“It’s a forty-dollar thing.” Now Glorya’s treating me to that same stare.
Kristian leans forward, folding his hands in a pleading way. “Her dad was the cop. She hasn’t been back to Austin since, and it would mean a lot to her if you’d let us step inside the room for five minutes, so she could get closure.”
Kristian’s words seem to melt the cynical layer from that woman’s ice-cold heart. She reaches for the keys and slaps them on the counter, her eyes flickering to me, a touch softer. “End of Building One. You got five minutes.”
“Thank you, Glorya. Hey, any chance there’s someone on staff that would have been working here back then? You know, housekeeping, maintenance . . . security . . .”
Glorya settles onto her stool with a huff and, reaching for the worn paperback, continues reading from her marked page.
Ignoring us.
“Thanks for your time. I’ll be right back with that key.” Kristian waves for us to follow him out the door.
“Why didn’t you flash your badge? Isn’t this what it’s for?” I ask.
“People in places like this tend to say less around badges, not more.” He leads us down a covered walkway past a row of rooms. One of those ugly pea-soup-green doors pops open and a man steps out, adjusting his tie as he pulls the door shut. But not before I catch a glimpse of the woman inside, nude and tangled in sheets, a cigarette perched between her lips as she shuffles a wad of cash.
The man ducks his head and scoots past to his black sedan, avoiding my stare. Of the ten cars in the parking lot, five of them are shiny, newish models. Nothing too luxurious—no Audis or BMWs—but decent cars, all the same. Cars driven by people who could probably afford better hotel rooms than this, if they weren’t here to pay for the services of a modestly priced prostitute.
“Come on, Gracie.” Noah gently guides me forward to the far end of the building, where Kristian stands in front of an open door.
My breath catches as I take in the gold-plated number—116.
We step inside and the temperature instantly drops. At least, it feels cooler. If I didn’t know this was the room where my dad died, would I have the same reaction? Would this strange hollowness, coupled with a swell of anger, stir?
“Definitely not the Ritz,” Kristian murmurs, his hands resting on his hips as he takes in the room: one queen bed and a dresser, a basic kitchenette and, next to it, I presume a bathroom.
I scrunch my nose. “It smells like feet in here.” And cigarettes. I’m not surprised, given the ashtray that sits right beside the “no smoking” plaque by the bed.
Kristian wanders in, squatting to peer at the floor near the window, dragging his finger along the thin burgundy carpet.
“What are you doing?”
“This seam, here. Do you see it?”
I frown. The carpet is dark and the lighting is poor, so it’s hard to spot the line at first. “What about it?”
“Looks like the owner was too cheap to re-carpet the room, so he just cut away where it was stained and glued down a remnant piece.”
My stomach drops as I stare at the spot with new understanding. The report said Hernandez was found by the window. The carpet would have been stained by his blood. “You really think this is from fourteen years ago?”
“There’ve been no reports of incidents in this room since.” Klein stands and walks over to the opposite side of the bed, his stride purposeful. He runs his toe along another seam in the rug—another new piece to replace a section of blood-soaked carpet. “This is where they found Wilkes.”
Wilkes. My father. Oddly, it doesn’t sound strange to hear him referred to by his last name. Maybe that’s because he’s little more than a painful memory to me.
I take a deep breath, and try to imagine the man I know from pictures and a foggy recollection lying there.
“Coroner’s report said he died quickly. Three bullets to his chest.” Kristian smooths his hand over a layer of beige-striped wallpaper that’s begun to separate on the wall behind the bed’s headboard.
Quickly isn’t instantly.
Noah’s hand settles on my shoulder, the pad of his thumb rubbing over my collarbone affectionately. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I swallow the growing lump in my throat and take in the dingy room again, wondering what it would have been like to die here. Wondering about those last few moments, as blood seeped into his lungs, as his heart gave way. What does “dying quickly” feel like? Does it really feel quick? Or are those last moments agonizingly long, as you play out all the things you won’t get to say, won’t get to experience, all the regrets?
What were my father’s last thoughts about? My mother? Me? Noah?
“What are you looking for, exactly?” Noah asks, not hiding his impatience.
“Anything interesting,” Kristian says in that flat way of his, where he makes everything sound boring when it’s anything but.
“Do you have any theories?” Noah pushes.
“One.”
Noah’s jaw hardens as he waits for the evasive FBI agent to elaborate.
“The simplest, most obvious one,” Kristian says after a pause. “There was a third person in this room, who pulled the trigger on one or both of Wilkes and Hernandez.”
“Great. Now you just have to prove that, with no evidence.” Noah folds his arms over his chest and waits quietly for an explanation.
A smirk touches Kristian’s lips as he runs his hand over that strip of wallpaper again. “Do me a favor, Grace, and go stand over there, on the other side of the bed. Pretend you’re Hernandez.”
As much as I don’t want to be playing the role of the dead drug dealer, I follow his instructions and wander over to stand where the carpet was patched.
“Take a look at the wall. What do you see?”
I squint. “Ducks?”
“Swans, actually. But look closely. What do you notice?”
I eye the expanse of ugly beige for a long moment before I notice a seam line, much like the one on Kristian’s side. “This piece looks newer. Not as dirty.” The strip of wallpaper runs about three feet wide, from floor to ceiling, just behind the nightstand.
“Right. It’s the same over here.” Kristian waves a hand in front of him. “If the motel owners cut out chunks of bloody carpet instead of just replacing it all, how much do you want to bet they also slapped remnant paper overtop blood splatter to save themselves the effort and money of re-wallpapering everything?”
“But . . . wait.” I frown as I try to recall the crime scene notes, riffling through the pages of the report that I brought with me. “It says here that the blood splatter was on that wall.” I point to the wall directly behind Kristian, which divides the bedroom area from the bathroom. “And on the window.”
“You’re right. That’s what it says. And it would line up with the story that Wilkes and Hernandez took each other down, standing on either side of this bed.”
“But . . .” Noah pushes.
“Hernandez took one bullet in the head, killing him instantly. That means he would have had to pull the trigger first. Right?”
I glance at Noah to see him nod.
“Let’s suppose the report is right for a sec. Hernandez is standing over there when he shoots Wilkes three times in the chest. Wilkes goes down, but before he does, he manages to fire off a round that kills Hernandez where he stands, over there.” He points at me. “The bullet goes right through Hernandez. Into his forehead and out the back of his skull at a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle, based on the coroner’s report.”
“That means Abe would have had to be standing,” Noah murmurs.
“Right. A guy gets shot three times in the chest and manages to lift his gun to shoot a guy head-on? Not impossible, but it’s definitely worth questioning. But what’s more interesting is the old news footage I found from that night. There was nothing on that window. No blood, from what I can see, and definitely no bullet hole.”