Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 9

Tunnel Vision

Max had finally found a service entrance and was elbow-crawling through the ceiling access tunnels above the Goliath casino area. The aging hotel’s multimillion-dollar face-lifts over the years had left much of the interior infrastructure in place.

Sure, the cameras and remote-viewing equipment were state of the art. Yet the light maintenance modern cameras required meant that outmoded and bypassed air-conditioning ductwork that was as forgotten, narrow, and tortuous as secret passages in the Great Pyramid at Giza could be used. At least access to the murder scene hadn’t altered since then.

Ga-cheez. Max sneezed at the dust. He was proceeding not by memory, but by what he could find about the hotel’s layout on the Internet. What a pathetic amateur memory loss had made of him.

After scouting the building’s well-disguised functional areas, he’d found the battered gray-painted metal door that led to this area. Service stairwells sported so many of these doors that the thrum of recognition in his mind at seeing it could have been déjà vu instead of resurrecting memory.

All he knew from Temple Barr, his lost love, and Molina, his unremembered enemy, was that a body had been found in the above-casino area of the Goliath. Molina, at least, had given him the vic’s name. Max lifted an elbow to claw farther forward and banged his funny bone on a metal strut.

Not funny, he thought with gritted teeth, biting back monumental curses. The drilling pain made him wonder why torture by funny bone had never been popular. What had Temple said? The man had been stabbed. That method of murder made sense in these cramped labyrinths, but one sure couldn’t lift an arm far to get in a decent killing blow.

According to Review-Journal archives the victim, Anthony Hedberg, had been the Goliath’s assistant security chief. Had Tony happened on a crime in the making, say abetting big-time cheating on the gaming tables below, or blackmailing the cheaters, or even a heist? Or was Hedberg a good guy gone bad? Was he setting the stage for any or all of the above?

Like many multiple-choice questions, those speculations weren’t solid enough to bet on.

Moving along mentally and physically in the dark, Max crawled right off the edge of a drop. Adrenaline peaked as he fell.

His latex-gloved fingers clawed upward to grab for struts, but his body swagged into a shallow depression, not a void. He tried to avoid scrabbling for stability and sounding like squirrels in the attic. The casino floor below chimed with choruses of cheery computerized sound from the slot machines, but the general racket would be more muted if he happened to be above a blackjack or craps table.

Exploring the miniature sinkhole, he concluded it was the equivalent of a duck blind in the sky. Back out a couple of bolts and you could shift the camera to look down on a Twenty-one table next to the cash-out area. A crook or a cop in this overlooking cradle could go country or pop: exploit the position for cheating at cards or know when the loaded cash cart was leaving for the vault.

So why kill the guy in the sweet spot? Maybe someone was trying a takeover bid. Or … Hedberg had spotted signs of a heist and was hoping to play the hero and expose the scheme at the last minute.

It had been his last minute, all right.

Max used his tiny high-intensity flashlight to inspect the overlooking post. Somebody with a sizable investment of time and stealth had prepared it. The area either suffered from black mold or the fingerprint dust from the police investigation two years ago remained undisturbed.

Max used the peephole station to jackknife his long legs around so he could retrace his path face-first. The classic “stiff upper lip,” gained by biting his lower lip with his upper teeth, kept the painful process quiet.

An echoing scuffle above the venting shadowed his withdrawal. It could be the hotel had installed a more modern catwalk above the old camera access route, with one-way glass to survey the casino.

Or … it could be his incursion had loosed a hound. The answer would soon be obvious as he approached the light leaking through the venting grille at the beginning of the air-duct tunnel, and now the end, for his retreat.