by Rob Thomas
With that, Grace Manning hung up the phone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Eagle’s Nest was even more dazzling in person than on video. Fragrant herbs and flowers overflowed from recessed planters. At the central bar, backlit rows of top-grade liquor lined a crescent-shaped wall. The ocean was visible beyond the other buildings downtown.
It was still early, and the bar was almost empty. Two men in suits, their ties loosened, sat talking quietly in chairs that looked out over the vista. A young woman with hair knotted in a tortured-looking bun read a paperback at the bar. Other than that, the only person was the bartender—the exact person Veronica was looking for.
Alyssa Winchell was in her late twenties, with dark hair cut in a bob around her cheekbones and a silver hoop in her left nostril. She stood behind the bar, yawning as she dried a glass. Veronica sat on one of the high wooden stools, a few seats down from the girl with her book.
“Hey, hon, what can I get for you?” The bartender put down the glass and braced her weight against the counter.
Veronica handed her a card. “I’m looking into the assault that happened here back in March. I was wondering if you had a moment to answer a few questions.”
Alyssa’s eyes widened. She stared at the card for a moment, then looked up. “Shit. You’re that private eye who busted the girl who faked her kidnapping, right?”
My dear stepsister, Veronica thought drily. Aurora Scott—her mom’s new husband’s daughter—had used Hayley Dewalt’s disappearance to stage her own, hoping to reap the reward money.
“That’s me,” Veronica said. “Do you have a minute?”
“Sure.” The woman leaned in toward Veronica. “I don’t know how useful I’ll be—I already told those cops everything I know. Total dicks, if you ask me,” she said. “They treated me like I was some kind of criminal because I couldn’t tell her ID was fake. It’s not worth my job to serve eighteen-year-old kids. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have. But—I mean, the license looked fine. And you’ve seen her, right? She looks like she’s older. What nineteen-year-old carries a fucking Fendi handbag?”
Chatty, defensive, observant. My new favorite witness.
Veronica smiled sympathetically. “Yeah, well, they were probably just trying to cover their own asses. That whole investigation’s been a royal clusterfuck from the get-go.”
Alyssa smirked. “Typical douche-nozzle cops.”
“Hear, hear!” Veronica drummed her knuckles on the wooden bar top. “So, did the victim come in pretty often?”
“Oh, yeah, she was in here a lot. Three, four times a month.”
“Did you ever see her meeting anyone in the bar?” Veronica asked. “Did she talk to anyone?”
A sly smile crossed Alyssa’s face. She glanced up the bar at the reader, still immersed in her novel. Then she looked back at Veronica.
“Nope. Never saw her talking to anyone here, except the staff. I mean, plenty of guys tried to talk to her, but she made it pretty clear she wasn’t interested. She’d just come in, have a few drinks, pay her tab in cash, and leave. She was a good tipper.”
“That’s so strange,” Veronica said, injecting a note of earnest confusion into her voice. “Why would she come in here all the time if she wasn’t meeting anyone?”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a theory about that.” Alyssa leaned in a little. Veronica hid a smile. Chatty, defensive, observant, and a gossip. Jackpot. “I mean, I’m guessing you’ve seen the surveillance tape. You saw what she was wearing, right?”
Veronica nodded.
“The girl was flashing some serious labels. And that was totally normal for her. She’d come in here on a weeknight, dolled up like she was going to a movie premiere.” Alyssa looked at her significantly. “You’ve heard about her boyfriend?”
“I heard she had one,” Veronica said carefully.
“Yeah, well, my impression: older dude, married. Kind of guy that loves to throw his cash around,” she said. “Eventually he gets a little soft around the gut—maybe in the sack too—but as long as he can buy his girl some diamonds, he feels powerful.”
Veronica frowned. “Did Grace ever talk to you about him?”
Alyssa shook her head. “Nope. She was pretty discreet about personal stuff. Sweet girl, though. If she was in on a slow night we’d talk sometimes. She’s smarter than she looks.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Veronica.
“I’ve met more than my fair share of dumb, mercenary bitches working here.” Alyssa tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “But Grace uses words like pivotal and Brechtian when she talks about TV shows. She can’t dumb herself down even when she’s trying.”
The reader at the end of the bar waved her hand, trying to get the bartender’s attention. Alyssa held up one finger toward Veronica, a just-a-minute gesture, and went to see what she wanted. For a moment, Veronica just sat and watched as Alyssa pulled out half a dozen liqueurs, chatting easily with the customer while she mixed, shook, and poured the complex drink. Then she came back, smiling apologetically. “Sorry about that. What was I saying?”
“Do you remember any other particular nights she was in here? Did anything ever stand out to you?”
Alyssa thought for a moment. “I don’t remember specific dates, if that’s what you’re asking…” She bit the corner of her lip. “Actually, she was in here the night of the fight.”
“Fight?”
“Oh, man, it was epic.” Her eyes flashed. “Somehow both Jimmy Ray Baker—a stubble-faced slab of man meat—and Oneiroi were in town the same night, and guess where they both were staying?”
Veronica gratified her with an open-mouthed gape, only half feigned; it was kind of funny. Former rodeo champion, super patriot, and noted NRA-apologist Jimmy Lee Baker was one of the top-charting country singers in the US. His latest No. 1, “Welcome Home, Sergeant Jake,” was an over-the-top weeper in which a high school football coach reconnects with his legless former star tailback at a Veteran’s Day parade. Oneiroi, on the other hand, consisted of three emaciated junkies in corpse paint who shrieked black metal suites about insect-headed succubi.
Alyssa grinned at Veronica’s expression. “I know, right? I don’t know what started it, but Baker’s bass player lost his shit and took a swing at one of the Oneiroi fans. Everyone was wasted, so of course it instantly turned into a full-on brawl. Grace left just before it happened. I remember telling her afterward that she’d missed the best show of the night.”
“What night was that?”
Alyssa frowned. “It was back in December, I think….I can’t remember the specific date.”
“Thanks so much. You’ve been really helpful.” Veronica dropped a twenty in the tip jar—an investment in future goodwill—and eased herself off the stool.
She had one more stop to make. Her dad still had some old friends from his days as sheriff, including a retired deputy who just happened to be a security guard at the Grand. It looked as though she needed to cash in a favor.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the cab on the way back to the office, she called Mac. “What are you doing tonight?”
“I have a feeling the answer might be ‘working late.’ What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you as soon as I get there.”
When she arrived at the office twenty minutes later, the neon Mars Investigations sign was off but Mac was, as always, at her computer.
“Thanks for staying,” Veronica said without preamble. “I’ll add you to the list of people I owe big. My boyfriend’s on top but you’re bum-to-belt-buckle with him.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about that image,” Mac said.
Veronica caught Mac up on the phone call and all it meant for the case. “Okay, so we’re not working for Preuss anymore,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to stop working.”
Mac looked at her for a long moment. Then she gave a quick nod. “You’d better see what I’ve been doing, then.”
Her
monitors were filled by all the different angles of the Neptune Grand’s security cameras, playing at double speed. Grace entered the front door and crossed the lobby. She got in the elevator, then, a few beats later, she got out again at the Eagle’s Nest.
“I’ve been watching all the footage between ten p.m. and seven a.m.,” Mac said. “As far as I can see, exactly forty-two people leave in that time span. I’ve got screenshots of all of them, and I’ve been logging all their movements.” She showed Veronica her tablet, where she’d scrawled a complicated timeline with her stylus.
11:01—PSU BASKETBALLERS SNEAK IN POOL.
11:07—BALLERS CHASED OUT OF POOL.
11:13—RED-HEADED MAN GOES TO BATHROOM IN BAR;
MANNING ORDERS 2ND DRINK; SANTIAGO (GUARD)
TALKS TO COHEN (CLERK) AT FRONT DESK.
11:16—RED-HEADED MAN RETURNS TO BAR STOOL.
11:20—RAMIREZ PUSHES CART UP THE SERVICE HALLWAY.
The words were color-coded, indicating if the subjects were staff or guests, and in places the text was cramped, the increments of time becoming ever smaller as Mac filled in every minuscule movement she could track.
“Wow,” Veronica said. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or set up an intervention. This looks like Russell Crowe’s wall in A Beautiful Mind.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out if any of them could be the victim in disguise,” Mac said. “Wearing a wig, or…whatever. But it’s impossible.” She sped up the footage by another click. Veronica watched as Grace disappeared into the stairwell. After that there was little movement other than employees gossiping in the lobby or moving around the lower floors. “Sixteen hotel employees leave at midnight, through the service entrance. None of them are hauling anything big enough to hide a body. Then there are four people who leave the bar when it closes at two, but they’re on camera the whole time—none of them are ever unaccounted for. Then there are the ball players at five a.m.”
“Unless she’s on stilts, Grace Manning isn’t with them.” Veronica’s eyes narrowed. The players all had identical black rolling duffels. It was hard to tell how big they were—the players were so tall they dwarfed everything. “Do you think she could fit into one of those bags?”
Mac leaned over, frowning. “Well, the wainscoting here is about three feet tall,” she said, pointing to the wooden paneling on the wall of the lobby behind one of the players. “So I’d say the bag is two feet long—two and a half, tops. I don’t know, that seems tight.”
“She’s pretty tiny, though.” Grace Manning was barely taller than Veronica and weighed maybe one-ten. Any of the towering men on that team could have picked her up—but she wasn’t sure if that translated to wheeling her out the door in a bag. Veronica watched as one by one, the players boarded the bus. The bus door faced away from the camera, toward the street beyond, so there was no way to track the bags past that point. She imagined they were filling up the hold beneath the bus.
“All those bags end up on a bus full of people, though. How would the attacker get her off the bus and into that field without everyone seeing?”
It was a good point. Veronica thought about the cover-ups she’d heard about in the past several years, stories of corruption in college athletics, where players’ crimes were an open secret protected by their teammates and even their coaches. Drugs, beatings, rape, even murder had been hushed up by group assent. But it was hard to imagine an entire busload of college kids—including managers and coaches and a chartered bus driver—agreeing to dump a wounded girl on the side of the road without a single leak in the months since.
Veronica squinted at the screen, then shook her head. She grabbed her bag and rummaged for a moment until she found an unlabeled disc. “Mind popping this in?”
Mac took the disc and put it into the drive. A moment later, they were looking at a new set of surveillance images.
“What’s this?”
“Security footage for December fifteenth from the Neptune Grand.” She leaned down over Mac’s shoulder and watched. “They usually record over the footage after a month, unless there’s an incident. Lucky for us, there was.”
The angles were exactly the same as those the night of Grace’s rape, but now Christmas decorations hung all over the lobby and the bar. A fifteen-foot tree stood just catty-corner from the front desk, gold and silver orbs glittering from every branch. On the roof, garlands looped along the bar, and both the bartenders wore Santa hats. Veronica noticed Alyssa at once, though her hair was a different color, dark red, and a bit longer than it was now.
The time stamp read 9:30. Just as Alyssa had said, the bar was packed to bursting with an eclectic crowd. Men in cowboy hats and embroidered Western shirts sat around the fire pit, talking to girls in Daisy Dukes. Gathered around the railings was a crowd sporting black vinyl bondage gear and zombie-eye contact lenses. Every now and then someone in one group would gesture at the other, or cast a furtive look their way.
“There she is.” At 9:32, Grace Manning entered the lobby. This time her hair was loose, curled into Veronica Lake waves that framed her face. She wore a gray trench that hit mid-thigh, her long legs bare beneath it. She headed to the elevator. Inside, the close-up of her face showed her carefully made-up face. She stood facing the doors and smoothed her hair.
Up at the bar, Alyssa was mobbed with people clamoring for drinks, but as soon as she saw Grace, she nodded at her and leaned in close. After a moment, Alyssa moved away to mix a drink. Grace took off her coat to reveal a low-backed black dress.
In the far corner, a stubble-faced Jimmy Ray Baker—wearing his denim shirt unbuttoned halfway down an admittedly impressive set of pecs—pulled out a guitar and started noodling. A girl with big Texas hair and pink cowboy boots climbed up onto one of the benches and began to dance, while another did an impromptu lap dance, grinding against one of the entourage.
Alyssa slid a martini glass across the bar to Grace, and Grace walked with it to the railing, looking out over the city. For a while all they could see was the girl’s bare back. At one point, a cowboy walked up to her and appeared to talk to her. A few minutes later, he slunk away, leaving Grace alone again.
“Shot down,” Mac said, impressed.
At 9:57, Grace set her empty glass on the bar and headed toward the stairwell, giving both Goths and goat-ropers a wide berth. She disappeared into the dark portal without a backward glance.
A minute later, a fight broke out. Mac paused the video, just as Jimmy Ray Baker drove his fist into a wraithlike metalhead’s face.
“So…why are we watching this?” she said.
“If Grace was there that night, then so was her boyfriend, assuming he didn’t cancel on her again.” Veronica nodded at the screen. “Fast forward. See what time she goes back downstairs.”
Mac clicked a key, and the images rushed forward. In the Eagle’s Nest, the skinny kid was getting mobbed by men in cowboy hats. Alyssa and the handful of other guests dove behind the bar to get out of the way.
“I feel like ‘Yakety Sax’ should be playing in the background,” Mac said.
“Or the score to West Side Story,” Veronica said.
In the lobby, there was no sign of Grace Manning. They watched as security ran across the lobby toward the elevator doors, hotel guests watching with startled eyes. Upstairs on the roof, an Oneiroi fan was waving a broken beer bottle. The security guards barged into the scene, deputies a moment later. Some of the warring factions were led away in cuffs, while others melted into the night. The bar cleared out. Back downstairs, a manager in an ill-fitting suit stood talking with desk staff, probably debriefing about the fight. A news crew showed up and was rebuffed.
At 1:14 a.m., the door to the stairwell in the ground-floor lobby swung open. Grace Manning stepped out, as cool and put together as she’d been when she’d first arrived. She had the trench coat wrapped tightly around her again. On her way out of the rotating glass door, she waved familiarly at the valet. He waved back with a grin.
Mac stared at Veronica. “Petra doesn’t strike me as naive. I’m guessing she’ll have pretty good network security. It might take me a couple days to hack my way into her reservations database.”
“Then it’s a good thing I have a password,” Veronica said. She grabbed a pen and a Post-it note from the desk. She jotted down two lines.
Login: corrigans
Password: pumpkin_and_princess
Mac raised her eyebrows. Veronica shrugged. “I watched Petra’s assistant log in.”
Mac’s fingers flew over the keyboard as she made her way into the Neptune Grand’s system. After signing in as Gladys, she clicked several times until she found the correct date. “There were five-hundred thirteen people staying at the Grand on the night of the fifteenth,” Mac said. “But only twenty-one with local zip codes attached to their billing addresses.”
Veronica leaned in closer. “How many are men?”
A tiny crease formed between Mac’s eyes. She stared at the screen for a moment, then highlighted a few more names. “Fourteen men, one ‘Avery,’ who could be either, I guess.”
Veronica narrowed her eyes. “Any way to find out how many have stayed there in the past, say, year?”
“Yeah, just a second.” Mac ran the names through the system one by one. The silence stretched out, Mac’s face pale in the light of the monitor. Veronica waited, watching names and dates flit across the screen.
Then Mac’s shoulders went rigid.
“What?” Veronica asked. When Mac didn’t answer, she frowned. “Did you find him?”
“Yeah. I found him.” Her voice was strange, low and flat.
Veronica looked at her curiously. “Well?”
Mac finally tore her eyes away from the screen and looked straight at Veronica. “It’s Charles Sinclair.”
