Page 57 of Blind Luck

“What if I end up on the other side of the hotel on my own?”

“Okay, do you want to swap rooms?”

“Then you’d end up with the cold shower.”

“Share rooms?”

She wouldn’t do that. Erin valued her privacy too much. As predicted, she shook her head, then took a croissant and began picking off tiny pieces.

“Getting no sleep isn’t ideal.”

“Sometimes I can’t sleep, and Marcel makes me special cookies,” Dusk said. “You want me to bring you a batch?”

Special cookies? “Do you mean weed cookies? And who’s Marcel?”

“Marcel is our assistant. Don’t tell me you’re one of those anti-narcotics zealots? Marijuana’s barely even a drug.”

“I guess I’m surprised you’d risk impairing your performance. I mean, with your job.”

Surely, she wouldn’t want to be sleepy while she was out playing Superwoman?Didshe go out playing Superwoman? Jerry and Tulsa wore capes for sure, andprobably Sin, but Alexa seemed to spend her entire life indoors.

“The alternative is me running on two hours of sleep, which is worse.”

“You suffer from insomnia?”

“Something like that.” Dusk downed the double espresso she’d ordered and set the dinky cup back on its saucer. “We’re here to talk about your investigation, not my sleeping habits. Erin, just swap rooms with Ari. Sleepwalking through surveillance is suboptimal.”

“But—” Erin started.

“We’re changing rooms,” I told her. Otherwise, we’d have this same conversation every day we spent in Vegas. “And is the surveillance going to be necessary for much longer? Haven’t you more or less confirmed that Kelsey Dorrias isn’t a cheater?”

“Rusty says we don’t have a definitive answer yet, so he wants to stick around for a couple more days. Although I think his willingness to stay is connected to his reluctance to go back home to Minnesota.”

“Why doesn’t he want to go home?”

“Because he’s still in love with his ex-girlfriend, and she’s engaged to another guy.”

Dusk frowned at the same time as I did. If his ex was the prom queen he’d been photographed with, then she was part of the friendship group he’d grown up with, and Savigny wasn’t a town you could hide away in. No wonder he couldn’t face going back there.

“Yikes,” Dusk said. “What happened? Do you know?”

“Not really. I think it was something to do with him signing a new contract for the Commanders.”

“She didn’t want to stay in California?”

“I don’t think she ever moved there. She just expected him to quit at the end of his entry-level contract and move back home. And when he didn’t…”

He’d surprised her with a new contract? Yikes indeed.

“She moved on? Oh, no, sweetie. He signed his new contract at the end of March, and the woman’s engaged in May? She was cheating on him, absolutely.”

“You think?”

“How many people do you know who got engaged two months after they started dating?”

“My friend Kelly. And also Loranne, who played piano during services. And Christine—she only met her husband on the morning of the wedding. Then there’s…” Erin trailed off. “That’s not normal, is it?”

“Rusty has his head in the sand if he thinks she didn’t cheat. Maybe deep down, he knows, and that’s why he agreed to come to Vegas to stalk Kelsey?”

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