Mason parked and stared to the west. Scaffolding had been erected around the end of the wing. Sections where the walls had been removed were covered with plastic sheeting. Construction scraps littered the walkway, which was pretty much covered with cement dust. Considering it was a Sunday, he wasn’t surprised to see construction had come to a standstill.
He walked through the breezeway beside the office and glanced around the side and past the empty pool toward the rear parking lot. Always best to make sure you weren’t going to get an unexpected surprise when you were dealing with people who dealt in indiscretion. A mess of broken CDs glittered on the ground around the overflowing Dumpster, beyond which he saw a single car, an older-model sedan. It was plastered with soot and ash, clotted and streaked by the recent rain, to such a degree that he wasn’t entirely sure what make, model, or color it was. It was parked in the same spot where his wife’s Lexus had been.
The hinges squealed when he opened the front door and entered the office for the first time. He took a quick mental snapshot. To his right, a rack brimming with brochures for local attractions, the top quarter of each dusty and sun-bleached. Past them, a unisex bathroom with a thin wooden door that didn’t fit quite right in the frame. To his left, a bulletin board covered with thumbtacks and photocopies, most of which offered services running the gamut from private dancing and massage to outright prostitution. The registration desk directly ahead of him spanned the entire width of the office. A section to the right was hinged to swing outward. He guessed it was bolted from the inside. There was a clipboard beneath a handwritten sign that read DON’T STEAL THE PEN. He rang the bell beside it.
A man emerged from the door behind the desk. He was stumpy and bald and had prison green tattoos slithering up over his jawline from his fat neck. Glancing over his shoulder, Mason could see a hazy room with nicotine yellow cinder-block walls and a sofa bed. The man had tiny, alert eyes that quickly assessed him and sought the only exit, which was behind Mason. His thoughts played out on his face. He was willing to play the odds that he could get past Mason if he had absolutely no other choice. Without a doubt, this was a man who’d spent much of his life in a cage.
“You got to sign in if you want a room.” He spoke with a slight lisp, as his teeth had rotted to brown nubs.
“There’s no pen.”
“Damn it.”
He grumbled something under his breath and ducked back into the rear room.
Mason figured his wife had walked directly to the counter, just as he had. The person who had left the message on his voice mail had been standing with his back to her, perusing the brochures. Or maybe the bulletin board. Mason glanced up to his left and then to his right, then back to eye level when the man returned and tossed onto the counter a ten-cent Bic he’d taped to a plastic spoon. Mason read through the list of names scrawled on the ledger. He didn’t imagine any of them were real.
“You signing in or what?”
“What happened to the cameras?”
“What cameras? I don’t know what the hell—”
“The one that was mounted right up there.” Mason pointed at the ceiling above him and to his right, where one would have been positioned to view the safe he assumed was under the counter by the man’s knees and the registrants, if they were close enough to the counter. He turned and gestured toward a spot diagonally across the room, above the entrance. “And the other one that was over there.”
There were circular holes in the water-stained acoustic tiles, through which the cords had once passed, and a triangular discoloration where the bases of the cameras had been mounted with three small screws.
“Look, man. I don’t need no trouble.”
“Then tell me where they are and show me where you keep the footage.”
“I don’t know about no cameras. My old lady’s cousin owns this place. He needed someone to hang out back here and check people in from time to time. That’s all. He pays me cash and I hardly got to lift a finger.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What do you want from me, man? There wasn’t no cameras when I got here.”
“And when was that?”
“Week ago Monday.”
“What happened to the guy who was here before you?”
“I don’t know. Probably flaked after the fire. I mean, he was here when them people got kilt.” He looked both ways, then leaned across the counter and whispered, “You can still smell it back there.”
He stepped back and nodded sagely. Mason felt his face fill with blood. The man backed up and raised his hands to his sides.
“Listen. I don’t got nothing to hide. You want to come back here and check it out, you go right ahead. My PO don’t got to know nothing about this, does he?”
“You let anyone who walks in off the street back in the office?”
“You kidding me? Half the people come in here I don’t even want to be in the same room with. I don’t got no beef with no cops, neither. I’ve been in enough trouble to last ten lifetimes.”
“You think I’m a cop?”
“Don’t no one come into a place like this who isn’t looking to either get some action or bust someone for doing so.”
He must have sensed he’d misspoken. He opened the hatch without a word, led Mason into the back, and left him alone in the room. It smelled of body odor, sour cigarette smoke, and alcohol. He found where the cords had been run down through the ceiling from the other side of the wall and the empty shelf where the recorder had been. There were no tapes or DVDs or digital storage devices of any kind.
Mason found the desk guy smoking out front as he came out. He left him with his card and instructions to call should he hear anything about where Everett might have gone. Looking in his rearview mirror, he saw the man watching him all the way out of the parking lot.
Maybe that hadn’t been as productive as Mason had hoped, but he’d learned one very important detail: Terrence Everett hadn’t run off on his own. Whatever those cameras recorded had been worth killing him to collect.
21
The cadaver dogs sniffed out Everett’s body beneath the freshly poured foundation in the room where Angie died. By the time the CSRT chiseled away the concrete far enough to get a good look at his body, the sun had already set. Lights on tripods ringed the oblong hole, at the bottom of which lay what could only loosely be considered a human being. The flesh had pretty well begun to decompose, however slowly, thanks to the lack of oxygen, and sagged from the bony framework. Everett’s thick beard and long hair made him look almost simian. There was a sharply demarcated ligature line across his neck. No secondary indications of a struggle. It had been a professional job—quick, decisive, and perfectly executed. Someone had simply come up behind him, wrapped a wire cord around his neck, and strangled him in the most dispassionate manner possible. The level of putrefaction and the lack of anterior hypostasis—the settling of blood after the heart stops beating—suggested he’d been thrown down there and covered with concrete immediately after his death. If the new desk guy, a relatively harmless ex-con named Vince Cobb, who’d served time for grand theft auto and welfare fraud, was right about the date Everett had abandoned his job, that meant they were looking at sometime between Saturday night and midmorning Sunday, at the latest. The conspicuous gap in the registration log all but confirmed it.
Mason stared down at what was left of Everett under the harsh glare, listening to the plastic drop cloth snap on the wind. His rap sheet was unimpressive as far as both criminals and sleazy motel managers went. He’d done a couple of stints in Cañon City for possession with intent to distribute and aggravated assault, but the rest of the offenses were small potatoes—petty larceny, criminal menacing—and there’d been nothing within the last three years. That meant he was smarter than your average recidivist. Mason hoped prison had taught him a lesson or two about paranoia, as well.
He shoved through the plastic and walked out into the night. I-70 was a long white line of st
reetlights through the swaying branches. Beyond it, the night had just begun to come to life on Federal. Neon Day-Glo colors lit up the facades of the strip clubs, where the parking lots around back were always full, even on a Sunday night.
Mason had called his partner as soon as he left the motel to let him know where he was and what he was doing. As he was expressly forbidden from working on this case, he needed someone else—someone he trusted—to take charge. He’d put Trapp in an awkward position and they both knew it. And if he caught the kind of flack Mason anticipated, he wasn’t inclined to think his partner would be doing him any other favors for the foreseeable future. In fact, Trapp had been doing his best to be anywhere Mason wasn’t since the CSRT arrived.
The signs had all been there. He just hadn’t recognized them until he saw the holes where the security cameras had been mounted. The rapid response of the insurance company and the speed with which they’d gotten a construction crew on-site should have tipped him off from the start. And there was no reason at all for the cement dust, since they shouldn’t have needed to replace any portion of the foundation. The ash and soot on the car in the back lot meant it had to have been there during the fire, but it sure as hell hadn’t been parked in that spot. He hoped the mess of broken DVDs and jewel cases in and around the Dumpster meant what he thought it did. It was too sloppy for the rest of the cover-up. He was banking on Everett’s having figured out the implications of the security recording and quickly trying to make it look as though there was no surveillance by removing the system and throwing away the other recordings. He was also counting on Everett to have learned enough from his prison experience to have made a copy of the original disc and stashed it somewhere as a bargaining chip.
Unfortunately for him, there had been no bargaining.
The owner of the motel’s name was Ralph Schaub, and he was waiting in the office when Mason walked through the door. He was a large man in a custom-tailored suit, the kind that shimmered under the light when he moved. He wore large gold rings and had a pencil-thin mustache that looked like it’d been drawn onto his upper lip. His black hair was slicked back from a forehead that bloomed with perspiration.
Schaub looked up, and Mason read the truth in his expression.
“Where’s your studio, Ralph?”
His eyes widened, his mouth parted, and Mason knew he had him dead to rights. He’d done his homework while the CSRT had been jackhammering. In addition to the Peak View Inn and the Riverside Inn down the street, Schaub also owned an adult bookstore, a strip club called Derriere’s, and a production company named Voyeur Videos, which distributed hack-job DVDs and ran a subscription-based website with live cams. The majority of his titles fell in the amateur category, and his site featured sporadic and unannounced live feeds. You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to guess where they’d been filmed.
“I’m sorry?” Schaub swallowed hard. Whatever was in there seemed to get stuck where the collar of his shirt bit into his gelatinous neck. “I’m not entirely sure what you mean by…”
He lost his train of thought when he saw the expression on Mason’s face.
“Anyone we use in a film or live broadcast has to sign a release waiver and gets paid a flat fee.”
“And those who don’t know they’re being filmed?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“Your motel receipts gross what? A couple hundred bucks on a busy night?” Mason reached over the counter, unlocked the hinged door, and joined Schaub. The enormous man sat awkwardly on the stool, which hadn’t been designed to accommodate his weight. “That’s a mighty impressive safe if all you’re protecting is a small stack of bills. Solid steel. Digital keypad and keyed lock tandem. Grounded electrical adapters and data safe storage. I guess you never can be too careful, can you? And you are a careful man, aren’t you, Ralph? Never been arrested. I should say, never been convicted of any crime. I wonder if that has anything to do with the large cash withdrawals you pull from your various accounts on a rolling basis every other month.”
Schaub tried to swallow again, to no avail.
“You see, Ralph, my wife was an investigator for the IRS. A damn good one, too. You can’t live with a woman like that without a little of her skill rubbing off on you.”
He made a garbled noise Mason couldn’t quite interpret.
“You’ll have to speak up, Ralph.”
He cleared his throat and tried again. It still came out as little more than an indecipherable grunt.
“I want you to open the safe for me, Ralph.”
Schaub’s eyes darted for the door. They both knew his chances of getting to it first. Mason slid his right hand under his jacket for good measure.
The front door squealed as Trapp entered. He didn’t appear too happy that Mason was behind the counter with the owner.
“Special Agent Trapp,” Mason said. “This is Mr. Ralph Schaub, the owner of this fine establishment. Mr. Schaub was just offering to open his safe for us.”
Had his partner not walked in when he did, Mason would undoubtedly have put him in an even more untenable position. To his credit, Trapp maintained a studiously neutral expression, joined them behind the counter, and gestured for Schaub to proceed.
Schaub hiked his pants, knelt on the floor, and set to work with fingers that were remarkably dexterous for their size. When he opened the steel door and sat back, Mason saw pretty much exactly what he’d expected. There was a digital relay panel with numbers from one to sixteen and two more, which read O1 and O2. Beside each number was a button that would light up when pressed. A small dented cash box sat next to it.
“So the manager serves as the casting director,” Mason said. “He makes sure the guests sign in, and if they’re attractive enough, he pushes the button to turn on the hidden cameras in the corresponding room when he puts their money in the safe. One quick motion for both. And considering most people pay in cash and don’t use their real names, you must have a pretty hard time tracking them down to sign the waivers and pay them, I’d imagine. Most of the registrants probably aren’t the kind who want their exploits known, so you don’t need to worry about them coming back looking for their paychecks, either. In fact, I’ll bet some of them are probably more than willing to pay you to make the proof of their little indiscretions go away, aren’t they, Ralph?”
“Most of the girls are paid well.” The sweat was positively running down his face. “They know what they’re doing, and their partners are only too happy to participate.”
“Was there a camera setup in room nine?”
Schaub again glanced at the door, and Mason had his answer.
“The old security cameras in here? They were just for show, weren’t they? So people wouldn’t think you’d stepped into the digital age. So they wouldn’t suspect anything. Hell, they weren’t even functional, were they? But Everett panicked. He tore out that old system when he realized the fire hadn’t been an accident, hoping that he’d fool whoever did it if they came back for him.”
“Which they did.” Trapp recognized the direction Mason was trying to steer the interview. “The ligature they used to strangle him nearly took his head clean off his shoulders.”
“Everett destroyed the DVDs in the foolish hope that no one would see through his deception, but he wasn’t entirely stupid, was he? He had a backup copy somewhere, didn’t he?”
“We have off-site digital storage,” Schaub said.
“You’re not going to make us go to all the trouble of getting a warrant, are you?” Trapp said.
Again, Schaub swallowed hard and had to jerk at his collar to make room for his pride to go down.
“No, sir,” he finally said. “I’m happy to be of assistance in any way I can.”
22
Schaub’s studio took up the entire back half of the second level of Derriere’s, above the open dressing room, where the dancers changed, and the small bedrooms, where he claimed they napped between sets. It was exhausting work, after al
l.
The studio had been soundproofed and the equipment inside was probably worth more than the entire building around it. Mason didn’t know a thing about soundboards, but this one appeared to be state-of-the-art. Again, he was surprised by Schaub’s dexterity as he manipulated several different functions at once to make the images on each of the four monitors above the central console come to life. Trapp and Mason sat on either side of him, while a pair of computer evidence specialists from the Rocky Mountain Forensics Laboratory watched him to ensure that he didn’t try to erase the data and waited for their turn to swoop in and confiscate the recordings.
Schaub was obviously hoping that his helpfulness would buy him a little leniency when it came to the eventual investigation into his side venture. Mason really didn’t care one way or the other. Schaub catered to an element of the population whose seed was more beneficial to the greater good of society in a tube sock than in the gene pool. He was perfectly content letting them have each other.
“So we have footage from both the office and the room on the day in question,” Schaub said. “Which one do you want to see first?”
“The room,” Trapp said.
Mason closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was staring at a row of black screens. The first and third had date and time stamps, the second and fourth running time and blank rectangles for image capture. The numbers scrolled past, but the darkness remained the same.
“There’s nothing there.” A note of panic crept into Schaub’s voice. “Not even sound.”
The numbers scrolled faster and the monitors flickered, yet the unmarred blackness remained. Somehow, Schaub managed to sweat even more, producing the unmistakable scent of fear. His fingers flew across the console.
The Extinction Agenda Page 9
