Page 118 of Blue Moon

Anyone notable missing so far?

Sin

Guy named Danny Wells. Apparently Luna hated his guts.

Me

Can Blackwood focus in on him?

Sin

They already are.

Luna had been missing for at least six and a half hours, possibly as much as eight and a half. Frank was about to cancel the show, and once he did that, all hell would let loose. At least the cops might finally sit up and take notice, although whether they’d help or hinder was debatable. Four other young women had gone missing in Vegas in the past month, and they’d only found two of them. And of those two, one had shown up at home when she returned from a drunken trip to Reno, and the other had been scattered beside the highway in small pieces.

Courtesy of Romeo, we had a list of sixty-six team members who were regularly assigned to the control centre. The centre ran twenty-four-seven, and twelve operatives plus a supervisor worked each shift. Monroe had called all sixty-six employees in—it was the fastest way to find out who was AWOL—and Blackwood’s team had corralled them in an empty conference room. Eleven people were unaccounted for. Romeo had provided a separate list of seven users with admin access to the system. Only one of the names appeared on both lists, a deputy manager named Jenny Bakewell, and she was in the hospital having knee surgery.

We were clearly missing something.

But what?

Echo

I have video footage.

Me

On my way.

32

TULSA

“Stop breathing on me.”

Echo had set herself up in Monroe’s office with Chase standing guard at the door. When Romeo realised where I was going, he’d insisted on coming too, and Monroe had followed. He might have been adequate at running the security team day-to-day, but give him a minor crisis to deal with, and he was way out of his depth. Monroe had been coasting in his job for too long, and controls were lax. I’d seen it a thousand times before. Taken advantage of it nine hundred and ninety-nine of them.

“I can’t stop breathing,” Romeo griped. “Do you want me to suffocate?”

“If that’s an option, I wouldn’t say no.”

We started running footage from the beginning of the day. Luna had ordered breakfast at five minutes to seven, and the call to room service had been recorded. Somewhere over the Atlantic, Ryder Metcalfe had already confirmed that during the conversation, she’d sounded normal—a little tired, a little polite. Now we watched the waitress wheel a cart out of the staff elevator on the twelfth floor, exchange a few words with the guard, and head for Luna’s suite.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

She returned sans cart four minutes and seventeen seconds later, checked her watch as she waited for the elevator, and went back to the kitchen.

Another hooker showed up for the guys in 1209. A pretty brunette.

“Smart girl,” Romeo said. “When I checked the room, she tried to give me a business card.”

“Did you take it?”

“Would it matter to you either way?”

I didn’t dignify that with a reply.

The guard was bored. This was the beginning of his shift, but he fidgeted, and when no one was in sight, he leaned against the wall. Honestly, I couldn’t blame him because there was fuck all going on, and he undoubtedly got paid shit. But he didn’t leave. Occasionally, he checked in over the radio.

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