"You said here. You're here now?"

"Downstairs."

"Why didn't you say so? Come on up."

He hung up before Karch could say anything else. Karch walked to the elevators and took a ride up to the second floor. As he rode he took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, balled it and stuffed it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He pushed it down so that it could not be seen but still served to hold the pocket open about an inch. He then checked his pocket for change and came up with a quarter and a dime. They were both recently minted and very shiny. He bent down and slid the quarter into one shoe and the dime into the other. One at a time he shook his feet to move the coins below the arches. He hoped Cannon wasn't watching him on one of his cameras.

Out of the elevator he went left to the security complex entrance and rang the buzzer to the left of the steel door. There was a two-way speaker mounted on the wall above the buzzer but it remained silent. After five seconds the door buzzed and he went in.

Don Cannon was a big and burly dark-haired man with a full beard and glasses. It was likely he had been hired for his size and what he could do with it when necessary on the casino floor. But over the years he had graduated to inside work, and the only parts of the casino he usually saw these days were on the video screens he and his minions monitored in the so-called tube room. He was waiting for Karch in a small anteroom on the other side of the steel entrance door. They shook hands as they always did and the folded hundred-dollar bills were seamlessly passed from one right hand to the other. As with most hotels on the Strip, it was the Flamingo's policy not to accept any remuneration to itself or its personnel for help given on criminal investigations. However, Karch knew the value of a gratuity and how it would keep that steel door's lock buzzing for him the next time he called.

"I'm a little light today," Karch said in a low voice. "I'll have to catch you later on that, if that's okay."

"No problem. I loaded the four o'clock chip while you were on the way up. Come on back."

Pocketing the currency as he moved, Cannon led Karch into the tube room, which was not unlike the casino security center at the Cleo. Video techs sat at rows of twelve-screen multiplex consoles, their eyes endlessly moving from screen to screen and using keyboards and joysticks to choose and manipulate camera angles and magnifications. They watched over everything, but most of all the money. It all came down to the money.

Cannon stepped up onto a stage at one end of the room where a lone console was situated so that as shift supervisor he could monitor cameras and video techs at the same time.

"You said she came in from the DI, right? Did she walk?"

Cannon slid into a seat on rollers and then pulled it close to the console. Karch stood behind him.

"Looks like it. A little after four."

"That's a long walk. Okay, let's see. We'll try the north entrance first."

His fingers started flailing across the keyboard as he typed in search commands. He continued talking.

"We went digital since I think you were last in here. It's a blast."

"Great."

Karch didn't know what going digital meant but it wasn't important to him.

"Okay, here's the door starting at four. I'll put it on double time until you see something."

He pointed to the large master screen directly in front of him in the console. It was divided into a matrix of twenty-four different camera angles. He moved the joystick and an arrow moved across the screen to one of the small squares. He hit the enter button and the image on the small square took over the entire screen. The image was from a camera showing an angled overhead shot of a set of automatic glass doors. The image was moving quickly. Cars seen in the distance through the doors sped by and people passing by on the sidewalk seemed to move at a quick trot. Karch stared intently at the screen and at the figures occasionally entering and leaving through the doors.

"There!" he said after nearly three minutes. "I think that was her. Back it up."

"All right."

Cannon moved the digital image until the figure that had gone by so quickly reappeared going backward out the door.

"There."

The image was frozen and then replayed on slow motion. The automatic doors opened and the woman Karch had watched on the video tubes at the Cleo entered carrying her backpack and the canvas bag containing the briefcase.

"That's her."

"Not bad-looking for a hooker. Too much hair, though. Wonder what she charges."

"Five bills minimum, my guy told me."

Cannon whistled.

"There's your rip-off right there. I don't care what a woman looks like, no piece of ass is worth five bills."

Karch laughed dutifully.

"She take the guy's luggage, too?"

"Yeah. But he doesn't care so much about that. He just wants that watch and ring."

"I don't know, she's holding that one bag like it's got Fort Knox jammed into it."

Karch started to perspire. He had hoped Cannon would run the video trail for him without being too interpretive.

"Well, let's see where she goes," he said, hoping to get Cannon to stop analyzing what he saw and just move through the video.

It seemed to work. Cannon grew silent and he trailed the woman through the matrix of camera angles until she left the casino building through the rear entrance and entered the eight-story self-parking garage at the rear of the property on Koval Road.

"That's gotta be a wig she's wearing, but even so, she looks new to me," Cannon finally remarked after five minutes of silence. "If you want, we can check our hooker bin for her."

"Hooker bin?"

"That's what we call it. We've got most of the working girls in town on computer file. Might be able to come up with a name if we can match her photo. Trouble is, she hasn't so much as looked up a single time. We don't have a clear shot of her so far."

And you're not going to get one, Karch thought.

"Well, let's see what she does and then worry about that after," he said instead.

In the garage the woman took the elevator to the eighth floor. She then walked to a blue unmarked van that was backed into a space in the corner farthest from the elevator. This time of night the upper floors of the garage were nearly empty. There was not another vehicle within twenty spaces of the van.

"No plate," Cannon said. "Looks like this girl takes precautions. You sure she's a hooker, Jack? Like I said, she doesn't look all that familiar to me and, besides, mosta these girls use drivers. Especially your five-hundred-an-hour variety."

Karch didn't answer. He was intently watching the screen. The woman opened the driver's door with a key, then loaded in the bags and climbed in. The lights came on as she started the van. Before putting it in gear the woman reached back and knocked on the partition between the front and the rear cargo area. Karch watched her lips move as she said something. Someone was obviously in the back of the van.

"Don, show that part again, will you?"

"No problem."

Cannon reversed the digital image and showed the woman knocking on the partition again. He froze it and went through some computer commands in an effort to clean up the picture. He then switched to the roller ball and slowly advanced the recorded image again.

"She said something," Cannon said. "I don't… it looks like maybe, 'How are you doing?' or 'How's it going?' Something like that."

"How's it going back there," Karch said.

"Damn, Jack, I think you're right. You're good, man. We could use you up here."

"I'd go stir-crazy inside a week. You going to be able to get a rear shot of the van?"

"As soon as she drives out."

Cannon went back to the matrix – now displaying only garage cameras – and followed the van down the seven levels until it went out the exit to Koval. As it passed through the exit, the van's rear end was recorded by a ground-level camera focused at the average height of a license plate.