Your Heart Belongs to Me

than half blind, but with a blind man’s intuition, he found his clothes, dressed, and silently navigated the bedroom. Without a sound, he closed the door behind him.
    Familiarity with the floor plan and dark-adapted eyes allowed him to reach the kitchen without a misstep or collision. He switched on the light above the sink.
    On the notepad by the telephone, he left her a message: Sam, manic insomnia strikes again. Too jittery to lie still. Call you tomorrow. Love, Winky.
    He drove home, where he packed a suitcase.
    The great house was as silent as the vacuum between planets. Although he made only a few small noises, each seemed as loud as thunder.
    He drove to a hotel, where no one on his house staff or in his private life would think to look for him.
    In an anonymous room, on a too-soft bed, he slept so soundly for six hours that he did not dream. When he woke Saturday morning, he was in the fetal position in which he had gone to sleep.
    His hands ached. Evidently, he had closed them into fists through most of the night.
    Before ordering a room-service breakfast, Ryan made two phone calls. The first was to Wilson Mott, the detective. The second was to arrange to have one of Be2Do’s corporate jets fly him to Las Vegas.
     

 
    FOURTEEN

    F lensing knives of desert sun stripped the air to the bone, and the shimmers of heat rising off the airport Tarmac were as dry as the breath of a dead sea.
    The Learjet and crew would stand by to return Ryan to southern California the following morning.
    A black Mercedes sedan and chauffeur awaited him at the private-plane terminal. The driver introduced himself as George Zane, an employee of Wilson Mott’s security firm.
    He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. Instead of shoes, he wore boots, and the blunt toes looked as though they might be reinforced with steel caps.
    Two knots of pale scar tissue marked his shaved head at the brink of his brow. Tall, muscular, with a thick neck, with wide nostrils and intense eyes as purple-black as plum skins, Zane looked as though his lineage included bull blood, suggesting that the scars on his skull resulted from the surgical removal of horns.
    He was not only a driver but also a bodyguard, and more. After Zane stowed Ryan’s suitcase in the trunk, he opened a rear door of the sedan for him and presented him with a disposable cell phone.
    “While you’re here,” Zane said, “make any calls with this. They can never be traced to you.”
    Like a limousine, this customized sedan was equipped with a motorized privacy panel between the front seat and the back.
    Through the tinted windows, Ryan gazed at the barren desert mountains in the distance until a maze of soaring hotels and casinos blocked the natural world from view.
    At the hotel where Ryan would stay, Zane parked in a VIP zone. While Ryan waited in the car, the driver carried the suitcase inside.
    When Zane returned, he opened a back door to give an electronic-key card to Ryan. “Room eleven hundred. It’s a suite. It’s registered to me. Your name appears nowhere, sir.”
    As they pulled away from the hotel, the disposable cell phone rang, and Ryan answered it.
    A woman said, “Are you ready to see Rebecca’s apartment?”
    Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.
    “Yes,” said Ryan.
    “It’s number thirty-four, on the second floor. I’m already inside.”
    She terminated the call.
    Away from the fabled Strip, Vegas was a parched suburban sprawl. Pale stucco houses reflected the bloodless Mojave sun, and many landscape schemes employed pebbles, rocks, cactuses, and succulents.
    The palm fronds looked brittle. The olive trees appeared more gray than green.
    Ribbons of heat, rising from vast parking lots, caused shopping malls to shimmer and shift shape like the underwater city in his troubling dream.
    Sand, dry weeds, and litter choked tracts of undeveloped land.
     

     
    The Oasis, an upscale two-story apartment complex, was a cream-colored structure with a roof of turquoise tiles. The privacy wall that concealed its large courtyard was inlaid with a caravan of ceramic Art Deco camels that matched the color of the roof.
    Behind the apartments stood garages, as well as guest parking shaded by horizontal trellises festooned with purple bougainvillea.
    Zane put down the privacy panel and both front windows before switching off the engine. “You best walk in alone. Be casual.”
    After stepping out of the car, Ryan considered returning at once to it and