Private Vegas (Private 9)

“No. I came back from my break. There was nothing happening, so I told the girl at the desk to call me if she needed me. I went to an empty room right here on the main floor and I watched TV and fell asleep. When I come out here, at like three a.m., the girl, Ms. Bird. She’s on the floor over there and she’s dead.

“I called 911. I stayed here. I talked to the cops. And then, a little while ago, the boss calls me and fires me. Because I was sleeping on the job. I’m not even mad about that. If I’d been on the door, I would be dead too, right, Captain? I’d be dead too.”

“Tell about the back door, Mr. Fogarty.”

“It was open, okay? The girl had the key. So she musta given it to someone, because the rear service door was hanging open. You got enough? Because I gotta go down to the office for my check.”

“Thank you,” Warren said to Fogarty. “You’ve been a big help.”

We watched the ex-doorman leave through the front door. Then Warren said to me, “I hate those guys, Jack. I hate that they’re in LA, I hate what they’re doing, and I hate that they’re so slippery. I’ll bet we don’t know the half of what they’ve done. It’s their game and they keep getting away with it.”

“I want to see their room,” I said.

Chapter 97

CAPTAIN WARREN PUSHED open the door to room 403, lifted the tape so I could go in before him. He said, “This room and the one next door were likely booked as a suite. The door between them was left open.”

The room was dingy blue, identical prints of a beach scene hanging on three walls and dusty gray draperies flanking windows that overlooked Cypress Avenue to the north.

A king-size bed, stripped bare, backed up against a wall and faced an armoire that held a TV and six open, empty drawers. The wall-to-wall carpet was a dark blue pattern designed to defy stains.

Hotel rooms are one of the worst possible places to collect forensic evidence, just below a strip club in Hollywood and the city dump. Hundreds of people had slept in this creepy room, all of them leaving prints, a blooming field of germs and too much DNA.

“Detectives from the Northeast got here within six minutes of Fogarty’s call,” said Warren. “They closed off the lobby and did a floor-to-floor canvass. When they saw four-oh-three, they locked it down. CSU was here for most of the last thirty-six hours, but as of ten this morning, they packed it in. They’re coming up empty.”

Just like they had in the lobby, CSU techs had left evidence of their own here; fingerprint powder was everywhere, white microfiber jumpsuits were wadded up behind the door, and discarded swab wrappers littered the place.

“CSU took the bedding?”

Warren said, “Hell no. The bed was naked when the cops got here. I’m still trying to get my mind around that. Same deal in the adjoining room.”

Wiping down phones and doorknobs was Cleanup 101. But people didn’t take bedding out of a room unless they were serious pros mopping up a homicide. In my one meeting with Gozan Remari and Khezir Mazul, I hadn’t made them as clean freaks. I thought they were pigs.

Assuming the Sumaris had been here and had been accompanied by two women, what had happened to those women? Had the Sumaris’ past pattern of sexual assault gone over the edge into murder?

Folded towels were on a rack in the bathroom, but if there had been any used towels, they were gone. Porcelain glistened under the fingerprint powder, and even the stopper had been removed from the sink.

I stood in the doorway between the two rooms and saw that 405 was a mirror image of 403. Stripped beds, fingerprint powder, no obvious trace of blood.

Professionals had made all the evidence disappear.

Warren said, “Here’s the sum total of what we’ve got, Jack. Fogarty’s five-second look at distinctive arm tattoos on a man with big hair and a big nose. He also saw the backs of two plus-size blondes. That’s all, but I know it was them. Remari, that pervert. And the other one. Mazul with those tattoos.”

I commiserated with the captain, and then went out to the balcony. It was sparsely furnished with a glass table and two homely lounge chairs. The view was equally spare: a deserted service road running parallel to the distant freeway. Directly below the balcony was a foundation planting of haphazardly trimmed hedges.

The smog was eye-watering. I was about to go back inside when I caught a glimpse of something forty feet down in the shrubbery, an object that didn’t belong. I called Warren and pointed until he saw the cell phone too.

He gripped the railing, exhaled hard.

“Is it too much to hope that that phone belongs to one of those pukes from Sumar?” he asked.

“Are you feeling lucky?” I said.

Chapter 98

VAL KENNEY WAS fifteen minutes late for her 6:00 p.m. appointment with Lester Olsen, and she was worried about that. Would Olsen wait for her or not? And by the way, she was still kind of lost.

She called Mo-bot, who told her to take a sharp left on West Spring Mountain Road, go one block, then take another left into the strip-mall parking lot. Val did that but couldn’t find an empty spot. She swore, apologized to Mo, then drove around the block and parked on the street.