Page 10

Chapter Ten

Even though it was the weekend and Delia would have much rather taken a page out of her friend Pru’s book and stayed home, she hadn’t forgotten about her agreement with Robert Hendricks, and knew she needed to go and prowl a few more casinos to see if any demons were lurking there.

After her last experience, she was inclined to think that the only unusual individuals hanging out on the Strip were a few people with abnormally good luck, but if she wanted to earn that ten grand — and maybe more, on the off chance that she actually managed to detect something — then she needed to get her ass out there and do her job.

So that was why, once she was finished with her laundry and had done some general tidying-up around the house, she got out of her yoga pants and sweatshirt and into some jeans and low boots and her favorite dark green sweater, put on some mascara and lip gloss, and headed out to see if she could find anything of use.

It still felt strange to wander a casino floor and act as if it was perfectly normal for her to drift from one place to the next, doing her best to reach out with the same psychic sense that helped her make contact with ghosts to see if there was something else here, something not of this earth. A couple of times during this process, the security guards gave her the side-eye, and she paused and popped a couple of quarters into a slot machine so they wouldn’t think she was there for an entirely different purpose.

Not that any of the “escorts” who tended to hang around the casinos and the clubs would let them be seen in public in such boring clothes or so little makeup.

But no matter where she went, she didn’t detect a single thing…until she was in the parking garage at the Bellagio, of all places.

She’d moved her car there after exploring Caesar’s Palace and the Hard Rock and the Venetian, and had to go all the way up to the third floor before she could find a space to park her Kona. Once she got out and began to walk toward the elevator, though, she found herself pausing, her spidey senses tingling all over the place.

Why this particular spot, she wasn’t sure, because there certainly wasn’t anyone or anything here of note except a few oil stains on the concrete and a discarded Starbucks cup.

And yet….

It was a little like walking into a room where someone had smoked a few hours earlier. Something about the smell still seemed to linger in the place, even though there wasn’t anything about this particular location to signal why it might be important.

The sound of an engine came up the ramp, and she stepped out of the way so she wouldn’t block the oncoming vehicle. It was a large Dodge Ram truck with a guy in a baseball cap behind the wheel, a man who didn’t spare a second glance for her as he continued upward in search of a parking space.

Once he was gone, Delia moved back into the middle of the access lane, eyes narrowing. Look as hard as she could, she couldn’t see a single thing to indicate there was anything unique or special about this spot.

Her psychic senses…or whatever you wanted to call them…told her a different story, however.

What had happened here?

She had no idea. The only thing she did know was that this didn’t feel like a ghost.

Did that mean a demon had once been here?

Maybe. Or maybe she was imagining the whole thing because she desperately wanted to have even a tiny piece of evidence she could present to Robert Hendricks whenever he next made contact. Delia had a feeling he probably wouldn’t reach out until Monday at the earliest, though, just because he hadn’t seemed like the kind of guy who would bug her over the weekend.

She supposed that was a good thing. The more time she had to dig into this, the better the chance she might have something to actually give him.

Although there really wasn’t anything to see, she went ahead and pulled her iPhone out of her purse so she could take a few pictures of the section of the structure where she stood. If nothing else, she could show them to Pru when they met tomorrow evening for drinks. Her friend was a trained private detective, after all, and Delia thought it was possible she might be able to see something that a mere real estate agent couldn’t.

Another car was coming up the ramp, so she took its appearance as a signal that she was done here and needed to head out. As she got into her SUV and pressed the button to start the engine, she couldn’t help wondering if her mind had manufactured those odd sensations out of pure frustration at not being able to find anything when she was wandering through the casinos.

No, that was silly. While she wanted to do a good job for Robert the same way she wanted to make sure all her clients were happy, she still shouldn’t be desperate enough to make up some kind of story about demonic residue. For one thing, if her brain really had conjured the whole thing, why do it here in the parking garage rather than on a casino floor?

She had no idea.

Which meant she had felt something real…even if she had no idea what it could have been.

Frowning, she backed out of the parking space and headed down to street level.

On the drive home, her phone pinged from inside her purse, and when she was safely stopped at a light, she pulled it out and took a quick look.

A text from Paige Loomis, saying she’d be at Delia’s office at eleven on Monday morning to sign the offer papers and collect Caleb’s proof of funds.

Well, that was something, she supposed. Not that she’d really expected Paige or her client to back out of the deal, not when that lemon of a property had been sitting on the market for almost a year — and not when Delia had come up with a buyer who was willing to do a cash transaction — but still, it felt like progress, and it was a piece of validation she needed right then, especially after experiencing that whatever-it-was in the parking structure at the Bellagio.

She had to wait for another red light to reply, but once that was handled, she returned the phone to her purse and continued the rest of the drive home without incident. After checking on the fish, she decided to do a little research to see if anyone had ever reported any strange phenomena in that location.

It wasn’t the easiest of internet searches, since she kept pulling up all sorts of random information about the casino rather than anything directly connected to the supernatural, and not for the first time, she admired the way her friend Prudence always seemed able to get right to the heart of the matter no matter how arcane the topic might be. For a moment or two, Delia wondered if she should send Pru a text to ask her to check into the Bellagio as well, then pushed the notion aside. Investigating Caleb was more important, especially since she still couldn’t say for sure whether what she’d experienced in the Bellagio’s parking garage had been nerves and nothing more.

After all, being tasked to investigate whether any demons were roaming around in Vegas casinos was probably sufficient to put you on edge.

Annoyed, she closed her laptop and vowed to focus on the mundane for the rest of the weekend. Grocery shopping, housework — she had someone come in to clean into the corners once a month, but she took care of the in-between stuff — maybe going to the Sherwin-Williams store to pick up some paint samples for the continually delayed repainting of her home office.

Anything to keep her mind off demons and casinos…and Caleb Lowe.

By the time Sunday evening rolled around, Delia thought she was feeling a lot more grounded. The house was clean, she’d decided on a gorgeous color for the office — a pale, hazy blue-green named Waterfall — and absolutely nothing weird had happened, much to her relief. She’d chatted with her mother and promised to go over for dinner sometime this coming week, had made appointments for two new home listings, and was glad that life in general seemed pretty normal.

Even in Las Vegas, January evenings were too chilly to sit outside — a lot of places had those big outdoor heaters, but unless you were sitting right next to one, they didn’t seem to help all that much — so Delia and Pru had already agreed to meet in the bar at Ghost Donkey and start there, then decide if they wanted to stay beyond drinks and nachos or move on to different restaurant if it turned out they wanted something other than Mexican food.

For a Sunday evening, the bar was pretty crowded. Luckily, though, it seemed as if Prudence had gotten there early, because she’d snagged them a high-top table off to one side rather than sitting at the counter.

Much better. Not that Delia was morally opposed to sitting at the bar, but it was a lot more difficult to have a private conversation that way.

Pru’s dark eyes were dancing, telling Delia she must have dug up something. However, it seemed she was willing to wait until they’d ordered their drinks — a Cadillac margarita on the rocks for Delia and a frozen prickly pear for Prudence, after they’d decided a pitcher wouldn’t be practical because they wanted different things — and also placed an order for a big platter of nachos before she was ready to launch into her findings.

“So, what’ve you got?” Delia asked after the waitress dropped off their margaritas and promised that their nachos would be out in a few minutes.

“Lots of stuff,” Pru replied, then took a sip of her margarita. Unlike Delia, who’d let her natural hair color come back in after deepening it to shocking scarlet when she’d sung for Final Girl, Prudence still sported one brilliant color after another, depending on her mood that month. Right now, it was a bright turquoise, a shade that certainly stood out against her all-black clothes and pale skin. “For one thing, his name isn’t really Caleb Lowe. It’s Caleb Lockwood.”

Delia stared at her friend. “How’d you find that out?”

Prudence grinned and sipped some more prickly pear margarita. “It wasn’t that hard. I got his photo from his driver’s license and then uploaded it to some other databases.”

“So…he really is in the witness protection program?”

“Nope,” Pru said, sounding cheerful. “If that had been the case, the stuff about his real identity probably would have been harder to dig up. But anyway, he’s Caleb Lockwood from Greencastle, Indiana, he’s thirty-one years old…and he’s been missing for the past two-plus years.”

“‘Missing’?” Delia repeated. She supposed that was a precursor to starting over with a new identity, but in this day and age, completely erasing your existence wasn’t as easy as it used to be.

The waitress showed up with their nachos right then, so they had to wait until she’d deposited the oversized plate on their table and asked if they wanted anything else before she took off and they had some much-needed privacy again.

Prudence grabbed a tortilla chip loaded with ground beef and tomatoes and cheese and popped it in her mouth. Once she was done chewing — and had washed the food down with another swallow of margarita — she said, “Yeah, it looks like Caleb and his father and a group of their friends went on some kind of chartered fishing trip in the Gulf two years ago in November, and the boat vanished without a trace. Had quite the impact on the community, since it wasn’t just that they’d lost fourteen of their own. Sounds like all the older-generation guys were what you’d call pillars of the community — Caleb’s father was president of the local bank, and the rest were doctors and lawyers and even the principal of the high school — so it was definitely a blow.”

Delia could imagine. And although she certainly wasn’t the type to keep up with news about a small town in Indiana, usually if there was that much loss of life occurring all at once, the national media would have picked up the story and run with it for a while until they came up with something else to distract their viewers.

As far as she could recall, she hadn’t heard a damn thing about the tragedy.

“Why wasn’t it on the news?”

Prudence shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I found articles in the local paper about what happened, and in places like Indianapolis and even Chicago, but it didn’t seem to have made the national news.”

“But if Caleb drowned in a fishing boat accident, then what the hell is he doing in Las Vegas with a new name and a new life?”

“I have no idea,” Pru said, still sounding way too cheerful, considering their topic of conversation. “I guess he was a better swimmer than the rest of them.”

The comment had been made as a joke, but Delia wasn’t sure if she wanted to dismiss it out of hand. Although she’d never been out on the ocean, she had to imagine that a boat sinking with a bunch of people on board must have been chaotic, to say the least. Maybe Caleb had survived longer than the rest and had been picked up by another fishing boat. Maybe he’d knocked his head against something and had amnesia, and had been hanging out in Mexico or something until his memories resurfaced.

Delia had to admit that particular scenario sounded like something right out of a telenovela, but what else would explain why he’d been missing for two years, only to reappear now with enough cash on hand to buy not one, but two properties?

She had no idea. Also, her theory had about a million holes in it. Even if Caleb really had forgotten who he was for months on end, why wouldn’t he have gone home to Greencastle once his memories reemerged? What would have sent him to Las Vegas and made him think that buying up properties was the best use of his time and resources?

“And there was absolutely no trace of him after the boating accident?” she asked, and Pru shook her head.

“Nothing at all. There’s a total gap between November ninth two years ago and now.”

Which she supposed would make sense if he’d been out of the country, surviving on other people’s generosity.

Or maybe he’d had an interim identity, something he’d used before he decided to become Caleb Lowe, for whatever reason.

She asked Pru if that was a possibility, and again her friend shook her head.

“I couldn’t find any other I.D.s with photos that matched his. Just the one from Indiana and the one that was recently issued here in Nevada. Maybe it’s possible he couch-surfed the whole time and only used cash and took Ubers everywhere, but I don’t think it’s very likely.”

Especially since the ride-sharing services got cranky with you if you tried to avoid having a credit card or a PayPal or Venmo account on file with them.

No — even though Delia wasn’t sure how he’d accomplished it — Caleb seemed to have been completely off the grid for the past two years, right up until the moment when he’d applied for his new driver’s license.

“How could he even get a license without a birth certificate?” she asked, and Pru sent her a look that seemed to indicate she couldn’t believe her friend could be so na?ve.

“You think they do a deep dive on those at the DMV? If you hand over a birth certificate and a Social Security card, they’re going to issue you a license. Judging by how recent his credit history is and yet so super-high at the same time, I have a feeling he paid someone for a package deal — you know, SS card, birth certificate, maybe a passport. Plenty of people here in Vegas who’ll do that for you.”

“Could you?” Delia said, genuinely curious. While she didn’t think Prudence was involved in anything illegal, considering how good she was at getting into various databases and digging up all sorts of information, she supposed it was possible that her friend might be able to manage such a feat…and make a little extra money on the side.

“Nah,” Pru said at once, allaying Delia’s fears on that account. “I mean, I could probably point someone to a person who could actually help, but even if I was able to create a fake credit report for someone — which I’m not sure I can — they’d still need to find a person with the necessary kind of resources to create realistic-looking fake paperwork. I have a feeling Caleb must have used false documentation to get his driver’s license, because that’s definitely real even if nothing else is.”

“None of this makes much sense,” Delia said slowly, then remembered there were nachos and the cheese was starting to congeal. She scooped up a mouthful, then drank some of her margarita, glad of the extra shot of Cuervo gold she’d poured on top.

Yes, that was much better.

Voicing the question that had surfaced earlier in her mind, she added, “Why Las Vegas? Why not go home and let any surviving family know he was still alive?”

“Have you been in Indiana in the winter?” Prudence asked, and Delia had to smile. While she was a native of Las Vegas — a rarity, she knew — Pru’s family had moved here from Minneapolis when she was in eighth grade, which was when they’d first become friends.

Anyway, Prudence knew all about Midwestern winters, while one ski trip to Tahoe when she was in college had been enough to convince Delia that she wanted as little to do with snow as possible.

“No,” she said in answer to Pru’s question. “So, okay, maybe he just phoned home or something. But this all seems a little weird.”

“It does,” Prudence agreed. “I guess the question is, what do you plan to do about it?”

The smart thing would be to do nothing. It didn’t seem as if her friend’s investigation had turned up anything illegal, and it certainly wasn’t Delia’s place as Caleb’s real estate agent to start asking him probing questions about his past.

And yet….

Something felt off here. She couldn’t even say what exactly, since she’d never encountered a situation like this before. It wasn’t just the faint drift of whatever it was that she’d first sensed in that one casino several days earlier, or the weird, smoky psychic residue she’d picked up in the parking structure at the Bellagio.

Or even the way she’d dealt with two overtly hostile ghosts in a row, something that had never happened to her before.

Individually, maybe it all could have been explained away.

But put together?

“I don’t know yet,” she replied.

Deep down, though, she thought she might. If Caleb Lowe…Lockwood…wanted to work with her to renovate the house on Pueblo Street, then he was going to have to tell her the truth first.

Afterward…well, after she heard what he had to say, then she’d decide what to do.

No matter what happened because of it.