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But how long had it been? It seemed like an awful long time ago. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time. That was even more disturbing. I tried harder, but my memory wouldn’t cooperate, no matter how much I furrowed my brow. And finally, I couldn’t think about anything else but trying to remember, and as I turned into the hotel parking lot, I was so busy flogging my memory that I almost didn’t see the police car parked at the lobby entrance.
Almost—at the last moment I did, in fact, see the patrol car, and I had absolutely no doubt that their presence at this hotel was no coincidence. They were here because they’d discovered that this was Dexter’s Secret Hideaway. I didn’t know if they were here to observe, to hassle me, or to rearrest me, but I didn’t look favorably on any of those choices, so I drove calmly around to the rear of the building and found a parking spot near the Dumpster, where they couldn’t see me getting out of the car.
I sat for a moment with the engine off. It was unlikely that they were here to arrest me—there was only one unit, which meant two uniformed officers. If they came for me—when they came—there would be several of those, plus a couple of motor-pool cars filled with detectives, and probably a satellite truck or two from the TV stations. So they were probably here just to watch, or to prod me a bit. But the smart thing to do was still to avoid the cops altogether; my morning chat with the two gendarmes in front of my house had proved that amply. So I got out of the rental car, locked it carefully—I knew well that Anderson was not above planting something incriminating—and used my room key to slip in the back door of the hotel.
I took the stairs up to the third floor, not really a hardship for me—although I found that I was actually breathing a little heavily by the time I passed the second floor. It reminded me forcibly that I had been sitting in a cell without my evening jog for much too long a spell. I would have to start again soon, or risk losing all my hard-won fitness.
Still, I did make it all the way up to the third floor without fainting. I peeked through the fire door to make sure nobody in a blue suit was watching. Nobody was. I stepped through and strolled down the hall to my room, thinking that the really clever move here was to grab my stuff, slide back down the stairs, and find a new hotel. I didn’t actually have anything to hide, of course. But if They knew where I was, They would hound me. The fact that They were here now was proof of that. I didn’t want a repeat of my encounter with the pair outside my house, and I didn’t want a cop sneering at me every time I stepped out of the shower. Far easier just to ease on down the road. It would only take a minute to pack, one of the few benefits of having almost nothing. I could go south and inland a bit, find another cheap and anonymous hotel, and then call Brian to let him know.
Wonderful—I had a plan. I stuck the plastic key into the slot on Room 324 and waited for the light to blink green. It didn’t. I tried again, jiggling the handle, wiggling the key. Nothing. Out of nothing more than frustration and spite, I kicked the door. The light blinked green. I left the Do Not Disturb sign in place and strode confidently through the door and into my tiny but free domain. I managed two very nice strides before I looked at the bed and jerked to a halt as abruptly as if I’d been yanked backward by a rope. Not because I’d run out of striding room, and not because there was a cop on the bed.
There was somebody on the bed, but he didn’t look like a cop. He was short and stocky and dressed in dirty work clothes. His skin and hair were dark, and his face was scarred and pockmarked, almost as if it had caught fire and somebody put it out with a golf shoe. It was the look of a day laborer hoping for a green card, not a cop. And I really, truly, devoutly hoped he was not a cop in disguise.
Because he was also dead.
He lay on the right edge of my bed, one arm crossed peacefully over his chest, and the other dangling over the side. He looked just like he had been sitting on the edge of the bed and then suddenly fell asleep and flopped over. On the floor right under his dangling hand was a wicked-looking folding knife, the kind they call a tactical knife. It had a six-inch blade, and it had been used quite recently, judging by the color of the blood that decorated it.
For what seemed like a very long time I just stood and stared, stupid with shock. I am certainly not a stranger to violent death. I have been around dead bodies in both my personal life and my professional career, and I am not shocked, horrified, revolted, frightened, or dismayed by the sight of an obviously murdered body. Under different conditions, I might even enjoy one from time to time. But to find one here and now, in my room and in my present circumstances, was so calamitous, appalling, and perilous that I could not even think.
I finally became aware that my mouth was dry—I had been gaping, with my mouth hanging open. I closed it hard enough that my teeth made an audible click. I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate; this was no time to dither and gawk. I was a murder suspect, and there was a lobby filled with eager cops below, and here I stood consorting with a dead body in a room registered to me. No explanation I could possibly invent would get me out of this, not even if it was presented by Frank Kraunauer.
Action was required, decisive, effective, and immediate action. First step: Determine who had the audacity to be dead on my bed. I summoned all the shards of my cool analysis and stepped in for a closer look at my new roommate.
The bed around him was still relatively clean and blood-free, which was wonderful news. But the front of his shirt was soaked with the stuff, and it appeared to be coming from a wound in his chest, just left of center, right where the heart is located.
For a moment a little voice nagged at me that something was wrong, and I didn’t get it. Then, quite suddenly, the nickel dropped. This picture didn’t make sense, and not merely because it was in my room. The wound that must have killed him should have spouted a fountain of blood and colored the whole room; it hadn’t. That meant he had died rather quickly. Otherwise the wound would have pumped out a great nasty geyser, enough to soak the mattress and ruin the carpet. The heart stops gushing out blood when it stops pumping. So he had taken the wound, and enough time had passed for the blood to soak his shirt—ten seconds? Maybe a little more, but not much. Then he sat down on the bed and flopped over, dead, heart stopped before it could pump out any more. And that left me with a very interesting question:
How had he died?
I mean, obviously from a wound in the chest, yes—but was I supposed to believe he had stabbed himself? Because I didn’t. And that meant that somebody else had done it.
I looked around the room, hoping for some clue—a matchbook from a strip club, perhaps, or a monogrammed glove. No such luck. But I did notice something else: My closet door was ajar.
I admit that I have my foibles. They are almost all harmless, most of the time. One of these is that, when I check into a hotel room, I always look in the bathroom, then in the closet, and then I close both doors securely. I do this out of mere paranoia, just to satisfy my inner child that nothing is lurking, but I always do it.
But my closet door was now ajar, which meant that somebody had opened it. It wasn’t housekeeping—the Do Not Disturb sign would keep them away. So it was almost certainly my new and silent friend. It was possible he had searched the room. It was not possible that he had searched the room and then stabbed himself.
And that meant there had been two people in my room.
And one of them was in my closet.
I felt my heart leap instantly into high gear and I looked around me for some kind of weapon. Nothing. Perhaps the chair—but wait. Calm down, dear Dexter, and spend one more moment in beautiful thought.
I did. I took a deep breath—keeping my eyes on the closet door, just in case—and I thought.
If somebody was waiting in the closet to leap out and cause me grievous bodily harm, possibly resulting in death, it would be stupid to wait this long. They would have done it almost immediately after I came in the door, well before I saw the other body and pulled my own weapon—not that I had one. But in princi
ple, you jump the other guy before he figures out you’re there and takes countermeasures. No such thing had happened, and therefore…
Either there was no second stranger in my room—which meant that Stranger One really had stabbed himself—or Stranger Two was still there in the closet. And if he was, in fact, there in the closet, then either he meant me no harm, or he was no longer capable of doing any harm.
Slowly, and with all the caution I could muster, I stepped over to the closet. I listened for a moment and heard nothing. I stepped to one side, reached back, slid the door open, and waited. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. No shots fired, no charging mastiffs, no flashing blades and cries of, Kali! Nothing.
Just as slowly, I peeked around and into the closet, and sure enough, there was Stranger Two.
He lay on one side in an impossibly uncomfortable position, slumped against the back wall of the closet with one arm pinned awkwardly under him and the other tucked behind him, between his back and the wall. His left eye socket was a nasty mess; something very sharp had clearly been shoved into it, far and hard enough to cause his present apparent lack of life. I knelt beside him in the doorway of the closet and looked closer.
Stranger Two was hatched from roughly the same gene pool as Stranger One. He was younger, and perhaps an inch taller, but he had the same olive complexion, stocky build, dark hair—even the same crappy skin. I didn’t need to feel for a pulse to be sure. He was indeed quite dead.
