Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(87)

But even four digits meant ten thousand possible combinations.

That was a lot. Far too many to try one by one.

I spent the first few minutes running through all the basic combinations that people used when they were rushed or complacent. A handful of combinations covered a big chunk of the PINs and passcodes people chose. I began with the most obvious numbers. 0000 and 0101 and 1010 and 1111 and 9999 and 1234 and 4321.

None worked.

Next was more common stuff. 2222, 3333, all the way to 8888. I went through sequential, easy-to-remember combinations: 2345, 3456, 4567, 5678, 6789, 7890. Then back down: 0987, 9876. Trying any sequence that was easier to remember than a random group of four numbers.

Each time, just a blinking red light marking failure. If Silas Johnson had gone with a random combination, I was missing it.

The next stage was more personal. I pulled his driver’s license from his wallet and tried his birthday, backward and forward. 6/2/1956 translated to 6256 or 6591. Nothing. His street address was 1004 and I tried that, backward and forward and mixed up. I tried digits off his credit card numbers and his medical record number from his health insurance and even combinations based on the phone numbers in his wallet. I didn’t know his wedding date but that didn’t matter. Soon-to-be divorced philanderers who had been kicked out of their apartments weren’t thinking about their wedding day.

Nothing worked. I checked the time. Over two hours had passed.

I had to go.

The safe was probably empty, I told myself. Silas Johnson was a slob. His stuff was all over the room. He didn’t seem like the type to take elaborate security precautions. If he had anything, it must be in the car.

The room door closed behind me. I headed down the hallway.

At the elevator bank I pushed the Down button and waited, picturing the car I was looking for. This hotel probably had a new Mercedes in every other parking spot. Silas’s car had been silver, four doors. I remembered the curved, taut lines of the roof and distinctive five-spoke rims. There had been a vanity plate. I thought back, trying to remember it. Vanity plates were easy to recall. Too easy. I didn’t understand why people paid to have them. I would have paid not to. LAW something. Numbers after the letters. LAW1981.

1981. According to his driver’s license, Silas Johnson had been born in 1956. Assuming he graduated college at twenty-two, in 1978, and gone straight on to law school, he would have graduated and sat for the bar in 1981. Silas Johnson was many things, but he didn’t seem like the type to fail the bar. In which case, by any measure—whether graduating law school, taking, or passing the bar—Silas Johnson had become a lawyer in 1981.

1981.

Four digits.

The elevator door opened.

I didn’t move.

I turned around and headed back the way I’d come, hearing the elevator door close behind me. Back in the suite, I checked on Silas. He was sprawled on the bed, snoring with tremendous volume, mouth open. I went back to the safe and punched in the four digits.

1981.

This time the light flashed green.

I opened the safe. The first thing I saw was a stack of hundred-dollar bills. To pay the call girls, no doubt. Under the money was a white stack of eight-by-eleven papers. Papers that would fit perfectly into an olive-green document folder. The top paper bore two words.

IN RETENTIS.

I’d only read through the first couple of pages when I stopped and carried the pages to the kitchen counter. I turned up the overhead lights as bright as they’d go, took my camera, and started photographing close-up shots of the documents. There were over a hundred pages. So I took over a hundred pictures. Along the way, I started to understand why even a sloppy, drunken lawyer was so careful with security and concealment. Why the papers weren’t sitting around his office or briefcase with everything else. I started to understand why Karen Li had been so frightened, and why she had gone through such elaborate pains to hide the photographs I had found.

I started to understand more about those photographs.

By the time I finished, I knew a lot more about Care4, and In Retentis, and what was going to happen on November 1. People will die. That’s what Karen Li had said. She had been right. People would die.

But I had been completely wrong about who.

I had barely two days.



* * *



It was past two in the morning when I finished. I was even more careful to put everything back as I’d found it now. Because I knew more. I closed and locked the safe, resetting the code to the same four digits, 1981. Silas Johnson was still snoring in his king bed. I looked at him. The last few days hadn’t endeared him to me, but I hadn’t considered him much more than a mild form of dirtbag. My opinion had changed. With what I now knew, I would have liked to do all kinds of things to the man snoring in front of me.

I couldn’t touch him, though. Silas Johnson needed to wake up without suspicion. Which meant that he’d avoid what he deserved. Things weren’t always fair.

I pulled off the rest of his clothes and tossed them at various places on the floor. As though they’d been passionately stripped and strewn. The owner of the passionately stripped clothes lay on his back, naked and snoring. This was the second time I’d seen him naked. I could do without a third. I took one of the condoms from his wallet, opened it, and threw the empty wrapper conspicuously on the floor near the bed. The condom itself I flushed down the toilet. I was going to open the other as well for good measure but I held off. No need to further swell his ego. I put his wallet and car keys and room key back in his pants pockets and jotted a line onto the hotel stationery on the nightstand.