the limousine driver, who had opened the passenger door closest to the curb. A third security man, wearing an unbuttoned cashmere overcoat over a turtleneck sweater and gray woolen slacks, stepped out and scanned the area, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. No doubt he was armed, the coat open to allow him immediate access to a weapon. He leaned back into the car and gave an all clear.
The main occupant, a man with short silver hair, gold-rimmed eyeglasses, and manicured nails that shone in the daylight like abalone, climbed out and the driver shut the door behind him. He smiled as Mulvane approached with his hand out. Winter was too far away to hear what was said, but close enough to read Pierce’s lips. As they shook hands, Pierce said, “Welcome to the Roundtable, Herr Klein. This is a great pleasure for us all.”
69
Alexa was headed to the far edge of the casino parking lot when she heard someone yelling her name.
“Alexa! Alexa!”
She turned to see a panting Jason Parr running toward her, waving frantically. Alexa stopped and waited for him to catch up, breathless.
“Jason.”
“You…you…left before…you got…your cut.”
“Don’t be silly. I had a blast. You don’t owe me anything.”
“Man, I ain’t had a run like that since my second wife caught me with my secretary and got her hands on my forty-four Bulldog.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Well, my wife got me good.”
“She shot you?”
“Be better if she had. She gave me a divorce so I could marry my secretary. Talk about revenge.” Jason took an envelope from his coat pocket and offered it to her. “This is roughly ten points. I didn’t have time to do a count because you run off on me. They’re counting it up now.”
“I have to go,” Alexa said. “And I can’t take that.”
She saw Brad’s truck heading toward her.
“Sure you can,” Jason said. “We had a deal and I always honor my word.”
Brad pulled up. Winter was in the rear passenger seat.
“Good luck,” Alexa said to Jason.
“You come back anytime I’m here and gamble with me. Same deal. I’ll be here till Sunday.”
“I think this is my last time,” she said.
Alexa didn’t know Jason Parr was going to hug her, but he lifted her off her feet and turned them both three hundred and sixty degrees before putting her down.
“Now I’ll be lucky all day. I can feel it.”
Alexa said good-bye, opened the truck door and climbed inside, closing the door behind her. Jason was already running back to the casino.
“I think your new pal really likes you,” Winter said.
“He only likes my luck,” she said. “Who was the VIP in the limo?”
“That was Klein, the owner,” Winter said.
Alexa asked, “Mulvane was the carrottop fancy pants with fat Albert?”
“By the way, Winter changed your plan,” Brad told her.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “I wasn’t in love with it.”
70
Back at the sheriff’s office, Alexa went on the Internet to research the Klein family and its businesses.
“Kurt Klein is the head of a family-owned industrial manufacturing conglomerate with roots that go back two hundred years,” Alexa said. “RRI is a very small piece of their holdings. Most of the RRI properties are large self- contained resorts located in Europe, the Caribbean, Las Vegas, and around the world. The Klein corporation isn’t publicly traded so there are no published financial figures. Maybe Klein isn’t aware of what is going on. If we assume he knows about the land and the murder, why would he be here before it was resolved?”
“If he isn’t aware, it could give us some leverage. Sometimes people are insulated, and they just say they want something to happen and other people make sure it does,” Winter said.
Alexa said, “And sometimes men with a great deal of money and influence aren’t what they seem, but what they choose to project. We just don’t know enough about Klein. I suspect the CIA would have a better idea about him than the FBI. I doubt Klein’s family businesses could have survived World War Two without some unpleasant alliances.”
“You think Leigh is in any danger now that you told Mulvane we were aware of the implied threat? He’d be crazy to let anything happen to her, right?”
Winter shrugged. “You’d think so.”
“I can have more of my people cover her,” Brad said.
“I can stay with her. Nobody knows me,” Alexa said. “I could just be a friend of hers visiting for support during a difficult time.”
“A larger official presence couldn’t hurt,” Winter told Brad.
71
Raymond Gee had bought the three-bedroom house as an investment, and he made his son, Alan, work on it like a slave all that summer, only paying him twenty bucks a day for ten hours or more of hard labor. All that was left was to sand and paint the Sheetrock, which would take another couple of weeks. The central heating was hooked up, as was the plumbing. Raymond Gee owned seven rental houses and was always telling his son that by the time he retired, the houses would be paid for and the rent checks they generated, after legitimate expenses, would pay him more than he made as a salesman at Gates Tires in Batesville.
Since Alan had a key, he and his best friend, Buddy Graham, had been hanging out in the house’s basement. They would smoke cigarettes, drink a beer or two, and party with Amy Buckley when she could sneak out and come there with them. While she was only fourteen to their sixteen, she was built like an eighteen-year-old, and she loved to get high. In exchange for a few hits on a pipe and their sworn promises not to ever tell anybody, she would take off her shirt and let the boys look at her breasts as long as they didn’t touch them. She enjoyed watching them masturbate to the sight of her boobs. Although this had only happened twice in two months, they were getting worried. The house would soon be ready to rent and, once it was, they’d be without a clubhouse for their tit- peeking jerk-off sessions.
The boys knew that the neighbors were accustomed to Alan working inside the house, and since he parked his Ford Fiesta there all the time, they paid no particular attention to when the young boy’s car arrived or left the
