Chapter 32
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West of Houston
The motel sat back off the frontage road behind a gravel lot, one strip of rooms under a sagging metal roof, the kind of place that took cash and asked nothing. Oakley’s burner phone signal had died before they left Black Haven. They drove fast anyway, hoping Oakley was still here and still alive.
Scarlett came off the interstate and let the rental settle as she rolled past the office. She checked the doors down the row. Twelve stood open a hand’s width, the room was dark through the gap. A door standing open on a dark room could only mean trouble.
She pulled the rental into a parking space two rooms away. Patterson had his weapon out before she stopped.
They slipped out of the vehicle and came up the walk along the wall, away from the open door. Patterson went in first and to the side, fast and low, and she came in behind him and put her back to the wall while her eyes adjusted. The room was unoccupied.
When she closed the door and Patterson flipped the light on, she saw it had been vacant for a while.
The covers were dragged half off the bed. A chair was tipped onto its side near the window. On the nightstand a paper cup of gas-station coffee had long gone cold, and beside it a second empty cup.
Patterson cleared the bathroom and came back shaking his head. “Nobody here. But there’s a razor, and a man’s whiskers in the sink.”
The phone was on the floor against the baseboard where the carpet met the wall.
Scarlett recognized the cheap burner she’d seen in Oakley’s backpack at the safe house.
The back was off and the battery was out, lying next to it, and the SIM had been snapped in two.
Somebody had taken it apart in a hurry and made sure it was dead not more than two hours ago, according to the signals Gaspar tracked.
“Gaspar said the phone had been pinging from here for quite a while. Then it stopped abruptly.” Scarlett gloved up, crouched over the phone, and grabbed it. “Looks like there’s blood on it, too.”
She dropped the phone parts into a plastic bag she pulled from her pocket.
Patterson was looking at the room, as if he could see what had really happened here. “There was a fight.”
“Looks that way.” Scarlett saw the toppled chair and the lamp cord pulled loose. A long scuff marked the carpet where a heel had dug in and dragged. And on the edge of the dresser, she noticed a low, dark smear that began to dry and go tacky at the edges.
“Looks like blood.” Patterson bent down on one knee in front of the smear. He leaned closer to examine it, the floor under it, and the wall close by.
“There’s a fair amount of it,” he said, pointing to several drops along the dresser and a spot of wall near the door. “Somebody bled here and somebody bled there.”
“Can you get a sample of it?” Scarlett asked.
He glanced around the room until he spied a wooden coffee stir stick. He used one end to scrape the blood from the dresser and the other end to scrape the floor.
“Can you add this stick to your baggie?” he asked, dropping it into the bag when Scarlett held it open. “You got a way to do a quick DNA test on these samples back at the office, right?”
“Yeah. Meanwhile, see those two cups?” Scarlett said, pointing to the bedside table near the house phone. “She had somebody with her.”
Patterson picked up both cups and tossed them into the plastic laundry bag. “We’ll take these with us, too. Might get some usable prints off of them and possibly a hit or two in the databases.”
“Let’s go check with the desk clerk. He might know something useful,” Scarlett said on her way out the door.
The clerk was a heavy man on a stool behind the counter with a small television going. He didn’t want any trouble, and he said so before Scarlett asked a single question.
She put a folded bill on the counter under two fingers and left it there, and the man’s manner changed by a degree.
She brought up the photo she’d taken of Oakley at the safe house and turned the phone so he could see it. “Was this woman using room twelve?”
He looked at it longer than he needed to before he glanced at Scarlett. “Yeah. That’s her. Mary Jones, she said.”
“Was she alone?”
“There was a dude with her. Didn’t check in, didn’t say two words. Maybe he was married or something. Not my business.” He shrugged. “People come here, they got reasons.”
“What did he look like?” Scarlett asked.
“Ordinary. I couldn’t pick him out in a crowd if you paid me.” Which was its own kind of answer and Scarlett let it pass.
“Anybody else come around asking about her?” Patterson asked.
The clerk’s gaze flicked to the television and back.
“Different dude. Asked me which room she was using. I told him we don’t give that out.” He sounded proud of it. “Looked at me a second and went on out. Few minutes later I heard a car start and noticed he was leaving.”
“Describe him,” Scarlett said.
“Looked like a hundred dudes you’d see around here. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes. Nothing you’d remember.” The clerk’s hand drifted up toward his own forearm. “Except he had something wrapped here. A bandage, under the sleeve. That I noticed.”
“Which arm?” Patterson said.
The clerk cocked his head to think about it. “Not sure. It was wrapped tight, though. I noticed because his sleeve sat funny over it.”
Outside in the lot, away from the office, Patterson stopped and put his hand flat on the roof of the car and stood there a moment.
“Dark clothes and a wrapped arm,” Patterson said. “The guy I saw at the safe house before the bomb exploded wore dark clothes. And whoever blew up the house had every reason to come out of it hurt.” He looked at Scarlett over the roof. “Could be our man.”
“Gaspar found Oakley by tracking the burner,” Scarlett said. “These people can run the same trace, and Gaspar said they probably had her number from the start. They followed the signal here, same as we did. That’s how they found her.”
She looked back at room twelve.
“If it’s the same people who bombed the safe house and the ones hunting Nancy Keane, then they tracked Oakley’s phone to this room and came for her.” The certainty settled as if she could prove it. Which she couldn’t. Not yet. “We have to reach her before they do. I’ll be right back.”
She went back into the room alone, just to confirm. The house phone was an old beige unit with a cord, probably twenty years old or more. Scarlett looked at it and then at the spot where she’d found the broken burner on the floor and worked it out.
Oakley’s burner phone was dead. She’d disabled it herself or someone else had. Either way, she had reached for the phone that still worked to make a call.
Scarlett lifted the handset with a tissue and pressed the button for the front desk. The clerk picked up. She’d expected to have to go back and give him another hundred. Maybe not.
“Listen, did Mary Jones make any calls from the house phone while she was here?” she asked.
“Let me check,” he replied, probably hoping to get rid of her quickly and return to whatever he normally did with his evenings. “Yeah. Looks like she called El Paso a couple of times.”
“Give me the number,” Scarlett said, as if she had the right to it. Before he had time to think it through, he read the number off the screen. “Thanks.”
Scarlett hung up. She dialed the number.
“Beto’s. This is Beto speaking,” he said in the voice she recognized.
Scarlett hung up and walked out to the rental. Patterson was already in the passenger seat with the engine running. Scarlett slid into the driver’s seat.
“She called Beto. She’s running for El Paso.” She pulled out of the lot and drove toward the interstate.
“Long way to run with killers chasing her,” Patterson said.
Scarlett merged onto the Interstate, gaining speed as they left the city behind. “He found her once. He’ll find her again. We will, too.”