“It’s late and I don’t want to waste your time, so I’ll get to it,” I say. “And I apologize if this is an uncomfortable question. I wouldn’t be asking it if I didn’t think it was important. You assembled your wife’s letters and documents for that book about her, right? I was wondering if there was anything you held back. Any notes or information that might have seemed unimportant.”
He shakes his head. “No, pretty much everything I had made it in. That was the problem, there wasn’t much. The publisher was on me to look for more. But I did the best I could. Everything from her office, from home. That was all I had.”
“My understanding is Simms played a role in helping Melody Fairbanks design the hotel,” I say. “Did she ever mention that? Anything about her contributions to the construction?”
“She was living out there while it was being built. I barely saw her. And even when I came out to visit, she was always wrapped up in work.” He shrugs, sits back in his seat. “I’m a butcher by trade. A lot of that science stuff just goes right over my head.” He looks up at me. “Why do you ask?”
“It may be relevant to an investigation.”
“What kind of investigation?”
“A complicated one.”
“I wish I could help you,” he says, though I’m not sure he means it.
“Do you have any notes or correspondence between her and Fairbanks specifically?”
He gives a little chuckle and says, “She told me Dorothy sent her a book. A fancy limited edition. Probably not helpful though.”
“What book?”
“Through the Looking-Glass.”
My breath catches, but he doesn’t notice. He says, “Have a nice night. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.” And he logs off the call, with no intention to ever call me again.
Doesn’t matter.
Ruby is already at my shoulder.
“As we investigate, I form a series of data matrixes, trying to connect relevant and similar facts so as to hasten the discovery of information, and often I find that the addition of new data points creates pathways that…”
“I hate when you do that. Just say you realized something.”
“Kolten Smith said he dreams of impossible things. That’s similar to a quote from the book.”
I slump down in the chair but it feels like I’m floating. This is the best part of the job. When the pieces start coming together.
And then I remember one more.
“There’s a book missing from Fairbanks’s office,” I say. “I noticed it earlier. Which one?”
After a quick scan, Ruby says: “Through the Looking-Glass.”
I clap my hands and jump up. “Damn it, sometimes I am good at this. Okay, I want you to run video, see if you can find who took the book.”
“There’s more.”
“Spill it.”
Ruby falls silent again. It hovers for a moment and then says, “?’Twas brillig and the slithy toves…”
“Stop stop stop,” I say. “What the hell is that?”
“What is what?” it asks.
“That…thing you keep saying. Slithy toves?”
“You do not have the required security clearance.”
“I hate you so much. Okay, one thing at a time. Just run that damn video. I have some plans to look at. And run a diagnostic on yourself.”
Ruby returns to its dock, hooking into the mainframe, and I mutter a little prayer that the video we need wasn’t lost in the purge. The person doing it could have been covering that up, but if I’m lucky they were hiding something else and this one survived.
Meanwhile I go to the filing cabinet in the corner and find a series of schematics for the hotel. Dig through and pull a pile of them out, laying them over the hologram table at the center of the room, and flip through. Looking at the fifth floor of Atwood, and anything that might be amiss about it.
The prints are all large and old and useless. Nothing out of the ordinary. But if it’s a secret room, why would it be on the plans?
Every inch of this place…
“Got something.” Ruby floats to my field of vision.
It turns to the video screen, which shows an angled, top-down view of Fairbanks’s office. Kolten walks on-screen and peruses the titles. He’s wearing the same outfit as when we first met, which makes me believe it’s from earlier today. I check the date stamp on the corner of the screen but find it’s not very helpful because, ha, like I ever know what day it is.
He takes a book off the shelf. Opens the front cover. Places his finger along some text, then puts it back.
“Now watch,” Ruby says.
He moves further down the row of books. Out of the view of the book he had picked up.
Which disappears from the shelf. One second it’s there, and then it’s not, like the video was edited. Except it’s smooth. The time stamp doesn’t skip. Kolten is still moving as it happens.
“The fuck?” I ask.
“There are no missing frames. This section of video was not subject to any sort of tampering. The book is there, and then it is gone.”
Which means we’re back to kleptomaniac ghosts. Allyn’s going to be very excited to hear this.
I appear on-screen, and Kolten and I start our conversation. I had noticed the gap on the shelf as I was walking up. It must have only just happened.
“Okay, so what was Kolten looking at?”
Ruby rewinds and freezes on the frame, then zooms in on what Kolten is reading. And thank the lord for video enhancement. In small, languid script, it reads: We will always have A527.
“So we go on the assumption that this is the book Simms gave to Fairbanks, but the room numbers in Atwood are even, not odd. She’s referring to a room that doesn’t exist, but it would be directly next to the room with Westin’s body.” I pace around the table, talking to myself more than Ruby. “Kolten was letting on more than he knew. He had a sense of the location but wanted to see if he could get me to give it up. Then, poof, the book just vanishes.”
“I have no real explanation for why that would have happened.”
“Of course you don’t, because you are not very helpful.”
“I am incredibly helpful.”
Something is building in my head. Pieces coming together faster than I can process them. I have an idea. I root around in my junk drawer, shoving aside soy sauce packets, thumbtacks, floss, last year’s TEA Christmas card, some dead pens I probably should have thrown out, until finally I find it: a tape measure.
Every inch.
At Atwood I breeze past the elevators until I reach the storage closet in the middle of the hallway. The first five floors are identical, all with the same floor plans and room sizes. The closets should stack directly on top of each other. I take out the tape measure and hook it against the doorframe of the first room to the left of the closet. Stretch over to the closet’s door frame.
Twenty-seven feet.
“What are you doing?” Ruby asks.
“It’s quiet time.”
Ruby shuts up, hovering behind me as I cross the hotel, to the storage closet on the first floor of Butler.
Twenty-seven feet.
Next, the second floor of Atwood. And the third. Then on the fourth, where I spook a couple with hair as blue as their blood. They hurry past the weird chick taking random wall measurements in the hallway, like this is all an elaborate ploy to steal their wallets.
Twenty-seven feet.