bellamy’s hands twitch, ever so slightly. She gave a grimly satisfied smile. Bellamy had gotten predictable through all his attacks. He didn’t react well to having his fantasy interfered with; didn’t like girls going off script. “Morgan,” the girl he’d asked for, had been much more his usual type—delicate, slender, fine-boned. Getting someone else, specifically an Amazon with a centerfold body and a brassy attitude, was as off script as it got.

The girl seemed to sense his indecision. She put a hand on his forearm. “I won’t disappoint you.” Her voice was softer, suggestive.

He moved his arm away from her touch. “Fine.” He looked her up and down. “Go get cleaned up. Wipe off that lipstick, it’s fucking tacky. Then come on out and let me see you again, and I’ll decide if I’m going to keep you.”

She smiled coyly. “I’m pretty sure once you see what I’ve got you’re not going to want to trade me in.” She went into the bathroom, and Bellamy moved agitatedly around the room for a few minutes, plumping pillows, straightening things on the dresser top.

A moment later, the bathroom door clicked open. The girl stepped out. She’d changed into a short, tight chemise. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, her lipstick wiped away. Across the arc of one breast was the narrow line of a tattoo. It was hard to make it out in the video camera, but Veronica knew what it said:
GODDESS
.

“Like it?” the girl asked, pirouetting slowly in front of him.

“Don’t look at me!” Bellamy snapped. He stabbed his index finger at her chest. “God, why do so many of you bitches ruin yourselves with all this tattoo crap? It just makes you look like a cheap whore.”

“Whore? Sure. Cheap? No.” She gave a cool smile, not flinching as his finger prodded her flesh. “And talking mean costs you extra, so you should be a little nicer unless you want this to get expensive in a hurry.”

Veronica thought for just a moment that the video feed had frozen. Bellamy stood stock-still, as if trying to process what he’d just heard. “Kenzie” put her hands on her hips, Wonder Woman style.

Veronica had a split second to admire the woman’s solid brass ovaries before Bellamy’s hands shot out and grabbed at her throat.

The brunette deftly dodged out of his reach, her reflexes faster than Veronica would have guessed. She caught a glimpse of Bellamy’s shocked face as he came up empty. Then his face contorted in pain as the woman drove her knee forcefully between his legs. He crumpled to his knees, clutching his crotch, and she kicked him again, this time in the face.

He was still curled up on the floor when she stepped over his body and went to unlatch the door. Her heels were soft in the carpet. The door opened and an enormous, hulking mass of a man entered the room. The shoulders of his sports coat strained to contain him. Like many big men in the security field, Sweet Pea moved gracefully, almost silently.

“Hello, Mr. Kiss and Tell,” he said. His voice was a soft croon. He had a brisk, professional expression on his face as he looked the other man over. Veronica realized that he was sizing him up.

“Who the fuck are you?” Bellamy groaned. He struggled to push himself up. His face was flushed, a ribbon of blood trickling from one nostril.

Sweet Pea shrugged out of his jacket and handed it to the girl. He rolled his sleeves up. Veronica wondered in passing what he’d told the real Morgan, the girl Bellamy had ordered; the plan had been for Sweet Pea to intercept her in the lobby, pay her for her time, and send her away.

“Friend of Madelyn Chase. I bet you remember her. You met her just down the hall from this room, what, ’bout a year ago?” Bellamy’s look turned to one of dawning horror. Sweet Pea nodded, as if his suspicions had just been confirmed. “Got some questions for you about her.”

He glanced up at the girl who’d let him in. “You want to wait in the lobby, sweetheart?”

Isabella looked directly at Bellamy, the smile spreading wider across her face. She sat in a chair, crossing her legs and resting her hands on her knee.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” she said. “I like to watch.”

The following night, Veronica and Leo stepped out of the Mercury, and found themselves in the lights and noise at the heart of the Strip.

Drunken tourists staggered up and down the street, sipping on foot-tall frozen drinks. To the south she could see the Luxor’s spotlight piercing up through the murky sky; north was the Stratosphere’s glowing protrusion. Every inch in between flashed, sang, glittered, and roared. They made their way toward the corner, maneuvering past a crowd of tourists buying official
CSI
merchandise at a sidewalk kiosk. Just past the crush they had to wedge through a gauntlet of card-snappers. Veronica didn’t glance right or left, but Leo looked startled as one persistent guy shoved a card right into his hand. Veronica pushed him forward, and as they came out the other side, he looked down at what he’d been given. Blushing red, he fumbled and dropped it.

“What the hell?” he asked, staring back at the crowd behind them.

Veronica bent down to pick up the card. It showed a girl with large fake breasts, her nipples covered with Photoshop stars.
CALL MAI
, said the print along the top.
AT YOUR DOOR IN 20 MINUTES
.

“Pretty ballsy,” he said, frowning at the men who were still shoving their cards at everyone who passed them.

“They’re out of your jurisdiction, Detective,” she said. “Besides, we’ve got an appointment. Let’s stay on track.”

He made a face, then shrugged and followed her. She threw away the card in a trash can as she passed.

Desert Bluffs was Vegas’s newest golf course, open just a few months. Tucked behind the Mercury, it was a stretch of green fringed with palms and acacia trees that boasted eighteen holes, a half-dozen water features, and the biggest sand trap in North America. Leo and Veronica arrived at the clubhouse a few minutes before ten. Two people were waiting for them, a man and a woman.

Leo was back in a suit and tie, his beard gone. Today he was back to being Detective Leo D’Amato. As far as the SDPD was concerned, he’d been in the middle of a long weekend in Vegas, using a few hard-earned days of vacation to play the slots and watch Cirque du Soleil when Veronica’s tip came in. Convenient, because he’d be able to assist the Las Vegas police with their investigation, which seemed to be connected to the rape case he’d
just
been looking into back in San Diego.

“And a good thing too,” he’d told his CO when he’d taken the call. “I already lost my shirt at the craps table. Time to get back to work.”

He shook hands with the woman first. “Detective Garcia. Thanks so much for your help.” She was in her mid-forties, threads of gray weaving through her short dark hair. She was dressed for manual labor in heavy canvas work pants and boots. “This is Veronica Mars, the PI I told you about on the phone.”

“Pleasure to meet you, D’Amato. Mars. This is the property manager, Kevin Cornell.” She gestured to the man, sallow and slender in an English-cut suit. He cast Leo a fretful look.

“How long do you think this’ll take? Our earliest tee off tomorrow is at eight thirty. If we could just get this taken care of before then…”

Garcia laughed. “I keep trying to explain to him that this golf course is now a crime scene, but he doesn’t seem to get it. No one’s teeing off at eight thirty, Kevin.”

“We’ll try to be as efficient as we can,” Leo said. “But Detective Garcia’s right. You’ll probably need to cancel tomorrow’s clients. At least those before noon.”

Cornell gave a feeble little groan, but didn’t argue.

“The dogs definitely reacted out there, but we haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact spot,” Garcia said to Veronica and Leo. “It looks like it could be a long night.”

They all climbed into a golf cart, Cornell at the wheel, and took off into the darkness, headed toward the seventh hole.

The ride was dreamlike, surreal. The cart’s rising and falling movements as it passed over rolling terrain felt like a night flight in a glider. Straight ahead was an even darker horizontal swathe formed by a row of trees. Above them the lights of the Strip pulsed like the aurora borealis.

Even by night it was obvious the course was incredibly lush. Man-made lakes spread out on either side of them, dense with cattails. The grass looked velvet-soft.
All in the middle of a desert,
Veronica thought.
Water crisis be damned.

Floodlights came into view ahead, a few people moving around beneath them. The sand trap, nicknamed “the Little Mojave,” stretched out across twenty-five thousand square feet of the green, just surpassing “Hell’s Half Acre” at New Jersey’s Pine Valley as the new standard-bearer for sand trap grandiosity.

“How exactly did you get this lead again?” Garcia turned to glance at them in the backseat.

Leo glanced at Veronica. Veronica gave a brisk smile.

“Can we call it an anonymous informant and leave it at that?”

Garcia grinned. “I’m a Vegas cop, honey. That’s how
most
of our work gets done.”

They pulled up just outside a perimeter of police tape, then ducked underneath it. Four people in coveralls were digging, scraping, and sifting. Cornell covered his eyes and moaned.

“Relax, Mr. Cornell.” Veronica smiled brightly. “You’ll be able to put it right. I’m pretty sure this is what hospitality insurance was made for.”

Garcia handed Leo a shovel. Veronica picked up another from a small pile of implements. Silently, they got started.

The work was slow. They didn’t know how deep to dig, so forensics had been loath to bring out a bulldozer. Something that big could accidentally destroy evidence. But the trap was over a half-acre wide, a sprawling area to explore by hand. The dogs had helped to narrow the search, but not by much.

Veronica’s back ached, her hands starting to blister from the shovel. She thought about what she’d learned the night before, after she’d turned off the video at the point when Sweet Pea shed his coat and advanced on Bellamy. Plausible deniability had something to do with her decision not to watch, but mostly she just didn’t want to see what came next. She’d gone down to the bar, back in her wig, and met Sweet Pea an hour and a half later. He’d taken a seat on a stool next to her and ordered a Coke.

“I’d have thought you’d be ready for a drink after all that,” she said, not glancing at him.

“Not me. I’m eight years sober.” He took a sip. Then he turned to face Veronica and told her what she needed to know, his voice soft but distinct: “The Little Mojave.”

She was surprised at how unruffled he looked. His jacket was neat and crisp, and there was no blood or sweat, no smell of iron, no bruises. You would have thought he’d come straight from the office.

“What?”

“The Little Mojave. It’s a sand trap on the Desert Bluffs golf course. It was under construction in December, back when Maddy went missing.”

Veronica had been surprised to feel her heart sink. She’d known since first meeting with Sweet Pea and Isabella that Madelyn Chase—or Molly Christensen, or whoever she really was—was most likely dead. But hearing it stated so matter-of-factly made her shoulders sag.

“And Bellamy…”

“He’s en route to the ER. Iz told the front desk she’d heard screaming from the room. I saw an ambulance pull up about five minutes ago.”

The thought should have chilled her, but it didn’t. She’d made her choice. She’d known exactly what the result would be.

Sometimes, that was the job.

It was just after three a.m. when Garcia let out a shout. The rest of the team hurried toward her. Veronica moved slowly, setting down her shovel. There was no hurry. Not anymore.

A partially mummified foot protruded from the layer of soil below the sand.

They’d finally found Madelyn Chase.