occurring in conjunction over time: synchronicity.
She knew Karch's plan. From suite 2001 a man had fallen to his death almost seven years before. Tonight that man's lover – and their child – would do the same. Karch would take the money. All other things could be laid to blame on Cassie, the distraught mother who shot her co-workers and her parole agent, abducted her daughter and then returned to Las Vegas to end it all as her lover had.
The plan was smart. She knew it would work. But knowing it wrested an advantage to Cassie's side of the board. She leaned forward, her head close to the door. She heard the faint sounds of cartoon mayhem coming from a television inside the suite.
Cassie gently placed a hand against the door and whispered, 'I'm coming, baby. I'm coming.'
43
KARCH unwound the telephone wire from around the two doorknobs and looked in on the girl. She was lying on her stomach at the end of the bed, her hands propping up her head as she fought to stay awake and watch cartoons.
'Everything okay in here, kid?'
'Where's my daddy?'
Karch looked at his watch.
'Soon… real soon.'
He closed the door and wound the wire back around the knobs.
'More like where's the goddamn food,' he said to himself.
He walked over to the phone and called Grimaldi's number. Again the call was answered immediately.
'Anything?' Karch asked.
'Not on this end.'
'Did you call in that room service order?'
'As soon as we hung up.'
'Vincent, your four-star kitchen isn't worth a shit. I'm fucking starving up here.'
'It's busy down there. But I'll make another call.'
'All right. And let me know the minute somebody has her.'
'Will do.'
'Oh, and Vincent?'
'What, Jack?'
'You better close a few craps tables down there. You don't want anybody getting hit.'
'Jesus! Are you sure it has to be this way? Can't we just – '
'Vincent! Vincent! You don't want questions, right?'
'No, Jack.'
'Then there is no other way. Synchronicity, Vincent. Call the pit chief. Close the tables.'
He hung up and walked over to the window. He banged a fist on it, hoping to get a feel for the tension in the glass. He wondered if he shot the glass out first, to make it easier, if the Metro investigators would be able to tell that. Would they actually gather the glass and examine it? Probably not, he decided. Too much trouble, especially for what looked like an obvious murder-suicide.
He decided the plan would be to shoot the glass out and then immediately drop the bodies. The girl first and then the mother. A classic murder-suicide: distraught mother tosses her daughter, then jumps herself.
In the housekeeping station Cassie moved the room service table into a position directly below one of the panels of the drop ceiling. She then cleared the dirty dishes to one side of the table and climbed onto the other. The table was constructed with large wheels so that it would roll smoothly across the deep carpets in the penthouse suites. This made it unsteady as a platform. Cassie slowly stood up on it and reached to the ceiling. She pushed the panel up and to the side. She then gripped the tracks of the frame that held the panel and tested them against her weight. She was 110 pounds in her clothes, the gym bag another 20 or so. The tracks held secure. She tossed the gym bag up first, then grabbed the frame again and swung her legs up. She climbed into the utility crawl space between the false ceiling and the real one.
The crawl space was no more than four feet top to bottom. It was crowded with electrical conduits, water lines and the fire sprinkler pipes. But what took up the most room was the network of air-handling ducts for the heating and air-conditioning system. Twin return and delivery ducts ran the length of the hallway and branched off in smaller tributary lines that went to vents in each suite on the floor. The main ducts were three feet square and large enough to crawl through easily. The tributary lines were smaller but Cassie knew from experience that the air-return ducts were large enough for her to move through, provided she pushed her equipment bags in front of her. She also knew that if she could make it through, Jodie could as well.
Her plan had serious faults and difficulties. Noise would be a major factor. Any sound in the ventilation tunnels was magnified by the time it got to the room vents. She wasn't as much worried about her entry as she was her exit with Jodie. Keeping a five-and-a-half-year-old quiet in what was going to be a frightening situation would be difficult. She hoped the cartoons were still on the television and could be used as sound cover when they made their escape.
Another problem that Cassie knew for sure was ahead would be the removal of the vent cover once she got to the room where Jodie was being held. The cover would be screwed on from inside the room. The difficulty would be in accessing the screws. Her plan was to use a small pry bar from the gym bag to bend the vent slats. She would then reach out with a screwdriver and remove the screws that held the vent in place. This, she knew, would be laborious and time consuming. If she dropped the screwdriver or even one of the screws the resulting noise could bring Karch right to her.
Its success was predicated on her belief that Karch most likely had Jodie in the bedroom of the suite, while he was in the sitting room. But if she was wrong and Karch was keeping the girl close to him, then Cassie knew her chances of getting a shot at a rescue were infinitesimal.
Despite all of this she pressed on. She carefully moved into the crawl space and slid the panel back into place. Once again she put her penlight into her mouth and directed it along the main air-handling ducts until she found the bolted seam of two conjoining segments. She crawled that way, careful to keep her weight at all times on the framework of the drop ceiling.
Cassie started removing the bolts from the bracket that held the two segments of duct together. The work was difficult. Each of the eight bolts had been spot welded as an apparent security measure. It had been almost seven years since Cassie had been in this same crawl space – when she had set up the job Max then wouldn't let her do – but she still remembered and she knew the spot welds were new. It took all of her strength to break the weld on the first bolt and a half minute to remove it. The process instilled a feeling of panic in her. It was taking too long.
Cassie had just started working on the last bolt when she heard the chime from the service elevator in the housekeeping alcove. She put her wrench down and quickly crawled back to the panel she had climbed up through. She lifted it a crack and looked down just as the elevator opened and a room service waiter pushed a table out onto the landing.
As the elevator closed behind him the waiter slipped a leather check folder out of the inside pocket of his red uniform jacket. He opened it to double-check on his destination. Cassie was three feet above him and could easily read the notations on the check inside the folder.
#2001 Leave in hallway. – V. Grimaldi Seeing the note was one more confirmation of Vincent Grimaldi's involvement. It also gave Cassie an idea for a new plan.
The knock on the door startled Karch from his reverie at the window.
'Room service,' a voice called from the hallway.
He turned and stared at the door and waited but there was no second knock or sound. He picked the. 25 up off the desk and cautiously approached the door. Before putting his eye to the peephole he put his ear to the jamb and listened. He heard nothing.
He looked out through the convex view of the peephole. He saw a room service table sitting in the hallway. It
