A Darcy Sweet Mystery Box Set Seven

by K. J. Emrick

  “Well, I happen to know that my husband has an unsolved murder on his hands that happened right here in Meadowood.”

  “More like an unsolvable murder. A man shot to death in a room all alone. It defies logic.”

  Darcy shrugged, starting to feel a little better now that she had something to do other than worry. “Well, it seems to me that we’ve had plenty of experience in the past with mysteries that seemed unsolvable. We’ve always done pretty good when we worked together to solve them.”

  He regarded her closely, tilting his head to one side. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  “Take me to where your murder happened. Let me see if I can use my…” She looked around them to make sure they were alone before she finished that thought. “My talents. Maybe I can see something that you and the other officers missed. Get a read on the place, sense a motive or get a glimpse of the killer, even. It’s happened before.”

  “Mm-hmm. I know. Except, that stuff is nothing that will hold up in court. It’s always helpful, but I can’t bring it to the judge as part of our case.” She could tell that he was against the idea, at least at first consideration. Then he looked down the hallway at a few nurses gathered together in their colorful scrubs, talking and laughing, and took Darcy by the hand to lead her in the other direction. He kept his voice low. “Let me ask you. Do you think this could be a case where the killer is a… ghost?”

  She was surprised by the suggestion, but then she thought about it, and remembered a few experiences where ghosts had tried to kill people. Herself included. “Um. I know we deal with weird stuff all the time… but, no. I don’t think this is the case of a ghostly killer this time.”

  “No? You seem pretty certain.”

  “I am.”

  “Mind sharing what makes you so sure?”

  “Because,” Darcy told him, “that would be the easy answer. When have you and I ever had the easy answer be the right solution?”

  He mulled that over, slowly nodding as he realized she was right. “Yeah. That’s true.”

  “Not to mention,” she added. “Your victim was shot. Ghosts don’t shoot people. They certainly don’t spirit away the gun afterward. They don’t exactly have to worry about leaving fingerprints, now do they?”

  That made him laugh, if only a little. “Okay, good point. So we’re looking for a human killer who can walk through locked doors. I don’t think that makes it easier, actually. This case is so different than anything I’ve worked on before. Usually, it’s more important to figure out who the killer is. In this case, it’s the opposite. It’s more important to figure out how the killer did the crime. Everything else would fall into place, I’m sure of it, if only we could figure out how it was done.”

  “Then let me help you do that, Jon. I can’t just stay here worrying about Colby and what’s going to happen next. If I do, I’m just going to start climbing the walls. Nobody has any answers right now and Colby’s going to be sleeping the rest of the night and I feel so utterly, completely useless. Let me do something to help you, at least.”

  He looked over his shoulder in the direction of Colby’s room, just like she had earlier, and chewed on his lip as he thought it over. Then he nodded. “Yeah, I get what you’re saying. They’ll call us if there’s news, and we aren’t going to do our daughter any good by sitting here worrying until daybreak.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

  “I’d be crazy to turn down help from the greatest mystery solver I’ve ever known, anyway,” he admitted. “Let’s go.”

  They left Darcy’s car in the hospital lot, and Jon drove them through Meadowood, down the main thoroughfare past the dark windows of businesses that were closed at this hour, and a McDonalds that boasted 24-hour service, and a couple of gas stations that were still busy even now. The rain sheeted across the road, reflecting the streetlights off the dark surface.

  “How far is it?” Darcy asked.

  “Not far. We’re here already.”

  He made a right turn onto a short side street that had the hotel on one side, all brightly lit with a waving American flag out front, and an all-night diner on the other. The street came to a dead end after that with a little turnaround spot with high snowbanks all around. Jon parked them in front of the hotel, as close to the front entrance as he could considering the weather, and Darcy looked up at the building through the windshield while he made a call on his cellphone.

  It wasn’t a very big hotel. It was just three stories high, in fact, but then again this was Meadowood, and not New York City or Chicago. Darcy had never stayed here but she could tell by the limited number of cars around them that they weren’t at full capacity, and she’d be willing to bet that didn’t happen for them very often. Large letters spelled out Rest Easy Suites over the doors. The U had a crack on one side.

  The windshield wipers that had been swooshing rainwater back and forth in front of her came to a stop as Jon shut off the engine. “Okay. Officer Jacob Mallette is going to meet us here in a few minutes. He was one of the first officers at the scene when it was called in, so he’s familiar with the case.”

  “And here I thought it was just going to be you and me,” Darcy said absently. She was still staring up at the hotel, but in her mind’s eye she was seeing Colby’s face as she slept in that hospital bed. Even a murder mystery couldn’t take her mind off her daughter. Not completely.

  “Ordinarily,” Jon said, “I’d be happy for it to just be the two of us. This is still Meadowood’s jurisdiction, though, and I don’t want their chief coming back from vacation mad at me for stepping on anyone’s toes. Jacob won’t be long. Why don’t we go up and do some snooping until he gets here?”

  She nodded, knowing that ‘snooping’ meant using her special talents.

  Not that her gift had been any help to Colby.

  It didn’t work that way, she argued with herself.

  She was a ghost whisperer, if she was anything. She wasn’t a doctor. She couldn’t diagnose symptoms with a wave of her hand or conjure up a cure for whatever was ailing her daughter with a carefully planned out spirit communication.

  With a sigh, she reached over and put her hand in Jon’s, feeling the comfort of his touch. “I’m still worried about Colby.”

  “Me too,” he told her. “I know you needed a distraction, but I know you don’t want to be away from the hospital for long, either. We’ll stay for a little while, and then head right back. I promise.”

  It made things easier to know that he was worrying with her. It was just part of what made them such a good team. “Okay. Let’s go do some investigating.”

  The clerk at the front desk smiled at them but didn’t say anything to them as they walked through the lobby to the elevators. Behind her, through an open office door, Darcy could see a night manager watching them without trying to look like he was watching them. Hotels were all about customer service, after all, and making people feel welcome. If they demanded to know what business each person had on the premises, people would stop wanting to come there. That would be bad for business.

  On the other hand, Darcy thought that maybe that would be a good thing for people wanting to commit murder. There would be no one to stop a killer from just walking into a hotel and going up to such-and-such a room to kill someone. Not unless they announced themselves with a gun in one hand or a maniacal look on their face. Few killers ever did that.

  “So basically,” she said as the elevator took them up to the second floor, “the killer could have walked right in and then up to our victim’s room, with no one to stop him.”

  Jon shrugged. “That’s the prevailing theory. Unfortunately, that only explains part of the mystery, and not even the hard part. How did he get into a locked room to kill our victim, and then how did he get out again with the doors locked from the inside? Those are the questions we can’t answer.”

  “Maybe I can shed some light on it,” Darcy offered, waving her fingers dramatically as the doors op
ened and they took a left down the carpeted hallway. “Which room is it? Oh.”

  She realized immediately which room it was when she saw the yellow police tape crisscrossed over the door to room 203. This must be the place…

  A gasp escaped her lips. “Jon?”

  He put his hand up to run his fingers across those numbers. 203. The same as Colby’s hospital room. “I didn’t even notice until now. I was so focused on what might be going on with her that I didn’t make the connection.” He looked back at her, seeing the distress in her eyes. “It’s just a coincidence, Darcy. That’s all.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Of course.”

  Only, she wasn’t all that sure. She wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. In fact, when two things happened at the same time, it had always been her experience that they were most definitely connected somehow.

  She’d been trying to find connections between everything that was happening in their lives. She knew they were there. She’d felt it with her sixth sense so strongly, but she hadn’t been able to see them before this. Here was one of the strings that tied everything together. The murder happened in room 203. Colby was in a hospital room across town with the same number. Somehow, everything that was happening to her and her family, all of it, was connected.

  Somehow.

  Well, one mystery at a time.

  She waited for Jon to remove the plastic tape, and then she put her palm flat to the door, reaching out with her extra senses. She tried to feel for changes in temperature, or ripples in the ether, or anything out of the ordinary. She reached for some glimpse of what might have happened here, willing the past to show itself to her. Closing her eyes, she tried harder.

  Then she felt it… the sense of someone there, close by. Close, and coming closer. A man. She concentrated, trying to get a clear picture of who this man was, what he was doing here, what he had to do with—

  “Hey, Chief.”

  Darcy jumped away from the door as she heard a man speaking, clear as day and coming closer. She felt her face turning red as she realized it wasn’t a ghost. Not a glimpse of the past. This man was here in the hallway with them, smiling and waving, a tall man with broad shoulders wearing a blue uniform shirt with police patches on both shoulders and a badge on his chest, and a nameplate that she read when he got closer.

  Jacob Mallette. The officer that Jon said would be joining them. She relaxed, feeling foolish that she’d been trying so hard to find a killer and all she’d picked up on was one of the good guys coming their way.

  “It’s all right,” Jon whispered to her. He knew exactly what she’d been thinking. “If it was that easy, anyone would do it.”

  She gave him a little smile, grateful that he understood her so well. Sometimes she didn’t have to tell Jon what she was feeling at all. He just knew. He was intuitive that way. Gifted, even, in his own way.

  Officer Mallette gestured toward room 203. “You know we appreciate your help but I’m not sure what else you’re hoping to find in here. We’ve been over it with a fine-toothed comb already. Harris was only staying for a night. He didn’t have much of anything with him. Nothing that points to a motive or a killer.”

  “Unless,” Jon suggested, “the killer took something with them just like they took the murder weapon.”

  Darcy had the impression that it wasn’t the first time Jon had suggested that. Even so, Jacob shook his head. “Nope. We watched the surveillance video from when he checked in. He had his suitcase and a bag from the grocery store. Everything he had with him was still in that room when he died.”

  “What did you find in his room?” Darcy asked.

  Jon listed everything off from memory. “Suitcase, clothes, wallet still with money and credit cards inside, a paperback book, car keys, cellphone, toothbrush and toothpaste and an electric razor, two empty bottles of water and a half-eaten bag of pistachios. Seems Harris liked to eat healthy.”

  “Except for the soda bottle we found in his trash,” Mallette added. “Two liters of sugary goodness all empty and cut to pieces like he was trying to hide the fact that he’d slipped off his diet. Guess even health nuts like to have a treat now and then.”

  “Well, everyone falls off the wagon sometimes,” Jon offered.

  “So wait,” Darcy said, trying to get the mental picture. “There wasn’t any briefcase? Laptop? Not even a thumb drive or anything like that?”

  Officer Mallette lifted an eyebrow at her and didn’t answer the question. “No offense, but I don’t know you.”

  “Oh, right.” Jon cleared his throat and waved a hand from Darcy to Jacob. “This is my wife. Officer Mallette, Darcy Sweet. Darcy, Jacob Mallette. She’s here to help us with the investigation. Anything you need to say you can say in front of her.”

  If anything, Mallette’s eyebrows went higher. “Is this the way policing works in Misty Hollow? You make it a whole family outing?”

  “We do,” Jon told him resolutely, “when your family is Darcy Sweet.”

  After a moment, the Meadowood officer shrugged the whole situation off like it was no concern of his. “Whatever gets the job done, I suppose. No, there wasn’t a laptop or a briefcase. Why do you ask?”

  There were lots of puzzle pieces here, but none of them seemed to fit. “It just seems to me,” she said, “that people come to hotels when they’re travelling, and you only travel for one of two reasons. Business or pleasure. The victim was alone, so it probably wasn’t pleasure. If he was on business, then where was all of his business stuff?”

  Jon snapped his fingers. “That’s a good point. We were concentrating on what was here, not on what wasn’t here.”

  Jacob shook his head thoughtfully. “But, like I said, we watched the video. It only goes back twenty-four hours but that was far enough to see Fred Harris checking in before he died. No briefcase. No laptop.”

  “Might have been a thumb drive,” Jon suggested. “Or a laptop that he carried in his suitcase.”

  “Sure, it could’ve been that, or he could’ve been carrying the Coca Cola recipe for all I know. No way to know for sure. That’s all just speculation, since we don’t know what Fred Harris was carrying before we found him. All we know, is what we found with him after he was dead.”

  It was Jon’s turn to shake his head. “So, we’re back to this. We need to find out how this crime was committed if we’re ever going to bring the killer to justice.”

  Those were good points, Darcy had to admit, and they were the same questions that Jon had raised earlier. “You looked at the video surveillance from the hallway, correct?”

  “Yes,” Jon told her. “For a twenty-four-hour period. Like Jacob said, that’s as far back as the recordings went. In all that time, the only person to go into this room was the victim. Of course, the surveillance recording goes up to the point where we asked the hotel manager for it, which means it shows the Meadowood PD going into the room, and a twenty-four-hour window prior to that moment. Doesn’t go back as far as we might like it to, but it still shows nobody but the victim going into this room. The housekeeper doesn’t even try to go in until the morning the body was discovered. She couldn’t get an answer at the door, and that was when the manager called the police.”

  Darcy frowned, because that really wasn’t helpful at all. One man goes into a locked room, locks the door behind him, and then gets murdered. Nobody else goes in. Nobody else goes out.

  How?

  “Can we look at the video again?” she asked. “Maybe together we’ll see something that was missed. Oh, but that’s going to mean a trip down to the police station, won’t it? I don’t want to be gone that long.”

  “Jon mentioned your daughter’s in the hospital,” Jacob said. His tone was honestly sympathetic. “I’m sorry to hear that. It’s always harder when it’s our children, isn’t it?”

  “You have kids, Jacob?” Jon asked him.

  “I do. Got a boy who’s twelve going on twenty-five and I know what it’s like when he’s sick and I’ve go
t to be somewhere else. Worst feeling in the world.”

  “We feel the same.” Jon checked his watch with a frown. “We’ll have to look at the surveillance video some other time.”

  “Or,” Jacob suggested, “we could look at it now. Got it right here.”

  He unclipped his cellphone from his belt and held it out sideways for them to see as he tapped on a folder icon on the screen.

  Jon looked impressed. “Technology. You gotta love it.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century, Chief,” Jacob said. “We basically carry computers in our hands everywhere we go that are more powerful than the ones used to make the first moon launch. I’m linked into the server down at the station so I can access everything from the digital casefiles on my phone. Watch.”

  Darcy watched as a blue line made a circle in the middle of the screen until the black background was replaced with an image of this very hallway, with a date in white block numbers in the upper corner that matched the date of the murder. Darcy noticed the angle of the camera and looked up to the corner of the ceiling to find the bubble lens there, watching her even now.

  The video surveillance played out on Jacob’s three-by-six-inch screen. The hallway stayed empty.

  “Let me fast forward it,” Mallette offered, tapping up a control bar on the bottom of the screen. The double arrow made the image move faster. “That’s room 203, right there.”

  Darcy watched where he pointed, and while people came down the hall and went to other rooms, there was no activity at 203.

  Until…

  Jacob stopped the playback as an overweight, balding man stepped in front of the door and inserted a keycard in the slot. The image was small, and the angle wasn’t great, but Jon nodded anyway.

  “That,” he said, “is our victim. So like we said, nobody went in before him in the whole time the security system was recording. Nobody follows him in, either. Watch.”

  He motioned for Officer Mallette to continue, and with a touch of his finger the image moved forward again at its increased speed. The victim went in. Hours passed until it was morning again. A woman in a housekeeper’s uniform came up to the door with her cart and knocked. With no answer, she tried opening the door.