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“Some friend. Don’t you know that she’s gone?”
“What do you mean, gone?” He straightened. “Out shopping or something?”
“No, boy. She’s left. Packed up her stuff and left in a hell of a hurry. Rude, really.”
She’d left.
What the fuck?
“Were those for her?” she asked, nodding at the flowers. “You hoping for something from her? You don’t look her type.”
He didn’t care what this old woman thought was Maeve’s type. He brought his phone up to his ear, then shoved the flowers at the older woman. “Here.”
“Everyone is always giving me flowers,” she muttered, disappearing into her room.
“Wait!” he said. “When did she leave?”
“Ahh, think it would have been three days ago.”
The same day she’d tried calling him? Had she been ringing to say she was leaving? Or was something else going on?
“Where’s the building manager?”
“Doris? Basement level.”
He nodded and ran downstairs. Where the fuck was she? When he got to the basement level, he knocked on the building manager’s door.
“Hold your horses,” she yelled out in a rough-sounding voice. Then she started coughing.
Fuck, how long was she going to take?
Damn, it was dark and musty down here. This was where the kitchen area was? No wonder Maeve didn’t use it.
He tried calling her. Voicemail. Fuck.
The door opened and a wizened lady in her seventies stepped out. She looked after this building? “What is it? You after a room? Got a free one on the third floor.”
Maeve’s room.
“Yeah, I want it for the night.”
“Only do week by week. We ain’t no hotel for you to bring your whore back to.”
“How much?” he demanded.
“Hundred.”
He drew double that out of his wallet. “I’ll give you twice as much if you tell me what you know about the girl who was there before?”
The woman stared up at him through rheumy eyes. “What’s to say? Name was Maeve. Came here from somewhere, left in a rush. Put the key under my door. Made a hell of a noise on her way out.”
He handed over some cash and she handed him the key. When he stepped into Maeve’s apartment, it looked like she’d never been here. The bed was stripped and someone had cleaned the place from the look of it.
There was none of Maeve’s mess. Her personality. He searched through everything, but he couldn’t see anything.
Then something caught his eye. Crouching, he pulled a piece of paper out from under the sofa. It was a photo of Maeve with a heart around her face. Had she done that? But it didn’t seem to make much sense. None of it did.
And why the hell wasn’t she answering her phone?
