Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(83)
After an hour I didn’t feel like I knew anything more about what I was searching for. Silas Johnson’s work seemed exactly what his wife had described it as: boring corporate law. The files could have been dealing with any corporation. Nothing stood out. No mention of In Retentis or strange photographs or murdered employees or criminal investigations. Nothing secretive or villainous. In fact, the most scandalous thing I’d found all night were the Penthouse magazines. I’d have to figure out a different angle. Silas Johnson was a terrible husband, but as a lawyer he seemed boring, capable, and nothing more.
Putting the rubber bands back around the three folders I stopped, interested. There was a fourth folder in the stack. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was completely empty. A plain olive-green filing folder containing absolutely nothing. The kind of folder that sold at Staples for about seventy cents. Just a basic organizational vessel to put papers in.
Or take papers out of.
Maybe this was nothing. Or maybe there had been other papers inside it. Papers that Silas Johnson didn’t trust to a locked desk in a locked office in a locked building. Papers that weren’t boring corporate law filed routinely for any company in the country. Papers that the lawyer would want to keep extremely close. I relocked the drawers and made sure everything was exactly how I had found it. When I was done, the only difference from when I walked in was the now-empty trash can, loaded with a new trash bag and ready for the next day.
The cleaners had long left. On to the next building, the next stop of their long night. I found the cardboard prop box where I had left it in the stairwell and headed down the stairs in the red glow of the emergency lights.
Thinking about the next step.
40
The Kingston Hotel was a block off Union Square, on Geary Street. It had a grandiose Art Deco feel. Not the sleek, minimalist luxury of newer hotels, but a more ornate style out of a Dreiser or Fitzgerald story. The lobby floor was white and black marble like a chessboard. Oil paintings in gold frames hung on the walls below crystal chandeliers. It was exactly the type of hotel that I would have imagined a wealthy, middle-aged lawyer would go to if kicked out of his apartment.
I didn’t know much about Silas Johnson, but I knew that he liked women and he liked a drink. Those facts counted for something. So I wasn’t surprised to find that he seemed to be a regular at the hotel bar. The hotel lobby offered a clear view of the bar. Basic architectural strategy: the more people that could see a place, the more likely they’d be to go in. The lobby was full of couches and armchairs. Easy enough to sit unobtrusively and watch.
The first night the lawyer unsuccessfully hit on a pretty Indian woman about my age who sat at the bar with a laptop and a glass of white wine. There was an unwritten rule that people on laptops weren’t generally around to be picked up. They were there to work. To concentrate. Silas Johnson either didn’t know about this rule, or didn’t care. Maybe he took it as a challenge. I watched as he sent a glass of champagne her way, via the barman.
The woman drank the champagne but didn’t seem much interested in the person behind it. The lawyer’s face showed irritation. Silas Johnson clearly liked women who thanked him after he sent them unsolicited bubbles. A few minutes went by. I watched him lean over and say something to her. Her face froze up in the kind of polite smile that women all over the world are used to giving in those situations. I noticed the sparkle of a diamond on her left hand. Maybe the lawyer had noticed it, too. Maybe he hadn’t. Even the best-intentioned men seemed to notice those details imperfectly. And Silas Johnson didn’t seem like the world’s best-intentioned man.
He also didn’t seem like the kind of man to take a hint. He finished the Manhattan he was drinking, ordered another, said something else, and patted the empty bar chair next to him. Like he was calling a dog to sit. This time there was annoyance behind her smile as she shook her head. A moment later the Indian woman got up and carried her laptop and drink to the far end of the bar.
That night Silas Johnson went to his room alone.
The next night he was back in the same spot. The bar was a bit more crowded on the second night. The lawyer’s gaze flicked around the room to different women but he didn’t talk to anyone. He checked his watch several times. By the time he’d worked his way through his first Manhattan, a tall blond woman in a tight black dress walked in. She must have been thirty years younger than the lawyer. She had red nails and copious eye shadow and a pair of stiletto heels that looked high enough to let her wade right across the Pacific without getting her hair wet. The lawyer stood, smiling. The woman walked over and he kissed her on the cheek. She sat next to him.
He drank a second Manhattan while she put down three vodka sodas, one after the other. I couldn’t blame her. In her position, I would have had six. He whispered something in the woman’s ear and they got up with their drinks.
I watched him sign for the tab.
I watched the two of them leave the bar and head for the elevators.
That was the second night.
The third night he talked to me.
Nothing about the situation was ideal. I liked to spend at least a week following someone before any contact. A night or two wasn’t nearly enough to learn someone’s habits. I preferred to watch someone interacting with the people in his life, learn his routine. I didn’t have the luxury of time, though. It was the twenty-ninth of October and I still had no real idea of what was going to happen on November 1. People will die. The words had been looping around in my mind until I felt like I was starting to go crazy. I knew increasingly how Karen Li must have felt in her last weeks. Too much uncertainty, too much stress. Care4 had taken over my mind. Whatever Silas Johnson had or knew, I couldn’t wait any longer to find out. Even watching him for two nights had been pushing it. I had to act.