Dead Calm

by Annelise Ryan

  Hurley turns to Patrick, who is standing by the door, and raises his eyebrows. “Can you look into it, please?”

  “On it,” Patrick says, looking eager and stepping outside. I imagine he’s more than happy to be released from duty anywhere near the mess in the room.

  Hurley turns back to Mathers. “You said you talked to the people who were in the neighboring rooms?”

  Mathers nods. He refers to his notebook and gives Hurley the names, contact information, and room locations of these guests. When he’s done with that, he gives us a brief summary of what each of these potential witnesses had to say. It isn’t much. The people who were in the room to the left of our victims—a middle-aged man and a woman who appeared to be a decade or so younger—claimed they heard nothing, though it’s hard to imagine they didn’t hear the sound of the gunshots. I suspect they did hear them but don’t want to get involved in any way, particularly if they are here at the motel for the same reason many of the right-wing guests are: for an illicit liaison of some sort.

  The couple in the room on the right were also a man and a woman, both in their mid-thirties. They were the ones Mathers had mentioned earlier, the couple who called the front desk. The remaining guests consisted of two all-male couples, two more heterosexual couples, and one female trio.

  Hurley turns to me and says, “I need to make a couple of phone calls to verify some things, and then you and I can go talk to the people outside. Now would be a good time to take your outdoor pictures, if you want.”

  I nod and step outside into the humid night air. After making some adjustments to my camera for the nighttime setting, I snap pictures of the motel room door, the adjacent room doors, the parking lot and the vehicles in it, including the license plates, and the woods. The trees behind the motel are a heavy mix of oaks, maples, and pines. I imagine on many a night the branches would be swaying in the wind, the leaves rustling and whispering. But tonight the air is heavy and utterly still; the trees are unmoving. The woods extend along the back of the motel and beyond, curving around on one end to border a field of corn, and ending at a side road on the other end, about a hundred feet from the opposite end of the motel.

  I venture a little closer to the edge, squinting into the darkness. I see there is a path of sorts, a narrow, trampled trail of ground extending into the woods, and I wonder where it leads. If it was light out, I might venture in there purely out of curiosity, but for the moment I can’t see a reason to do so. I’m even less inclined when I hear a rustling sound from deep inside the woods, a sound like small scampering feet scurrying over the ground. Clinching my decision is Hurley’s voice hailing me from the motel room doorway. I turn my back on the woods, though not without one last paranoid glance over my shoulder, and hurry back to the motel room door.

  As we head around to the front side of the motel, Hurley says, “This one looks cut-and-dried as far as the manners of death, but I still want to talk to some of the witnesses out front.”

  “Maybe,” I say, still bothered by that note. I stop walking, and it takes Hurley a few steps to realize it. He turns and looks at me with a confused expression before walking back to me.

  “What?” he asks, his voice an odd mixture of impatience and curiosity.

  “I’m a little confused as to the motive behind it all. If we assume Craig and Meredith were having an affair, what made Craig take such a drastic step?”

  “Meredith wanted to end things,” Hurley says in a tone that makes it sound as if he’s explaining the obvious to a simpleton.

  I give him an annoyed look. “If that’s the case, then why did she come out here with him tonight? If she was going to cut him loose, I’d think she’d do it somewhere a little less . . . erotic.”

  Hurley scratches his head and shrugs. “Maybe she wanted one last roll in the sack for old time’s sake,” he says. I can hear the tired irritability in his voice.

  “Maybe,” I say again, unconvinced.

  “Let’s not build this into something it isn’t,” he says. “Sometimes I think you hang around Arnie too much, because lately it seems like you expect to find a conspiracy in every nook and cranny.”

  He’s referring to Arnie Toffer, our lab tech and resident conspiracy theorist, a man who thinks space satellites were launched to give the government a way to monitor our every conversation and action, that every tap on our computer keyboards is monitored by some highly classified, black-ops government employee, and that some of the homeless people out there on the streets are really government spies in disguise. Sometimes I think Arnie has cornered the market on paranoia, but then again . . .

  “Just because you’re paranoid . . . ,” I say to Hurley, letting him finish the cliché in his head. He simply rolls his eyes at me, turns, and once again heads toward the front of the motel.

  CHAPTER 3

  The crowd out front has diminished some, but there are still several people milling about. I see Patrick downstream in the parking lot, standing between some cars, his cell phone to his ear.

  When the crowd sees us emerge from beneath the police tape, the questions start firing.

  “What happened in there?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Is someone dead?”

  “It sounded like gunshots. Was someone shot?”

  “Can we leave now?”

  Hurley zooms in on the man who asked about leaving, and we head toward him and the woman standing next to him. Both of them look awkward, guilty, and embarrassed. I’d bet money the two of them are having an affair.

  Hurley says, “Would you two please come with me?”

  They turn and glance at one another with sheepish, worried expressions before looking back at Hurley, who walks toward the taped-off area at the back of the motel. The couple doesn’t move at first, so I stay where I am, staring at them expectantly. The woman lets out an exasperated sigh, glares at her partner, and finally turns to follow Hurley. The man looks at me and scowls.

  “After you,” I say with a forced smile, waving a hand in Hurley’s direction.

  With an exaggerated harrumph of annoyance, he follows the woman, while I bring up the rear. Hurley herds them to a corner of the taped-off area by the woods. He takes out his notebook, squinting as he tries to read what he has scribbled there. There are a few portable light stands set up in the taped-off area, but none of them are pointed in this direction.

  After half a minute of silent squinting at his notebook, a gesture I’m pretty sure Hurley is doing simply to make our guests even more uncomfortable, Hurley looks up and introduces himself, flashing his badge. “I understand the two of you were in one of the rooms next to our victims,” Hurley says without introducing me.

  The man and the woman both nod.

  Hurley then shifts his attention to the woman. “Can you tell me your name?”

  She chews her lip and looks off to the side for a second before saying, “Lisa. Lisa Martin.”

  “Not the name you used here,” I say. “Your real name. If you lie to us, you can be arrested for interfering with a murder investigation.” I have no idea if this is true, but it doesn’t matter. The police are allowed to lie when interviewing or interrogating witnesses and suspects, and I figure that courtesy extends to me as well, since I’m assisting them at the moment.

  The woman shoots me an annoyed look, trying to appear offended by my suggestion that she has lied. But she can’t quite pull it off. There are too many nerves firing away beneath her skin.

  I see Hurley giving me a curious, questioning look. “I saw that name in the registration book on Cinder’s desk,” I tell him with a shrug. “She signed in with that name. Nobody who’s renting a motel room by the hour signs in with their real name.”

  “Damn it, Tom,” the woman snaps, slapping her male companion on the arm. “I told you we’d get in trouble if we lied to the cops.”

  The man scowls and mutters something under his breath. He shifts nervously from one foot to the other and rakes his teeth over his lowe
r lip. “Look,” he says, “we don’t want it known that we were here. We . . . I . . . she . . .”

  “The two of you are having an affair,” Hurley says with bored nonchalance. “We get it. Even if your nervousness and the fact that you rented a room here didn’t clue us in, your mismatched wedding rings are a dead giveaway.”

  I glance at their rings and see what Hurley is referring to. Tom is wearing a wide gold band with a thin black stripe around the middle, whereas his female companion is wearing a thin silver band. I feel a moment of pride in our collective abilities to read people and situations. Hurley and I make a great team, both on and off the job.

  “We don’t care about why you’re here,” Hurley goes on. “All we care about is what you might have seen or heard from the room next to yours.”

  “So you won’t tell anyone we were here?”

  “Not unless you give me a reason to,” Hurley says.

  They both look visibly relieved.

  “So tell me your real names, and then tell me what happened,” Hurley says, addressing this question to no one in particular. I’m curious to see which one of them will speak first.

  “My name is Susan Richter,” the woman says.

  “And I’m Tom Collins,” the man says. Hurley arches a skeptical eyebrow at this. “I swear, that’s my real name,” the man insists. He digs in his pocket and pulls out a wallet, flipping it open to his driver’s license, which he shows to Hurley. “Believe me, I’ve spent my entire life hearing jokes about my name.”

  Satisfied, Hurley jots down the name and then asks them both for contact information. When they are done providing it, he looks at Tom Collins and says, “Okay, now tell me what happened.”

  Susan looks at Tom, chewing on the side of her thumb. Tom says, “We were in our room . . . in bed.” He shrugs and seems a little embarrassed. “You know.”

  Hurley nods impatiently.

  “Things were getting kind of loud in our room,” Tom says, making Susan squeeze her eyes closed and look away, a grimace on her face. “And I heard a loud bang. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was, and I didn’t pay it too much attention because I didn’t want to . . . well, things were . . . you know.”

  Hurley nods again, letting out a get-on-with-it sigh.

  “And then I heard a second bang, and I was pretty sure it was a gunshot. I froze, and Susan asked me what was wrong.”

  Hurley looks over at Susan. “You didn’t hear the shots?”

  Her face flushes red. “Not exactly,” she says. “I kind of had the pillow wrapped around my ears. I heard them, but I didn’t pick up on them as being anything worrisome.”

  “She was rather distracted at the time,” Tom says with a salacious wink. “Anyway, I told Susan that I thought I’d heard gunshots outside our room, and I stopped what I was doing and got out of bed. I pulled on my pants and told Susan to get dressed. We pulled on some clothes and then we went over to the door and looked out the peephole.”

  “Did you see anything?” Hurley asks.

  Tom shakes his head. “When we didn’t see anyone out there, we went over and peeked out the window, moving the curtain aside. But we still didn’t see anything. So we decided to call the front desk. A few minutes later we heard the woman from the office knocking on the door to the room next door. After a couple of knocks, she opened it, and then she just closed it again and disappeared.”

  “What did you do after that?” Hurley asks.

  “We sat and waited. I didn’t think it would be smart to go outside since we didn’t know what was going on. Then we heard a siren, and the cops showed up. We stayed put until an officer came knocking on our door.”

  Hurley scrunches his face in thought for a second. Then he says, “I’d like you both to think back to when all this happened and tell me if you heard any other noises before, between, or after the shots.”

  They both look down at the ground, staring at their feet. Then Susan perks up. “There was a noise right after the shots.”

  “After?” Hurley says, sounding skeptical.

  “Yeah, it was a thud, you know, like someone hitting the wall or something. In fact, the wall that adjoins that room shook a little.” She looks over at Tom. “Remember?”

  Tom gives a slow nod, his eyes narrowed in thought. “Yeah, you’re right,” he says. “I do remember the wall shaking a little.”

  Hurley’s brow furrows. I imagine mine is doing the same, trying to determine what could have made the sound they’re describing. Presumably, both people in the other room were dead by then.

  “How much time was there in between the two shots?” Hurley asks.

  “Not much,” Tom says. “Maybe ten seconds?”

  Hurley has apparently filed this information away and moved on. “What time did the two of you check into your room?” he asks.

  “Around twelve-thirty,” Tom answers.

  “Did you hear anyone or anything from the other room before the shots? Voices or anything like that?”

  Both of them shake their heads.

  “Okay,” Hurley says. “That’s all I need from you for now. You’re free to leave if you want.”

  Both Susan and Tom sag with relief. Then Tom says, “My car is that one over there.” He points to a Ford SUV parked inside the taped-off area.

  Hurley looks over at it, then at the tape. “I’ll remove the tape so you can leave,” he tells them. Then he does so as both Tom and Susan hurry to the car. A minute later they are gone, and Hurley puts the tape back up.

  We head out front to the remaining crowd, who are now looking less interested in finding out what’s going on and more interested in running away. Hurley motions at Patrick, who is walking toward us, and we reconnoiter just outside the main office area.

  Hurley says, “What have you got for me?”

  Patrick flips back some pages in his notebook and starts talking. “That Lexus over there belongs to Craig Knowlton,” he begins, pointing toward a black vehicle at the very end of the front parking lot. “Mathers had already verified the owners of the cars inside our crime tape out back, and that’s who’s waiting here.” He nods toward the remnants of the crowd. “I’ve run plates on all the other cars here, and none of them belong to Meredith Lansing or anyone else named Lansing.”

  Hurley nods and says, “Good work, Devonshire. Go back to the motel room and see if anyone has come up with a set of keys so we can get into that Lexus. Once you get them, just stand by the car until I can join you. In the meantime, we’re going to talk to the rest of these people.”

  Patrick nods and takes off at a lope toward the back of the building. Hurley moves in on the remaining crowd, which is now down to seven people. I notice as I follow that no one wants to make direct eye contact with him.

  Based on the descriptions Mathers gave us, it’s not hard to guess who is who. We approach the couple with the age disparity—the man looks to be in his forties, the girl in her early thirties, if that—and question them. Despite being in the room on the other side of our crime scene, they swear they heard nothing. They provide us with honest IDs and appear to have nothing to hide, stating that they are from out of town, traveling to Minnesota, and stopped here for a few hours of sleep, facts Hurley is able to verify by phone. Hurley lets them go, and I volunteer to take down the tape so they can leave.

  When I return, Hurley is questioning the trio of women who were staying in a room two doors down from the crime scene. All three of them reek of booze, and they are clearly drunk, judging from their giddy behaviors and tittering laughter. They offer nothing of use, and when Hurley releases them, they head back to their motel room.

  The final twosome are two men who are both restless and pacing, staying a personal space of distance away from one another. When Hurley approaches them, they both look at him with wide, anxious eyes.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Hurley says. “Can I ask you for your names?”

  “I’m Jim Peters,” the guy on the left says quickly. He is tall, slender
, balding, and has a prominent Adam’s apple that is sliding up and down his throat like the puck on the strongman game at a carnival. I half expect to hear a bell ring when he swallows and the lump leaps up his throat.

  “I’m Sal Mastroianni,” the second man says. He is shorter, with a full head of dark hair and an olive complexion.

  Hurley eyes the two of them for a few seconds, then looks at his notes. “The two of you were in room 15, two doors down from our investigation.”

  Before he can say anything else, Sal pipes up. “Look, I heard someone was killed in that room. But we don’t know anything about it. We didn’t hear anything or see anything. In fact, we didn’t know anything had happened until the cops showed up.”

  Jim Peters nods vigorously, like a just-flicked bobblehead doll.

  “What time did the two of you check in?” Hurley asks.

  “Around eleven, I think it was,” Sal says. He looks to Peters for confirmation, and the other man’s head bobs some more. “We were asleep with the TV on when the cops knocked on our door.”

  “And you didn’t see or hear anything?” Hurley asks.

  Both men shake their heads. Then Sal says, “We had the TV on kind of loud.”

  “And you slept through that racket?” Hurley asks, sounding skeptical.

  Both men nod; Sal shrugs and smiles.

  Hurley scratches his head, thinking. Then he asks them for contact information.

  “Why do you need that?” Peters asks, his puck going up and down, up and down. I notice both men are wearing wedding rings that, like the earlier couple’s, are nothing alike.

  “In case I have any other questions for you.”

  “But we didn’t hear or see anything,” Peters insists.

  “Be that as it may,” Hurley says with irritation, “there might be something else I need to ask you.” The men exchange looks. “I promise to be discreet if that happens,” Hurley adds.