AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ma’am,” she said, as if learning a new word. “Maybe I could get used to this place. We could make it a fun place.”
—
After she was gone, Milo and I stayed in the interview room.
He said, “Jones. Creative. Why not go straight to Jane Doe?”
He got up, filled a coffee cup, tasted it, scowled, and set it down.
Pacing a couple of times, he returned to his chair. “Vegas call girl bags tycoon? Looks like Rikki got it wrong, sometimes you can pull off a movie-type triumph.” He rubbed his face. “With no happy ending…at least I don’t have to track down the group Meagin was with the night she picked up Doug. Guy’s sitting there with his beer and his paperwork, has no idea he got targeted by a pro.”
I said, “Meagin might have figured it for a one-night stand. Then she learned who she was dealing with and decided to stake a claim.”
“Sixty mil a year and clueless about women,” he said.
“About relationships, in general. His intelligence may be high but it’s narrow.”
“Clueless about anything except real estate.”
“When you told him about Gio he seemed genuinely surprised—stricken. I can be fooled by good acting but so far I’m not seeing him as someone with theatrical chops. When Meagin was asked about her past, she clammed up and got edgy. But she did let on to her spa friends about bad experiences with older men.”
“Someone not naive.”
I said, “She moved here from Vegas. It’s not hard to imagine.”
“Some hard-case parolee—or a casino type.”
“Or her problem stretched back prior to Vegas. She was forty-one when she died. Plenty of opportunity for a tough history.”
“Unknown suspect from an unknown place murdering a mystery woman? Gee, thanks for clarifying.”
He looked at the coffee as if reconsidering. Got to his feet and hitched his belt over his gut and said, “Okay, let’s see what we can learn about whoever she was. Beyond ‘Jones.’ ”
—
Keywordingmeagin marchproduceddid you mean megan march?
Keywordingmeagin jonesprompteddid you mean megan jones?
He muttered, “Screw you, RoboCop, if I meant that I’d say so.” But he spent a lot of time trying the more conventional spelling only to learn that none of the women offered up by the search-engine gods was his victim.
“Expected nothing, got nothing,” he said. “I guess that’s a type of success.”
Addinglas vegasto the search was unsuccessful. Shuffling combinations ofash jones exotic vegas dancerand tacking on the names of several casinos was equally futile.
I said, “Maybe she disappeared herself.”
Shrugging, he tried a slew of missing persons databases. Another adventure in failure.
Duplicating the entire process withmegpulled up tons of data, all garbage. Attempting the same on NCIC returned zero hits. But local arrests can evade the national database as can entire categories of nonviolent crimes so he phoned a homicide D at Las Vegas Metro he’d worked with named Tom Brush and asked him to check Clark County arrest records.
Seconds later, Brush said, “Nope, nothing spelled that way. I do have a Megan Jones busted for meth and simple assault a couple of years ago but she’s twenty-four years, two hundred pounds, and has facial tattoos and biker connections.”
“Not my gal. Could you try Rhonda Montel?”
“Who’s that?” said Brush.
“Known associate of my gal.”
