Sucker Bet Read Free

herself.
    "To Harrah's?"
    Her head shook slowly. "No, to here. This spot."
    "Right here. In the station. This was your destination?" He didn't think many women would consider hanging out at the train station on the Strip a good time for a Thursday night, but hell, what did he know about the opposite sex? Diddly-squat for the most part.
    A quick sweep from head to toe showed this particular woman to be five foot one or two, a hundred and ten pounds, fair skinned, blue eyes, delicate facial features, and short fingernails, painted a vivid red. She was dressed in loose jeans, way looser than current fashion dictated, a form-fitting red T-shirt, and brown leather sandals. No earrings, no makeup except for that shiny lip stuff, and no watch. Large ornate gilded ring on her right hand, which was almost overpowering for her small fingers. Not a hooker, that he could say with certainty, but otherwise not easy to read.
    Nervous eyes darted left and right and had trouble meeting his. "Yes. I was planning to meet someone here."
    That was progress. "Who?"
    "Um. A guy."
    Or not. Nate really was tired. He'd been up for seventy-two hours, easily, and he had a pounding headache. He shouldn't have even answered this call, but he had the most experience, and several other detectives were on vacation for spring break. But his brain was foggy, his patience thin, and his witness was either intentionally uncooperative or not the brightest bulb in the pack.
    "What guy? A friend? A boyfriend?"
    "Well, not exactly a friend. Definitely not a boyfriend. More like an acquaintance."
    "What's his name?"
    "I don't know his real name."
    Nate stared hard at her. Was she a user? Meeting a dealer? That would explain the fact that she looked like a strong wind could blow her over, and her translucent complexion, not to mention her repeated evasiveness. "Look, if you were doing a deal, buying some stuff, I don't care about that, okay? I'm more concerned with who did this…" He jerked his thumb over to where the photographer was taking shots of the victim, a white male in his twenties, entirely drained of all his body fluids. "I don't care who sells you your smack. I just want to hear what you know, what you heard, what you saw, the whole truth, do you understand?"
    For the first time since he'd been directed to her upon arriving at the scene, she lost her nervous demeanor. "I wasn't here to buy drugs!"
    She sounded downright indignant. Utterly offended.
    "Then what were you here for? Is your hook-up guy married?" Maybe she was having an affair or into anonymous sex for kicks. She didn't look like the type, but Nate had learned they rarely did.
    "Oh, I don't know. Do you think he's married?" That seemed to flummox her.
    Nate tried not to sigh. "I don't know. Tell me how you know him and why you were meeting him, and maybe we can figure out if that has anything to do with the poor guy wadded up like dirty laundry and crammed behind a ticket machine. I don't know about you, but I'd like to catch a killer here."
    She winced and rubbed her arms absently. "That was rather appalling, wasn't it? Poor sot. Do you know who he is?"
    She had quite the little focus problem and it was starting to bug the hell out of him. "Who were you meeting?" Nate glanced down at the notebook in front of him. Her name was Gwenna according to the uniform who had initially arrived on the scene. Gwenna Carrick. "Look Gwenna, just tell me what you know about the guy you were meeting."
    "I just know the user name he goes by. It's Slash87."
    "User name? Online?"
    "Yes." Her cheeks got a little pink.
    "You were meeting a guy you met on the Internet?"
    She nodded.
    Christ. Why did everyone suddenly think it was a good idea to hook up online with total strangers and meet them in unsafe locales without knowing jack shit about them other than the fact that they used freakin' smileys in their damn e-mails? Yeah, Nate was officially out of patience.
    "Okay. So you don't know his real