Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 by Jenn Stark Page A

we strode back through the small collection of uniforms out onto the clear pavement. We didn’t stop until we got in the car, and I held my stomach, queasy as we rolled out onto the street. “Who is it?” he asked.
    “I don’t know much about him.” I stared out the window, my voice leaden. “A name. That’s it, no location, no base of operations. But that mark on the corpse’s arm looked—” I shook my head, remembering the glyph on Soo’s skin. “It looks a lot like a bondage tattoo inked into the slaves of a dark practitioner who goes by the name of Gamon.”
    “Gamon.” Nikki’s stare shifted my way. “Never heard of him.”
    “I’ve never run into him personally, but he’s known in the black market. The darkest of dark practitioners. My guess is he called up one of his minions with a corpse or four that would work, maybe tailored the one body to leave us a clue with that tat, and dumped them here.” I didn’t tell them about the sidewalk chat. I should, I knew, but the sight of that tattooed arm seemed to burn a hole in my mind, blotting out everything else.
    “But why?” Brody snapped. “Why here, why now?”
    Brody’s phone buzzed at his side, and he pulled it out and up to his ear in one smooth motion. “Rooks.”
    Whatever was said made him punch the gas pedal. “On it.”
    He threw the phone down and glared into the rearview at me. His eyes had gone a soulless gray.
    “There’s another one.”

Chapter Seven
    There were three total, in the end. Spread out around the city in a triangle, with the Strip in the dead center. All the bodies were positioned similarly, none of the others with a visible mark indicating that a tattoo had been present on the forearm. There only needed to be one, though. Gamon’s curse would have adorned each of these slaves.
    Given the state of the bodies, cause of death was impossible to determine, though at least the amputations had happened postmortem. The victims appeared to be somewhat deliberately exsanguinated, but not completely. It was unclear how much blood was taken, or, of course, for what use.
    “Nothing in the media. The rash of drug busts are drowning out everything else.” Brody typed at a keyboard in his cramped home office, leaving Nikki and me sitting in other chairs, staring at his wall-sized map. Las Vegas was laid out in front of us, a virtual pincushion, with clusters of brightly colored tacks marking the various gangs, safe houses, persons of interest—and Connecteds, too, I realized. At least he’d given the psychic community purple to help us stand out. Purple was nice.
    Three new red pins connected with string also adorned the board. The locations of the body dumps.
    “No messages to the precinct house, people claiming ownership?” Nikki asked. After the scene at the first drop, she’d persuaded us to stop by her apartment for more suitable clothes. Now she sat in her black-and-white camo pants and a tight black T-shirt, her black Chicago PD ball cap suspiciously well worn. The longer I got to know Nikki, the more glimpses I got into who she was before the fabulous hair, glittery nail polish, and cherry-red stilettos.
    No stilettos tonight, for certain. She balanced her chair on its two back legs, her feet encased in sturdy combat boots capable of kicking a rhino to death.
    “Not a blip.”
    “Talk to me about the drug busts. Why are they different?” I sat forward, focused on the triangle. Something about the use of the symbol was important. It was exact, each distance carefully measured out. Dumpsters had served as ground zero for the first two locations, but the third set of bodies had been found in a large plastic bag behind a series of tract houses. The cops had discovered it last, exactly where Brody had radioed them it should be after he’d considered how tight the first two sites had been to the Strip.
    “No product,” Brody said. “By the time our guys caught up to the users, they were in full sway of the drugs,