Unfortunately, the two suspect women — the blonde and the black girl — have thus far eluded pursuit, and so far none of the Cape October uniforms have spotted the suspect blue Impala. So he figures if the MCU can come up with real meat, then he can go back to the Glendenning woman and calm her down regarding the procedure they’ve been following, a perfectly sound procedure, by the way, that resulted in a capture and conviction in the Henley case three years ago, even though the little boy was dead by the time they got there.
The three MBU cops know how important this case is to the captain, so they go over the ladies’ room with more devotion to detail than they might normally lavish at any crime scene. They vacuum the place top to bottom for stray hairs or fibers, they dust the sink faucets and knobs for latent fingerprints, and the paper towel dispenser, and the hand drier, too, and the doorknobs — inside and out — on the entrance door, and the turn bolt lock on the entrance door, and the latch on the door to the one stall in the room, and the flush handle on the toilet, and the toilet seat, and the toilet-paper holder, and the windowsill, and the little pulls on the window sash, and the window itself, and anything and everything in that room. It is almost two-thirty by the time they leave the place.
The manager tells them he’s had a lot of complaints from ladies who had to pee.
Johnson, the detective/first heading up the team, tells him he should have directed them to the men’s room.
“Shoulda thought of that,” the manager says.
It is still raining.
In Cape October, during the rainy season — but May is not the rainy season — you can expect a thunderstorm along about three or four every afternoon, at which time the humidity and the heat have combined to leave the suffering citizenry virtually limp. The rain, when it comes, mercilessly assaults the sidewalks and the streets, but only for an hour or so. During that short while, the torrential downpour brings at least a semblance of relief. But once the rain stops, you’d never know it had been there at all. Oh, yes, the gutters are running with swift-flowing muddy water, and there are huge brown puddles everywhere, and here and there a truly flooded street — but the heat and the humidity follow as closely behind the brief storm as does a rapist his victim. Within minutes you are sweating again.
This is not the rainy season; this is May.
But by three o’clock that afternoon, the rain is coming down in buckets.
Detectives Wilbur Sloate and George Cooper have been driving in the pouring rain from motel to motel ever since two o’clock. Following the Cape October city and county grid supplied to them by Captain Steele, they have already visited twelve motels, and when they spot an Impala in the courtyard outside the Tamiami Trail Motor Lodge, they can hardly wait to get out of the maroon Buick they’re driving.
“Go!” Sloate shouts, and both detectives burst out of the car and into the rain, dashing across the courtyard to the motel office, where — in his soft-spoken, seemingly subservient black way — Cooper tells the clerk behind the desk that they are looking for a person driving an Avis-rented blue Impala, and they’ve just noticed that there is such a vehicle parked outside, sir.
“Yeah?” the clerk says.
“Want to tell us who’s driving that car?” Cooper asks.
“Let me see your badges,” the clerk says.
They both flash the Cape October PD tin.
The clerk studies the shields as if they were freshly minted. He is not sure how he feels about cops on the property. He is sure his boss won’t like learning about it when he comes in tomorrow morning. But there’s nothing he can do about their being here, he supposes, unless…
“You got a search warrant?” he asks.
“Mister,” Cooper says, “let’s just see your damn register, okay?”
This turns out to be academic because Sloate is already turning the register so they can read it. They have no trouble finding the license plate number from the car outside, or matching it with the name alongside it, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Holt from Cleveland, Michigan.
“This the room they’re in?” Cooper asks. “3B?”
“It’s a cabin. We don’t have rooms here, we have cabins,” the clerk says.
“This the cabin then?”
“That’s the one.”
“They happen to be black, these people?”
“Man was white. Didn’t see the woman, she stayed in the car. Lots of them stay in the car while the man registers. Specially if it’s raining.”
“Was it raining three days ago, when it says here they checked in?”
“I don’t know what it was doing three days ago,” the clerk says.
“Then you want to show us where 3B is?” Sloate says.
“It’s right across the courtyard,” the clerk says. “What’s this all about, anyway?”
“Just checkin on a car, is all,” Cooper says.
The clerk figures they’re looking for either a wanted desperado or an al-Qaeda terrorist, but he points them in the right direction, and hopes there won’t be any gunplay here.
The white man who opens the door is wearing a bathrobe over pajamas. This is a quarter to four in the afternoon and he’s ready to go to bed. Meanwhile, the two detectives are standing in the rain.
“Mind if we come in, sir?” Sloate asks.
“Well, gee, I don’t know,” Holt says.
He has a little Charlie Chaplin mustache. Behind him, the television set is on with a rerun of a cop movie. The detectives have just showed him their shields, but Holt seems more interested in the movie than in the real live cops standing in front of him. They can hear a shower running behind a closed door they assume leads to the bathroom. Mr. Holt’s wife, no doubt, if indeed she is his wife. Quarter to four in the afternoon, he’s ready for bed. Can it be his wife? They are still standing in the rain. He still hasn’t asked them to come in.
Sloate steps in, anyway, guidelines be damned. Cooper comes right in behind him. Holt still doesn’t know what they want, but to play it safe he tells them he’s from Cleveland, Michigan — which they already know from the register — and that he has been coming down to Cape October ever since 1973, when he caught bronchitis and his doctor advised him to go someplace warm for the winter. He tells them that he is here with his wife, Sophie, who is at this moment taking a shower, and he tells them that tomorrow he will be taking her to Disney World in Orlando.
“Been coming down here for more ’n thirty years now, never been to Disney World, can you imagine?” he says.
“Is your wife black?” Cooper asks.
“Black?” Holt says. “No. What kind of question is that? Black? I’m from Cleveland. What do you mean, black? My wife? What’s this all about, anyway?”
He does not look or sound like the sort of person who has kidnapped a pair of little kids, but then again not many rapists look like rapists or bank robbers like bank robbers, at least not in the experience of these two cops. In any case, there is just this one room here, and the bathroom beyond, where they can still hear the shower going, so they have to assume — until they can check out the bathroom, at any rate — that since there are no little kids in evidence, this is not the man and woman who kidnapped the Glendenning children. Unless Mrs. Holt — if she is Mrs. Holt — turns out to be the black Sheena of the Jungle they followed strutting up Citrus Avenue with the expensive French luggage bouncing on her hip and the wide gold bracelet on her arm.
“We’d like to have a look in that bathroom whenever Mrs. Holt is finished in there,” Sloate says.
“I don’t suppose you have a search warrant, do you?” Holt asks.
“No, we don’t, Mr. Holt,” Sloate says. “Do you want us to go all the way downtown to get one?”