'I want you to check for any reports of a body found in Swope Park on Thursday evening any time in the three hours before the fire at the barbershop.'
'Of course. Then I'll run a check for Jimmy Hoffa when I'm done.'
'This is serious, Rachel.'
'This is the middle of the night. Call me tomorrow,' she said, and hung up.
Mason was jazzed. He had a hunch that felt so right it had to be wrong, and if he was right, it could still go down very wrong. He smacked his hands together.
'Okay, Mickey. What have you got?'
'This,' Mickey said, holding up a thumb drive.
'And that is?'
'It's a thumb drive with a copy of the bank records of Ed Fiora and the mayor, plus a few dozen money- laundering stops in between that show a steady stream of cash from Fiora to the mayor. The total is around a hundred and fifty thousand bucks. It began a month before Fiora got his casino license and goes right up to last week. I backed the records up just before Fiora and his trolls did a tap dance on my face. I stuffed it down my pants when they busted in here.'
Mason jumped out of his chair, pulled Mickey up, and embraced him. 'I love you, man!'
'Don't go there, dude!' Mickey pushed Mason away and dusted himself off. 'Now what?'
'First of all, you're hired. Second of all, we work weekends. Tomorrow night, we're going to the Dream Casino.'
'We gamble on the job?'
'Only for high stakes,' Mason said.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Mason was so wired when he got home that he had rowed a two-thousand-meter sprint just to wind down, adding a second sprint for good measure. By the time he took a shower, he was barely able to crawl into bed. The last thing he saw was his clock telling him it was four in the morning.
He was sleeping the sleep of the comatose when his phone rang Saturday morning. He let it ring until the answering machine came on.
'Pick up, Lou. The sun is up and you'd better be,' Rachel said.
Mason fumbled for the phone, trying to clear his throat while squinting at the clock. It was eight o'clock. 'I'm here,' he groaned.
'Good. Paybacks are hell. Why do you want to know about a body in Swope Park?'
'Can't tell you,' he said, pulling himself up in bed before collapsing back against his pillows.
'Why not?'
'I may be wrong about something. If I am, no one needs to know. If I'm right, you'll get the story.'
'It had better be a good story. I talked to one of the dispatchers who's a friend of mine.'
'You mean an anonymous source who gets a turkey at Thanksgiving?'
'I don't bribe people. The paper is too cheap. She's a kindred spirit.'
'A member of the lesbian underground?'
'We're everywhere. She said there were no reports of a body being reported or found in Swope Park on Thursday night or any night for the last six months. What does that tell you?'
'That you may get a hell of a story if I don't get killed.'
'Then, don't get killed. I need all the good stories I can get.'
'That's it? No Thanksgiving turkey?'
'I'd miss you. How's that?'
'Nice,' he told her, and hung up.
Mason rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. He tossed and turned with the uneasy confirmation of his suspicions. He gave up when Tuffy stuck her nose in his face, reminding him that she wasn't operating on his schedule. Her whimper said she was overdue for breakfast and her morning ablutions in the backyard.
While Tuffy was outside, Mason took another shower, hoping that the pulsating hot water would trick his body into feeling fresh and renewed instead of tired and abused. After pulling on faded jeans, a washed-out green sweatshirt, and sneakers, he let the dog inside and poured himself into a chair at his kitchen table, wishing someone would appear and make his breakfast.
Cooking was not one of Mason's skills. He wasn't the kind of man who could scour his pantry for a few disparate leftovers and whip up a tantalizing omelet while whistling classical music and puzzling over what wine works best with a bagel and cream cheese. He relied too heavily on fast food, once prompting Claire to warn him that one day he would drive through McDonald's and the cashier would greet him by asking, 'The usual, Mr. Mason?'
Tuffy was pacing around the kitchen, poking her head into nooks and crannies she'd explored countless times, before stopping in front of Mason and pawing his thigh. He gazed down at her, raising an eyebrow as if to ask, what now? She yelped once and trotted to the back door, repeating the ritual she observed whenever she wanted to go on a walk.
'Why not?' Mason muttered. 'Maybe we'll find some roadkill for breakfast.'
He put on his coat, grabbed a ball cap that he yanked low on his brow, and hooked Tuffy's collar to the leash he kept on a hook by the door.
Mason hadn't paid attention to the day until Tuffy took him outside. The sun had blasted away the grim bedrock of slate-colored clouds that had covered the city like a fossil layer for weeks. The temperature had climbed into the forties but felt even warmer in comparison to recent days. The air was crisp and clear and hit him like a shot of adrenaline. The next thing he knew, he was jogging alongside Tuffy, his jacket unzipped and a thin sheen of sweat lining his forehead. He grinned at his dog, who grinned back before sprinting after a squirrel.
Tuffy led Mason to Loose Park, the city's second-largest park, which was only a couple of blocks from his house. They stopped at the large pond along Wornall Road long enough for Tuffy to say hello to the other dogs that were walking their owners, Tuffy sniffing enough dog butts to last a lifetime. Mason was about to introduce himself to a good-looking woman with a white fur ball of a dog when Tuffy sniffed the dog once and knocked it on its butt. Horrified, the woman scooped up her dog, gave Mason the finger, and marched off in a huff.
A few minutes later, Mason and Tuffy power walked past Beth Harrell's building. He craned his neck skyward, shielding his eyes from the sun, wondering which windows were hers and what she was doing behind her drawn shades. Tuffy wasn't interested in the answer and tugged him along the last few blocks to the Plaza.
Mason tied her leash to a traffic sign outside Starbucks while he went inside for a blueberry muffin and a bottle of water. He shared both with Tuffy, pouring the water into a plastic bowl he borrowed from the cashier.
On the way back, they stopped at the waterfall in front of the Intercontinental Hotel. The waterfall plunged two stories from the pool deck to street level. The fountain had been turned off for the winter, but a heavy layer of ice had built up during the storms of the previous weeks. The sun bore down on the irregular slags of ice, reflecting and refracting across their faults, forecasting the coming meltdown.
From his vantage point, Mason could see west to the entrance to the hotel's parking garage on Ward Parkway. He could also see south, up Wornall Road, to Beth's building, which towered over the roof of the hotel. The juxtaposition of both views crystallized something that had lurked in the jumble of details that this case had become.
He remembered Beth telling him that Cullan had taken her home after the incident at Blues on Broadway the night he was killed. She had said that Cullan had dropped her at the door and that she had stayed inside the rest of the night. Later, she had told Mason that she began using the hotel's parking garage to avoid the press, taking advantage of the walkway between the hotel and her apartment building so that she wouldn't be seen coming or going.
Mason guessed that the security system in her apartment building included video monitoring of the apartment garage. Had Beth gone out again that night, or any night, her departure and return would have been recorded. If
