Beyond Limits (24 page)

He’d left early, yes. But if she’d been some random woman, he wouldn’t even have stayed that long. Clearly, she wasn’t up on standard operating procedure for a meaningless hookup. Usually, he completely dodged the whole morning-after scene filled with needy looks and awkward conversation. But with Elizabeth, he would have liked to have been there. He’d definitely wanted to see her sex-mussed hair and her sleepy smile, but her phone had been blowing up, and he’d known without a doubt that someone on her team was about to come banging on her door, so he’d hightailed it out of there.

And landed himself on her shit list.

Although he might have landed there anyway, because if there was one thing he was learning from this conversation, it was that despite her hot and completely eager attitude toward him last night, she now had regrets, big time. She’d finally let her guard down with him—not just once but four times—and she was using his stealth exit as a reason to blow him off.

She was uncomfortable. And if he ever wanted to see the sex goddess side of her again, he had some work to do. And he had to do it fast, because, as she’d correctly pointed out, he didn’t have much time left. And the thought of going back to base without touching her again was pretty much unbearable.

Forgettable.
She had no freaking idea.

“I never meant to make you feel like that,” he said now.

“Drop it. I’m done talking about this.”

“I’m going to make it up to you.”

“I don’t want you to make it up to me. I want you to drop it.”

He took her hand. “Liz—”

“I mean it. Just forget it, okay?” She pulled her hand away. “I need you to just leave me alone and let me do my job.”

Elizabeth was still rattled an hour later when she left the office. Some of it was from lack of sleep—she was going on day eight without a solid night, and her nerves were frayed—and part of it was the pressure of working a high-stakes case.

But part of it was Derek, a big part. She couldn’t get him out of her mind, and whenever she tried to focus on work, all she could think about was the intent look on his face when he’d come to her room last night.

Torres held the door open as they stepped into the midday sunshine. Another blazing-hot day that had already hit triple digits. Heat radiated up from the asphalt, and her clothes felt glued to her skin.

“I’ll drive,” Torres said. “You’re a mess today.”

She glanced at him as they crossed the parking lot. She hadn’t realized she looked quite as awful as she felt.

“Sorry,” she said, sliding into the passenger seat. She was doing something she never did, letting her personal life interfere with her work. She needed to focus. She checked her notes and programmed their destination into the GPS.

“Looks like we’re taking the Southwest Freeway,” she said.

Torres glanced at her as he pulled out of the lot. “You’ve got a thing going with that guy, don’t you?”

She looked up. “Who, Derek?”

“Yeah, Derek.” He smiled. “The guy you’ve been drooling over ever since California.”

She glanced out the window, embarrassed. “Is it that obvious?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

She looked at him.

“Relax, it’s not
that
obvious,” he said. “But I’ve known you longer than most of these people.”

They picked up the freeway, and he veered into the left-hand lane. She was glad he was driving so she had a chance to get her thoughts under control.

The timing of all this couldn’t have been worse. She’d been handpicked for the most important case of her career, and she’d decided to become infatuated with one of the men involved.

She was now convinced, though, that the timing wasn’t accidental. At least, not on Gordon’s part. He’d selected her for this case. Her, a relative newbie compared with the other agents on the task force. And he’d done so knowing full well that she had a personal connection to one of the SEALs involved in the raid. There was an underlying plan there. Gordon didn’t do anything without a reason. And he didn’t miss much, either, which meant that he, like Torres, probably knew she now had a “thing” going with Derek.

Elizabeth sighed. “What am I doing?”

“I don’t know.”

Torres looked completely relaxed behind the wheel. He was so low-key about everything that sometimes she had to remind herself she wasn’t talking to Lauren.

He glanced at her. “Are you asking my advice?”

“I don’t know. Do you have any?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s hear it.”

He swerved around a minivan. “You want my advice as your friend or as someone who’d like to take you out sometime?”

“As my friend.” Whoa, talk about awkward. But he was grinning now, so she hoped he wasn’t taking any of this too seriously. She should have waited to talk to Lauren.

“As your friend, my advice is to look at his rap sheet,” he said.

“He doesn’t have a rap sheet.”

“His personal rap sheet. You know, with girls.
Women
,” he corrected himself, cutting a glance at her. “Is he a love-’em-and-leave-’em type, or is he going to stick around? That’s what I tell my sisters to think about. If he’s the kind of guy who’s going to stick around and you like him . . .” He shrugged. “Then what the hell? Give him a shot.”

She turned to look out the window. It sounded logical and not that far removed from what they’d been taught about human behavior at the Academy. People were predictable. And the best predictor of future criminal behavior was past criminal behavior.

So what did Derek’s personal rap sheet tell her? She didn’t know. She didn’t know him well at all, which was one of the problems. But as for sticking around? That wasn’t happening. He wasn’t sticking anywhere—the SEALs were his life.

She looked at Torres again, hoping to dispel any awkwardness by being direct with him. “So what’s your other advice?”

He smiled. “That’s easy. Don’t waste your time with him. He’s a loser who’s going to break your heart and leave you in the dust.”

She choked out a laugh. “Great. Something to look forward to.”

“Hey, you asked.”

“You need to exit up here.”

Torres cut across two lanes of traffic and took the exit that would lead them to the Happy Trails Motel.

Situated between a Smoke ’n Toke and an adult video store, the place was high-class all the way. Elizabeth had found the phone number for it scrawled on a takeout menu in Matt Palicek’s apartment, which had prompted her to wonder if there was a chance they’d get lucky and learn that Ameen had been staying here at some point.

Torres slid into a space beside a souped-up black Cadillac with gold rims.

He straightened his tie. “I’m feeling a little underdressed,” he joked as they got out.

They approached the front office. The window beside the door sported a spiderweb crack and a hole clearly made by a bullet.

“Nice.” Torres pulled open the door. “Think they have a restaurant here? I’m craving crab cakes for lunch, maybe a little chardonnay.”

They stepped inside.

“Sixty a night, twenty an hour,” droned the man at the desk. He didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle as they approached him.

“Are you the manager?” Elizabeth asked.

He frowned at her over his reading glasses. “Who’s asking?”

She pulled out her ID, and he muttered something under his breath. His gaze slid to Torres.

“Your people were here yesterday. I told them I didn’t see the guy.”

“Which guy?” Torres leaned a palm on the counter.

“Are you here about the drug bust?”

“Nope.”

The manager frowned at Elizabeth again as she pulled a photo from the pocket of her blazer. “We’re looking for this man.” She slid the picture of Ameen across the counter.

“Never seen him.”

“What about this man?” She pulled out a second photo, this one of Rasheed. He gave it a glance.

“Nope.”

“You sure?” Torres asked. “Take a good look.”

The man stared at him stonily.

“They may have been driving a blue Chevy Cavalier or possibly a maroon Nissan Sentra.”

Elizabeth caught a flash of movement in the office behind the manager. A woman rolled back in a desk chair.

“A blue Cavalier?” she asked through the doorway.

“That’s right.”

Elizabeth’s nerves fluttered as the woman heaved herself out of her chair and waddled over. The manager glared at her as she picked up the picture, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“We had a blue Cavalier in last week.” She tucked a frizzy gray curl behind her ear. “I don’t recognize either of them, though.”

“It had a dinged back quarter-panel,” Elizabeth added.

“And big tires. I remember it.”

Torres shot a look at her.
Score
.

“You know the guest’s name?” Elizabeth asked.

“No,” the manager said, adamant now as he glowered at the woman beside him, presumably his wife.

“You don’t keep names of your guests?” Torres asked, heavy on the disbelief.

“The guests, not the cars,” the manager said.

“But it definitely wasn’t these guys.” The woman handed back the picture. “I’ve got a memory for faces.”

“You notice who was driving the car?” Torres asked her.

“No, but Jamie probably did. She was on nights last week, wasn’t she? So she might’ve checked them in.” She looked at her husband, who grunted a confirmation.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Torres said, “we’d like to see a list of your guests last week.” Instead of a warrant, he offered her one of his friendly smiles, which Elizabeth hoped would work, because she didn’t want to face any more red tape today.

“No trouble at all.”

Hallelujah
. The day was looking up.

Fifteen minutes later, they stood before room 112. The motel was running at sixty-percent capacity, and the room hadn’t been occupied since the previous guest had left Friday. That was the good news. The bad news was that the guest had paid in cash and checked in under the name John Smith, a name that no doubt appeared frequently on the motel’s register. And the clerk who had checked him in had conveniently neglected to take a driver’s license number.

“Think she’ll remember them?” Torres asked as he opened the door with a keycard.

Elizabeth donned a pair of paper booties before following him inside. An evidence response team would be over soon to comb through the place, but until then, they wanted to have a quick look around.

“Depends,” Elizabeth said, scanning the room. Gray walls, faded bedspreads. She glanced up. Brown water stain on the ceiling that she really didn’t want to think about. “If they slipped her a fifty for a quickie, no-hassle check-in, then she probably remembers them.”

“Fifty? I’d think she’d remember for twenty.” Torres walked over to the nightstand and opened the drawer with a gloved hand. “Girl makes minimum wage.”

“The dancer at the Pussycat said these guys are big tippers.”

Elizabeth glanced at the channel guide propped on top of the TV alongside the remote control—which happened to be number one of the top five locations to look for fingerprints in a hotel room.

She sighed. “The crime-scene techs are going to hate this place.”

Hotel rooms, particularly those that weren’t cleaned well or often, yielded a mountain of forensic evidence. Fingerprints, hair, DNA—the sheer volume made it difficult to process.

Torres crouched down and looked under the bed. “I can already hear the bitching and moaning. This place hasn’t been vacuumed since 1985.”

Elizabeth peered into a trash can. Empty, but that didn’t mean the techs wouldn’t find something there. An alternative light source would probably reveal trace biological evidence.

She carefully opened the closet using only the tip of her gloved finger. A familiar scent hung in the air, and she tried to place it.

“You smell something?” she asked.

“Mildew.”

“Besides that.”

“Cheap-ass piña colada air freshener.”

“Besides that.” She stepped into the bathroom, home to the remaining four on the top five list for prints: faucet handle, shower handle, toilet flusher, and toilet seat, a high-probability area for male prints.

The bathroom had one of those one-piece shower stalls. This one had rust stains near the drain and was surrounded by chipping caulk where it didn’t quite meet the wall. Nothing had been left behind on the shelf, not even a microscopic bar of soap for the next Happy Trails guest.

Elizabeth stepped back into the sink area and glanced around. On the linoleum floor, she noticed a row of copper-colored droplets. She crouched down for a closer look. Then she stood and examined the sink again, where she spotted a copper-colored smear on the faucet handle.

A memory hit her, and she was inside a cramped apartment in Fairfax, Virginia, two years after her father died, during what her mother called “the lean years.” She could see her mother primping in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready for a date as Elizabeth looked on, brimming with resentment.

Why do you have to wear all that pancake stuff?

Her mother had bristled.
You think you’re always gonna look like that, Miss Priss? Just wait till you hit forty.

Those had been the days before Richard. Before Glenn. The days of coupons, and ramen noodles, and home dye jobs in the bathroom sink. Her mother’s color had been Clairol Light Ash Blonde, and it smelled faintly of ammonia—just like this motel room.

Elizabeth’s stomach suddenly felt squishy. She crouched down and studied the droplets, along with the strand of long hair caught against the baseboard.

Her throat went dry.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked up at Torres. “I can’t believe I missed it. We all did.”

“Missed what?”

She stood up and glanced around, panicking. How had she, of all people, been so blind? How many clues, how many possible leads, had she overlooked?

“The mystery accomplice,” she said. “The driver. The one who bought the Chevy and murdered the college student and picked up Rasheed in Del Rio. The one who’s been here, laying all the groundwork for all this.”