CHAPTER TWENTY - LUKE
“And did you at any point see anyone behaving oddly toward the front of the crowd?” I asked the bartender, who was leaning against the bar in the bridge’s nightclub with her hands clasped in front of her. I could tell she was wracking her brain, but it didn’t take long for her to start shaking her head and frowning.
“Sorry, but no. I was focused on the people in front of me all night, and the crowd was too dense up at the front to be able to tell whether anyone was doing anything. I wish I had more for you.”
I wanted to take a deep breath and pull out a bottle of whiskey, but instead, I kept a stern face and nodded calmly.
“No, that’s reasonable, you were doing your job. What about any odd customers you had that night, did anyone stick out to you in any way?”
She shook her head, and I nodded.
“If anything comes to you,” I said, “let me know. You have my email.”
“Of course,” she said. “Anything to drink while you’re at it?”
I started to frown, then rolled my eyes and nodded. “No, but thanks.”
“You got it,” she said, and I checked my phone quickly.
I’d spent the past few days running nearly constant interviews with the various workers and guests who had been present at the concert to try to get any scrap of missed information that I possibly could. I felt like I was in limbo, but nothing was helping.
The bartender made her way down the bar, wiping an already clean surface.
She wasn’t the only person I’d tracked down on the job to interrogate. Dragging people into my office day in and day out not only disrupted the workflow around the casino, it also made people nervous and let them know something was wrong.
I was a hands-on kind of guy. That was always how I had been. So, I made it a point to tackle this myself. Anyone else would have fallen short of my standards.
But no matter who I asked, nothing came through for me. Nobody who was close up to the stage was around anymore or willing to talk, and the ones who were just didn’t see anything.
I finished my drink and started making my way to the next person on my list. Over the next hour or so, I pulled aside two more security guards who had been working that night, as well as a few of the other workers who happened to be in the area. But all of them had the same answers: they either couldn’t see anything up there or didn’t notice anything suspicious.
By the time the end of the day rolled around, I felt exhausted and frustrated, and I had a pounding headache, but I was far from being defeated. I was a persistent man, and I got what I wanted when it came down to it.
But as I headed up to my office, I felt my phone buzz, and I checked it to see a message from the engineer in charge of the third-party investigation of the stage equipment. It said that the inspection was finished, and I had an email in my inbox that I’d want to see.
I hurried up the rest of the way to my office, and I sat down to pull up the email and start scanning over the report.
As I did, my eyes got wider with every line that I read.
I was getting toward the end of the report when my phone rang, and I looked down to see Casey’s name. I smiled, seeing the picture of him I’d taken to use as his photo ID.
“Hey,” I said as soon as I put the phone to my ear.
“Hey there,” he said back, and just hearing his voice made my heart pound faster and my headache feel a little less intense. Casey soothed my soul on a level that no medicine could. “What’s going on? Tied up with work all night?”
“Actually,” I said, sitting back in my chair and crossing my legs, “I just hit a break that I think will make all the difference in the world.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I can’t remember if I told you how we were getting a third-party inspector to come and look over the equipment,” I said, “but I’m sitting in front of my laptop reading his report.”
“Let me guess,” Casey said, “some maniac arsonist rigged everything to blow up in your faces?”
I grinned silently, and there was a long pause between us before I heard his voice speak up again.
“...Luke? That’s not what actually happened, is it?”
“He came to the conclusion that everything was set up as it should be, with one anomaly: someone definitely tampered with the equipment after it was set up. None of the technicians were at fault. This was absolutely sabotage.”
“Sabotage?” he said, suddenly sounding concerned.
“Yeah, the tampering seems to have been clearly deliberate,” I said, scrolling over those pages of the report that said as much. “Which answers one question and takes some of the pressure off me, but now I’ve got a new puzzle to solve.”
“Figuring out who the hell would want a fire to start at the concert,” Casey finished for me.
“Exactly,” I said. “And I have a feeling this wasn’t just some psychotic arsonist in the audience with an antigay agenda.”
“Well, I wouldn’t write that off entirely,” Casey said ruefully.
“No, you’re right,” I said. “I’m going to try doing some research on everyone present that night and—” I paused, taking a deep breath and collecting myself. “Actually, let’s put a pin in that. What’s up? I’m sure you didn’t call just to ask what my latest headaches are.”
“Well, I certainly don’t mind,” Casey said a little playfully. “I like hearing about your day to day life.”
“Me too,” I said. “How was your day?”
“Oh, not nearly as exciting. Just a normal day of work, then asking a cute guy if he wants to do dinner with me after a stressful day.”
“That sounds better than anything I could have come up with, honestly,” I said immediately, a big, stupid grin crossing my face.
No matter how bogged down in work I got, the slightest effort from Casey could pull me right out of it.
“Got a place in mind?” I asked.
“I’ll send it to you,” he said.
“I’ll see you there,” I said, and I hung up, still feeling my heart pounding.
I needed this more than Casey probably realized.