Seven of Spades2: Trick Roller

Levi was up much earlier than Dominic, and he had just gotten out of the shower when he was summoned to a new crime scene.

He sighed at the thought of having to abduct back to his apartment to change his clothes first.If you stayed overnight with Stanton and borrowed a clean shirt, you'd be fine for the day, but wearing a borrowed shirt from Dominic would make him look like a kid pretending to be a grown-up.

He still has to shave and brush his teeth.Maybe he should bring something over here, just in case—

Wow!He quickly stopped thinking.It's too early, and it's moving too fast.

When he returned to the bed, Fan Gumei raised her head buried in her front paws and looked at him curiously.She had slept with them last night, curled up between their feet, and since she was doing well, he didn't mind.

Levi scratched her ear and looked at Dominic.He was lying sprawled on his back with the sheet hanging loosely around his waist.His shoulders and chest were astonishingly broad, taking up a lot of room, and the sheets outlined his muscular thighs.He had a small circular scar under his right shoulder from a bullet he had fought in Afghanistan.

Levi knelt on one knee on the bed, bent over, and stroked the old wound on his nose along Dominic's strong square jaw with his fingers. "Dominic," he said.

Dominic blinked a few times and opened his eyes, and he grinned naturally at Levi. "Hey."

"I have to go. There was a suspicious murder at the Mirage Hotel, and it happens to be my shift this time."

"Well, okay." Dominic turned his face, his mouth just touched Levi's fingers, and Dominic took the opportunity to kiss his fingertips.Levi's breathing stopped. "Call me back?"

"it is good."

Dominique closed his eyes, rolled back on his side and pulled the sheet up to his shoulders, sinking his head back into the pillow.Levi stared at him for a while, wondering if he could stay.He also began to miss the peace he could always feel around Dominic on weekdays.It's great to be completely relaxed and happy with him, and Levi doesn't need to be on his guard all the time because he knows nothing can hurt him.Even the haunting and tormenting nightmares he'd had since childhood—stalked and hounded by an invisible enemy—had faded over the past few months.

Levi kissed Dominic on the cheek and turned away.He couldn't lock the door behind him, but he figured whoever broke into the apartment would be pissed if they found out that the apartment was populated by retired Army Rangers and a personal guard dog that weighed over a hundred pounds.

Dominique's building was structured like a motel, and all the apartment doors opened onto the outer hallway, and as Levi made his way down to the stairs, another door opened and closed behind him.He turned and saw Jasmine Anderson, who lived next door to Dominique—she lived with her boyfriend, Carlos.

She was an unrepentant beauty, with intricate tattoos on light brown skin and long braids dyed in seven colours.She drew long eyeliner at the end of her eyes, which set off her big eyes, and put on a fine filigree-style silver lip ring on her lips, and she carried a linen messenger bag on her shoulder.

"Hey, Levi," she said, not seeming at all surprised by his presence, "you two started sleeping lately?"

"It seems to be." He stopped and waited for her to follow, so that he could walk to the stairs with her. "Are you going to work?" It's a little odd for a tattooist to go to work on a Sunday morning, but that's Las Vegas.

She shook her head. "Go to the farmers market. Get there early so the good stuff doesn't sell out."

"Ah." When walking down the stairs, Levi racked his brains to find a topic.He liked Jasmine and Carlos, but he was still a little uncomfortable around them—he was always uncomfortable with people he didn't know well, but not just because of that.They were all Dominic's best friends, and they were definitely judging him as a good partner, and if they thought he wasn't good enough, Dominic probably felt the same way.They walked out of the fence outside the building and came to the parking lot, and Levi asked, "How were you and Carlos yesterday?"

"Probably not as good as you guys." She said and winked at him, making him suddenly suspicious. "goodbye!"

She walked away quickly, heading for her car.Levi narrowed his eyes, then shrugged and walked to his car.

Dominique lives very close to the Las Vegas campus of the University of Nevada, and it is much closer to the Mirage Hotel from here than from Levi’s new residence in the Rancho Ochi community[1], so he is equivalent to going around After a long journey, the time to arrive at the scene was much later than planned.He hurried through the front lobby, which was arranged in a tropical rainforest style, and passed the huge aquarium behind the reception desk. He was surprised to see that Martin was waiting at the elevator entrance before he suddenly stopped.

He and Martin are both detectives in the homicide team. There are six people in the team; because they have their own strengths and complement each other's weaknesses, they are often assigned to solve the same case together.Martin lives in the Sunrise Manor area on the outskirts of the city, but even so, she should arrive earlier than Levi.

"I thought I was definitely the last one to arrive." Levi said, standing in front of the elevator with her. "What's wrong?"

"My family is full of rebellious teenagers, that's all." Martin spoke with a thick Flatbush accent.She was born in Haiti but grew up in Brooklyn. "Mikaela has been thinking and sulking to herself for a whole week. I haven't seen her lose her temper like this since she could walk, and now even Simon is infected. When I left in the morning, Antoine's face—as if I'd thrown him among the wolves."

Levi frowned sympathetically.

Martin has a dark brown complexion and a small and exquisite figure.Although she looks tired at the moment, she still carefully manages her short hair into perfect elastic curls, and she is as meticulous as usual.She looked at Levi from head to toe, with an insightful light in her eyes, which Levi didn't like very much.

"You're finally having sex with Dominic again?" she said.

With a soft "ding" sound, an elevator arrived and let out a family of five chattering. "How do you always know?" Levi hisses Martin as he steps into the elevator.They were the only ones in the elevator, but he lowered his voice further and said, "I'm not... Am I walking with a limp?"

She pursed her lips tightly, as if holding back a smile, and then pressed the button for the 22nd floor. "No, but thanks for saying that, now I know who you are. You just—you look relaxed, you know? I don't see you like that often. And, you Badly shaved and crooked tie. 'Demented after cannon' written all over his body."

With a curse, he untied his tie and retied it.

A Vegas Police Department officer stood outside the door of the room where the body occurred.Levi and Martin signed the crime scene entry and exit registration form, put on gloves and shoe covers, and walked in.

The room is not very big, but it is very beautifully decorated, with vivid deep purple and red contrasting sharply with the snow-white bed sheets and curtains.A pair of glass vases are filled with blooming flowers, and a flat-screen TV is installed on the wall facing the king-size bed.

Crime scene photographer Fred is busy with two crime scene investigators and a coroner.Standing in the corner watching was Jonah Gibbs, who might have been a pretty good cop if he hadn't been so hot-tempered, so careless, and so unsophisticated.

"Anything?" Levi asked him.

Gibbs nodded in the direction of the dead body, which lay across the floor near the end of the bed. "Dr. Stephen Hensley, 53 years old, from Baltimore. They have a 'palliative care' seminar or something starting Monday, and a bunch of people come early to have fun—you know."

"I will never understand, what kind of evil are these people, they would choose to come to Las Vegas for the meeting in July." Martin said in a low voice.

"I heard you muttering. Well, in the morning, one of his doctor colleagues told the hotel security department that he had an appointment to go down for breakfast, but he didn't show up, the phone didn't answer, and the door didn't answer. Then the security found out. The victim. That colleague was already on his way to the branch office, and he was quite frightened."

Levy nodded and went straight to the corpse.In order to suppress the urge to touch the scene unconsciously, he put his hands in his pockets—even if he was wearing gloves, the less physical evidence he touched, the better.

Hensley was a solidly built white male with dark brown hair, graying at the temples.The deceased was wrapped in a hotel bathrobe, and Levi couldn't tell if he was naked underneath.There were no visible wounds on the body, but there was a pile of vomit near the head and clotted bile around the mouth and chin.

"Drug overdose?" Levi asked the coroner, who was kneeling beside the body.

"It is almost certain," she said. "The time of death is tentatively determined to be between one and three in the morning. Before the autopsy, that's about all I can say."

Levi thanked her and continued to search the room.The room was too cramped for seven people—eight including Hensley—so he had to gather as many clues as he could with every step he took.

The bed was wrinkled, with pillows thrown all over the place and the bedspread piled haphazardly on one side.Two used condoms were lost in the bin near the bed.There were two champagne glasses on the TV cabinet, and there was still wine in them. One of them had clear lipstick marks on it, and there was a bottle of champagne in a metal ice bucket beside it, and the ice had turned into water.Hensley was wearing a wedding ring, but if it turned out to be a colleague, Levy would bet he didn't bring his wife with him.

What was there was as important as what was there. After a thorough investigation, they still didn't find Hensley's wallet and mobile phone.Also, there are a bunch of charging cables on the table, but no electronic equipment in sight.

"What do you think?" Martin asked him when they met him again at the door. "Did Immortal Jump [2] jump over the head?"

That was Levy's tentative conclusion. "Xianrendiao" refers to sex workers - or people pretending to be sex workers - who lure clients to private places and then rob them. Usually, the perpetrators first drug clients to make them unconscious.It's nothing new in Las Vegas, but it's not usually fatal.If this was really a fairy dance, the overdose was probably an accident.

but……

"If the sex worker was going to rob Hensley, why did he actually have sex with him?" he asked.

Always quick to rebut, Martin said: "Maybe the woman didn't intend to rob him at first, but then something the victim said or did that pissed her off and she changed her mind."

"We don't know if this person is a woman."

"There's still lipstick on the champagne flute," Gibbs interjected.

"It doesn't have to be a woman who wears lipstick," Levi replied.

Gibbs blinked. "Okay, okay, that's right. But I think we have a good chance of winning by betting on girls."

Levi shrugged; the kid was probably right.

At the same moment, Martin frowned and scanned the room. "There's another thing - why leave obvious fingerprints and DNA after a robbery, let alone an accidental killing?"

Now it's Levi's turn to pick the nitpick. "Assuming the victim was alive when the woman left, maybe she was pretty sure he wouldn't have reported the crime under the circumstances. Or maybe she just panicked and ran away."

"It's not as emotional as a serial killer, is it?" Gibbs smiled narrowly.

Levi glared at him. The "Seven Bloods of Spades" case was closed amidst Levy's protests, and five murders were blamed on the late Keith Chapman, although Levy was quite sure that he was framed.Levy forwarded the provocative message left by the murderer in the hotel room to his supervisor, Sergeant Wen, who gave him a strange look, said it was obviously a prank, and asked him if he needed a vacation to "refresh his mind."

After word got around, co-workers played tricks on him for weeks, writing all sorts of silly “messages” on Sevens of Spades poker and putting them around: at the bureau, on the windshield of his car Put it on, even in the pocket of the coat he took off.Levy suspects that half of them are the work of Gibbs.

"Go and investigate the rest of the floor," Martin said sharply to Gibbs. "Take note of all the people who are not there, so we can ask the hotel manager for their information later."

Gibbs mumbled a few inaudible words, but followed the instructions and headed for the corridor.Talk back to Martin and wait for her to swear in return. Martin swears so badly that sailors detest their ears.

"Seven of Spades" is the thorn between Levi and Martin, because she doesn't believe that the real murderer is still at large.So he had to pretend the subject had never been brought up. "Does this the old fashioned way?" he asks, meaning she's in charge of the crime scene and he's going to question the first witness.

Not long after she agreed, he set off.Pursuing Gibbs' statements from hotel security was not a matter of urgency in his view, and Martin would make sure that all relevant employees were questioned that night.So he drove south, along the Las Vegas Strip to his branch, and questioned Hensley's colleagues.

Dr. Anika Kapoor was waiting for him in a comfortably furnished room that the police use to mourn relatives or interview victims and witnesses of traumatic events.Dr. Kapoor is a buxom woman who looks to be in her late fifties, with smile lines on her face and black hair cut into an ear-length bob.Unexpectedly, she was accompanied by a tall and thin white man who looked much younger than her.

Levi reached out to her first. "Dr. Kapoor, this is Detective Levi Abrams. My condolences."

"Thank you," she said, forcing a weak smile as she cried.Gibbs said she was "terrified"; but it was much more than that.Her eyes were bloodshot and her nose was swollen from crying for hours.

The man wasn't crying, but he also looked out of his mind, his face pale like a ghost, with an expression as if he had been greatly shocked.Levi raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

"Oh, this is Dr. Craig Warner," Kapoor said. "He's a researcher under Stephen and I, and we work together at Johns Hopkins University."

She choked up at the mention of Hensley's name.Levy reached for a nearby box of tissues and handed it to her, then motioned for her and Warner to sit back on the sofa—the two had stood up because of his presence.He sat down in the armchair across from them and took out a notebook.

"I understand that this is all painful, but can you tell me the last time you saw Dr. Hensley alive?"

Kapoor swallowed hard and nodded. "The three of us and some colleagues had dinner last night at 'Samba', the hotel's own restaurant. I remember Stephen leaving for his room at about ten o'clock. Said he'd go to bed early tonight—to beat the jet lag."

"Did either of you get in touch with him after this? Any way, phone? Text?"

Kapoor and Warner shook their heads.

"Do you also live in Mirage?" Levi asked.

"Yes, we're actually on the same floor," Kapoor said, "in the group of rooms booked for the seminar."

"Then did you see or hear anything suspicious on that floor last night?" This time, Levy turned to Warner to ask questions, and the other party hadn't spoken yet.

"No," said Warner, a thin man with a strangely deep voice. "I said, there's a lot of people coming and going in this hallway all night, but... that's what Vegas is about, is it?"

Kapoor agreed, and Levy took a few minutes to confirm the reason for their trip and last night's itinerary.As Gibbs said, the national symposium is about end-of-life care and palliative care, and the group flew in from Baltimore before the symposium officially kicks off on Monday.After eating at the Samba restaurant, they drank a few cocktails in one of Mirage's bars before parting ways.

Kapoor went to the casino floor and didn't return upstairs until three o'clock in the morning.Warner was different. He was so drunk at the bar that he had to be supported by two friends to get back to the guest room. He also called his girlfriend in Baltimore regardless of the jet lag, and then went crazy in front of the TV playing pay movies. unconscious.

"I don't usually drink that much," he said, rubbing his face with his hands, "and now my girlfriend is mad and I'm hungover, not to mention all that has happened."

Welcome to Vegas, Levi thought to himself, but didn't say it. Even he couldn't do something so indifferent. "What made you worry about Dr. Hensley this morning?" he asked Kapoor.

"We made an appointment to have a buffet breakfast together at the 'Aspiration Restaurant' at nine o'clock in the morning. Stephen was...in his lifetime..." Kapoor closed his eyes, opened them again after a while and insisted, "Punctual To a sick person. I texted him a few times before he showed up by the hour and called him on his cell. I even tried his guest room phone and it just kept ringing. It made me feel like Something was wrong; I could feel it. I called hotel security to help, and they let me into his guest room. He—he had—"

She started crying softly again, covering her face with a tissue.Warner puts an arm around her shoulder.

Levi gave her some time to relax, and then asked, "Is Dr. Hensley married?"

"It's over," said Warner. "His wife's home, Baltimore—over, she doesn't know about it, does she?"

"Does any of you know that Dr. Hensley has another sexual partner? Mistress, girlfriend?"

Kapoor slowly lowered his hands covering his face, then stared at him. "What?"

This is embarrassing, but it has to be discussed. "Dr. Hensley did find out about sex with someone last night," Levy said. "Our priority now is to find the man he was in the guest room with last night. Did he initiate flirtation with anyone before leaving the restaurant?" , make an offer?"

"No," Kapoor said, "as far as I know, he went straight to his room."

"Is it possible that he arranged for a compensated dating service?"

Kapoor and Warner were silent for a moment, and glanced at each other uncomfortably, all the information Levi needed to know was in this glance. "It's not...he can't do it." She said cautiously.

"Wait a minute." Warner sat and turned to face her. "I thought Dr. Hensley died of an overdose of some kind."

She took a shaky breath. "Isn't that what I saw?"

"But all these questions..." he frowned at Levi, "do you think someone overdosed him? Like some prostitute who had sex with him and then killed him?"

Hearing the word "prostitute", Levi gasped and said, "We haven't officially determined the cause of death yet. Until then, I don't want to speculate. But no matter how Dr. Hensley died, the most urgent thing is to find The guy he was with last night."

"I'm sorry, I don't think we can help you on this one," Kapoor said, "We're both in Vegas for the first time. I don't know where Stephen got a... escort."

Levy asked a few more questions one after another, but no more relevant information was asked. "Are you still going to the seminar?" Levi asked as they stood up.Here's the tricky part of the tourist murder case: Once all the key suspects and witnesses have gone home, the police have a headache; then there's not much Levy can do to keep them around.

Kapoor nodded. "We plan to present the breakthrough results of our research in the second half of the week - Stephen has dedicated a large part of his life to this research. He will also want us to stay and continue to make presentations."

"Can I ask what you're studying?" Levi said, taking some notes.

"Cellular Mechanisms in Pain Signaling and Perception," Warner said.

Levi gave his title to the two doctors and told them, as was customary, to call him if they remembered anything useful.He led them out of the sub-office, and walked back to his station.The first thing to do was to call the Baltimore Police Department and ask them to send the local police to inform Mrs. Hensley of her husband's death in person.Then he had to apply for a bunch of search warrants—the hotel didn't have surveillance cameras in the hallways, but they did in the elevators and lobby.He also needs to get the guest room phone records and Hensley's cell phone records.If Hensley had booked the compensated dating service online, they were out of luck—after all, the laptop was missing.

After all these are done, he still needs to verify the alibi of Kapoor and Warner, so as not to leave any dead ends, and he may ask for a few more seminar materials to learn about Hensley's background.His day was sure to be long.

At noon, he put down his work to get a cup of coffee and a sandwich.Dominique goes to his mother for family dinners at his mother's every week at this time, and he calls Dominique as he eats, thinking he'll be done eating by now.

"Hey," Dominic says over the background noise, and it sounds like he's talking to Levi over Bluetooth in his pickup truck. "What about the case?"

"We're not 100% sure it's a homicide," Levy wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Even if there was a case, it looks like manslaughter."

"Well, it won't take long for you to solve the case."

Levi sneered and said, "Thanks. How was lunch?"

"Great. Gina is getting big. She promises she's not carrying twins, but her June belly is bigger than all the girls in our family have in this month."

"You didn't say that to her face, did you?" Levi asked.Dominic is the third of five siblings, and Gina is his youngest sister, who is currently expecting her first child.

"How come. I don't want my balls to be crushed into blood, thank you." Dominic paused. "My mother said it."

????"Oh My God."

"Well, all of a sudden, there was a lot of quarreling, vying to compare how fat someone was when they were pregnant-everyone took out their mobile phones, dug out old photos and yelled for more than an hour." , Dominic still sounds very pleasant. "Anyway, I'm meeting up with Carlos at the gym now, and I'm off to McBride to practice tonight and tomorrow night. But I thought we could have lunch tomorrow afternoon?"

"Sounds good," Levi said.He was already looking forward to it.

"My schedule is easier to adjust than yours, so all you have to do is give me a call and let me know where and when."

"Okay, see you tomorrow."

As he hung up the phone, Levy couldn't help but recall a moment from last night vividly - when Dominic pinned him on the headboard, ramming inside him, calling him "baby."It was something that came out of my mouth in passion, and Dominic didn't know whether he realized he said it or not.

He has never liked nicknames, and of course he never used them with Stanton.He began to think again of Dominic calling him "baby" in that deep voice.He should hate it, but he can't help but shudder because this time is different.

Everything about Dominic is different.

[1] Rancho Ookey, a community located west of downtown Las Vegas.

[2]? The original text was written as trickroll, which is a unique name for beauty tricks in Las Vegas.