I glanced up and down the side of the annex. I saw no other curtains open and no one leaning on their railings to take the air—not that the air would be all that delightful this close to the Dumpsters baking in the July heat. And even if the distant golfers took a break from their game to look our way, the distance and the glare would keep them from seeing what we were up to, so I left the curtains open.
“Leave the lights off,” I said. “And let’s start with a general search, paying particular attention to any interesting papers we find.”
“Good thinking,” she said. “Here.”
She handed me a three-inch by four-inch plastic zip bag marked EXAM GLOVES: 2 LATEX-FREE, LARGE, POWDER-FREE VINYL EXAM GLOVES. Dad kept dozens of these in his doctor’s bag. I wonder if Caroline had raided her own first aid kit or if Dad had helped provision our expedition.
I pulled the gloves on, pocketed the little bag, and began my search.
Luckily Denton appeared to be a light packer, which would make our search a little easier. His empty suitcase was in the closet, along with a sports jacket, several pairs of pants, and a couple of shirts. They filled the closet—an incredibly tiny closet for a hotel room. Presumably maids and nannies weren’t expected to bring extensive wardrobes. Denton’s shaving kit sat on the bathroom counter, and the few toiletries not inside it were arranged neatly on the counter.
“Tidy, for a man,” Caroline said.
“Unless the maids have tidied up after him,” I said.
“No.” Caroline shook her head. “I thought we’d want to see it just as he left it, so I had Ekaterina put it at the end of her schedule. So it’s him who’s neat.”
“Or he hasn’t been home since they cleaned yesterday. The bed’s still made.”
“Some people do make their beds, you know,” she said.
“In a hotel? Not many. He travels light, doesn’t he?”
Caroline gave a last look around and abandoned the bathroom. I poked around for a few more minutes, but I had to admit that if there was something to be found, it would take a more expert hunter than me.
“This armoire is locked!” Caroline called out.
I stepped out of the bathroom to find her rattling the armoire’s doors vigorously, as if she hoped to shake them open.
“Don’t get too excited,” I said. “The key’s sitting right there on the dresser.”
I found only the usual Bible and stationery in the bedside drawer, so I went over to see what Caroline had found in the armoire. A modest TV with two drawers underneath filled the right side while the left offered more hanging space to make up for the small size of the closet. Denton hadn’t needed the overflow. He’d stashed his socks and underwear in the top drawer. The second one contained a laptop and a small collection of papers.
“Bingo!” Caroline said. “You boot up the laptop; I’ll start photographing these.”
She set the papers on top of the desk and pulled out a small digital camera. I brought the laptop over and set it beside the papers.
“Here,” I said, as I hit the laptop’s power switch. “You watch this while it boots. I can take the photos for a while. I’m tall enough to get a better angle anyway.” I also knew, from seeing the fuzzy, crooked pictures she took of the animals at the Willner Wildlife Sanctuary that Caroline was a singularly inept digital photographer, and while my shots of the boys might not be award winners, they were at least in focus more often than not.
“Thank you, dearie,” Caroline said.
I concentrated on getting good, sharp shots of Denton’s papers, but I scanned them as I worked, and I wasn’t spotting any earth-shattering new information. I found three weekly progress reports, addressed to Mr. Leonard Fisher of First Progressive Financial, the last one dated three days ago. Not exactly page turners—mostly they were long lists of the people he’d interviewed and the tiny scraps of information he gained from them.
“Not making much progress, is he?” Caroline said, when I’d finished photographing the last of the reports.
“Don’t gloat,” I said. “Neither are we.”
“At least he does appear to be doing what he said he was doing,” she said. “Trying to find out how Mr. Throckmorton has been getting his supplies.”
“I don’t like how much energy he spends asking about secret passages,” I said. “And looking for them.”
“Looking inside the courthouse,” Caroline said. “He won’t find anything like that inside the parts of the courthouse he can reach. Speaking of not finding things—your PI fellow has a password on his laptop. We’re not going to find out much information from it unless you can guess what it is.”
“Then we won’t find out much from it,” I said. “Because I haven’t a clue what he’d use as a password. Get Rob to find you a hacker with a password cracking program.”
“Okay,” she said. “If you won’t even bother to try, I’ll turn it off and see if I can fit it in my purse. Then—”
“We are not taking that laptop with us,” I said. “You snuck in once with me, you can sneak in again with Rob’s hacker, once he finds you one.”
I could tell she was about to argue with me, but just then someone knocked on the door.
“Denton!” a male voice said. “Are you in there?”
Caroline and I froze. Then she scrambled toward the armoire.
“Lock me in,” she whispered. “And then you can get out through the window.”
“They probably won’t come in,” I whispered back. “And if they do, then they’re burgling the place, just like us, and the armoire is the first place they’ll look. We’ll both just have to go out the window.”
“What about the laptop? And the papers? We—”
“Leave them!” I whispered. “Let’s move!”
“Denton?” The man outside knocked again. And he was using the same discreetly low voice and firm but soft knock I’d used.
“There’s no one there,” another voice said. “Shut up and hurry up.”
“Quick!” the first voice said. “Someone’s coming.”
The door didn’t pop open immediately, which probably meant that this new set of burglars was hiding from someone passing by, just as Caroline and I had.
Thank goodness for passersby. Meanwhile, we’d reached the window. I looked down. We were only on the second floor, but the ground sloped down behind the hotel, and it was at least a two-story jump to the concrete loading dock below.
I pulled the sliding glass door open and grabbed the left curtain to pull it closed.
“Grab the other side,” I whispered. I was moving the potted petunias so they were in front of the window, leaving the less visible ends of the ledge for us. “Pull it closed. And then take the other end of the ledge.”
“We shouldn’t jump?” Caroline whispered.
“They’d hear the sound of our bodies going splat on the loading dock,” I whispered back. “This is the best we can do.”
I backed out onto the ledge and then stepped sideways over the petunias. It wasn’t easy to wedge myself into the narrow space between the railing and the side of the hotel. I suddenly wondered if Caroline could do it.
Caroline grabbed the other side of the curtain, pulled it closed, and then began trying to squeeze into her end of the balcony. After a few fruitless attempts to wedge herself in, she used the petunia pot to give her a leg up and sat on the railing with her rump hanging over the outside. I suspected her perch felt as precarious as it looked and wondered, for a moment, if the ledge and the railing were really designed to hold this much weight.
I thought of closing the sliding glass door, but before I could do it, we heard the door opening.
The carpet underfoot muffled the intruders’ footsteps—that and the wool curtain between us and them—but we heard the door close again.
“Not much here,” one of the voices said after a moment.
“He’s not stupid enough to leave anything important lying out in the open,” said another voice. A familiar voic
e—one of our rival burglars was Leonard Fisher.
“No, sir.”
“Do a thorough search,” Fisher ordered. “And bring me any papers you find so I can check them out.”
“Yes, sir.” Two voices, in almost perfect unison.
“Stuffy in here, sir,” one voice said after a moment. “Shall we open the curtains?”
Caroline shifted slightly. I hoped she was preparing to come out fighting, not to go over the railing.
“Just turn up the AC,” Fisher said. “I don’t want to take any chance of being spotted.”
“Yes, sir.”
A few seconds later, I heard the hum and rattle of the HVAC unit kicking in. I breathed a small sigh of relief. Not that we’d benefit from the cold air, since we were outside in the broiling sun with the curtain between us and the AC, but at least the noise of the compressor would camouflage any small sounds Caroline and I made.
If only we could camouflage ourselves from possible onlookers outside. Luckily, the Annex was the only part of the hotel with windows overlooking the loading dock area, and the occupants of those rooms would have to step onto their ledges to see us. But the golfers would have a great view, if any of them happened to look this way. Or anyone who made a delivery to the hotel. Even a staff member coming out on the loading dock to smoke, as a discreetly placed ash tray suggested some did. To anyone who bothered to look up instead of straight ahead, we were about as unobtrusive as a black cat on a snow-covered roof.
But since there was nothing I could do to make us any less visible, I focused my attention back to what was going on in the room.
“If anyone spots us, pretend to be washing the windows,” Caroline hissed.
I realized that if I leaned as far as I could to the left, I could get one eye next to the place where the two sides of the curtains came together. I could only see a small fraction of the room, but since that fraction included the desk, on which we’d left the papers and the laptop lying, it was potentially an interesting fraction.
Leonard Fisher was sitting at the desk, leafing slowly through the papers I’d photographed. I caught an occasional glimpse of an arm or a leg clad in dark blue with red trim. From those glimpses, and from the sounds we were hearing, I deduced that uniformed Flying Monkeys were doing a rapid and thorough search of the room—and probably being a lot less careful than Caroline and I had been to avoid leaving any signs of our presence. Meanwhile, Fisher had booted the laptop and discovered the password screen. He made a few unsuccessful attempts to log in before frowning, muttering something under his breath, and turning the machine off again.
Caroline and I had a bad moment when one of the guards came over and searched the folds of the curtains. I jerked my head back from the opening. Caroline actually tucked her head down and under one arm, in a fair imitation of a sleeping bird, as if she could prevent him from seeing her if she didn’t see him.
Luckily, the guard was so focused on the curtains that he never looked out. And also luckily, he left the curtains very much as he had found them, so there was still a tiny gap for me to peek through when he moved off again.
A few minutes later the guards had finished their search.
“Nothing, sir.” One of them came to stand at Fisher’s elbow, rather like a dog coming to heel.
“Take that.” Fisher pointed to the laptop. I saw Caroline stir slightly. For a moment, I was worried that she’d leap out from behind the curtains to wrestle the guard for the laptop. I reached over and patted her shoulder a couple of times. She became still again, but I could tell from the tension in her shoulder that she didn’t like it.
“Wait for me down at the car,” Fisher said.
“Yes, sir,” the two voices said in unison.
The room door opened and closed again. Fisher glanced over, as if to make sure the guards were on the other side of it. Then he pulled out his cell phone and punched some buttons.
“It’s me,” he said. “No luck.”
Evidently whoever was on the other side of the call had a lot to say in response, and was saying it rather loudly. Fisher moved the phone ever so slightly farther away from his ear and waited, staring at the botanical print above the desk.
“I realize that,” he finally said. “But I can’t find it if it’s not here to be found. And if you want my guess, I don’t think he has it.”
More listening.
“Absolutely,” Fisher said. “It’s the only reason I can see for that whole crazy stunt.”
I found myself wishing Fisher would find some reason to put his phone on speaker. I had a feeling I could learn a lot if I heard both sides of this conversation.
“No.” Fisher was starting to sound annoyed. “It’s the only copy.… Well, it is now.… No, like I keep telling you, a photocopy’s useless. Same thing for a scan. Too easy to forge. If both sides show up with a photocopy, it’s a he said/she said thing, and we can win that. They show up with the original and we’re sunk.”
Caroline poked me, and pointed at the crack in the curtain. Did she think I wasn’t already listening to every word?
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Fisher said. “I’ll fill you in later.”
He punched a button or two and then stuck the phone in his pocket as if glad to be rid of it.
He looked around, frowning, as if dissatisfied with his surroundings. Was he doubting the thoroughness of the guards’ search? Had he only just noticed that they’d not only searched but trashed the room? I’d assumed either that they didn’t care who knew the room was searched or that they were hoping to leave a message for Denton.
Suddenly he strode over to the window. Caroline and I drew back and quailed in our separate corners of the ledge.
“No wonder this place is such an oven,” he muttered. I heard him slide the glass door closed and then latch it.
“Great,” I muttered. “Now we’re really stuck.”
Chapter 27
“Sssh!” Caroline hissed.
“If we keep it quiet, he can’t hear us with the window closed,” I whispered. I was peering into the room again. “And it’s okay. He’s gone now.”
“It’s not okay,” Caroline said. “I’m stuck here on this wretched little balcony with my bum hanging over the railing, clinging for dear life to a geranium plant.”
“They’re petunias,” I said.
“Whatever. I’m not a botanist. How are you going to get me down from here?”
“I have my cell phone,” I said. “Do you have Ekaterina’s number?”
Of course, it took rather a lot of careful wriggling to extricate my cell phone from my pocket without knocking myself off the balcony. And after all that, Ekaterina’s phone rang on unanswered.
“She probably turns it off when she’s working,” I said.
“She could put the damned thing on vibrate!”
“Maybe she has and will call us back as soon as she can,” I said, in my most soothing tone.
“As soon as she can may be too late,” Caroline said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can hang on.”
I took a closer look and realized that she wasn’t exaggerating. I’d managed to wedge myself between the rail and the side of the hotel, but even so my perch felt precarious. Caroline was perched on the rail and wobbled alarmingly. To keep from falling, she had to hold on to the rail and the petunia pot, which meant she was supporting a lot of her weight with her arms—and she didn’t have the same upper body strength that my blacksmithing gave me.
I had to do something.
If I’d had any kind of metal tool, I might have tried breaking the window, but the closest thing I had to a hard object was my phone, and I didn’t think it would survive an abrupt encounter with triple-paned glass. I glanced down. If I could crawl over the railing and dangle from it as far down as possible before letting go, I would probably survive the fall. I might not even break anything if I relaxed.
At least that was what Rob would tell me. He was a total klutz but claimed he’d never b
roken a bone in any of his mishaps. According to him, the key was to retrain yourself so when you realized you were falling, your reaction was not “Oh no! I’m falling! I’ll break every bone in my body!” but “Hey, cool, I seem to be falling again.”
But so far, my attempts to retrain myself had not been successful, and I suspected that the most important factor in falling safely was having a laid-back temperament. I’d never qualify.
Think positively, I told myself.
“Where do you have the key card?” I asked Caroline.
“In my right pocket,” she said. “But I don’t dare let go to fish it out.”
At least it was in the pocket on my side. I managed to lean over and fish out the room key card. I also snagged her cell phone and put it on the dirt in the geranium pot, where she might have a chance of reaching it if she needed it. Then I began carefully climbing over the rail.
“What are you doing?” Caroline asked.
“I’m going to use my ninja training to jump down and land lightly on the loading dock,” I said. “And then I go around to the front of the hotel, walk in like someone who knows she has a perfect right to be here, and hurry back up to the room so I can unlock the sliding glass door from the inside.”
“Use your ninja super-speed while you’re at it, dearie,” Caroline said.
“I’ll try.” By this time, I was dangling from the bottom of the railing, arms stretched as far as they would go. The gap between my feet and the concrete seemed to be at least the length of a football field, Maybe two football fields. “If by some chance I kill myself, is there any chance you could manage to call 911? Just tell them to come and pick up the dead ninja on the loading dock.”
“I’ll tell them two dead ninjas,” Caroline said. “Because if you go splat, I don’t think I can hold on until they get here.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let go.
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