The sunlight was a dark burnished gold when she let herself into the first-story room a few minutes later. She swung open the door and turned on the light.
It was shabby and stale smelling, not so much bland as despairing. The walls were papered in the same faded rose-trellis pattern as the lobby was, and the gray carpet was stained and threadbare. The clumsy old furniture seemed weirdly bunched up at one end of the room, a pile of thickly varnished wood, the bedspread pilling and thin.
She stood in the middle of the room for a moment. Déjà vu. This was every shitty motel that’d ever been someone’s undoing—this was the Camelot, where she’d followed philanderers and con artists night after night. This was the Palm Tree Lodge, where she’d long ago looked for another missing girl, poor Amelia DeLongpre. This was the Lake Creek Motel, and she was almost certain Hayley Dewalt had been here.
She started with the obvious, opening drawers, feeling around in the back of the closet, unsure what she hoped she’d find, but looking for it anyway. Perhaps she’d turn up something Chad or Hayley left behind, a clue that would tell her what had happened the morning they arranged to meet halfway between Neptune and Stanford. She ran her hands along the seams of the room—the AC vents, the paneling in the walls, the outlets—trying to feel anything loose, unusual.
When she’d finished she sat on the edge of the bed. She softened her gaze, no longer looking for something but looking at everything. Her mind rolled gently over the objects of the room, the facts she knew, and the suspicions she had. Sometimes you had to see both the forest and the trees.
That was when they sharpened into view: the marks on the wallpaper. Boxy outlines where the wallpaper was brighter, less faded and filthy. As if something had been sitting in front of it, protecting it from the light the rest of the roses were exposed to. The shapes were low on the wall.
Approximately where furniture would usually sit.
She jumped off the bed. First she grabbed the nightstand—it was bulky but surprisingly light. The bed was harder. She had to drag it in fits and starts. It’d been crowded close to the dresser, but based on where the wallpaper had faded it’d recently been moved about three feet. She pulled it back to where it’d once stood. Then she walked around to the other side. And that’s when she saw it.
There, in the carpet, was the unmistakable stain of blood.
Someone had tried to clean it up—a wide, pale circle around the spatter showed where it’d been scrubbed. But the rusty splotches were too deep, too rich to be wiped away so easily. A pointillist collection of drops formed a small circle, about six inches in diameter. From there the spray radiated left, fanning out about two feet.
It’d been about ten years since she’d done her FBI internship—and she’d only worked for a few days with blood spatter. But it was obvious someone had been hit, hard. And probably more than once.
Her throat felt raw. She straightened up again, eyes darting over the room. Something frantic scuttled in her chest, a panicked and sharp-nailed feeling. She tried to ignore it. But the only thing that mattered right now was the evidence—the physical facts.
There was nowhere to hide anything large in the motel room. And besides, two weeks out, the smell of a body would have gotten someone’s attention. She left the door to the room ajar as she walked back outside. The world seemed suddenly more desolate than it had twenty minutes before, dry and brown beneath the setting sun. Down at the end of the row of rooms, she saw the cool light of a vending machine. Next to it was the icemaker.
She walked toward it as if she were in a dream. Or a memory? How many dead girls drifted in her wake? How many ghosts did she have to carry? She could almost see Amelia walking ahead of her, translucent and shimmering. Lifting up the flap to the ice machine and climbing inside.
That was where she’d found DeLongpre’s body all those years before, covered in ice in another crappy motel courtyard. Murdered by her boyfriend for the money she’d received in a settlement from Kane Software. Lightning couldn’t strike twice. It couldn’t.
She stood in front of the machine for a moment and then lifted the metal flap. Crushed ice glistened inside. She grabbed the scoop and started shifting it around, rummaging toward the back. Then her shoulders collapsed as she exhaled.
Nothing there. Nothing but ice.
Hayley Dewalt could still be alive. Maybe the blood wasn’t even hers—or maybe it was and she’d just run off, hoping to get away from everything in her life that had led her to that tawdry room, everything that had led her to a boy who would hurt her when he was supposed to love her. She went back to the room and shut the door, putting the key in her pocket. She turned to head back to the office. And then she saw something that made her jaw go tight.
The birds she’d seen from across the street still wheeled in tight circles behind the motel. She could see them more clearly now—their dark red heads, the silent, focused gliding of their bodies, wings wide and motionless for seconds at a time as they hung on an updraft. The desperate, scared thing in her chest went very still as understanding, irrevocable as the blood on the carpet, settled on her.
The sun was now sinking behind the hills, brilliant as it died. She walked around the edge of the building. The motel lot extended back half an acre before the land started to climb, dense with buckwheat and sumac. An ancient chain-link fence ran along the property line, but it sagged in several places, and in one spot it’d tumbled altogether. The buzzards dispersed as she approached the site they’d been circling. She stepped over the fallen fence.
Something hot and fetid washed over her in waves, getting stronger as she went. She covered her mouth and nose, breathing against her own palm as shallowly as she could. Her mind spun, throwing out desperate possibilities. It could be a deer, a coyote, even a bear. But she knew it wasn’t.
She saw the hair first, a swath dark against the dun-colored earth, curling out from a haphazard tangle of branches. She took a few more steps and could see the body clearly then. She lay facedown under a low bush. It looked as if he had tried to cover her with leaves and twigs, but something—animals, most likely—had disturbed her. She caught a glimpse of a white dress so covered in dirt it blended with the ground. The distant and industrious buzz of insects sent electric prickles over Veronica’s skin.
She’d found Hayley Dewalt.