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another bolt from the thunderstorm that seemed to be parked directly over the airport. He smiled weakly at Betts. Frank wore a hairpiece, but he wasn't a bad-looking guy. Kind of a bumpy face. Wens. There was one below his left eye like a petrified tear. He was short and almost as round as his wife, but a fully packed roundness, as if staying in shape was just another religion for Frank. Tennis racket gold cufflinks. Sure.
    "They're private detectives," Betts explained, deciding it was time for her next Merit. She was wondering how rough it was going to be, a nonsmoking hop to Heathrow Airport in London. Nine and a half hours? But two martinis before dinner, then a prescription sleeping pill and a snooze in roomy first class with her feet up should see her through a no-nicotine stretch.
    "You two were in Vegas recently? Would you believe I've never been? I hear they have some great shows."
    "Speaking of luck," Pinky said, revisiting a favorite theme, for the moment distracting herself, "we got tickets to see Lincoln Grayle! I mean, not only that, we met him." She glanced again at the professional-looking men in gray suits. Private detectives? Did that mean—bodyguards? Obviously there was more to Betts Waring than met the eye. And then Pinky got it, the last name belatedly making a connection in her memory. Wasn't that also the name of the girl who had been in the news months ago, warning a stadium full of graduates and parents that a DC-10 was about to crash just where they were sitting? Pinky felt the downy hair on her forearms standing up.
    "Grayle? That name's familiar," Betts said with polite interest.
    "The magician. He's done TV specials. Maybe you saw the one; he escaped from a drone airplane that was blown up in midflight?"
    "Most incredible illusion I've ever seen," Frank commented. "He definitely was put aboard that plane, wrapped in chains, and handcuffed. The door was welded shut, mind you, and the camera never cut away as the plane took off, rose to two thousand feet, and blooey! Then the camera panned to a rescue truck racing to the scene, and the first man off the back of the truck, dressed in a fireman's coat and helmet, was Grayle."
    "In cred ible," Pinky seconded. "But I believe his Vegas show is better than anything he's done on TV. The Lincoln Grayle Theatre is a show itself. Like a glass palace, halfway up the mountain, whatchamacallit, five hundred feet above the desert." Pinky gestured theatrically herself, in the manner of a magician about to produce a palm tree from a top hat, her rings glittering in another burst of lightning just outside the shivering window wall.
    "Drawback is," Frank said, "Grayle's theatre isn't in one of those posh hotels on the Strip. It's almost a twenty-buck cab ride west if you miss one of his free buses, which we did?"
    "But worth every penny," Pinky assured Betts. "When the Grayle Theatre is lit up at night and the fountains are going, they say airline pilots can see it a hundred miles away."
    Pinky's gaze shifted and she smiled fitfully at a man in a United captain's uniform helping himself to coffee not far away. He also smiled and nodded as Pinky hitched herself a little closer to Betts. The lights in the lounge dimmed following a crescendo of thunder. Pinky shuddered superstitiously, glancing over one shoulder at the torrent outside, the unnatural daytime darkness between flashes.
    "I've heard," Pinky confided to Betts, "that other illusionists—you know, all the big names like Copperfield, Lance Burton, Siegfried and Roy good as they are, even they can't figure out how Grayle performs some of his illusions."
    "If they are illusions," Frank said darkly.
    Pinky finger-polished her crucifix again, nibbled at her plump under lip.
    Frank scoffed at her expression. "Oh, now, that's pure showbiz baloney, angel. I was just getting a rise out of you. It's all part of Grayle's mystique, his image. He doesn't have supernatural powers. You're just supposed to believe he does.