Keep Her Safe

by K. A. Tucker

  Not that a place like this would be too worried about respecting laws even now.

  Kristian sets his elbows on the front desk counter and leans, causing the entire unit to shift. He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, his focus on the heavyset woman working behind the counter, a crime thriller in her hands. “Miss Glorya Ruiz!” he says in a cheerful voice.

  She closes her book and eyes him like I would eye anyone who came here—suspiciously. “You can read name badges. Good for you.”

  “How long have you worked here, Glorya?”

  “Nine years. Why?” There’s a challenge in her tone.

  “Just curious.”

  “You gonna waste my time or get a room?” She glances over at me, then at Noah standing behind me. “I figure she ain’t cheap, but I’m not givin’ you no deal for sweet-talkin’ me.”

  Glorya thinks I’m a hooker. An expensive one, but a hooker all the same.

  I open my mouth to blast her, but Noah’s arm curls around my waist. He pulls me back against him and leans in to whisper, so close to my ear that his lips graze my lobe, “Let him handle this.”

  Even in the sordid setting, the intimate contact sends a thrill down my spine. I instinctively sink into his body.

  “So, Glorya . . . do you remember that big shooting here?”

  She flashes a wicked smile that highlights all her missing teeth. “Darling, which one? There’s been a few over the years.”

  “May third, 2003. An off-duty police officer was shot. It was a big deal. The owner changed the motel’s name not long after that. Too much bad press, I guess.”

  “Right. I might’ve heard about that one.”

  “What’d you hear?”

  She gives him a flat look. “That a cop got shot.”

  “In Room 116, right?”

  She shrugs. “Sure. Why not.”

  “Listen, I was wondering if we could take a quick look in there.”

  “If it’s available.” She glances over at the key rack where the room keys hang. They clearly haven’t upgraded . . . anything. “It’s available.”

  “Great! We’ll only be—”

  “That’s forty bucks for the two-hour rate.”

  “The two-hour rate?” I blurt out. “Is that a thing?”

  “It’s a forty-dollar thing.” Now Glorya’s treating me to that same stare.

  Kristian leans forward, folding his hands in a pleading way. “Her dad was the cop. She hasn’t been back to Austin since, and it would mean a lot to her if you’d let us step inside the room for five minutes, so she could get closure.”

  Kristian’s words seem to melt the cynical layer from that woman’s ice-cold heart. She reaches for the keys and slaps them on the counter, her eyes flickering to me, a touch softer. “End of Building One. You got five minutes.”

  “Thank you, Glorya. Hey, any chance there’s someone on staff that would have been working here back then? You know, housekeeping, maintenance . . . security . . .”

  Glorya settles onto her stool with a huff and, reaching for the worn paperback, continues reading from her marked page.

  Ignoring us.

  “Thanks for your time. I’ll be right back with that key.” Kristian waves for us to follow him out the door.

  “Why didn’t you flash your badge? Isn’t this what it’s for?” I ask.

  “People in places like this tend to say less around badges, not more.” He leads us down a covered walkway past a row of rooms. One of those ugly pea-soup-green doors pops open and a man steps out, adjusting his tie as he pulls the door shut. But not before I catch a glimpse of the woman inside, nude and tangled in sheets, a cigarette perched between her lips as she shuffles a wad of cash.

  The man ducks his head and scoots past to his black sedan, avoiding my stare. Of the ten cars in the parking lot, five of them are shiny, newish models. Nothing too luxurious—no Audis or BMWs—but decent cars, all the same. Cars driven by people who could probably afford better hotel rooms than this, if they weren’t here to pay for the services of a modestly priced prostitute.

  “Come on, Gracie.” Noah gently guides me forward to the far end of the building, where Kristian stands in front of an open door.

  My breath catches as I take in the gold-plated number—116.

  We step inside and the temperature instantly drops. At least, it feels cooler. If I didn’t know this was the room where my dad died, would I have the same reaction? Would this strange hollowness, coupled with a swell of anger, stir?

  “Definitely not the Ritz,” Kristian murmurs, his hands resting on his hips as he takes in the room: one queen bed and a dresser, a basic kitchenette and, next to it, I presume a bathroom.

  I scrunch my nose. “It smells like feet in here.” And cigarettes. I’m not surprised, given the ashtray that sits right beside the “no smoking” plaque by the bed.

  Kristian wanders in, squatting to peer at the floor near the window, dragging his finger along the thin burgundy carpet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “This seam, here. Do you see it?”

  I frown. The carpet is dark and the lighting is poor, so it’s hard to spot the line at first. “What about it?”

  “Looks like the owner was too cheap to re-carpet the room, so he just cut away where it was stained and glued down a remnant piece.”

  My stomach drops as I stare at the spot with new understanding. The report said Hernandez was found by the window. The carpet would have been stained by his blood. “You really think this is from fourteen years ago?”

  “There’ve been no reports of incidents in this room since.” Klein stands and walks over to the opposite side of the bed, his stride purposeful. He runs his toe along another seam in the rug—another new piece to replace a section of blood-soaked carpet. “This is where they found Wilkes.”

  Wilkes. My father. Oddly, it doesn’t sound strange to hear him referred to by his last name. Maybe that’s because he’s little more than a painful memory to me.

  I take a deep breath, and try to imagine the man I know from pictures and a foggy recollection lying there.

  “Coroner’s report said he died quickly. Three bullets to his chest.” Kristian smooths his hand over a layer of beige-striped wallpaper that’s begun to separate on the wall behind the bed’s headboard.

  Quickly isn’t instantly.

  Noah’s hand settles on my shoulder, the pad of his thumb rubbing over my collarbone affectionately. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I swallow the growing lump in my throat and take in the dingy room again, wondering what it would have been like to die here. Wondering about those last few moments, as blood seeped into his lungs, as his heart gave way. What does “dying quickly” feel like? Does it really feel quick? Or are those last moments agonizingly long, as you play out all the things you won’t get to say, won’t get to experience, all the regrets?

  What were my father’s last thoughts about? My mother? Me? Noah?

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” Noah asks, not hiding his impatience.

  “Anything interesting,” Kristian says in that flat way of his, where he makes everything sound boring when it’s anything but.

  “Do you have any theories?” Noah pushes.

  “One.”

  Noah’s jaw hardens as he waits for the evasive FBI agent to elaborate.

  “The simplest, most obvious one,” Kristian says after a pause. “There was a third person in this room, who pulled the trigger on one or both of Wilkes and Hernandez.”

  “Great. Now you just have to prove that, with no evidence.” Noah folds his arms over his chest and waits quietly for an explanation.

  A smirk touches Kristian’s lips as he runs his hand over that strip of wallpaper again. “Do me a favor, Grace, and go stand over there, on the other side of the bed. Pretend you’re Hernandez.”

  As much as I don’t want to be playing the role of the dead drug dealer, I follow his instructions and wander over to stand where the
carpet was patched.

  “Take a look at the wall. What do you see?”

  I squint. “Ducks?”

  “Swans, actually. But look closely. What do you notice?”

  I eye the expanse of ugly beige for a long moment before I notice a seam line, much like the one on Kristian’s side. “This piece looks newer. Not as dirty.” The strip of wallpaper runs about three feet wide, from floor to ceiling, just behind the nightstand.

  “Right. It’s the same over here.” Kristian waves a hand in front of him. “If the motel owners cut out chunks of bloody carpet instead of just replacing it all, how much do you want to bet they also slapped remnant paper overtop blood splatter to save themselves the effort and money of re-wallpapering everything?”

  “But . . . wait.” I frown as I try to recall the crime scene notes, riffling through the pages of the report that I brought with me. “It says here that the blood splatter was on that wall.” I point to the wall directly behind Kristian, which divides the bedroom area from the bathroom. “And on the window.”

  “You’re right. That’s what it says. And it would line up with the story that Wilkes and Hernandez took each other down, standing on either side of this bed.”

  “But . . .” Noah pushes.

  “Hernandez took one bullet in the head, killing him instantly. That means he would have had to pull the trigger first. Right?”

  I glance at Noah to see him nod.

  “Let’s suppose the report is right for a sec. Hernandez is standing over there when he shoots Wilkes three times in the chest. Wilkes goes down, but before he does, he manages to fire off a round that kills Hernandez where he stands, over there.” He points at me. “The bullet goes right through Hernandez. Into his forehead and out the back of his skull at a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle, based on the coroner’s report.”

  “That means Abe would have had to be standing,” Noah murmurs.

  “Right. A guy gets shot three times in the chest and manages to lift his gun to shoot a guy head-on? Not impossible, but it’s definitely worth questioning. But what’s more interesting is the old news footage I found from that night. There was nothing on that window. No blood, from what I can see, and definitely no bullet hole.”

  “So you’re saying there’s false evidence in the report?” Noah’s brow is tight with concentration.

  “Well, let’s try another scenario. Wilkes and Hernandez are standing in the same place. Hernandez shoots Wilkes three times. Wilkes hits this wall,” Kristian falls backward to hit the strip of wallpaper that was replaced, “and then, just before going down, shoots Hernandez in the head.”

  “But if that strip of wallpaper behind Gracie is hiding splatter from Hernandez, then . . .” Recognition fills Noah’s face. “Abe couldn’t have shot Hernandez.” Noah takes long backward strides to the opposite side of Klein. He raises his hand like a mock gun. “Someone would have had to be standing over here to shoot Abe. And then shoot Hernandez from over here.” He shifts over to the other side of the bed, closer to me.

  There had to be a third person involved.

  “Mantis,” I say automatically.

  “Maybe,” Kristian agrees. “Turns out Luiz Hernandez was one of the APD’s informants, so it’s plausible that they knew each other.”

  “And the room was rented out to Hernandez, right? He could have opened the door and invited Mantis right on in,” Noah murmurs. “Mantis probably shot Hernandez to keep him quiet.”

  “And made him the scapegoat,” Kristian adds.

  “Look at you two, getting along over murder theories.” I eye the cut-out carpet patches and strips of wallpaper with renewed interest. “How can we trust anything that’s in the report, then?”

  Kristian’s phone chirps with a message. He disappears out the door.

  “I’ll give him one thing: he hasn’t wasted time looking into this,” I murmur.

  “Yeah, he’s a real superstar.” Noah’s voice drips with sarcasm. He studies the spot where my dad died for a long moment, a troubled look on his face.

  “What are you thinking?”

  He hesitates. “That Silas said he looked over every piece of evidence. He should have noticed this.”

  I bite my tongue. Noah doesn’t need to hear my accusations right now.

  Silence lingers in the dingy motel room for a long moment.

  “I’ll be outside.” He turns and strolls out the door.

  I wait a beat longer. Long enough to close my eyes and try to recall something about my father. Anything. That laugh that Noah mentioned the other day, that infectious booming sound. “We won’t let them get away with this,” I whisper into the empty room, before finally leaving.

  I find Noah and Kristian around the corner.

  “ . . . it’d be easy enough.” Noah leads us along the path. Room 116 is on the end of Building One and there’s a walkway between it and Building Two, which runs perpendicular. The walkway ends at the back, where there’s nothing but Dumpsters and open space and, beyond that, a commuter parking lot for the highway.

  “He could have ducked out and come this way. Made the 9-1-1 call from that parking lot.” Kristian stops at the rusty chain-link fence that separates the properties, hidden from view. Grabbing hold of it, he gives it a tug. The one side comes clean off the pole. “Any bets that’s been busted for at least fourteen years?”

  “Did they even check?”

  “Without the evidence files, we’ll never know.” Kristian’s hands settle on his hips as he does a slow circle, his brow tight. With frustration or thought, I can’t tell.

  “Do you believe that evidence was ‘accidentally incinerated’?” I ask.

  He doesn’t miss a beat. “Not a chance.”

  “Is that you being suspicious or do you have actual proof?” Noah levels him with an even gaze.

  If Kristian’s irritated by Noah’s constant testing, he doesn’t let on. He does, however, seem to weigh his words. “The team that investigated Abraham Wilkes’s death was hand-selected by Chief George Canning. Mantis was one of them. Shawn Stapley was another. Canning pulled the two of them from their drug squad duties temporarily, to work this case for him.

  “Nine months later, Stapley got hurt on duty and ended up assigned to administrative work. Guess where?” He pauses for a second. “The evidence room. He was the one who ‘accidentally’ sent the case to the incinerator.”

  The pieces are all starting to fit together nicely.

  “And no one questioned this?” My voice carries through the near-vacant parking lot.

  “Why would they? New system in place . . . horrible glitch . . .”

  “Because they had no reason to question it,” I mutter.

  “I think someone started building a case against your dad before anyone crossed that motel-room threshold.” Kristian’s voice is a touch softer. “Why else would they execute a search warrant on his house less than twenty-four hours after he was shot?”

  “Holy shit,” Noah whispers under his breath. Realization dawns on his face.

  Kristian studies him. “Care to enlighten?”

  Noah sighs. “Canning said that right before Abe died, Mantis told him about a tip from an informant that an APD officer was dealing drugs. I’ll bet Mantis started setting Abe up with the chief as soon as he knew Abe wanted to bust him.”

  “So you know Canning personally?” Behind that veiled flat look, I can see Kristian’s thoughts swirling.

  “No, not really. He was at my uncle’s for dinner. We talked about Abe’s case a bit.”

  Kristian’s knowing gaze passes over me, his eyebrow arching. I see the unspoken accusation there. See, Grace? Canning and Silas, like two peas in a pod.

  I ignore it. “Okay, so Canning picked Mantis and this Shawn Stapley guy to investigate. But what about the others?”

  “You mean the two officers who work in Internal Affairs under Mantis? The ones who were recently investigated for falsifying evidence?” Amusement touches his lips. “I wouldn’t
count on them for honesty, either.”

  “Weren’t they cleared?” Noah asks.

  “They were. By Chief Marshall.” Kristian begins walking away.

  “Hey! Where are you going?”

  “To go visit the lovely Glorya again.” He holds up a business card between two fingers. “I want her to be able to call me when she hears anything.”

  I snort. “Because she’s been so cooperative.”

  “We’ll see if she changes her tune when I show her my badge and hand her the warrant we just got to tear apart this room.”

  So that’s why he was here in the first place . . . “Do you actually think you’ll find anything?”

  “You two need to get to my office,” Klein says, ignoring my question. “Give your name to security and Agent Proby will get you started. I’ll be there as soon as I get my team settled here.” He waves at Agent Tareen, who just stepped out of his car, holding papers in the air as if in confirmation. Beside him an unmarked white van has pulled up.

  “If nothing else, he’s efficient,” Noah mumbles, digging change out of his pocket as he heads for the vending machine. “Do you want anything?”

  “A Coke. Please.”

  After sliding the coins into the slot and stabbing at the button with his finger several times, he frowns at the machine, then smacks it. “Damn thing ate my money.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  Noah’s phone rings, distracting him. He looks at the screen and then, shaking his head to himself, hits a button, sending the call to voicemail. He’s done that twice already today. My guess is he’s avoiding his uncle.

  “You all right?”

  He squeezes the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Yeah, I just . . . Let’s get this statement thing over with.” His phone rings again and he swears under his breath.

  “Who is it?”

  Surprise flashes across his face when he checks the screen again. “Pool company. Give me a sec?”

  While he answers, I let my gaze drift over the three buildings. It’s quiet here, not a soul milling around. Not many want to be caught loitering in a place like this.