I took my quarters to the cage and asked to cash out. I no longer had an appetite for gambling with small change. I was going to invest my winnings in two more beers and take them back to my room. There was more writing I could be doing, as well as preparing for the next morning’s interview. I was going to talk to a man who’d been in prison for more than a year for a murder I was convinced he hadn’t committed. It was going to be a wonderful day, the goddamn start of every journalist’s dream to free an innocent man from an unjust imprisonment.
While waiting for the elevator in the lobby I carried the bottles down by my side in case I was breaking some sort of house rule. I stepped in, pushed the button and moved to the back corner. The doors started to come together but then a gloved hand poked in and hit the infrared beam and the doors reopened.
My pal Sideburns stepped in. He raised a finger to push a button but then pulled it back.
“Hey, we’ve got the same floor,” he said.
“Wonderful,” I said.
He went to the opposite corner. I knew he was going to say something and there was no place for me to go. I just waited for it and I wasn’t disappointed.
“Hey, buddy, I didn’t mean to mess up your mojo down there. My ex-wife used to say I talked too much. Maybe that’s why she’s my ex-wife.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I have to get some work done anyway.”
“So you’re here on work, huh? What kind of business would take you to this godforsaken part of the world?”
Here we go again, I thought. The elevator was moving so slowly that it would’ve been faster taking the stairs.
“I have an appointment tomorrow at the prison.”
“Gotcha. You a lawyer for one of them guys?”
“No. Journalist.”
“Hmm, a writer, huh? Well, good luck. At least you’ll get to go home after, not like them other fellas in there.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
I moved toward the door as we reached the fourth floor, a clear signal that I was finished with the conversation and wanted to get to my room. The elevator stopped moving and it seemed an interminable amount of time before the doors finally began to open.
“Have a good night,” I said.
I stepped quickly out of the elevator and to the left. My room was the third door down.
“You, too, partner,” Sideburns called after me.
I had to switch the two beer bottles to my other hand to get my room key out. As I stood in front of the door, pulling it out of my pocket, I saw Sideburns coming down the hallway toward me. I turned and looked to my right. There were only three more rooms going down and then the exit to the stairwell. I had a bad feeling that this guy would eventually come knocking on my door during the night, wanting to go down for a beer or out to get some pussy. The first thing I planned to do was pack up, call the desk and change my room. He didn’t know my name and wouldn’t be able to find me.
I finally got the key into the lock and pushed the door open. I looked back at Sideburns and gave him a final nod. His face broke into a strange smile as he got closer.
“Hi, Jack,” a voice said from inside my room.
I abruptly turned to see a woman getting up from the chair by the window in my room. And I immediately recognized her as Rachel Walling. She had an all-business look on her face. I felt the presence of Sideburns go by my back on his way to his room.
“Rachel?” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Why don’t you come in and close the door?”
Still stunned by the surprise, I did as instructed. I closed the door behind me. From out in the hallway I heard another door close loudly. Sideburns had entered his room.
Cautiously, I stepped farther into my room.
“How’d you get in here?”
“Just sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Twelve years earlier I’d had a short, intense and, some would say, improper relationship with Rachel Walling. While I had seen photos of her in the papers a few years ago when she helped the LAPD run down and kill a wanted man in Echo Park, I had not been in her presence since we had sat in a hearing room nearly a decade earlier. Still, not many days went by in those ten years that I didn’t think about her. She was one reason-perhaps the biggest reason-that I have always considered that time the high point of my life.
She showed little wear and tear from the years that had passed, even though I knew it had been a tough time. She paid for her relationship with me with a five-year stint in a one-person office in South Dakota. She went from profiling and chasing serial killers to investigating bar stabbings on Indian reservations.
But she had climbed out of that pit and had been posted in L.A. for the past five years, working for some sort of a secretive intelligence unit. I had called her when I’d found out, gotten through to her but been rebuffed. Since then I had kept tabs on her, when I could, from afar. And now she was standing in front of me in my hotel room in the middle of nowhere. It was strange, sometimes, how life worked out.
My surprise over her appearance aside, I couldn’t stop staring and smiling at her. She maintained the professional front, but I could see her eyes holding on me. It wasn’t very often you got to be this close to a former lover of so long ago.
“Who was that you were with?” she asked. “Are you with a photographer on this story?”
I turned and looked back at the doorway.
“No, I’m by myself. And I don’t know who that was. Just some guy who’d been talking to me downstairs in the gambling hall. He went to his room.”
She abruptly walked past me, opened the door and looked both ways in the hall before coming back into the room and closing the door.
“What was his name?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really talking to him.”
“Which room is he in?”
“I don’t know that either. What’s going on? How come you’re in my room?”
I pointed to the bed. My laptop was open and my printouts of notes, the copies of the case files I had gotten from Schifino and Meyer as well as the printouts from Angela Cook’s online search were fanned across it. The only thing missing from the spread was the transcript of the Winslow interrogation, and that was only because it had been too heavy to take with me.
I hadn’t left it all on the bed like that.
“And were you going through my stuff? Rachel, I asked you for help. I didn’t ask you to break into my room and-”
“Look, just sit down, would you?”
The room had only one chair, the one she had been waiting in. I sat on the bed, closing my laptop sullenly and gathering the paperwork into one stack. She remained standing.
“Okay, I showed my creds and asked the manager to let me in. I told him your safety might be in jeopardy.”
I shook my head in confusion.
“What are you talking about? Nobody even knows I’m here.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You told me you were going to the prison up here. Who else did you tell? Who else knows?”
“I don’t know. I told my editor and there’s a lawyer down in Vegas who knows. That’s it.”
She nodded.
“William Schifino. Yes, I talked to him.”
“You talked to him? Why? What is going on here, Rachel?”
She nodded again, but this time not in agreement. She nodded because she knew she had to tell me what was going on, even if it was against the FBI creed. She pulled the chair over to the middle of the room and sat down facing me.
“Okay, when you called me today, you weren’t making the most sense, Jack. I guess you are a better writer than a teller of stories. Anyway, of all that you told me, the part that stuck with me was what you said about your credit cards and bank accounts and your phone and e-mail. I know I told you I couldn’t help you but after I hung up, I started thinking about that and I got concerned.”
“Why?”
“Because you were looking at all of that like it was an inconvenience. Like a big coincidence, that it just happened to be going on while you were on the road working on this unrelated story about this supposed killer.”