“And if he left by the stairs, no one would have seen him,” she continued. “The doormen don’t wait on the sidewalk late at night, certainly not when it’s this cold. Who is the room billed to?” she again asked.
“To her, to Ms. Crispin. She came in and stopped by the desk around eleven-forty-five last night. Again, I wasn’t here. I got here a few minutes later.”
“Why would she stop by the desk if she’d been a guest here since October?” Scarpetta asked. “Why wouldn’t she just go straight up to her room?”
“The hotel uses magnetic key cards,” Curtis said. “No doubt you’ve had the experience of not using your card for a while and it doesn’t work. Whenever new keys are made, we have a record of it on the computer, which includes the checkout date. Ms. Crispin had two new keys made for her.”
This was more than a little perplexing. Scarpetta asked Curtis to think about what he was suggesting for a moment. If Carley had a friend-Dr. Warner Agee-staying in her room, she wouldn’t leave him with an expired key.
“If he’s not registered or paying the bill,” she explained, “he wouldn’t have the authority to have a new key issued if the old one expired because the checkout date encoded on it had been exceeded. He couldn’t extend the reservation himself, I would assume, if he’s not the one paying the bill and his name isn’t even on the reservation.”
“That’s true.”
“Then maybe we can conclude her key wasn’t expired, and maybe that’s not really why she had two new ones made,” Scarpetta said. “Did she do anything else when she stopped by the front desk last night?”
“If you’ll give me a moment. Let me see what I can find out.” He got on his phone and made a call. He said to someone, “Do we know if Ms. Crispin was locked out of her room, or did she simply stop by the desk for new keys? And if so, why?” He listened. Then he said, “Of course. Yes, yes, if you would do that right now. I’m sorry to wake him up.” He waited.
A call was being made to the desk clerk who would have dealt with Carley late last night, someone who probably was at home, asleep. Curtis kept apologizing to Scarpetta for making her wait. He was getting increasingly distressed, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief and clearing his throat often. Marino’s voice drifted out of the room, and she could hear him walking around. He was talking to someone on the phone, but Scarpetta couldn’t make out what he was saying.
The manager said, “Yes. I’m still here.” Nodding his head. “I see. Well, that makes sense.” He tucked his phone back in the pocket of his tweed jacket. “Ms. Crispin came in and went straight to the desk. She said she hadn’t been to the hotel for a while and worried her key wouldn’t work and her friend was hard of hearing. She worried he might not hear her if she knocked on the door. You see, her reservation was month-to-month, and the last time she renewed it was November twentieth, meaning the key would have expired tomorrow, Saturday. So the reservation needed to be extended if she intended to keep the room, and she went ahead and renewed it and was given two new keys.”
“She extended the reservation until January twentieth?”
“Actually, she extended it only through the weekend. She said she likely would be checking out of the room on Monday the twenty-second,” Curtis said, staring at the partially opened door of room 412.
Scarpetta could hear Marino moving around in there.
“He never saw her leave,” Curtis added. “The person working the desk when she came in saw her take the elevator up, but he didn’t see her come back down. And I certainly haven’t seen her, either, as I’ve said.”
“Then she must have taken the stairs,” Scarpetta said. “Because she’s not here and neither is her friend, presumably Dr. Agee. To your knowledge, when Ms. Crispin has been here in the past, has she ever taken the stairs?”
“Most people don’t. I’ve never heard anyone mention she did. Now, some of our high-profile guests try to be very discreet about their comings and goings. But frankly, Ms. Crispin doesn’t seem to be what I’d call shy.”
Scarpetta thought about the hair clippings in the sink. She wondered if Carley had let herself into the room and might have seen what was in the bathroom. Or maybe Agee was still in the room when she showed up to drop off Scarpetta’s stolen BlackBerry. Had they left together? Both of them taking the stairs and leaving Scarpetta’s stolen BlackBerry in the room? Scarpetta envisioned Agee with his shaved face and head and no hearing aids and possibly no glasses, sneaking down the stairs with Carley Crispin. It didn’t make sense. Something else had happened.
“Does your hotel’s computer system keep a log for when rooms are entered and exited by using these magnetic key cards?” Scarpetta thought it unlikely but asked anyway.
“No. Most hotel systems, at least none I know of, would not have something like that. Nor do they have information on the cards.”
“No names, addresses, credit card numbers. Nothing like that encoded on the cards,” she said.
“Absolutely not,” he replied. “Stored on the computer but not the card. The cards open the doors and that’s all. We don’t have logs. In fact, most hotel cards, at least ones I’m familiar with, don’t even have the room number encoded on them, no information of any sort except the checkout date.” He looked at room 412 and said, “I guess you didn’t find anybody. Nobody’s in there.”
“Detective Marino is in there.”
“Well, I’m glad,” Curtis said, relieved. “I didn’t want to think the worst about Ms. Crispin or her friend.”
He meant he didn’t want to think one or both of them were dead inside that room.
“You don’t need to wait up here,” Scarpetta told him. “We’ll let you know when we’re done. It may be a while.”
The room was quiet when she walked back in and shut the door. Marino had turned off the TV and was standing in the bathroom, holding the BlackBerry in a gloved hand, staring at what was all over the sink and the marble countertop and the floor.
“Warner Agee,” she said, pulling on the gloves Marino had given to her earlier. “That’s who’s been staying in this room. Probably not Carley, probably not ever. It would appear she showed up last night around eleven-forty-five, my guess, for the express purpose of giving Warner Agee my BlackBerry. I need to borrow yours. I can’t use mine.”
“If that’s who did this, not good,” Marino said, entering the password on his BlackBerry, handing it to her. “I don’t like that. Shaving off all your hair and walking out with no hearing aids or glasses.”
“When’s the last time you checked OEM, SOD? Anything going on we should know?” She was interested in any updates from the Office of Emergency Management or the Special Operations Division.
Marino got a strange look on his face.
“I can check,” she added. “But not if someone’s in the hospital or been arrested or taken to a shelter or wandering the streets. I’m not going to know anything unless the person is dead and died in New York City.” She entered a number on Marino’s BlackBerry.
“The GW Bridge,” Marino said. “No way.”
“What about the bridge?” As the phone rang in the OCME’s Investigations Unit.
“The guy who jumped. Around two a.m. I watched it on a live feed when I was at RTCC. About sixty maybe, bald, no beard. A police chopper was filming the whole friggin’ thing.”
A medicolegal investigator named Dennis answered the phone.
“Need to check on what’s come in,” Scarpetta said to him. “We get a case from the GW Bridge?”
“Sure did,” Dennis said. “A witnessed descent. ESU tried to talk him down, but he didn’t listen. They do have it all on video. The police chopper filmed it, and I said we’d want a copy.”
“Good thinking. Do we have any thoughts on an ID?”
“The officer I talked to said they got nothing to go on about that. A white male, maybe in his fifties, his sixties. He had no personal effects that might tell us who he is. No wallet, no phone. You’re not going to get a good visual on him. He looks pretty bad. I think the drop from where he was on the bridge is at least a couple hundred feet. You know, like a twenty-story building. You aren’t going to want to show anyone his picture.”