Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3)

by Jay Stringer

He nodded a greeting. “Back again?”

  His voice was a permanent nasal monotone.

  “Yup. Still not finished. Tony around?”

  “No, I thought he was with you.”

  “Well, I did ask him to run a couple errands. He’s probably not back yet from taking our guest home. I need back in the room—you got a key?”

  Every door in the hotel operated with those annoying key cards that never work the first time. He passed me a master card and left me to it. The Hound did have an ancient, pillbox-sized elevator, but it was a brave person who risked it. I took the stairs, with my knee complaining at every step. Another souvenir of previous problems.

  As I stepped through the door that opened from the stairwell onto the third floor, my stomach crawled. I slipped the card into the slot on the hotel door, and on the third attempt the light went green and I twisted the heavy handle and pushed the door inward.

  I regretted it straight away. Violence might always involve an act, a deed, but it also involves a smell. Blood and urine, unmistakably mingling like the scents of burnt copper and warm ammonia. I knew what I was going to find even before I flipped the light switch. The only question was who it would be. There was twice as much blood now, and it had soaked into the carpet to make a dark burgundy treacle at my feet. Jellyfish was still where I’d left him, slumped beside the bed, near his clothes, but he was no longer the only corpse in the room.

  Tony lay between me and the bed.

  He was facedown in his own congealed blood, and much of his throat looked to be missing. His arm was stretched out toward me across the floor, and his glassy eyes stared at me. I couldn’t help but wonder: What was the last thing he saw on this earth? Was it his killer? Was it the door? Had he held out hope of reaching it before his life drained away?

  There was no sign of Maria, and I hadn’t expected there to be. My initial suspicions about her had been right, if only I’d followed them deeper than her name and natural hair color. She’d played the drama out to perfection. She may have been overplaying how high she was, anything to fool me, get me out of the room. I was just glad she’d decided I had a walk-on part rather than a starring role.

  I knew there would be neither the money nor the proof under the bed, but I owed it to myself to make sure. The treacle covered the floor between me and the bed, and I didn’t want to attract attention by going back downstairs for supplies. We owned the hotel, but we didn’t involve the staff in things like this. I pulled the bottom of my jeans up clear of my ankles, and then walked slowly across the floor, ignoring the squelching noise and trying not to think of what the soles of my shoes were sinking into.

  Beside the bed I squatted down on my haunches, with both my abdomen and my knee reminding me this was a stupid idea, and used the light from my mobile phone to look under the bed. There was nothing but dust and a cockroach that was hiding out until the killing had finished. I told him the coast was clear. Then I climbed back to my feet, trying to avoid putting my hand on anything sticky.

  I stepped back over to the door and kicked off my shoes before heading out into the hallway, pulling the door almost closed behind me so Jelly and Tony couldn’t listen in on the bad news. I dialed Gaines’s number, and she answered straight away. I pictured her sitting there, waiting for my call.

  “The packages aren’t here, but we’ve picked up an extra dropout.”

  There was a delay. Then her voice came over the line, tense and worried. “Who?”

  “Tony. Things have gotten a bit messy.”

  “And the girl?”

  “No sign.”

  That wasn’t true. The whole room was a sign, loud and clear. But I didn’t think Gaines was in the mood for my insightful wit, so I just waited for her to speak. When she didn’t, my stomach twisted. I’d never seen Gaines this stressed about anything, and I’d seen her with worries that would have put any normal person in the hospital with a heart attack.

  “Boss, what’s going on here? What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ronny—”

  “Clean it up. Then fix it. Trust nobody.” Her voice cracked. “Nobody. I don’t know who is in on this. I want the money, I want the proof, and I want that fucking girl.”

  She hung up.

  That fucking girl. That fucking girl who I had spared. The implication ate away at me through the phone. You fucked up, again. Gaines had watched me make these choices before, sparing people or looking the other way, and she’d had to clean up the resulting mess too many times.

  I looked through the contacts on my phone for one of our cleanup teams, and pressed the green button to dial. Before it could go through, I pressed the red button and stared at the phone as the call died.

  Trust nobody.

  There was a leak in our organization, and tracks were being covered in blood. If Tony had lived long enough to place a call after I’d left, he would have contacted people on the same list that I had, and now he was dead and none of them were here.

  I stepped back into the room and leaned against the wall while I tried slipping into my shoes without letting my feet touch the floor. I got them mostly on, with the backs digging into my heels and biting further into my soles with each step. I knelt down and patted Tony’s back pockets, but there were no bulges. I found a spot on the floor that was free of blood and rested my right knee on it so I could get down closer to the body. I tried to wriggle my hands into the front pockets of his jeans but he was a dead weight pressing down on them. As I tugged at his clothes I could hear the sound of drying blood being peeled away from skin, and the copper smell of it crawled down my throat so that I didn’t want to swallow. I reached across his back and grabbed hold of his waist, blindly hoping I was grabbing a clean spot, and pulled. After a few attempts I managed to turn him toward me, and stepped out of the way as the corpse rolled with the force of a heavy garden slab. The blood was thick and dark on the front of his clothes, where it had been pressed tight between the body and the carpet. I slowly went through his pockets, using clean bits of his coat as gloves, but all I could find were matches, a set of keys, and his wallet.

  No phone.

  For the first time, I thought about checking for Jelly’s phone. I went through his piled-up clothes again, but there was no sign of a phone on him, either.

  Both had been taken.

  Tony had set up a network of people to help dispose of unwanted problems. Funeral homes that could cremate or bury people in other people’s coffins, hospital staff that could misplace bodies. But without knowing if Tony had been set up by any of them, I had to find another way.

  Great.

  There’s nothing like needing to cover up a couple of murders to make you realize how few people you have in your life. I’d run out of family options. I hadn’t spoken to my brother in two years, my sister was a human rights campaigner who wouldn’t see the funny side of the situation, and my mother split her time between a wheelchair and romancing her physical therapist. My father? We hadn’t spoken in a long time. He’d never forgiven me for joining the police force. My closest friend for my whole adult life had been Terry Becker, but he was a cop, and I’d burned that bridge with too many lies. Who did that leave?

  I stared at my phone for a long time before typing in a number I’d spent two years trying to forget. I called my ex-wife.

  “Fuck you.”

  The first meeting in several months with my ex-wife did not get off to a great start. She stepped into the hallway of the third floor and straightened up. I watched as her cop instincts kicked in, and she guessed at what she was going to find. From there it was a short leap to work out why I’d called her.

  Laura had always been the ambitious one in our relationship, and since we’d split up she’d moved up the ranks at CID to Detective Chief Inspector. She’d gotten the promotion off the back of a large drug bust; the case had invo
lved handing a multiple murderer over to the Crown Prosecution Service wrapped in a nice bow. Police do the legwork, but it’s the CPS who ultimately decides if there is enough of a case to take to court. Once they’d jumped at the chance to try the case, the force had needed a hero to defuse the media storm that followed. Laura had been young, talented, and photogenic enough to wear the cape. What didn’t make it into the news cycle was that Laura had worked the case from both sides by going onto the Gaines payroll. She had stayed there ever since. We all gained something from the case: Laura got a promotion, Gaines got a drug monopoly, and I got spliced intestines and a limp.

  She followed up on her greeting with a more polite version. “Please, fuck right off.”

  I put out both hands in a calming gesture and attempted to look helpless. I tried to think of what to say first. She was angry but she hadn’t turned and left at the sight of my face. If I just said the right things before showing her the mess, maybe she’d stay. I’d left it brief on the phone, said I needed help and that it was personal, then told her to come with a change of clothes and use my name at reception to get up to the third floor.

  While I’d waited, I’d made myself useful.

  I’d learned a lesson the hard way. I once discovered a dead body and let it distract me so much that I failed to notice the killer was still there, hiding in another room. This time I used the master key to go from room to room, checking for any trail left by Maria. I still had no idea whether she’d had help or acted alone. Both Tony and Jelly were physically bigger than her, but I knew that meant nothing. I checked the fire escape. The hotel kept the door alarms switched off so people could make a quiet exit if the police come in through the front.

  I was still checking the stairs on the other side of the door when I heard Laura’s greeting at the other end of the hallway.

  I tried my best smile, and walked toward her slowly as she looked from me to the door of Jellyfish’s room. I’d left it open, and the smell was drifting out.

  She looked great. Her hair was shorter and darker than I’d ever seen it, and she was wrapped up in sharp and expensive clothes, dark slacks and a black shirt under a fashionable leather jacket. She looked like the exact mid-point between a hot date and a casual business meeting, and she was carrying a small overnight bag to complete the image. Then the penny dropped. There could be lots of reasons why a woman’s ex-husband might call her to a secret meeting in a hotel after dark, with a change of clothes. Most of them relating to activities without corpses.

  I never ceased to be amazed at how much of an asshole I could be.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have called but I had nobody else to ask.”

  “You have plenty of people you can ask.”

  “None that I can trust right now.”

  “So I’m your last resort?”

  I was not prepared to have that particular argument without being sure what we were arguing about, so I brought it back to specifics and filled her in on what Jellyfish had told Gaines.

  She waited me out. Then she said, “Have you thought about the obvious? Those new gangs in Birmingham? They’ve been trying to come in ever since you took out the Mann brothers. There’s that new kid—what’s the name I keep hearing, Dredge?”

  “Dodge.”

  “Right, he sounds like he has his shit together. It was him who took out Letisha, right? That’s what they say, anyway. And she worked for Gaines, so maybe Jelly approached them, and this is their next move.”

  “No. The Letisha thing was just gang stuff, territory. They wouldn’t have the savvy for something like this. And that wouldn’t explain Maria. She was good. Good enough to fool me. This is someone else.”

  She stepped past me and looked into the room, nodding. “Okay, then you’re officially fucked.”

  “We both are.” I waited to see how she took that. She didn’t, so I carried on. “See, if there’s someone on our side leaking information to the cops, they must also know that someone on your side is giving information to Gaines. Even if they don’t know it’s you, how hard would it be to follow it back?”

  “I’ve covered my tracks.” Her words were confident, rehearsed, but her eyes said something else. “There’s nothing that leads to me.”

  “You sure? You’d have to be pretty confident of that to walk away. I mean, this mess here? This isn’t your problem. Maybe I get it cleaned up, maybe I don’t. Maybe I get caught. There’s nothing to tie it to you, except your ex-husband, and everyone knows he’s a scumbag, right?” I pretended not to notice her smile. “No, this mess isn’t your problem. Your problem is the leak that led to it. This is just collateral damage. You need that leak found, which means you need me to help you. What if the cops find me with two bodies? Worse, what if Maria comes back to tidy up and finds me alone? I won’t be around to fix your mess for you. Then what? Best case? The cops find out about you, and you have to face them. Worst case? Someone on the other side finds out, maybe the people who’ve done this, maybe somebody else, and they come looking for you.”

  “That’s not worst case, to be honest. Not right now.”

  “Oh?”

  “Commissioner Perry has his election coming up. He’s not delivered on any of his promises from the last campaign—we don’t have the budgets or manpower—so he’ll need to pull something big out of his hat to distract people. Something that gets him on the front page.”

  I knew Perry. I’d helped him out of a jam once. He was another in the long list of people who had taken money from Gaines. “He won’t want to make a big deal out of police corruption. It could blow up in his face.”

  “This is politics. If he can spin it, he can use it. He can run as the man who finally exposed a corrupt Detective Chief Inspector, maybe use it to make a case against Gaines, too. I don’t want to give him any ideas.”

  “So, basically, you’re saying I’m right?”

  She sighed. “Don’t push it. Okay, where do we start?”

  “You tell me—you’re the cop. Work this backward. Can we make it look like two accidental deaths in a fire, torch the place?”

  The truth was I’d already thought most of this through. Cop training never really goes away, and once you’ve worked enough crime scenes, you have a sense of how to reverse engineer them. But I wanted to make her take the lead, to distract her from thinking too much about the implications of what we were doing.

  She looked around and shook her head, pointing at the carpet and then the bodies. “Wouldn’t work. If two bodies are found after the fire, it will have to start out as suspicious circumstances. Even if it’s just being done as a formality, there’s enough here for them to figure out something’s wrong. Then they’ll bring in a murder team, forensics. Case’ll blow.”

  She bent down and pulled at the carpet in the gap between the room and the hallway, prying it loose and pulling it up a few inches. She made quick headway, and a minute later was pushing the carpet back away from the door and exposing bare wooden floorboards.

  “The carpet’s caught most of the blood. Advantage of the cheap material they use. If we get it up now there will be minimal mess on the floorboards, and there’s none on the bed. You’re not planning on reporting any crime, right?” She waited until I nodded. Then she also nodded. “Right, so, we get rid of the carpet and the two bodies. Get someone to lay a fresh carpet, maybe repaint, and the room will be fine unless a forensic team has reason to come in.”

  “I thought you couldn’t paint over blood.”

  “You been watching TV? I’ve heard that one too, but you can paint over anything if you use enough.”

  She kicked off her shoes and left them in the hallway with her overnight bag, nodding for me to follow her into the room. Once inside the room she shut the door, then walked over to the en suite bathroom, sidestepping a patch of blood. She stepped inside the bathroom and shut the door. A moment later I heard her coug
hing, and the toilet flushed. The shower came on, but it didn’t sound like anyone stepped beneath it. I stood and waited, feeling like I’d missed an instruction manual on how to respond in this situation.

  When Laura opened the door the shower was still running and she’d stripped down to her underwear, but she wasn’t wet.

  She looked at my confused expression, and sighed, rolling her eyes before waving at the shower. “The noise will help cover us.”

  “Trust me, noise isn’t really an issue in this place. Why take off your clothes?”

  “They’re expensive, and nice. You want to ruin yours?”

  “Fair point. And the toilet?”

  “Nerves.”

  Laura was cold and methodical. I followed her lead.

  The corpses had already emptied their bowels onto the floor, and the blood flow had stopped. Whatever fluids remained inside them would have sunk to the lowest point and settled, meaning I wasn’t looking forward to turning the bodies over. Laura started on Jellyfish, who was already naked, and I did the heavier work of stripping down Tony. Using towels from the bathroom, we wiped them down so we could move them without getting covered in blood.

  I checked Tony’s wallet just as I had done earlier with Jellyfish’s, and found pictures of a woman and a young boy, a wife and child I didn’t know he had. I pocketed the wallet without showing it to Laura. I didn’t want her knowing about the family. It wouldn’t take much for her conscience to get in the way.

  We piled their clothes and belongings in the center of the room and worked our way around the edges, pulling the carpet loose. We then started pulling it into the center of the room, with me taking the weight of the furniture one corner at a time while Laura pulled the carpet beneath it. The bed took the longest, with us both needing to lift it with both hands while pulling at the carpet with our feet. Laura yelped when the cockroach ran out. Then her face flushed, and she laughed.

  “A cockroach, huh? Two dead bodies and a load of blood, fine, but you see a bug and you freak out?”