Kincaid’s Dangerous Game

Chapter 1

Holt Kincaid was no stranger to insomnia. He’d been afflicted with bouts of it since childhood, and had learned long ago not to fight it. Consequently, he’d grown accustomed to whiling away the long late-night or early-morning hours catching up on paperwork, going over notes from whatever case he was working on, knowing that what he didn’t pursue would come to him on its own, eventually.

Not this time.

The only case he was working at the moment-the only one that mattered, anyway-was at a dead standstill. The paperwork had been done. He’d been over his notes a hundred times. There was nothing more to be gleaned from them.

Over the course of his career as a private investigator specializing in missing persons cases-the cold ones in particular-he’d had to admit defeat only once. That one failure was the case responsible for a lot of the insomnia he’d suffered for most of his life, and the idea that he might have to add this one to the roster of his regrets weighed heavily on his mind. Sleep wouldn’t come to him this night, no matter how coyly he played her flirting game.

Laurel Canyon was quiet now. There’d been sirens earlier, prompting him, as a longtime resident, to pause and sniff the air for the smell of smoke. But the cause this time-a traffic-stopping fender bender on the boulevard-had been cleared up hours ago. An onshore breeze rustled the leaves of the giant eucalyptus trees that soared above his deck, but in a friendly way, last week’s Santa Anas being only a bad memory now. Late-October rains had laid the threat of brush fires low for the time being.

Holt had come to be a resident of the notorious Santa Monica Mountain community by happenstance rather than choice, but over the years it had grown on him. He’d found it suited him, with its shady past, the steep and narrow winding dead-end streets and pervasive aura of mystery. The huge old eucalyptus trees and rickety stairways and ivy-covered walls guarded its secrets well. As he guarded his own.

He’d also come to embrace the canyon’s laid-back, live-and-let-live attitude, a holdover from the sixties when it had been the center of L.A.’s rock music scene. Now as then, in Laurel Canyon the expression “goin’ with the flow” wasn’t just a hippie slogan, but a way of life.

It had become his way of life: Go with the flow…don’t get emotionally involved…go about your business and don’t waste energy railing against things beyond your control.

Yeah. That was my mistake with this case. I got too close. Made it personal.

As with the first and still his greatest failure, he’d let himself get too fogged in by emotions to see where the answers lay hidden.

Face it, Kincaid. Maybe there just aren’t any answers. Not in this life, anyway.

Unbidden, as if a stubborn imp in his subconsciousness had again touched Replay, the case and the events of the past year unfolded slowly in his mind, playing out against the murmur of breezes through eucalyptus trees and the intermittent shush of a passing car.

He’d taken on Cory Pearson’s case for two good reasons: First, because it presented a new kind of challenge. Typically, he’d be searching for a birth parent, a child given up for adoption, an abducted child long ago given up for dead by everyone except loved ones still praying for answers. But this was a man searching for four younger brothers and sisters. The children had been taken from him when they were very young by a well-meaning social services agency after their Vietnam vet father had shot his wife and then himself during a violent episode of PTSD. The four younger ones had been adopted by two different families while the oldest brother fought his way through a dismal series of foster homes and juvenile detention facilities, only to be denied access to his siblings’ whereabouts when he finally reached adulthood.

A sad story, for sure, but one to which Holt had felt confident he could give a happy ending. These kids had vanished into the system. Systems kept records. And Holt was very good at getting old systems and old records to give up their secrets. That was his second reason for taking on the case of Cory Pearson’s lost siblings: He’d expected success.

Holt didn’t take on hopeless cases. He already had one of those, and it was more than enough.

Things had gone about as expected, at first. After months of tedious detective work, he’d finally gotten a line on the oldest boy, now working as a homicide detective in Portland, Oregon. The timing hadn’t been great. Cory had dropped into his brother’s life in the middle of a case involving a serial killer and had very nearly been mistaken for the killer himself. Thanks to a drop-dead gorgeous blond psychic who’d been helping out with the investigation, everything had turned out fine in the end, and the psychic-or empath, as she preferred to call herself-had recently become Cory Pearson’s sister-in-law.

Cory’s reunion with one brother was followed immediately, and without any further help from Holt, by the second. Finding his younger brother paralyzed as a result of a climbing accident, Cory’d been determined to bring him back to the life and the woman he’d loved and left. After epic battles with a wild river and a deranged killer, he and his wife, Sam, had been successful.

Two down, Holt had thought then. Two to go.

It hadn’t been a piece of cake, but eventually he’d tracked down one of the twin girls. And again, his timing had been lousy-or, he supposed, depending on how you looked at it, fortuitous. He’d arrived in the woman’s Texas Hill Country town to check her out only to find his client’s baby sister had just been arraigned on charges of murdering her ex-husband-with the aid of a pet cougar, no less. Since both Cory and Sam had been on assignment and unreachable, Holt had called on Cory’s best friend, a well-known part-Native American photojournalist named Tony Whitehall.

That had all worked out okay, too-again, depending on how you looked at it, since former confirmed bachelor Tony now appeared about to become his best buddy’s brother-in-law, stepdad to a nine-year-old kid and co-caretaker of one helluva big kitty cat.

Holt had been riding pretty high that day, thinking he had the case as good as sewed up, since finding one sister meant finding both, right? Then the news had come down on him like a ton of bricks: Brenna Fallon had run away from home at the age of fourteen, and hadn’t been heard from since. Her sister Brooke didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. Holt didn’t like remembering how he’d felt hearing that…the cold knot in his stomach, the sense of utter helplessness. This kid-though she’d be a woman in her thirties now-wasn’t in any system. She’d gone completely off the radar. She could be anywhere. Or nowhere. She could very well be dead, or as good as.

He hadn’t given up, though, even then. Giving up wasn’t Holt’s style. In the past two months he’d called in every marker, every favor he had coming and then some, and as a result had had people combing through cold case files and unclaimed Jane Doe remains in virtually every state in the union, plus Canada and Mexico. He’d personally checked out more bodies of young women dead way before their time than he’d ever expected to see in his lifetime, and armed with DNA samples from Brooke, had eliminated every one of them. Which was good news, he supposed.

But it still didn’t give him answers. And three out of four wasn’t going to cut it. He didn’t think for one minute Cory Pearson would be content to have found three out of four of his siblings. The one he hadn’t found was going to haunt him forever.

Nobody knew better than Holt Kincaid what that felt like.

He rubbed a hand over his burning eyes and turned away from the window, and from the mesmerizing sway of eucalyptus branches. Sinking onto the couch, he reached for the remote, thumbed it off Mute and began to click his way through ESPN’s late-night offerings, rejecting an old George Foreman fight, some pro billiards and a NASCAR documentary before settling on a Texas Hold ’em poker tournament. Maybe, he thought, if he could get into the strategy of the game it would take his mind off the damn case.

He’d watched enough poker to know this wasn’t a current tournament, more likely one from a few years back. He was familiar with some of the players, particularly the more colorful ones. Others, not so much. The commentators seemed to be excited by this event because of the fact that a woman had made it to the final table, something that evidently had been almost unprecedented back then. It didn’t hurt any that the woman in question was young, blond and cute, either. Billie Farrell, her name was, and Holt thought he’d probably seen her play before. Anyway, she looked familiar to him.

Damn, but she looks familiar…

He felt an odd prickling on the back of his neck. Leaning closer, he stared intently at the TV screen, impatient with the camera when it cut to one of the other players at the table, tapping his fingers on the remote until it came back to the one face he wanted to see.

She was wearing dark glasses, as so many of the players did, to hide their eyes and not give anything away to steely-eyed opponents. She had short, tousled blond hair, cut in layers, not quite straight, not really curly, either. An intriguingly shaped mouth and delicately pointed chin, like a child’s.

He really needed to see her eyes.

Take off your glasses, dammit.

He got up abruptly and crossed to the dining room table that served as his desk, half a foot deep now in manila file folders and stacks of papers he hadn’t gotten around to putting in files yet. Nevertheless, he didn’t have any trouble finding the one he wanted. He carried it back to the couch, sat, opened the file and took out a photograph. It was a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl, computer-aged twenty years. He didn’t look at the photograph-he didn’t have to, because it was etched in his memory-but simply held it while he stared at the face of the poker player known as Billie Farrell.

He wasn’t conscious of feeling anything, not shock or excitement or anything in particular. Didn’t realize until he fumbled around for his cell phone and had to try to punch the buttons that his hands were shaking.

It took him a couple of attempts, but he got the one he wanted. Listened to it ring somewhere in the Texas Hill Country while he stared at the TV screen with hot, narrowed eyes. When an answering machine picked up, he disconnected, then dialed the number again. This time a man’s voice answered. Swearing.

“Okay, this better be an announcement of the Second Coming, or else I just won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. Which is it?”

“Tony. It’s me, Holt.”

“Dude. D’you know what time it is?”

“Yeah. Listen, is Brooke there?”

“Of course she’s here. She’s asleep, what did you expect? At least, she was-” There was a sharp intake of breath. “Wait. It’s Brenna, right? God, don’t tell me. You found her? Is she-she’s not-hey, Brooke. Baby, wake up. It’s Holt. He’s found-”

“Maybe,” Holt interrupted. “I don’t know. I need Brooke-”

“I’m here.” Brooke’s voice was breathy with sleep, and shaky.

“Okay.” Holt took a breath. Told himself to be calm. “I need you to turn on your television. ESPN. Okay?”

“Okay.” Her voice was hushed but alert. She’d been married to a deputy sheriff once upon a time, so Holt figured maybe getting phone calls in the middle of the night wasn’t all that unusual for her.

“I don’t know which channel,” he told her. “Just keep clicking until you find the poker tournament.”

After a long pause, she muttered, “Okay, got it.”

“Watch for her-the woman player. Okay, there she is. Tell me if-”

He didn’t get the rest of it out. There was a gasp, and then a whispered, “Oh, God.”

He felt himself go still, and yet inside he was vibrating like a plucked guitar string. “Is it her? Is it Brenna?”

He heard a sniff, and when she spoke in a muffled voice he knew Brooke was crying. “Oh, God, I don’t know. It could be, but she was just a little girl when she…It’s been so long. I’m not sure. I can’t see her eyes! If I could just see her eyes…” And then, angrily, “Why doesn’t she take off the damn glasses!”

Holt held the phone and listened to soft scufflings and some masculine murmurs of comfort while he waited, eyes closed, heart hammering. After a moment Tony’s voice came again, gruff with emotion.

“Hey, man, I’m sorry. She can’t tell for sure. It’s been what-eighteen years? She says it might be her. But you’re gonna go check her out, right?”

“Yeah,” Holt said, “I’m gonna go check her out.” He picked up the remote and clicked off the set.

An hour later he was in his car on I-15, heading east toward the rising sun and the bright lights of Las Vegas.

He hit the jackpot right off the bat. The casino manager at the Rio was new, but Holt found a couple of dealers who’d been around awhile, and had actually worked the poker tournament he’d been watching on ESPN reruns.

Although, even if they hadn’t, they would have remembered Billie Farrell.

“Sure, I remember her. Cute kid. Pretty good poker player, too,” Jimmy Nguyn said as he lit up a cigarette and politely blew the smoke over his shoulder, away from Holt and the other dealer. Jimmy was a guy in his late thirties with a Vietnamese name and an Americansize body-five-eleven or so and hefty. He had a cardsharp’s hands, though-big and long boned, with nimble, tapered fingers. He wore a pencil-thin moustache and his hair slicked down and looked like something out of a 1930s gangster flick.

The other dealer snorted and moved upwind of the smoker. She was a tall, angular woman with sun-damaged skin and long blond hair she wore pulled up in an off-center ponytail. She’d told Holt her name was Cricket. Now she popped a piece of chewing gum in her mouth, tossed the ponytail over her shoulder and said, “Come on, Jimmy, she was more than ‘pretty good.’” She looked over at Holt. “She had talent, that one, plus charisma up the wazoo. That year, the one you’re talking about? Came this close to winning a bracelet. Woulda been a big star in the circuit, if she’d stuck around.”

“Stuck around?” Holt felt his stomach go hollow.

Cricket shook her head. “Quit right after that tournament you saw, didn’t she, Jimmy? That’s the way I remember it, anyway. I guess it was…I don’t know…pretty hard for her to tough it out, after what happened.”

“What did happen?” Holt kept his voice low, hiding the despair that was rolling over him like a bank of cold Pacific fog.

She shrugged and shifted around, looking uncomfortable. “Okay, well, she had this partner…”

It was Jimmy’s turn to snort. “Guy was a real scumbag.” He dropped his cigarette onto the parking lot asphalt and ground it to dust under his shoe as he said musingly, “Miley Todd was his name. Never did get what a young pretty girl like that saw in him. The guy cheated and got caught,” he explained to Holt. “Got himself banned from the casinos for life.”

“Billie was clean, though,” Cricket put in.

Jimmy lifted a shoulder. “Yeah, okay, the kid probably was clean. But there’d have been talk. There’s always talk. Rumor and innuendo-you know how it is. Carries a lot of weight in this town.”

“I don’t think that’s why she quit,” the blond dealer said, quick to jump to another woman’s defense. “Billie was tougher than that. Tough as nails. What made her such a good player. If she’d wanted to stay, she would have.”

Jimmy held up a hand. “I’m just sayin’…”

Cricket gave him a dismissive look and focused on Holt. “All I know is, she won pretty big that night-finished in third place-and she took her money and split. That’s the last the poker world saw of her.”

Holt hauled in a breath. “Okay, then, thanks for your time.” He couldn’t turn away fast enough. It was all he could do to keep his disappointment in check, and what he wanted more than anything was to slam his fist into something and cuss until he ran out of words bad enough. To come so close. And now it looked like he was right back at square one. Well, maybe not square one, since at least he had a name and a town.

“Hey,” Cricket called out to him as he was about to open the door of his car, “you asking about Billie, I’m assuming you’re looking to find her, right?”

Holt turned to look back at her. “Yes, I sure am.”

“Well, then, don’t you want to know where she is?”

“Excuse me, miss. Could you help me out here?”

Billie gave the hose nozzle a twist to shut off the water and lifted what she hoped was a helpful smile to the customer who was standing a few feet away with a bedraggled gallon-size Michaelmas daisy in one hand and a fading sedum in the other.

She’d noticed the guy wandering up and down the aisles, first because she’d never seen him before, second because he looked a lot like Clint Eastwood. In his prime. And third, because he didn’t look like the sort of person to be browsing in a nursery on a weekday morning. He was wearing slacks and a sport-type jacket, for one thing, instead of jeans and a T-shirt. He wore a dress shirt with no tie, open at the neck, which gave him a casual, rumpled look in spite of the dressy clothes. Still, he looked out of place, Billie thought. Dirty Harry in a flower shop. And she had a pretty good sense for people who seemed “off” in any way. Her survival, for a good part of her life, had depended on it.

“Sure,” she said, wiping her hands on her blue cotton apron. “What can I do for you?”

He shifted the two pots up and down, like he was trying to gauge their weight.

“I’m looking for something pretty with flowers. These look a little…I don’t know…tired.” He’d put on a smile, but it didn’t look comfortable on him. As if, Billie thought, turning on the charm wasn’t something that came naturally to him.

She studied him covertly from behind her sunglasses. “You’d have better luck with annuals this time of year. We’re starting to get in some cool-weather stuff now. Be more in a week or two.”

“Yeah, but they die, don’t they? I’m looking for something you don’t have to plant new every year.”

Billie shrugged and nodded toward the pots in his hands. “Well, those two you got there are perennials. They’ll come back every year.”

“Yeah…” He said it with a sigh and a disappointed look at the sedum. “I was hoping to find something that looks a little nicer in the pot. Actually, it’s for a gift.” He gave her the smile again, along with an explanation. “My sister’s getting married Saturday. They’ve bought this house here, and it looks pretty bare to me-one of those new subdivisions south of town. I thought maybe I’d get her some plants-pretty it up a bit.”

“Ah, well…fall’s not a good time for perennials. Sorry.” She gave the hose nozzle a twist and turned the spray onto the thirsty crepe myrtles spread out in front of her.

“Look-” The guy set the two pots down next to the crepe myrtles and dusted off his hands. “I hate to be a pain in the ass, but I’m getting kind of desperate here.”

I believe that’s the first truthful thing you’ve said to me. She didn’t say that, of course. She turned off the water and laid the hose carefully aside, out of the pathway, then angled another measuring look upward as she straightened. She could almost feel the guy vibrating, he was so tense. Mister, I hope you’re not planning on playing any poker while you’re in town. You’d lose your shirt.

All her defenses were on red alert. Clearly, the guy wanted something, and she seriously doubted it was potted plants. But if her danger instincts were aroused, so was her natural curiosity-which admittedly had gotten her into trouble more than once in her life.

Who is this guy? What does he want with me?

And most important of all, and the question she really, really needed an answer to: Who is he working for?

Giving the man the smile he seemed to be trying so hard to win, she said, “Well, there’s no need for that. Look, why don’t you go with some kind of shrub? You can get something with some size, so it’ll look impressive up there with all the other wedding presents.”

“Impressive. Okay, I can live with that. So, what’ve you got?”

“Well, let’s narrow it down a bit. First, since you said this house is in a new subdivision, I’m guessing no trees, right? So you’ll need something for full sun. And heat tolerant, obviously-this is Las Vegas.” She turned to walk along the pathway and the man fell in beside her, strolling in a relaxed sort of way, reaching out to touch a leaf as they passed. She gave him a sideways glance. “How do you feel about cactus?”

He winced and laughed, as if she’d made a joke.

“I’m serious. More and more people are going with native plants now to save water. Save the planet-you know, go green.”

“So to speak,” he said dryly, and she found herself smiling and meaning it.

“So to speak.” She nodded, conceding the point. “So, okay, no cactus. Evergreen, or deciduous?”

“Deciduous-uh…that means they lose their leaves, right?”

She looked at him and he grinned to show her he was kidding. This time she tried not to smile back. “You seriously are not a gardener, are you? Where are you from?”

“Nope,” he said amicably, “definitely not a gardener. And I live in L.A., actually.”

“Really. Most people in L.A. have some kind of garden.”

“Not me. Not even a houseplant.” He paused, then added with a shrug, “I’m not home enough to take care of anything living. I’ve got eucalyptus trees and ivy, some bougainvillea-that’s about it. Nature pretty much takes care of those.”

He halted suddenly and pointed with a nod. “What are those? Over there-with all the flowers?”

Billie gave him a look. “Uh…roses?”

“Okay, sure, I see that now,” he said, throwing her a sheepish grin before returning to stare thoughtfully at the display of rosebushes. “Can you grow roses in Las Vegas?”

“We wouldn’t sell them if they wouldn’t grow here,” she said shortly, and got a look of apology that made her feel vaguely ashamed. Her mind was skittering around like a squirrel trying to decide whether or not to run into traffic.

The guy is attractive and charismatic as hell, and he still smells wrong. Well, actually, he smells pretty good. Whatever he’s using for aftershave, it was a good choice.

She hauled in a determined breath. “Actually, roses do very well in a desert climate. Less trouble with disease. You just have to give them enough water.”

“Hmm. Roses kind of go with weddings, don’t they?”

“Sure. I suppose so. Yeah.”

“They’d definitely be impressive,” he mused.

“Yes, they would.”

“And they have pretty flowers.”

About then Billie realized they’d both stopped walking and were standing in the middle of the aisle smiling at each other. Really smiling. And her heart was beating faster, for no earthly reason she could imagine.

Okay, I’m not a squirrel. I know what happens to squirrels who run into traffic.

She cleared her throat and walked on with purpose, making her way quickly to the rosebushes. “Your timing is good, actually. They put out a nice fall bloom, once the weather cools. Couple more weeks, though, and we’d be pruning them back for the winter.”

The customer picked up a red rosebush in a three-gallon pot, read the tag and threw her a look as he set it back down. “Well, you’ve saved my life, you know that?” He moved aside a pink variety-he was a guy, of course, so no pink need apply-and picked up a butter-yellow with some red blush on the petals. “You’re very good at your job. You must like it.” He said it casually, maybe too casually.

“Yes, I do,” she replied carefully, and felt her skin prickle with undefined warnings.

He straightened, dusting his hands. “If you don’t mind my asking, how’d you come to work in a nursery? In this town, someone with your looks…” He smiled again, but his eyes seemed a little too sharp. A little too keen. “Seems an unusual career choice.”

And again she thought, This guy better never try his hand at the poker tables-with a tell like that, he’d never win a hand. “Maybe,” she said evenly, “that’s why I made it.”

Watching his eyes, she knew he was about to fold.

“Well…okay, tell you what,” he said abruptly, all business now. “How ’bout if you pick out half a dozen or so of these-the nicest ones you can find.” He reached for his wallet. “Can I pay for them and leave them here until Saturday? Because I’m in a hotel, and I can’t exactly…”

“Sure.” Suddenly she just wanted to be rid of him. “That’s fine. Just tell them at the register. Six, right? I’ll put a note on them, put them back for you.”

He thanked her and walked away, rapidly, like somebody who’d just remembered he had somewhere to be.

Billie watched him as far as the cash register, then turned abruptly. Angry. At herself. And shaken. The guy had folded, no question about it. So why didn’t she feel like she’d won the hand?

Holt was sitting in his car with the motor running and the air-conditioning going, although it was November and not that hot for Las Vegas. But considering it was midday and he was in the middle of a treeless parking lot, he was pretty sure he’d be sweltering shortly if he turned the AC off.

He wasn’t pleased with the way things had gone with Billie Farrell. Definitely not his finest hour. He’d turned on the charm-as much as he was capable of-and had gotten nowhere.

So she was wary, on her guard. He hadn’t wanted to push too hard, thinking he’d be better off to leave himself someplace to go with his next try. Which was why he was sitting in the parking lot staking out the nursery, waiting for her to come out so he could follow her, see where she lived, find out where she liked to go for lunch. Figure out how he might “happen” to run into her again. Maybe this time he’d offer to buy her a drink, or even dinner.

If he could just get her someplace indoors where she’d have to take off those damn shades…

Meanwhile, what in the world was he going to do with six rosebushes? Donate them to an old folks’ home? He’d have to think of something. Hell, he didn’t even know anybody who grew roses.

When someone knocked on the window of his car about six inches from his ear, he did three things simultaneously: Ducked, swore and reached for his weapon.

Then he remembered he wasn’t carrying one at the moment, that it was currently in the glove compartment of his vintage Mustang. By which time he figured if anybody had been looking to do him damage it would already be lights-out.

However, he was still swearing a blue streak when the door on the passenger side opened and Billie Farrell slipped into the seat beside him.