No. Anybody but Holly. She had to protect Holly.
However, the other people on the list knew Kaylee only as the aloof head of casino security. When she took them off Mentafixol and approached them about joining the casino’s protective force, they might see her as a threat and run straight for the Res. Holly at least knew Kaylee as a roommate and best friend and was more likely to stand with her.
Plus, it would be simple to wean Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol. All the young people being drugged were told they were the only ones, and they received the pills from various places, so they wouldn’t compare notes and get suspicious. But Holly and Elijah both received the drug from the casino pharmacy. Kaylee could make a phone call and stop the shipment.
Mr. Diamond’s scribbled notes indicated the strong emotion that had brought on Holly’s and Elijah’s powers in the same night had to do with each other. Elijah had asked Holly out. Holly’s parents had wisely told her she couldn’t go. If Holly and Elijah had been allowed to date, they would have talked about MAD eventually, gotten suspicious, realized their powers were real, and stopped taking Mentafixol. They might have hurt each other accidentally, just as couples at the Res hurt each other on purpose.
But if that spark between them was still there now, Holly and Elijah off Mentafixol would be fiercely loyal to each other. That could make them even more useful to the casino.
Or, if they were captured, even more useful to the Res. The Res would absorb them into its society and turn them against the casino. Kaylee would be no match for them by herself.
At that thought, Kaylee paged frantically through the binder one last time, hoping a new alternative would appear. If she drafted Holly and Elijah to help her, she would be putting Holly in so much danger. And likely ruining any chance Holly might have had at a relatively normal life with a nice guy like Rob. Kaylee thought of Holly, so book smart yet ditsy, so witty in an off-key way that some people never got her jokes. She wanted to keep Holly innocent and happy in a world where shoes still mattered.
But if Kaylee did nothing, everyone would be in danger from the Res. Could she really pull this off?
She fought the urge to look to Mr. Diamond for guidance. His dark suit slumped beside her.
God help her, she’d have to pull this off.
Decision made. She’d call Peter Starr and convince him to give up his magician act to Holly in a few weeks, after she was Mentafixol-free. She’d let Jasmine Brown know what was going on and send her out of town so Elijah couldn’t read her thoughts about the Res while he was coming off the drug. If he could, he’d likely get curious and head straight there.
But first—she looked out the window behind her and gathered strength from the beauty of the glowing and dancing fountains of the Bellagio in the distance down the Strip—she needed to hide Mr. Diamond’s body.
3
“I majored in entertainment engineering and design at UNLV,” Holly explained, “because I’ve always known I would take over the family business someday. That’s why I started working as my dad’s assistant when I was fourteen. But I thought someday was in the distant future. Then last week, out of the blue, my dad informs me that he’s going to teach me everything he knows!”
“Really?” Rob asked, keeping his eyes on the road as he made a turn in his cop car.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “I’m so excited! But it’s been a week since he suggested it, and he hasn’t said another word about it.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Rob asked, easing his cop car to a stop at a red light. He blinked himself out of his reverie.
Holly bit her lip in annoyance, tasted lipstick, and immediately ran her tongue across her teeth to scrub the lipstick off, like a well-trained showgirl. What exactly did Rob mean by what? What, he hadn’t heard her last sentence over the noise of night traffic, or what, he hadn’t been listening to anything she’d said since he picked her up? If they’d been together awhile, she would have ribbed him about this: You never listen to me. But she’d known him only a week, and she couldn’t hold his attention on this, their first date. They were in trouble already.
Her vexation melted away as he glanced at her from across the seat with guileless brown eyes that sagged a bit at the corners. He’d worked all day, he’d had to wait until her parents’ show ended at 10 p.m. to take her out—and then she hit on the real problem.
“I’ll bet you worked that suicide today, didn’t you?” she asked. “That girl who jumped off the Hoover Dam?”
He turned forward. The traffic light reflected red in his eyes. For a split second, he was a handsome demon.
“Fuck this,” he grunted. He reached between them to flick a switch on the dashboard. The police siren wailed to life, startling Holly. Blue lights from his cop car leaked down the roof and spilled across the windshield. The cars in the middle of the intersection paused, then inched backward to make room for him. He stomped the gas and sped through the traffic light. Half a block down, he reached to the dashboard again to flick off the siren.
He put his hand on the knee of Holly’s jeans as if he’d done nothing unusual, which . . . maybe he hadn’t. Maybe all cops used their sirens and risked causing an accident just because they didn’t want to wait at a light.
“Sorry I stopped listening and drifted off like that,” he said. “I need to leave work at work. What were you saying?”
Holly sighed. Rob wasn’t going to share secret cop info with her. Since she’d seen the suicide reported on TV that morning, she’d replayed it over and over in her mind: how empty and awful that twenty-year-old girl must have felt to take her own life. But how cool, actually, to do it in such a dramatic way. If you were going to do it, you might as well do it right. That girl must have stood on the brink of the dam, the vast expanse of concrete below her and the Colorado River snaking darkly away like drying blood, the red canyon all around her, the blue sky above, and thought: Now, once, I am powerful, and let go.
Of course, that was just Holly being all mental adolescent dysfunctiony. If Rob didn’t want to talk about the state of the body, Holly shouldn’t ask. With effort she dragged her mind back to her small-scale problem and repeated a short version of her story. “My dad promised he’d clue me in on all the family secrets, but it’s been a week, with no clueage.”
“Clueage?” Rob’s dark brows knit. “I don’t think that’s a word.”
“Really?” she asked. No shit, Sherlock, she thought. She’d hoped that after seven years of hardly dating at all, she would be swept away by Rob, but she kept getting hints that she wouldn’t be. He didn’t understand when she was kidding—which was bad, because she was usually kidding.
“Have you bugged your dad about it?” Rob asked.
“No. He has this big stunt coming up next Tuesday. You probably saw the posters advertising it when you were at the casino last week. An impossible feat of physical stamina. He’s going to stand on a one-foot-square platform a hundred feet above the back lot of the casino for twelve hours. Not as long as David Blaine, because my dad likes his beauty sleep at night. To make up for that, the platform’s smaller than Blaine’s, and my dad won’t have ‘those pansy safety cables,’ as he calls them. Anyway, he says he wants to concentrate on training for that stunt and get it out of the way, and then he’ll teach me how he does it.”
“What’s the prob?” Rob asked. “You think he’ll splat on the pavement and take his secrets to the grave with him?”
This hadn’t occurred to her. True, her mom wasn’t as limber as she used to be, but Holly hadn’t ever thought her parents could be seriously hurt during their act full of knives and flames, because they’d never gotten hurt. She stared at Rob in distaste, talking herself down, telling herself that what he’d said wasn’t crass. She’d been the one to bring up her parents.
“No,” she said. “I just think it’s bullshit. I love my dad, but let’s get real. I’ve lived with him all my life. I’ve seen what goes on. He doesn’t train for stunts, unless you count sitting on the couch watching sports and eating fried pork skins as training. The way he eats, it’s a wonder he doesn’t weigh six hundred pounds. And I think next Tuesday, when his ‘training’ ”—she made finger quotes—“is over and it’s time for him to teach me what he knows, he’ll give me another excuse not to.”
“Why would he do that?”
She frowned. “I just graduated from college. They let me move into my friend Kaylee’s apartment a year ago, but gosh, she’s head of security at the casino. What could be safer? I wonder whether my parents have made me this promise of magic as a ruse to keep me close and obedient.”
“And you want to be disobedient?” Rob’s thumb moved on her knee, sending a jolt of awareness up her leg. She’d forgotten his hand was there.
She ached to explain the real problem: that she had a mental illness. But of course this would scare away a potential boyfriend. Besides, it was hard to feel close to him when he turned everything into a sex joke. Not that she didn’t want sex. She did, when she found herself in a real relationship.
Which explained why a girl made to work as a bikini-clad Las Vegas showgirl at fourteen was still a virgin at twenty-one. Many times she’d contemplated a one-night stand, just to see what it was like. The thing was, she wanted it to be with a dashingly handsome man who didn’t know who she was. Everyone knew who she was, courtesy of the billboard over Interstate 15.
Then, last week, Holly had met Rob. He was good-looking in a clean-cut, self-satisfied, frat boy way. He’d just moved to Vegas from Chicago. Now he was gainfully employed as a Clark County Sheriff’s deputy. So he was taking her on this date in his cop car because he was too cheap to buy his own civilian vehicle. So what? Nobody was perfect. She had a mental illness.
Therefore, she was able to overlook his latest sex joke. She even allowed his hand to remain on her knee as she explained, “I just want to be a magician. My dad hasn’t told me how he pulls off his impossible feats of physical stamina, but I’m brainstorming for something cool I could do for my debut. Walk a tightrope across the canyon at Hoover Dam?”
“Hoover Dam is a high national-security risk,” Rob said sternly. “That’s why they built the bypass bridge. It would be impossible for you to get a permit.”
Holly didn’t like being told her idea was impossible. Who did he think he was, the police?
Wait a minute.
Best to change the subject. “So, where are we going?” she asked brightly. Last week at the casino, he’d promised he would feed her. She didn’t forget promises about food. She’d been hoping for a late dinner at a nice restaurant—perhaps too much to ask on a rookie cop’s salary, but didn’t men spring for first dates? Broaching the subject might prove awkward, but Holly would be glad to go Dutch or to treat Rob, especially when food was involved. Her mom would die if she caught wind that Holly had ordered dessert. At least Holly could enjoy a salad and the atmosphere of the fine restaurant and feel like an adult, maybe even save this date from sliding any further downhill. They’d entered a residential neighborhood, though. Most restaurants were in the opposite direction.
“Home sweet home.” He parked behind a way-cool early 1960s muscle car in the driveway of a one-story orange stucco house, landscaped with gravel and cacti, average Vegas living. It was impressive that he’d been able to buy this at twenty-two years old. Maybe the muscle car was his, too.
“Is this all yours?” she asked.
“No, I rent it with a couple of roommates.” He got out of the car and slammed the door.
She watched him as he rounded the car. He was so handsome, with his dark hair short and perfectly styled. She found it a bit weird that he carried a piece while off duty, and that he kept it in a holster at his hip where everybody could see it. But that was probably an overcautious cop habit. She was being too critical. If she’d dated more, she would have seen what a catch he was. He had a logical reason for taking her back to the rented house he shared three ways without making the least effort to impress her first. She smiled brilliantly up at him as he opened the passenger door and held out his hand to her.
When she stood, he didn’t let go of her hand. He held it as they walked up the sidewalk to the house. And just as this was making her uncomfortable enough to pull away, she caught a whiff of alcohol.
Don’t panic, she told herself. It was 10:30 p.m. He’d worked a suicide that day. It made sense for him to have had a drink before he picked her up. It also made sense for him to hold her hand. They were on a date. He had no idea he was turning her off.
She swung his hand to lighten the mood. “What will we do while we’re here?” she asked hopefully. She could picture a few dates in Rob’s rented home that wouldn’t be so bad. He might want to show her his favorite movie ever. He might cook her his mom’s famous lasagna. Holly could even eat it. Her stomach rumbled at the thought that they were out of the public eye and her mom would never find out what she put in her mouth.
He stopped on the threshold, brushed his thumb across her lips, and crooned, “That depends on you.”
Holly’s throat closed up—not as completely as it had in her imagination during her mental breakdown seven years before, but enough that she touched her collarbone with her fingertips. Though his words weren’t sexual, his tone dripped innuendo. He was moving so fast it made her anxious. As he opened the door and stepped inside, drawing her by the hand, she tripped over the threshold. She caught herself, but her heels clacked ungracefully on the floor inside.