“Told you there’s lots of activity in this old place.”
Activity? She eyed them again, read the logo on their bags, and rolled her eyes. REEL PIS: PARANORMAL INVESTIGATORS. As if. She stuck her finger in the elevator button, doing her best to ignore the morons. She hadn’t heard so much as a whisper or a wail since she’d entered the hotel.
“Faster goin’ up the stairs,” Jason said, pulling her arm with one hand and pointing toward the stairway door. He flipped the door handle and pushed through. “After you,” he said with a flourish of his hand. His grin said he knew how much she disliked racing up three flights.
She gave him the stink-eye and started the climb. When she reached the third-floor landing, she glanced through the door’s rectangular window, saw no one in the hallway, and opened the door.
The corridor smelled as bad as it looked—urine to complement the yellowed beige walls, mildew to enhance the brown-and-green plaid carpet.
Gasping to catch her breath, she looked left, then right, and caught a flash of impossibly blonde hair a moment before Sylvia Reyes turned the corner farther down the hallway. Cait hurried after her, on the scent of a woman about to cheat on her husband. She turned the corner, entering a hallway marked by a door frame for a double door that no longer existed. The corridor was empty. No room doors along the short hall closed to indicate where their target had gone.
Jason drew up beside her, his eyebrows rising. “What now? Listen for moaning?”
Giving him a shove, she took a step past the hallway door frame, and then halted, some instinct keeping her from pushing forward. Or maybe what stopped her was the yellow police tape covering one of the doors. Not something she had time to ponder right that moment because a strange hum sounded. A bulb popped, plunging the hallway into darkness. The hairs on her arms lifted a second before electricity arced from a light switch, sending out a bolt like lightning that shot toward the ceiling, then turned, traveling toward her, hitting doorways as though searching for ground. The jagged dagger of electricity darted, then blinked out, but not before she saw a figure, one in four-inch hot pink heels, her eyes rounding in terror—a figure she could see straight through to the piss-yellow wall behind her.
Darkness took the figure. Then another hissing arc flared from the light switch, brightening the hallway again. Sylvia Reyes was gone.
Jason grabbed her arm, pulled her back around the corner, and flattened her against the wall with an elbow digging into her belly.
The white bolt flickered past the corner, then dove to the floor, sparking out with a fizzle.
“Bad wiring?” he whispered.
She shook her head, shoved away his elbow, and stepped into the hall again. The faint smell of something burning lingered in the air. The hall was once again empty. And dark.
Cait held still, listening, and then she heard the sound. A soft wail. Like a distant echo. “Hear that?” she whispered.
“No. What do you hear?”
She swallowed. “Not anyone living.”
Then the faint sound of whispers rose, maybe half a dozen voices joining in chorus. Her hand dropped to the camera at her side. She flipped off the lens cap, raised the camera, and looked through the viewfinder. Nothing out of the ordinary, other than a really sleazy flophouse. Still, she clicked off a couple of shots. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t want to wait around until she leaves? A shot of the lady kissing her boyfriend good-bye would close this case.”
Cait shook her head, not wanting to voice what she suspected. Not before she was sure of exactly what she’d seen. “No. Let’s get back to the office. I have to look at something.”
Jason knew her well enough not to ask any more questions. The fact she was cutting the surveillance short told him they had a problem.
This time they took the elevator. The sooner she got out of here the better. Well, she’d gotten what she’d wished for. Something out of the ordinary had definitely happened.
Back at the Delta Detective Agency, Cait slipped the memory card from her camera into the slot in her computer. With a couple of clicks, she found the file of pictures and opened it.
There was Sylvia Reyes outside the Deluxe, her small catlike features coated in too much makeup, her coarse blonde hair flattened to rest limply on her shoulders. Her expression was furtive, but excitement sparkled in her dark eyes. Another shot caught her too-tight skirt hugging her J.LO butt. Then Cait clicked on the last two shots, unsure what she might see inside the third-floor hallway. Maybe nothing. Maybe something she didn’t want to see.
The shot showed an empty hallway. The photo was blurred, but the differences between the hall’s actual appearance and what was on the computer screen was startling. Gone were the yellowed walls and crappy brown and green carpet. In its place was wallpaper—a foiled gold-and-wine-colored paisley. The carpet was a solid blood red. The fixtures—lights, switches, brass plates on the door—were shiny and new.
“Where’d you take that?” Jason asked, hovering at her shoulder.
“At the Deluxe,” she said, closing out the file. She suppressed a shiver of dread.
“No kiddin’? How come I didn’t see that?”
She didn’t dare look his way. He’d see her shock and ask more questions. Questions she didn’t have any quick answers for.
“Tacky as hell, but—”
She gave a sharp shake of her head. “That’s not the way it is.” At last, she shot an upward glance.
Jason pushed out his lips. His gaze settled on her, waiting.
She knew he wouldn’t let her up from the chair until she gave him at least a clue of what was going on in her head. “It’s the way the hotel was.”
His gaze narrowed. “What do you mean?”
She rubbed a hand over her face. “I don’t know what I mean.”
A frown dug a line between his blond-brown brows. “I don’t think Reyes is going to pay us for those shots or our time since we didn’t get what he wanted.”
“Reyes is the least of our problems,” she muttered.
Jason groaned. “It was the anchovies, right? This is your revenge?”
Her mouth tipped up into a smirk. “You think this is all about you? Poor little rich boy.”
He shook his head, grinning, but the fine lines beside his hazel eyes deepened with worry. “Since this case looks like major woo-woo is involved, you have the lead. Where to first?”
Cait grimaced. Once again, she had no doubt they were headed straight down the rabbit’s hole. “I need to talk to Sam about that taped-off room.”
2
At Cait’s apartment, Sam Pierce felt along the top of the door frame, and then cursed as his fingers encountered cool metal. Heat filled his cheeks as anger boiled up. But he hesitated before barging in. Instead, he opened his palm and stared down at the brass Brinks key. For the first time since he’d resumed his on-again/off-again relationship with his ex-wife, he studied the key, his detective’s instincts kicking into gear.
This was no dusty, corrosion-encrusted key. The metal gleamed in the light cast by the lamp outside her door. If what he suspected was true, Cait hadn’t simply forgotten about the key being there all this time. She’d replaced it.
But why? And when?
She’d had no idea they would be pulled together again on the Worthen case, that he’d be ordered to stay on her tail day in, day out, until the investigation ended. And yet, the first time he’d sought her out after nearly a year of forcing himself not to check, not to care, this shiny new key had been there. Waiting.
It’s what enabled him to break into her apartment that first morning when he’d been scared shitless she was somehow involved with the murder of Henry Prudoe, the incident that launched their investigation. The key’s presence was what allowed him to continue to enter at will, take what he wanted of her, then quietly leave again.