Viv bit her lip hard, trying not to sob. I was right, she thought. I thought I was crazy, but I was right. I was right.
“You won’t know what I want until you meet me,” Jamie said. “Twenty minutes or I go to the police.” He hung up.
Hess breathed into the phone for a second, then hung up as well. Viv put the receiver down. Her throat was tight, her eyes burning.
A minute later, a car motor started in the parking lot. She walked to the door and watched Hess drive away. Now, except for the passed-out Mrs. Bailey, Viv was alone at the Sun Down.
She waited fifteen seconds in case Hess changed his mind. Then she opened the bottom desk drawer and rifled through it until she found what she was looking for: a key labeled MASTER. Janice had shown her the key briefly on her first night. If someone’s passed out or dead in one of the rooms, you might need this.
Viv took the key and stood, hesitating. Then she dug in her purse and put her knife in its leather holster under her sweatshirt. She had left the office unarmed once, and it had nearly cost her. She wasn’t doing it again.
She left the office, walking quickly to the stairs. She had needed Jamie to make that phone call; Hess would never have believed a woman. He’d expect his blackmailer, the mastermind who had put all the pieces together, to be a man. He would have hung up on a woman—and then he would have remembered Viv, that he’d seen her somewhere.
So she’d enlisted Jamie, and he had done his part. It wasn’t bad for the price of a kiss.
Viv climbed the stairs and walked to the door of room 212. Put the key in the lock. The doors up here were closed again, as if Betty had tidied up after herself. But as Viv opened the door to 212, the lights flickered.
The room was like all the rooms at the Sun Down: bed, nightstand, small dresser. A TV sat dark in the corner, the famously advertised cable TV on the sign. On the bed was the small suitcase Simon Hess had been carrying. It was closed. Nothing in the room was touched. It seemed as if Hess had checked in and simply sat, doing nothing until he got Jamie’s phone call.
What goes on in his mind? Viv wondered. Everything? Nothing? Hess had killed Tracy Waters either this morning or last night. Her death would be fresh to him. Was he reliving it in his mind, the memories vivid? Or had he forgotten about it already?
She walked to the suitcase and flipped the latches, opening it. She turned on the bedside lamp. Inside the case were neatly folded clothes: shirts, ties. A toothbrush, a shaving kit. Everything was tidy and clean. If Viv had hoped for bloody clothes and a murder weapon, she was out of luck. The problem was, she didn’t know what she was looking for.
At the bottom of the case was a folder, neatly tied shut, full of papers. She pulled it out and untied it, leafing through the pages. These were the neatly dittoed lists of Hess’s schedule, his maps, his sales receipts.
There was the map of the neighborhood in Plainsview where Viv had seen him. It diagrammed the street and each house with its number. In the square of each house Hess had handwritten a symbol, the language not hard to figure out. An X meant he had been turned down at that house. An O meant no one was home. And a Y meant he had made a sale.
Tracy’s house was blank. What did that mean? Viv flipped through the pages, hoping for something else. Something concrete. Pictures of Tracy, maybe, or notes to her. She wanted to call Alma Trent and get her to arrest Simon Hess right now, tonight. But Alma would have to call in other cops to do that, and she wouldn’t do it without a reason. Get me something, anything, Alma’s voice said in Viv’s head. Get me something, Viv.
“I know,” Viv muttered to Alma in the dark silence. “I know you would help if you could. You just don’t understand. And now Tracy is dead.”
At the bottom of the file was a second map. This one was hand-drawn in pencil on a piece of lined paper. Viv held it under the lamp and saw a row of houses, a laneway between two of them, a square at the end of the lane labeled Park. In front of the houses, on the other side of the park, was a street that curved in a C shape. Viv turned the page one way and then another, trying to see if the map was familiar. Her brain paged through its mental images of Cathy’s street, Tracy’s, Victoria’s. The map didn’t match any of them.
What was it a map of? A victim Viv didn’t know about? Was this a map of something in Fell, or in another town? There were no street names written anywhere. She flipped the page over and studied the back, but there was nothing there, either.
This meant something, she was sure of it. She just had no idea what.
“Close,” she said to herself, to Alma, to Betty. “I’m so damned close.”
She went through the papers again. Then the suitcase, the clothes. She circled the room, looked in the trash can, the dresser drawer, the nightstand drawer. All were empty. She walked into the bathroom. It was dark and silent, untouched. She looked at the shower curtain, the single thin towel hanging on a rail.
The lights flickered again, a few quick blinks this time, on and off, like someone flipping a switch. Except there was no switch that would turn the entire motel on and off in an instant.
Betty.
A warning.
Viv turned from the bathroom and stepped out into the main room again. She patted her pockets for her key. The suitcase was sitting open on the bed, the contents obviously rifled through. Viv straightened the clothes quickly and flipped the lid of the case closed. She was fastening the latches when a voice in the doorway said, “What are you doing?”
* * *
• • •
Simon Hess was damp now, the shoulders of his overcoat wet with rain. Water had splashed the hems of his trousers. The bedside lamp lit his features, his even and regular face. He had brown eyes, Viv realized for the first time. He looked very calm.
Still, her gut turned and her blood pumped, every nerve ending screaming danger. “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered.
The words hung there, inadequate. Hess looked at the suitcase she was closing, then back up to her face. He blinked. “You,” he said, his voice soft with surprise. “It was you.”
Viv took her hands off the suitcase and turned to face him. He blocked the doorway and there was nowhere to run. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.” He took a step into the room and closed the motel door behind him. As he did, Viv could hear the click and bang of one of the doors slamming open. Then there was no sound as Simon Hess closed the door, trapping them in his room.
“I don’t,” Viv insisted. Cold sweat was beading under her clothes.
“Then why are you here?” The question was asked calmly, as if he were a doctor or a teacher, but Viv could see the splotches of red on his cheeks that meant anger. “In my room, going through my things? You were at that bus stop. Your footprints were in my garden.”