The Taken. Vicki Pettersson

Double-check. Then I find secondary confirmation and I check again. This was an ongoing operation. Truckers driving through the southern portion of the state, probably through Arizona via the new Hoover Dam bypass, would tweet about it online.”

      “So you think it was a passion kill? Some trucker snapped when he found himself being interviewed rather than undressed?”

      “No. We were supposed to be meeting a girl there, maybe a woman. And she had a list naming some of the most powerful men in this city as clients. I think one of the names on that list killed her.”

      “I’m sorry,” Hitchens said, “but what would Vegas’s most powerful leaders want with street lays in a fleabag motel off a stretch of highway best known for being forgotten?”

      Kit exhaled. “I don’t know.”

      Dennis leaned forward. “Kit, can you think of anyone who might want to harm Nicole?”

      “She was a reporter,” Hitchens remarked under his breath.

      “But well-liked,” Kit countered. “I told you. Vivacious. Happy. Full of life.” And now she was dead. “But she was also stubborn, a total pit bull when something captured her curiosity. Even I thought there was a better way to do this thing, but Nicole wanted the list. And she wanted more than just names, she wanted proof.”

      “And what did you want?”

      Kit looked at Hitchens. “To know who this girl was.”

      Why she was on the streets at such a young age. Why she’d ever consider selling her body for money. For Kit, it was always about the person more than the story. That’s why she was working for her family’s newspaper rather than running it. “I wanted to help her.”

      Dennis looked at his partner. “If she was juvie, it could’ve been a pimp.”

      “I worried about that,” Kit said, “but Nic just said I was weaving tales again. That my imagination was getting the best of me, and that if the girl was defying a pimp by meeting with us, then she must really be desperate.”

      “But she didn’t come. And you waited a full hour before checking on Nicole?”

      “She texted me after ten minutes, told me to stay put.”

      “We’ll want to see that text,” Hitchens said.

      But Dennis looked worried. “So is it fair to assume that whoever was with Nicole knew you were waiting in the car?”

      Kit nodded, and told them about the figure that’d momentarily pushed aside the curtains.

      “I’ll have forensics do a run on those panels,” said Dennis, standing. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

      A rockabilly lifestyle, a sting involving truckers, young girls, possibly pimps. An anonymous woman who’d written the names of the city’s movers and shakers on a list that had drawn Nicole to her death. Was that all?

      Wasn’t that enough?

      Kit shook her head. “No.”

      But there was more, of course. There was Nicole’s family and friends to inform. There were visits to make and a funeral to plan.

      “Do you still have this list of names your contact gave you?”

      Kit nodded at Dennis. She could print another copy. “So you believe me?”

      “It’s an angle,” he said. “But even without that list, you girls were playing with fire.”

      It wasn’t the first time they’d done so, and maybe that was the problem. They’d thought their journalism credentials could protect them from anything. “We’re a great team.”

      And before she’d realized she’d spoken as if Nic were still alive, Hitchens said, “Then maybe you shouldn’t have left her alone in that room.”

      “Brian,” Dennis said.

      But Kit lowered her head, knowing he was right. And, somehow, she was going to have to live with that.

       CHAPTER THREE

       In the dream, Grif was driving through the desert, waiting for Vegas to rise out of the inky darkness like a neon mirage, just as he had fifty years earlier. Evie was straining forward next to him, as if she could force the car faster with the weight and heat of her body, like she could bend the entire world to her will with her curves alone. She’d always been like that. Taken the not-inconsequential gifts God had given her—beauty, jets, guile—and parlayed them into bigger game than her Iowa roots allowed. More than what her simple family had expected of and for her. Certainly more than what Grif could give.

       He felt it when she finally shifted, turning to him, though he didn’t dare look back. “Your love should have saved me.”

       “I know.”

       “You weren’t strong enough.”

       Grif kept his eyes on the narrow, snaking road. “I know that, too.”

       “Are you strong enough now?”

       Was he? He had a strong title, Centurion, and a strong job, helping others. And even if Centurions were the lowest celestials on the totem pole, he was still an angel. That had to count for something.

       But would he be having these dreams if he were truly strong? No. He’d have already healed from the trauma of his death and moved on into Paradise. Tightening his hands on the wheel of his dream ’fifty-six Chevy Bel Air, Grif sighed. Incubation was supposed to have pulled these flashbacks from his mind. Yet they regularly reached up in the guise of a dream or an unintended thought and coldcocked him, like a fighter sprung early from his corner. And in that brief, flashing moment, even in the Everlast, Grif remembered, and felt, it all.

       “I don’t have to be strong,” he finally said, refusing to dwell on it. “I’m dead.”

       And that’s how he got through his days. His job was to escort Takes to the Everlast, that’s all. Didn’t matter if their deaths had been accidental, if they’d been murdered, or if they’d severed the rip cord themselves. It wasn’t his responsibility to figure out how they’d gotten that way. Not anymore.

       Evie laughed beside him, like she could read his thoughts.

       “Yet you still help people. Never could break you of that soft habit, could I? All the time, helping others instead of just keeping your head down and doing for us. And look where it got you. Look where it got me.”

       He finally did turn to her, and she was just as pretty as he remembered. Eyebrows plucked into perfection above irises of dipped chocolate, blond hair styled into waves so flawless they were severe. But she was also angry. “I don’t know where it got you,” he said.

       He’d never seen her in the Everlast. She’d probably bypassed it, went straight into Paradise. That’s what the pure angels did, right? And that’s what she’d been to him. His angel. His Evie.

       His wife.

       But right now she was his conscience.

       “Yes, you do,” she said accusingly, just as Grif knew she would. He’d had this dream before. And what Evie didn’t say, but what still rose in the dark between them, was that if he hadn’t died, he could have saved her. And that was really why it was so hard to look at her: all that beauty and life and energy straining forward in anticipation of a future that would never come.

       He scrambled for an answer, trying to think of something that would make it better—