Sampson understood and left. I waited a minute and then punched in the number. It rang. My partner answered. “Right here,” he said. “The blue iPhone.”
“Okay,” I said, hung up, and looked at Blossom. “Her phone’s inside, but nothing else.”
“No,” Blossom said, shaking her head. “She would never, ever leave her phone. She was, like, a textaholic.”
“What if she’d just shot four people?” I asked. “Would she leave it behind?”
“Cam?” She paused. “I guess I don’t know.” Then anguish took her. “How am I going to explain this to my parents?”
I was confused but then understood. “Blossom, as long as you are cooperating with us, as far as we’re concerned, your parents don’t have to know a thing about this. Ever.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Blossom Mai broke down all over again.
Chapter
9
At seven forty-five the next morning, Marcus Sunday strode confidently through the lobby of the Four Seasons in Georgetown, knowing full well that no one would ever recognize him in this outrageous getup.
On another man it might have been thought a clown’s outfit: purple high-top sneakers, orange shirt and pants, ice-blue contact lenses, two nose rings, and a flaming-red Abe Lincoln beard with matching eyebrows and a matching wig that stood four inches straight up over his head. But Sunday knew that the disguise exuded a certain, well, charismatic threat, especially in a place like this, as if he were some sort of psycho Carrot Top or worse.
Indeed, the maître d’ looked mightily upset when Sunday went to the stack on a table and grabbed a copy of the Washington Post that featured a story on the death of Mad Man Francones and three others at a local massage parlor, then approached his station, saying in a nasal, whiny tone: “Table for one.”
The maître d’ tried to look down his nose at Sunday, said, “And do you have a reservation with us, sir?”
“Guest of the hotel,” Sunday said. “Room 1450.”
Room 1450 was a thousand-dollar-a-night suite. The maître d’s attitude shifted measurably, but he still eyed the writer’s attire. “Mr.…?”
“Mulch,” Sunday replied. “Thierry Mulch. Like the composted stuff.”
“Oh,” the maître d’ said as if he’d just tasted something unpleasant, and snatched up a menu. “Please follow me, Mr. Mulch.”
Inside the dining room, the air seemed at a different barometric pressure, as if some vast low had descended over the place. And it bore a smell beyond rueful bacon, sausage, and coffee that Sunday recognized as the rot of power.
Corpulent stuffed shirts with five-hundred-dollar haircuts were wall-eyeing the writer almost immediately. A brassy blond cougar in a brick-red Chanel suit looked up as he passed. Sunday winked her way, licked his upper lip with feline hunger, and almost laughed when her cheeks ignited.
He kept walking, flashing on the mystery that was Acadia Le Duc, and the indescribable fun and desires they would share in just a few short—
“Mr. Mulch?” the maître d’ said, breaking into his thoughts with a stiff gesture to a table tucked in the corner by the kitchen doors.
“Why don’t you stick me in the john?” Sunday asked in that nasal, whiny voice, then pointed over near the windows. “I’d like to sit there.”
The maître d’ went stone-faced but nod
ded and led the writer to a table where almost everyone in the place could see him.
“Thanks,” Sunday said loudly. “More like it.”
He looked around at the various dignitaries, politicians, lobbyists, and the like, many of whom were either glancing at him or staring openly. The writer gave several of them the thumbs-up. They looked like they’d just felt a tick crawling up their spine.
Brilliant entertainment, he thought, and then analyzed the forces at play.
These sorts of ridiculous people believed in decorum, tact, and manners. Sunday had found that when you brushed up hard against their rules of accepted behavior, you created agitation. And agitation, as far as he was concerned, was a good thing, a very good thing—what he lived for, as a matter of fact.