Luke Murphy - Dead Man's Hand

Jimmy nodded. “I’d say. To a tee.”

But forensics could still find something.

“Okay, I’ll take the desk. You check the rest of the room,” Dale said.

First, he checked the call list on the phone, but it showed mostly calls to the casino. Then he read each item on the papers stacked on top. “Hey, these pages are out of order, like someone rifled them and hurried to straighten them.”

“What are they?”

He shrugged. “Bills and accounts. We’ll just take it all in.” He opened the desk drawers and thumbed through the contents. There was very little.

“Something’s not right, Jimmy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve heard about Grant. He was obsessive with his work and a conscientious man to the point that he didn’t even have a CFO or business manager. He only trusted himself and his son. There should be boxes full of bills, receipts or documents from the casino around here. This was swept clean.”

“Maybe he does all that somewhere else?”

“Like the office where Watters was supposed to have been this morning. You find anything?”

Jimmy removed the Rembrandt painting. “There’s a safe back here.”

He pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open. “Glen, it’s Dale. Send a forensics team over to the Grant home. I need a full sweep of the office plus a safe cracked. Pull it all into the station. The search warrant we have covers repeat searches. Hurry!” Dale hung up. “Let’s go.”

The detectives walked outside and joined Linda Grant and the two officers, who were standing near the edge of the flower garden.

Linda had the phone pressed to her ear and dropped it when the detectives arrived. “Find anything?”

“I don’t know. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Grant. Some people will be coming over. Please cooperate with them. Again, our deepest sympathies for your loss.”

When Linda had entered the house, Dale turned to his patrol officers. “You guys wait here until Glen arrives. I don’t want our number-one suspect to destroy any evidence.”

The cops nodded.

Jimmy backed out of the driveway and through the gate opening. They drove thirty feet before stopping next to a car parked across the street. Dale rolled down his window and spoke to the man sitting in the driver’s seat. “All right, Johnny, you and Stan are up. Don’t let that woman out of your sight and report anything unusual. You have your thick soles on just in case the pursuit ends up on foot?”

“You got it, Dale.”

He handed his colleague a GPS unit. He was hoping that Linda Grant was not as cool as she looked and would contact whoever killed Doug Grant. That was all he could do for now.

As they headed back to the station, Jimmy was silent. Finally he said, “Ace Sanders and Doug Grant weren’t best friends.”

Dale nodded. “For more reasons than one. We know he kept bugging Grant to buy the casino. But do you think the rumors are true that he slept with his wife too?”

Jimmy smiled. “This is Vegas, right?”

“I deliberately didn’t mention Sanders to see how Mrs. Grant would respond to my line of questioning, what there was. We know that Sanders and Grant have been feuding over the years. The hatred between the two is well documented and we also have heard rumors about Sanders and Linda.”

“How did she do?”

They traded a look, but Dale didn’t answer. He only smiled. Linda had acted exactly as he had thought she would. Linda Grant was at the top of his current suspect list, but Ace Sanders was a very close second.

Linda slipped into the master bedroom with her cell.

“That son of a bitch! The nerve of that man to keep me on hold for this long. I’ll have him disbarred before he can even say the word lawsuit .” She slammed the phone down. Her first order of business was to fire her attorney.

She opened the entertainment unit, which was just a TV monitor feed from the hidden camera at the front of the property. A parked car sat across the street from the gate.

She turned off the screen and got down on her knees, reaching under the bed. Opening up a trap door, she removed a cell phone box and carried it into the separate dressing area of the master suite. She locked the door. Unwrapping the box, she dialed a number.

“What?”

“It’s me.”

“I know who it is. You better be using the phone I bought you.”

“I am.”

“What do you want?”

“The cops were just here.”

“So?”

“So? You told me I’d be protected. You said nothing would happen to me as long as I followed the plan. Now I have cops here asking me where I was when Doug was killed.”

“Is this the Linda I know? Take a deep breath and calm down. This is like a cop show. Suspect the wife, immediate family, blah, blah, blah. As long as you don’t do anything stupid, they have nothing. The LVMPD is on a fishing expedition.”

“What should I do?”

“Call Ace.”

“What?”

“Call Ace and tell him you’re worried because the cops were there. Go hysterical. And Linda?”

“What?”

“Make sure to call him from your landline.”

She disconnected the call when there was a rap on the door. “Mrs. Grant, we need you to come out.”

“Hold on, I’m not dressed,” she called back.

She picked up the portable phone. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and thought about what she would say. She punched the number to the direct private phone line in his office at the Golden Horseshoe Hotel and Casino.

“Ace, it’s me. Two homicide detectives were just here. They questioned me for half an hour before searching the entire house. But I don’t think they found anything. The lead detective grilled me. He thinks I killed Doug. Cops are sitting outside now watching the house. They…” Her words were fast and her breathing rapid.

He cut her off before she could say more. “Listen, Linda. I can’t talk now. I will contact you when I can. Don’t call me. Hang up now and wait for my call.”

The call was disconnected and another knock came on the bathroom door.

“Mrs. Grant, we’re supposed to keep you in sight at all times.”

She applied lipstick and mascara, rolled the top of her dress down, exposing just enough cleavage to draw attention, then whirled and opened the door.

“Here I am, boys.”

Chapter 12

The detectives arrived back after three to a buzzing station. The room was noisier than usual with gossip and unanswered questions.

Dale threw down his fast-food lunch and sat at his messy desk. He opened a drawer and swept every piece of paper inside. The new case files had been stacked on the filing cabinet. He grabbed the files and tossed them onto his clean desk. The forensics, coroner, crime scene and street police all had completed their reports. There was a crime scene analysis and a crime scene sketch as well as Grant’s bio. But other than the tread marks found on the side of the road, nothing else had yet been discovered. The reports offered little cause for optimism. He had already issued an APB for Grant’s missing car.

The phone call was the only promising lead. It just didn’t make sense.

“Hey, Dale.” One of his officers approached his desk. “Linda Grant has already placed a call to Ace Sanders. Sanders didn’t let Linda speak long enough to say anything incriminating.” He started to walk away and then stopped. “Oh yeah, the tracking device has been planted on Linda’s chauffeured limo and is operational.”

Dale thanked his officer, took a long gulp of coffee, powered up his computer and grabbed the first file. Then he heard his sergeant storm out of his office.

“Has anyone seen Dayton?” The sergeant yelled into the crowd at no one in particular.