Page 83 of Her Rival

He was in the main concourse.

I knew it was him before I knew it was him, which was the strangest part. I'd never seen the man's face in my life. I'd spent the previous week receiving Hollis's text reports about a man named Hartley out of Calvert, Tennessee, and I'd built a picture in my head from the language Dani had used to describe him at three in the morning, and the man standing in the concourse fifty feet below the railing looked, to within a margin of error my body didn't bother trying to reconcile, exactly like the man I'd built.

He was in a plaid button-down and jeans and the kind of windbreaker a sixty-five-year-old Tennessee man wore in November. His hair was thin and gray and combed flat. He had a manila folder under his arm. He was at the security desk, talking to Janice.

Janice was being very polite. The kind of polite a long-time security desk woman is polite, which was to say she'd already pressed a button under the desk and the Caldwell security men were already moving from the corners of the concourse toward the desk in the casual unhurried way men move when they've already won a conflict and are just collecting on it.

There were four of them. Two from the south end, two from the east. They converged at a measured pace. Hollis's man, the one from the motel parking lot, had to have called ahead. The man at the desk hadn't yet noticed any of them.

"He came in the front door," Victoria said quietly. "He walked up to Janice and asked to see his daughter. He has a folder in his hand. He's holding, I'm fairly sure, the letter Marielle served him yesterday. He's here, I think, to argue."

"He thinks the letter's a thing he can argue."

"He thinks a lot of things, Jett."

"How long has he been there."

"Two minutes."

"He doesn't know we know."

"No," he said. "He doesn't."

"Are the police coming."

"Five minutes out. The letter barred him from this building the moment Marielle served it yesterday. He walked in anyway, which makes it criminal trespass, and he's making a scene on top of it. They'll arrest him, not just question him. Marielle's on her way too."

"Okay."

The four security men reached the desk. They didn't approach him directly. They positioned themselves at the four cardinal points around him, ten feet out, all in suits, all with their hands visibly empty, all perfectly relaxed. The man didn't notice for another second. Then he did.

He turned. He saw them. His shoulders did the smallest thing. A startle. He recovered.

He turned back to Janice. He raised his voice.

We could hear him from the mezzanine.

"I have a right," he was saying. "I have a constitutional right to speak with my own daughter. She is in this building. I have been informed by a private party that she is in this building right now."

"Sir," Janice said. The voice she'd spent twenty years using on hockey fans who'd drunk too much. "I cannot help you with that."

"Don't sir me. I am her father. I have driven from Tennessee. I have papers I need to give her. I have. Listen to me. I have a letter I have to respond to. I cannot respond to it without speaking to her. She has a right to know what I came here to say. I am her father. Do you understand me. I am the only father she will ever have."

Beside me, Victoria's hand on the railing tightened by a measurable degree. She did not move otherwise.

"Sir," Janice said, "I'm going to ask you one more time to lower your voice. There are four gentlemen behind you who are going to escort you out of this building. They are very professional. The Las Vegas police are on their way. You can go quietly or you can go loudly, but you are going."

The man turned. He looked at the four security men. He looked at the badges on their lapels. He looked back at Janice.

I watched him decide.

I watched him decide he wasn't going to leave quietly, because leaving quietly was a thing he hadn't done in any room in his entire life, and a room where a man like him leaves quietly is a room where the man like him isn't the man.

He raised his voice.

He said the thing.

"Bring her down here. Bring my daughter down here. Right now. I have driven nineteen hours and I have a right to see her face. Ashley."