Several doors stood open along the hallway. Moving as quietly as she could, she started to look around.
The first door led to a bathroom, lined with shining green tile and dark slate. The drawers beneath the sink were empty, but in the medicine cabinet there was a cornucopia of pill bottles—Dilaudid, Percocet, Oxy, and some others she didn’t recognize—and an antique snuff case, full of loose white powder. She carefully put everything back where she’d found it and shut the cabinet.
Another door looked in on a small suite that could have come straight out of the Playboy Mansion. A huge round bed took up most of the room. Red and green neon lighting ran around the walls in abstract shapes, and a bar stood in one corner. In an adjoining room, a huge Jacuzzi-style tub sat bubbling quietly, already warmed up.
A set of wide French doors stood open to show a circular library beyond. Built-in wooden bookshelves lined the walls, filled with heavy leather tomes and fronted with glass. The books seemed to be actual collectors’ items, carefully curated. She saw Aristotle, Erasmus, Machiavelli. Someone was a classicist—or had the money to look like one. A fire crackled in an enormous stone hearth, and the furniture was glossy and dark.
She moved quickly and quietly, her high heels dangling from one hand so they wouldn’t make a noise on the hardwood. It wasn’t until she turned the corner in the hall that she saw where the music was coming from. It streamed out of a partly open door, an ominous electronic thud. Veronica’s heart hammered in her ears, asynchronous with the music’s rhythm. She held her breath and crept toward the open door.
It led to a den. Framed movie posters—Scarface, The Godfather, GoodFellas—hung around the walls; track lighting generated a warm, indirect glow. A wide scarlet couch sat in front of a plasma-screen TV mounted on the wall. Two men were sitting on the couch, playing a video game, their backs to the hall. One had short, shiny dark hair.
The other sprouted with wild dirty-blond dreadlocks.
The dark-haired head bent down for a moment. The smell of pot suddenly filled the air. She could hear the gurgling sound of someone taking a deep, committed hit.
“I’m not complaining, man,” said Willie Murphy. He talked quickly, in a lilting, urgent patter, never taking his eyes off the screen, where the burly army guy he was playing let loose a hail of bullets at an alien. “You guys are like family to me, you know? I mean, anything you want, anything I can do, I’ll do.”
She watched as Rico Gutiérrez Ortega tilted his head back and exhaled.
“Anyone ever tell you you talk too much?” he finally asked as his lungs cleared.
Pulse throbbing in her ears, Veronica took a few steps back from the door. She pulled out her phone with shaking fingers, and then, covering the speaker with her thumb to mute it, she dialed Lamb’s cell.