Something About You (FBI/US Attorney #1)(9)

“Didn’t you think the hooded T-shirt was a little odd?” Jack asked.

“I heard butt cheeks being slapped and walls that were banged so hard my teeth nearly rattled. Frankly, I’ve found this whole evening to be a little odd, Agent Pallas.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack could see Wilkins glance up at the ceiling while fighting off another smile.

“Are you certain about the man’s height?” Jack continued.

Cameron paused, thinking. “Yes.”

“How about his weight?”

She sighed. “I’m really bad at guessing that kind of thing.”

“Make an effort. Pretend this is something important.”

Another glare.

Cameron glanced over at Wilkins. “How much do you weigh?”

“Wait—how come Jack doesn’t have to answer that?”

“The man I saw seems closer to your build.”

“Oh, so he’s a smaller guy, then?” Jack suggested helpfully.

Wilkins turned around. “A smaller guy? I’m an inch above the national average. Besides, I’m spry.”

“Let’s try to narrow this down,” Jack regrouped. “I weigh one-eighty-five, Agent Wilkins is about one-sixty. Given that, where would you say this guy falls?”

She looked between the two men, considering this. “About one-seventy.”

Jack and Wilkins exchanged looks.

“What?” Cameron asked. “What does that tell you?”

“So just to make sure we’re clear on this, the man you saw leave the room right before security arrived was about five-eleven or six feet tall, and around one hundred and seventy pounds. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” she agreed. “And I see that you’ve gotten whatever information it is you wanted out of me. So I would like some information in return.” She looked to Wilkins first, who looked to Jack.

After debating a moment, he leaned against the wall. “Okay. Here’s what I can tell you.”

“AND JUST SO we’re clear: everything I’m about to tell you needs to be kept confidential,” Jack told her. “In fact, if you weren’t with the U.S. attorney’s office, I wouldn’t be telling you anything.”

Cameron got the message: he didn’t want to tell her jack-shit, but his boss had ordered him to share information as a professional courtesy.

“Crystal clear, Agent Pallas,” she said.

“You’ve obviously put a few things together, so I’ll speed through the preliminaries,” Jack began. “You called hotel security, they found the dead woman next door, so they called the paramedics and the police. CPD arrived at the scene, saw there were signs of a struggle, and began their investigation.”

“What signs of a struggle?” Cameron asked.

“To save time, you should assume going forward that anything I don’t tell you is a deliberate decision on my part.”

Cameron looked up at the ceiling, biting her tongue. Of all the murder and she-had-no-friggin’-clue-what-else-but-something-that-apparently-involved-the-FBI crime scenes in all the hotels in all of Chicago, Jack Pallas had to walk into this one.

“While CPD was conducting their sweep of the room, they stumbled onto something hidden behind the television across from the bed. A video camera.”

“Do you have the murder on tape?” Cameron asked. If only all crimes came to prosecutors so neatly wrapped up.

Jack shook his head. “No. What’s on the tape is the stuff that took place before the murder.”

“Before the murder?” Cameron thought about the raucous sex noises she’d heard through the wall. “That must be quite a tape.”

“It is,” Jack agreed. “Especially since the man on the tape is a married U.S. senator.”

Cameron’s eyes widened. She had not expected that. She asked the obvious next question. “Which senator?”

Agent Wilkins pulled a photograph out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to Cameron.

She glanced at the photograph, then back at Jack. “This is Senator Hodges.”

“So you recognize him?”

“Of course I recognize him,” Cameron said. Bill Hodges had represented the state of Illinois in the U.S. Senate for over twenty-five years. And lately she’d seen his face in the news more than usual—he had just been appointed the chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Cameron thought back to the redheaded woman she had seen on the paramedics’ gurney. “That wasn’t the senator’s wife in room 1308, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jack said.

“Who was she?”

“Let’s just say that Senator Hodges was paying to have a lot more than his hardwood floors done last night.”

Nice. “A prostitute?”

“I think women at her level generally prefer to call themselves ‘escorts.’ ”

“How do you know this already?”

“We have the escort service’s records. The senator had been seeing her regularly for almost a year now.”

Cameron got up and paced before the bed, working the scenario like a new case she’d been handed. “So what’s with the camera? Don’t tell me the senator was stupid enough to think he could keep a sex tape secret.” She stopped, thinking quickly. “No . . . of course. Blackmail. That’s why CPD called you guys.”