Heather Graham - Nightwalker

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.”