Kingston Kidnappings (What Happens In Vegas Book 3) by Matt Lincoln (classic books for 10 year olds txt) 📕

surrounded by casinos and theaters. There’s a giant Ferris wheel not even a mile away, and we’re sitting in this office staring off into space.”

“It’s the middle of the workday,” I scoffed.

“What’s the point of working in Las Vegas,” Miranda groaned, “if you can’t shirk your responsibilities to go gamble all your money away?”

“Can’t you just go after work?” I asked. “Why do you want to rush off in the middle of the day?”

“It’s always more fun to do stuff when you know you’re not supposed to be doing it,” Miranda smiled devilishly. “That does sound fun, though. Going after work, I mean. Oh, why don’t we do that after the case is solved? We can all go out into the city to celebrate.”

“Don’t you think you should focus on actually solving the case?” I asked. “Before you start making celebratory plans?”

“Nope,” Miranda retorted. “Making plans just encourages me to solve it faster. Anyway, I’m serious. It’s been more than six months since you and Charlie started working here, and we’ve never all gone out to do something together. We wouldn’t have to go far. We’re already in Las Vegas.”

“That does sound fun,” I admitted. While I had explored the city, I hadn’t really gotten a chance to take advantage of the activities the city had to offer. Las Vegas was a city that came alive at night, and I always just went straight home after work.

“It’s a plan, then,” Miranda grinned, unilaterally deciding to take my vague interest in the idea as agreement. “Hey, let’s play a game.”

“What kind of game?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Miranda shrugged. “It’s so quiet right now, it’s depressing. Tic-tac-toe?”

“Sure,” I shrugged.

“No!” Miranda exclaimed. “I have a better idea. Let’s play ‘would you rather.’”

“What?” I asked blankly as she got up and plopped down into Charlie’s chair at the desk across from mine. “Aren’t we a little old to play something like that?”

“Don’t be boring,” she frowned. “It’s not like you have anything better to do, right?”

“Good point,” I conceded as I closed the laptop that I wasn’t actually using, anyway. “You first.”

“I’ll start it off easy,” Miranda hummed as she tapped her finger against her chin in a show of being deep in thought. “Would you rather break your arm or your leg?”

“Neither,” I responded immediately. Miranda rolled her eyes.

“That’s not how you play,” she admonished with an exasperated sigh. “Just pick one.”

“My arm, I guess,” I shrugged after thinking about it for a few seconds. “That way, I could still walk. I think it would be more inconvenient to have my mobility affected than my ability to grab or hold things.”

“Fair,” Miranda nodded. “Okay, your turn.”

“Let me think,” I mumbled as I glanced around the room for inspiration. My eyes landed on the open door of the break room. “Would you rather lose your sense of smell or your sense of taste?”

“Smell, obviously,” Miranda replied without hesitation. “Food is one of the greatest joys in life. Can you imagine never being able to taste stuff again?”

“If you lost your sense of smell, it wouldn’t taste the same, though,” I explained. “A lot of what we perceive as taste comes from our nose and ability to smell things. That’s why stuff tastes weird anytime you get a cold.”

“It’s a trick question, then,” Miranda protested. “That’s not fair.”

I just shrugged and smirked at her in response. We spent the next hour trading questions back and forth, each one increasingly more personal and risque than the last.

“I’m just saying,” Miranda chuckled. “If you had to choose someone in the office--”

“Agents,” Nelson interrupted before Miranda could go any further, and I breathed an internal sigh of relief. The conversation had quickly gotten out of hand and was becoming wildly inappropriate to be having at work in the middle of the day. “Collin Atkins is here. He’s being brought up right now. Which of you is conducting the interrogation?”

“I am,” I called as I quickly stood up. I was eager to both get away from Miranda’s line of questioning and to have something to do after the dull morning.

“What?” Miranda pouted. “Unfair. I wanted to do the interrogation.”

I felt a little bad as I turned around to look at her. It had been pretty rude of me to just jump up and proclaim that I would do it without even consulting her first. I wondered if I should offer to let her have it, but before I could, she broke into a wicked smile.

“I’m just teasing,” she snickered. “You should work on your poker face, Junior. Suspects will get the upper hand on you if you’re so easy to read and manipulate.”

“Thanks,” I replied sarcastically. I wasn’t dumb enough to let my emotions get the better of me when it came to working with a suspect. Obviously, the only reason it worked for Miranda was that she was my friend, and I wasn’t expecting her to try to manipulate me. I wanted to tell her as much, but I knew that she hadn’t done it maliciously, and I needed to focus on the suspect now, anyway.

A moment later, the doors to the office unlocked and swung open as the police stepped inside with Atkins. After the bombing that had destroyed our previous office, Wallace had implemented more intense security measures to ensure that people wouldn’t be able to enter the office unless they had explicit authority to do so. Unless the person trying to enter had a code for the keypad outside the door, the doors would remain tightly locked.

“Looks like it’s time to start,” I nodded as Nelson showed the officers into the holding cell area. Miranda and I followed behind them. Nelson was speaking to one of the officers while the other one got Atkins settled in the interrogation room.

“No priors,” the police officer informed us as we entered the room. “His record was squeaky clean. His entire house was full of drugs, though, and not just meth. We also found several hundred thousand dollars’ worth