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“You already told them the victim wasn’t your mother, but I do suppose they will call to see if you know of any connection.” She thought for a second. “I’m surprised you didn’t already see this online this morning.”
“I didn’t check my computer, and my phone is charging upstairs. I was just about to do that.” Remmi read the article for the third time and frowned. “All this gives is her age, and that she’s from the Seattle area. Divorced. No children. Mother is next of kin. Mind if I take this?” She was already scooping up the paper and heading for the stairs.
“Just save me the puzzle,” she said. “Oh, Remmi, your breakfast—”
But Remmi ignored her rumbling stomach and raced up the back staircase so quickly that her heart was pounding as she reached her apartment. Unhooking her phone from its charger, she caught her breath, then dialed Detective Settler’s number, one she’d memorized, only to hear it ring on the other end, then go to voice mail.
She hung up, wanting to throw the phone across the room. What good were the police if you couldn’t reach them when you needed them?
Stop. Slow down. You know about the cops. You’ve dealt with them before.
A little calmer, she punched in the numbers again, and when the phone again went to voice mail, she left a message. “This is Remmi Storm. Please call me back.” Then she left her number and clicked off.
She’d wait. For now. First, she’d do some checking on Karen Upgarde, then she’d visit Jennifer Reliant, that damned agent for Maryanne Osgoode, and find out who the hell the author really was.
* * *
So far, Settler’s phone calls to the agent for Maryanne Osgoode had gone unanswered, and she’d gotten the runaround at the small press that had published I’m Not Me. Currently, still in a suite where she’d conducted interviews at the Montmort, she was waiting for the editor of Stumptown Press, a small publisher located in Portland, Oregon, to return her call. Said editor was conveniently “out for a few days,” which seemed more than a little suspicious, given the fact that the book on Didi Storm was getting a lot of attention and was certainly Stumptown’s biggest seller.
As for the interviews with the hotel staff? Most had been a bust.
But not all.
After spending nearly three hours with employees and guests, Settler and Martinez hadn’t learned much more than she had the day before. The detectives had again examined the room occupied by Upgarde as D. Storm, noting that there were doorways on both sides to connecting rooms; both, it had been reported, had been locked. They’d reviewed the security tapes of the outer hallways, elevators, and common areas with the hotel security manager and spoken to room service, maid service, and the front desk staff, but no one had experienced much interaction with Karen Upgarde aka D. Storm.
The only point of interest came when they’d been able to speak to one of the janitors who worked the night shift.
Al Benson, a portly man with a thin moustache, told them: “Saw a guy I didn’t recognize using the service elevator. About three in the mornin’, maybe three-fifteen or so, you know, on the mornin’ of the day that woman jumped? Anyway, I got on at the tenth floor and said, ‘Hey,’ and he said it back then real quick-like punched the button for fourteen and got off. I rode up to twenty-one. But the strange thing about it was, the car stopped on the nineteenth floor. Doors opened. No one got on, so he probably was headin’ that way, but then decided to get out on fourteen. Or else someone on nineteen decided not to wait and took the stairs, y’know.”
Settler had felt that little buzz at the back of her neck that warned her she was onto something. “And you didn’t know him?”
“Never seen him before, I don’t think, but he was wearin’ tinted glasses and a baseball cap, had a bit of a beard going, three days’ growth or so, I’d guess. Which probably should have made me sit up and take notice.” He’d shrugged. “I guess I was payin’ more attention to my cell phone. Had a call from the parking garage attendant, who was havin’ trouble with the electronic gate.” Al frowned and scratched his chin. “But the more I think about it, I don’t think he was wearing a badge, y’know, like this one.” He’d wiggled his name tag, pinned to his shirt pocket. “But sometimes people forget. They’re s’pose to wear them, but they don’t always. And once in a while, guests, they hop on the service elevator; it’s not locked or nothing, so it’s really not that big of a deal.” But his eyes had clouded. “You don’t think he had anything to do with that poor gal on nineteen’s death, do you? I mean it was a suicide, right? She jumped.”
“We’re just investigating all possibilities,” Settler had said, but the sensation that she’d just found a fissure, a crack in what had, at first, seemed like an open and shut case of suicide, stayed with her. Now the door leading to homicide was definitely ajar.
“Anything else you can tell us about this guy?”
“Wish I could,” he’d said, but despite more questions and prodding, Al had told them all he remembered. They had double-checked the security tape for the time listed but didn’t find anyone on the nineteenth floor between three and four in the morning, though when they viewed the film of the service elevator, they saw that Al’s memory had been spot-on, and now there was a black-and-white image of a man who appeared to have pushed a button on the panel of the elevator car when he’d gotten on in the parking garage. When Al Benson had stepped onto the car, he’d immediately pressed another button. In the footage, she couldn’t read the floor numbers, but he’d made a quick exit on floor fourteen.
They reviewed the videotape of the stairs, and sometime later saw the same man in the stairwell, his face hidden by the baseball cap, hurrying down to finally exit into the parking garage.
From that point, they’d lost him.
And they hadn’t seen him in any of the footage of the nineteenth floor, though, unfortunately, the camera on the floor had been working only sporadically for the week before the tragedy, so it was possible someone could have slipped into D. Storm’s room without there being any footage of his or her entrance.
Coincidence? Bad luck?
Or had someone purposely fiddled with the camera?
But how? An inside job? Was someone on the hotel staff compromised?
Or was all of that
conjecture just too damned far-fetched?
Maybe Karen Upgarde, who was known to be a flamboyant dresser, got a wild hair to leap off the building as a celebrity, possibly Marilyn Monroe.
But there was the fingernail—the damned signature of Didi Storm.
