by Dale Mayer
Nico quickly asked his chat window support for all the related information. Unfortunately this was a huge hotel, and, by the time he got the staff list, he groaned. “Thirty names to check here.”
“Let’s start knocking them off then. We don’t have the luxury of time here, so let’s go by the standard profiling. Cross off anybody who’s married with family here. Anybody who’s been on staff for a year or more.”
So, with the chat’s help, they narrowed the list from that point down to those who were making decent money, then to a list of single males of any age who hadn’t been at the hotel for very long. Less than three months was the time frame they put on that and then checked who would normally have worked today but didn’t show up. Two names came up. Nico quickly twisted the laptop around and said, “Just these two.”
“Let’s find addresses and go check them out.”
That took another three minutes. By the time they had those, they were already fully armed and heading outside. “Time to have a talk with those guys, huh?”
“Depending on what’s going on,” Keane said, “I’m not too sure if these guys will be around to talk to.”
“If they’re smart, they would have gone with the rest of the crew.”
“Maybe, and maybe they’re in the way.”
“Depends if they’ve done this before or if this is a steady operation.”
“Hope you’re not bringing up sex workers or white slavery,” Keane said. “That’s the last thing I want to deal with.”
“I hear you,” Nico said. “But there could be only so many scenarios. Something like this has four likely options.”
“Humanity is a sick place,” Keane said. “There are as many options in this world as you can possibly think of. The trouble is, we can only think of so many, hindered by our apparent lack of evil intent, until a new scenario comes up. Then we realize how logical it is, from a malevolent point of view.”
The two men exited in the same vehicle and pulled out into the night, just about twenty-one hours since she’d gone missing.
“I still think that, if they were smart,” Keane said, “they’d have taken her a long way away by now.”
“If they were smart, they wouldn’t have done this in the first place,” Nico said. “At least not here, not in a public place. Would have been much easier to have run her vehicle off the road and taken her then.”
“She didn’t drive. At least not here. She took cabs.”
“Has anybody checked with the cab companies to make sure she didn’t get a ride somewhere?”
“The team is on it but so far nothing has turned up,” Keane said.
Since Nico wasn’t driving, he sent the request for more information. One thing about jobs like this was their never-ending thirst for answers. And you never knew what you didn’t know until it popped up.
They hit the first employee’s address. It was an apartment in a middle-income neighborhood. Donning another pair of disposable gloves, Nico and Keane checked the area before leaving their car.
Nico picked the locks and defined this place as empty cold, as if nobody had lived here in a while. But food was in the fridge. An air of desolation surrounded the place, and, despite the presence of food, the furniture looked cold, uncomfortable. Nico looked over at Keane and said, “Doesn’t feel like somebody’s been here for a few days.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
They did a quick sweep. Clothes were in the dressers, laundry in the hamper, and shampoo in the bathroom. “So he’s planning on coming back,” Nico said. “He’s just not here at the moment. Interesting.”
They slipped out the back, locking it up like it had been, and returned to their vehicle, not bothering to take off their gloves just yet. After typing in the second employee’s address into their vehicle’s GPS, they headed out. When they got to his place, they found a small bungalow nestled in a block of similar-looking houses. It was a little bit better secured with bolts and a lock, but, even with that, they got in easily enough.
As soon as they entered through the back door though, they both stopped and froze.
The smell …
“Shit,” Nico said, his heart sinking. “This is not good.”
“We need to confirm though,” Keane said.
Silently they quickly went in with handguns out and at the ready. They swept through the small bedroom. Using flashlights, they held the light up to study the body on the bed, atop the covers, fully dressed, with one bullet to the head.
“I wonder if this is one of our two hotel workers,” Nico said. He quickly took a photo of his face and sent it in for Miles to identify.
“It’s hard to see in this light. The photo on the file wasn’t very current.”
“I know.” Just then Nico turned and headed to the bathroom. “And here’s a second one,” he called out. “And I recognize this one. These are our two missing employees.”
The two men exchanged hard looks, and Nico quickly told Miles about the newest update. Then he pocketed his phone, completed a full search of the house, looking for anything that would lead them to Charlotte or to find out why the kidnappers would have taken out these two local men. “Either they were loose ends or they caused trouble,” Nico said. “Or the other kidnappers are increasing profits for the job by reducing the number of ways the money needed to be split.”
“You know what? I’m almost tempted to believe the last one. It doesn’t make any sense that they would be cleaning up, unless they’re planning on killing Charlotte. And, with that damn helo on the roof, I don’t think she’s dead. Not at this point anyway.”
“And yet,” Nico stated, “there’s got to be another reason to kill her, not just because she’s an activist.”
“You’re right,” he said. “She didn’t have that big a voice in that community. It’s not like she made national headlines.”
“She wasn’t targeting a particular company or industry either,” Nico continued, “so it’s not like some big monopoly would be after her.”
“And that takes us back to the brother issue.”
Both men were silent and grim as they moved from room to room. In the kitchen in one drawer full of odds and ends they pulled out a notepad. A few names were written on it. Nico tapped the top name and said, “That’s the second DB in the bathroom.” They quickly tore off the top list and checked for more. Nico took a photo of the list, then sent it to Miles. These names, check them out.
“Why would he have that list here?” Keane asked, studying it.
“Hard to say but maybe it was early on, when they first started working together, and he wanted to know who the team members were.”
“Well, I know I wouldn’t work solo with somebody if I didn’t know who they were,” Keane said.
“Yet we’ve all worked with teams where we didn’t know some of the guys,” Nico said. “We might have had a first name or a second name, but, chances are, those aren’t the names that their mothers knew them by.”
“Yeah, but we knew who they were,” Keane said with a half smile. “We knew who they were inside. Otherwise we wouldn’t be working with them.”
“Agreed,” Nico said. Then, after a complete search of the home, the two of them turned and looked at each other. “Now to check the bodies,” Nico said. A couple empty grocery bags were on the counter. He quickly grabbed them both, and they returned to the first body. Keane followed. There, Nico pulled out the first DB’s wallet and dropped it inside one plastic bag and handed that to Keane, while Nico checked the rest of his pockets, doing as well as he could to not move the body. Considering the deceased was on his back, it was just a case of lifting up one side to make sure that each pocket was freed up.
With all the pockets turned inside out, and the cell phone taken, he handed everything over to add to the first bag Keane held, and then both men went to the second body. This one had a cell phone, a wallet and loose change too, but nothing else. That all went into the second grocery bag. In the kitchen, they quickly wen
t through the wallets, looking for anything helpful. They photographed everything and then returned the wallets to the bodies. “The cops need the cell phones too,” Keane noted.
“Agreed. Sending everything on these to ours.” Nico pulled out a small device and hooked it up to each of the hotel workers’ cell phones and quickly downloaded as much as he could; then he popped out the sim card and replaced it with another one.
“You always walk around with sim cards?” Keane asked.
“Standard issue in my to-go bag now,” Nico said.
Keane shrugged and said, “If you say so.”
And then they turned and walked out, making sure they left no fingerprints on the doors either, taking off and pocketing their disposable gloves once outside. Back in their vehicle, this time Nico took over the driving as they headed toward the hotel. His phone rang, and he tossed it to Keane. “It’ll be Miles.”
“Miles, what’s up?”
“I’ve arranged for an anonymous caller to alert the local cops about the two DBs you found. Both men have records, but it’s all recent. Like in the last two to three months. Otherwise they’re both clean, and they both worked only at the hotel. Both were hired three months ago, after they had attended a job fair, and were hired on the spot. Didn’t appear to have any prior connection before working together at the hotel.”
“Well, they moved into a really ugly sideline of life.”
“Makes me wonder if somebody else at the hotel might have recruited them.”
“Money is a great motivator,” Nico said to Miles, the phone now on Speaker mode. “If you think about it, these are both young men, looking to make something out of their life or to have a different life instead of this drudgery of a nine-to-five, working in the laundry room of a big hotel. If they were offered big money, chances are they jumped at it and didn’t even ask questions.”
“Or they asked too many questions,” Keane said with a look over at Nico.
Nico turned the corner up ahead and pulled into the hotel’s underground parking lot. “That’s true too,” he admitted. “What we need to know is if our two DBs were friendly with anybody else who worked at the hotel.”
Keane clicked away on his phone, thankful to have a copy of the dead kidnappers’ contacts sent to him as well. “Checking the contacts on our two DBs. Ah-ha. Charles Huntington. He’s on shift right now, and he’s due off in half an hour.”
“Laundry?” Nico asked.
“Loading and unloading for the trucks and sorting and restocking the shelves,” Miles explained.
“Okay. Do you have a photo, Miles?” Nico asked. “We’ll have to come in through the laundry area, find him, and talk to him.”
“Sending you a photo now. You do that and just be quiet about it then,” Miles said. “There’s a good chance he won’t be pleased about speaking to the authorities.”
“Rap sheet?” Keane asked.
“Yes. Breaking and entering,” Miles said.
“Good enough,” Keane said. “We won’t go in as cops though. Maybe as some local hustle, looking to see if he’s interested in some jobs.”
“Or maybe as a local hustler who knows he’s already involved in a job,” Nico corrected. Grim, he added, “Chances are, he is in over his head.”
“Let’s go find out.”
Chapter 3
Charlotte had been moved from the truck to another laundry cart. Like, what the hell was with that? She was being pushed even now down a hallway. She had no idea why all kinds of discussions were going on in front of her, but one of those was about a helicopter. She wondered exactly who and what was going by helicopter because, if it was her, that wasn’t good news. That would mean she had pissed off somebody really big. She groaned silently.
She wanted the companies to do more, and she wanted the governments to do more. But what she really wanted most was for the world to wake up and to pay attention. To everything—the people, the animals, the climate, and the planet. But, of course, everybody was addicted to their instant conveniences and were happy to stick their heads in the sand about any future generations’ problems and make it a not me problem. She shifted uneasily in the bottom of the bag only to have the top of her head smacked, hard. “Don’t move.”
She took several deep calming breaths. She was covered with laundry and hadn’t really thought anybody would notice, but maybe it made the bag itself move. She stuck a finger along the edge and waggled it. Could somebody else see it? But she did not want the man pushing her to know.
Using her feet, she set up a slight rhythm on the end of the laundry cart. At least the guy pushing her wouldn’t see that. And, with the swaying as they moved forward, it should cover her movements. So far, she hadn’t even heard anybody in the hallway. How did that work? Sure, it was probably late at night again, at least by her estimation, but she was losing track of time. They’ve given her several bathroom breaks, but somebody stood guard each time, watching her.
The first time it made her feel really icky. The second time had been a matter of urgency and she’d been just too damn grateful that she hadn’t worried as much about them watching her. She had muttered Pervert as he walked past though and had been cuffed on the side of the head for that comment. Still, it hadn’t beaten her spirits down too badly.
As long as they were on the move, surely somebody, anybody might see them by chance. The cart jolted as it took a sudden turn. She listened intently, and, sure enough, she heard footsteps up ahead. She didn’t know if it was just one person or not. She also didn’t know if that person would help her or if it was somebody meeting this guy.
“Hey, you still on duty?”
“Last load,” said the guy pushing her cart.
“Man, it’s late for you.”
“I know, right? But the place is a nuthouse.”
“If only I had a share of the money that this hotel was pulling in,” the new guy said enviously. His footsteps continued to walk on past ever-so-slightly.
She again used her foot to make it look like something moved inside the cart, but he hadn’t even seemed to notice. She sank back, feeling hot tears in her eyes. Something in that new voice had her desperate to try to jump out though. But then, if it got her killed, what good would that do? And then suddenly she heard the voice call out, “Hey, by the way, where are you taking that laundry hamper to?”
“It’s going up to the penthouse. Why?” asked the guy pushing her. She could hear the tension running through his voice like a coiled wire stretched too tight.
“I didn’t think that was part of your job.”
“What the hell do you know about my job?” the guy said defensively.
“Well, for one, the penthouse doesn’t get laundry carts like that,” the guy said in a dry tone. “And, for another, you’re well past your shift.”
“I’m not. I still have ten minutes left.”
“Yeah, well, let me see what’s inside your laundry cart.”
“What the hell do you care, man?”
“I care,” he said, “so just shut it and let me see.”
“It’s fucking laundry. But sure, if you’re into laundry, go for it. Here. Come on over and take a look.”
If the guy bent over, she knew what would happen. Her kidnapper would hit this poor person if she didn’t do something. She struggled to move underneath the laundry, but it seemed to be at the same time that they were lifting up laundry above her. She screamed behind her gag, a sound that she swore was yelling at top decibels but came out as a muted moan.
And then she heard the new guy say, “Hey, what the hell is this?”
Her kidnapper said, “You fucking asshole, get out of my business.”
She heard a blow hit. She tried to sit up and push off all the laundry that had been put on top of her. She felt some of it giving way. She reached for the edge of the hamper and tried to stand, sending the rest of the laundry all over the floor. She fell over the side of the hamper to the floor, completely caught up in the laundry.
Then she was set on her feet, and the binding around her mouth was ripped free, and a voice asked, “Are you Charlotte?”
She nodded, staring in the dimly lit elevator to see who it was. She felt a little reassured that the doors to the elevator remained open.
“You’re safe now,” he said.
She stared up, her gaze widening. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“My name is Nico. My partner’s attacking your kidnapper right now.”
She shook her head and frantically said, “He’s only one of four. You have to help him.”
“Help my buddy? No, somebody needs to help your kidnapper,” he said. Just then another man came into the elevator, pushing the laundry cart.
As she stared down, her kidnapper was facing up, but he was unconscious. “Is he dead?” she whispered.
The new arrival just grinned and shook his head, pushing a button on the elevator to close the doors and to get it moving now.
As she stood here, shivering and trembling at the sudden change of her circumstances, she said, “If you don’t clean up all that laundry out there, somebody’ll notice.”
“Yeah. They’ll notice and blame him.”
Before she could process it, her arms were separated from her bindings. She groaned as Nico dropped her arms gently to her side. She shuddered with pain, but her rescuer rubbed the top of each of her arms all the way down to her hands. She looked to see the knife he’d used to separate the duct tape. She whispered, “Thank you. I thought my arms had died.”
“No problem. It’s always rough at first, when trying to get the blood flowing again,” he said, a note of apology in his voice. “Take the rest of the bindings off while I cut your feet apart.” He quickly separated the tape at her ankles and ripped it off. She’d been wearing slip-on sandals and Capri jeans, so the duct tape had left a raw red band on her skin. But she barely felt it with all the blood rushing to her extremities. Just being upright made her a bit dizzy. She huddled against the corner as she slowly tried to get the rest of duct tape off her wrists.