“On the 911, yeah,” she said. “Don’t have the records on The Ponderosa, but that’s what the bartender reported to Vegas Metro.” Kristy could hear Poremba sighing. “Any precedent for any cell, anywhere, calling ahead?”
“Defeats the purpose of the whole terror part,” Poremba said.
“Tell that to D.C.,” Kristy said. “They’re bringing in every available agent in the West. If you’re not in Tora Bora, you’re expected in Las Vegas by 5 p.m.”
Poremba fell silent for a moment. “The bodies bother me.”
Kristy knew the numbers: Two thousand people went missing every year in Clark County, 99 percent of them resolved with a living person eventually walking through a door. Two hundred fifty people got murdered every year in the county, which made up a good part of the remaining 1 percent. The rest either don’t want to be found or they’re at the bottom of Lake Mead in a barrel, their killers praying there’s not a drought. What they weren’t, for sure, was being abducted, killed, and left in freezers behind a dental office on East Sahara.
“Who owns this office space?” Poremba asked.
“It’s an LLC registered locally to a Jerry L. Ford. He owns a bunch of office and medical space around town, plus an apartment building or two. No previous dirty bombs, far as I can tell.” Her cell phone buzzed. It was the head of the field office, Senior Special Agent Sebelius. “Look, I got Sebelius calling me for a report. So. I’ll file all of this and be off. Once they realize it’s an arson, Vegas Metro will handle it from here, and it will go unsolved until forever.”
“Wait.” Poremba said. “The ownership piece. You’re positive it’s Jerry L. Ford?” He put the emphasis on the L for some reason.
“Yeah,” Kristy said. “Pulled it as soon as the city opened up. Bought it eighteen months ago. The whole space has been leased to the dentist for over a year.”
Kristy could hear Poremba breathing. Which was weird. She’d always assumed he was a robot.
“I’m emailing a file to your personal account,” Poremba said. “Your eyes only. Download it, get a burger, and call me in fifteen from somewhere busy.”
“Really?” Kristy said. “I’ve been at a crime scene since dawn.”
“Fifteen,” Poremba said again and was gone.
“And I’m feeling better, thanks for asking,” Kristy said to the hum of white noise.
KRISTY TOOK THIRTY AND DROVE OUT TO THE BAGEL CAFÉ FOR SOME COMFORT food, ordering a bowl of matzo ball soup and an Earl Grey tea to help ease her guts. Her maternal grandmother was from Russia, her paternal grandmother from England, and this meal was like sitting with them both. The Bagel Café was nearly empty, the lunch rush over, but there was residual energy floating about, as if she’d walked into a room full of leftover conversation hanging lazily in the air. She half expected to see Rabbi Cohen, since she’d run into him here half a dozen times before his accident, holding court with Rabbi Kales, the two of them always looking so serious until a Temple Beth Israel congregant came to shake their hands, slip them a twenty, and then both men radiated such charm she felt the ions in the room rearranging. Both knew how to make you feel like they could see into your soul, that they’d anticipated everything you were about to say and had answers at the ready, like when Rabbi Cohen found her at the cemetery last winter.
She’d just started chemo and she was, frankly, out of her fucking mind. She’d broken into the cemetery sometime after 3 a.m. and had gone running through its sloping hills, letting the wind blow through her disappearing hair, only to run into Rabbi Cohen. Literally—he caught her at the bottom of a hill, dressed like the fucking Unabomber, in retrospect. She had no idea what he was doing there, was too stricken with grief and madness to even ask, but he comforted her, told her to focus on finding mazel, and she’d done that each day since, looking for some proof of mazel even when the world seemed inordinately fucked. Some days were harder than others. She was riding a serious zero for Wednesday thus far.
Her waitress—Penny Meltzer’s daughter Lynn; she knew them from the book club at Temple Beth Israel, where both had fallen in love with The Bridges of Madison County—dropped off the matzo ball soup and a plate of cheese blintzes, too.
“I didn’t order these,” Kristy said.
“You look like you could use it,” Lynn said. She put down a ramekin of strawberry jam. “When they begin gathering us up, you’ll want the carbs.”
“Who is ‘they’ in this situation?”
“Didn’t you hear? The terrorists hit the Commercial Center this morning. Supposedly they’re going to hit Excalibur next. That’s what the radio said.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Kristy said. Why terrorists would want to blow up a King Arthur–themed casino was anyone’s guess. Why someone would believe they’d want to blow up a King Arthur–themed casino when the Luxor was right there for the taking, well, that was just a question for another day. Kristy was too fucking tired.
“My dad keeps talking about buying a gun,” she said.
“What’s stopping him?” Kristy said.
“Have you met my father? He can’t even get the VCR to stop blinking twelve o’clock.”
Kristy had, in fact, met her father. He worked at the local NPR station, did a show where he played classical music and interviewed local celebrities about their favorite compositions, every meteorologist in town talking about Tchaikovsky. “Can I tell you a secret?” She motioned Lynn toward her. “That wasn’t a terrorist attack today.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m an FBI agent. I was there.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “A lot of people say the FBI brought down the Towers, so it’s all very confusing.” She set down Kristy’s bill. “The blintzes are on the house.”
Kristy waited for Lynn to leave before she opened her computer, read through the file Poremba sent, drained her bowl of soup, then called him.
“What am I looking at here?” she asked.
“You in public?”
“I’m in a deli, currently eating a blintz. Not sure where in the tradecraft book they suggest this, but, sir, I am ready for the briefing.”
“Casino deli or freestanding?”
“Freestanding.”
“Good,” Poremba said. “I picked something up on surveillance. Six, nine months ago, when you were out.”
Kristy scrolled through the file with a sense of . . . not quite doom, but wild unease. She pulled up a photo of her own funeral plot at the Kales Home of Peace. “Lee, is this that shit you had set up in Summerlin? I thought you pulled this wire?”
Poremba had legally miked up a house on the other side of the Kales Home of Peace cemetery, working a hunch about the disappearance of Sal Cupertine, since Cupertine was—at least theoretically—last seen in a frozen meat truck that made a delivery to Temple Beth Israel, owned and operated by Rabbi Cy Kales, the father-in-law of Bennie Savone. Poremba was convinced Savone had something to do with Cupertine’s disappearance, but he’d thus far found no connection whatsoever, even after Special Agent Jeff Hopper had come out here and made, seemingly, the same connection and ended up missing his head. He’d even sent out Matthew Drew and turned that poor fucked-up kid into a ticking time bomb.
Four years Poremba had tried to find something. Four years he’d come up empty.
In fact, the only thing Poremba picked up of interest was Kristy and her rabbi talking about her cancer while she surveyed her plot. That was a year ago. Since then, Poremba had become her . . . friend, of a kind. If it was possible to be friends with Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba.
