Cold Snap (24 page)

“Not on my watch,” Kate said.

“Those two blondes could have been red herrings,” Lucy said. “Killed to mask the real victim or the real motive.”

“Or we could just have a psycho on our hands,” Harris said. He glanced at his watch and shook his head. “I can already tell I’m not getting much sleep tonight. Tomorrow, oh-six-hundred, I’m leading a search for the missing body. It’s here somewhere, and I will find it.”

CHAPTER 21

Lucy woke up at five-thirty after less than two hours of sleep. Kate and Dillon were still passed out in the bed next to her, but Sean wasn’t there. He hadn’t come back to the room at all. She picked up her phone and called him.

“Hey,” he answered with a yawn.

“Where are you?” She tried to whisper so she wouldn’t wake Kate or Dillon.

“I fell asleep in the security office. They have a comfy chair here.”

“You should have come upstairs.”

“I didn’t want to leave my equipment running without me, and I needed the hotel servers.”

“Find anything?”

Kate moaned and stretched. “Is that Sean?”

Lucy nodded.

“Whoever is tracking St. Paul did it from Chicago, but they’re not online and I can’t pinpoint the location until they get back online. I have his computer up and running and am waiting for the cyberstalker to ping it.”

“Come upstairs and rest.”

“I’m fine. I slept a couple hours.”

“I’ll bring you food.”

“Great. I’m famished.”

Lucy hung up. She’d showered the night before because it took too long to dry her hair in the morning, especially a morning that promised to be as busy as this one.

She left Kate and Dillon and went down to the coffee shop, where she bought two breakfast sandwiches, coffee for her, and orange juice for Sean.

Sean was talking to a young tech guy from the hotel, who seemed to be glued to everything Sean said. Sean winked at her when she walked in. “My savior has arrived,” he said. “Gary, do you mind giving us a minute?”

“Go ahead. I’ll download this to the main server, it’ll take some time.”

“Let me know when you’re done.”

“And you think this will really prevent anyone from messing with the system again?”

“No—but next time, your team will be alerted immediately. If the cameras go down, you’ll know why. If someone’s trying to piggyback on your system, you’ll see it—and who. It would be better to upgrade the whole enchilada, but corporations are being stingy with money right now.”

“Wow—this is really great. Thank you.”

Gary left, and Lucy eyed Sean quizzically.

“Nothing illegal, promise,” Sean said. “Their system is just so archaic, I couldn’t help myself. I wrote them a program that should fix the worst of their problems.”

“I love you.” Lucy kissed him. “Eat, and tell me what you found out.”

Sean slid over a piece of paper. “Here’s St. Paul’s attorney, his home phone and cell phone. I found St. Paul’s cell phone number and it’s completely shut down, either dead or the battery has been removed. No way to track it. Except that he made several calls from his cell phone in this hotel over the last three days.”

“How do you know?”

“The hotel has an internal cell receiver, so all cellular calls route through it. Because it’s owned by the hotel, and they already gave me permission to go through their system—”

“Understood.”

“The last call he made was yesterday at noon, right after he checked out.”

“To who?”

“Blocked number. The phone hasn’t been used since.”

Lucy frowned.

“But I found out more about Denise. Her name is Denise Vail, from a suburb in Chicago. She moved four months ago and left no forwarding information, so I’m doing a background on her and hope to find out where she might have gone. I also ran my facial recognition software on all the guests in the hotel. Most guests are recorded twenty to forty times a day on a variety of cameras—usually entering the elevator or in the lobby. Denise has been on camera only twice, both times yesterday morning. I don’t know if she’s a guest—but if she is, it’s not under her name. Now I’m running a program reviewing all the guests who checked in yesterday morning. It’s taking a while because there was an unusual number of check-ins due to the storm. And the two images I have of her are difficult to discern—my program didn’t catch them as a hundred percent, but classified them as probable matches. She was wearing large dark glasses in one, and in the other had a hat on.”

“Like she was trying to hide,” Lucy said. “Did you compare her image to the Jane Doe we found outside?”

“I don’t have a good enough picture, but Vail is five foot three—the victim is five foot six, according to Dillon. I’ll let you know if I find her.”

“Eat. I’m going to meet with Kate and Detective Harris and see what they want to do about the attorney.”

“Do you want to know about the status of the airport?”

She’d almost forgotten. “Are we leaving tonight?” She wanted to leave—but at the same time, she had to admit that she wanted to find out what happened here. She didn’t want to leave the case unsolved, even if it wasn’t
her
case.

“Tomorrow morning. They’re resuming flights this afternoon, but it’s going to be a madhouse, and we’d have to get there early with no guarantee of a seat. I have the four of us booked tomorrow morning, first class.”

“First class?”

“I have so many miles, they practically pay me to fly.”

“Sean, I’m on a government salary. A rookie government salary. And you’re no longer getting a paycheck.”

“And I’ve told you before money isn’t a problem.”

He had, and she’d assumed RCK paid him well for his skills. She’d been raised in a big, one-salary family and had always been frugal, especially with things like clothing and airfare and luxuries. Sean had always been more than generous, but she had never thought about his finances before.

Sean eyed her oddly. “Luce, I don’t need to work. Ever.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve written or fixed some of the best-selling software programs on the market today and was paid extremely well for it. I thought you knew that.”

She shook her head, still not understanding what he meant by “I don’t need to work.”

“I work because I’d go insane if I didn’t have something to do. Or find myself in deep trouble.” He smiled, leaned over and kissed her. “It’s nice that you fell in love with me before you knew I was rich.”

“You don’t act rich.”

He laughed. “I buy the best electronic toys. I own a plane. I don’t skimp when I travel commercially.”

“Okay.” Thinking back to all the times they went out and traveled, she realized that he’d never let her pay for anything. She hadn’t thought much about it, because for all Sean’s contemporary ways and state-of-the-art toys, he was a gentleman at heart.

“You’re cute when you’re confused.” He kissed her and said, “Go find Kate and then tell me how fabulous she thinks I am.”

“She’ll never admit it. But I think you’re fabulous.” She smiled.

“And you, princess, are the only one I really care about.”

Lucy tracked Kate down at the coffee shop ordering a large coffee to go. Kate said, “Harris wants to start in the basement and search every inch of the facility, including the immediate grounds outside, until we find the body. He’s instructing the security staff now.”

“Sean has information on St. Paul’s girlfriend, Denise Vail.”

“The one who broke up with him four months ago?”

“Yes. She’s in the hotel. Or she was here, yesterday morning.”

“Now that’s interesting.”

“What are you thinking?” Lucy asked as they took the elevator to the basement.

“That she shows up and St. Paul disappears.”

“Sean’s running facial recognition software against the hotel’s archives to find out if she’s registered in the hotel under a different name. I also have St. Paul’s attorney’s contact information.”

“Good.” Kate glanced at her watch. “It’s seven in the morning, and Sunday to boot. I’ll give the info to Harris and see what he wants to do.”

They found Harris talking to a large group of hotel staff members. Half were security. They broke off in five groups of two and went in different directions. “I have a feeling I’ll be doing it again myself,” Harris grumbled. He took a long gulp of coffee. “I also sent a team of four to canvass outside and in the garbage. There’s been no garbage service for two days because of the storm, so it’s possible the body could have been dumped there.”

Kate repeated Lucy’s information and said, “I can talk to the attorney.”

“Do that,” Harris said. “Agent Kincaid, do you want to join me on my own search? The crime-scene techs will be here between ten and eleven.”

“You have us until tomorrow morning,” Lucy said.

“Tomorrow?” Kate asked.

“Sean booked us on a flight early in the morning.”

“Great,” Harris said. “If the killer is still here—and I think he is because no one has left the building since before Mrs. Katz was killed—then we need all the people we can get.”

Harris and Lucy walked through the basement, monitoring the progress of the security staff.

“So, what’s your theory?” Harris asked Lucy.

“I don’t have one.”

“Of course you do. I could tell last night.”

She said, “I don’t like guessing. There are a lot of possibilities.”

“I’m not going to shoot you if you’re wrong.”

Lucy considered what they knew. “I think all three murders are related. That even though there wasn’t a body in room 1080, the killer had a reason for moving it. I think it might be James St. Paul.”

“You think that this unknown stalker ex-girlfriend from Chicago tracked him down here?”

“Sean found evidence on his laptop that he was being cyberstalked, and two blond twentysomething women who resemble his girlfriend Denise are dead.”

“Devil’s advocate—what if that information was planted?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What if Denise is the psycho ex-girlfriend but is covering her tracks by making it seem that she left him because of someone else? You couldn’t find a name on his computer; when Denise allegedly left St. Paul four months ago, then two months later he allegedly filed a restraining order against an unknown female.”

“Then why kill two blond women?”

“To distract us.”

“But it hasn’t,” Lucy said. “In fact, finding the missing body is at the top of our priority list right now—we have most of hotel security looking.”

Harris frowned. “Maybe that was the distraction.”

“What do you think?”

“I think the body is another blonde, and that James St. Paul is the killer. I’ve met a lot of psychopaths, and this whole setup is creepy. But I think that two of the three victims are the distractions. I think there is one primary target and the others are to make the target less obvious.”

The radio Harris was carrying beeped.

“Harris here.”

“Detective, we found a body. In the basement, outside the laundry. Go through the double doors at the end, down the corridor, and turn left.”

Lucy and Harris walked briskly to the laundry. They found the corridor, and when they turned saw at least ten laundry carts and a dozen meal carts, many broken or in disrepair. One of the security guards, a young guy not older than Lucy, looked green as he stood at the front of the corridor waiting for them.

“Where’s the body?” Harris asked.

The security guard was upset. “I checked here yesterday, but I didn’t look inside the bins. Nothing seemed out of place so I didn’t think—”

“Where?” Harris repeated.

He motioned toward the far end of the corridor. “Last cart on the right.”

Harris and Lucy walked down the corridor to the end.

Inside the last cart was a body.

It was a woman, in a maid’s uniform so drenched with blood Lucy couldn’t tell the original color. She was neither blond, nor James St. Paul. She was an anomaly.

“Now the million-dollar question,” Harris said. “Why didn’t the hotel tell us they had a missing maid?”

*   *   *

“I’m gone for an hour and you practically solve the case without me,” Kate said when she caught up with Lucy and Detective Harris.

They’d moved the body to the makeshift cold storage. Harris was on the phone with his chief about the latest development.

“Hardly,” Lucy told Kate. “Did you get an ID on the maid?”

“Monica Sanchez.” Kate flipped open a small notepad. “According to the manager, Lynn Thomsen, Sanchez clocked out at four yesterday, so she wasn’t on the staff list. I spoke to the head of housekeeping, who said she may have finished another maid’s rounds—someone who had kids at home and didn’t want to be stuck in the blizzard. When they called the staff who’d been on shift during our time window, they hadn’t thought of calling Sanchez because she’d supposedly left earlier.”

“And no one thought she was missing?”

“She’s divorced, lives alone, her two kids are grown.”

Lucy was saddened that someone could be missing for nearly twenty-four hours and no one thought to call about them.

Instead, she focused on what she could control—finding the killer before anyone else died.

“Whoever killed these women has a plan, and he—or she—is not going to stop until it’s completed.”

Kate zeroed in on the pronoun. “My money is on a she. Tessa Gilliam.”

“Who?” Harris said when he got off the phone.

“St. Paul’s stalker ex-girlfriend. I had a long chat with his attorney, who was unusually paranoid even for an attorney. He checked out my credentials while I was on hold. Apparently, Gilliam found out where he lived and poisoned his family’s dog. The dog survived—mostly because it was an eighty-pound golden retriever—but it freaked him out.”

“She went after St. Paul’s attorney?”

“Because he’s the one who spoke to the judge. She had to show for the restraining order hearing, and she was furious at how he portrayed her, as well as the fact that St. Paul showed up with a bodyguard. The girl is a nutjob.”

“Was she charged in the poisoning?”

“No proof. It’s one of those ‘he knew it was her, but couldn’t prove it’ cases. Like the stalker psycho chick from the movies, the one who boiled the rabbit.”