by John Farrow
He spelled it out for him. “If the people who took her want to know what I know then it’s reasonable to expect that they do so by now.”
“I hear you, Émile. But they wouldn’t expect her to know anything.”
“Not unless they ask.”
His voice was quiet, determined, when he said, “They won’t harm her, Émile.”
That suggested to Cinq-Mars that he was making an educated guess about who snatched her up. “And you’re confident of that why? Isn’t this whole thing a trail of dead bodies? Isn’t that why I’m here? So why should Sandra be safe?”
“Because—” Dreher started, then stopped. He knew that he was traipsing closer to what he did not want to say and to what Émile Cinq-Mars was after. But he chose to forge on and told him, “Because they have no reason to.”
“Whereas the others, someone had reason. What reason?”
But Agent Dreher knew his limits.
“Émile, I’m sending help right away. Let me get onto that. I know who I want on this.”
“Yeah? You got somebody to call you trust? Who trusts you? This I gotta see.”
Cinq-Mars turned away from the window, the city, as he punched off his phone. The night beckoned him into a freefall from which he might not surface. Sandra’s finger, her life. He had to go hard until a positive outcome arrived. Otherwise he might just collapse.
He took a step and winced. Oh no, this he could not allow. Of course it had come upon him. The plane travel, all the sitting he’d been doing, then the stress bounding through his bloodstream. Another step and his left lower side ignited with pain. He wondered if he hadn’t slipped a disc. He could not falter now. Sandra needed him. He could not avoid doing what was necessary, and so Cinq-Mars lay on his back upon the bed, breathed deeply into his belly, then into his lungs, and stretched his considerable length and held his breath before he slowly let the air out as if deflating an air mattress and brought his arms down to his waist. He did that once more before he permitted himself a few normal breaths to keep from hyperventilating. Then he repeated the procedure several more times until he lost count. When he stood up again, he was somewhat okay. Semi-normal. Out of pain with decent mobility. He was able to function.
As he stepped toward the corridor he acknowledged that the incident was both symbolic and fortuitous. In this crisis, he had to make sure to look after himself or be rendered useless.
FOURTEEN
Everardo Flores had arrived back at the hotel, his trip home interrupted in similar manner to Sergeant Dupree’s. Unlike Dupree, he returned looking impeccable, as if to start a new day. Had he let the breeze catch his hair on the way out, had he slackened his tie, no such gesture toward ease and relaxation was apparent now. Reconfigured as a coiffed, groomed hotel representative before daring to return inside the Hilton, he struck the rather studied figure of a meticulous and composed individual.
The moment he entered, a subordinate informed him that on his watch a man in the hotel, neither guest nor employee, had been murdered in a vacant room.
Instead of going straight to Dupree as several officers asked him to do, he went off to find Émile Cinq-Mars. Flores was directed to the seventeenth floor, and as Émile stepped out into the corridor, the head of security rushed to greet him, his concern and loyalty going first to the welfare of a hotel guest rather than to the dictates of the local New Orleans detective.
He came at Émile in such a rush it appeared he might tackle him.
For his part, Émile suppressed a desire to fly off the handle. Before he could think of a single articulate word he felt an inappropriate rant surging through his veins—“What kind of a hotel are you running here anyway?”—which would escalate into a diatribe against the Hilton chain and, in due course, possibly denounce the Hilton family and generations of their progeny—“Do you think I care one whit about Paris Hilton?” The lunacy of his rage alerted him to his own imbalance. He was so rarely off his centerline that this unwanted mental harangue was indicative of an impending collapse. He reined himself in, hard and fast.
“Mr. Cinq-Mars. My God! I’m so sorry.”
“Mr. Flores, what do you know?”
“I’m sorry? Know? Nothing!”
“What have you heard? Do you know about the dead man?”
“Oh. Sorry. Yes. I believe I’m up to speed, sir. Are you all right? You don’t look well. The shock. I understand. Your wife! But where are you going now?”
“Where’ve you been? Home?” Cinq-Mars stopped walking and turned so abruptly that Flores rammed into his chest. The former detective looked down on Flores in his policeman’s practiced accusatory style. “Were you home?”
“Almost. I came the moment I got the call. I take it she’s not answering.”
Cinq-Mars gazed closely at Flores. So rarely was he behind in any conversation. He realized also that he felt light-headed, mildly faint, and he wasn’t at all used to that. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“You’ve called her?”
“Are you—” He abbreviated that dormant rage again, in this case censoring a torrent of personal insults. Forcing himself to be calm, or calmer, he understood at least part of what the man meant. “As radical as this may seem to you, Mr. Flores, my wife did not bring a cell phone along on the trip. What would be the point in two of us paying for additional coverage in the USA? Do you have any idea how expensive that is?” He was offtrack again. “In any case, no, I can’t call her.”
Simultaneously, Flores appeared both enlightened and confused.
“What’s the matter?” Cinq-Mars inquired.
“Then how do you know—” He stopped himself, probably because he didn’t want to appear to be the ignorant hotel security man.
“Never mind,” Cinq-Mars told him. “You’ve just given me an idea. Come on. I need to get back to my room. Then we’ll find Dupree. How can we find Dupree?”
As it turned out, Everardo Flores could assist him with that. He got in touch with his associates in Security and tracked down the man staying close to Dupree without letting him out of his sight. First, they rode an elevator to the eleventh floor.
“I’m confused,” Flores mentioned as the car slid downward. “What idea did you get from me, sir?”
Cinq-Mars answered quietly. “You came back when we called. That’s a clue.”
“That’s a clue? Asking stupid questions, that’s another clue, I suppose?” he grumbled. Flores wanted, and yet didn’t want, to press him for an explanation.
“Maybe. In this instance, it hasn’t hurt.” Cinq-Mars assured him, “You’ll see.”
In his room, he worked at a pace, sorting through his wife’s things.
“What?” Flores asked, baffled. He stood at the door, holding it open.
“Hang on.” When Cinq-Mars broke for the elevators again Flores hurried to catch up. This time they rode a car down to the eighth. As the elevator doors slid open, the pair hurried to find Dupree.
In the corridor it became clear that Everardo Flores was not totally up to speed. He had not been made aware that cops were waking up guests. He was stunned. They stepped into the room where Dupree was seated on a bed.
“What the hell is this?” Flores demanded.
“Keep your voice down,” Sergeant Dupree told him. “Y’all don’t want to distress your guests, do you?”
“You’re waking them up!”
“Ah, but we speak very softly when we do so. I find it makes all the difference in the world when you drag somebody from a deep sleep, don’t you?”
An empty room served as a temporary command post while his people were on that floor. If a guest wanted to complain, or worse—have a fit, or go into a feverish paroxysm at this interference with their carefree dreaming hours, or, as in a few cases, become belligerent about an interruption to their porn-watching and whatnot—then they knew where to find him and Dupree could talk them down. Flores saw the merit in that, but remained upset that guests were being disturbed.
“Better to h
ave us rather than killers and kidnappers wake them up, no? But don’t worry, Mr. Flores, we’re not telling people that. Or would you rather they knew?”
Then Dupree saw Cinq-Mars standing behind Flores.
“Mr. Cinq-Mars. We’re doing our groundwork. Nothing’s turned up yet.”
“We’ve erred,” Cinq-Mars said. He stepped further into the room. “I erred. She’s not in the building.”
“Say what? This was your idea. It’s worth pursuing, no?”
“Your idea?” Flores flared.
“We missed the obvious.”
“Okay,” Dupree allowed. “How do you figure?”
“What’s the first question you ask when someone goes missing?”
Thinking about it, Dupree was also busily scratching the back of his right elbow. He sat with his thick thighs splayed outward. The indentation on the bed went deep. “I’d ask, what does the individual look like?”
“Except that in this case you know what she looks like. You met her. So the next question would normally be—and I admit, this is not a normal situation—what was she wearing?”
“Okay,” Dupree played along, remaining sceptical. “What was she wearing?”
“I went through her wardrobe. Blue jeans and a pale green top, a pullover type thing.”
“We’ll get that on the wire,” Dupree assured him.
“You’re not following me.”
“Why am I not surprised? Talk me through it, Cinq-Mars.”
Émile took a breath, still putting it together in his head and trying to grasp the ramifications. “Sandra walked out of here on her own accord. She willingly left the building. She wasn’t abducted—initially—because she took the time to choose clothes buried in her suitcase. Nothing that was on top, easy to get at. If she was being abducted she’s not going to go carefully looking through her luggage to put something on for the occasion or to select clothes that match.”
Dupree remained confused. “Okay. I get it. But you’re telling me that—initially—she was not abducted?”
“I’m saying that she was lured outside. It’s the only explanation. Everardo gave me the idea. He came back here as soon as he was called. The call was important enough that he turned around and drove straight back. Sandra—she also must’ve received a call. Something that lured her into leaving the hotel, probably to meet me, maybe to meet you. Who knows? Since then, I’m guessing, she’s been kept away.”
Rising from the soft mattress was not easy for the large man, but Dupree heaved and puffed and made it up. “We still have a problem,” he noted.
“The blood smear. I know. I was thinking about that. It’s what gave us—gave me—the wrong thought. But it could have been after the fact, no? We didn’t know about Mr. Grant then. You said it was an hour old, the blood? First off, Mr. Flores here is tight with his security. It would not have been easy for someone to find out my new room number. Possible, but not easy. I’m not in the computer at the front desk, for instance. Instead, Sandra was telephoned. She doesn’t have a cell. The hotel switchboard would’ve found her and put the call through. So check on that. But that’s why I still think that she was grabbed. Because after she was grabbed, she gave up the room number. And her key card. That makes the blood smear in the room possible, probably from a sheared off finger—hopefully, Jefferson Grant’s, no one else’s—which all occurred after she left. They wanted to make it look as though she was abducted straight out of her room. Grant’s troubles might have started in my new room, he might have been killed there, but I consider that highly unlikely. More likely, the finger was brought back to the room after he was killed—so much easier than dragging his body around, don’t you think?—then the wall was smeared, both to alert us to an abduction—”
“Alert us?”
“Who kidnaps anybody in secret?”
“Okay. So what’s the other thing?” Dupree wasn’t smiling anymore, but looked both puzzled and attentive.
“They wanted to alert us to the abduction, to fool us about how it occurred. And they wanted to intimidate us, or maybe just me, with the sight of blood and of course, eventually, with the dead body. I bet that’s why we haven’t heard from them yet. They expect us to need a lot more time to find the corpse.”
Dupree nodded briefly and paced the floor a little. His size astonished Cinq-Mars in this intimate environment. “I’m not calling off the door-to-door,” he told him. “But I get you, Émile. I’m buying into your interpretation. We’ll follow both theories. Say, for now, that she walked out the front door, unaccompanied, all on her own.”
“Most likely unaccompanied. Somebody sold her a bill of goods.”
Pausing, Dupree stared directly into Émile’s eyes. “Just so we understand each other, this is a tough one. I’m looking for the same miracle you are, but until we hear from her abductors, assuming that she has abductors, this is a tough one.”
“I know what you’re saying, Sergeant.”
The detective nodded, touched his hand a moment to Émile’s biceps, and quietly said, “Call me Dupree.”
“Dupree, there’s one other theory to consider.”
For the briefest moment, the detective flashed that glittering smile again. “Go ahead. I’m all ears.”
“The dead man. He might have told my wife to leave. In that sense, in some kind of scenario like that, she wasn’t abducted. She put on some clothes. Things that she can move around in comfortably. Then she hurried out. She escaped.”
“Escaped? You think your wife might have escaped? The Hilton Garden Inn?”
Cinq-Mars himself didn’t want to wave this flag with enthusiasm, only to be keenly disappointed further along. But it was possible. “I talked to my guy in the FBI, like you asked me to do. It turns out, he hired Grant to protect me.”
“Really? If that’s true, Jefferson Grant’s come up in the world. Not that it’s done him much good. So the FBI was protecting you. Okay, from what? From who?”
“That’s where we reach an impasse. They just won’t say.”
“Do they know?”
“They won’t say. I’m guessing they know.”
“Damn. Probably one of their asinine conspiracies. They’re the biggest conspiracy theorists on the planet.”
“Part of their job description, I suppose.”
Dupree folded his arms across his chest. “Anything else I need to know?”
Cinq-Mars took a deeper breath. “You won’t like this part, Dupree.”
“I don’t like any part of this, Émile.”
“They’re coming.”
“Great. The FBI? Great. You’re right. I don’t like it. This is New Orleans, Émile. Do you know what you get when you put a New Orleans cop in the same room with an agent from the FBI? Doesn’t matter who the individuals might be.”
“You tell me,” Cinq-Mars invited him.
“Disdain,” Dupree let him know, although he might have guessed. “Sheer disdain. It grows on you. Like mold. Anyway, thanks for the head’s up.”
“I’m told they’re sending in the cavalry. I suppose I insisted on it.”
The two men looked away from one another.
“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Dupree said.
“Does that mean I have to go back to calling you Sergeant now?”
Someone in the hall was waving for Dupree. Without answering the question, he turned away and walked off to attend to that matter. Everardo Flores came up beside Cinq-Mars and the two men observed the activity in the corridor.
“How can I help?” Flores asked.
“Help?” Cinq-Mars absentmindedly repeated. He was feeling dizzy again and the front of his brain throbbed.
“You called me back here.”
“You were called back here, Everardo, because you’re a suspect. We don’t want our suspects out of sight. Don’t you get that yet?”
He didn’t and, being put out by the idea, scurried off in a huff to ease the distress of his other guests in the Hilton Garden Inn.<
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Over the next half hour, Cinq-Mars pinned his hopes on the arrival of Rand Dreher’s cavalry. As he expected, no further evidence was derived from the hotel searches and no news came in from the streets. Sandra had vanished. He didn’t know what another infusion of police could do, but he was having a difficult time maintaining his usual equilibrium, and since he could not rely upon himself he was relying upon numerical force. If he could he’d call out a multitude from the heavens, a legion from hell, mobs from their sodden lairs, and armies from their barracks. He’d like to summon the minions from every continent to search and destroy, to query every living soul on earth until answers were revealed. His weariness, perhaps, or his abrupt and free-ranging fears had taken over, and he no longer felt himself. The severe ache in his brain could be an impending stroke, not that he had any experience in such matters, but the sensation felt menacing and strange. Émile had to will himself to be calm and suspected that at any other time of his life he could manage even a crisis this severe with a higher degree of control and calm were it not for two aspects that impinged upon his usual strengths: he was out of his territory, therefore surprisingly incapable of action, and he just felt older, more tired. Whereas in another era he might have been running on adrenaline, postponing an eventual crash, now he felt as if he had already crashed, and was waiting for someone, or some event, or some thing, to pick him up.
Dupree moved his so-called command center a floor higher, and Cinq-Mars followed along. He was alone in that room when he heard a knock on the open door. Cinq-Mars looked up and saw a woman in conservative attire suitable for an office, and for the tiniest fraction of an instant a thought zipped through his head that she was Sandra. But no. Sandra did not have longish, dark brunette tresses or blue eyes. His wife was much younger than him, but nowhere near thirty, which was the approximate age of his visitor.
“Detective Cinq-Mars?” the woman asked.
He chose to dispense with denying he was a detective. “Yes?”
“Vira Sivak,” the woman replied. She strode forward and extended her hand. Cinq-Mars had seized upon a thought that terrified him—“oh no, the press!”—when she added, “Special Agent, FBI.”