“I’ll text Sterling.” Dean reached for his phone. There was a good chance Sterling and Briggs might have picked up on the lie, but they’d want confirmation from Lia. “Anything to add?” Dean asked as he began typing.
By some miracle, Michael managed to stifle his long-held tendency to answer everything Dean said with a smart-mouthed barb. “Two things,” Michael said. “First, defensiveness isn’t an emotion. It’s a combination of emotions that plays out in different ways in different people at different times. In this case, we’ve got a tantalizing cocktail of anger and self- presentation and guilt.”
Tory feels guilty. I tried to reconcile that with what I knew about her.
She struck me as pragmatic. Like Camille, she’d risen to the top of a male- dominated field. To have her own show in Vegas, she’d have to be ambitious.
She didn’t strike me as a person who would let herself feel bad about anything for long.
“And the second thing?” Dean asked.
“Her reaction to Aaron Shaw.” I beat Michael to the punch line.
Michael inclined his head slightly. “Temporary freezing of the facial muscles, brows fighting the urge to draw together, lips just barely stretching themselves back.” He shifted his flask rhythmically from one hand to the other and back again, then clarified. “Fear.”
What are you scared of, Tory? Why did you skirt the question when Briggs and Sterling asked you if Camille had said anything about Aaron Shaw?
My mind went to what I knew about Sloane’s half brother. He’d grown up in a family where wealth and power were givens. I was betting he’d been raised to follow in his father’s footsteps. It wouldn’t be hard for someone like that to get used to blurring moral lines. But there had also been something gentle about the way he’d interacted with Sloane, and that something gave me pause.
Is it you Tory’s scared of? I thought, picturing Aaron in my mind. Or is it your father?
Dean sent the text. A moment later, we heard Agent Sterling excuse herself from the interrogation. Dean got a text back less than a minute later. “Anything else?” he read out loud. “Cassie?”
The fact that Agent Sterling had directed that question to me told me that she was looking for something specific—a confirmation of her own hunch, or some aspect of Tory’s personality that I would be more likely to pick up on than Dean.
“I’m not sure,” I said quietly, “but we might be looking at a history of assault. Verbal, physical, sexual—or maybe just the ongoing threat thereof.”
Saying those words felt like violating a confidence. Michael must have heard that in my voice, because he leaned over Dean and passed me the flask. I raised an eyebrow at him. He shrugged.
“I can’t help you.” The increase in volume drew my attention back to the tablet. Clearly, Tory had reached a breaking point. “If you have any more questions, you can address them to my attorney.”
“Everything okay here?” Sterling reentered the conversation, stepping into the frame.
Briggs cleared his throat. “I was just asking Ms. Howard if anyone could verify her whereabouts after she parted ways with Ms. Holt.” And she asked for her attorney. Briggs let the second half of that statement go unsaid.
She doesn’t trust people in power, I told him silently. And she certainly doesn’t trust you.
“I can.” A male voice carried over the microphone several seconds before its owner appeared on-screen, stepping directly between the FBI
agents and Tory. Male. Young. Early twenties at most. My brain started cataloging his demographics before my mind recognized his face.
“Beau Donovan,” Dean said. “One of our persons of interest. The twenty-one-year-old dishwasher who won the amateur spot at the poker tournament.”
“Tory was with me,” Beau was saying on-screen. “Last night, after she and Camille parted ways, Tory was with me.”
“Funny story,” Lia mock-whispered. “She totally wasn’t.”
You’re lying. That alone was enough for Beau to command my full attention. He was about the same height as Tory, but he stood slightly in front of her. Protective.
“You and Beau were together last night?” Agent Briggs pressed Tory. “That’s right,” Tory said, staring down the agents. “We were.”
“She really is good,” Lia commented. “Even I might not have pegged that one for a lie.”
“And how do you two know each other?” Sterling asked.
Beau shrugged, looking for a moment like the kid slumped in the back of the classroom, barely paying attention to what was said at the front. “She’s my sister.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Your sister,” Agent Sterling repeated.
“Foster sister.” Tory was the one who supplied that information. She was older than Beau by two years, maybe three. Something told me the protectiveness ran both ways.
“You still need help with fixing the lights?” Beau asked Tory, as if the FBI wasn’t even standing in the room. “Or what?”
“Mr. Donovan,” Agent Sterling said, forcing his attention back to her, “would you mind if we asked you a few questions?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Tory isn’t the only one who’s not overly fond of people with power.
“I understand you’ve advanced to the finals of the Vegas multi-casino poker tournament,” Agent Sterling said. “You’re getting quite a bit of attention.”
“Everyone likes an underdog story.” Beau shrugged again. “I’m thinking of selling the rights to Hollywood,” he deadpanned. “It’ll be one of those really inspirational stories.”
“Beau,” Tory said, a warning note creeping into her voice. “Just answer the questions.”
Interesting. She didn’t want him to aggravate the authorities. For a split second, I felt like I was watching some alternate-universe version of Lia and Dean, where she was the older one and he had Michael’s mouth.
“Fine,” Beau told Tory, then he turned back to Agent Sterling. “What do you want to know?”
“How long have you been playing poker?” “A while.”
“You must be good at it.” “Better than some.” “What’s your secret?”
“Most people are crappy liars.” Beau let that sink in. “And for a high school dropout, I’m pretty good at math.”
I saw Sterling filing those words away for future reference, and I did the same.
Agent Briggs took over the questioning. “Were you at the New Year’s Eve party on the roof of the Apex?”
“Yeah,” Beau said. “Thought I’d see how the other half lives.” “Did you know Camille Holt?” Agent Sterling asked.
“I did. She was a nice girl,” Beau replied. “Lie,” Lia sing-songed.
“Well,” Beau amended, as if he’d heard Lia, “Camille was nice to me.
We were the outsiders in the inner circle. She was a chick. I’m a dishwasher.” He managed a small, crooked smile. “A girl like that? She wouldn’t normally give a guy like me two seconds. But once I joined the tournament, she went out of her way to make me feel welcome.”
“She was trying to figure you out.”
I recognized Agent Sterling’s statement for what it was—an attempt to see how Beau dealt with rejection. Tell him Camille was only nice to him because she was manipulating him, see what happens.
Beau shrugged. “Of course she was.”
“A swing and a miss,” Michael said under his breath. In other words: Sterling’s words hadn’t gotten a rise out of her target. At all.
“Camille was competitive,” Beau said. “I respected that. Besides, she decided pretty early on that I wasn’t the one she needed to worry about.”
Agent Sterling cocked her head to the side. “And who was Camille worried about?”
Beau and Tory both answered the question, and they both said the exact same thing. “Thomas Wesley.”
