I didn’t get to Rostok right away. Someone had just been found dead in the Lucky Seven, under less-than-ideal circumstances, and that changed things.
The hotel was less imposing in the dying daylight. It was also less attractive without the twinkling green lights. The casino resembled two square towers of gray concrete—which was exactly what it was. I approached the building in the shade of the west tower and walked up the red-carpeted steps. I felt numerous eyes on me the moment I passed through the polished glass doors. Undoubtedly, a dozen cameras and eyeballs were checking me out. As I crossed the hotel lobby, a man in a khaki uniform with a mustache that covered his upper lip in red-pepper bristles tapped me on the shoulder. After some initial confusion, I realized first off that someone was dead; McKesson had been called but hadn’t gotten there yet; and that rather than being about to give me the boot, they wanted me up to the room where the murder had occurred right away. As they put it, “You work with McKesson, right?” And who was I to say I didn’t? After all, we often wound up appearing together at unpleasant events. McKesson would be mad I’d pretended to be his partner, but I’d deal with him later.
In the bowels of the hotel, we passed through a door with a combination lock, like the one I’d encountered on my first trip to visit Rostok. I wondered if I would be meeting the hotel’s owner and his pet named Ezzie again today. I rather hoped I wouldn’t, even though they were the most probable sources of hard information in this place.
“The body is right inside,” the security guy told me. He stopped and tapped on the combination lock. It beeped five times then clicked open.
I must have had a funny look on my face, because he frowned at me as I hesitantly stepped into the room. I tried to force myself to act calm and in charge. I straightened my shoulders and walked confidently into the dimly lit room.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. It was an awful mix of barbeque and burnt plastic. The lights were on automatic, and they flickered into full brilliance at about the same time the security guys let the door click behind me.
What I saw next stopped me in my tracks. Bernie, the pit boss that Jenna and I had just spoken with a day ago, was dead.
He was lying on his back on what appeared to be a conference table. He hadn’t passed away in his sleep either. He had a foot-wide burn mark over his body—a long streak of charcoal, as if someone had run him over with a steam iron. Blackened flesh and melted clothes had fused together. His one remaining eye was open, staring sightlessly at the fluorescent lights directly overhead.
I took an unsteady step forward, with my hand over my nose. Getting closer to the corpse wasn’t making the smell any better. I walked around the conference table, looking for evidence. The carpet was burned at the foot of the table, where something hot had first gotten hold of the man. That streak of melted carpet fibers could only have been caused by intense heat. It led from a spot on the floor about six feet from the corpse. The trail was straight and purposeful. Whatever had caused it had rolled right up and right over Bernie. But the trail ended abruptly after that. There was no sign of a burned path leading into or out of the room. The conference table itself was barely scorched. There were even a few paper cups and a stray pen sitting undisturbed on the table itself.
I checked Bernie’s wrists next. His hands had been burned away to bone and ash. I assumed this might be considered a defensive wound. He’d burned away his hands trying to defend himself. But his wrists were intact, and there were lines of blood and flaked skin around each of them. I nodded, still holding my nose. Someone had cuffed him and let him die helplessly.
My immediate suspicion, of course, was that it had been Ezzie, or one of her type. It almost certainly had been a creature like the lava slug I’d found in the middle of my burnt house. What else could it be? The evidence pointed toward an organized effort, however. The only way such a creature could get into and out of a building without burning it down was via a rip in space. Could the cultists be involved? Gilling might have brought it in, rolled it over him, and then popped it home again. Or maybe that was Rostok’s power, here inside the Lucky Seven. Maybe that’s why he had Ezzie, because he could move things into and out of his domain.
Frowning, I straightened up. I knew I didn’t have much time left. I was surprised, in fact, that McKesson hadn’t shown up yet. He was the master when it came to finding freaky crimes.
I opened the door and stepped out between the two security men, both of whom were waiting nervously in the hall. I noticed that they took pains not to look inside the conference room.
“This is quite a mess you have here,” I said.
“You got that right,” Mr. Red Mustache said. “How are you going to do it? A big black body bag and an ambulance around the back? We’ll wheel the gurney out ourselves. The less the paramedics see, the better.”