Her 24-Hour Protector (10 page)

She needed to speak to her dad, find a way to broach the subject of the death threats, and she’d make her decision from there. But as Jenna closed the file the headlights of a car swept up the driveway, and she heard the distinct crackle of tires approaching on wet driveway. She glanced up. She had to get out of here, fast. Quickly shoving the file back into the drawer, she closed it and flipped off the light.

Jenna couldn’t face her father now…she needed to think.

Rebecca Lynn had set her up to find these. Why? And how had Rebecca Lynn known about them in the first place? Had Harold told Rebecca Lynn himself? And, if so, why not tell the rest of the family? Her stepmother had succeeded in her goal tonight—she’d driven a needle of mistrust into Jenna. Mistrust of her own father.

Carefully shutting his office door, she made her way quickly through the living room and up the marble stairs. She reached the landing just as the front door opened.

Heart thudding, Jenna peered down over the banister, saw her dad’s distinguished silver head. And with a sick feeling, Jenna knew. She just knew that she was going to be forced right up against the fence, and she was going to have to pick a side.

The side of her family, a place of murky allegiances and mixed-up love, a place she’d always felt secure, the only place she’d ever really known.

Or the side of law—Lex’s side.

I
t was late Sunday afternoon, and both Lex and Rita Perez were still in the FBI office. Perez was meticulously combing through public records of Rothchild real estate dealings, putting together a detailed timeline of transactions. She was looking, in particular, for links between Harold and Frank Epstein’s old cartel. Lex, on the other hand, was focusing on Frank Epstein himself.

The two families seemed to be intersecting in relation to himself and to this case, and Lex didn’t believe in coincidence.

He was finding it tough to accept Mercedes Epstein had shown up at Jenna’s auction, uninvited, and started a bidding war on him purely by chance. Or was he just trying to read too much into it all because Mercedes had worked at the Frontline at the same time as his mother? And because Frank Epstein had been the one to both hire—and fire—Sara Duncan.

Lex rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was also troubled by the fortune-teller’s allusion to his mother
being connected to the old Vegas underworld. Or was he also giving too much weight to the Lucky Lady’s strange words?

There was no doubt in most minds that Frank Epstein did once have ties to the Chicago mob and subsequently to organized crime in Las Vegas. Epstein, now in his seventies, would have been in his late twenties in the late 1950s—a time when gangsters still owned and ran all the big Vegas joints. Epstein was reputed to have had a sharp eye for a deal, even at a very young age, and he’d made connections and climbed fast, eventually forming a powerful business cartel that had bought the old Frontline Casino. It was a mob-owned, Chicago-based union pension fund that had enabled Epstein to finance the razing of the Frontline and the subsequent construction of his massive Desert Lion—the sheer scope of his new casino unprecedented at the time.

Those were the days when no bank or legitimate investor would’ve come near the gambling business. Without mob money, the Vegas boom would have never happened. They were the days before Howard Hughes had started investing massive proceeds from his airline sale into Vegas property, giving gambling its first positive image, opening the doors to corporate ownership of hotel-casinos. After Hughes, Wall Street investors had finally sat up and started taking notice—and gambling had become acceptable to mainstream America. It was about that time that the federal government had started a massive crackdown on organized crime in Las Vegas, running most of the old gangsters out of town.

Epstein, however, had managed to elude the dragnet. He’d given the feds nothing they could pin on him. But they’d continued to watch him. They’d kept files on him, looking, in particular, to connect him with some of the brutal murders alleged to have been carried out by a man named Tony Ciccone.

A mob enforcer.

Lex continued to scroll down through the old microfiche files the FBI had compiled on Epstein dating back to the 1970s, noting that Epstein had hired Ciccone from Chicago to handle security at the Frontline.

He sat back, reached absently for his coffee mug, sipped. It was cold. He pulled a face, shoved the mug aside, thinking that one needed to understand the context of Vegas at the time. It was a period when the mob literally ruled Sin City. And people like Ciccone—who took orders from men like Epstein—commonly got away with murder. Murder and gangsters even added to the edgy glamour and allure that was Las Vegas in that era.

But when Ciccone had eventually come under investigation for a run of increasingly violent homicides, Epstein seemed to have severed ties with him. Lex scrolled further through the files, noting it was around this same time that some sort of rivalry had developed between Ciccone and Epstein. And Ciccone had broken away from Epstein, forming his own camp, and allegedly muscling into Epstein’s business, on Epstein’s turf.

It was also around this period that Lex’s mother had been murdered.

Lex rubbed his brow. Was he insane for even thinking along these lines? What on earth could Sara Duncan have had to do with any of these people? The fortune-teller’s words snaked back into his mind.
“Everyone was touched by those tendrils of evil. Everyone…”

He shook off the thought, turned back to the files.

Apparently, before the feds had been able to pin the homicides on Ciccone, the Italian-American had simply vanished. Dematerialized into the ether. The FBI had mounted one of the country’s biggest manhunts for the violent mob enforcer, but no one ever found a clue what had happened to him. It remained an unsolved mystery to this day.

And from the point of Ciccone’s disappearance, Frank
Epstein’s business seemed to have suddenly gone squeaky clean, Epstein apparently transitioning seamlessly into the new corporate era of Las Vegas.

The new Vegas has risen…

However, the FBI files on Epstein had remained open, and the feds continued to keep him in their sight. Now, decades later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FBI’s financial crimes unit, finally had a small lead on Epstein’s alleged involvement in a massive junk bond scam. And now an undercover investigation into some of Epstein’s other holdings and New York Stock Exchange transactions was currently under way.

Lex reached for his coffee, almost taking another swallow before he recalled how cold it was. He set the mug back down, turned to Perez. “You got any idea yet when exactly Harold and Frank were on good business terms, and when things went sour between them?”

Perez flipped through her notebook. “I got here that in the early 1980s, they were still in business. Seems things went sideways in the mid-80s when they dissolved a formal partnership.”

“Does the dissolution revolve around any deal in particular?”

“Still looking into that.”

Lex chewed on the inside of his cheek, thinking. Harold was a little younger than Epstein; still he’d been around and doing business in Las Vegas long enough to have been tainted by the organized crime that had once ruled Sin City.

“What are you thinking?” asked Perez.

About who could have killed my mother, and why.

“Just can’t help wondering what happened to Tony Ciccone, you know?”

Perez twisted her thick, dark hair round a pencil and made it into a bun, the pencil sticking out the top. She did that when she was getting tired and needed to keep focus. “You think Epstein had Ciccone whacked or something?”

Lex shrugged. “A lot of people apparently thought so at the time. Ciccone was in Epstein’s employ, and when Ciccone started drawing too much federal heat to Epstein during the crackdown, it looks like Epstein tried to sideline him, send him back to Chicago. It appears Ciccone didn’t want to go home. He dug in, started trying to muscle in on some of Epstein’s Vegas business himself. Then, poof, suddenly he’s gone.” Lex snapped his fingers. “Just like that. And Epstein goes clean as a whistle.”

Perez got up, stretched her back. “I’m beat. Want some food? I’m going to get takeout.”

“Uh…yeah, sure. Did you manage to get those records on Mercedes Epstein I asked you about yesterday?”

Perez rummaged through the growing pile of papers on her desk, extracted a file. She slapped it down on Lex’s desk, reached for her jacket. “Pizza or Chinese?”

“Whatever,” Lex said, opening the file.

“Oh—” she stopped at the door “—that fire in South America, at Joseph Rothchild’s old offices? No record of it.”

“No surprise, either,” Lex muttered as Perez left the room. But what Lex saw when he opened the file
did
come as a surprise—Mercedes was not her real name. It was a stage name.

She’d been born Mary Roberts and had officially changed her name when she’d arrived in Vegas and started dancing. And what Lex read next chased a strange shiver over his skin.

Mary Roberts, aka Mercedes Epstein, originally hailed from bluegrass country, a Kentucky girl who’d run away from home at the age of seventeen. In the file that Perez had compiled were copies of newspaper stories about a distraught couple searching for their missing teenage daughter. But it was the next line that had chilled Lex.

The city Mary Roberts hailed from was
Lexington,
Kentucky.

He sat back, feeling vaguely shaky. Not many people had
the name
Lexington.
Personally he didn’t know one. This meant nothing, of course, just
another
coincidence that a woman who had bid a fortune on him hailed from Lexington, Kentucky, and that she was the wife of a one-time mob man who had sacked his mother for being pregnant with
him.
And that she shared Lex’s passion for orphan-related charities.

He dragged his hand though his hair, cursed softly. Perhaps the Lucky Lady was right. Perhaps Las Vegas was rubbing off on him, and now he was starting to look for signs, for connections. For omens.

He thought again of The Tears of the Quetzal, of the legendary curse.

Of Jenna.

He shook it all off. Superstition was ludicrous. He was a cop. He dealt in cold hard facts. Logic.

Still, it felt weird. He felt off, and no matter how freaking nuts it all was, somehow it
was
all dovetailing. On impulse, he grabbed the phone, dialed the FBI’s financial crimes unit in New York, asked to speak to someone on the Epstein investigation.

It was late Sunday evening and Harold was still holed up in his study. Jenna paced impatiently outside her father’s door. She’d been trying to find an opportunity to speak to him all day, and now she was dressed up and due at Cassie’s big birthday bash being held at the Desert Lion.

But she couldn’t go without speaking to her dad first. She just could not leave this for another day. She stopped outside his door, sucked in her breath, knocked. Harold detested being bothered in his study.

Jenna waited impatiently, getting tense. She rapped again, harder.

“What is it?” her father barked from inside.

She opened the door. The lights were dimmed, and Harold
Rothchild was sitting in his great leather chair with his back to her, feet up on an ottoman, whiskey tumbler balanced on the arm rest, as he listened to female vocals with the clear voice of a bird. He did this sometimes when he was brainstorming a particularly thorny problem.

He glanced round.
“Jenna?”

“I need to talk to you.” She set her purse down, struggling suddenly for a way to broach the issue.

He studied her for a long moment. “Why don’t you take a seat and—”

“I don’t want to sit. I want the truth, Dad. You’re hiding things from me, and I want to know why.” She gestured in the direction of his desk drawer. “Why didn’t you tell me about the additional death threats to our family? Why did you keep those other five notes from the police? And what’s all that stuff about revenge for a past deed and The Tears of the Quetzal? What was it,
really,
Dad, that got Candace killed?”

His face, usually so controlled, his blue eyes usually so deceptively friendly, suddenly turned dark and thunderous.

A warning to be cautious whispered through Jenna. She’d intended to broach the issue delicately, but she’d already botched it in her frustration. And she could see her father had already had a couple of Scotches. It was at times like this, loosened by alcohol, that Harold could get mean, and she’d become a little afraid of him, even though she loved him so much. Because of his power to hurt and reject her.

Because of her own need to be loved.

All those old childish emotions suddenly began twisting into a thorny braid in Jenna’s chest now.

“You saw the notes?” he asked quietly.

“I saw them,” she said. “Why did you hide them, Dad?”

He said nothing.

Anger began to bubble deep in her gut, fueled by her con
flicting emotions. Jenna tried to keep her cool, but control was elusive. “Candace died, Dad—she was
murdered.
And those notes threaten our entire family with the same fate. That includes
me.
But you didn’t think to let me know, did you? Oh no, the great Harold Rothchild is immune from death threats. Little Jenna doesn’t need to know anything. Just use her to play with the FBI agent and mess up his homicide investigation so it can all be thrown out of court later—”

“Jenna, that’s not—”

“Not true? Why should I believe a thing you say now? I think Lex was right—I think you
do
want to use me to obfuscate this whole business.” Her heart was racing, moisture now filling her eyes. “Why? Why are you doing this? Why do you not want the police to solve this thing? Why are you putting us all in danger?”

He swung his feet down off the ottoman, took a deep slug of his drink, set it down and glared at her. “What were you doing in my office?”

“Is
that
all you care about?”

“What—” he repeated, cold and slow “—were you doing in my office?”

“The…door was open and so was the desk drawer—”

He got swiftly to his feet. Even in her four-inch heels, Harold positively towered over Jenna. She instinctively cringed inside but refused to take a step back. “Rebecca Lynn had been in here, Dad.
She
left the door ajar, and she left that top drawer open with the file sticking out.”

A fleeting unreadable look shadowed his features.

“Rebecca Lynn knew about those death threats, Dad, and she purposefully set me up to see them.” Jenna wasn’t going to mince things now. She wanted to poke at him, about Rebecca Lynn, about everything.

Harold regarded her for a long moment, as if trying to control his rage before he spoke again. Jenna felt Napoleon
nudge against her ankles, but she resisted the powerful urge to scoop up her little dog, hold him tight. Instead she met her father’s glare head-on.

“They’re idle threats, Jenna.” He watched her eyes carefully as he spoke. “They’re simply designed to unnerve us. My belief is that someone read in the papers about Candace, the ring, the legendary curse and just wanted to jump in on the whole Rothchild media circus. I will
not
allow the sender of the notes that pleasure.”

“Is that not a conclusion the FBI should be making?”