Deadly Testimony (Safeguard #2)(36)

“Huh.” Lizzy drew in a deep breath through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. “Bubblegum.”

“Someone was chewing bubblegum?” He couldn’t keep the incredulity from his tone. The shooting had been yesterday, he seriously doubted any human’s olfactory senses were that good.

“No.” Lizzy returned to the plastic and took another sniff. “It’s the plastic. I didn’t notice the smell until I pulled it off. Vapor must’ve been caught under it with the pallets. Our shooter uses an e-cig.”

“Those are supposed to be very unobtrusive.” He still wasn’t sure he believed it could have lingered so long and fear was starting to twist his guts. Perhaps the person they were looking for had been here much more recently. Or they were coming back.

“Compared to cigarettes, e-cigs are a huge improvement.” She wrinkled her nose. “But the vapor scent can hang around longer than the marketing says it does, especially the sweeter flavored scents. Under the plastic, it’s not like it had any place to go anyway.”

Well, it was an explanation for the smell of bubblegum, however long a stretch it was for Kyle to have considered. “Is there anything else?”

Lizzy cast one more glance around the room. “Not here. No. I’d like to check the other floors just to be sure, but then we can leave.”

Relieved, he waited until she returned to him and walked with her back to the door to the stairwell. “Is there a chance the shooter will return?”

“Not likely.” She paused, pushing him to the side as she opened the door, still being careful. “Another thing snipers like to be sure to have when they choose a perch is a quick escape route. This one took the time to clean up after he or she left, so I’m guessing they didn’t plan to come back. Actually, the chances are very slim.”

She hesitated. Looked at him.

That didn’t mean they might not stumble across the person on a different floor. He wanted to raise the argument but perhaps it would be stating the obvious.

It was the first time he saw indecision in her expression as her lips pressed together and her eyes darted around the room and down the stairwell. Kyle pressed back, away from the door, as he waited for her to think her options through. They’d been quiet on the way up but not perfectly silent. Their conversation here had also been in low tones, not likely to be heard from more than a few feet away, but there was still a chance someone waiting could have heard something.

“Shit.” She muttered under her breath. “It’s still extremely unlikely. But we’ll clear each floor as we go down to be sure. Stay close, right behind me. If Murphy’s Law kicks in, we don’t want someone coming out from above us while we’re still going down the stairwell.”

“The elevator?” Security would notice but right now it would be so much faster than stairs, less exposed.

“Those can turn into death in a box.” She gave him a hard look and there were ghosts, memories in her dark brown eyes. “If he or she was here long enough to set up their perch and break it back down again this way, they’d have had the chance to set something up in the elevator to buy them time in case of pursuit closing in. It’d be a contingency plan.”

He considered that. “You would do it.”

“Yes.”

*

“All set, Mr. Yeun?” The security guard stood and smiled as they walked out into the empty lobby.

From this angle, Lizzy spotted three small monitors giving the old man a view of the lobby behind him and the emergency exits in the two stairwells. He hadn’t even been monitoring who was on each of the floors once he’d issued them badges.

Obviously the businesses in this building required some security, but not incredibly tight. It would be a long shot to try acquiring the footage from the day before to try to spot their shooter. Possibly worth it though. If she could get her hands on it.

Doing so meant bringing official scrutiny here. She couldn’t do that without also giving away their location. For at least the past twenty-four hours, she’d been in blackout with no communication to either the police or the federal marshals. Safeguard could probably guess she was alive and her whereabouts because she’d checked into the hotel but they’d wait for her to report in first.

This was one of those times when she wouldn’t feel a drop of shame in being paranoid. She wanted to get Kyle safely back to the hotel and maybe even moving to a different spot before contacting each of her contacts.

Doing all of that would delay getting the right people here to conduct further investigation and forensics.

“Everything all right, darling?” Kyle’s question prompted her to make a quick decision.

It was unorthodox, but hell, it’d answer another one of the dozens of questions she had about this entire situation.

She smiled at the security guard apologetically. “I know I took the stairs, but I was wondering, does this building have a fourth floor?”

The guard gave her a quizzical look. “Well, there are a bunch of floors above the floor you went to and that was the third floor. Four comes after three so I’d say yes, there’s a fourth floor.”

Duh. She popped out a giggle and pitched her voice for embarrassment. “Oh! I didn’t explain my question very well. I was reading up on Asian cultures, see. And you know how a lot of buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor? Well, some buildings don’t have a fourth floor either because it’s bad luck or something. It’s a superstition thing and those kinds of things are so interesting. So I check as often as I can to see if I spot a building like that. I totally forgot when I asked that we take the stairs up.”