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we have to—”
    “I don’t give a damn about guidelines,” Worthington said. “We’ve got three people dead and a missing girl and time is our enemy. I know this sounds unconventional, but like I said, we’re talking about somebody who was once the go-to guy in Nevada law enforcement circles.”
    “So why did he stop?”
    “You more than likely already know.”
    Royer’s eyebrows raised. “What’s that supposed to mean? Who the hell is this guy?”
    Worthington hesitated, and Anna was suddenly struck by the notion that there was something more going on here, something deeper. That the man Worthington was recommending might be more than just a colleague. They were connected somehow.
    “His name is Pope. Daniel Pope.”
    Anna felt a sudden prickle on the back of her neck. Had she heard him right?
    “ The Daniel Pope? The same Daniel Pope whose wife—”
    “That’s the one,” Worthington said. “But when you meet him, you might not want to bring that up.”
     

6
     
    I T WAS STILL dark when Pope got back to his room.
    The crisis with Anderson Troy, as petty as it was, had been artfully averted. While most practitioners of his craft were loath to admit it, it’s often possible for a skilled hypnotist to manipulate a subject’s thought processes through visualization and guided imagery.
    After putting Troy under again, Pope managed to feed him just enough details to get him to believe that the Nigel Fromme he’d Googled was an entirely different person. That Troy’s Nigel Fromme—whom Troy himself had eagerly conjured up—was a bad-ass London gangster whose untimely death had been the result of a hail of bullets fired almost point-blank as he was bedding a beautiful blond Sunday School teacher.
    With very large breasts. And no surprises, dangling or otherwise.
    Recall and imagination. A 10/90 mix.
    Pope walked away from this adolescent fantasy session feeling like a fraud, knowing he had broken nearly every tenet of his profession, but secure in the belief that Arturo wouldn’t be shoving a knife into his rib cage anytime soon, thus maintaining the sanctity of Troy’s plush white carpet.
    The things we do to stay alive.
    Not that Pope really had much of a life these days. But he did like being alive.
    Standing at his window now, he looked out at the desert darkness and at the distant cluster of squat gray buildings that had kept him company nearly every morning in recent memory:
    The Nevada Women’s Correctional Facility.
    Who in his right mind, he wondered, would think to build a hotel-casino so close to a prison compound?
    Then again, he couldn’t be sure which had come first. And it was almost as if the marriage had been arranged just for him, so that he could stand here on dark mornings, stare at those distant buildings, and wallow in his misery.
    He wondered if Susan was awake in her cell, thinking about what she’d become and how she’d gotten there.
    Thinking about Ben.
    Thinking about Pope.
     
    H E WAS JUST coming out of the shower, finally ready to crawl into bed, when his cell phone rang again.
    Hoping to Christ it wasn’t Sharkey, he snatched it up off his nightstand and checked the screen, surprised by the name he saw.
    J. T. Worthington.
    Cousin Jake.
    The two hadn’t spoken in months. Pope had halfheartedly invited Jake and Veronica out to the casino when the show first opened, but they’d never been able to make it. And in that last call, Pope had sensed a trace of disappointment in Jake’s voice. As if he thought Pope could do better. That the show was a frivolous enterprise. A waste of Pope’s time and talent.
    All of which were probably true.
    But then Pope wasn’t much interested in Jake’s opinion. He had little use for friends and family these days.
    After the tragedy hit the news, followed by the trial, the sentence, and all the nastiness that accompanied them, the people in his life had slowly begun to drift away.
    Thanks to the skewed logic of the many graceless TV