Chapter Hunter
HUNTER
He waited.
The generator sputtered back on—or tried to. A weak half-light reigned over the motel, a gloaming of mercury vapor, and from beside him Hunter heard Fernanda let out a startled gasp. She was pressed against the wall, staring at the room’s bed, her body stiff with fear.
Hunter followed her gaze. He, too, went very tense.
They weren’t alone.
Two women lay on the bed. One was wearing nothing but an old-fashioned garter belt.
The other woman was completely naked. Their hairstyles were out-of-date: a bob for one, a short beehive for the other.
The two women were kissing, madly. Touching each other.
Breathing hard, but they didn’t appear to make a sound.
The woman with the beehive opened her eyes. It was just a little blink, like she was coming up for air. She closed them.
She opened them again, wide. She stared over her companion’s shoulder at Hunter and Fernanda with the same shock with which they were staring at her. The other woman turned, saw them for herself, scrambled to pull the blanket over her bare body.
The woman screamed, but her open mouth remained silent as a cry in a nightmare.
The lights came back up. The women dissipated like smoke.
Hunter said nothing.
Fernanda shuddered. The roll of Sarah’s film, draped over her neck, whispered against her long hair. “You saw them too.”
Hunter said nothing.
Fernanda said, “Are we losing our minds?”
“I hope not,” Hunter said. “We don’t have time.”
Hunter had his doubts about Fernanda. He wasn’t sure he could count on this girl if trouble hit the fan. (Case in point: in all the chaos of the last couple minutes, she’d never once reached for her gun.) Fernanda seemed strung out on adrenaline, wrecked by a very long day.
The good news was that Hunter didn’t exactly need her help. For most of the night, he’d had a pretty clear idea of everything that had happened at the motel since he and Ethan had arrived. He knew who had killed Sarah Powers, and how, and why.
He also knew that the odds of anyone finding conclusive proof of the killer’s guilt would be next to impossible, meaning all of this was a waste of time.
“Go search the bathroom,” Hunter told Fernanda, mostly to keep her out of his hair. “The toilet. Under the vanity. Everywhere.”
“For what?”
“Anything that might have been stolen out of Sarah’s room. Guns. Money.” He hesitated. “The satellite phone. Or just anything out of the ordinary.”
“You are not afraid of what we just saw?”
“I’ve seen weirder.”
“Weirder than that?”
Hunter frowned, if only to himself. He thought about one of his last nights in Huntsville, listening to the horrors being whispered about in the cell next door. The last night of The Chief.
Tell Sarah—
Tell Sarah, the mountain—
Hunter said to Fernanda, “You’d be surprised.”
He took stock of room 7. Stanley and Penelope had made themselves at home.
There were two full beds, only one of which had been slept in.
The room had the same wardrobe and long dresser and brass lamps as all the other rooms. The same reddish-brown carpet and turquoise coverlets and chevroned bars on the front window.
There were two pieces of luggage in sight. A brown overnight bag stood on the corner table. The bag was stodgy and less impressive than it wanted to appear, like Stanley. A muted pink backpack rested on the easy chair. Penelope’s, no doubt.
Penelope’s backpack held only a sports bra and a pair of athletic shorts, like the girl had been packing for a PE class, not a trip to Mexico. Stanley’s bag didn’t have much more in the way of clothes: a few shirts, some socks, a couple pairs of underwear.
Hunter called to the bathroom, “The Holidays weren’t packing for a long trip.”
“I do not believe Penelope packed for a trip at all,” Fernanda said. “I heard a little about it at Frank’s house. Ryan Phan picked the girl up from school three days ago. They were in Mexico by the time anyone thought to miss her. It all sounded rather unplanned, at least on her part.”
“You were at Frank’s house?”
Silence.
“Any idea what sort of work Sarah Powers was doing for Frank?”
“No.”
Hunter ran a thumb along the seams of Penelope’s bag, then Stanley’s.
Sure enough, he found a false pocket in the lining of Stan’s overnight case.
Hunter pinched the fabric and tugged it open, revealing a cache of cash: five hundred-dollar bills.
An emergency travel fund, typical for people at risk of mugging. No real surprise.
He thought of the cash spilled across Sarah Powers’s dresser. He put Stan’s money away.
His eye caught something on the floor, over near the bed. Looking up, he saw a few fine dots on the nightstand, a mist of red-brown stains. He cocked his head. He hadn’t expected this.
But before he could take a closer look, Fernanda poked her head out from the bathroom.
“You call him Frank. Not Frank O’Shea.”
Hunter met her eye. “So?”
“Have you met him?”
“No.” This was a lie, but the truth would be too much of a headache to explain. “Why?”
“Their mothers disappeared from this area. Frank’s mother, and Stanley’s. Both on the same night. Perhaps even from this motel.” Fernanda pushed back her hair. “There is a legend about this place. That twelve people vanished without a trace one night, many years ago.”
“Do we really have time for legends?”
Hunter said it dismissively, but he remembered the morning he’d met Sarah Powers. He remembered the awful things he’d heard in Huntsville the night before. Terrified whispers in the dark. The last night of The Chief.
Tell Sarah, the mountain is getting restless.
Fernanda said, “There is great power in a story. Even if you do not believe it.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“The women on the bed just now. One of them had Frank’s jaw. The other had Stanley’s hair.”
Hunter looked from Fernanda to the bed and back again. His lungs were starting to burn from the room’s dry air. He thumped his chest. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Fernanda didn’t let it go. “Something much stranger is happening here than a simple murder. I have felt it all night. Those things in the desert, the time running fast, now these shades on the bed—we are dealing with something we do not understand.”
“Then let’s get busy figuring it out.”
Still—still—Fernanda didn’t move. “You do not care about Sarah’s murder. You are just killing time until you can get back to your room.”
Hunter said nothing.
“I do not think you killed Sarah, but I think you know many things you are not saying. Things you do not want Ethan to know about you. Things that might complicate his picture of you. You are hiding something.”
Hunter rose very slowly from the floor, and Fernanda drew away, clearly frightened of him. He almost wanted to tell her she had nothing to be afraid of—if he wanted to hurt her, she’d never know it was coming.
No. It was just time to play hardball.
“Takes one to know one, ma’am.”
With a few quick steps, Hunter reached the side of the room’s rumpled bed. Crouching down, he plucked up the curious item that had caught his eye a moment ago: a glossy black hair, long enough to reach a woman’s waist.
He held the hair where Fernanda could see it.
“Stanley had short red hair. Penelope has long blond hair. These rooms were all immaculate when we checked in, all the carpets vacuumed. So if this black hair wasn’t left by a previous guest and if it wasn’t left by the room’s occupants, that begs certain questions.”
Now it was Fernanda’s turn to be silent.
Hunter watched her. Fernanda was right: he wasn’t terribly interested in trying to solve Sarah Powers’s murder, but now he was curious. This single thread of hair looked poised to complicate the picture he’d had of the evening. To answer questions he hadn’t even thought to ask.
Hunter said to Fernanda, “There are only two people at this motel who have black hair this long. So tell me—was it you who came here to see Stanley tonight, or the dead woman in room four?”