“Yes,” she admitted. “And thankfully I don’t have to go through the process of divorcing him.”

  “No, you sure don’t,” Aiden noted, “and, of course, that is more motive.”

  She glared at him. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I know,” he agreed, “but the cops don’t know that yet.”

  “And why don’t they?” she asked. “I can’t believe that this has gone on as long as it has.”

  “Because they’re still trying to look for something to nail you with,” Mountain explained. “Just relax. We will get there.”

  She nodded slowly. “If you don’t mind, I’m going upstairs to lie down. It’s been a very nerve-racking day.”

  “Did the lawyer say anything else to you?”

  She pointed at the paperwork on the coffee table. “Read and sign the paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork,” she said bitterly. “Like I haven’t seen enough paperwork in a very long time.”

  “That’s all right to deal with later,” Aiden replied. “I’ll be up in a little bit.” She looked at him nonplussed. He smiled. “Where you are, I will be.”

  She shook her head at that. “It’s a waste of time. It’d be way too obvious for somebody else to get killed now, and it still won’t stop the case against me for supposedly murdering my ex.”

  “You always call him your ex.”

  “Always,” she snapped. “It’s more than I can stomach to remember that I married him, and I know it’ll sound even worse, but thank God he’s gone. Thank God I don’t have to deal with the repercussions of having him around on a daily basis.” And, with that, she stormed up the stairs.

  Aiden looked over at Mountain. “I don’t like the inference that the cops are not being honest.”

  “In a town like this?” Mountain raised one eyebrow. “And remember. I grew up here. It’s all about who you know.”

  “It should be about the law.”

  Mountain shrugged. “It will be the end result, but, if they can make it fit, they will.”

  “Surely the DA will be on top of whether the evidence will be something that’ll make a case or not.”

  “Also depends if the DA is in the father-in-law’s pocket.”

  Just then came a ding. Aiden looked down at his phone. “Well, that’s good timing. Father-in-law’s file just arrived.”

  “Good,” Mountain said, “let me take a look.” Aiden sent him the file, and Mountain nodded. “Now that we have all this, should be absolutely no way to not get this sorted.”

  “Yeah, that just means what we really need is,” Aiden stated, “proof that she’s in the clear, which, of course, she isn’t yet.”

  “No,” Mountain replied. “The information through the Mavericks seems to flow pretty well.”

  “It does.” Aiden looked over at his buddy. “Is that part of what you’re testing?”

  “Partly,” he noted. “Let’s just say that I’ve got a really nasty suspicion that I’ll need a hell of a lot of help to fix this other problem of mine.”

  “And yet you’re still not ready to talk?”

  “No, not yet,” he confirmed. “Last thing I want to do is put you in jeopardy.”

  At that, Aiden looked over at his friend and raised an eyebrow. “That bad?”

  “Hell, yes,” he snapped. “That bad.”

  “Okay. Well, we each need to get through this, and we’ll talk soon about your other op.”

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t have a whole lot of time,” Mountain explained. “So, if I don’t get this finished with you, I may have to leave you alone to handle this.”

  At that, Aiden stared at him. “I’m not sure exactly what that means,” he admitted, “but obviously this other op of yours is urgent.”

  “I keep trying to contact somebody, and I had communication two days ago,” he shared. “Then bad weather set in, and I’m not sure whether that’s part of the problem now or whether we’re heading in a direction I don’t want to go.”

  Aiden couldn’t really make a whole lot of sense from that, but, as Mountain got up and started pacing, Aiden realized Mountain would only tell Aiden so much. “When you’re ready to talk, let me know,” he said gently.

  Mountain immediately nodded. “Will do.”

  With that, Aiden had to be satisfied. He started poring over Daddy’s file. “This guy owns a casino,” he said.

  “Yeah, one of the smaller ones.”

  “But he owns it outright apparently. Have you had any dealings with him before?”

  Mountain shook his head immediately. “No. But don’t forget I’m the black sheep of the family.”

  “So is Toby apparently,” Aiden noted in a noncommittal voice.

  “That’s true,” he murmured.

  Aiden added, “And her daddy? I don’t think he will do anything to help, which to me is just mind-boggling.”

  “That’s because you’re a romantic, and you want things to work out well for everyone,” Mountain stated.

  Aiden stared at his buddy in shock. “A romantic?” He almost felt insulted.

  Mountain quirked his lips at him. “Yeah, a romantic. You’d like nothing better than to go upstairs and to tell Toby that this will all go away.”

  “Of course I would like to do that,” Aiden agreed, “but I’m not naïve, and I certainly know it won’t go away just because I want it to.”

  “I hear you,” Mountain noted. “And sometimes the shit just doesn’t stop falling.”

  Again Aiden figured it came back to something else in Mountain’s life. Aiden frowned. “I like her,” he announced.

  Mountain smiled. “I know, and honestly the two of you look good together.”

  That was another eye-opener for Aiden. “Which has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re here about,” he stated immediately.

  “Hey, you now know that I’m not against the two of you hooking up. It’s just that she’s in a delicate position at present.”

  “I’m not looking at hooking up with anybody,” Aiden stated in a dry tone, “and never on the job.”

  “I don’t know. According to some of the things that I understand are going on in the Mavericks,” Mountain stated, “that’s not necessarily been true for everyone.”

  Aiden shrugged. “Yeah. I heard. I still have that weird code.”

  “That code will get you killed,” Mountain replied absentmindedly.

  “I hope not,” Aiden countered. “It’s the one that I live by.”

  “And that’s not done you a whole lot of good, has it?”

  “Neither has it hurt.” Aiden looked at his friend, worried. “You’ve really got some bee in your bonnet right now.”

  Mountain slumped into the chair beside him. “I do,” he admitted. “Sorry. I’m not trying to bitch my way out of here.”

  “Let’s focus and get your cousin out of trouble,” Aiden said, “then we can go deal with your problem.”

  He looked over at Aiden and smiled. “That wouldn’t be a bad idea. I want to have a talk with the father-in-law.”

  “Is that smart?” Aiden asked.

  “Hell no, it’s not smart,” Mountain agreed, “but I also want to check the crime scene locations.”

  At that, they looked up to see Toby coming down the stairs, her arms wrapped around her chest. She glared at her cousin. “I heard all of that, and I can’t sleep now,” she announced.

  “In that case, maybe you should come with us,” Aiden suggested, making a decision. “We’ll go check out the crime scenes.”

  “It’s not a good idea to take her with us,” Mountain argued.

  “And it’s not a good idea to leave me behind,” she argued in a smug tone. “So, the only option is to take me with you.”

  Mountain obviously didn’t like it, but Aiden nodded. “Grab a sweater.” She looked at him, and he shrugged. “It’s cloudy out and kind of misty.”

  “It’s still Vegas,” she declared.

  “Fine,” he said. “But maybe put up your hair so that that long hair isn’t quite so discernible.”

  “Are we going in disguise?”

  “Not necessarily,” Aiden shared, “but I definitely want to make sure that you aren’t easily picked off as being highly visible.” She obviously didn’t know what he meant by that. “I just don’t want everybody to be pointing fingers at you.”

  “Oh, great,” she muttered in disgust. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “No, and you need to,” he murmured. “Things could get dicey.”

  “Not could,” Mountain murmured, “will.” He looked over at his cousin. “Put it up under a baseball cap. Your profile is pretty distinctive anyway, so we won’t have a whole lot of luck in trying to disguise you that easily,” he explained. “We just want it to be a first-glance rejection kind of thing.”

  She nodded, walked over to the front closet, pulled out a baseball cap, tossed it on her head, and asked, “How about this?”

  “That’ll work,” Mountain noted, “particularly if you take that hair and put it up.”

  She groaned and removed the cap. Then she immediately screwed her hair up into a bun, grabbed a clip off the side table, where she’d tossed it after coming home from work, and put the hat on again. At that, they all trooped outside again.

  Aiden looked at her and added, “Unless you’d really rather stay home.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I’d rather do,” she replied calmly. “If you guys are out here trying to help, the least I can do is try and help too.”

  “Unless there’s nothing you can do,” he noted.

  “According to Mountain, there is.”

  “And, if nothing else,” Aiden said, “you and your cousin are in agreement over that.”

  She shrugged. “I’d be a fool to not believe him. I know he has an awful lot of skills that I don’t know about.”

  “And you trust him?”

  “Yes, absolutely.” Toby looked over at Aiden. “I absolutely trust him.”

  “Good,” Aiden said. “Then you need to put me in the same category of trust, and, if I tell you to do something, whether at home or in the field, you must do it without question,” he declared, his voice turning hard.

  She glared at him. “Doesn’t mean I’ll listen to you.”

  “Then you’re not leaving this house,” he snapped. “My way or the highway.” She stared at him open-mouthed. He shrugged. “Make a decision, or else I’m staying here, and Mountain is going alone.”

  She didn’t like hearing any of that. She looked over a Mountain. He just stared back at her. She asked her cousin, “And you agree to this?”

  “Aiden is a good guy. And very few men are out there I’d trust with your life,” Mountain said, “but he’s one of them.”

  She threw up her hands in disgust. “Fine. Go all macho, then see if I care.”

  At that, Mountain snickered. “Hey, it could be way worse. We could not give a damn. Then where would you be?”

  Chapter 5

  Toby gave Aiden a quick tour of the city, as Mountain drove. “That’s the casino where I work.” She pointed to the big fountain splashing outside. He nodded, and Mountain kept on driving. “You don’t care about that one?” she asked the guys.

  “No, I want to see the crime scenes.” And, one by one, checking each crime-scene location noted in the police’s case files, they went from place to place, the street numbers and addresses already input into Aiden’s phone.

  When Mountain stopped at one, she fell silent.

  “I guess this is the one then, isn’t it?” Aiden asked her.

  She frowned. “The one what?”

  “The one where your husband was killed.”

  She nodded slowly. “Although I’ve told you that I don’t like that word.”

  “It’s legally correct,” Aiden noted, “so don’t get upset when people use it without thinking.”

  She didn’t say anything because he was right. Just because she was against the word didn’t mean that it would stop the word from being used.

  Aiden got out with Mountain at his side, who took several photos. Aiden marked it on a map and then walked around. “Do you know who found him?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t have any information on that.”

  “We can find out,” Aiden noted, as he looked through the files. “It just says a passerby.” As he looked around, he shook his head. “It’s hardly a passerby area.”

  “Probably a druggie,” she guessed. “This is a popular area for drug deals.”

  “Did your husband use drugs?”

  “No.” And then she stopped. “Honestly I don’t know anything about him really.”

  It was such an odd comment to make that Aiden looked over at her in surprise.

  She shrugged. “And we’re back to that again. I really don’t know anything, except that he’s a bully and made my and Michelle’s life miserable.”

  “Got it,” Aiden replied. And, with that, they continued on to the next address and then the next.

  By the time they were done at the last crime scene, she asked, “And what exactly did any of that tell you?”

  Aiden faced her and explained, “They all center within the same six blocks. They’re all close enough to the strip that it could have been any number of reasons to use these Dumpsters at these locations.”

  “But mostly because these guys were robbed and murdered,” she noted.

  “Right,” Aiden agreed. “So, it makes sense that they would come out of the casino—high on whatever drug of their choice, including just gambling—and may have had a friend in common or may have had, you know, a cab in common or something with the victims. … I need to do an in-depth look into each of the characters.”

  “I already did a bunch,” Mountain relayed. “Two of them were visitors on holiday. One of them was a local man, and one of them was a regular but an upstanding citizen supposedly,” he said, with more of a mocking tone than anything.

  “And what about Moscow?” Aiden asked Mountain.

  “He was a gambler with a gambling problem,” he stated. “Honestly you can’t trust that type at any time.”

  At that, she nodded. “And I would agree with that. Moscow and I both come from gambling families. We know how devastating it can be.”

  “And yet you went gambling yourself,” Aiden told her.

  “I went gambling because I needed the money,” she said, “and I’m good at it. The fact is, the casinos don’t really want me to be around, so I had to find another way. I got tired of the confrontations. I would walk in, and they would basically tell me that I wasn’t welcome.”

  “Got it,” Aiden noted. “Do you think that was about you and your card-counting abilities, or was that about your dad owning his own casino or some other influence, like Moscow’s father?”

  “I have no idea,” she replied, frowning at Aiden. “I assumed it was just about me.”

  “And yet I’m not so sure that that would be a fair assessment,” Mountain stated.

  “Regardless,” Aiden replied, facing Toby, “I’ll give you the names and pictures of the gamblers who died and see if you know them.”

  “The cops already did that,” she said. “I knew them only from visiting my table.”

  “So, you had no social life with them at all?” Aiden asked her.

  “I had no social life,” she declared, with a bitterness that was hard to ignore. “Remember my ex?”

  Aiden nodded. “Right. Got that. And so none of these dead men are memorable in any way.”

  “Not particularly,” she said. “I mean, obviously there might have been something that made them memorable but to me? Not necessarily.”

  “And how often do you get big winners?”

  “Often enough that it becomes commonplace,” she replied.

  Aiden added, “And by big, I mean the whales playing at a completely different table.”

  “I wasn’t dealing with the whales.”

  “Meaning, the big spenders?” Aiden asked to confirm.

  “Sure. They get a lot of special treatment, and they get an awful lot of extras and freebies,” she noted. “They don’t necessarily come to somebody like me.”

  “And yet if you had that lucky name?” Mountain asked.

  “And I did.” She winced. “I was asked to work a couple tables for private parties, but it’s not my favorite gig.”

  “Why is that?” Aiden asked.

  “Because of the booze and the groping hands,” she replied, with a roll of her eyes. “This is all about money, and, in that case, those men don’t stick out to me.”

  “And you didn’t see them any more than you would expect to see any of the other gamblers?”

  “No, not at all.” She looked at the photo of the last dead guy, frowned, and added, “He did ask me on the last night that I worked if I liked working there, but that was such a nondescript kind of question. I mean, it’s not as if I ever think about it. It’s a job. I do it because it’s what I do to pay my bills.”

  At that, Aiden nodded. “And that’s quite true, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. I mean, you do what you have to do.” She frowned. “The other two out-of-towners I don’t even remember. Which sounds terrible because they had families and somebody should remember them,” she murmured, as she studied their faces on his phone. She swiped through the pictures one more time, shrugged, and returned Aiden’s phone to him. “Honestly? Not a whole lot is memorable about any of them.”

  At that, Mountain added, “They were all stabbed too.”

  “Which is upfront and personal,” she noted, “and definitely not something I would choose.” She gave a light shudder.

  “Why in particular?”

  “Well, for me,” she explained, “I don’t have any martial arts skills or very much in the way of self-defense skills, so to kill a man that way would be very hard. I mean, I couldn’t subdue him.”

  “We already know that it’s not you,” Aiden replied, “so what we need is more proof that we can turn the cops in the right direction.”

  “In that case,” she snapped, “you need to get my ex’s father off their backs.”

  “And we’ll try that too,” Aiden confirmed, with a look over at Mountain.

  Mountain nodded. “And the thing is, he has also got lots of security. So it’s not as if we just walk in and tell him to smarten up.”