Mind Games

Chapter 2-1

2

The security measures in place on the Twin Arrows casino’s computer and surveillance systems were pretty decent, all things considered. Still, they were child’s play compared to the firewalls that had once protected the Special Enforcement Division of Homeland Security. Those barriers had taken him nearly forty-eight hours to penetrate, whereas Jeremy was inside the casino’s security system within an hour of ending Dan Begay’s call.

Some would have said tact wasn’t Jeremy’s strong suit, but even he knew it probably would be better if he didn’t mention to his friend how easily he got inside.

Everything on the security footage looked pretty normal to him…but of course, it would. Your standard gaming rooms, with tables for blackjack and poker, roulette and craps, and banks and banks of slot machines. The place was probably a little ritzier than a lot of Indian casinos, since the facility wasn’t even ten years old yet, and a lot of money had been spent to ensure it would be a showplace. Not that Jeremy could know for sure; he definitely wasn’t into gambling, and although some of his Wilcox cousins went out to Twin Arrows on a regular basis to go eat someplace different from the usual batch of restaurants in Flagstaff, or to visit the night club, or even simply to have a quick getaway to someplace that was still in the clan’s territory but not too distant, he’d never cared much about going, and so he’d never actually been there.

At the moment — a little past four on a Thursday afternoon — the place didn’t seem all that crowded. Some people playing slots, a few more at the poker and blackjack tables, but it probably was pretty thin compared to the kind of traffic the casino would get on a weekend.

Anyway, he wasn’t all that concerned about eyeballing the current group of patrons. Maybe Randall Lenz, formerly with Homeland Security and now hanging out in Wilcox territory, would have been able to survey the crowd and detect any patterns of behavior that seemed off, but Jeremy knew he didn’t have that kind of training.

No, he had a different kind of analysis in mind.

Because things had been so quiet at Trident Enterprises lately, he’d been spending most of his mental energies on creating his own facial recognition software. He knew the government had employed several versions of the technology, but he wanted to write his own code and see what he could come up with. True, it probably wouldn’t help much with Trident’s main goal of locating orphan witches and warlocks, since by definition, he and Jake and Laurel didn’t know exactly who they were looking for and therefore couldn’t know anything about a particular witch or warlock’s appearance, but he still thought the program would be something handy to have in his toolbox.

Because Dan had said this was a recent occurrence, Jeremy downloaded the last seventy-two hours’ worth of security footage to Trident’s servers, then had his facial-recognition program go to work on it. He figured at the very least, it would pick up on anyone who spent a lot of time in the casino or had an unusual pattern of activity when it came to moving from table to table or coming and going from the casino itself.

While that project was humming away in the background, he went back to work on the debugging routines he’d been focused on when Dan called. Maybe not the most glamorous task in the world, but it was something to do. At least he could say he was earning his keep, unlike Jake and Laurel.

All right, that probably wasn’t entirely fair. After everything Jake and Addie had been through together, they deserved some time off. If anything critical had come down the pike, of course Jake wouldn’t have taken the afternoon to go hiking. Laurel, on the other hand, hadn’t really put in enough hours to justify blithely heading off to Jerome with several of their cousins, but since Jake hadn’t seemed to care one way or another about her playing hooky, Jeremy knew it was better for him to keep his mouth shut.

Most of the time, he preferred to work alone anyway. He hated interruptions, hated it when he got into a good flow state and then had to stop abruptly because Jake had a question or Laurel wanted to chat, or whatever. Honestly, it was better that they were both gone.

A soft chime came from the Mac Pro he’d been using to analyze the security camera footage from the casino. Frowning slightly — he hadn’t thought it would get through the analysis that quickly — Jeremy rolled his office chair over to the Mac’s big cinema display and took a look at the screen. Six individuals had been flagged, although he could tell right away that the first two had attracted the attention of the algorithm simply because the people in question had spent what seemed like a ridiculous amount of time wandering around the casino before deciding on a game to play. One man, one woman, both of whom looked to be in their late forties or early fifties, although they didn’t seem to have any connection to one another beyond their similar ages.

The third person was, Jeremy realized after a moment, a plainclothes security guard for the casino. The guy never even sat down at a gaming table, which meant the algorithm shouldn’t have pointed him out in the first place. Something Jeremy would have to fix the next time he went in and fiddled with the code. He’d included the parameter of being an actual gambler when he set up the specs for the scan, but obviously, something had glitched.

The fourth and fifth and sixth people were a trio of women in their early or mid-twenties, one with blonde hair set in loose waves down to the middle of her back, the second a redhead, hair around the same length but straight, while the third woman had mid-brown hair cut in a choppy bob that didn’t quite hit her shoulders. The blonde wore a tight pink T-shirt and similarly tight jeans, while the redhead had on a flowy flowered dress, and the one with the brown hair was wearing jeans and a sleeveless chambray shirt. They seemed to be roughly around the same height and build.

No, wait…they were exactly the same height and build. Eyes narrowing, Jeremy enhanced each image, removing the blur the security cameras had given the still shots. He lined them up next to each other, and gave a satisfied nod.

Those three women were all the same person. When viewed side by side, it was hard to miss the way they all shared the same full mouth, the same heavy arched eyebrows and rounded nose. And okay, in each “version,” the woman’s makeup was different enough that it did a decent job of playing down those features and making them harder to detect, but they were all still unmistakably the same person. Probably, no one at the casino had detected anything unusual about her because they’d never had the opportunity to see those three different disguises placed next to one another…which Jeremy was sure had been the woman in question’s intention all along.

Now that he’d narrowed things down to this one woman, it was easy enough for him to go back and scan through the raw footage again, tracing her movements. In each separate disguise, she went into the casino and played a number of games at the poker tables, each time walking out with a decent amount of cash. Not crazy lottery amounts of money, but definitely hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

And at the end of each session in the casino, she went to the cashier and cashed out her chips, then left, exiting through the lobby to the parking lot.

So, she wasn’t staying there.

Actually, that made a lot of sense. If she’d stayed at the Twin Arrows hotel, she would have run a much higher risk of someone noticing that the woman coming and going from a particular room kept radically changing her appearance.

He went back through the footage and paused to watch her playing poker — this time, in her guise as the redhead. Nothing seemed that strange about the way she conducted herself during the game; she seemed serious, intent on her cards, but she also appeared to talk to the others at the table, and looked relaxed enough while doing so. Could someone count cards and also hold a conversation at the same time? He supposed so, although he thought that must take a hell of a lot of mental focus.

Once or twice, though, he caught her going still, face blank as if she was concentrating on something. Counting cards, he assumed, except she wasn’t even looking down at the cards in her hand or the ones laid out on the table. Instead, it almost seemed as if she was staring at the other people who surrounded her, although those frozen moments never lasted very long, and he couldn’t tell from watching the videos whether anyone at the poker tables had even noticed.

However, he thought he’d seen enough. Maybe the woman on the video just liked to play with her appearance as a sort of hobby, but he kind of doubted it. Much more likely that she kept switching things up so no one would notice how often she’d come to play at the casino…or how much she won.

Jeremy took a series of screen grabs of the woman, then quickly edited the photos to make them a manageable size for sending electronically. Since he didn’t have Dan’s email address — they always communicated via text — he figured he’d email them to himself, then text them over to his friend. Then Dan could do what he wanted with them.

Except…something about the whole scenario didn’t feel quite right. If asked, Jeremy probably couldn’t have explained exactly what had sent his spider sense tingling. He certainly wasn’t psychic; computers and code were his gift, not reading people’s minds.

Reading people’s minds….

He wanted to shake his head at himself. Talk about jumping to conclusions. Just because the woman with the constantly changing appearance paused in the middle of game play to stare off into the middle distance didn’t mean she was doing so in order to probe the thoughts of the people around her.

But what if she was? Mind reading would be a hell of a useful gift to have if you were trying to support yourself on poker winnings. No wonder Dan had mentioned counting cards — he’d guessed something was up, but he couldn’t have known that the casino had a psychic poker player doing her best to accumulate a nice pot of winnings before she moved on to the next place.

If that was even what was going on.

Damn it — Jake had picked a real great day to go AWOL. If he’d been at Trident like he was supposed to, Jeremy could have shown him the footage and asked him what he thought. In general, his brother had better instincts about those sorts of things.

But since Jake was off hiking around Aspen Corner with Addie and probably wouldn’t head home until the sun started to go down, enlisting his help wasn’t an option. From what Jeremy had been able to tell, it looked as though the mysterious woman preferred to gamble in the afternoons and rarely hung around much past six before disappearing to wherever she went when she was done for the day. It wasn’t quite five now; if he left right away, he could be at Twin Arrows by five-thirty.

And do what? Confront her? That sounded like a recipe for disaster, especially since he didn’t have any evidence of wrongdoing. The smart thing to do would be to send the photos to Dan, tell him what he’d seen, and walk away. There was no reason to get involved beyond that.

Unless, of course, the woman in question was far more than the card shark she appeared to be.

And wasn’t Trident all about tracking down people with unexplained abilities?

Jeremy hesitated for a moment, staring at the images on the screen. Then he muttered, “Screw it,” and got up from his office chair. The keys to his truck were in his hand before he even got to the door.

Because if there was one thing in the world he really hated, it was unanswered questions.