Cold Snap

by Allison Brennan

  Lucy watched the information hit Katz and sink in. He shook his head. “Everyone loves Maggie. No one would hurt her. It was an accident. It had to be. An awful accident.” His eyes closed tight and his body shook with emotion.

  “As I said, we’ll know more when the coroner arrives. In the meantime, I’ll ask security to escort you to your room. Let them know if you need anything.”

  Katz didn’t want to leave, but eventually Harris got him to go with security without resorting to threats.

  “He didn’t do it,” Harris said emphatically. “Of course, we’ll have to look at his background, money issues, but he seems genuinely in shock.”

  “I concur,” Dillon said. Lucy had almost forgotten he was in the room—Dillon had an uncanny way of observing unobtrusively.

  Harris said, “I’m going to talk to security and see what their resources are. I don’t want to cause a panic, but we have to make sure that the guests know that they need to be careful, not go anywhere alone.” He held up the card key he’d found on their frozen Jane Doe. “I’m going to find out what room this belongs to, maybe we’ll get an ID on our second victim.”

  “First victim,” Lucy corrected. “She definitely died earlier this evening.”

  “How can you tell? She was outside for a long time.”

  “I worked at a morgue for a year, I can extrapolate based on what I know about weather conditions and decomposition. I suspect she was killed before ten P.M., and we know Maggie accessed the gym at nine-thirty P.M.”

  “And,” Kate added, “we have witnesses who saw her on the treadmill around ten in the evening.”

  “She knew the pool closed at eleven. She probably jumped in after her workout, then warmed up in the Jacuzzi.” It was something Lucy did whenever she had access to a pool. “The killer was either in the Jacuzzi and didn’t appear to be a threat, or came up to her after she entered. Another hotel guest, nothing to worry about,” Lucy said, putting herself in Maggie’s shoes. “Might have exchanged hellos or something innocuous. Kate, do we have the key cards yet that accessed the gym before and after Maggie?”

  “Yes, there are only twenty-four, so we can run them down very quickly. We already interviewed those who were in the gym when we arrived. There are nine we need to track down and talk to.”

  “One of the flaws in the card key system is that anyone can walk in on a master key, or follow someone in who has a key,” Harris said. “Most people in hotels, especially nice places like this, don’t think about it, but if someone didn’t want to be tracked, they could easily move around without having to use any identifying card key.”

  “Or steal a key,” Lucy said. “Most hotels give two keys per room, even if there’s only one guest. It’s easy to misplace one, or think you lost it.”

  “It’s easy to use anyone’s key for public areas,” Kate said.

  “Any word on the missing stabbing victim?” Harris asked.

  “Security has been searching the hotel, but so far nothing.”

  “Let’s talk to them again. Dead people don’t just disappear,” Harris said with irritation.

  Kate said, “Dillon, can you stay here with Abby? Make sure there’s no trouble.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “And, Lucy, let us know if Sean gets anything off St. Paul’s computer.”

  Lucy left to bring James St. Paul’s computer to Sean. He was leaning back in a chair in the security office, watching the monitors with half-closed eyes. “I just got the oddest call from your brother.”

  “Patrick?”

  “Yep. He just sent me a message to be on call for something technical. But I haven’t heard back from him.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Lucy put St. Paul’s laptop next to Sean. “I think St. Paul’s ex-girlfriend is stalking him. He stopped using his e-mail for anything personal two months ago, and I read some of the messages that made me think he thought she was spying on him via the computer.”

  Sean sat up, wide-eyed. “This will be fun.” He hooked up his tablet to the computer, then ran a program that examined St. Paul’s hard drive. It took several minutes, and Sean chatted about Patrick and what he might be up to. “Do you know why he’s in San Francisco?”

  “He didn’t say specifically, just that he was on an errand for Mom.”

  “She sent him to San Francisco on an errand?”

  “I know, weird. But it’s not that far out of the way, and he can just as easily get a flight out of San Francisco as he can out of Sacramento, maybe more easily.”

  Sean’s eyes sparkled with discovery as he typed on St. Paul’s computer. “The guy was right, he was being cyberstalked. There’s a Trojan on here that records him when he’s at the computer.”

  Lucy shivered. Being watched—especially by someone unseen—creeped her out.

  “He disabled his camera two months ago,” Sean said. “There are additional programs that forward all messages he gets to another e-mail.”

  “Can you track that e-mail?” Lucy asked, a wave of excitement running through her.

  “Already did. It’s shut down, but I can definitely get the host and basic account information. For account ownership you’d need a warrant, if you want to keep it legal.” He worked quickly on the keyboard. “It’s a freebie account with a national provider. I can’t tell where the recipient lives, it’s all routed through multiple servers depending on traffic volume.”

  Sean leaned forward. “Oh, shit. I think your theory’s right, Luce.”

  “What?” She didn’t see what he saw in the rows of code.

  “He may have shut down the camera and stopped using his e-mail and run virus protection software and thought he was safe, but there’s a boot code. Anytime he turns on his computer and hooks up to any Internet connection, a notice goes out to a public message board. The last time the notice went out was three days ago, when he logged in to the hotel network. Oh—this is good. I might be able to trace it.”

  “You can trace a public message board?”

  “Not quite—but I can upload a virus to send me information about any computer that accesses that specific page and where that computer is—under most circumstances.”

  “Great. And can you find out if he sent any messages?”

  “Yes, give me a little time.”

  For Sean, “give me time” essentially meant “I can work faster if you’re not hovering.”

  She kissed his cheek. “You’re the best.”

  He grinned. “I know.” He glanced at her. “Go to bed. It’s nearly three in the morning.”

  “What about you?”

  “As soon as I crack this, I’ll be up. Promise.”

  She left and went to the tenth floor. She found Kate and Detective Harris coming out of room 1080.

  “You’re right, Agent Kincaid,” Harris said. “Definitely blood. I collected some samples and the crime-scene techs will be out here tomorrow, hopefully early.” He closed the door. “The hotel blocked all electronic keys until they arrive. I’m going to crash in the security office—no way am I driving home in this weather.”

  “And we can get an early start,” Kate said. “We have a guard on our makeshift morgue, and extra patrols in the halls. Sean got the security cameras back up.”

  “He also confirmed that St. Paul was being cyberstalked,” Lucy said.

  “Do we have any real reason to think this is connected to St. Paul?” Harris said.

  “We haven’t been able to reach him, he left his luggage here, and we haven’t found him in the overflow rooms,” Kate said. “There’s just something weird about the situation.”

  “He’s the killer or the victim,” Lucy muttered.

  “What?” Kate asked. “I missed that.”

  “We’re missing a body, someone who was killed in a room St. Paul had vacated. He’s been stalked. He could easily be a victim. Or, he set it all up to make him appear to be the victim so he could get away with murder.�
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  “Not on my watch,” Kate said.

  “Those two blondes could have been red herrings,” Lucy said. “Killed to mask the real victim or the real motive.”

  “Or we could just have a psycho on our hands,” Harris said. He glanced at his watch and shook his head. “I can already tell I’m not getting much sleep tonight. Tomorrow, oh-six-hundred, I’m leading a search for the missing body. It’s here somewhere, and I will find it.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Lucy woke up at five-thirty after less than two hours of sleep. Kate and Dillon were still passed out in the bed next to her, but Sean wasn’t there. He hadn’t come back to the room at all. She picked up her phone and called him.

  “Hey,” he answered with a yawn.

  “Where are you?” She tried to whisper so she wouldn’t wake Kate or Dillon.

  “I fell asleep in the security office. They have a comfy chair here.”

  “You should have come upstairs.”

  “I didn’t want to leave my equipment running without me, and I needed the hotel servers.”

  “Find anything?”

  Kate moaned and stretched. “Is that Sean?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Whoever is tracking St. Paul did it from Chicago, but they’re not online and I can’t pinpoint the location until they get back online. I have his computer up and running and am waiting for the cyberstalker to ping it.”

  “Come upstairs and rest.”

  “I’m fine. I slept a couple hours.”

  “I’ll bring you food.”

  “Great. I’m famished.”

  Lucy hung up. She’d showered the night before because it took too long to dry her hair in the morning, especially a morning that promised to be as busy as this one.

  She left Kate and Dillon and went down to the coffee shop, where she bought two breakfast sandwiches, coffee for her, and orange juice for Sean.

  Sean was talking to a young tech guy from the hotel, who seemed to be glued to everything Sean said. Sean winked at her when she walked in. “My savior has arrived,” he said. “Gary, do you mind giving us a minute?”

  “Go ahead. I’ll download this to the main server, it’ll take some time.”

  “Let me know when you’re done.”

  “And you think this will really prevent anyone from messing with the system again?”

  “No—but next time, your team will be alerted immediately. If the cameras go down, you’ll know why. If someone’s trying to piggyback on your system, you’ll see it—and who. It would be better to upgrade the whole enchilada, but corporations are being stingy with money right now.”

  “Wow—this is really great. Thank you.”

  Gary left, and Lucy eyed Sean quizzically.

  “Nothing illegal, promise,” Sean said. “Their system is just so archaic, I couldn’t help myself. I wrote them a program that should fix the worst of their problems.”

  “I love you.” Lucy kissed him. “Eat, and tell me what you found out.”

  Sean slid over a piece of paper. “Here’s St. Paul’s attorney, his home phone and cell phone. I found St. Paul’s cell phone number and it’s completely shut down, either dead or the battery has been removed. No way to track it. Except that he made several calls from his cell phone in this hotel over the last three days.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The hotel has an internal cell receiver, so all cellular calls route through it. Because it’s owned by the hotel, and they already gave me permission to go through their system—”

  “Understood.”

  “The last call he made was yesterday at noon, right after he checked out.”

  “To who?”

  “Blocked number. The phone hasn’t been used since.”

  Lucy frowned.

  “But I found out more about Denise. Her name is Denise Vail, from a suburb in Chicago. She moved four months ago and left no forwarding information, so I’m doing a background on her and hope to find out where she might have gone. I also ran my facial recognition software on all the guests in the hotel. Most guests are recorded twenty to forty times a day on a variety of cameras—usually entering the elevator or in the lobby. Denise has been on camera only twice, both times yesterday morning. I don’t know if she’s a guest—but if she is, it’s not under her name. Now I’m running a program reviewing all the guests who checked in yesterday morning. It’s taking a while because there was an unusual number of check-ins due to the storm. And the two images I have of her are difficult to discern—my program didn’t catch them as a hundred percent, but classified them as probable matches. She was wearing large dark glasses in one, and in the other had a hat on.”

  “Like she was trying to hide,” Lucy said. “Did you compare her image to the Jane Doe we found outside?”

  “I don’t have a good enough picture, but Vail is five foot three—the victim is five foot six, according to Dillon. I’ll let you know if I find her.”

  “Eat. I’m going to meet with Kate and Detective Harris and see what they want to do about the attorney.”

  “Do you want to know about the status of the airport?”

  She’d almost forgotten. “Are we leaving tonight?” She wanted to leave—but at the same time, she had to admit that she wanted to find out what happened here. She didn’t want to leave the case unsolved, even if it wasn’t her case.

  “Tomorrow morning. They’re resuming flights this afternoon, but it’s going to be a madhouse, and we’d have to get there early with no guarantee of a seat. I have the four of us booked tomorrow morning, first class.”

  “First class?”

  “I have so many miles, they practically pay me to fly.”

  “Sean, I’m on a government salary. A rookie government salary. And you’re no longer getting a paycheck.”

  “And I’ve told you before money isn’t a problem.”

  He had, and she’d assumed RCK paid him well for his skills. She’d been raised in a big, one-salary family and had always been frugal, especially with things like clothing and airfare and luxuries. Sean had always been more than generous, but she had never thought about his finances before.

  Sean eyed her oddly. “Luce, I don’t need to work. Ever.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve written or fixed some of the best-selling software programs on the market today and was paid extremely well for it. I thought you knew that.”

  She shook her head, still not understanding what he meant by “I don’t need to work.”

  “I work because I’d go insane if I didn’t have something to do. Or find myself in deep trouble.” He smiled, leaned over and kissed her. “It’s nice that you fell in love with me before you knew I was rich.”

  “You don’t act rich.”

  He laughed. “I buy the best electronic toys. I own a plane. I don’t skimp when I travel commercially.”

  “Okay.” Thinking back to all the times they went out and traveled, she realized that he’d never let her pay for anything. She hadn’t thought much about it, because for all Sean’s contemporary ways and state-of-the-art toys, he was a gentleman at heart.

  “You’re cute when you’re confused.” He kissed her and said, “Go find Kate and then tell me how fabulous she thinks I am.”

  “She’ll never admit it. But I think you’re fabulous.” She smiled.

  “And you, princess, are the only one I really care about.”

  Lucy tracked Kate down at the coffee shop ordering a large coffee to go. Kate said, “Harris wants to start in the basement and search every inch of the facility, including the immediate grounds outside, until we find the body. He’s instructing the security staff now.”

  “Sean has information on St. Paul’s girlfriend, Denise Vail.”

  “The one who broke up with him four months ago?”

  “Yes. She’s in the hotel. Or she was here, yesterday morning.”

  “Now that’s interesting.”

  “What are you thinking?”
Lucy asked as they took the elevator to the basement.

  “That she shows up and St. Paul disappears.”

  “Sean’s running facial recognition software against the hotel’s archives to find out if she’s registered in the hotel under a different name. I also have St. Paul’s attorney’s contact information.”

  “Good.” Kate glanced at her watch. “It’s seven in the morning, and Sunday to boot. I’ll give the info to Harris and see what he wants to do.”

  They found Harris talking to a large group of hotel staff members. Half were security. They broke off in five groups of two and went in different directions. “I have a feeling I’ll be doing it again myself,” Harris grumbled. He took a long gulp of coffee. “I also sent a team of four to canvass outside and in the garbage. There’s been no garbage service for two days because of the storm, so it’s possible the body could have been dumped there.”

  Kate repeated Lucy’s information and said, “I can talk to the attorney.”

  “Do that,” Harris said. “Agent Kincaid, do you want to join me on my own search? The crime-scene techs will be here between ten and eleven.”

  “You have us until tomorrow morning,” Lucy said.

  “Tomorrow?” Kate asked.

  “Sean booked us on a flight early in the morning.”

  “Great,” Harris said. “If the killer is still here—and I think he is because no one has left the building since before Mrs. Katz was killed—then we need all the people we can get.”

  Harris and Lucy walked through the basement, monitoring the progress of the security staff.

  “So, what’s your theory?” Harris asked Lucy.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Of course you do. I could tell last night.”

  She said, “I don’t like guessing. There are a lot of possibilities.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you if you’re wrong.”

  Lucy considered what they knew. “I think all three murders are related. That even though there wasn’t a body in room 1080, the killer had a reason for moving it. I think it might be James St. Paul.”