Kyla
Whatever Sarah had said, it had certainly gotten Frank’s attention.
“I’ve covered up a few,” Hunter said. When the other three turned to stare at him, Hunter shrugged. “It’s a joke.”
Ethan edged away from Hunter very slightly, joke or not. “I guess we could start by looking around. Maybe the killer left something behind, right? Or we could figure out the motive for wanting to kill her in the first place. That might help eliminate suspects, right?”
Hunter said, “Our two most obvious suspects are dead. Stanley was definitely afraid of that Ryan person revealing something back in the office. He—”
“I’m not sure Stanley was such an obvious suspect,” Ethan said. He gestured to the spot by the side of Sarah’s bed where the big man, earlier in the night, had crouched next to her corpse in total shock. “The guy seemed stunned to find her like this. That’s hard to fake.”
“Not as hard you think,” Hunter said. “But sure. Say it wasn’t Stanley. That leaves this Ryan person, a man who spent all night hiding from us until he decided to make a big entrance and start throwing accusations around. If that’s not suspicious, I don’t know what is.”
Ethan said, “So what do we do?”
Hunter scowled. “We go barricade our doors and pray for the best. Just like I’ve been saying.
Most crimes are solved from interviews, not evidence.
Cops spend days getting people to say shit they shouldn’t.
Without that or a forensics team here to dust for fingerprints and look for stray hairs, there isn’t much we’re going to turn up just poking around this room. ”
Kyla said, “Are you done?”
Hunter scowled. “Fine. You want to find a motive? Look at the way Sarah’s pants are pulled down. That seems pretty unambiguous.”
Kyla supposed he had a point. Leaving the front door cracked (cold as the room was, she also had a feeling it was probably keeping the body from starting to smell), she took a long breath, went to the side of the bed, forced herself to look.
Sarah Powers’s jeans had been pulled down halfway to the knees.
It certainly looked sexual, maybe even nonconsensual, but when Kyla hefted the room’s chunky brass lamp and brought the light closer, she said, “I don’t see any stains. ”
“Maybe the killer didn’t finish,” Hunter said. “Maybe he got interrupted. Sarah started to wiggle free, so he killed her.”
“But wouldn’t there be blood between her legs if it was rape?” Kyla said.
Ethan looked at Hunter.
Hunter looked at Ethan.
Ethan said, “You expect us to know?”
Fair point.
While Kyla replaced the lamp, Ethan took his time gazing around the room.
His eyes passed over the money scattered across the long dresser, the mess of junk on the corner table, the suitcase and purse on the floor with their contents spilled everywhere.
“Was Sarah really messy, or did someone toss this place? Did the killer come here to take something and Sarah just got in the way?”
“How would we know the difference?” Kyla said.
“I don’t know,” the boy said, but he got on his knees and started sifting through the woman’s luggage.
Kyla said, “Is there any way to figure out when exactly she died?”
Hunter frowned. “The doors to this room were open for an hour. The temperature’s been below freezing the whole time. Touch her. She’s probably stone-cold.”
Kyla really, really didn’t want to do that, but she supposed there was no way around it. She reached down and plucked up Sarah’s stiff arm from where it was stretched over the coverlet. A flood of goose bumps washed over her. Sarah was so cold she didn’t even feel human anymore.
“You’re right.”
“Meaning she could have been killed at any point between—what—six o’clock, when we all go to our rooms, and eight o’clock, when Tabitha finds the body. Two hours is a long time. It’d be hard to narrow down suspects with such a wide window.”
Kyla was inclined to agree with him, only for something to occur to her. “No. It’s actually not that wide. Me and Fernanda heard Sarah talking to someone in this room at seven thirty. A man. It sounded like an argument.”
“A man?” Ethan said, looking up from the suitcase.
“An argument?” Hunter said.
“Yes, it was definitely a man’s voice, but the man and Sarah were talking too quiet for me to hear much through the wall,” Kyla said. “But they were having an argument. That was pretty easy to tell.”
“Was that argument so bad it could have come to blows?” Ethan said.
Kyla thought of Stan Holiday’s busted lip, the restless rage that had filled him when he’d come into the motel’s cafe shortly before the body was discovered.
“Maybe. The important thing is that Sarah was still alive by seven thirty. Meaning the murder actually happened in a very narrow window of time.”
Hunter leaned back against the long dresser, folding his arms, looking curious almost despite himself. “Alive at seven thirty, dead by eight o’clock. You’re right. That is manageable.”
Ethan said, “It stands to reason the killer is the man she was arguing with, right?”
“Not necessarily. We don’t know how long that conversation lasted,” Hunter said. “The mystery man could have left at 7:35 and the killer come right in after him. It wouldn’t have taken that long to do this. Especially if…”
He drifted off.
Kyla, for her part, couldn’t stop staring at the corpse. “Why would the killer put pillows over her face? Were they, like, ashamed of what they’d done? They didn’t want to see her?”
“No.” Fernanda finally spoke. The woman had spent the last few minutes in her thoughts, standing very near the room’s door like she hoped to slip back out the moment she could. Now, however, she took a few steps closer to the bed, squinted at the bloody pillows, nodded.
“This is a cartel trick. You place one pillow over the victim’s head to cover any screams, then place another over the neck to control the spray of blood. Look at that one, the pillow over Sarah’s neck. It has a hole in the side. That is where the knife went in.”
Fernanda wasn’t wrong. Looking closer, Kyla saw that the pillow over Sarah’s neck had a clump of something small and red frozen next to it on the coverlet.
On closer inspection, she realized they were feathers—small down feathers—that had spilled from a gash in the side of the pillow.
The hole in the pillow looked like it went straight through one side and out the other: a through-and-through stab.
The hole shimmered, bright and crusted with blood, like a geode grown from a grave.
Steeling herself, Kyla lifted the pillow away. Hunter looked at the wound in the neck Kyla had revealed. “That’s definitely a knife puncture. And a big one, too. You could fit a letter through that hole.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Kyla shot a glance at Fernanda. How did the woman know a trick like this?
“You might as well lift up the other one,” Hunter said, gesturing to the pillow over Sarah’s face. “We should make sure it’s actually her. Just a formality, though.”
Kyla nodded. The blood in the pillow had frozen to Sarah’s long black hair, and as Kyla lifted it free, she heard strands of hair crackling like cold grass underfoot. They found a head staring straight down into the coverlet.
Hunter came to Kyla’s side. With a little grunt of effort, he grabbed hold of the dead woman’s shoulders and flipped her over, though they didn’t learn much.
This was, indeed, Sarah Powers. Now that they could see her face, Kyla thought the woman looked like she’d died in the grip of some awful insomnia, staring at the ceiling with an expression of absolute dread.
But Fernanda had been wrong about one thing. The woman had died with her mouth closed. That second pillow hadn’t muffled any screams.
From where he was seated on the floor, something caught Ethan’s eye. After lowering himself to his stomach and reaching his arm under the bed, he emerged with a long knife in one hand and a brown leather sheath in the other.
The knife’s blade was crusted with blood.
Ethan dropped the knife onto the frozen pillow. “Sarah was wearing this knife in the office.”
Kyla looked up, nodded. “I remember.”
Hunter frowned, running his tongue along his teeth. “They killed her with her own weapon.”
Before this could settle in, Fernanda made a discovery of her own. Stepping down the short hallway at the back of the room, she flipped the switch in the bathroom. A moment later, an infernal red glow washed over her.
Fernanda took a sharp step back. She gestured to Kyla. “You must see this.”
Sarah Powers had replaced the plain light bulb above her sink with a red one.
A piece of black paper had been taped over the glass block that served as the room’s only window.
The tub was filled with a thin layer of water, in which sat three glass bottles with handwritten labels bearing the names of chemicals Kyla didn’t recognize.
A toiletries bag and pair of nail scissors rested on the vanity.
Sarah’s camera—the one Fernanda had been so enraptured with back in the office—was perched beside them.
Next to the camera were a pair of tweezers and two plastic cylinders, one big and one small.
The small cylinder was a yellow roll of film—Kodak 400 Gold—the sight of which sent a thrill of déjà vu through Kyla, considering the reason they’d had to leave Fort Stockton in such a hurry this afternoon. What were the odds?
The other cylinder on the counter was much stranger. It was black, and when she picked it up Kyla found that the cylinder was made of thick plastic, bulky enough to need two hands. It had a screw-on top, at the center of which was a wide mouth that tapered inward like a funnel. The lid felt loose.
Fernanda practically snatched the cylinder out of Kyla’s hand. Bringing the black cylinder to her ear, she gave it a soft shake. “Close that door. We cannot risk any light coming inside.”
“Is that what I think it is?” Kyla said.
“Yes. Sarah was not lying about one thing. This is a development tank for exposing photo negatives.” Fernanda gave it another shake. “And there is still film inside.”