Sunset Beach(109)

“Pause it again here, Rae,” Drue added, as the young housekeeper stopped in front of the hotel room door.

“Now watch, she takes the lanyard with her key card and pulls it over her head. She takes the cap off to do that, and you get a good look at Jazmin’s face. Start it again, please, Rae.”

As the three watched, the housekeeper did just that. Her chin was sharp and pointed, with the same small cleft that Aliyah had, and her face sagged with fatigue.

“See?” Drue said. “That’s Jazmin Mayes. No doubt about it, right?”

“Yeah, that’s her. Nobody has claimed otherwise,” Rae said.

There was a short gap in the video, then the hotel room door opened and the cleaning cart was pushed from the room.

Brice leaned forward to read the time stamp at the bottom of the video. “There’s nearly a two-and-a-half-hour gap. What’s up with that?”

“The security cameras in the hotel are motion activated,” Rae said. “It was apparently a slow night in that wing of the hotel that night.”

“Which is another interesting point,” Drue said. “There was a Shriner convention going on in the hotel. People everywhere. Why not in that hallway at that time of night?”

She glanced down at the video. “Pause it here, okay?”

Drue tapped the figure of the housekeeper, suspended in time. “Notice anything about Jazmin?”

“Not really,” Brice said. “But from the camera angle, you can only see the back of her head.”

Rae leaned forward to get a better look. “Something’s different about the hat, right?”

“Bingo.” Drue tapped the screen again. “Look how high that cap is sitting up on her head.”

“Looks like the cap shrunk,” Brice agreed.

“Okay, start the video again,” Drue said.

As they watched the video, the housekeeper pushed the cart down the hallway at a breakneck speed.

“Must have chugged a couple of Red Bulls while she was inside that room,” Hernandez said. “Or maybe that’s not Jazmin anymore. Right?”

Brice shook his head. “What? You’re saying it’s somebody else? Who? And how did they get in that room?”

Drue exchanged a knowing look with the detective.

“Your daughter is saying that it’s not Jazmin pushing that cart. It’s Neesa Vincent. Remember all those dreads and braids she was wearing? She had to shove ’em up under that cap so she’d look like Jazmin, at least to the security cameras. And she had to keep moving, and keep her head down.”

“That’s why I had to get a look at that room tonight,” Drue explained. “I watched that video backwards and forwards, and finally I figured it out. Jazmin went in that room at 11:05. But she never came out. Because somebody was waiting for her. Somebody who chose that particular room because it was in the oldest, most isolated part of the hotel, with the crappiest rooms that rarely got rented out.”

“Byars?” Hernandez said.

“But how did he get in?” Brice asked. “Unless somebody tampered with that video?”

“I kept wondering if it had been tampered with, but it’s digital,” Drue pointed out. “Everything is time-and date-stamped.”

“If it was Byars, he got in the room the same way you did, right?” Hernandez asked.

“Through the sliding-glass doors,” Drue said, nodding excitedly. “That room’s not exactly ground-floor, as I’d hoped, but even somebody with a blown-out knee like me didn’t have much trouble climbing up onto the balcony.”

“There were no video cameras on the back of that building,” Hernandez said. “We checked.”

“There are now, though,” Drue said dryly. “That’s how Shelnutt’s security guard saw me climbing up.”

“After Jazmin was killed, Gulf Vista’s owners took a look at the hotel’s security lapses and beefed up everything,” Brice said, looking at his daughter. “If I’d known you were going over there tonight I could have saved you from getting arrested.”

“No, you would have stopped me from going altogether,” Drue said. “But that’s not the point, Dad.”

“So Byars decides to deal with Jazmin that night, after she gets off shift,” Hernandez said slowly. “But not in his office, because that’s too public. He uses a room he’s probably used before for that kind of thing.”

“He was head of housekeeping, so he had plenty of access to stepladders or whatever else he needed,” Drue agreed. “And if anybody stopped to ask what he was doing, he could say he was changing a lightbulb or something like that.”

Hernandez took a sip of coffee, made a face and pushed it away. “I don’t think he planned on killing Jazmin. It was an impulse. Maybe he just intended to have sex with her. She resisted, which either pissed him off or turned him on, or both.”

“If I remember correctly,” Brice said quietly, “the medical examiner said Jazmin had been beaten and strangled.”

“I think she tried to fight him off, and maybe he bashed her with something in the room. Like a lamp or something,” Hernandez said. “The medical examiner said she was choked with a ligature. Maybe an electrical cord.”

An image of the young mother flashed in Drue’s mind, of Jazmin, alone and fighting for her life in that shabby hotel room. She felt queasy.