Evil in All Its Disguises

by Hilary Davidson

“I act like such an asshole sometimes. Why do you even talk to me?”

  “So you can look things up for me, of course.”

  He laughed, but the sound came out with a rough-edged rasp. “I deserved that. Okay, spell out the name for me.”

  I did. “Thanks, Brux. You know I appreciate it.”

  “Just be careful. And promise me you won’t go into any other strange rooms. Especially ones with men in them.”

  CHAPTER 28

  As cheerful as I’d tried to sound on the phone with Bruxton, it took all of my energy to get my laptop out of the safe and onto the bed. At least I wasn’t dizzy anymore. The pounding in my head was probably from my paranoid delusions. Had I really thought someone was poisoning me? That was pure paranoia, and if there was one thing that terrified me more than anything else, it was the idea that I might end up like my mother. She was a drunk, but that wasn’t the worst of it. My mother had paranoid delusions that sometimes made her abusive, though she wasn’t completely crazy. She was also incredibly manipulative, and she had a talent for getting under my skin, and Claudia’s, wounding us with barbed words that went in like arrows and couldn’t ever be cleanly extracted. The last thing my mother ever said to me was, You only care about yourself, you selfish little bitch. I used to spend a lot of time wondering if she’d really meant that, or if she’d simply relished wielding words like weapons. Then I’d made the decision to put her out of my mind, and I did my best to stick to that.

  Resting against pillows and the headboard, I balanced the laptop on my legs and opened it. Brux was good to his word, and there was a detailed list of instructions from the tech guy, Santos, and a note at the end, telling me he would be at a family wedding for most of the day, but I could call someone named Christy Hintz if I needed help. I read the instructions over, and they seemed pretty clear: first get the email’s “full headers” displayed, find a string of numbers in the “originating IP,” and then plug them into a site called Network Tools. That sounded easy enough. For all my adoration of retro things, I loved modern gadgetry, too.

  Try it on your own email first, Santos had also written. That way you’ll know you’re doing it right. So I did, and I instantly hit a speed bump, because it took me a while to figure out how to see the full headers. Once I got it, my screen was filled with long strings of letters and numbers, broken down into groups with odds names. X-Apparently-To. Return Path. Received-SPF. Authentication Results. X-Cloudmark Score. Content-Transfer-Encoding. What the hell was all of this? But I spotted X-Originating-IP as well, highlighted the string of numbers that followed it, and copied it into the search box on Network Tools. A split second later, the site told me The IP address is from Mexico(MX) in region North America, and poured out what looked like an endless string of numbers that took over my screen again. What was I supposed to do with any of that? But I scrolled down, and kept scrolling as I discovered text that started to make sense. Cablemas Telecomunicaciones (Acapulco), it finally revealed, identifying both the Internet Service Provider and the location. Success! I felt like I’d figured out a big puzzle, even though all I’d done was plug some numbers into a search box.

  My prideful feelings didn’t last long. I repeated the process with Skye’s email and got exactly the same result I had with my own. Stupid computer, I thought, silently cursing it out. You are useless. I noticed that the Network Tools site had a caveat near the top: Network Lookups may be blocked by the various registries. The direct links for IP address network lookups are: Americas (ARIN) | Europe (RIPE) | Asia-Pacific (APNIC) | Africa (AfriNIC) | Latin American and Caribbean (LACNIC).

  So much for my computer skills. I called Christy Hintz and left a message for her. Afterwards, I stared at my screen. What if the computer was actually right? Gavin Stroud believed that Skye had decamped to another hotel in Acapulco. I hadn’t taken him seriously, but it looked as though he might be right about that after all.

  Pushing the computer aside with reluctance, I pushed myself off the bed and made my way into the living room. Skye’s two Frakker’s guidebooks were still on the table. I’d planned to give them to Gavin with the rest of Skye’s things, but when I’d discovered she’d marked all the Pantheon properties, it had made me so curious about what she was up to that I held them back. Part of me felt guilty; after all, the books could have held her travel plans. But I didn’t think she’d circled all of the Pantheon properties for that reason. Whatever the story she was working on happened to be, I suspected it involved those hotels in some way.

  I dragged the books back to the bedroom and the relative oasis of the bed. Then I gave myself a minute with my eyes closed—all the while hoping whatever gorilla was sitting on my chest would go away and leave me in peace. Not likely, I realized, finally opening my eyes. When I started leafing through the Mexico guidebook, I looked for the hotels Skye had circled. None of the others were in Acapulco, but there was one in Mazatlán, which wasn’t far from Acapulco. I dialed the number on my cell phone.

  “Hola, estoy llamando a uno de los invitados a su hotel,” I said when a clerk answered. I’m calling for one of your guests. “Skye McDermott.”

  “Se equivocó de número,” he said immediately. Wrong number.

  I sat up straighter; he hadn’t even bothered to check the guest registry. “Me gustaría hacer una reserva en el hotel.” I would like to make a reservation at your hotel.

  He hung up without another word.

  I stared at the phone in my hand, and at Skye’s note in the margin of the book. She’d scrawled PW—for Pantheon Worldwide—and a skeptical FULL???

  My disbelief grew as I called each Mexican hotel Skye had circled. Some didn’t answer at all. A couple of them told me they were full and would be for the foreseeable future.

  With a gnawing sense of trepidation, I leafed through the Eastern Europe guidebook. In addition to marking the Pantheon properties, Skye had made a funny mark I didn’t recognize next to some of them. Before I could find a pattern, my cell phone rang. “Hi, this is Christy. Santos told me you might be calling,” said a woman with a warm voice and a cheerful Midwestern accent.

  “Thanks for calling me back on a Saturday,” I said. “He wrote out instructions for me, but I think I’m messing them up.”

  “Okay, let’s go through this,” Christy said. She led me step by step through the process, and I got the same result with Skye’s email.

  “Maybe your friend really is in Acapulco,” Christy said.

  “Is that why the originating IP address has exactly the same numbers?”

  “Exactly the same numbers as what?”

  “Santos said to do a test first with my own email, to make sure I was doing it right,” I explained. “I used an email I sent this morning. The IP address on Skye’s is identical.”

  “Lily, every ISP customer has a different IP address,” Christy said. “If the IP address is identical, your friend sent her email from the same place you did.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. That would mean—”

  Christy finished my sentence. “She’s in the building with you.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I called Gavin. This was his hotel, and he needed to know what was going on. He didn’t answer, and I ended up leaving a message saying I urgently needed to speak with him.

  When I hung up, my doorbell rang, and then I heard a whirring sound and a click. Too late, I realized I hadn’t put the deadbolt on; someone had opened the door of my suite. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, even though I felt too weak to make it to the doorway of the bedroom. It was a relief when Denny poked her head inside.

  “Sorry to bother you!” she said. “I wanted to check on you. And I hope you don’t mind, but I brought visitors.”

  Ruby and Roberta were right behind her. “Are you feeling better, Lily?” Roberta called.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “You look like something the cat dragged in,” Ruby added.

  “Thanks for nothing
,” I said. “I think it was something I ate at lunch.”

  “We all ate the same thing, and no one else barfed.”

  Denny came into the room and set several bottles of mineral water on my bedside table. “We thought we’d get you some food that definitely won’t make you sick.”

  “You gotta take this, too.” Ruby crab-stepped in and handed me a bottle. “Activated charcoal. That’s what they’d give you at the hospital if you went in sick like you are. I never travel without it.”

  Denny opened a bottle of water and I swallowed a few capsules. “You guys are the best.”

  “I’ve got some protein bars,” Ruby said. “You want to see if you can keep one of those down?”

  “I am kind of hungry,” I admitted. She handed me a bar in a foil wrapper and I tore it open.

  “I’m glad to see you eating,” Roberta said. “I was a little bit worried about you, to tell you the truth. I thought you might be one of those anorexic-bulimic girls.”

  That was hilarious. Roberta the lush was worried about me? “I love food, but sometimes I forget to eat when I get stressed. On this trip, I seem to get sick when I eat.”

  “My daughter’s nervous like that,” Ruby said. “Only she crossed over into actually having a real disorder. There was nothing anyone could say to convince her. Even when she was a bag of bones in the hospital, she was saying she had tree-trunk thighs. Can you believe that?” Ruby shook her head.

  “Did she…” Did she die, I wanted to ask, but Ruby misunderstood my question.

  “She did get better. I wouldn’t say she’s completely well, but she’s on track and she sees a therapist to keep her that way. She got married last year, so now she’s got someone else to watch over her.” She sighed. “For a long time, I felt responsible. I was a dancer when I was younger, you know.”

  “We know,” Denny and Roberta answered at the same time.

  “Yeah, well, I was obsessive about what I ate. I guess I thought I transferred that into her head,” Ruby said.

  “That wasn’t your fault,” Denny argued. “There are a million different ways women get the message that they should be thinner.”

  “I used to watch over her like a hawk though. I’d say, ‘Don’t eat that, it’ll make you fat.’ You want your kid to turn out well, you know? But you never know how what you do will affect them. But I was a single mother long before it was fashionable, and I just bumbled along.”

  As Ruby was speaking, I thought of my own mother. Most of the time, I banished her from my mind. Even though I knew that my sister and my father had their flaws, I was able to accept them and love them anyway. Claudia had lied and stolen to support her addiction, and my father had been something of a womanizer. But my mother was another case entirely. When I remembered her, it was like thinking of a terrible injury, and all I could do was wonder how I got through it. My mother was either self-absorbed and feeling sorry for herself, or else obsessing about Claudia and me and doing crazy, paranoid things as a result. Either way, she was drinking. When I was growing up, all I could think about was getting away from her.

  “I’m sure you tried your best,” I said. “I bet your daughter is grateful for what you did for her.”

  “Maybe. Who knows?” Ruby said. “Sorry to be so depressing. It just preys on my mind, and I wonder if I could’ve done things differently. Done them better, I mean.”

  It was a funny thing, but moments like this were what I really loved about press trips. When you were on the road, far from home, it was possible to become very close very quickly to people who were strangers to you a day earlier. Travel stripped away routines and habits, making you more vulnerable and more aware of your surroundings, and more open than you would normally be. There was an intimacy created simply by being together in an unfamiliar place. Sitting in my bedroom, with Roberta perched near the foot of the bed and Ruby and Denny standing in the doorway, was the first time I felt relaxed since coming to Acapulco.

  It didn’t last long. There was a whirring sound and a click. We all heard it, and stopped speaking. “Was that the door?” whispered Roberta.

  The door closed with a quiet click, and then there was the clack of the deadbolt. Ruby’s eyebrows shot to the ceiling. It was perfectly normal for the hotel’s staff to come in for a variety of reasons, but strange that no one knocked first. There were footsteps, then a pause, as if the intruder had paused to listen for any sound, and footsteps again. Then Gavin appeared in the doorway.

  CHAPTER 30

  Gavin was at least as astonished to see Ruby, Roberta and Denny as they were to see him. He dropped the large bouquet of flowers he’d carried in, scattering long-stemmed lilies all over the floor. “Damn it,” he muttered, stooping to pick them up. “What are you doing here?”

  “What about you, sneaking in here without ringing the bell!” Ruby yelled at him. “What were you, raised in a barn or something? Did nobody ever teach you manners?”

  Gavin’s face was bright red when he stood. He glared at Ruby but didn’t answer.

  “We all wanted to see how Lily’s feeling,” Denny said, breaking the tension.

  “She needs rest, not a lot of chatter,” Gavin said.

  “What’s in that box you’re holding?” asked the eagle-eyed Roberta.

  “Nothing,” Gavin muttered.

  “Did you bring Lily a present? That’s so sweet!” Roberta, for all of her boozing, was quite possibly the sharpest tack in the drawer.

  “A present! How romantic!” Ruby’s beady eyes were bright, as if she were on the trail of some particularly juicy gossip.

  The pair of them had successfully thrown Gavin off his game. Without a word, he handed me a shallow, wide box was black and white, and tied with a red ribbon. The name Elisabeta Joyería was printed, in white script, on the ribbon. The name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  Gavin had crept into my room, bearing flowers and gifts? I was thoroughly creeped out, and all I wanted to do was to change the topic of discussion. “Gavin, are you here because of my message?” I asked.

  His blank expression made it clear that he had no idea what I was talking about, but he leapt at the opportunity to save face. “Yes, of course.”

  “What I wanted to tell you is that I was able to check the IP address of email that came from Skye’s account this morning. From that, I was able to tell that Skye’s message was sent from inside this hotel.”

  “What?” The red drained from Gavin’s face as if he were being bled. Denny’s expression was aghast. Ruby and Roberta looked confused.

  “There are two possibilities,” I explained. “Either Skye is in the hotel, sending email, or someone else in the hotel has her computer and is sending email from it.”

  “Are you quite sure, Lily?” Gavin asked. “I don’t mean this as a negative comment, but aren’t you up on 1940s films rather than modern technology?”

  I pretended to smile. “I can understand your doubting that. I had doubts myself, which is why I called a friend at the New York Police Department. She was able to confirm it.”

  “So Skye is still here. She never left.” Gavin’s voice was quiet, almost musing. “And she couldn’t have left today. How completely in character for that stupid, selfish, narcissistic little—”

  He caught himself before an epithet crossed his lips, but the damage was done. His cold contempt for Skye took my breath away and dropped the temperature of the room by several degrees. Everyone was speechless. Surprisingly, the person who found her voice first was Roberta.

  “Skye is a very sweet girl. If she’s having a personal problem, we should be kind.” Roberta’s voice was calm and dignified as ever, but there was a steeliness in her eyes as she addressed Gavin. “Cruelty is the worst vice of all.”

  Gavin didn’t answer that. Instead, he cleared his throat and turned to the one person he was able to order around. “Denny, I need to speak with you,” he said. “I strongly suggest that the rest of you leave Lily alone and allow her to rest.”
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br />   “Oh, please don’t leave,” I said to Ruby and Roberta. “I like having you here.” Especially since I was worried that Gavin would creep back into my room at his first opportunity.

  “Very well,” Gavin agreed, but his tone was grudging. “Come along, Denny.”

  She rolled her eyes at me but followed in his wake. The door of my suite opened and closed before anyone said anything. “Would you mind putting on the deadbolt?” I asked them.

  “Sure thing,” Ruby said.

  Both she and Roberta left the room, and I heard them whispering and giggling. When they returned to the bedroom, Roberta nudged Ruby. “Told you so.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. A greedy eye sees far.” Ruby shrugged. “Magpie here thinks Gavin Stroud has the hots for you.”

  “It’s just the way he talks about Lily,” was Roberta’s prim rejoinder.

  “What did he say?”

  “Well… at lunch, he was telling us about something you said at breakfast this morning.”

  “What?”

  Roberta and Ruby exchanged a brief glance. “He went on and on and, well, I don’t even know what the point of the story was, except to make it clear you two were on a date.”

  “An all-night date,” Ruby added, wriggling her eyebrows for clarification.

  “The worst part was when he said he loved having breakfast in bed. Remember?” Roberta looked at Ruby and shuddered.

  “That’s disgusting,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he oversold it when he said that,” said Ruby. “I knew then and there he was full of crap. I told you he wasn’t her type. He’s one cold fish.”

  “Gavin’s a strange man,” Roberta said. “He’s cold, but he’s not as controlled as he wants to be.”

  “He looks like he’s itchy all the time, but he’ll be damned if he’ll scratch.” Ruby cocked her head, making her appear like a bright-eyed bird. “Looks like he’s really making a play for you, though. Flowers, presents. I wonder what’s in the box?”