The Voting Machine

Chips with No Value

Back when I was a suspect in the Employee of the Year award investigation, I spent a lot of time studying how to lie. My friend Larry used to be a cop. He explained the signs of deception that police and FBI look for when they are questioning somebody.

The most important thing is the eyes. A person who is lying will typically look up to the right when they are giving a false answer. On the other hand, if they look up to the left it means they are genuinely trying to remember something. This is reversed if the person is left-handed.

There are other tells that investigators are trained to observe, like a change in breathing pattern, higher voice tone, folded arms, tapping fingers, and fidgeting in the chair. But the eyes are the biggest tell.

From the moment the FBI brought me in to discuss the voting machine murders, I'd been preparing for the question about Shiro. I was preparing to lie because I remembered the conversation I'd overheard between David and Brenda. I remembered the warning. Shiro's eyes and ears were everywhere.

When I overheard Brenda and David, I didn't really know what to make of this. I thought that Brenda might be having some kind of strange delusion. Maybe David was humoring her. Maybe he didn't want her to believe she was crazy. After all, there's a whole bunch of people out there who believe strange things and society doesn't consider these people certifiably insane. They just believe in theories that can't be proven with facts.

The notion of a fact can change over time. That's what David taught in his history class. Sometimes a truth starts out on the fringes, like the idea that the world is round instead of flat. Then, little by little, it moves into the mainstream until the whole world believes something different.

When David and Brenda first mentioned Shiro, it seemed like a fantasy. Now David was dead. He'd been gathering a list of names related to all this. Zeke Legend, the only he person he told about the list, was also dead. Brenda's fellow soldiers from the mission in Iraq were all dead. She'd been spared but everyone figured she was crazy.

She was not crazy. In my mind, the story about Shiro had passed from fantasy to fact. The knowledge of Shiro was deadly. The knowledge of David's list of names was deadly. It was all tied together somehow.

So that's why I lied to the special agent in charge and told him I'd never heard any mention of Shiro. As I answered, I was careful not to look up in the right corner. I was careful not to fidget, tap my fingers, or do anything else to arouse suspicion that I was telling a great, big lie.

After I finished my story about Brenda, all five agents and Teresa left the room for a briefing on the National Guard deployment in Clark County. Starting the next morning, hundreds of ready reserve activists would mobilize to support the local police and Homeland Security on-site at polling locations throughout the metro area.

I glanced around the room at the empty seats surrounding me.

I noticed Teresa had left her purse.

It was from the designer chain Bebe; a glitzy, silver, fake-leather bag with a shiny gold buckle that kept it fastened shut.

Of course I had to look inside.

There was nothing incriminating in her wallet: a driver's license, passport, and around two hundred cash in crisp, new twenty-dollar bills. There was also makeup, a small mirror, and plane itinerary for a return to LA tomorrow morning.

At the bottom of the purse, I found something more interesting.

There were three poker chips from the Babylonian, Marvin Perlson's new luxury casino on the Strip.

I was hardly an expert on the casinos, but it was impossible to spend time in Vegas without learning the basics. All the big places on the Strip had their own branded casino chips with a distinctive color and design. This was especially true for the places that were known for their high stakes Texas Hold 'Em poker rooms like the Aria, the MGM, and the Rio.

The Bellagio was known for the prettiest chips, the red, white, and blue-striped "flags" were worth $5,000 each. The purple "cranberries" worth $25,000 went out of circulation last year after a gunman stole a million dollars' worth of chips at a craps table.

Teresa's chips were colored blue, white, and gold, the standard colors of the Babylonian.

But there was something very unusual about them.

They listed no monetary value.

Chips for games on the floor of the casino always carried some numeric amount; otherwise, how would you know whether a bet of one chip was worth one dollar or one thousand dollars?