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“Has room twenty-five been cleaned yet?” Alvarez asked.
The maid shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Hmph.” Alvarez eyed the parking lot. “Mind if we look inside?”
“Okay.” The maid led the way along the long concrete porch and unlocked the room that was identical to the one Ryder had occupied.
Whoever had resided there had left in a hurry. The bill was still under the door. The bed was a tumble of blankets, and towels and hangers littered the floor. Trash was still in and around the waste baskets—newspapers and fast food wrappers, water bottles, paper cups, plastic packaging for some kind of headphones, and wadded up receipts from local stores.
“Didn’t he ever have the room cleaned?” Alvarez asked.
“No. Both he and the man in number thirteen asked for no service. I talked to each of them and they refused.” Rhonda shrugged in a what’re-you-gonna-do manner. “The management doesn’t like it, but the guest’s wishes are always granted.”
“We’re going to want to seal both rooms. We don’t want either of them cleaned any more,” Pescoli said.
Alvarez was looking at the billing that had been left. “I assume your guests have to register their vehicles at the front desk?”
“Yes. Always.”
“Good,” Alvarez said. “We need to see the registration for”—she met Pescoli’s gaze—“Mr. . . . Bryan Smith. I saw cameras outside. Does the motel keep the tapes?”
Rhonda shook her head. “The outside cameras are all for show. All they are is a red light to make it look like they’re filming. Just like the security signs about a company that is monitoring the place. It’s all just to make people think twice about stealing or loitering or whatever. The only cameras that work are in the lobby.”
Alvarez said, “Then we’ll need to see the lobby tapes.”
They left the room.
Arms wrapped around her, shoulders hunched against the cold, Rhonda led them toward the main building. “You’ll have to talk to Carla about that. She’s the manager.”
“We will,” Pescoli said as she tightened her scarf and wondered about Ryder’s “friend” in room twenty-five. She had a bad feeling about Bryan Smith. It didn’t make sense. Did the two men know each other? She doubted it. Could the maid have been wrong about a possible connection? Probably not. “Just seal the room, make certain it’s not cleaned.” She recalled Blackwater’s comment about Bruce Calderone, Anne-Marie Calderone, and Troy Ryder being in the plot together. Far-fetched, she’d thought, but maybe some part of it was true?
Rhonda was already on a walkie-talkie, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish.
Alvarez whipped out her cell phone. “I’ll get officers over here ASAP,” she told Pescoli as they headed back to the reception area.
Looking over the registration information in the River View’s lobby, they added a 1998 Ford Explorer with Texas plates to the APB they’d sent out earlier for Ryder’s Dodge pickup and asked for any and all security tapes from the motel’s archives, which, Carla told them proudly, were kept for a month.
As they walked back to the Jeep, Alvarez’s phone rang again.
“Do you have those head shots yet?” Blackwater asked, finding Zoller at her desk, her fingers on the keyboard of her computer. As a junior detective, she shared an open space with several other detectives, each desk area divided by half walls to create a cubicle.
“Yes, sir,” she said, hitting a few keys. Within seconds, a slide show of images appeared on her monitor, each essentially the same face and expression. The features were different in each, changing as they would look if artificially manipulated or permanently altered with surgery. The hairstyles were different, the cut and color changing, glasses added, contacts used to alter eye color, makeup to change the shadows of the cheekbones, eyebrows plucked or thickened, lips made fuller or thinned out, and the aging process factored in, just in case Anne-Marie Calderone had decided to disappear into middle-age. Twenty-five different shots rolled slowly by and with each one, Blackwater became more frustrated.
He was certain he’d seen her before. Would have sworn to it. Something about her eyes and shape of her face caused a memory to tug at his brain. He was good with faces, to the point that he never forgot one, so why then did he sense he’d met her but couldn’t quite recall?
One image swept by and he asked Zoller to freeze it. In the shot, the woman looked a good ten or fifteen years older. Her brown hair was short, her glasses rimless, her lips thin. “Can you make her blond? Not like before.” There had been several blondes in the lineup. “But this particular hairstyle.”
“Sure.” With a keystroke, the head shot was of a woman with pale hair.
Blackwater nodded. That seemed better. “And give this one the full lips.”
Again, Zoller altered the shot.
God, he knew he’d seen her. But where? He concentrated. It was important on a lot of levels. If Anne-Marie Calderone was found under his watch, and the detectives managed to prove a case against her, his job as sheriff would be secure. Solving the bizarre crime would attract lots of media attention. It was already happening, and it wasn’t just the local press. Papers and news agencies from as far away as Spokane and Boise were calling. If Anne-Marie Calderone, involved in bigamy and murder, were captured in Grizzly Falls, he might be hailed as a national hero . . . And if his team stopped a serial killer’s rampage? Though that kind of spotlight had never been his goal, he would take any means to become the next sheriff of Pinewood County. Any political ambitions after that would have to wait.
But first things first. They still needed to locate and capture Calderone.
“Anything else?” Zoller asked, looking up at him with her hands poised over the keyboard.
