“I don’t know.”
Torres looked completely relaxed behind the wheel. He was so low-key about everything that sometimes she had to remind herself she wasn’t talking to Lauren.
He glanced at her. “Are you asking my advice?”
“I don’t know. Do you have any?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s hear it.”
He swerved around a minivan. “You want my advice as your friend or as someone who’d like to take you out sometime?”
“As my friend.” Whoa, talk about awkward. But he was grinning now, so she hoped he wasn’t taking any of this too seriously. She should have waited to talk to Lauren.
“As your friend, my advice is to look at his rap sheet,” he said.
“He doesn’t have a rap sheet.”
“His personal rap sheet. You know, with girls. Women,” he corrected himself, cutting a glance at her. “Is he a love-’em-and-leave-’em type, or is he going to stick around? That’s what I tell my sisters to think about. If he’s the kind of guy who’s going to stick around and you like him . . .” He shrugged. “Then what the hell? Give him a shot.”
She turned to look out the window. It sounded logical and not that far removed from what they’d been taught about human behavior at the Academy. People were predictable. And the best predictor of future criminal behavior was past criminal behavior.
So what did Derek’s personal rap sheet tell her? She didn’t know. She didn’t know him well at all, which was one of the problems. But as for sticking around? That wasn’t happening. He wasn’t sticking anywhere—the SEALs were his life.
She looked at Torres again, hoping to dispel any awkwardness by being direct with him. “So what’s your other advice?”
He smiled. “That’s easy. Don’t waste your time with him. He’s a loser who’s going to break your heart and leave you in the dust.”
She choked out a laugh. “Great. Something to look forward to.”
“Hey, you asked.”
“You need to exit up here.”
Torres cut across two lanes of traffic and took the exit that would lead them to the Happy Trails Motel.
Situated between a Smoke ’n Toke and an adult video store, the place was high-class all the way. Elizabeth had found the phone number for it scrawled on a takeout menu in Matt Palicek’s apartment, which had prompted her to wonder if there was a chance they’d get lucky and learn that Ameen had been staying here at some point.
Torres slid into a space beside a souped-up black Cadillac with gold rims.
He straightened his tie. “I’m feeling a little underdressed,” he joked as they got out.
They approached the front office. The window beside the door sported a spiderweb crack and a hole clearly made by a bullet.
“Nice.” Torres pulled open the door. “Think they have a restaurant here? I’m craving crab cakes for lunch, maybe a little chardonnay.”
They stepped inside.
“Sixty a night, twenty an hour,” droned the man at the desk. He didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle as they approached him.
“Are you the manager?” Elizabeth asked.
He frowned at her over his reading glasses. “Who’s asking?”
She pulled out her ID, and he muttered something under his breath. His gaze slid to Torres.
“Your people were here yesterday. I told them I didn’t see the guy.”
“Which guy?” Torres leaned a palm on the counter.
“Are you here about the drug bust?”
“Nope.”
The manager frowned at Elizabeth again as she pulled a photo from the pocket of her blazer. “We’re looking for this man.” She slid the picture of Ameen across the counter.
“Never seen him.”
“What about this man?” She pulled out a second photo, this one of Rasheed. He gave it a glance.
“Nope.”
“You sure?” Torres asked. “Take a good look.”
The man stared at him stonily.
“They may have been driving a blue Chevy Cavalier or possibly a maroon Nissan Sentra.”
Elizabeth caught a flash of movement in the office behind the manager. A woman rolled back in a desk chair.
“A blue Cavalier?” she asked through the doorway.
“That’s right.”
Elizabeth’s nerves fluttered as the woman heaved herself out of her chair and waddled over. The manager glared at her as she picked up the picture, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“We had a blue Cavalier in last week.” She tucked a frizzy gray curl behind her ear. “I don’t recognize either of them, though.”
“It had a dinged back quarter-panel,” Elizabeth added.
“And big tires. I remember it.”
Torres shot a look at her. Score.
“You know the guest’s name?” Elizabeth asked.
“No,” the manager said, adamant now as he glowered at the woman beside him, presumably his wife.
“You don’t keep names of your guests?” Torres asked, heavy on the disbelief.
“The guests, not the cars,” the manager said.
“But it definitely wasn’t these guys.” The woman handed back the picture. “I’ve got a memory for faces.”
“You notice who was driving the car?” Torres asked her.
“No, but Jamie probably did. She was on nights last week, wasn’t she? So she might’ve checked them in.” She looked at her husband, who grunted a confirmation.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Torres said, “we’d like to see a list of your guests last week.” Instead of a warrant, he offered her one of his friendly smiles, which Elizabeth hoped would work, because she didn’t want to face any more red tape today.
“No trouble at all.”
Hallelujah. The day was looking up.
Fifteen minutes later, they stood before room 112. The motel was running at sixty-percent capacity, and the room hadn’t been occupied since the previous guest had left Friday. That was the good news. The bad news was that the guest had paid in cash and checked in under the name John Smith, a name that no doubt appeared frequently on the motel’s register. And the clerk who had checked him in had conveniently neglected to take a driver’s license number.
“Think she’ll remember them?” Torres asked as he opened the door with a keycard.
Elizabeth donned a pair of paper booties before following him inside. An evidence response team would be over soon to comb through the place, but until then, they wanted to have a quick look around.
“Depends,” Elizabeth said, scanning the room. Gray walls, faded bedspreads. She glanced up. Brown water stain on the ceiling that she really didn’t want to think about. “If they slipped her a fifty for a quickie, no-hassle check-in, then she probably remembers them.”
“Fifty? I’d think she’d remember for twenty.” Torres walked over to the nightstand and opened the drawer with a gloved hand. “Girl makes minimum wage.”
“The dancer at the Pussycat said these guys are big tippers.”
Elizabeth glanced at the channel guide propped on top of the TV alongside the remote control—which happened to be number one of the top five locations to look for fingerprints in a hotel room.
She sighed. “The crime-scene techs are going to hate this place.”
Hotel rooms, particularly those that weren’t cleaned well or often, yielded a mountain of forensic evidence. Fingerprints, hair, DNA—the sheer volume made it difficult to process.
Torres crouched down and looked under the bed. “I can already hear the bitching and moaning. This place hasn’t been vacuumed since 1985.”
Elizabeth peered into a trash can. Empty, but that didn’t mean the techs wouldn’t find something there. An alternative light source would probably reveal trace biological evidence.
She carefully opened the closet using only the tip of her gloved finger. A familiar scent hung in the air, and she tried to place it.
“You smell something?” she asked.
“Mildew.”
“Besides that.”
“Cheap-ass pi?a colada air freshener.”