Wild Card

The cigarette calmed Sissy down, and she passed it across the table to Mona. “The finger was in the glove compartment. It was hollow and flesh-colored. I think there was something stuck inside of it, but I can’t swear to it.”

“Like what?”

“Something white.”

“Was one of his hands deformed?”

“No. I sat next to him in the casino, and we played a slot machine together. I would have noticed if there was something wrong with his fingers.”

“So he had all his fingers?”

“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “You gonna bust me?”

Valentine stared into her face. Sissy’s eyes looked like busted panes of glass, and he felt reasonably certain that there were narcotics in the apartment. He didn’t know too many hookers who didn’t use them. The only person Sissy was a threat to was herself.

“Not today,” he said.

The answer made her smile. “You gonna bust Mona?”

“No. The only person I want to bust is the Dresser.” He put his hand on the back of her chair, then knelt down so their faces were level. “I came here to see if I could get you to remember any more details from last night. I’d like to hypnotize you.”

Sissy looked at him with fear in her eyes. “You won’t… you know, take advantage of me while I was under, make me do something I wouldn’t want to, would you?”

Valentine shook his head. He wondered which family member had abused her when she was a kid. He hadn’t met a hooker who hadn’t been.

“Scout’s honor,” he said.

Sissy glanced at Mona. “He okay?”

“He’s the squarest guy in Atlantic City,” Mona said.

“All right. Go ahead and hypnotize me.”

He got a pillow from the living room and made Sissy put it behind her head. Then, he made her tilt her head back and roll her eyes up. A quarter inch of white cornea was visible below each iris. It was a good sign that she was receptive to hypnosis.

“Okay,” he said, “I want you to tell me about last night, what you were wearing, what you had for dinner, the whole nine yards. Play it out in your head like a movie, and you’re the narrator of the movie. Take your time.”

Sissy spent fifteen minutes recounting the events of the previous evening. Up until the point she encountered the Dresser inside Resorts it was pretty boring; then her voice changed, and became strained. “He was making me laugh, giving me a line. The first few minutes with a john, you have to feel him out, make sure you don’t have a Son of Sam on your hands. This guy was ultra-smooth, even if he wasn’t good-looking.”

She described the negotiation, then walking outside in the bitter cold to his car, then him feigning illness and pulling the car onto a darkened side street. “He asked me to open the glove compartment and get his pills. That’s when I saw the fake finger. It was sitting on a deck of playing cards that had the word DeLand printed on its side. My mom’s from Deland, Florida. Anyway, I stare at the finger, thinking ‘How weird is this?’ and then I saw something white and crumpled stuck in its end. It was…” She grit her teeth, working to pull the memory from the recesses of her brain. “… a cigarette butt.”

Her next memory was of lying face-up in the gutter. Valentine slowly brought her out of her trance, and got her a glass of water. Then said, “I want to have an artist come by named Ernie Roe. I want him to draw a composite of the man who picked you up.”

“Okay, detective,” she said.

Valentine motioned to Mona, and she took her handbag off the back of her chair and stood up. Sissy walked them to the front door and undid the chain.

“Guess I should stay inside until this guy gets caught, huh?” she said.

It was the first smart thing Sissy had said.

“I would,” Valentine replied.

Chapter 35

Mona gave him a lift back to Resorts. She pulled into the employee’s covered parking lot, and turned sideways in her seat.

“You’ve got to find this guy,” she said. “All the girls are terrified.”

“I’m trying,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.”

“See you around.”

He got out of her car, and entered the casino from the Boardwalk entrance. The place was packed, and it occurred to him that the Dresser could be hunting for his next victim at that very moment, right under their noses. Going upstairs, he found Doyle in the surveillance control room, drinking coffee.

“How did it go?” his partner asked.

“The Dresser was in the casino last night. I’m going to have the techs watch the tapes, see if they can spot him.”

Doyle grunted under his breath. If the casino’s surveillance had a flaw, it was the amount of raw tape that was recorded. A hundred hidden cameras produced thousands of hours of tape each day, much of it blurry, and out of focus. Finding one person who’d been inside the casino was like finding a needle in a haystack.

“I’ve got a JDLR on the wheel,” a voice called out.

They hurried across the room. The wheel was casino jargon for roulette, and Resorts’ wheel had been losing money for days. A white-haired Tech named Fassil who everyone called Fossil stood in front of a monitor.

“This guy is winning way too much,” Fossil declared, pointing at a player on the monitor.