Nightwalker (5 page)

Dillon shifted around, longing for even an hour’s sleep.

He closed his eyes tightly.

And then, in that state between wakefulness and sleep, in a netherworld between conscious thought and oblivion, he saw the maiden, felt her gentle hand on his face.

“Yes,” she whispered to him. “It is the beginning, the beginning—and the end.”

“I
see them dancing in the sky,” Timothy told Jessy.

She was driving him back to the home, and she felt torn. Worried about leaving him alone, she’d had Sandra come over to watch him this morning while she’d returned to the casino to turn her chips into cash—later exchanged for a cashier’s check made out to the home—and fill out the IRS forms. She’d never had to fill them out before, because her winnings—the few times she’d played a few dollars for fun—had never been close to enough to report to the government.

She didn’t mind. The government was welcome to its share.

She was concerned now because she had to work that afternoon, and even her sizable winnings weren’t enough to keep her job from being very important to her ongoing well-being. But Sandra had met her at the door when
she’d returned and suggested she might want to talk to someone at the home before she left Timothy there.

“Why?” she’d asked.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as I think, but…” Sandra hesitated. “He’s having conversations with imaginary people. And when I asked him who he was talking to, he gave me a sly look and said they were people in the walls, and that they were his friends and they made him happy, so I shouldn’t worry. And maybe, if he’s happy…”

Now it seemed that his friends were in the sky.

Maybe she was just nervous because she’d woken up in the night, certain that someone was watching her again. That kind of feeling usually vanished with the coming of day, though, and this time it hadn’t…. This morning, as she’d been brewing coffee and tossing raisin bread into the toaster, she’d paused again, feeling eyes on her before telling herself that you couldn’t feel someone watching you. Except that you
could
. Somehow people knew when they were being observed. Maybe it had to do with that huge part of the brain scientists said went unused.

But there hadn’t been anyone there. Not last night, and not this morning.

But this morning Timothy had been talking to people in the walls, and now he was seeing dancers in the sky.

Which one of us is actually going crazy here?
she asked herself.

The Hawthorne Home was just outside Las Vegas proper. She parked in front of the administration building, and Timothy frowned. She usually parked by
Building A, his building, when she was bringing him back from a visit or an outing.

“I have to go in and pay Mr. Hoskins,” she told him.

“Pay him?” Timothy asked indignantly.

She patted his hand. “Yeah, that’s life, Timothy,” she said, and leaned over to kiss his cheek. Once upon a time he’d been the best guardian in the world, and she still loved him so much.

“We all have to pay the rent, you know,” she said.

“Not in the day of the ghost dancers,” he said.

“Maybe, but that was a long time ago. And there’s no such thing as ghosts, anyway,” she added.

“But if there
were,
” Timothy said, cracking a dry grin, “they wouldn’t have to pay rent, would they? They’d just phase in, and phase out, huh?”

She was pleased by the pleasure Timothy took in his small joke. “I’m not so sure this would have been reservation land,” she said, grinning back. She started to tell him to wait in the car while she went inside to pay, then thought better of it. He still knew how to drive. His imaginary friends might suggest that he needed to run over to a convenience store for something.

“Why don’t you come in with me,” she suggested.

“I suppose that idiot Mr. Hoskins will be there?” he asked tartly.

She almost laughed aloud at his indignation. He was half Lakota, which had given him straight black hair—faded to white now—but those genes hadn’t reached his eyes. They were blue. He was still a handsome man, she thought, when he was standing straight and proud, as he was now, his face set in firm lines.

“Yes, I need to see him. And don’t say anything rude to him, okay? At least we only have to see him once a month or so….”

“I’ll be perfectly courteous,” he assured her.

She wasn’t at all certain about that. Hoskins was a man who didn’t just find himself uncomfortable around the aged, he flat out didn’t like them, and he let it show—which made her wonder why he’d taken this job to begin with. Well, like all people, he would get there soon enough, she thought. Or maybe he wouldn’t. There was always that alternative. But she hoped he would lead a long life, until one day he needed care himself, only to discover that the younger generation wanted nothing to do with
him
.

They got out of the car, and she linked arms with him as they walked inside together. The receptionist was pretty and young, and she looked at Jessy with surprise. “Miss Sparhawk! Good morning. We thought perhaps you’d decided to keep your grandfather at home with you. We…we weren’t expecting to see you.”

“Oh? Why not? I always enjoy having Timothy at home for a visit—” she turned to smile at him “—but it wouldn’t be practical for him to live with me, seeing as I have to work. I’ve brought the rent for the next few months,” she added, giving the other woman a saccharine smile.

“Oh. Well, if you’ll just excuse me…I’ll get Mr. Hoskins,” the girl said.

She didn’t ring his office, she jumped up and went in. A moment later Hoskins appeared, frowning. “Miss Sparhawk, Mr. Sparhawk. I hadn’t expected to see you.
I was assuming that you’d be making other arrangements today.”

“Well, as you can see, we’re not. I’ll be taking Timothy back to his room now,” she said, handing him a cashier’s check.

He stared at her as if she were a ghost herself. “He was paid up through today,” Jessy said. “Now he’s paid up for the next three months. Everything is in perfect order, contractually speaking.”

She didn’t know why Hoskins looked so distressed, and she didn’t care.

“Good day, Mr. Hoskins,” Timothy said, then turned to head out. Jessy said her own rather more triumphant goodbye, and followed him.

As they walked back to the car, Jessy saw a luxury sedan pull up a few spaces away. A young guy got out, then went around to help an elderly man from the passenger side, and the reason for Hoskins’s white face became suddenly clear. He’d been all set to rent Timothy’s room to someone else. She laughed as she and her grandfather got back into the car, sharing the joke as she drove over to his building.

They checked in downstairs with the young male orderly on desk duty during the day—every building had someone at the entry day and night since they weren’t taking any chances with wandering seniors—and headed up to Timothy’s room. In the upstairs hallway they ran into another orderly, Jimmy Britin, a tall African-American with a wide smile. “Timothy, Jessy,” he said, his surprised pleasure evident.

“Hoskins was about to rent my room right out from
right under me,” Timothy said. “But he underestimated my granddaughter. And the ghosts, of course.”

“Well…” Jimmy said, obviously unsurprised by what Timothy had said. He looked at Jessy, a question in eyes.
What did you do? Rob a bank?

As Timothy headed straight for his room, Jessy smiled ruefully at Jimmy. “I don’t know about any ghosts, but someone must have been looking out for me. I won a small fortune at the craps table.”

“That’s wonderful,” Jimmy told her.

“I never gamble, but…” She shook her head, as if puzzled by the whole thing.

“You were desperate. And you got lucky,” Jimmy said.

“Listen, I’ve got to get to work,” she told him.

“No sweat. I’ll get him situated. And stop looking so guilty. You take him home lots of weekends. Meanwhile, I’m here, and Liz Freeze, his favorite nurse, is on today, too. He’ll be fine. Now out of here.”

“I just wanted to let you know, he’s…”

“He’s what?” Jimmy asked.

“He’s hallucinating. A lot. About ghosts. They’re in the walls, in the sky…. He even talks to them.”

“Nothing I haven’t seen before. It’ll be okay, I promise,” he said, giving her a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

With a grateful smile, she hurried into Timothy’s room and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’m off to work now, okay?”

He nodded gravely. “Don’t worry. The ghosts are busy dancing in the sky. Things are going to be all right.”

“Of course they are,” she said, then gave him another kiss and hurried out. Glancing at her watch, she realized she was going to be a bit rushed getting into costume, but she would manage. Things will be all right, she told herself. She had the routine down pat.

She hurried back down to her car, but before she unlocked it, she paused and looked around, certain that someone was watching her again, but she couldn’t see anybody.

She checked the backseat.

No one.

She looked around one last time, then gave herself a mental shake and told herself to stop being ridiculous. It was a bright, sunny day. If anyone was watching her, it was Hoskins, no doubt ruing the fact that she had made the payment, so he couldn’t rent Timothy’s room to someone else—probably at a higher rate.

But the sensation of being watched followed her as she wove through traffic and all the way into the casino.

It was almost as if someone were sitting right next to her in the car.

“See? Two cameras, but notice the range,” Jerry Cheever told Dillon. “There’s Tanner Green, though it’s difficult to see him because there were a dozen other cars in the entryway at the same time. It looks as if he got out of a white limo. Can’t see the plate, though, and there must be a hundred of those things in town,” he said in frustration. “And Green looks like half the other drunks coming out of the woodwork at that time of night. He staggers there—” Cheever pointed at the screen “—but the guy ahead of him just shoves him away. See his look? Probably just thought it was a drunk falling on him. Then watch Green moving through the crowd. Everyone is talking to someone, no one is paying him the least bit of attention. Not even the doorman. He’s just holding the door open and watching that brunette with the huge tits, completely oblivious to everything else, even the guy with the knife in his back. Okay, right here he’s picked up on a new camera….” Cheever’s voice trailed off as he flicked the remote control, shifting to a scene in the casino. “He passed six cameras on his way to the craps table, but all you can see on any of them is him stumbling through the crowd—until he bumps into Miss Sparhawk and they both land on the craps table. And there you are, helping her back up.”

Cheever was discouraged; his frustration that so many security tapes could yield so few clues was evident in his voice.

“I’d like to run through them all again, if it’s all right,” Dillon told him.

“Be my guest. I’ve been staring at them for the last three hours. I had a video tech in here trying to home in on Green, but it didn’t help. Someone’s head, an arm, whatever, is blocking part of the view every step he took.”

Cheever tossed the remote to Dillon, who studied it for a moment, then hit a button to start the tape over. “It’s almost as if someone knew that outer drive was just out of the cameras’ useful range,” he mused.

“Just like,” Cheever agreed. “So what do you think it means?”

“I think it means our killer has to be someone involved with the casino, or who knows someone who is.”

“God only knows how many people that could be,” Cheever muttered.

Dillon turned in his chair and looked at Cheever, who was perched at the edge of his desk. “What’s happening with the knife?”

“The lab has it. But preliminary reports aren’t giving us a thing. It’s a short-bladed work knife, sold—literally—in the thousands here in town. It’s a popular blade for breaking the plastic bands on stacks of money. Every casino in Vegas has a few of them. And of course there’s not a hint of a fingerprint on the hilt. The killer probably wore gloves. Green was stabbed with considerable force, and the blade was just long enough to pierce the heart, which caused Green to bleed out. Because it was a short blade, he made it through to the craps table before he died.”

“Strange,” Dillon said, rewinding the tape. “Any possibility I could get a vid tech in here to look at this with me?” he asked.

Jerry Cheever stared at him, his eyes narrowing, as if his first instinct was to defensively tell him to go right to hell. But then he shrugged. “Sure. If you can find something I didn’t, that will be great. I’ll go grab someone.”

The minute he left the office, Dillon was out of his seat, looking at the files on Cheever’s desk. Tanner Green’s was right on top. He leafed through it quickly, but Cheever had nothing more than he had said.

A minute later a young woman from the video de
partment came in and introduced herself as Sarah Clay. She had a controller with her that made the remote look like a kiddie toy. Dillon started with the first tape, and they went through it frame by frame, but Cheever had been telling the truth. It wasn’t that the security equipment wasn’t high quality, because it was the best. But the car from which Tanner Green had been expelled was just far enough out of range, of both the cameras and the neon lights, that making out details was impossible.

A white limo. That much was obvious, and also useless. As Cheever had said, Vegas was thick with the things, especially white ones. Every casino owned limos, the casino bosses owned limos, the rental companies owned limos, even half the high rollers in town had their own.

There was no way to tell the make or model, but even once the tapes were enhanced, there didn’t seem to be any markings on it, nothing to indicate where it might have come from, which didn’t help him now but might mean something when they moved on to the process of elimination.

They went through the other tapes in order, with Dillon asking the tech to freeze certain frames and enhance them, but once again, Jerry Cheever had been dead-on. The crowd in the casino that night had worked heavily against them. The best video tech in the world couldn’t remove a body blocking a body, and even though the different angles caught by the different cameras usually helped with that kind of problem, this time they were shit out of luck.

“Are we through?” Sarah asked him politely, glancing at her watch.