Authors: Hank Phillippi Ryan
Brileen laid her left hand over the top of her own mug, then her right hand over that. She removed them, quickly—the coffee looked hot—and stared at her palms.
“Brileen?” Catherine said. “My daughter is asking the perfect question. Why?”
The girl was clearly stalling. She must be, what, twenty-six? At the most?
Twenty years younger than Greg.
What could she possibly be considering so intently?
The steam from the coffee in front of her rose, dissipated, disappeared.
“I had to protect Valerie. And then Lanna. But now I’m done.
Yes.
This has to end.” Brileen laced her fingers together, hands clasped under her chin. She leaned forward. “You have to understand. I—your husband and I—we were trying to protect you,” she whispered.
“Protect me?” Catherine said.
“Not only you, Mrs. Siskel,” Brileen said. “You and Tenley.”
“What?” Catherine could not process this.
Brileen put one hand flat on the table, moved it closer to Catherine, almost touching her. “I’ll tell you the whole thing. But first, I am so, so,
so
sorry. And so sorry for your loss.”
The surveillance room was empty. Jane closed the metal door behind her. Scoped the place out.
How different could all this equipment be from the edit booths and microwave trucks that Jane had worked in for years? The computer console with its array of controls and lights might has well have been edit room 4 at her old TV station. It looked exactly like Marsh Tyson’s office. Or Editing 101 at J-school. Which Jane had aced.
She felt watched, even though no one else was in the room.
Probably because you’re trespassing,
she thought. But wasn’t this where Beefy and Co. had wanted to bring her anyway? She dropped into the ratty swivel chair, its stained upholstery snagged and worn, and rolled herself up to the main console.
Five rows of video monitors spanned the wall, a flickering grid of black-and-white images. Hallways, elevators, vending machines. Stairways, supply rooms. Kitchen, pantry. Closed doors, some with the room numbers showing. Wonder if guests knew their every move was watched and recorded? Some screens were dark, like black holes in the video grid.
The second row of monitors all showed the lobby. Front door, concierge desk. She saw the concierge on the phone for one second, then the screen shots changed and new images swam up. The registration desk. Empty. The palm tree where she’d encountered Gracie. On the lowest row, the five screens were larger, images constantly changing. A pretty expensive setup. She watched, feeling strangely omniscient.
Where was Gracie now? Where would she have gone? Back to Lewis’s room on the third floor? The floor where Jake was headed? Or did someone take her?
Wait. All she had to do was find the right screen, and she’d see whatever happened. Police, rescue, shoot-out. Happy ending. Her heart raced with the possibility. She could grab her camera right now, be ready to shoot terrific exclusive video. Would that be legal?
Did it matter?
She stood, hands on hips.
Find Gracie.
And where was Jake? Trying to scan, she leaned forward, squinting. On the highest row, the screens were too small to make out much. Soon as she saw a cop the image would disappear, because the screens kept changing views, rotating every few seconds, like several cameras fed each monitor.
Made sense, she guessed, because you didn’t need to look at the same place all the time, so they used fewer monitors and multiple sources. Probably also why they had two guys. Mesmerizing to watch these things all day. Eventually, paralyzingly boring.
Unless, of course, there was a shooting. Or a missing girl.
“Okay,” she said out loud. “There’s gotta be rhyme and reason.”
Five rows of monitors. Ten monitors across. Fifty screens. If this had been her setup, she might have labeled them. But no.
If there were no labels, did Beefy and Co. simply know camera placement by heart? There must be a—
ha.
She yanked a white vinyl binder from between two console banks. The yellowing clear plastic cover was separating at the corners, brittle and peeling away. Someone had made devil horns on the words
HEWLITT SECURITY
on the cover and added Mickey Mouse ears to their fancy logo of a camera lens. Not-so-happy employees, she thought. With not enough to do.
She flipped open the binder. Bingo. Spreading out a triple-fold piece of paper, she saw a blueprint of what had to be a chart of the monitors. Like a big checkerboard, each square filled in with words. Supply5. Linen5. Vending4. Corridor5A.
Looked like the five rows corresponded to each floor of the hotel. Brilliant. The middle row was the third floor, where Jake and D and a million cops were.
Maybe this was a time suck? Maybe she should run out of here and start going door-to-door. That would be rewarding, because it would feel like she was doing something. It was also inefficient and primitive. And possibly dangerous.
“Find. Gracie,” she commanded herself. Was the little girl hiding? Or being hidden? The whole thing was a juggle, because the shots on each screen kept changing.
Still, in this one room, Jane could be everywhere in the hotel at the same time. Most likely, Gracie wouldn’t be changing position, right? If she was hiding.
If
she was hiding. Which was a big if. Because she might be with—
Oh, my gosh. She was an idiot.
Who had told the police that Gracie Wilhoite was missing? Besides Jane, only one other person in the building knew the girl was here. Or maybe—two?
* * *
Now it made sense, Jake thought.
Not good sense, not rational sense, but as much sense as domestic violence ever made. The man on the stretcher was Lewis Wilhoite. Gracie’s stepfather, the one who clearly had taken her yesterday.
“Is this the person who told you the girl was missing?” Jake asked Deb Kratky. He repeated the question to the room full of EMTs and cops. “Gracie? His stepdaughter? Did he say any more? Where she might have gone? And why?”
“Negative, Jake,” one of the cops said. “By the time we got here, he was down for the count.”
“So who—” Jake stopped as a familiar shape filled the hotel room door.
“Come with me,” DeLuca said. “Move it.”
Jake followed DeLuca, double speed, down the deserted corridor. The amplified warning instructions blared, repeating. All the room doors remained firmly closed. “D, you got people looking for Gracie?”
“Listen, Jake. Of course we do. They’ll find her. Lotsa rooms in here, lotsa places to hide. But listen.” D stopped in a spotlighted pool of light on the mottled carpeting. A discarded room service tray holding grape stems, ketchup packets, empty breadbasket, and a pile of dirty silverware sat untouched outside the room to his left.
“So, yeah. We have a situation. Got the shooter in there.” He pointed to a closed door black-stenciled
SUPPLY RM.
“Great work,” Jake said. Done and done. Only several million questions left to answer, but at least they knew who to ask. There wouldn’t be any more shooting. And then he could get some sleep. All in a day’s work. Two days.
“What’s his condition? What’s his story?” Jake fired questions at DeLuca. “He call for a lawyer yet? What’s the plan for HQ transport for questioning? We’re the primaries, correct? You recover the weapon? Anything I should know?”
“Shooter’s cuffed, seated, basically silent. Got the gun, yeah. Twenty-two. Registered. Hasn’t called for a lawyer yet, no.”
“Great,” Jake said. “Let’s get this asshole. Shooting a guy in a hotel. Scaring this little girl to death. Now she’s hiding somewhere, I bet.
Shit.
Hope poor Gracie didn’t see this go down. Asshole.”
“Jake?” DeLuca said. “The shooter’s not asking for a lawyer. She’s asking for Jane.”
“I can’t look at it,” Catherine said.
She put up both palms, blocking the computer screen in front of her. They’d hurried out of the Purple Martin and crossed to City Hall, she and Tenley and Brileen, then closed Catherine’s office door behind them. Snoop-faced Siobhan Hult had been sent to tell Ward Dahlstrom that Tenley was still with her. Siobhan had never seen Brileen before, so they would appear, Catherine hoped, to be a typical mom hanging out with her daughter and her daughter’s pal. It would all seem peacefully familial. Instead of disgusting and horrific.
Brileen had finished her stomach-turning story, mother and daughter silent, as the din of the Purple faded into white noise around them. “I kept the thumb drive with me, all the time, on my key chain,” she’d finally said. “As insurance. It’s the only way I could make sure it was safe.”
Now Catherine and Tenley were about to see what was on that thumb drive. The video Brileen had protected. The “insurance.” Had Greg watched it, too?
“Tell me again.” Catherine, sitting in her leather desk chair, her computer humming, was still trying to understand. “
Whose
idea was this?”
“I was only told his name was Hugh.” Brileen standing by the desk, hands jammed in her pockets, shook her head. “He said he had surveillance tape of me, with Valerie. From—well, it doesn’t matter. He threatened to show her parents, the worst possible situation, if I didn’t help him.”
“Help him what?” Tenley perched on the edge of the couch.
“With his—I don’t understand the whole thing, I don’t even want to, but he found me at school. Had me approach Lanna. ‘I know all about your little friend,’ he said. He told me to tell her he had surveillance video of her, you know.” She swallowed. “‘With’ someone. And that he wanted money. Or he’d make it public.”
“Surveillance video? From where?” Catherine couldn’t process this. “With who?”
“With who?” Tenley echoed.
“Lanna never told me.” Brileen shook her head again. “She asked me—begged me—to go to her father. She couldn’t face him. Hugh told me to warn her that it would not only humiliate her.” She paused again. “It would
ruin
you.”
“
Ruin? Me?
This man knew
me
? How?” After three terms at City Hall, Catherine had met an incalculable number of people. But how many would want to destroy her? Well, plenty, she guessed. It was politics. And all she needed was one. This one. “Do I know
him
?”
“Mrs. Siskel, I simply don’t know. I only met him that once, other times it was all by phone. I simply—arranged it. I’m so sorry, but…” She paused. Took a deep breath.
“But there was no way out. I had to protect Valerie, you know? Mr. Siskel and I met. Made the exchange. I put the money in the Dumpster, like Hugh told me. But I kept a copy of the video. In case, I don’t know, I needed it for evidence.” She pulled a chunky rectangular key ring from her pocket, silver with a black suede tassel on the end. She yanked the tassel, and a thumb drive clicked out. She inserted it into the keyboard port of Catherine’s computer. “I’ve never looked at this, though. I couldn’t.”
“Greg never told me,” Catherine murmured. The computer hummed, the screen still black. “Nor did Lanna.”
“Me either,” Tenley said.
Catherine reached out across the desk, took her daughter’s hand.
“Mrs. Siskel?” Brileen’s eyes filled with tears. Again. “Do you want to look at the video now? I don’t know if your husband ever saw it. Or if he even kept the original thumb drive—he said he’d destroy it. But Lanna was happy, you know? Until this. She had some boyfriend, I guess he was the one on the tape. And her father forgave her. They had pledged never to tell you, decided that it would be their secret. She loved him, your husband, I mean, so much. And you, Mrs. Siskel. And you, too, Tenley. And when she died—”
Catherine’s lungs worked to breathe against the weight of the burden suddenly crushing them. “This Hugh. He wouldn’t have—do you think he
killed
her? In the woods?”
“I don’t,” Brileen said. “I mean, I don’t know. Didn’t the police say it was an accident? I believe them. I have to. It’s the only way I can deal with it. It’s too horrible, otherwise, thinking that I … and now, I’d do
anything
to—”
“We all would.” Catherine looked around her office. The same low-bid office where she’d battled the hotel workers’ strike and the neighborhood pothole lynch mob and the snow removal budget and the mayor’s continuing disconnect with his constituents. Boring, mundane City Hall. Now getting ready to present her daughter on some sex tape from some obviously illegal hidden camera.
“I can’t look at it,” Catherine said again.
But Brileen had already clicked the silvery mouse. One frame of video now filled Catherine’s computer screen. Black and white, that muddy half-tone identifying surveillance video. A white triangle violated the middle of the screen. When Brileen clicked the triangle again, the video would start.
“Mom?” Tenley’s voice was tiny, the thin, reedy voice of a child. She pointed to the screen, moving the pale pink rounded nail of her right forefinger past the triangle. “Um. I think that’s, like, your greenroom.”
Catherine stood, slowly, both palms on her desk. The room around her seemed to be off its axis. The floor was moving and the lights were dim, then bright, then dim again. There was no surveillance camera in her greenroom.
That she knew of.
She reached out a hand. It felt almost as if it weren’t attached to her arm. Lowered two fingers to the sleek polished surface of the mouse.
And clicked the triangle.
And then clicked it again. To stop it.
“Wait,” she said. Catherine had more to think about than the past, more to worry about than what might have been on some contraband video—
in her office! How?—
of her daughter and some asshole who’d taken advantage of Lanna, and Catherine, and practically every other thing in her universe that was honorable and sane. If he had harmed her daughter, in Catherine’s own office, it couldn’t be any worse on video than it was in her imagination. She would not poison her brain with it.
She needed one more answer. Right now.