The Resurrection Pact (Winston Casey Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  I'd heard that before. "It's cancer, isn't it?"

  Hinkle moved right along to the punchline. "We found Carla Gugino-Baron dead in her apartment Saturday afternoon after an anonymous tip."

  The delivery felt like a blow to the gut but not just the news itself. It felt like Hinkle used the news like a weapon, or maybe a test to see how I would respond to the news.

  I had the jet to myself on the way back and a lot of time to think. A lot of crazy ideas crossed my mind. The images of Carla on her bed, the notion of someone going there to record the scene…it was intended to make a point. But what? The police were tipped off. By whom?

  Thoughts like leaves in an autumn storm blew around me and none of them formed anything more substantial than a feeling of dread and a sense of loss I didn't expect, certainly about someone I barely knew.

  "I'm sorry for your loss. I know you were friends." He waited a moment while I tried to catch my breath.

  I found myself staring at the scratches and blemishes on the steel tabletop. I noticed long scrapes and scars up the side of the table top leading to iron loops hanging underneath. Others who sat where I did didn't have the luxury of standing and running out. It was an urge I fought hard against.

  "Would you like some water, Mr. Casey?"

  My reflection in the two-way mirror startled me. The confusion I felt didn't match the horror on my face. The lights caught the sweat beading on my forehead despite the cool air from the blower above us. The sight of myself hunched over like a hunted man deprived of sleep forced me to swallow the worst of my emotions. I sat up and stammered, "N-no. What happened?"

  "The word isn't in yet. But. I can say with some confidence that it was drug-related."

  "An overdose?"

  "Maybe, maybe not. That didn't shock anyone here. Does it surprise you?"

  "No." My thoughts returned to her dead body, eyes fixed, breasts and arms flopping from the shaking her bed and the thrusts of the person on top of her. Such a lonely way to go. So cruel and so pointless. I asked, "Does she have anyone? Someone to take care of her…"

  Hinkle wasn't there to chat. "When we last spoke, Mr. Casey, you said you hadn't seen her in years. Do you still think that your meeting was a coincidence?"

  I took a breath. "No."

  He was surprised, like he opened the tricky lock on the first try. "No?"

  "I've learned she used to belong to a -- a club operating out of this casino. She was kicked out at some point and it was important to her to get back in. Our mutual friend Grant Parker was a member here with her until he died, so I'm wondering how much she knew about my trip here."

  "The Eternals or whatever? They do swords and sorcery like over at The Excalibur, right?"

  "Something like that."

  "How do you think she knew you were coming when you did?"

  "I think…" I thought about who was standing behind the glass. "It's all speculation, but you're right: I don't think it was random. Maybe our mutual friend Parker set it up?"

  "Your dead friend. Convenient."

  "Not for either one of them."

  "You know she was a prostitute, right?"

  Her pixelized avatar grinding against a sperm-shooting video game hulk withstanding I answered, "I didn't know that."

  "But it doesn't shock you. You didn't 'catch up' with her back at her place?"

  "I didn't know she was a prostitute, no. She said she was a dancer."

  Hinkle laughed. "Everyone in Vegas is a dancer. In L.A. it's actors. Portland is probably all sculptors or some shit. Carla hasn't held a dancing job that didn't involve a pole in over a year."

  "And that makes her a prostitute?"

  "No, but the registration on file at the Nye County Sheriff's Office does. And the regular health checks show she was working for two years. Either that or she kept her options open by complying with the laws keeping her permit open."

  Hinkle was alternately baiting and poking me, but I couldn't understand why. While I had myself pretty much back together, he clearly saw me as worn down, even on the verge of breaking down.

  "The cathouses didn't want her because of her drug use. So she specialized in a private client list, most of whom flew in to see her. They sometimes stayed at this hotel, by the way."

  "That's not surprising, detective. But what else can I tell you?"

  "Where have you been the last two days?"

  "You know I was here."

  "How do I know that?"

  "This is a casino. You've been asking them about Carla and you needed me for questioning. It would make sense for you to ask security before you sent them after me. They've been planning for my arrival since I used my membership card to book a flight back. They tell you why?"

  "Enlighten?"

  "I'm a high roller with the Aeternus crowd. For some reason, they want to keep me happy."

  He was not impressed. "You happen to know anyone else hanging out with Carla?"

  "Other than that big guy you arrested at the…"

  "I understand you met with Dennis Reilly back in Pennsylvania. He's an attorney for Lawrence Kline who is under investigation for child pornography and prostitution."

  "Yes."

  "Reilly used to be a pimp. You know that?"

  "No."

  "Guess who used to work for him."

  I sighed. "Carla?"

  "Exactamundo. What's up with that, Mr. Casey?"

  "Reilly is suing Aeternus. Public records are available in the courthouse gift shop."

  Now I'm under investigation.

  I tried to look offended, but I know it came across as just scared. "You're thinking I killed her?"

  "Well, now that you mention it, Mr. Casey, I'll have to consider it because – hey, yeah – those facts line up nicely to opportunity. But you were on the other side of the country when the M.E. said it went down. Still. There's something about you being a 'high roller' here in a club she was kicked out of, the business at the bank and your story about coming here to meet a mutual friend who is also dead so I'm looking at why you might have motive. I'd say I'm not exactly ready to flip a switch on Ole Sparky, but I'm looking at you with significant interest. That said, I expect you'll want to be very open and honest with me about things. A lot of detectives love digging around and playing gotcha with perps, but I don't like dead hookers piling up on my desk and don't want to spend a lot of time dancing over the details of her death. So. Now that I've shared with you what I know about Carla, about you…let's make with the open discussion, okay?"

  "Am I under arrest?"

  Hinkle shook his head. "We're having a conversation here. You have no criminal history aside from having a lead foot behind the wheel in your teens. Your wife bounced a check at the grocery store three years ago and never took care of it…"

  "You looked into Claire's…rap thing…sheet?"

  "I'm sorry about the divorce. Sounds like you might lose a lot in the deal. And your employer's about ready to issue you a pink slip and a cardboard box for the pictures of the family you don't have."

  "Holy hell, man. How do you know all that?"

  He laughed as though I were astonished by the appearance of fire. "It's my job. This is Vegas. You know what kind of shit goes down here? What kind of freaks this place attracts? Nobody is who they really are here, Winston, so we tend to dig a little. Besides. Everything I mentioned is part of your public record. Well, I ran your phone records, too. No calls to or from Carla, which is good for you. Nothing from you on her computer…no email… so you've got that going for you, too."

  His silence emphasized my heavy breathing. I tried to get it under control. "You want something to drink?"

  "This is crazy. Absolutely nuts!"

  "Relax, Mr. Casey."

  "I didn't kill her. And…" I'd skipped over an important fact in my blind terror. "Wait a minute. I thought you said her death was drug-related."

  Hinkle pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes a second. Maybe it was the harsh light or maybe
I was becoming a problem for him by not saying what he needed to go back to the office and write up the confession.

  The dry, sweet smell of ash coated the inside of my nose. I almost gagged on the unexpected, but familiar stink of Grant Parker's smoldering undead flesh. With it came a feeling of resolve sweeping across my mind, calming my thoughts for the first time in hours and revealing the detective's "tell" behind sad, cynical eyes.

  "He has nothing." Parker's voice did not echo off the hard walls of the room. "Why here? Why talk to you here, Winston? You know Huan's listening. You're being played, buddy."

  NOW you materialize to play coach.

  Hinkle could tell something had changed, maybe in me or maybe in the room. That something bothered him. I caught a quick side-glance to the mirror, but not at his reflection.

  I leaned forward on the table. The metal felt cold under my naked forearms and sent a chill down my back. "Carla was a desperate woman. Yeah, she carjacked me. But everything I told you checks out -- where I was, down to the minute. Hell, there are probably people in that neighborhood with garage cameras or whatever -- maybe peeking through their blinds at the strange car outside. You have a hundred ways to find out if I did something wrong. You could check my hotel room."

  He placed his palms down on the folders in front of him, the folders he never once opened. The fat folders that looked like months, maybe years of indexed pages. He ignored them. "Who says we're not?"

  "He wants you to fear him." Parker's voice came from above and behind me. "He's testing you."

  I had to agree.

  Hinkle considered me a long while. Inside I hoped my genuine anger broke through the mess of emotions I felt. Finally, he asked, "How long will you be in town this time, Mr. Casey?"

  I shrugged. "We'll see. As you say, there's not a lot I want to go home to now." The air cleared of Parker's stink, but I remained focused and confident.

  He nodded, stood up and gathered his papers.

  "Detective?"

  "Yes, Mr. Casey?"

  "Did she have family? Someone to claim her?"

  Hinkle took a breath. "Well, we're still looking for family. There was nothing in her phone or at her residence to help us. If you don't know, then…" He shrugged again and waited for my follow up.

  "What happens to her?"

  "Her remains will stay with us until the investigation is complete. Without someone pushing for a burial, we can take our time but eventually…" He took a step to toward the door. "We'll take care of the arrangements. You have my number if you think of anything else. It's my personal line. If you go through the switch, you won't get me."

  He patted me on the shoulder and walked out without another word. On his way out, he flipped the light switch on the wall by the door. For a moment, I could see Mistress Huan's unmistakable hourglass shape in the adjoining room. Two others stood nearby, but I couldn't make them out. I pretended not to notice. They didn't seem to react as I slowly stood up and turned toward the door.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ezrin wasn't in our suite when I checked in but her bed was made and her belongings stowed.

  I asked the desk for directions to the IT center. They sent me down the ivy-covered stone hallway into a cavern-like corridor lit by halogen torches. The sound of the convention hall faded, replaced by the sound of dripping water and a stream in the distance. The echo made it hard to tell where the sound originated but I thought it must be from a network of speakers. After three turns and a short set of cobblestone steps, I came to a big oak door bolted to the stone with iron hinges. The thumb trigger handle thunked open to a hidden nest of the modern world, a white room lined with steel shelves holding dozens of computer components. The shelves were marked with colored paper labels marking TO-FIX or BRICKED along with some proper nouns I didn't recognize, probably place names. I didn't spend a lot of time scanning the decor. Lord Woe stood in front of a rainbow curtain of CAT-5 cables dangling from a black box on the wall. He looked surprised to see me, but quickly pretended to be busy looking for something.

  He found something to pretend to examine as he said, "Hey! Welcome Behind the Curtain."

  "Lord Woe? How do you get the shit shift this early on a Sunday?"

  "We have a massive go-live in a few weeks and if I don't do it, I have to worry about my team of Adderall junkies missing a dose and fucking up weeks of code. I'm the one who gets colonoscopied by Alan if it shits the bed, so…"

  "I understand."

  "And down here you can call me Louie."

  Louie sat down at his cluttered desk and gestured to an open meeting chair.

  "I need some help."

  "General Asq still griefing you in-world?"

  Last I heard, poor Mr. Gilman was ejected from his suite and headed east to Orlando. I had no news about the young woman who played Qixji Nor. "No. I need to talk to one of your people about someone hacking into an A.I. and security camera in the Harrisburg Safe House."

  He offered his full attention. "I see."

  "Can you help?"

  "You know this 'someone' who hacked you?"

  "Yonder Grace."

  Louie scratched his face and pretended to try and hide his amusement. "Yonder Grace retired five years ago, Winston."

  "Can he still get into the system?"

  "Not unless the dead can VPN from hell. To be fair, if someone did hack into the security feed, they probably spoofed an old account. A lot of people have inactive accounts even the three or four hundred dead users. We're supposed to close them but legal asked us to just keep them in case one of them is a cold case extortion or something."

  "Shit," I said.

  "Someone blackmailing you?"

  "No. Well, not exactly. He, she or they…they kept saying 'we' used Eris's voice to threaten me and show me videos of some of the people in here. I saw one video that bothered me and I want to learn more."

  "So – to be clear – you think someone hacked security at Harrisburg to show you video." He looked doubtful, then confirmed it. "Look, Winston. I know this is new and upsetting, maybe. But. We've all gotten recorded living the Aeternus life. I've gotten nine extortion notes. I hold the record."

  "And how did you deal with it?"

  "I just don't care."

  "I'm not being extorted, I'm being harassed. I need to know more about what I saw."

  He raised his hands to surrender. He had the look about him of the clerk at Radio Shack at 9:59 from the other side of the locked entrance door. "Sorry, man. Can't help you."

  "Seriously?" The room beyond Louie's office was much larger and contained a dozen ceiling-high servers that I could see and the room was much larger than that. "I thought with all the proprietary tech and the paranoid security this place had -- particularly if people are getting blackmailed with the frequency you're saying -- you'd have some kind of protocol in play by now."

  Louie rolled a USB drive between his fingers and considered it a moment. "I can see how you'd make that connection."

  I shrugged. "I'm not too old or too stupid to know guys like us have to protect our asses. Who else will, right?"

  He grinned. "Tell you what. I'll look at the Safe House logs and see if there was a breach and what else I can find. Fair?"

  "I appreciate it," I said having my doubts that he'd even make the attempt.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As helpful as Ezrin had been and could be, I had to assume she was an informer to someone. Even her character implied a high probability of betrayal. Above everything else she would only tell me what she was allowed or what she thought she knew. As a slave to the higher powers, it made sense to assume she was being spied on and manipulated, too, fed information about me or even the executives in charge of things. She was smart, don’t get me wrong, but that just made the quality of her information that much more suspicious.

  The trouble with doing any online research was the obvious monitoring protocols being used. Logging into my Magic Book and snooping around would be expected.
Of course, I looked up all the things I wanted to learn about Parker, his role in the Realm, Ezrin, her real-world husband, Ni Huan, and Lord Bus. They expected me to do my homework and learn the rules of the game, so my studies were not suspicious. I also anticipated they would expect me to peek a little into their private identities on social media. After all, who wouldn’t want to know more about these beautiful, rich people and what’s behind the masks they wear? I allowed myself a little online stalking, but when I tried looking up things on my phone, I noticed that my voice signal remained clear while my data connectivity dropped to 1990s speeds. This only got worse the longer I tried searching on my own network.

  I left the hotel. Despite the early hour, at least four security guards from the Peppermint made a point of wishing me a good morning by name as I walked to the street. About two blocks away I found a coffee bar, ordered an egg sandwich and iced coffee and made a phone call while I waited. Not surprising, my signal strength improved immediately. Even less surprising, one of the casino guards decided to grab some breakfast in the same coffee bar. His attempt at a disguise was to remove his aviators and read a menu. He tried a smile, but that didn't seem to work well across his granite block of a face so he stopped trying.

  It was 5 in the morning back home, but I knew Diane Walton would be just getting ready for bed.

  She picked up on the third ring, her tone as serious as you'd expect to take a car that early in the morning. "Walton and Warner Investigations."

  "Diane. This is Winston Casey. I'm sorry to call…"

  "Winston. Holy shit, brother. What's wrong with you?" Her tone shifted to the old friend recognizing danger. It's one of the things I loved about Diane. No bullshit small talk. Competitive sarcasm, yes, but none of that "how's life?" crap that eats away so much of our time on Earth.

  "I'm in a bit of trouble out in Las Vegas."

  She sighed. "Are you in jail?"

  "No."

  "Are you in immediate danger?"

  "Not that I know of, but…"

  "Okay. I'm stalling you until I can get my pants on."

  Diane and I graduated high school together. She was the only professional investigator I knew and one of the few people I trusted to tell me the truth.