“My court date isn’t until next month,” said Erica Price, a bleached blonde with acrylic fingernails long enough to put an eye out. She stood in the doorway of her apartment, eyeing Dominic with disdain.
He blinked; this was one he hadn’t heard before. “Ms. Price, your court date was two days ago.”
“Uh, no.” She snapped her gum. “It’s May 14.”
“It was April 14,” Dominic said, half in disbelief that this was actually happening. He pulled the papers out of his jacket pocket and handed them to her.
She studied the bail agreement and warrant with narrowed eyes, then shoved them back at Dominic with a disgusted, “Ugh. Well, can’t it wait another day? I’m right in the middle of something.”
“You do understand that you’re literally breaking the law as we speak, right?”
“Fine.” She gave him a monumental eye-roll. “Just let me lock up. I’ll bet you wanna handcuff me, huh, you big perv?”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” said Dominic.
He waited for her to gather her purse and lock up the apartment, then led her down to his truck. She texted the entire way to the CCDC.
Dominic hadn’t pursued a bounty since he’d found Goodwin’s body over a week ago, and he’d begun to suspect that his subconscious had more than one reason for that. So he’d eased himself back into the swing of things by picking up a simple warrant for a low-level drug offense committed by a bounty with no history of violence. The fee wasn’t much, but considering he’d found her within an hour, the ratio of pay to time invested wasn’t bad.
He turned Erica over to the CCDC staff and watched them escort her deeper into the facility, her complaints ringing off the walls until she was out of earshot. While he waited for the bail company to be notified, he checked the email on his phone. Junk, junk, a link to a YouTube video forwarded by his sister Gina, more junk, a reminder to pay his electric bill—and a Google alert for the term Seven of Spades.
All right, so he hadn’t butted out of the case altogether. But there was no law that he couldn’t keep tabs on it from afar. Plenty of civilians besides him would be doing the same.
He followed the link to the news story, which reported a murder last night that had been attributed to Las Vegas’s new and exciting serial killer. He frowned as he read.
A violent stabbing? No way that was the real Seven of Spades, not unless something had gone drastically wrong. Representatives from the LVMPD had refused to comment.
It wasn’t his business either way. Dominic shoved his phone into his pocket, firmly resolved to go home and start working on some more challenging bounties.
Thirty minutes later, he found himself walking into Levi’s substation.
“Mr. Barton, could you tell me why the Seven of Spades might target your wife?” Levi asked.
They sat in an interrogation suite, though Barton wasn’t handcuffed—despite their certainty that he’d killed his wife, they didn’t have enough physical evidence to arrest him. Yet.
“The Seven of Spades is a vigilante, right?” Barton shrugged. He was short but brawny, with a thick neck and small eyes that glinted with contempt. “He kills people who do bad things. Patty was a whore.”
“I beg your pardon?” God, Levi would love to punch Barton right in his sneering face.
“She was sleeping around with any guy who would have her. Everybody knew it. I’m not surprised she was next on the list.”
“The Seven of Spades targets people who are getting away with crimes,” Levi said. “Infidelity isn’t a crime.”
Barton folded his arms. “What are you, some kind of expert? You don’t really know why he does the things he does. You’re just guessing.”
“Maybe. But I investigated the Seven of Spades’s first three crime scenes, and aside from one detail, they didn’t look anything like your wife’s. You see, there were details withheld from the press—details a copycat killer wouldn’t know.”
Barton’s jaw clenched, and his eyes flicked to one side before returning to Levi’s face. Levi smiled. The Seven of Spades was a maddening quarry, but this pathetic bastard was no different from every other killer he’d sat across from.
“You know I didn’t kill her,” Barton said. “I have an alibi—I was at a work event all night. Dozens of people saw me there. Patty had been dead for hours by the time I got home and found her.”
He wasn’t wrong. His alibi was strong—not airtight, but it posed a challenge. Plus, Patty Barton’s fingertips and nails had been cleaned with bleach to remove trace evidence from her attacker, and the murder weapon had yet to be found. Any evidence they had against Barton was circumstantial, so his confidence wasn’t surprising.
Levi was planning to rattle that confidence a bit.
“Why don’t I tell you what I think happened?” Levi leaned forward, his forearms on the metal table and his hands clasped loosely together. “I think that you left your event without telling anyone, confronted your wife at home about her infidelities, and lost your temper so badly that you stabbed her to death. Then you panicked, remembered a story you’d heard on the news, and put a playing card on her body to redirect suspicion before you cleaned up and went back. You pretended everything was normal and called the police when you got home like it was the first time you’d seen her body.”
Barton’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t speak.
“It wasn’t a bad performance, except for a few things,” Levi went on. “First, nobody who had actually seen the Seven of Spades’s real kills could mistake this for the work of the same person. Then there’s the fact that most killers don’t do a great job of disposing of the murder weapon—or, say, their blood-stained clothes. We have uniformed officers out looking for them now. I’m also willing to bet that the security footage from the event has a block of time when you’re mysteriously absent from the room, and shows you wearing different clothing later in the evening than you were at the beginning.”
That one landed. A small flinch ran through Barton’s body.
“Honestly, though, I’m willing to bet the smoking gun will be in your phone records. You can erase texts and call logs, but your carrier still has them. And if your wife called you while you were at your event, or sent you a text that might have prompted you to leave it unexpectedly . . . well, that won’t look very good for you, will it?”
Barton was now deathly pale. “You won’t find anything. I didn’t kill her.”
Levi’s chair scraped against the linoleum floor as he stood up, bracing his hands on the table. This was no mysterious, intelligent serial killer who left bizarre messages and made devil’s bargains with the police. This was a vile, angry man who’d murdered his wife and thought he could get away with it. Levi would take great pleasure in disabusing him of that notion.
“If you confess now, things will be much easier for you. If you don’t, I give it twenty-four hours before you’re back here in handcuffs—forty-eight hours at most.” Levi bent down further. “Because I know you killed your wife, Mr. Barton, and I will prove it. I can promise you that.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Barton said again, shakier this time. Still, he held his ground, glaring up at Levi with pure loathing.
“No jury in this city will believe that by the time I’m through with you.” Levi pushed himself off the table and strode toward the door. “You might want to start getting your affairs in order,” he said over his shoulder, and let himself out of the room.
“Hey, Dominic.” Martine swiveled around in her chair. “Are you here to see Levi?”
“What?” he said, thrown off balance not by her words, but by her tone of heavy insinuation. “No, I’m not here to—to see him. I mean, I’m here, and I’ll see him, but that’s not—”
Her smile was bright and mischievous. She definitely knew about the kiss, and since she wasn’t pulling her gun on him, she must know he’d stopped it before things had gone too far.
Sighing, he gave up. “I saw the report on the murder last night that could be a Seven of Spades copycat, and I was curious. I could just as easily be coming to see you.”
“You could,” she said. “But you aren’t.”
There was no point in denying it. Dominic wasn’t even sure why he’d come when he knew that seeing Levi again would be crazy awkward, but he hadn’t been able to stay away. Maybe he just wanted to check on Levi after what must have been the mother of all hangovers.
Yeah, that sounded good. He’d stick with that.
It didn’t matter right now anyway, because Levi’s desk was empty. “So, was it a copycat?” he asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” Martine said without a trace of doubt. “Any rookie could see it was the victim’s husband. We don’t have enough to arrest him yet, but Levi’s interrogating him now—whoops, guess I spoke too soon.”
Dominic turned around to see Levi heading toward them. Levi’s eyes widened a bit when he saw him, but other than that, he demonstrated an impressive lack of reaction.
“Dominic,” he said as he came to stand behind his own desk.
“Levi.”
“He was curious about the copycat,” Martine chimed in.
“I thought you weren’t going to get involved in the case anymore,” Levi said.
“I’m not. Doesn’t mean I can’t check in, does it?”
Levi seemed to find this argument acceptable. “Barton didn’t confess, but I’ve got him on edge. With any luck, he’ll do something stupid like going straight to wherever he stashed the murder weapon.”
“Good,” said Martine. “Another wife-killing creep in prison where he belongs.”
Dominic’s eyes traveled over Levi’s desk while he listened, taking in every detail, and his attention was snagged by the one thing that was out of place. Levi always had coffee on his desk, but it was usually in either a reusable travel mug or a foam cup from the coffee shop down the street. The cup he had this morning bore the logo of a hotel Downtown, nowhere near where he lived, nor on the way between his home and work.
“Are you staying in a hotel?” Dominic said, before he thought better of it.
He had the pleasure of seeing Levi completely shocked for a couple of seconds before he looked down at his desk and understood how Dominic had figured that out.
“Damn,” Martine said appreciatively. “You’re good.”
Levi’s cheeks were a little red, and he didn’t quite meet Dominic’s eyes. “I broke up with Stanton.”
Dominic took a step back. “Why?” he asked, feeling sick. Please, God, let it have nothing to do with him. If Levi had left his boyfriend of three years because of one kiss and some mutual attraction—
“It had nothing to do with . . .” Levi hesitated, glancing around the busy bullpen. “With anything that’s happened recently. It was a long time coming.”
They both looked at Martine, who continued typing away at her keyboard. “This is my desk, you know. If you two need to speak in private, there are better places for you to do that.”
“We don’t need—” Levi said, but was interrupted by the ringing of his desk phone. He picked up the receiver. “Detective Abrams.”
Moments later, his face went as rigid and lifeless as a mask. He set the receiver down and pressed the speakerphone button on the base.
“Can you say that again, please?”
“I didn’t kill Patty Barton,” said a raspy electronic voice.
The entire bullpen jolted into action like a kicked anthill. Dominic watched in astonishment as several people rushed out of the room, and Martine leapt from her chair to whisper frantic orders to some nearby personnel.
Levi just stood where he was, vibrating with tension. “Why should I believe you?”
“I gave you my word. Five days. There’s still one day left.”
“Holy shit,” Dominic said under his breath. This was the Seven of Spades calling. There was a serial killer on the phone with Levi right now.
“It’s important to you to be considered a person of your word, isn’t it?” Levi was holding onto the edge of his desk with one hand, his knuckles white.
“Of course.”
“Then you must be angry that someone stole your signature for his own crime. Are you planning to kill Drew Barton?”
There was a weighty pause. “Not if you arrest him first.”
Levi’s eyes fluttered shut. When he opened them, he looked across the room at Martine. She pointed to a computer and then shook her head, throwing her hands in the air. Dominic didn’t know if that meant that they hadn’t been able to trace the call, or that the trace just hadn’t been helpful.
“I know you think you’re different,” Levi said, biting out every word. “You tell yourself you’re special—that what you’re doing is honorable. But the truth is that you enjoy killing. You get off on it, so you’ve talked yourself into believing you’re on some kind of noble crusade. At the end of the day, though, you’re just a murderer, and the only difference between you and Drew Barton is that you’re fucking crazy.”
He banged the phone receiver down on the base, ending the call. Everyone in the room gaped at him.
“You just taunted a serial killer,” Dominic said, as if Levi was somehow unaware of what he’d done.
“Ask me if I fucking care,” Levi snapped. “I’m sick to death of these games. If the Seven of Spades wants to come after me, I’d love to watch them try.”
He grabbed his cell phone and keys from the top drawer of his desk, then slammed it shut so hard the entire desk rattled.
“I’m going to do whatever’s necessary to nail Barton to the wall,” he said to Martine. “You coming?”
She grinned and hurried after him, pausing only to retrieve her purse and pat Dominic’s back on the way out.
Dominic left the building at a slower pace, rattled by what he’d just witnessed. Hearing the Seven of Spades speak, even in that electronically altered voice, had chilled him to his bones, and he worried that Levi had put himself in greater danger by provoking them.
Lost in his thoughts, Dominic was startled to realize that his wandering feet hadn’t brought him to his parked truck, but rather north along the Strip. He stopped in his tracks and stared at the soaring pyramid of the Luxor.
It would feel so good to go inside and sit down at a blackjack table or even a slot machine—let the rush of endorphins take over and everything else fade away. It was the only thing that would relieve this stress. He wouldn’t let it get out of control this time. He’d learned his lesson, he could handle it for just a couple of hours . . .
Dominic clenched his hands into fists, unable to look away.
It took hours for the rage kindled by the Seven of Spades’s call to burn itself out. Levi didn’t fight it; instead, he let it drive him, powering through the Barton case with a fierce determination that no obstacle could stand against.
By the end of the day, he had over a dozen statements from friends, relatives, and neighbors confirming that Drew and Patty Barton were well known for their angry, at times violent altercations. Several of Barton’s colleagues had asserted that there had been about an hour in the middle of the previous night’s event when he’d been nowhere to be found. Verizon had come through with a spate of nasty texts exchanged between the couple right around that same time. Reviews of the venue’s security tapes showed that, while Barton had been wearing the same jacket later in the evening, as well as the same color shirt, the shirt’s collar was a different style, and the trousers were a subtly lighter hue.
The real clincher had been when the officers combing the Barton’s neighborhood had found a hastily wiped kitchen knife tossed into someone else’s garbage can ten blocks away. The crime lab was processing the knife now, but a warrant had already been issued for Barton’s arrest, and Levi had put out the APB himself before calling it quits. He’d had officers keeping tabs on Barton all day, and one of them would bring the bastard in. Let him cool his heels in a jail cell overnight; then they’d see if he was ready to talk.
Levi returned to his hotel wrung out but pleased with the day’s work. He could admit that the Seven of Spades case had rocked his confidence in his abilities as a detective, but wrapping up a homicide in less than twenty-four hours had gone a long way toward restoring his self-esteem.
He stashed his gun in a drawer, stripped down to his underwear, and gathered a pile of fresh clothing. He was just entering the bathroom when his cell phone rang.
Glancing at the screen, he saw it was only Martine—now that the Barton case was taken care of, she’d want to talk about his phone call with the Seven of Spades. That could wait until after he’d taken a long, hot shower.
Levi stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, and let the call go to voicemail.
“Hi, I’m Dominic, and I’m a compulsive gambler.”
“Hi, Dominic,” said the twenty or so people seated in the ring of folding chairs.
He remained seated as well; this group had always been informal. “I don’t come here very often.” He flashed a sheepish smile at Gus, the group leader. “But it’s been a stressful week in more than one way. I didn’t mean to, but this morning I spent over an hour walking up and down the Strip, staring at the casinos and fantasizing about going inside.”
There were nods and murmurs of empathy all around the circle.
“I’ve always been drawn to gambling—all the way back since middle school. It didn’t get really bad until after I finished high school, though. I was in community college, and I hated it. I was constantly looking for any distraction, any excitement, and gambling played that role for me. I wasn’t legal yet, but when has that stopped anyone?”
A few people laughed. Dominic chuckled as well.
“I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t gamble the way other people did,” he said. “Once I started, I couldn’t stop until someone made me stop, no matter how much money I’d lost. I thought about gambling all day, creating strategies, reliving my wins, imagining how I could have avoided my losses. It took over my life, became the only thing I cared about. I was terrified of what was happening to me, but instead of asking for help, I dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army.”
His family hadn’t been thrilled by the news, but they hadn’t been shocked, either. Though at that point he’d still been doing a good job of hiding his addiction, they’d known he was unhappy in college and looking for a way out.
“I thought the Army would save me—and for a long time, it did. Being a soldier taught me discipline and self-control; it gave my life structure, and most importantly, it gave me a purpose greater than myself to focus on. I was able to stay away from gambling for eight years. I thought I was ‘cured.’ So I finished up my second contract and came home when I was discharged.”
He cleared his throat, rubbing his palms up and down his thighs. No matter how many times he told this story, it never got any easier.
“The problem was that I’d gotten used to having a mission, and without one, I lost that sense of purpose. I had no job and no goals. I missed the sense of fraternity I’d had with my fellow Rangers. After my years of service, civilian life was like a black-and-white movie. I wasn’t angry or sad, but nothing interested me, excited me, made me happy. Gambling was the only way I could fill that void.”
He had to stop again. The others in the circle were respectfully quiet; they’d all had different experiences, but there were core truths to a gambling addiction that everyone here could understand.
“It was so much worse the second time around.” He cringed at the onslaught of memories he usually kept buried deep in the back of his mind. “I was of legal age, living on my own, and I wasn’t accountable to anyone. I’d spend eighteen hours a day in casinos. I blew through all my savings and then got into massive debt. My mother and siblings had to bail me out over and over again. But no matter how bad it got, I literally couldn’t stop. I hated myself so much.”
As he choked up, a woman he’d known for a couple of years, Anita, took his hand and squeezed it gently before letting it go. She gave him an encouraging smile.
“My dog saved my life,” he said. “When she was about seven months old, she got pancreatitis. She needed bloodwork, IV fluids, medication—and I couldn’t pay for any of it. There were three dollars in my checking account and all my credit cards were maxed out. I had to call my mother and beg her to cover the bills.” He swallowed hard. “I’ve never been so ashamed before or since. Here was this puppy who loved me and trusted me, and I’d let her down. If my mother hadn’t helped, she could have died, and it would have been my fault.”
It’d been one of the worst moments of his life, the crushing realization that he was so out of control he couldn’t protect his own dog.
“Rebel gave me the courage and determination I needed to stop. Until that point, nothing else had been enough. But taking care of her was my job, my new mission. I finally got help, and whenever I feel that compulsion creeping back up, I think about her—about how much she needs me to stay in control. That’s what I thought about earlier today when I was so tempted. And I think it’s important to the recovery process to have something or someone that gives you a reason to stay on track. I didn’t care that much about hurting myself, but I’d never hurt her. She keeps me strong.”
He sat back in his chair, breathing out with the relief of unburdening himself. “Thank you, Dom,” Gus said as everyone clapped. “Anita, would you like to go next?”
The remainder of the meeting proceeded as usual, with a few people sharing their stories and everyone commiserating with each other’s struggles. At the end of the hour, they stood and joined hands for the Serenity Prayer to wrap things up. Dominic hung out for a bit afterward, helping to straighten out the rec room and chatting with a few people over coffee and chocolate chip cookies.
He felt much better when he left the church, calmer and more centered. It was getting late, so he’d have to stop somewhere for dinner on the way home, because his refrigerator was empty. Or maybe he’d see if Carlos and Jasmine wanted to go out somewhere.
Debating his options, he backed out of his parking space. As he was waiting to turn out of the lot, his phone chimed with an incoming text from an unfamiliar number.
Detective Abrams is in danger. He needs your help.
Before Dominic could process the bizarre message, it was followed by a second text containing a street address he didn’t recognize and a room number.
He turned on voice-to-text and joined the stream of traffic. “Who is this?”
His answer came in the form of a photograph—a seven of spades playing card.
A chill ran down his spine, but he kept his hands on the wheel and his focus on the road. “Nice try.”
Please. It’s my fault he’s in danger, and there’s only so much I can do to help him.
Dominic drove another block, chewing on his lower lip, then cursed and pulled over to the side of the road. If there was a chance Levi’s life was at risk, even a small one, he couldn’t ignore it.
“Why don’t you call the police?” he asked as he programmed the address into his GPS.
I reported a disturbance at Detective Abrams’s hotel, but I couldn’t be more specific or they would know it was me. They’d suspect a trap, and the delay could cost him his life.
Dominic waited for a break in traffic, got back on the road, and followed the highlighted route. He was surprised to see he wasn’t far away; with luck on his side, he could reach the hotel within a few minutes.
“How do you know I won’t do the same?”
Because you’re already on your way.