"I'm going to give you the short version, Elias. If I give you the long one, we'll be here till Elvis returns. It came to our attention a while back that a young lady was winning big in the casinos. On the slots. The biggest wins were at the Babylon. She was checked out and, as the saying goes, she's squeaky clean. I can't prove this, but she says the security at the Babylon roughed her up. She's a schoolteacher. She went to Harvard and is a Rhodes Scholar. She's working toward her PhD. She seems genuinely to love kids and is considered an excellent teacher. When we ran the check on her we found out she'd been very badly mugged, and her recovery was long and painful. There are no blemishes on her record at all. She's just your all-American kid from next door. I say kid because she's thirty-one. To me that's a kid.

"Her first day back at work, a fellow teacher takes her out to dinner to celebrate, and they decide to stop at the Babylon and take in one of the shows and play a little on the slots. There is absolutely no sign that this young woman had ever frequented any of the casinos before. Or the friend, who is married with three little kids. She's as clean as Marble Rose Barnes. By the way, that's her name. I forget the friend's name.

"Then Miss Barnes started going to the casinos on her own, maybe once a week, sometimes twice. We have video of her walking up and down the slot aisles as she looks for just the right machine to play. She eventually picks one and plays no more than fifty bucks in one night. She won every damn time except once, and she probably would have won that night, too, but she was rousted and kicked out. The lady won millions. The executives held meetings. They complained to us. We went to her, and she was very cooperative. I'd stake my life on it that she's just who she says she is, the luckiest damn woman in the world. The casinos aren't buying it. Especially Hank Owens at the Babylon because his place was hit the hardest. Owens is head of Babylon's security and meaner than a snake.

"One night about three weeks ago, Miss Barnes showed up, and they did a snatch and grab. That's a lawsuit in the making. They did the wand thing, made her strip, with a female attendant in charge, of course, gave her new clothes to wear, made her wash her hair, remove all her jewelry, then sent her out on the floor with an army of security. She walks around for about twenty minutes before she finally settles down to one of the progressive machines. She had come in with a fifty-dollar bill. They confiscated her bill and gave her another fifty. You following me so far, Elias?"

"Yes."