Pieces of the Puzzle

by Robert Stanek

  He hunkered down and waited. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. He clamped a hand over her mouth, heard the faint echo of footsteps from above.

  The footsteps grew louder slowly.

  He heard heavy breathing, wasn’t sure if it was hers, wasn’t sure if it was his own. He pressed his back against the wall, pulled Helen closer, and waited.

  He was sucking at warm air that wouldn’t quite fill his lungs when he saw a shadow framed in the doorway. The door opened. He ducked down, for a moment he was sure the suit had stared straight at him.

  He heard footsteps directly above his head. A moment later both suits were standing directly in front of him. He knew this only by their voices.

  One said to the other, “Did you see them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We lost them.”

  “I told you we didn’t need the camera anymore. Audio would have done just fine—”“We’re not supposed to be listening to the audio in the first place, so how in the hell are we going to know what this guy is doing if we don’t have video?”

  “But we were listening—”“Only because you repaired the transmitter. If we went to wires, you know the client would go nuts. I don’t want to end up as gator bait, do you?”

  “I told you this was mongo weird, told you from the start this wasn’t about some guy’s wife—”“They gave us the slip, arguing isn’t going to help anything.”

  “That camera cost nineteen grand. It’s coming out of your share.”

  “It cost him nineteen grand, not us. You’re getting on my nerves.”

  “We’ll wait. He’ll come back for the car, I know it.”

  “No, we lost him.”

  “Let’s get drunk and watch the recording of those chicks getting it on again.”

  “And count on Harry the Wonder Clerk to tell us if they return? You’re not only a pervert, you’re stupid.”

  “Up yours! I’m going to order a bottle of cognac and charge it to the room.”

  “Sticking the client for two hundred bucks isn’t going to help anything.”

  “Want to bet?”

  Chapter 16

  Miami, Florida Friday, 21 January

  Scott took Helen to the one place the suits wouldn’t think to look: Back to Room 908. He paced in circles for a few minutes and shouted at the walls as he tried to think. How did Helen fit into all this? Maybe she had known about the camera all along but she was the victim here and not otherwise. The terror in her eyes, every time he saw it, was real, very real. There was one thing someone held over her, the only thing she felt she had left in the world: Jessica.

  But what brought her back to the Ritz-Carlton? Why come back? What had she said about the camera—seeing it made her sure he would return. Had she really planned to kill herself?

  Scott eyed Helen. She was sitting on the bed, hugging her knees and sucking her finger like a little girl.

  Yes, she would have killed herself. There was no question about it.

  Why would she have wanted him to come back here? Was there something here she wanted him to find? Surely the suits would have removed the camera if she had killed herself. What else was here?

  It would have been a lot simpler if he could have asked her, but she wasn’t exactly coherent at the moment. She was babbling to herself, nothing he could understand, and anytime he came near her, she started screaming.

  What was here?

  He saw her suitcase in the corner of the closet and dumped its contents onto the floor. And for a second time, he found himself sifting through underwear, only this time it was Helen’s lingerie and not Jessica’s. But it all looked the same, frilly lace, yards of red and black—slips, panties, bras, entire outfits. No dresses, why not any dresses?

  “It’s not mine,” Helen said quietly.

  Scott rose from his haunches. Helen was still clutching her knees, but she had stopped trembling.

  She repeated, “It’s not mine.”

  He looked up at her. She was wearing a thin cotton jacket over an oversized red sun dress. It was hard to tell what was under the layers of baggy clothes, but he had never seen her wearing a bra. “These are Jessica’s?”

  She moved her head back and forth slowly. “Nope, Pattie’s weekend specials.”

  He walked toward the bed.

  She started screaming. “Stay where you are, don’t touch me, never touch me. You promised you wouldn’t hurt me, you promised you wouldn’t let anyone hurt me.”

  He sat down on the bed, put his arms around her. “It was a promise I never should have made, but I can help you, if you help me. Will you help me, Helen?”

  She nodded.

  “The truth, Helen,” he said firmly, “the whole truth. You knew the camera was there all along, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Words, Helen. I want to hear it.”

  “He promised if I did everything he asked, he wouldn’t hurt Jessica.”

  “He lied. How much of what you told me was a lie?”

  She returned a candid stare. “Everything that counted was the truth. Everything. I didn’t know where Jessica was. I didn’t know where the gizmo was. Why did he have to kill her?”

  “Why don’t you tell me? How was Jessica involved in this, was she an agent like your father?”

  “What do you know about my father?”

  “Not much, a little about his agency employment, his death in 1989.”

  She started crying. “My father never talked about his work.

  He worked for the government, that’s all I knew—that’s all I wanted to know. But Jessica, she wanted to know everything. Her business wasn’t enough, her degree wasn’t enough, nothing was ever enough.”

  “Was she working for our government?”

  “Our government, another government, what’s the difference? It’s all in her diary. She wasn’t going to give it to them. She was just playing with whoever would play her game.”

  He grabbed her shoulders, and the instant he did, he knew he shouldn’t have. “It wasn’t a game. People get killed for the things they know. It’s that simple. You know too much, you become a liability… They were using her, Helen. She was playing with her life and didn’t know it, but that’s the point. Make something look like nothing and get someone else to do the dirty work for you. The bottom line is to put the hook in someone else’s mouth. They used her. Now I need you to tell me who they are.”

  “The calendar pages… The client was XWEH. May never wrote anything out.” Helen’s sobs intensified.

  Scott sucked at the air. “All right, Helen. Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the client. He brought the box to Jessica?”

  “No, Jessica was on her way to meet a client when he intercepted her. He wasn’t my sister’s client and Jessica never saw him before that.”

  “Tell me his name. You have no reason to protect him anymore, and every reason to want to get even. Tell me his name.”

  “He told me his name was John. He gave me instructions on how to contact him and get him the things he asked for.”

  “A phone number, an address, what?”

  “A P.O. box in D.C. and a phone number.”

  “What types of things did he ask for?”

  “Little things at first. The names of Jessica’s clients, what project she was working on, things like that. I told him to get rid of him, and if I told him the things he wanted to know, sometimes he wouldn’t come and sometimes he wouldn’t touch me. I wanted to make him go away. I wanted to make him go away forever just like he promised.”

  “What is WIH-2?”

  “The project Jessica was supposed to be working on, but she said it didn’t have anything to do with the Internet and that it was only supposed to look that way. She found something. She wrote about it in her diary, but didn’t say what she found.”

  “You have her diary?”

  “And her date book. The funny thing is, is that the book says the project came in as routine: Make a test port, te
st for FCC compliance, help the client work it through the system so the product can be shipped off.”

  He didn’t say that routine for Jessica was probably never routine, instead he said, “Shipped where?”

  She put her head against his chest and sobbed. “I’m so tired. I just want to close my eyes and never wake up. There’s nothing left to wake up for—”He hushed her and rocked her back and forth like her mother should have. He closed his eyes and thought about what she had said, and later, he thought about the conversation he had overheard in the stairwell. He figured the suits were staying in the hotel, and soon, at least one, and possibly both, would be dead drunk.

  ***

  Scott waited by the service elevator. Helen stood a few steps behind him—she didn’t want to be alone in the room and he didn’t want to let her out of his sight. A few minutes ago, he placed a call to room service from a hotel phone just off the lobby, “We’re back. Send another bottle of cognac to our room.” Click.

  A pimple-faced teenager was walking toward the elevator. He was carrying a bottle, whistling and acting like he didn’t have a care in the world. Scott watched him and waited until he was a few feet away. “Just another Friday night, hey Ernie?”

  Ernie almost dropped the bottle as he jumped. “The service elevator is for employees. You’re supposed to use the main elevators.”

  “It’s broke anyway.”

  Ernie pushed the elevator button. The doors opened. “No it ain’t.”

  Scott said to Helen, “Well look at that.”

  Helen smiled at Ernie and walked into the elevator. Scott followed. Ernie hesitated then entered. He pushed 3. The doors closed.

  “I remember you,” Ernie said, “I always remember big tippers. You want something, don’t you?”

  “What room are you taking the bottle to?”

  Ernie didn’t say anything. The elevator stopped on the third floor. Ernie got out. Scott and Helen followed. Scott waved an Andrew Jackson in front of Ernie’s eyes and repeated, “What room are you taking the bottle to?”

  “Forget it,” Ernie said coolly, “Some guy gave me a fifty just to let him deliver the bottle last time. The way I figure it, someone big is staying in the room, a movie star maybe, and I oughta get an autograph.”

  Scott glanced at Helen, put the twenty away. “Well then, we’ll just follow you and let you do all the work.”

  Ernie stopped midstride. “Twenty is good.”

  Scott took out his wallet again. Ernie reached for the money.

  Scott said, “Not so fast. The room number first and the bottle.”

  Ernie gave Scott the bottle. “Room 336.”

  “Room 336?”

  Ernie nodded. Scott waited for Ernie to get back in the elevator and for the elevator doors to close. Once Ernie was gone, Scott started walking. Room 336 was the last room on the right at the end of the hall, near the stairs.

  Scott touched a finger to his lips when he reached the door and pointed down the adjacent hall. The door to the room was ajar, not enough to see into the room, but still not closed and locked. He didn’t like the looks of it. He continued past the room, turned the corner, knowing that if Helen wasn’t with him, he wouldn’t have hesitated.

  He gripped her shoulder to tell her to stop and took the .22

  Beretta out of his boot. “Can you use this?” he whispered.

  She grimaced. “The only thing my daddy ever taught me to do right.”

  “Can you shoot a man if you have to?”

  “Don’t carry unless you’re willing to kill because the other guy will see it in your eyes and know you can’t pull the trigger, that was one of my daddy’s rules.”

  He looked her in the eye. “Would you have shot to kill when you found me in your sister’s office?”

  “No, not really.”

  “You shoot this, you shoot to take someone down. You shoot so they don’t ever move again because if they get up, they’re going to kill you. Do you understand?”

  Helen gulped. “I don’t want to, but I do.”

  He handed her the gun. “We’re going to go back to the room now and do this just like we talked about.”

  “And if you don’t come out?”

  “Don’t worry, I will.”

  She kissed his cheek. He glared at her.

  “For good luck,” she whispered.

  Scott pushed her away, saying “I don’t need luck,” and moved her with his eyes to the place she was supposed to stand. He took the gun out of the shoulder holster, tucked it into the back of his pants, then knocked on the door. The door slipped open a bit more with every knock. He said, “Room service, someone here ordered a bottle of cognac.”

  No one responded.

  Scott continued to knock and as he did so, he nudged the door with his elbow and peered into the shadowy gloom of the room. He repeated, “Room service.”

  Nervously, he waited. He glanced to Helen, warning her to stay where she was with his eyes. A little voice in the back of his mind told him something was wrong, very wrong.

  He nudged the door again with his elbow and slipped into the room through the narrow opening. When no one shouted or screamed, he set the bottle down next to the door and took the gun out of concealment.

  He was suddenly glad the room was shadowed in darkness and also suddenly very aware that his figure was outlined in the lighted doorway. He reached back with his foot and kicked the door closed, the soft thud of the closing door was loud enough that it should have brought someone running but it didn’t.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and a while longer for him to realize that the stillness meant no one was there. The room was laid out differently from his room upstairs. It looked larger for one thing, there were two beds for another, and the door interconnecting the next room was wide open.

  There was a light on in the next room. He crossed to the doorway, then peered inside.

  A lamp was on beside the single, king-sized bed. The balcony doors were wide open and the wind was ruffling the drapery. The bathroom door was closed, but he could see a finger of light under it.

  He listened at the bathroom door for a long time, hearing only his heartbeats in his ears. Satisfied, he touched his hand to the knob and slowly turned it.

  As he prepared to push the door open, in one swift move, he played his index finger nervously across the trigger. He thrust open the door, tensed as he sighted the gun from the sink to the tub and when he was looking down the barrel of the gun at a Jacuzzi tub and bloodstained walls, he closed his eyes and sucked at air that wouldn’t fill his lungs.

  He didn’t look into the tub. He didn’t need to. Two right arms dangling over the side of the tub said it all.

  He raced back to the other room and brought Helen in from the hall. He closed the door behind her. “Did anyone see you standing there?”

  “No one. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” He tucked the Browning into the back of his pants, took the Beretta from Helen and put it back into his boot.

  He raised his hands to his head, trying to think. “Don’t touch anything. Just stay right there. You got that?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He turned on the overhead lights. Nothing in the room caught his eye. He raced into the other room and turned on the lights. A table and chairs pushed against the far wall next to the TV caught his eye; under the table was what he was looking for He kneeled down, eyed the recording equipment and an empty rack for discs.

  Helen said from behind him, “It’s still playing.”

  He smacked the back of his head on the tabletop as he stood.

  He spun around and glared at Helen. She was standing in the doorway between the rooms.

  He turned on the TV, saw static, ejected the disc from the recorder. The disc was labeled: 12-8. He stuck the disc back into the recorder, pressed Play. Helen came up behind him. He pushed her back with a gentle nudge and sat in one of the chairs.

  The picture wasn’t v
ery clear and just like the recording he had seen in the limo, there were a lot of shadows. The room was empty and quiet. He saw an unmade bed, the nightstands beside the bed, and nothing else. He pushed Fast Forward.

  Bright light from the balcony windows filtered into the room and lifted some of the gloom. Someone came into the room: A maid with a cleaning cart. She cleaned the room, made the bed. He didn’t hear anything, turned up the sound, and still didn’t hear anything.

  A while later, he saw a hand, everything went black, and then when the picture returned, he heard a faint hiss. He pushed Fast Forward.

  There was nothing for a long while, then something passed in front of the camera. He slowed the recording. He heard a woman’s voice in the background. A door opened, closed. He heard the voice again.

  “Is everything all right?” the voice asked, the volume so loud that it made Helen jump. He adjusted the volume, satisfied, he leaned back.

  A second female voice replied, “Yeah, I’ll be out in a moment. I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.”

  “You’re not still worried, are you?”

  There was a long pause. “Of course not.”

  “Well, I’m worried about you.”

  “Don’t be.” A door opened. “How do I look? I bought it for you.” The woman who was speaking passed in front of the camera and sat down on the edge of the bed and for the first time, Scott saw her face. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Helen bite the back of her hand. The woman was Jessica and the eyes, the eyes were as haunting as ever.

  Scott asked Helen “Is that Pattie with Jessica?”

  Helen rolled her eyes.

  He grabbed her shoulders. “Is it or isn’t it?”

  “Sounds like her. Do we have to watch this?”

  “Not much more, I just want you to be sure that the other woman is Pattie. I want you to get a good look at her—” He cut short as the other woman approached the bed. He saw the back of her head as she went around the side of the bed and kneeled on the floor next to Jessica who was sitting on the edge of the bed. Jessica leaned back onto the mattress and her elbows. The other woman crawled up onto the bed, halfway up Jessica’s thighs. She reached down to the floor for something Scott couldn’t see.