I got the call from Marchant on my phone about an hour later. “Did you take Sarabelle with you?”
Now, clutching my iPad, watching the driveway, I remember how suffocated I felt sitting beside Marchant in the private waiting room inside the LVPD. And how ill I’d felt when I learned that another escort had gone missing a few weeks before. Ginnifer Lucky, a 22-year-old from Arkansas. Vanished just after her last shift at another brothel. I had an alibi for that night in August, but Marchant didn’t. It had been his night off, and he’d spent it at his private home in Summerlin.
Neither of us answered any of their questions. The LVPD didn’t need to know anything except that Sarabelle fell asleep in my room and I awoke the next morning to find her gone. I was back at the Wynn two hours later, wearing the floor thin as I paced my suite with Marchant, trying to find some clue as to where Sarabelle had gone.
Donnie, the escort who’d brought me the drugged drinks, confirmed they came from Priscilla herself. According to the sticky note I’d found in my room the day after, I fucked her that night, but I didn’t remember doing so for obvious reasons. I could have performed in my juiced-up state, but it seemed unlikely. Had she really come into my room after filming all night with Marchant for a sunrise fuck with a man she roofied? What would be the point of that?
For that matter, why roofie me? My only theory was that she’d been angry I’d rejected her. But it was still really fucking weird considering Sarabelle disappeared that night.
The person who’d tried to send Marchant an S.O.S. about the camera malfunction was an escort named Geneese Loveless. Richard, March’s head of security, had been out with the flu, and with Rach away at her sister’s funeral and March chasing his dick, Loveless had volunteered. I know Loveless well—I used to be one of her regulars—and I can vouch for her trustworthiness. She wouldn’t hurt Sarabelle, and she wouldn’t have let anyone else, either.
It’s always possible that Sarabelle got up and walked away on her own, but she never returned to her room, and she left her purse in mine. She didn’t have her phone or car keys.
Clearly, someone took her.
It took me two weeks after Sarabelle’s disappearance to track down Priscilla. When she finally surfaced, shit really hit the fan.
I check my watch and stroll into my bedroom, replaying the first night Priscilla surprised me here. I stepped out of the bathroom, near naked from my shower and planning to hit the hay. I sensed company before I saw her, and I stepped toward the cabinet beside my bed, where I keep a loaded .45. I don’t think she knew that, but she must have guessed based on the way I moved.
“Calm down. It’s just me, Hunter.”
I’d turned to find her in a form-fitting trench coat and high-heels. “What the hell are you doing in my room?”
I can still see the determination on her Botox’d face as she smiled. “How many people know about your mother?”
My gut clenched, but I held my poker face. “Rita?”
“Your biological mother: Roxanne. The escort who worked for Lotti Bleaufont at the Hartland Casino in the early ’80s. She died in child birth. Some big-headed boy.” Priscilla grinned wickedly and held out a folder. I snatched it from her and flipped it open. Mine. From my safe. My birth certificate, which lists the name of my biological mother, and the certificate of adoption, from when my father’s high school sweetheart and second wife, Rita, adopted me. Both certificates had been kept under lock and key my whole life; no one could know my upstanding paps had once been head over heels for a Vegas escort.
“This would be such a lovely story for Page Six, don’t you think? Your father would be known for something besides pissing off Russia.”
“What do you want, Priscilla?”
She’d smiled. “I just want to get into your bed. I think you’d enjoy it.” She shrugged. “If you disagree, I think you will agree that your story is just too salacious, given what’s happened lately. Mother was a prostitute. A prostitute disappears after you fuck her. Sounds kind of creepy-kinky, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds like you know a lot of things that aren’t your fucking business.”
Her eyes widened, and she smiled widely. “Of course it sounds that way to you, silly man…”
I INHALE DEEPLY, returning to the here and now. I hear the sound of fabric swishing on the other side of my bedroom door and step back into my room just in time to greet her.
“Hunter.”
I hate the way she says my name. Like she’s talking to a puppy. Like she owns me, and for a secret I don’t give a shit about, not directly. I’m not overly worried about the blow to my father’s reputation if people find out my biological mother was an escort. It’s other things I need kept quiet—things more likely to come to light if a bunch of reporters start snooping around my family’s past. The kind of things that, if they were revealed, might even make me more likely to be wrongfully convicted in Sarabelle’s disappearance.