“Activities? Like what?”
“Like you check into a casino and you’re up in your room on the twelfth floor and you want to go online and check out restaurants for tonight. You find out your room didn’t come with free Wi-Fi, but you don’t want to go down the elevator and wait in line again, so you boot up your computer and check for other strong signals in the area. You click on the one just below the hotel Wi-Fi. It gets you online and everything looks good, until a little box pops up and says you’ve got to pay. Good news is, it’s less than half the hotel rate. Bad news is, you’re giving your credit card numbers to the wrong people. That’s the kind of operation Mondari would have a piece of. He would never be one of the guys to get busted, but he’s in the background.”
“You’re saying he’s a scumbag.”
“He’s nuanced. Think of him as the venture capital guy who funds the little, dirt poor, garage-start-up cybercriminals. On the good side, he’s not violent and he’s bright. He’s a gamer, a schemer. He knows his casinos. His type probably didn’t exist before them. He reminds me of the guys who used to hang around horse racing when I was a kid. For some, it was their whole life and they were part of the juice and energy of the track. They knew every inch of it. Denny is that way about casinos and computers. Where are you meeting him?”
“The Bellagio, for dinner.”
“The Bellagio is one of his favorites. We’re talking about a guy who shops for just the right cologne, and shaves and dresses carefully before going out at night. He’ll be dressed when you meet him tonight. When he’s lucky, a younger woman goes back to his love pad with him.”
“Yuck.”
“Think period piece. It’s worth seeing.”
“If you can tell all that from being around him, I’d like to know some things about my life.” She leaned toward me. “Will I ever find true love?”
Right there at that moment, I started liking Sarah Warner. I smiled and drank and said, “I think it’s inevitable for you. Look, I’ve studied Denny. Sometimes he comes up big, so I’ve learned to pay attention. That’s why we took his casino-extortion bomb plot seriously.”
“But that tip doesn’t really fit with anything, does it?”
“So far, it doesn’t. Are you buying dinner tonight, or is the DOD?”
“The Criminal Investigative Division will pick up the tab if I get enough from him.”
“Don’t leave the table before everything is ordered, or you’ll end up in your supervisor’s office a month from now explaining the bill.”
“Okay, I’ll remember that.”
“He’ll order, but he won’t eat. He just drinks and he doesn’t get drunk, and he doesn’t go all the way on the first date. He’ll give you something but not everything. He knows how to tease, and he knows how to find out what’s valuable to you. You’re law enforcement so you’re untrustworthy, but that doesn’t mean you’re not fun to dance with. You can be worked and if you work him in return, he’ll respect you. I know this is probably too much information.”
“Actually, after everything, I can’t believe you’re even talking to me.”
But she could. She was proud and determined and not afraid to put herself out there. She might not believe it right now, but my guess was, she’d become a top investigator at the Department of Defense.
“I can’t either,” I said, “but I’ll be waiting for your text tonight. I’ll be close to the Bellagio. I need to catch him when he leaves you.”
I stood and picked up my coffee, then saw she had something else she wanted to say.
“Can we start over?” she asked. “You and me, I mean.”
“Want to do it right now?”
“This second.”
“I’m good with that.”
We shook hands, then tapped our plastic coffee cups together in a quick toast, and you know, that would never have happened with a younger me. The younger me would still be offended that DOD had suspected me. But if you live long enough, you learn we all make mistakes. Then you learn how to let them go. That’s the hard part, letting them go.
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