Last Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 3)

by Stephen Penner

  After a few excruciatingly long seconds clacking across the marble lobby where, thankfully, no one seemed to be paying any attention to her, she was able to slip into the cover of one of the long guest room hallways. The Dead Guy Suite was on two, but there was a maid cart dead ahead. It was cleaning time and the staff were doing their rounds. She had expected to find the laundry room first to grab a uniform but she knew an opportunity when she saw it. She scanned the cleaning cart as she approached. The maid was inside a room and Maggie’s quarry was hanging by a strap from the cart. Without breaking stride, she yanked the passcard off the cleaning cart—the maid inside the room far too busy making the bed to notice—and disappeared into the next stairwell.

  *

  It took her longer to find the laundry than she’d expected. The hotel had a basement level, so that’s where she’d started. It had looked promising, with concrete floors and undecorated hallways—just the sort of place one would expect to find a laundry room and supplies, especially maid uniforms. However, what few rooms there were housed things like boilers and plumbing and electrical. Necessary, Maggie supposed, but annoyingly unhelpful to her.

  It took almost an hour before she found the extra maid uniforms in a supply closet on the sixth floor. As she slipped on the white coveralls and pink apron over her street clothes, she realized she probably could have been in and out of the Dead Guy Suite in the amount of time she’d taken searching for a maid outfit. She shrugged and tied the apron behind her back. Better to have a cover story if she were discovered. Not that she wanted that kind of complication—but she was learning to expect them.

  She took the stairs back down to the second floor. There would be no elevator trips during this adventure. The hallway was quiet. Not ‘too quiet,’ but quiet. In fact, she might have welcomed some ‘too quiet’—an eerie but empty hallway giving her the chance to slip into the room completely unnoticed. As it was, however, there were always a few guests walking from point A to point B. Luckily, her maid costume afforded her a measure of invisibility, as it signaled to the hotel patrons that it was socially acceptable to ignore her.

  Nevertheless she kept her face turned down and away as she walked to the end of the hallway, then counted room doors on the way back.

  One… Two… Three… Four. Dead Guy Suite.

  She glanced around suspiciously, trying not to look it. There was one heavy-set man at the far end of the hallway near the vending machines. He was unlikely to notice her and even less likely to remember her. She pulled the passcard out of her apron pocket and slid it through the door’s card reader. Two seconds and one flashing green indicator light later, she pushed open the door and slipped inside.

  *

  “I wonder if it’s true,” Emma Valentine remarked to her neighbor in the next cubicle, “that they always return to the scene of the crime.”

  “How’s that, Emma?” replied Abby Jameson, the forensic scientist next to her. She had her face pressed against a microscope. “I’m kind of trying to concentrate here.”

  “I said, I wonder if it’s true that they always return to the scene of the crime.”

  “Who?”

  “The criminals.”

  Jameson lifted her face from the device. “Why would they do that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Valentine replied. “Maybe to see their handiwork.”

  “Oh, okay,” Jameson said. Then after a moment. “So what?”

  Valentine grinned. “Well, that’s just it. If we can match the non-victim DNA, we could wait for the killer to return to the hotel room.”

  “You still going on about that hotel murder?” Jameson sighed. “Don’t you have any other cases?”

  Valentine tapped her lips. “I don’t know, Abby. There’s something about that one. Who removes a victim’s spine?”

  “Maybe it was my husband,” Jameson joked. “He needs a backbone.”

  Valentine laughed and shook her head. “No, this was something sinister. I just hope we can match it before the killer’s already been and gone.”

  *

  Maggie scanned the hotel room. She wanted to do her thing and get out as fast as possible. The hour searching for the maid costume had given her extra time to consider the most efficient course of action. There had been blood on Sarah’s picture frame, and there had been blood—lots of it—in the bathtub. The blood from the frame showed her the bathtub, so she wondered what the blood from the tub would show her.

  ‘Nothing’ was the apparent answer as she stepped into the bathroom.

  It had been completely redone. Fresh paint and what seemed to be a new shower. She pulled out her phone. The photo of the dead man was still there and pulling it up confirmed that the hotel management had—wisely, she supposed—completely replaced the shower/tub enclosure.

  “Damn,” she muttered. But she could hardly blame them. ‘Mind the blood’ was hardly a selling point.

  She crossed her arms and frowned at the room. She’d come a long way and gone to a lot of trouble to just give up because of some entirely foreseeable redecorating. She raised a hand to her face and tapped pursed lips.

  There were three choices. One, give up and leave now. That wasn’t really an option. Not for her.

  Two, figure out something else to inspect in the hotel room. Not bad, but still, an admission of defeat.

  Or three, smash forward and figure out some way to make her original plan work.

  Her frown curled into a smile. Option three it was. She had an idea.

  She dug a fingernail into the caulk surrounding the shower enclosure. She scraped away until she got enough to grab, then she started peeling it off.

  She doubted they bothered to paint under the new shower cover.

  A few minutes later the caulk was curled up on the floor and the surprisingly thin plastic of the shower wall was pried away and propped open several inches by three wooden hangers from the closet. Maggie was peering into the gap, looking for bloodstains and wishing she’d remembered to bring her flashlight. Heck, she should have brought an entire toolkit, although she supposed that might have been suspicious: a maid with a tool box.

  She peered into the gloomy gap, spying a myriad of stains on the drywall. They had definitely not painted before the new, slightly larger shower had been installed. That left a thin strip of old white paint before the newer, yellow-beige color started. She decided that was her best bet and squinted low, guessing that any blood would likely be closer to the floor.

  She wondered how the cops did it. How did they distinguish between blood stains and regular stains—mold, dirt, chocolate? She’d seen TV shows where they used some sort of test that made the blood glow in the dark or something. One more thing for her toolbox, she supposed. She located a small, dark stain near the floor. It was sort of a blotch with a half-hearted drip extending below it. It seemed like as good a candidate as any. She would have liked to have cut it out and taken it somewhere more conducive to the divining spell, but again no tool box, and anyway she didn’t know what to use to cut drywall. She’d have to do the spell where she was, kneeling on the floor of a hotel bathroom in a maid costume. How dignified.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the section of frame she had brought with her. She could hardly carry an entire picture frame in her pocket, and it was broken anyway, so she’d snapped off the side with the glass embedded into it. She laid it down next to the maybe-blood stain and prepared to cast the divining spell again.

  She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. She might not remember the exact words from the Dark Book, but she remembered the words she’d used on the frame back at her flat. She opened her eyes and said them again.

  “