Jackpot

17

Ziggy Peng hung up with Bingo and wondered what to do with Dale Gai. He was feeling less guilty about hitting her and angrier that she had made him resort to that kind of primal response. Despite his reputation as a violent man, Ziggy Peng didn’t think of himself that way. He didn’t get into fights over petty matters, he didn’t carry grudges, and he took no particular enjoyment in hurting others. In his line of work, violence was often just the only way to solve a problem. Dale Gai was a problem.

It raised his suspicions that she’d been talking to Stone Barrington, even though Ziggy had been led to believe that Stone Barrington had left the casino with the rest of his loud and obnoxious family and friends. This whole mess — this silly, elaborate plan at the behest of Li Feng — was layer upon layer of ridiculous deceit. Ziggy left his office and went to a small cubicle in the workroom where he liked to watch security footage. He typed in the keywords needed to bring up the video feed from the time Dale Gai was talking to Stone Barrington in the security suite.

After watching the conversation forward and backward several times, he used the mouse to draw a box around Stone Barrington’s face, copied the image, and then pasted it into a box off to the side of the video feed. The casino’s facial recognition software would pull up any other video feeds from the last seven days that matched. Nothing came up.

Ziggy rewound the video feed back to the time he knew Stone Barrington checked in and switched to the camera views from the front desk. When he found video of Stone checking in, he did the same search. This time multiple video results came up, but not the conversation with Dale Gai. Ziggy grunted in disgust and went back to the bookmarked video of the conversation with Dale Gai. It was obvious to him now that someone had pretended to be Stone Barrington, and that Dale Gai had seemed to have known.

He zoomed in on their conversation and saw her give a room number to the impersonator before walking away. On his way out of the security suite, Ziggy retrieved a black pole the hotel security used for disengaging the security bars on locked room doors, a contingency used mostly in the event that they suspected a guest may have fallen sick within a locked room. It was time to pay a visit to Dale Gai.