My radar pinged and I said, “Is the blood male or female?”
“Funny you should ask—it’s female.”
“Blood type?”
“AB negative.”
Candice and I had been in more than a few scrapes together, and at the hospital after one of those scrapes I’d learned that she had AB negative blood. I remembered from my freshman biology class in college that AB negative was the rarest type of blood, which was why the odd fact about my BFF stuck in my head.
“Brice?”
“Yeah?”
“Candice has AB negative blood.”
He paused before saying, “Well, if she were going to fake her own death, she’d probably put something like that in the car to make us believe it was really her.”
“But that makes no sense,” I said. “Candice knows full well that water corrupts blood evidence. Why would she waste her own blood on something that would likely be useless to the investigation? And, what’s more, you said that they already checked the proteins against Saline’s blood type, right?”
“Maybe she planted it at the crash site,” Brice said reasonably.
“Yeah, but that makes no sense either,” I told him. “Candice knows she has a rare blood type. Less than one percent of the population has AB negative blood. Why would she put a blanket covered in her own blood at the scene when she should also know there is a ninety-nine percent chance of it not matching Saline’s blood type? And with something like that at the scene, CSI would definitely test it against Saline’s DNA if she came up dead, just to make sure it matched the victim.”
And then I remembered the bloodstain on the towel in the bathroom and I felt a small shudder travel down my spine. “I don’t think she left that blanket there on purpose, Brice. I think Candice is hurt. Bad.”
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said, his voice tight as if he couldn’t bear the thought of his wife somewhere out there, injured.
I told him what I’d found in the bathroom and he and I talked for several more minutes, going over the facts as we knew them and trying to put the pieces together to form a coherent picture. I think by the end of the conversation we were more confused than when we started, and I knew I’d rattled him by telling him about the bloody towel. I finally hung up with him and moved over to the dining room table to take a seat. I’d made up my mind while talking to Brice and my plan going forward was simple. I was going to stay put until Candice came back and then I was going to confront her and hope like hell she didn’t kill me.
So I sat there for an hour, drumming my fingers on the tabletop, watching the door, basically waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did.
After two hours, when I was good and bored, I went to my suitcase and pulled out my laptop, thinking I might as well try to work on the case while I waited. Using my phone as a hot spot, I logged on and began to write out everything I knew about what was going on. That took nearly forty-five minutes.
At the end of it I sat back and studied the screen. It was so much information that it felt overwhelming. Getting up from the table, I rooted around in my suitcase again, coming up with a set of blank three-by-five cards.
This was a trick I’d learned from Candice, who taught me to write out the most basic facts about a case, lay them on a flat surface, and wait to see what dots I could connect. The method had worked well for us in the past, and it seemed like this case could also benefit from the technique.
Before writing down the facts, I decided to follow a timeline; I’d start with what I believed was the first relevant fact. “Candice goes to Vegas to get married,” I said as I wrote that out on a card. Eyeing the calendar on my phone, I added the date almost exactly six weeks before and set that on the dining room table.
“Next, she meets with Kato. . . .” I put that card on the table and moved on. “Next she meets with Saline.” I paused then and realized I didn’t know when Candice had met with Saline. It could have been either before or after she met with Kato. Still, I knew she’d met with her, so I jotted that down; then I got another card and said, “She hangs out with Robinowitz at some point too.” As I didn’t know what specific date she’d met with the good doctor, I wrote it out and put it next to the Saline and Kato cards.
I tapped my lip while I thought about what might’ve come next and realized I did know at least one date. “March sixth, Lenny Fusco is murdered,” I mumbled. As I was writing that out, however, my radar pinged, and not just a little ping—it was more of a PING!
“Hmmm,” I mused. “Lenny Fusco. The domino that set this whole thing in motion?”
I knew very little about Candice’s ex-husband, other than he’d been the one to train Candice in the art of private detecting, but he was such a sleazeball that he’d eventually lost his license and had operated under Candice’s license for the duration of their short marriage.
I also knew that the last time we’d encountered Lenny, Candice had been mad enough to kill him.
Still, that was over two years ago, and it wasn’t like Candice to carry a grudge. Or was it? I sat down at the table and pulled my laptop close. My fingers flew over the keyboard as I did a search on Lenny Fusco.
The first hit was the story of his body being discovered, and the police indicating that he’d been shot in the face, execution-style and at point-blank range. One week earlier, he’d been reported missing by his wife, who said that she’d seen him off to work, only to learn later that Lenny had never arrived at his job at the Bellagio. His abandoned car was found in the parking lot of the hotel, but no one remembered seeing him enter the casino/hotel.
And then I read a quote that made me suck in a breath. It was taken from the detective assigned to the case, Detective Robert Brosseau, who said, “We are investigating possible links between the victim and organized crime, but at this time, I cannot state definitively that this was a mob hit.”
Feeling almost too excited to type, I switched away from that window over to my personal list of contacts and scrolled through the Bs. A few seconds later I had the detective on the phone. “Robert!” I sang. “It’s Abby Cooper calling.”
“Abby!” my old friend replied. “Long time no talk to, lady. How’s that husband of yours? You two enjoying married life?”
“We are, we are,” I said. Then I got down to business. “Listen, Robert, I’m doing a little digging into one of your cases, and I’m hoping you can give me some background on it.”
“I’m guessing you want to know about Lenny Fusco. Am I right?”
“You are.”
“Abby, don’t you think this is one case you shouldn’t get involved in?”
“You mean because Candice is my best friend and the prime suspect for the murder?”
“Exactly because of that.”
I sighed. “Robert, I know that Candice is looking pretty guilty right now, but until I hear a confession come out of her mouth, my money is still on her.”
“How’s she doing, by the way?” Robert asked. “I heard she’s in a coma.”
“She’s . . . hanging in there. Anyway, about Lenny Fusco. I’m assuming you put it together that Lenny and Candice were once married?”
“I did, and I was the one who brought it up to the Feds when they came knocking.”
I felt my temper flare, and even thought Robert and I were old friends, I couldn’t help snapping at him. “Why would you do that? Candice was your friend too, Rob!”
“Hey, hey, take it easy on me, would ya?” he said. “Listen, I wasn’t going to mention it to them until I found out that Lenny met with Candice the same day he was murdered.”
“Wait, what?”
“I found all this out when I started digging into Lenny’s job at the Bellagio,” he explained. “I remembered Candice calling me right after she and Brice arrived in town; she wanted to have dinner with me and Nora, but I was on
my last week of working the night shift, and Nora’s mom had knee surgery and needed some extra attention, so we couldn’t make it work.
“Anyway, Candice had mentioned that she and Brice were staying at the Bellagio, and I didn’t even make the connection to the two of them until I heard from one of Lenny’s coworkers that in the days leading up to his disappearance, he’d been overly interested in one of the female guests at the hotel. Lenny had a pretty good gig going, monitoring the surveillance cameras for any security issues. They pay those guys top dollar to catch and report people trying to cheat the system, or who look like they’re about to cause trouble. When I started poking through Lenny’s workplace hunting for clues, the coworker pointed me to Lenny’s computer logs, and that’s when I discovered that he’d had Candice under surveillance almost from the moment she walked into the hotel. His computer log shows him tracking her from camera to camera throughout the hotel, restaurants, and casino. Then the tracking stopped sometime around noon on the fourth day she’s there, and that happens to be the same time Candice fails to show up at a massage she’d scheduled in the hotel spa, but going back through the surveillance tapes, we were able to see her leaving the hotel with Lenny hot on her heels. We’re not sure where they went or what they talked about, but they both came back to the hotel about an hour and a half later. A couple of days after that, the exact same scenario occurs: Candice schedules a spa appointment, cancels at the last minute, and she and Lenny leave the Bellagio within ten minutes of each other, both of them returning an hour or so later. A while after that, Lenny agrees to cover the night shift for a sick coworker, and his boss lets him head home early to catch some z’s.
“Lenny’s wife confirms that she found him sleeping on the couch when she got home from work. She woke him up for dinner; then he went back to sleep for a few, then took a shower and told her he’d see her in the morning. He left their place at eleven and that’s the last anyone saw or heard from old Lenny.”
“But where was Candice at that time?” She had to have been with Brice, and therefore had a solid alibi. The security cameras at the Bellagio would no doubt show that.
“We fished around for more footage and found Candice leaving the hotel at around eleven. She returned fifty minutes later with a plastic bag with the CVS logo on it. According to the statement her husband gave the Feds, Candice said she had a headache, and went out for some pain meds.”
“Did you follow up with footage from CVS?”
“We did,” Brosseau admitted. “And we see her there for about a half hour, lingering in the magazine section.”
“Okay, so at least she has an alibi for Lenny’s murder.”
“There’re still twenty minutes that are unaccounted for, Abby.”
I rolled my eyes. “You really think Candice murdered her ex-husband and disposed of his body in twenty minutes?”
“I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been a challenge, but it’s physically possible if Candice really wanted to pull it off.”
I put my elbows on the table and rubbed my forehead. Why was absolutely everything pointing back at Candice? She had to have known she was under video surveillance at the Bellagio. If Lenny went missing and was later found dead, of course they’d look at her, especially since the pair had such a volatile past.
Desperate and grasping at straws, I said, “Robert, is there anyone else you looked at for Lenny’s murder?”
“Well, sure,” he said. “Lenny still worked the occasional case out of an office on the south side. We found a file that he’d worked up on a woman named Saline Hamon.”
My breath caught. “You’re kidding.”
“You know her?”
“No,” I lied. “But keep talking. What was in the file?”
“According to Lenny’s research, she arrived in Vegas about ten years ago at the ripe old age of nineteen. She worked the strip joints for a while and moved up to the escort service. Eventually, she started hanging around old men with heart conditions.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yep. She dated three guys old enough to be her grandfather, and they all died within a year of meeting her—of natural causes according to the coroners’ reports—trust me, I checked. Anyway, after each one bit the dust, he left Saline a little money, which she used to go to real estate school, and then parlayed that knowledge into some property investments that made her some pretty good coin. Of course, the real estate bubble popped in ’oh seven, and Saline was up to her eyeballs in debt. Then she starts hanging around with this guy, Frank Garafolo, who owns Big G’s Hotel and Casino, and suddenly she’s the owner of a swanky new condo and she opens up a title company that handles all of the condo sales for Big G’s. But in one or two of the surveillance photos in the file, Saline is seen on the arm of Salazar Kato, and shortly after that, she’s shopping at all the best stores in town. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that she was playing both men for their money, and they’re known rivals—definitely not the kind of guys you want to cross, especially against each other.”
“Why is she a person of interest in Lenny’s homicide?”
“It’s a couple of things,” Robert said. “Mostly it’s the way Lenny conducted his investigation. It starts out pretty normal—some photos, some background checks, some credit reports—but then he’s tracking her across town on his days off from the Bellagio. And the photos go from faraway shots of her in a shop, to close-ups of her face, her chest, her legs, and her rear. I saw the photos and I can’t really blame the guy—Saline is a looker—but it’s pretty obvious he became obsessed with her.”
“You think she found out about the surveillance?”
“I do. Mostly because the file is an inch thick and it appears it was never delivered to whoever ordered him to dig up dirt on her. Well, that and now she’s disappeared. There’s no trace of her since last week.”
I knew exactly where she was, but I wasn’t about to divulge that to Robert. “Did you share any of this with the Feds?” I asked next.
“Of course, but they didn’t want to hear it. They like Candice for the murder, Abby.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t.”
“Do they know you’re rooting around in this?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I’ll keep my mouth shut, but I really think you should butt out. Candice got herself into this mess. There’s no reason you should go down with her.”
“Noted,” I said stiffly. “Thanks, Detective. Please give my best to Nora.”
I hung up with Brosseau and tapped my finger on the card marked “Lenny Fusco.” All of this started with him. He ran surveillance on Saline and then he monitored Candice and then he got killed. By either Candice or Saline.
“What if they were working together?” I said aloud, and I felt a lightness in my stomach. I sat up straighter. “Saline and Candice were working together?” Again I felt that familiar lightness that indicated I’d hit on something that was true. And yet, somehow it didn’t quite fit.
I stood up and began to pace, trying to talk it out. “So, Saline finds out that Lenny Fusco is running surveillance on her, and she and Candice team up to kill him?” That felt way too far-fetched given the leaden heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Okay, then maybe Lenny mentions Saline to Candice and . . .” I paused. My whole middle had lit up like the Fourth of July. “Lenny told Candice about Saline!” Finally I had a piece of the puzzle that felt solid, like the corner piece I could work everything else off of.
I just knew that was the beginning of the timeline too. I began to talk it out. “Lenny sees Candice at the Bellagio and recruits her for something having to do with Saline. Like, maybe he’s concerned about her habits with older men, or . . . Oh! Wait! Saline is engaging in dicey activity by leading on two dangerous men: Kato and Big G. Maybe Lenny tries to warn Saline off, but she won’t listen, so he asks Candice to intervene. Candi
ce and Saline meet and have a talk, which is where Frank gets that photo he showed me, and between the two of them they come up with a plan to end it with Kato, so Candice then goes to Kato on Saline’s behalf, and at the meeting she tells him it’s over and he gives Candice a big wad of cash for . . . for . . . Saline’s expenses? As a farewell gesture? For old times’ sake?” I threw my hands up in the air. “I have no idea.”
Moodily I sat down in the chair again. Just when I’d been making progress, I came to a point in the story that made little sense.
Kato, Candice, Saline, and Lenny. These were the four players with multiple connections to one another, but how they all lined up I still wasn’t sure.
I then had another thought, and that was to do a spread of three-by-five cards with all the characters involved in the case. Maybe if I created a cast, I might be able to follow the play.
It took me only a few minutes, but I wrote out every person I thought was involved, and laid them on the table, thinking I’d be able to visualize a possible hidden connection.
During the time I was writing out the cards, I allowed my intuition to guide me and I set the characters on the table almost without thinking, allowing my radar to choose the spot on the table. When I was done, I realized two things right away. The way I’d arranged the cast was roughly in a circle, and the middle space, where everyone else revolved around, was empty.
“I’m missing someone,” I whispered, feeling my senses tingle. I looked long and hard at the cast, and ticked them off as I read their names out loud. “Candice, Saline, Dr. Robinowitz, Salazar Kato, Frank Garafolo, Lenny Fusco. Who could I be missing?”
I tapped my finger impatiently on the tabletop. The answer felt right in front of me, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out whom I’d left out. What’s more, that mysterious person was at the center of all of this; I felt that deep in my gut. So I wrote out a note card with a question mark and the name “Mystery Person,” put the card in the center of all the other names, and shifted farther down the table, where I went back to the timeline and tried to work it through from there, writing out even more cards as I went.