Evil in All Its Disguises

by Hilary Davidson

I bit my lip. “Is this a joke?”

  “No. But keep in mind, there is a great deal of material to review.”

  “Such as?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “I’d be happy to help you review it.”

  That earned a frown. “That will not be necessary.” He stood, adjusting the front of his trousers, smoothing creases out of them aggressively. One cuff caught on something and he freed it, but not before I caught a glimpse of a gun in an ankle holster. Was his job so dangerous he needed to carry a gun at his hip and another hidden under his clothing?

  “I hope you will enjoy your stay here, Lily,” he announced as he walked away. From Apolinar’s mouth, it sounded almost like a threat.

  CHAPTER 21

  More than anything, I wanted to be alone to think. When I went upstairs, I found my room had been tidied by a maid—bed newly made with fresh linens, cushions fluffed, toiletries rearranged. I should have been glad to see that, but I wasn’t. The lock on the door of my room gave me the illusion of privacy, but an illusion was all it was. A dozen people might have a key card, and any of them could come inside whenever they felt like it. A maid. Gavin. Apolinar.

  I kicked off my shoes and collapsed on the sofa. What I wanted was a cigarette, but I lay there, staring at the ceiling and trying to work through the web of secrets and lies and evasions that I’d let myself become ensnared in. What bothered me the most at that moment was the fact that I hadn’t even asked Skye about Apolinar. Listen to me, Lily. You don’t want to know that guy. I should have asked why, but she was rushing off to make her phone call and I hadn’t stopped her. What did she know about him? Or was I looking at it the wrong way? What did Apolinar know about her? Was that why Skye really warned me away from him?

  What if Skye was working on a story about the corruption at Pantheon? Anyone tied to Pantheon—Martin, Gavin, Apolinar, maybe even Denny—would have a motive to shut her up. Of course, there was also the possibility that Skye had slept with Apolinar. His snakelike qualities aside, he was handsome enough—and undoubtedly vain enough—to seek out new, temporary conquests.

  Oh, Honey Bear. Deep down, you’re pretty superficial, Claudia taunted me. Get your mind out of the gutter. That edgy little voice in my head was right. Why had I leapt to the conclusion that Skye had gone to bed with Apolinar? I needed a better working theory, one that didn’t make her out to be a cheap seductress. She may have looked like Jean Harlow, but that didn’t mean she was mimicking the actress’s vile, deceptive character in Hell’s Angels.

  I couldn’t dismiss the idea that she had been kidnapped. Gavin was strangely unworried about her disappearance. I don’t want to speak out of turn. It’s just that I suspect Skye was upset with someone, and she flounced out of the hotel because of it. She’s probably cooling her heels for a day or two, not realizing the chaos she’s caused. He seemed so confident about that idea. Did that mean he knew something, or was it wishful thinking on his part?

  I rubbed my temples and sat up. Counting on other people was getting me nowhere. I had to do something to help Skye. If that meant calling the local police myself, so be it. I got my laptop out of the safe, and looked for a number to call.

  It wasn’t as straightforward as I’d assumed it would be. The first thing that came up was a Facebook page dedicated to reporting the extortion of tourists by police in Acapulco. Next, a story of how eleven people were killed in Acapulco the previous weekend; the police had no leads in any of the cases. Five bodies had recently been found on a beach, all of them headless. Sites in English and Spanish warned me away from having any contact with local police, claiming that people who looked to them for help often ended up extorted for cash or in jail themselves. The exception were the federal police, who were a relatively recent addition to the three other layers of police in the city, but the Federales only dealt with street crime.

  The only useful bit of advice I found recommended contacting the consulate for help. Acapulco didn’t have a U.S. consulate, but it had a consular agent who was tied to the embassy in Mexico City. I dialed the number, listened to a long series of messages as I went through the electronic switchboard, and landed in voice mail. I left an urgent message, and hung up with a heavy heart. The office was only staffed for four hours a day on weekdays, and it was a Saturday. What were the odds anyone would call back before Monday?

  Every move I made felt futile, because without the hotel or the police helping in the search, Skye’s trail was pretty damn cold.

  There was one other call I realized I had to make. Thanks to Skye’s passport, I knew her home address. I’d handed her passport over to Gavin and Apolinar, but I remembered what it said: 75 Livingston Street, Brooklyn. It was a well-known landmark, also known as the Court Chambers Building, a 1927 neo-Gothic office tower with a pyramid at its peak. I’d included it in a Brooklyn walking tour I’d once written for a British newspaper. Not that you could go inside, since it had been converted to residential apartments decades ago. It was a beautiful—and very expensive—place to live.

  It took me a minute to find the telephone listing—for R. Brooks and S. McDermott. Skye had filled the contact information in her passport in ink. Technically, you were supposed to change those details when you moved, but most people didn’t bother. It turned out that Skye hadn’t either. The voice-mail said, “You’ve reached Ryan Brooks. Unfortunately, I’m not available at the moment. Please leave me a message so that I can return your call.”

  The formality caught me by surprise. “Hello,” I said. “You won’t remember me, but I’m a friend of Skye’s. My name is Lily Moore, and I’m another journalist who’s on the press trip with Skye right now. I’m calling because Skye has disappeared. We don’t know what’s happened to her, and we’re worried. I wanted to ask if there’s any chance she’s called you. Please call me as soon as you get this message.” I left my cell phone number and hung up.

  I had a few minutes until lunch with the group and nothing to do. That wasn’t quite right: I had the uncomfortable feeling that there were things I should have been doing to help Skye, but I had no idea what they were. Thinking about what might have happened to her made me panicky and more than a little paranoid. Broken pieces of worst-case scenarios flicked through my head like film clips run through an old projector. They stopped and started, rolling back and forth, jagged at the edges and shimmering in and out of focus. Skye being abducted. Held hostage. Injured. In pain. By the time the headless bodies on the beach started to swirl into view, I had to bolt. As much as I’d craved solitude to think things over, my own ideas were driving me mad.

  Heading out again, I made my token knock at Skye’s door. I knew she wouldn’t answer, even as I waited. After giving it a minute, I made for the elevator. It arrived at the fifth floor, but before I could step in, Pete Dukermann stepped out. His eyes were still bloodshot, but he looked steadier on his feet than he had early that morning by the water.

  “You again.” He sounded more like his usual self, too.

  “Always such a charmer.”

  He brushed by me, then turned around. “Have you found Skye yet?”

  “No. They’re supposed to be looked for her,” I answered, hoping that really was the case but having less than complete confidence in Apolinar.

  “Where would she go?”

  “Pantheon had a kidnapping threat at another of its Mexican hotels,” I explained, leaving Martin’s name out of the equation.

  Pete wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What’s going on with her, huh? I mean, something coulda happened to her…” His voice rose, sounding odd and strained.

  “I don’t know. You haven’t gotten any strange emails that claim to be from her, have you?”

  “Email? I dunno. I’ve been unplugged all morning.” He frowned. “You said claimed to be from her? You think someone hacked Skye’s account?”

  “I got a couple of emails that were supposed to be from Skye but they were… strange.”

  “Well, then she’s okay, right?” His bloodsho
t eyes darted over my face.

  “One of the emails said she’d flown home, but we know she didn’t do that because she left her passport with me last night.”

  “Shit. This is serious.” He stared at me. “You think this has anything to do with her story?”

  “I don’t know anything about her story. Do you?”

  “No. No, nothing.” He said it quickly, as if determined to get that out of the way, before I could delve in further. “I can check my email now, see if there’s anything from her.”

  I startled both of us by saying, “Can I come with you?”

  “Um. Uh.” He rubbed his chin, eyes darting to the side, then back at me. Just as he was studying me, I was judging him. The red scratches on his arms were in plain sight, and I wanted to know how he’d gotten them.

  “It will just take a minute, right?” My curiosity outweighed my revulsion at the thought of going back to Pete’s room with him.

  “Okay,” he muttered. “Come on.”

  I trailed after him, down the corridor in the opposite direction my room. No sounds emanated from the hotel rooms we passed. The only sound was of footfalls on the red carpet, which barely registered, yet seemed to boom in the silence.

  “Do you think there’s anyone else around?” I whispered.

  Pete slowed down, glancing over his shoulder at me. “Skye asked me that yesterday.” He was whispering, too. “I said it was like a ghost town. And she said…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. It didn’t make sense.”

  We were at the end of the hallway now, and Pete fished a key card out of his jeans. His door had a do not disturb sign hanging on the handle. Pete opened the door an inch, but held it so I couldn’t see inside. “Could you wait here for a minute? I need to, uh, put some stuff away.”

  “Okay,” I said, envisioning a porn stash and blow-up doll. Whatever Pete had lying around in there, I didn’t want to know. He went inside, closing the door behind him so quietly that I was surprised. What had happened to brash, drunken Pete? Was it just the heavy atmosphere of the empty hotel weighing down on him, as it did me, or was there something else?

  Finally he opened the door. “Okay. Come in,” he muttered, grudging and stern, pulling the door back just enough for me to enter.

  I edged by him carefully, not wanting to have any physical contact with him, and headed through the hallway. As I walked into the living room, I stopped dead, astonished, at the same time Pete locked the door behind me.

  CHAPTER 22

  “What the hell happened in here?” I said, staring around the room in shock. Pete’s suite looked as if a cyclone had hit it. There was trash on the carpet, including a smashed ashtray with butts scattered far and wide. There were empty bottles of tequila and crushed cans of a Mexican beer called Tecate. One tall lamp lay on the floor, bent in two; its shade was a few feet away, making it look like a party guest who’d finally passed out. There was a fist-sized hole in the plaster of a tangerine wall.

  “Nothing.”

  “Pete, this place looks like…” Something crunched under my shoe. “Is that glass?”

  “Maybe, yeah, I broke a glass last night.”

  I turned to stare at him. “Did you get into a fight with someone?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Because your room has been trashed, you’ve got a cut on the side of your hand, and you look like you’ve been through the wringer.” There was nothing diplomatic in my answer. The truth was brutal, but Pete needed to hear it. There was something about his manner that brought out the sharpest, roughest edge of my personality.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t know shit.” His face was getting red. “I wasn’t in that kind of fight.”

  “What kind of fight were you in?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. You better not mention this to anyone, or I’ll…”

  “You’ll what, Pete?”

  His threat hadn’t been articulated, but it hung in the air between us. My instinct was to run from the room, but he was between me and the door, and making a sudden move like that seemed riskier than staring him down. But, before my eyes, Pete drew back, deflating. His face, so furious and red a moment before, seemed to bleed out color, leaving him ashen, and he shrunk back into himself, muttering.

  “My computer’s in the safe.” His head was down; he stared at the floor. “I’ll get it.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder what Pete’s bedroom looked like. He pulled the door behind him but he didn’t shut it completely. From the living room, all I could really see was that the bed was unmade, which was hardly a surprise. I heard him open the closet door. These rooms were laid out in identical ways; the safe in my room was in the bedroom closet, too. Walking to the window, I stared outside, but I was really watching for him in the reflection I saw in the glass. What the hell had Pete gotten himself into? Why was he so erratic, and what was eating away at him, under his skin?

  He came out of the bedroom carrying his laptop and shut the bedroom door. That only increased my suspicion. What was he hiding from me? Was there something worse than a trashed room?

  “Okay, I’m opening my email,” he announced. I turned to face him, but I couldn’t catch a glimpse of his screen.

  “Anything?” I prompted while he silently scanned his email. He clicked on something and read it, his lips moving as he did. “Is there anything from Skye?”

  “Uh, no, I don’t think so. Lot of junk in here. Let me check my spam.” A couple of clicks, and he shook his head again. “Nope. Nothing from her.” He stared up at me, looking so fearful and wary that it caught me by surprise. “Do you think she’s in trouble?”

  “Yes. Don’t you?”

  He wiped his forehead. “Yeah. She was weird yesterday.”

  “Weird? How?”

  “She swore me to secrecy.”

  “About what?” I demanded. “Pete, she’s missing. She might have been kidnapped. If you know anything about what was going on with her, you need to speak up.”

  “I don’t know anything.” His tone was petulant. “It was just a couple things that popped outta her mouth, you know? Like, she was bugging me yesterday about the hotel.”

  “What about it?”

  “She asked me if I noticed anything odd about the hotel. I was all, like, what? It looks kinda cheesy, I mean, the whole fortress thing they got going on, but that’s not odd, right?”

  “No. So what was it?”

  “She didn’t tell me. She just kept asking me questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Okay, she was like, what do you think of the other hotel guests? And I was, like, what other hotel guests? This place is like a ghost town. And she said…”

  “Pete.” I started to reach out my hand to touch him, but recoiled. “What did Skye say?”

  “She said, ‘They’re all ghost towns.’” He stared at me, turning his hands palm up. “That make any sense to you? ’Cause it didn’t to me. I asked her what the hell that meant, but she wouldn’t say anything about it. I mean, what ghost towns?”

  They’re all ghost towns. An idea tickled the back of my brain, but it seemed so preposterous that I didn’t want to acknowledge it. “Did she ask you anything else about the hotel? Anything at all?”

  “She kept going on and on about the hotel’s prices. I thought that was funny, ’cause, hey, we’re on a press trip. We don’t pay for squat.”

  “You might pay for breaking your room, Pete.”

  He shrugged. “Probably not. You know how it is.”

  I nodded. Yes, I did know, and he was probably right. So long as he produced material that showed the hotel in a good light, everything would be forgiven. “So, Skye was talking about hotel pricing. Room prices?”

  “Yeah. And she asked what I thought the flowers cost. You know, the flowers in the lobby. She asked if they were worth ten thousand a month. I’m, like, this is Mexico. Are you crazy? I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Who thinks about what the flow
ers cost? Who cares?”

  That was odd. A travel journalist needed to know what it cost to book a room, but why would anyone care about the flowers? “Pete, you were with Skye yesterday. She talks. She talks a lot. She must have told you something about the story she was working on.”

  “She swore me to—”

  I hit my hand against the desk and he flinched, pulling his head back like a turtle. “Pete! She’s missing. Whatever she told you might be the reason why. What did she say?”

  “She said she was going to get even with somebody—she didn’t say who. She said this article would settle a lot of scores.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t fucking know, okay? She told me she knew she was right and she just had to prove it.”

  “You don’t have any idea what she meant?” My voice was pleading now. “There must have been some clue.”

  “She freaked out, made me swear I wouldn’t say anything to anyone.” He ran both hands through his shaggy hair. “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared out the window. There was a small crack in the gray sky, just enough to remind me there was light behind it. “Pete, were you serious this morning when you asked if that guy was following one of us?”

  “I was just feeling paranoid. You’d already surprised me. I didn’t expect to see anyone around at all.”

  “What about yesterday?” I prompted. “When you were with Skye. Was anyone following you then? Maybe someone trying to eavesdrop?”

  He shook his head. “No. It was just a hinkey feeling I had this morning. Like when the hairs stand up on your neck. I can’t really explain it.”

  Great. One paranoid person egging on another. At that moment, I would have given anything to have Jesse beside me. Through so much of my life, he’d been the wisecracking voice of sanity. Without him, I was becoming unnerved and, I feared, unhinged.

  “Where did you and Skye go yesterday?” I asked.

  “Nowhere. She just wanted to hang around the hotel. We walked around, sat in the bar. I took some photos of her.”