Sunset Beach(47)

“I love a company that refers to employees as ‘team members,’” Drue said, following the walkway toward the rear of the building. When Corey didn’t reply, she turned to see him still standing in front of the guest wing.

“Come on,” she called. “Let’s check it out.”

“Is that wise?” he asked, joining her reluctantly.

“If one of the ‘team members’ comes along, they’re not going to shoot us,” Drue said impatiently. “We’ll say we got lost. It’s not like it’s the hotel vault we’re trying to break into. It’s only a laundry room.”

“I bet they have some really high-thread-count sheets and towels here, though. Probably Egyptian cotton,” Corey said.

As they progressed around the building the impressive landscaping gave way to cracked concrete and weedy-looking pine straw. The sidewalk ended abruptly in front of a set of solid-looking steel doors with a key card reader.

“Damn it,” Drue fumed. She looked up at the security camera pointed toward them, and pivoted quickly in the opposite direction with Corey following closely this time. A few yards away, she stopped and peered around the branches of a bedraggled-looking hibiscus. The grass beneath it was beaten down and littered with cigarette butts.

“Looks like we found the team’s smoking lounge,” she told Corey.

“But did you find any clues to who could have killed the girl?” he asked.

Her shoulders slumped. “No. If I could just get inside…”

“Forget it,” he advised. “I want to buy my fiancée a drink at the tiki bar.”





21


“Hi, handsome. What’ll you have?” The bartender batted her eyelashes at Corey and completely ignored Drue.

“Just an unsweet iced tea,” Corey said.

“Got it.” She turned to go.

“And I’ll have a margarita, no salt,” Drue called after her.

She studied Corey. “So you really don’t drink at all?”

“No. I figured out not long ago that I make poor choices when I do, so now I don’t.”

“Um, yeah,” she muttered. “Poor choices. Big-time.”

The server brought their drinks and set a bowl of popcorn in front of them. Drue noticed that she had a lanyard around her neck with a key card dangling from it.

“That’s what I need, damn it,” she whispered to Corey.

“What? Fake eyelashes?”

“No,” she said, nodding at the server, who was now measuring rum into a blender. “One of those lanyards. With the keys to the kingdom.”

The bartender scooped ice into the blender and added chunks of pineapple. As she did so, Drue noticed a server at the far end of the bar move behind the first woman. “Okay, bye,” their bartender said. “Are you working tomorrow?”

“No,” the other woman said. “I’m off ’til Tuesday.” She lifted a hatch in the bar top, and just before exiting, hung her own lanyard on a nearby peg.

“I need to get my hands on that key card,” Drue said.

Corey gave her the side-eye. “And just how do you propose to get it?”

She crammed a handful of popcorn in her mouth and eyed the lanyard, so temptingly near but just out of arm’s reach.

“Steal it.”

He pushed his bar stool away and stared at her in mock horror. “Who are you?”

“Just a girl with a shady past,” Drue said. “But don’t worry, I haven’t stolen anything in years and years.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “The thrill is gone, I guess. My shrink, at the time, said I was only doing it to get my father’s attention. And to further alienate my stepmother.”

Corey drained half his iced-tea glass. He propped his elbow on the bar and rested his chin on his knuckles. “And was his theory correct?”

“She, not he. Yeah, she was partly right.”

“Dare I ask what kinds of things you stole?”

Drue thought back. “Let’s see. There was my stepbrother’s weed. Money out of my dad’s wallet. My stepmother’s pearl earrings. Her sterling silver Tiffany cigarette lighter. And her cigarettes. My dad’s booze. And my stepmother’s birth control pills. Also her sleeping pills. But not all at the same time. Sometime I’d go weeks and months without stealing anything.”

Corey gave an uneasy chuckle. “If you had authority issues I get why you’d steal liquor and drugs and money and jewelry. But why take the poor woman’s birth control?”

“The therapist said I was trying to gaslight her. Make her think she was losing her mind. Which I one hundred percent was doing. Like, the jewelry, after she’d searched the house and my dad yelled at her for losing it, I’d put it back, weeks later.”

He shuddered. “Jesus. What a horrible, demented kid you must have been.”

“Agreed,” Drue said. “But Joan and her kids treated me much, much worse. They made my life a living hell, so I lashed out. In the end, she won. And I lost.”

The bartender came by with a pitcher of iced tea and refilled Corey’s empty glass. “How’s my margarita coming?” Drue asked.

“Oh yeah. I’ll get right on that,” the bartender said.