The Gatekeeper Read online

  He flushed, then was annoyed with his own reaction. He was a cop, for God’s sake. “It’s not patronizing. It’s just the truth,” he said. “Listen—”

  “I’m not going away. I’m free and over twenty-one. And here in Vegas, my activities—or whatever activities you suspect me of—are completely legal. You can continue on your quest—just leave me alone to follow mine.”

  She surprised him by smiling again. A real smile, not pretending to be a hardcore temptress or making fun of him.

  “Let’s start over, shall we?” She walked over to him, offering her hand. “My name is really Calleigh. Calleigh McGowan. From San Francisco. I’m a Libra—usually very fair in all things. I love long walks in the forest, and I think there’s nothing quite so beautiful as a full moon rising on a clear night. And you’re...?”

  He couldn’t help it; his lips twitched. He gave her his hand. “Saxon Kirby. Detective by trade—and inclination. I have a deep-seated need to help the underdog, and I loathe watching the powerful take advantage of the weak.” He paused, shaking his head. “What the hell am I doing standing here still talking to you?”

  “Admitting that I’m not going away, that I may actually be—” she paused to laugh “—of some help. Face it, Carl Bailey is always surrounded by security, and he may have half your department in his pocket.”

  “All right, back up.”

  “I said may,” she stressed.

  “And Carl Bailey may not even be behind these deaths. It could be any one of a whole list of suspects, including the new hotshot in town—that Canadian wolf who’s been throwing around so much money.”

  She could manage a truly impressive stubborn set to her chin. “I’m telling you, it’s Carl Bailey. He runs the werewolves of Las Vegas. The Keeper here is...weak.”

  Weak. That was an understatement.

  “It’s not like that in San Francisco,” she said. “There are laws in San Francisco, and everyone knows you obey them or you pay the price.”

  Saxon frowned. San Francisco had laws—why couldn’t the rest of the world manage it?

  No time to dwell on that now.

  “I should call your father,” he threatened.

  She looked away nervously, and he realized he’d hit on the key to keeping her safe.

  “You don’t know who he is,” she said, but she still wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “I’ll find him. I know he’s in San Francisco,” Saxon told her.

  She shook her head. “Don’t you dare! He doesn’t know that Angie is missing. He doesn’t know that I’m here. He and my mother—”

  “Listen to what you’re saying! Do you want them to lose two daughters?”

  “Care to let me finish?” she asked him coolly.

  “All right.” He stood back, arms crossed over his chest.

  “Not too long ago, my father got a request from a Keeper in London, via Larry Miller, our Keeper in San Francisco. They were having some trouble in Chelmsford—a banshee rampage. Anyway, they were seeking my father’s advice.” She was quiet for a minute. “My dad has a background in law enforcement and the judicial system. He’s gone to work with the English on a central plan so they won’t find themselves in this situation again, and my mother’s over there with him. It’s very secret. I don’t even have a way to reach him. He calls every few days to check on me. He thinks Angie is so busy with a show that she’s impossible to reach, so...”

  “So you’ve been lying to him,” Saxon finished. “Your father is Theo McGowan, then? The former congressman?”

  She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to.

  He shook his head. “Great. Theo McGowan’s daughter is in Vegas pretending to be a stripper, and he has no idea.”

  “You won’t find him.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking how great it is that the San Francisco Keepers actually cooperate with their international counterparts. But that’s not important right now. What’s important is—”

  “Finding Angie and stopping this killing spree,” Calleigh said. “And that’s just what I intend to do.”

  “Calleigh, listen, I’m a cop—”

  “And I’m a big girl. You can’t stop me. What you can do, if you want, is help me,” she told him. “Meanwhile, your bill is getting higher and higher,” she warned him. “You need to get out of here before you go bankrupt.”

  “Calleigh, I can’t let you do this.”

  “It’s not your call. Right now you need to go. We can talk later,” she told him. “Trust me. If you don’t give me away, I’m safe, at least for this afternoon, even if I can manage to lure Carl Bailey here. If—”

  “Carl Bailey is old, Calleigh.”

  “And I’m young.”

  “My point is, he knows every trick in the book, and he hasn’t got a moral fiber in his body. He’d just as soon kill you as look at you if you were in his way.”

  “Then I’ll have to make sure he doesn’t realize I’m in his way. How about I meet you tonight and we can make a plan to work together?” she said. “Please. Frankly, I don’t want to be responsible for a good cop going bad to pay his bill for my services.”

  He hesitated. “You’re not lying to me to get me out of here?”

  “No. I swear. I’ll do anything to find Angie, so if you’re really going to search for her and not think of her as a showgirl gone bad—”

  “Calleigh, Missing Persons has been on it—”

  “And done nothing.”

  “All right. We’ll talk tonight. But if you don’t show, I will find you here, and I will find a way to arrest you.”

  “I’ll meet you.”

  “Where?”

  She scratched out an address he knew vaguely. It was one of the local equestrian facilities where the members of the show circuit trained their hundred-thousand-dollar mounts.

  “This is where you’re living?” he asked her incredulously.

  She nodded. “The house belongs to a man—a human being—named Dirk. He’s in love with Angie, and he’s going insane with her gone.”

  “And he knows what you’re doing and hasn’t tried to stop you?”

  “Seriously? Even if he wanted to—which he doesn’t—can you imagine any human who could stop me? I need to find my sister.”

  Saxon knew that he would find Angela Sanderson, no matter what. She was Elven.

  He looked at Candy—at the hope in her eyes.

  He could only pray that, with everything else that had been going on, there was the ghost of a chance that he would find her alive.

  Chapter 4

  Saxon had several hours to kill until he was scheduled to meet up with Calleigh.

  He headed back to his station house, sat down at his computer and pulled up the information on the cases that he was now convinced were linked.

  Two months back: bones found in the desert. They might have been the result of an accidental death—and the surefire way the desert had of cleaning up the dead. A forensic examination of the bones had been inconclusive. There were no chips or marks on them to indicate that a bullet or a knife had been the cause of death. There were tooth marks on the bones, but while the ME considered them likely to be postmortem, Saxon had his own theories on that. The dead man had been about six feet tall, between forty and fifty years old—and somehow he had managed to die ten miles out in the sand, where vultures, coyotes, beetles and whatever else had pretty much taken care of all his soft tissue. His dental records had led nowhere. He’d been wearing a denim shirt and jeans, size-nine boots, and a buckle that advertised a Tennessee country rock band.

  He’d died minus a wallet or any other identification—or someone had intentionally removed them.

  Saxon had attended the autopsy, because the bones had indicated a possibility that the victim had been one of the Elven, who had strong, elongated bones.

  But in the end the ME had determined that the skeleton had belonged to a man—just a man, and nothing more. A dumb man—traveling in the d
esert on foot with no wallet—but a man. Except that Saxon didn’t think that little of humanity. And no mortal man could have gotten that far out in the desert on foot. It was too convenient to think he’d simply lain down in the sand to die, then was fortuitously consumed by the local wildlife. No, someone had taken him out there and left him to die, or killed him elsewhere and dumped him in the desert for the body to be eaten and the evidence destroyed.

  Murder number one, he thought. At least that he knew of.

  Then there had been the craps dealer. Rutger Heinz. He had come to Las Vegas because he’d been entranced by what he’d seen and read about the city while growing up in Bavaria. He’d arrived just five years earlier, attended the University of Nevada, then taken a job.

  At Monty’s casino. Which was mostly owned by Carl Bailey.

  Security cameras recorded Rutger’s exit the night he had gone missing. He could be seen getting into his car and driving away. And then, somewhere in the congested traffic of the Strip, he had disappeared. And he hadn’t been seen again.

  Not long afterward, Angela Sanderson had disappeared. Exquisite, beautiful, Elven. Young, talented, ready to take on the world. With everything to live for.

  One thing he’d noticed on the casino security footage of both Rutger and Angela before they’d disappeared was that there had been a very high proportion of werewolves around. It was a tentative connection to the murders, but his gut told him it was real nonetheless, that werewolves were involved in the disappearances as well as the killings.

  Then, yesterday, the half-chewed body of the Oregon tourist that had caused a disaster on Fremont Street.

  Two officially dead—and his concern as a homicide detective.

  Two missing and, he feared, most likely dead.

  The dead man found right there on Fremont Street seemed to be a sign that the murderer wanted to be noticed. It was like a cry for recognition.

  Why would a killer make such a point of calling attention to himself? One possibility: it could be a cry for help. Maybe he abhorred the killing, but couldn’t stop himself and was hoping the police would catch him. Or maybe he was showing off for someone.

  Another possibility: the killer was so mentally deranged that he was certain he wouldn’t be caught; as a narcissistic personality, he considered his own desires of uppermost importance and couldn’t imagine that he could be caught.

  Yet no matter what else was true of the killer’s psyche, the validity of this was not in question in Saxon’s mind: the killer was a werewolf. A werewolf acting as pack leader, as alpha, and trying to convince the rest of the pack that it was time for the wolf pack to take their place as kings of the city.

  Las Vegas was one of the pleasure capitals of the world, a neon-lit paradise where every vice known to man—and Others—could be indulged. Where money—and women—changed hands from minute to minute. A city where Carl Bailey was already the de facto king.

  What more could the man want? Saxon wondered. Why would he kill—or, more likely, have someone else kill for him? He had money, and hundreds of people working for him, worshipping his name. He had power, scores of mistresses, every conceivable comfort.

  Maybe it wasn’t Carl Bailey, Saxon reminded himself.

  He shook his head.

  No, Carl had to be involved. The new wolf from Toronto hadn’t been here long enough to make the kinds of connections you needed to kill someone and dispose of the body.

  Still, it wouldn’t do to count the guy out. A smart detective considered all possibilities.

  He rose. He supposed he could pay a visit to Carl. But he wanted more evidence than what he had—which came down to pretty much nothing—when he actually accosted the man.

  He wanted to arrest the bastard, just on general principles, but he had nothing to hold him on.

  Besides, how much good would it do when he finally did have enough? How much sway did Carl Bailey have in the courts? Was there any hope the werewolf would actually wind up paying the ultimate penalty under the law?

  There should have been another law. A universal law for the nonhuman races. The kind of law that the Keepers had surely used to rule over their creatures, once upon a very long time ago.

  Saxon reminded himself that he was a cop. Even if he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Carl Bailey was a murderer, the man was protected by his rights under the Constitution. Saxon couldn’t just walk in with a silver bullet and shoot him down.

  They desperately needed real laws for the Otherworld. With real consequences.

  It was a waste of time to rue the fact that Monty Reilly was either as crooked as Carl Bailey or totally ineffectual. There were two lost people out there, alive or dead. One of them a woman who was, in a way, kin. He had to find them.

  He put through a few calls and found out that the new wolf in town, Jimmy Taylor, was playing craps at one of Carl Bailey’s casinos.

  He decided he felt like gambling.

  * * *

  Jimmy Taylor was in his late twenties, tall, leanly muscled, and he had a thick lock of dark hair that fell over his forehead and the heavy-lidded bedroom eyes that women seemed to find attractive.

  The guy could have made it in movies. He should have headed to Hollywood—the kingdom of stars—Saxon thought.

  But he’d come here instead—to the kingdom of high stakes.

  Carl Bailey’s Galway Glen casino was, like all his properties, expensively and expertly decorated. There were salutes to Ireland throughout. The Tralee Tavern, located above the casino floor with a view of the action, was done in shades of green, and the bartenders were all female and all wearing short green skirts. Carl liked women—the prettier the better, the bustier better still. It was pretty much a given that if a beautiful woman wanted a job—and was willing to kowtow to Carl Bailey—she was guaranteed a job at the casino.

  Saxon knew that Carl hated him. He knew from the minute he entered the casino that the security cameras were on him and his presence would be announced to Carl, wherever in the city the man might be.

  He didn’t head straight to the gaming tables but decided on a drink first. He settled into a green upholstered chair at the Tralee and took a minute to appreciate the ornately carved wood of the bar itself, designed to look as if it had been cobbled together from logs in a forest. Eyes peered out from between artificial branches, as if mischievous leprechauns were watching out for those who’d come to imbibe. A realistically carved female figure, one of Ireland’s famous selkies, looked down from above the bottles of expensive liquor shelved behind the bar.

  His waitress was in her early twenties. She shimmered a bit when she moved, and he instantly thought, shape-shifter.

  “Good evening, Detective Kirby,” she said. “Are you here to ask questions? Or are you...off duty?” she finished flirtatiously.

  “I’m off duty. But I always like to ask questions,” he told her. “I can start with how do you know my name?”

  She flushed. “I guess you’re not going to believe I’ve waited on you before and you introduced yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, so...the truth is, Mr. Bailey alerted the employees to keep an eye out for you to show up. He doesn’t want to cause a stink by refusing you entrance. He does want you watched.”

  Saxon looked over at the selkie statue above the bar. He knew she had cameras in her shimmering eyes.

  He waved.

  “Why does he want me watched?” he asked innocently.

  “He says you’re on a vendetta—blaming the werewolves for everything that’s been happening lately.”

  “Could be a shifter pretending to be a werewolf,” he said with a shrug. “Or a person. It’s not as if vicious serial killers can’t be human.”

  “So what will you have?” she asked, apparently deciding not to pursue the topic of his intentions.

  “I think I’ll stick with the theme. A good Irish beer, please.”

  She left to get his beer, and his eyes idly tracked her journey b
ack to the bar. He noticed that there was a platform in front of the selkie statue, and as he watched, one of the servers climbed up and took her place on it. Traditional Irish music started playing, and she began to dance, her feet moving with skill and speed to rival the best performer back on Irish soil.

  The waitress returned with his beer.

  “She’s good,” he said, nodding toward the dancer.

  “Yes—we don’t get hired if we can’t perform.”

  “What’s your specialty?”

  “I’m a vocalist,” she said.

  “This is where that singer used to work,” Saxon said, keeping his tone casual.

  “What singer?”

  “The one who disappeared.”

  His waitress shrugged. “Girls come and go in Vegas. You get a better offer, you move on.”

  She started to turn away, but he grabbed her wrist to stop her. “This girl didn’t get a better offer. She disappeared.”

  She tried to wrench herself away from him. Without blinking, he made a vise of his hand.

  “Damn Elven,” she muttered.

  “You don’t need to fear the Elven. You do need to fear your boss.”

  “Let go of me. They’ll notice, and I’ll get in trou—”

  “Then smile and act like you’re flirting with me.”

  She smiled, and he kept his eyes locked with hers, so she didn’t give the cameras a guilty look.

  “Did you know her? Angela Sanderson?” he asked. She was obviously frightened, her eyes widening in shock, but she didn’t say anything. “You did know her,” he said.

  She leaned close to him and laughed, as if he’d said something funny. “I replaced her,” she said, swallowing. “They said she wasn’t coming back. But that was before I knew...”

  “Before you knew that she’d disappeared.”

  She looked even more terrified, if that was possible. “I have to go,” she insisted, trying to pull away again.

  This time he released her. When she was gone, he drank his beer, then headed for the craps tables.

  He spotted Jimmy Taylor at one and took a spot at the other end. He bought in for several hundred, aware that Taylor was staring at him angrily. He ignored the other man and laid money down on the pass line.