Despite the flamboyant package of car and woman, she was a cautious driver and easy to follow. She left the Del Moray city limits and took A1A north along the coast for a few miles. The Miata’s convertible top was lowered and her red hair whipped and waved like a proud flag as the little car cut through the ocean breeze.
After passing a row of motels along the shoreline, she slowed and made a right turn into the parking lot of the Red Dolphin Inn, an upscale motel overlooking the sea.
Carver followed and parked at the other end of the lot. The Red Dolphin Inn was built of heavy red and brown stone and exposed rough-hewn beams. The office sported particularly bulky and graceless architecture and was built in an A-frame that was fronted with darkly tinted triangular glass and had a slate-shingled roof and heavy wooden doors fitted with iron rings for handles. Jutting from each side of the office was a long, two-story wing where the rooms were located. The wings looked like cheaply built blockhouses that had been added as afterthoughts and didn’t fit in with the heavy rustic quality of the rest of the motel.
The redhead had parked near the office, but she didn’t enter it. Instead she climbed from the Miata and went through a door to the right of the main entrance.
Carver waited a few minutes. A silver minivan containing a man and woman and two kids drove into the lot and parked in front of the office. The man, a skinny guy still in his twenties, got out of the van, stretched as if he’d just awakened from a ten-year nap, then walked stiffly inside to register. The woman sat still, but the kids were bouncing around inside the van as if they were on fire.
A dark blue Mercury pulled in and looked as if it were going to stop behind the minivan. Then it drove around the boxy little vehicle and parked halfway down the wing nearest Carver.
The driver, a middle-aged man wearing sunglasses and a gray suit, climbed out and walked directly to one of the lower-level rooms. He unlocked the door but didn’t enter. After poking his head into the room and glancing around, he shut the door again and walked back toward the office. He moved into the stark shadow of the peaked roof and entered the office just as the minivan driver was coming out clutching a key with a big green plastic tag as if it were a prize.
Wondering if the redhead had simply used another entrance to the office and registered, or if she’d gone directly to a room out of his vision, Carver worked his way out of the Olds and headed toward the door she’d used. The sun was low but still hot; its energy seemed to resist him like warm liquid until he reached the cool shade of the building.
He opened the door slowly, feeling a rush of cool air, and found that it led to the motel lounge. When he stepped all the way inside he saw the redhead seated in a dim booth near the back. The guy who’d gotten out of the Mercury was with her. He must have come through the door between office and lounge. He’d removed his dark glasses and he and the woman were staring at each other over drinks and a generous flower arrangement in the center of the table. Neither of them noticed Carver. There were only four other customers in the lounge: two men seated at the bar, and two women in business clothes in another booth, studying and conferring about something on a notebook computer.
Carver slid into a secluded booth away from the door and ordered a Budweiser from the tired but smiling woman who plodded over from behind the bar.
He sat sipping his beer from its frosted mug, waiting for the redhead and the Mercury driver, knowing he could see them if they left by the outside door or passed through the doorway into the office.
When they’d finished their drinks twenty minutes later, they went directly outside. They were holding hands. The man glanced at Carver without interest while the redhead, even more beautiful up close, stared straight ahead with a slight smile on her very red lips. It was the kind of smile even a monk might read a lot into.
Carver followed just in time to see them enter the room whose door the man had opened earlier.
He went back to the Olds, jotted down the Mercury’s license number, then waited in the heat. Quickly he settled into the patient, seemingly half-asleep mode of a cop on a stakeout or a sniper surveying terrain from cover. He was actually super-alert to everything around him. He saw the young mother from the minivan plod down the fancy iron stairs and get four cans of soda from a machine. Watched her go back upstairs, a pair of cans clutched close to her body in each hand as if she were applying cold compresses to wounds. In the darkening sky beyond the horizontal line of the motel’s roof, a gull was soaring in abrupt, measured patterns, as if trying to spell out something in the air. A riddle for Carver that he might solve too late.
It was dark when the redhead opened the room’s door and stepped out, smoothed her skirt over her hips, and strode to the Miata. With practiced ease, she raised the little car’s canvas top before driving away. There still was no sign of the man as Carver started the Olds and followed her out to the highway, then back toward Del Moray.
She didn’t drive far. After a few miles, she parked in the lot of another motel and followed much the same procedure. This time she drank alone in the lounge for about fifteen minutes before a tall man with raven black hair and wearing a black suit showed up.
He didn’t even sit down. Didn’t say hello or so much as nod to her. The woman rose, wearing her siren’s smile, and they walked together from the lounge and up a flight of inside stairs to the upper rooms. Carver followed halfway up the stairs and then paused, watching them enter one of the rooms and noting its number: 203.
He had a second beer before returning to wait in the Olds. It was easy to find the outside entrance to 203 from the catwalk that fronted the building. If the woman and the dark-haired man left by either door, he’d be able to see them.
He was surprised when a crack of dim light appeared as the room’s door onto the catwalk opened. More surprised when he caught a glimpse of a dark figure entering the room. He sat up straighter, staring through the windshield.
The room’s drapes were closed but glowed several times in quick succession in brilliant flashes of light. The door opened again, a shadowy figure ran out, and Carver saw a short man in dark clothing hurl himself down the stairs, then run across the parking lot. He heard but didn’t see a car roar away, glimpsing twin red taillights and nothing more as it reached the highway.
The whole thing had taken less than a minute.
The room’s door was still open. A light came on, and for an instant a nude man appeared in the doorway, body hunched and long black hair wildly mussed. Even from this distance Carver could see the look of horror on his face as he slammed the door.
Less than fifteen minutes later the black-haired man, fully dressed now but carrying his suit coat, emerged from the room with the woman. She was dressed as before but had her hair pinned in a pile on top her head. They stood for a few minutes at the base of the stairs, talking earnestly in the faint glow of the vending machines. The man was waving his long arms, obviously upset. The woman touched his cheek gently from time to time, calming him. He slipped into his suit coat and stood still, listening to her. Then they kissed briefly and parted. Carver had a chance to get the license number of the man’s black or midnight blue Cadillac before following the Miata.
This time the redhead drove all the way back into Del Moray. She parked in the dark lot of a small, seedy motel three blocks from the ocean and went directly into one of the detached cabins, using a key she’d fished from her purse. Lights winked on inside the cabin, providing a view of a wall with an arrangement of framed prints on it, some of them hanging crookedly. Then the woman appeared at the front window and closed the drapes.