Page 31 of Speak of the Devil

Even in Las Vegas, January evenings were too chilly to sit outside — a lot of places had those big outdoor heaters, but unless you were sitting right next to one, they didn’t seem to help all that much — so Delia and Pru had already agreed to meet in the bar at Ghost Donkey and start there, then decide if they wanted to stay beyond drinks and nachos or move on to different restaurant if it turned out they wanted something other than Mexican food.

For a Sunday evening, the bar was pretty crowded. Luckily, though, it seemed as if Prudence had gotten there early, because she’d snagged them a high-top table off to one side rather than sitting at the counter.

Much better. Not that Delia was morally opposed to sitting at the bar, but it was a lot more difficult to have a private conversation that way.

Pru’s dark eyes were dancing, telling Delia she must have dug up something. However, it seemed she was willing to wait until they’d ordered their drinks — a Cadillac margarita on the rocks for Delia and a frozen prickly pear for Prudence, after they’d decided a pitcher wouldn’t be practical because they wanted different things — and also placed an order for a big platter of nachos before she was ready to launch into her findings.

“So, what’ve you got?” Delia asked after the waitress dropped off their margaritas and promised that their nachos would be out in a few minutes.

“Lots of stuff,” Pru replied, then took a sip of her margarita. Unlike Delia, who’d let her natural hair color come back in after deepening it to shocking scarlet when she’d sung for Final Girl, Prudence still sported one brilliant color after another, depending on her mood that month. Right now, it was a bright turquoise, a shade that certainly stood out against her all-blackclothes and pale skin. “For one thing, his name isn’t really Caleb Lowe. It’s Caleb Lockwood.”

Delia stared at her friend. “How’d you find that out?”

Prudence grinned and sipped some more prickly pear margarita. “It wasn’t that hard. I got his photo from his driver’s license and then uploaded it to some other databases.”

“So…he really is in the witness protection program?”

“Nope,” Pru said, sounding cheerful. “If that had been the case, the stuff about his real identity probably would have been harder to dig up. But anyway, he’s Caleb Lockwood from Greencastle, Indiana, he’s thirty-one years old…and he’s been missing for the past two-plus years.”

“‘Missing’?” Delia repeated. She supposed that was a precursor to starting over with a new identity, but in this day and age, completely erasing your existence wasn’t as easy as it used to be.

The waitress showed up with their nachos right then, so they had to wait until she’d deposited the oversized plate on their table and asked if they wanted anything else before she took off and they had some much-needed privacy again.

Prudence grabbed a tortilla chip loaded with ground beef and tomatoes and cheese and popped it in her mouth. Once she was done chewing — and had washed the food down with another swallow of margarita — she said, “Yeah, it looks like Caleb and his father and a group of their friends went on some kind of chartered fishing trip in the Gulf two years ago in November, and the boat vanished without a trace. Had quite the impact on the community, since it wasn’t just that they’d lost fourteen of their own. Sounds like all the older-generation guys were what you’d call pillars of the community — Caleb’s father was president of the local bank, and the rest were doctors and lawyers and even the principal of the high school — so it was definitely a blow.”

Delia could imagine. And although she certainly wasn’t the type to keep up with news about a small town in Indiana, usually if there was that much loss of life occurring all at once, the national media would have picked up the story and run with it for a while until they came up with something else to distract their viewers.

As far as she could recall, she hadn’t heard a damn thing about the tragedy.

“Why wasn’t it on the news?”

Prudence shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I found articles in the local paper about what happened, and in places like Indianapolis and even Chicago, but it didn’t seem to have made the national news.”

“But if Caleb drowned in a fishing boat accident, then what the hell is he doing in Las Vegas with a new name and a new life?”

“I have no idea,” Pru said, still sounding way too cheerful, considering their topic of conversation. “I guess he was a better swimmer than the rest of them.”

The comment had been made as a joke, but Delia wasn’t sure if she wanted to dismiss it out of hand. Although she’d never been out on the ocean, she had to imagine that a boat sinking with a bunch of people on board must have been chaotic, to say the least. Maybe Caleb had survived longer than the rest and had been picked up by another fishing boat. Maybe he’d knocked his head against something and had amnesia, and had been hanging out in Mexico or something until his memories resurfaced.

Delia had to admit that particular scenario sounded like something right out of atelenovela,but what else would explain why he’d been missing for two years, only to reappear now with enough cash on hand to buy not one, but two properties?

She had no idea. Also, her theory had about a million holes in it. Even if Caleb really had forgotten who he was for monthson end, why wouldn’t he have gone home to Greencastle once his memories reemerged? What would have sent him to Las Vegas and made him think that buying up properties was the best use of his time and resources?

“And there was absolutely no trace of him after the boating accident?” she asked, and Pru shook her head.

“Nothing at all. There’s a total gap between November ninth two years ago and now.”

Which she supposed would make sense if he’d been out of the country, surviving on other people’s generosity.

Or maybe he’d had an interim identity, something he’d used before he decided to become Caleb Lowe, for whatever reason.

She asked Pru if that was a possibility, and again her friend shook her head.

“I couldn’t find any other I.D.s with photos that matched his. Just the one from Indiana and the one that was recently issued here in Nevada. Maybe it’s possible he couch-surfed the whole time and only used cash and took Ubers everywhere, but I don’t think it’s very likely.”

Especially since the ride-sharing services got cranky with you if you tried to avoid having a credit card or a PayPal or Venmo account on file with them.

No — even though Delia wasn’t sure how he’d accomplished it — Caleb seemed to have been completely off the grid for the past two years, right up until the moment when he’d applied for his new driver’s license.

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