by Jon F. Merz
“Sir,” he began, “we do not have room service in this hotel. And if we did, we most assuredly would not serve…chicken fingers.”
“Maybe it was my bottle of Krug Clos du Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 1995 champagne then.”
He blinked. “In which case, it most definitely should be cold.”
“Indeed.”
“Was there something I could help you with, sir?”
“I’m checking into the unfortunate incident upstairs,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
He sighed. “As I told the other gentleman, there’s nothing I can tell you. I was on duty last night, but I saw nothing that would cause me any alarm. Now really, sir, I do have a very busy schedule today.” He went back to typing on the computer.
I put both of my hands on the counter in front of him. “That’s fine, I mean, I’ll just hang out here until you have a few minutes to talk. In the meantime, I’ll be sure to greet each and every one of your guests as they walk through the lobby. Maybe, I don’t know, offer them a tour of the crime scene upstairs. I’m sure everyone would enjoy seeing the body of a man who was killed in your hotel, on your watch, within feet of where they happen to be staying. Things are still pretty rank up there, but once you get used to the smell of death, it’s not that bad. Some of them might freak out, but you know, that’s how it goes. Price of admission and all.”
The lobby door swung open and a well-dressed dowager came strolling through with an air of imperiousness I hadn’t seen since the last time I attended a knighting ceremony in Great Britain.
“Good morning-“
The dude behind the desk dashed around it and took me by the arm, guiding me away from the dowager with deft skill. I let myself be led to the sitting area where I broke the grip easily and rounded on him.
“I tried being nice, but don’t screw around with me, kid. I want some answers and I want them now.”
“Very well, very well. Just don’t talk to anyone.”
“I can do that.”
“Then what do you want to know?”
2
“What’s your name?”
The hotel manager didn’t have a strand of hair out of place on his entire scalp, with each lock carefully positioned using some type of organic hair product. He wore an Armani suit and the caps of his Italian leather shoes showed my reflection. “My name is Templeton.”
“That’s your first name?”
He nodded. “I’ve heard it all my life, trust me.”
I shrugged. “Fair enough. What do you have for security around this place?”
Templeton gestured to several discrete orbs positioned about the lobby ceiling. “We have cameras covering most of the entrances and exits. Our footage is preserved offsite using latest generation tech. We don’t want to give the appearance of being a high-security facility, mind you, but we do want our guests to feel safe while they are with us.”
“So much for that, huh?” I watched Templeton’s eyes, but he’d long ago mastered the art of remaining cool and detached and they didn’t even flicker.
“Yes, well, that was an unfortunate event.”
“No doubt.” I pointed at one of the orbs. “You have them fixed or do they pan across the entire area?”
“Fixed,” said Templeton. “We employ more than one to cover all the different angles. I was told that is less likely to leave gaps in coverage.”
“It might,” I said. “But any seasoned professional will know how to get through them all without leaving any trace of themselves on film.”
“Film? This is digital.”
I sighed. “It’s just an expression. You want to show me where you have the monitors?”
“This way.” Templeton led me to a small door behind a large potted plant and we passed out of the swank lobby into a cold, austere back hallway that led us to the security room. Inside, the hum of electronics and artificial cooling droned on while banks of screens captured the action back in the lobby. Another bank showed various doorways and emergency exits. One of the screens was dark.
I pointed to it. “What’s the story with that one?”
“It went down last night at some point,” said Templeton. “I have a repair order out to the company that services these units. It should be operational later today, I’d expect.”
“I’d be willing to bet my unborn kid that camera covers the exit used by the killer. We won’t get anything off of them leaving. But how about coming into the hotel in the first place? Can you roll back footage to last night and let me go over it? There’s a chance I might get lucky.”
Templeton pointed at the computer sitting on the desk. “You can scroll back through the files and replay footage on the computer easily enough. How long do you think it will take you to do so?”
“Depends,” I said. I could tell Templeton wanted this entire affair out of his mind and off of his property. But unless he gave me everything that I needed, it wasn’t going away anytime soon. “But I’ll try to be out of your hair as soon as I can.”
“I’d really appreciate that. We have a fair number of long-term residents,” said Templeton. “Needless to say, the presence of so many…different…people will no doubt alarm them and I have no wish to do so unnecessarily.”
“You don’t think the fact that some dude got his entire body carved out last night is cause for concern?”
Templeton held up his hand. “It’s not that, I mean of course, I think it’s cause for alarm. But I don’t really believe that the killer will come back. I mean, do you?”
“Anything’s possible.” But I knew he was right. Whoever had done Amalfi back upstairs had staged everything just so. That took time. Effort. And an ability to put things into motion without drawing attention to themselves. If they came back to this place, they’d be asking to be scrutinized and that didn’t jibe with their plans.
At least not at this point.
“Look, I’ll do what I can to get into this and then be done and gone as soon as I can. If I have any questions, can I bother you?”
“Of course,” said Templeton. “I’m here until noon and then I vanish for several hours for my workout and nap. I’ll be back this evening.”
“Fair enough.”
Templeton hesitated as if he wanted to say something, but then just nodded his head. “All right then, I’ll leave you to it.”
I watched him exit the room and then slid the office chair back from the desk and sat down. The interface was simple enough and I started going back over the footage from the previous day. The immediate priority was looking through the footage of last evening. I didn’t think I was going to have any luck, but I’m an optimist at heart - despite what people think about my intensity. You see the same shit I have in my life and you can’t help but be an optimist; once you hit the bottom of the barrel, the only way is up.
Amalfi showed up on screen at about ten o’clock. He was dressed in a bespoke suit that fit his features like a second skin. Custom suits look like no other; and there’s no mistaking a store-bought with a bespoke if you know what to look for. I did. Amalfi clearly took pride in his appearance. Put most schlubby guys in a suit and the suit wears them; but a real man knows how to carry himself when he’s dressed well. It’s the difference between being the class clown frat boy that no one respects and being a man with standards who doesn’t give a shit what people think of him.
I watched as Amalfi checked in at the counter and slid the black credit card across the way. Another figure moved in behind him.
A woman.
And the hat she wore did an exquisite job of concealing every part of her face. She wore gloves, too. A rarity these days, but no doubt an oddity that she probably used to help attract a better class of men to her. The dress she wore clung to her curves and showed off her assets. The coat she’d worn was draped over her arm and she stood patiently while Amalfi checked them in.
She didn’t move at all. Not until Amalfi was done and turned to smile at her. She held o
ut her right hand, let Amalfi take it and then pivoted to her left, keeping herself turned away from the camera the entire time.
I leaned back.
She knew.
She knew the cameras were there. I mean, it wasn’t that much of a stretch to think there would be security cameras - every place had them these days. Especially in Boston. After the Marathon bombing, even the smallest places had cameras installed. You couldn’t go anywhere without being recorded.
But to avoid a camera, you had to know it was there and then you had to know where it was positioned. The woman on the footage seemed to know exactly where to stand, how to position herself, and even what to wear to keep from being seen on camera.
I switched cameras to see if there was footage of them exiting the elevator at their floor. I found it and scrolled back to find the right time stamp. There it was. At precisely 10:13:27, the elevators doors opened and they both stepped off the car. The woman’s hat continued to obscure her features, even as they walked down the hallway toward their room.
I frowned and fast-forwarded but the woman with the hat didn’t appear on any other footage that I could find. I’d ask the Ferrets to go over it again, just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, but I didn’t think I had. I knew what she’d done and the steps she’d taken to ensure her identity stayed secure.
She’d done reconnaissance on the hotel.
How else could she have known the camera positions? How else would she have been able to conceal herself unless she’d gone over the killing ground ahead of time?
The question was: how far in advance had she planned this? It could have been days, but I didn’t think she would have risked it. I put myself in her shoes: if I was planning a hit I would have scouted things at least a couple of weeks ahead of time, and preferably about a month out from the hit itself. A lot of footage got archived after thirty days, and retrieving it would be more problematic. But even if she hand’t done it a month before, certainly it had been within a few weeks.
And nothing longer than a month. Anything over that and you ran the chance that things might change in some way that would affect the plan. Renovations, a new coat of paint, anything like that could throw off the lay of the land. This woman didn’t strike me as the type who would throw caution to the wind and take a chance like that.
Not her.
In order to do what she’d done, she needed to know that she could come and go without fear of being seen or identified. She needed enough time to eviscerate Amalfi and then she needed some means of carrying out the organs with her for whatever use she intended. That meant she needed an exit that she could come and go probably a few times.
The busted camera.
That would have been how she got out and then came back for her repeat trips. The hat wouldn’t have worked as well there because she needed more than one trip to bring Amalfi’s body parts out with her. So break the camera, do what she needed to do, and then scram.
I wondered if she was some type of professional hitter. The job had the hallmarks of a pro: careful planning and execution, not one bit of useable evidence as far as I could tell, and judging from the manner that she displayed on camera, she wasn’t jumpy or excited about anything. She appeared to be cool and detached, exactly what a pro might be.
Then again, the manner of death and the post-mortem evisceration didn’t jibe with a pro hit. It didn’t feel cool and detached at that point at all. It felt…orgiastic, I guess. I couldn’t describe it exactly, but something made me feel like she had enjoyed the post-mortem events more than the act of killing itself. If I thought about it, the kill had been quick: a sliced open throat and then the stake to the heart. It would have been over in maybe one minute. Maybe.
But the after party, that was something else. The precision those cuts had been made with showed someone with discipline and skill. And while she might have reveled in the process, she didn’t allow the emotion to interfere with her precision. This was someone who could be lusty one moment and utterly ice cold the next. If I’d been a psychologist, I might have said she was bi-polar, but I knew she wasn’t. She didn’t have two personalities at opposite ends of the extreme. She had two sides that worked seamlessly well together. All geared toward a single purpose: to kill and harvest what she needed.
Whoever she was, the woman was dangerous. Genuinely dangerous. And in some ways, perhaps more than even Talya.
I took a breath and slowed my heart rate, realizing just then how much it had ticked up in intensity. Was I scared? Fear went along with my job, but I’d learned long ago how to process it properly so it didn’t impede me. But I didn’t think this was so much fear, as it was something else.
I was excited about this hunt.
3
I found my way out of the back hallway to the lobby where I saw Templeton and asked him to give the Ferrets access to the camera footage files so they could comb through it once more. I didn’t think they’d find anything, but then again, it doesn’t hurt to double-check.
“Is there anything else?” asked Templeton.
“Show me where the security camera is that’s broken. I want to see what area it covered.”
“Of course.” Templeton led me to another employee door and we snaked our way down the corridor to a separate door. This gave us access to the emergency stairwell that allowed people to exit the building in case of a fire or if the elevators stopped working. He pushed open the emergency exit door at the base of the stairs and pointed up at a camera outside the building. It was positioned to show the doorway itself. Anyone coming out or trying to get in would have been picked up by the camera.
Except it was broken.
I walked around outside and could see it would be easy enough to break the camera with very little effort. Using a broomstick, someone could reach up and move it off its mount. A little extra force would tear the wire housing and disconnect it entirely. Which is pretty much what I thought the woman I was now chasing had probably done.
“You say it went offline last night?”
“Yes. Shortly before ten o’clock.”
I nodded. She would have made some sort of excuse to come around to the back of the building and break the camera. That was right before they checked in. She wouldn’t have broken it any earlier because it would have been repaired. No, she would have had to break it right before she came into the hotel. It was the only way to ensure she could exit and re-enter without being recorded.
I turned and surveyed the area. The emergency stairs led out to the alley I stood in now. It was hemmed in on either side by tall brick walls from neighboring buildings. But the doors on either building looked as though it would take a tank to break through them. While crime was low in the area, the neighborhood hadn’t always been as safe as it was now.
Correction: until last night.
But the alley was wide enough to permit a car to access it. And I wondered if perhaps the woman had backed her car in, popped the trunk, and then shuttled down the bags containing Amalfi’s body parts. With the trunk up, no one would see what she was doing. And I doubted anyone would even notice the car parked in the alley here anyway. On a cold winter’s night, there wouldn’t be much, if any, foot traffic after ten o’clock at night.
Once she was done stowing her souvenirs, it would just be a matter of hopping into the car and driving off with no one the wiser.
I squatted down and searched the ground for any sort of sign I could possibly use. I didn’t expect to find anything, really. It wasn’t like I was man-tracking someone across wet ground; this was the hard asphalt of the cold city. Unless she happened to blow a tire in the alley, I wasn’t going to uncover a damned thing.
“Do you need me to be out here with you?” asked Templeton.
I’d forgotten he was there with me. I turned and looked at him. He shivered in the cold air. “No. Thanks for your help. If I need you again, I’ll walk around to the front and find you.”
“Very well.” Templeton ducked back into the
emergency exit and the door slammed shut behind him, leaving me all alone in the alley.
I took my time looking around again. Minimal trash littered the ground. Templeton actually seemed to do a decent job keeping his area as clean as was possible. I saw a story cigarette butt some distance away, but discounted it: there was no lipstick on it. That wasn’t necessarily conclusive, but I doubted the woman smoked. For some reason, a picture of her was beginning to develop in my head, and the picture didn’t include a smoker. Such behavior seemed…I don’t know, beneath her.
Plus, from a tactical standpoint, it wouldn’t make sense for her to leave something behind like a butt that could possibly be used to identify her. I didn’t think she was that careless. Not after all the time she’d clearly invested into planning this jaunt with the care and precision evidenced thus far.
No. Not a smoker.
I walked to the end of the alley and leaned against the wall. From where I stood, the alley fed into a street lined with shops and apartments. A bunch of cars sat parked at meters and the foot traffic seemed about normal for the area. Cars zipped by, but the closest intersection was a few blocks away: too far for any cameras there to pick up a car coming out of the alley.
I sighed. She’d done her homework, that was for sure. She might not have been a professional assassin, but she certainly knew the skills necessary to be one.
A small bodega sat next to an ATM stall at eleven o’clock to the alley. That would be my best bet, I decided. The ATM might not have an external camera, but I felt pretty certain the bodega would. A lot of times, the shop owners who ran the small convenience stores went all out protecting their little slice of the American Dream, and I respected them for doing so. I did a quick walk by and confirmed that the place had more cameras than bags of chips. Perfect.
But a vampire couldn’t just waltz into a store and demand to see their security footage from last night. There was no way they’d ever give it up.