12
Four hours later I was lying on a hotel bed, about five floors above Powell Street. Serena had registered for us; I’d waited in the car for her to come back with the keys before we’d gone up in the elevator.
She was in the bathroom now, and I was watching TV, though the Eastman case wasn’t dominating the news anymore; it was relegated to the crawl on CNN. Lack of new information, I supposed, and a lack of reporters to cover what there was.
Until I’d met Jack Foreman, I hadn’t realized that newspapers and TV stations, like most businesses, were short-staffed on weekends. In theory, Jack had explained, everyone acknowledged that news didn’t differentiate between weekday and weekend. In practice, he’d said, any reporter with any amount of seniority had an “enterprise” piece in the can by Friday night and spent Saturday and Sunday at home with the kids.
I’d been surprised, told him that I’d thought reporters lived to rush out the door at any hour in pursuit of a good story. Jack had shaken his head. “A rare few,” he’d said, “but you’d be surprised how many are willing to let a story jell for a day. That’s what my old editor in New Jersey used to call it. Or editors say, ‘We’ll run a follow tomorrow.’ ” He’d laughed at my look of disbelief.
Tomorrow, Monday, the gears would begin to mesh in earnest. Whether that would be good for me or bad, I didn’t know. I had to believe that eventually, under enough scrutiny, this case would render up a detail that would tell investigators I hadn’t committed these crimes, despite the fingerprint on the casing, despite everything.
If that didn’t happen, if things really went sour here, maybe I could join Jack Foreman in Kiev. Maybe he could use a bodyguard. Journalists got killed sometimes in the developing former-Soviet nations. Besides, we’d always gotten along fine together in bed.
Restless, I flipped away from CNN, around the other cable news channels until I recognized the exterior of the Eastman home, no longer under police barricades and crime-scene tape, closed up and empty. I turned up the sound, but not fast enough to catch the thrust of that report before the story changed to international news.
Serena came out of the bathroom, glanced at the TV and saw a commercial playing, and sat down on the corner of her bed. “Okay,” she said. “What’s the plan?”
I rolled over to lie with my chin in my hand. “Can you make a run to a drugstore?” I asked.
“What do you need?”
“Safety pins, in a couple of different sizes, and a little screwdriver.”
“Lock-picking stuff,” she said, understanding immediately. “You’re going to the dead woman’s house. Are you sure that’s safe?”
“Reasonably,” I said. “It’s been two days. The technicians and detectives shouldn’t need a round-the-clock presence anymore. I’ll go late tonight and park a little ways off and walk to the house under cover of darkness. It’s about the quietest residential area in the whole city. The neighbors will be sleeping, and even the most ambitious detective isn’t going to be there after midnight.”
“There are graveyard-shift cops,” Serena said.
I shook my head. “Those are the kind of cops that mop up bar fights. Major-crimes detectives and forensics people might get called out to a fresh murder scene after midnight, but no one’s going to be doing routine follow-up work at that hour.”
“Okay, but what are you looking for?”
“Anything,” I said. “Anything that’ll tell me who this ‘Hailey’ chick was. If she left any clothes or shoes behind, I’ll know something about her height and build. If there’s red or pink swipes on the bedspread, I’ll know what color she paints her toenails.”
“Then we can stake out shoe stores and look at women’s bare feet until we catch her.”
“I’m just saying, she’s a woman, I’m a woman. You think most cops know how often you paint your toenails sitting on the bed, and how you accidentally smear a little on the spread because you’re moving around again before they’re dry?”
She didn’t look convinced, but said, “Give me some money, then. For the drugstore.”