Beyond Limits (Tracers #8)(61)
“Never seen him.”
“What about this man?” She pulled out a second photo, this one of Rasheed. He gave it a glance.
“Nope.”
“You sure?” Torres asked. “Take a good look.”
The man stared at him stonily.
“They may have been driving a blue Chevy Cavalier or possibly a maroon Nissan Sentra.”
Elizabeth caught a flash of movement in the office behind the manager. A woman rolled back in a desk chair.
“A blue Cavalier?” she asked through the doorway.
“That’s right.”
Elizabeth’s nerves fluttered as the woman heaved herself out of her chair and waddled over. The manager glared at her as she picked up the picture, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“We had a blue Cavalier in last week.” She tucked a frizzy gray curl behind her ear. “I don’t recognize either of them, though.”
“It had a dinged back quarter-panel,” Elizabeth added.
“And big tires. I remember it.”
Torres shot a look at her. Score.
“You know the guest’s name?” Elizabeth asked.
“No,” the manager said, adamant now as he glowered at the woman beside him, presumably his wife.
“You don’t keep names of your guests?” Torres asked, heavy on the disbelief.
“The guests, not the cars,” the manager said.
“But it definitely wasn’t these guys.” The woman handed back the picture. “I’ve got a memory for faces.”
“You notice who was driving the car?” Torres asked her.
“No, but Jamie probably did. She was on nights last week, wasn’t she? So she might’ve checked them in.” She looked at her husband, who grunted a confirmation.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Torres said, “we’d like to see a list of your guests last week.” Instead of a warrant, he offered her one of his friendly smiles, which Elizabeth hoped would work, because she didn’t want to face any more red tape today.
“No trouble at all.”
Hallelujah. The day was looking up.
Fifteen minutes later, they stood before room 112. The motel was running at sixty-percent capacity, and the room hadn’t been occupied since the previous guest had left Friday. That was the good news. The bad news was that the guest had paid in cash and checked in under the name John Smith, a name that no doubt appeared frequently on the motel’s register. And the clerk who had checked him in had conveniently neglected to take a driver’s license number.
“Think she’ll remember them?” Torres asked as he opened the door with a keycard.
Elizabeth donned a pair of paper booties before following him inside. An evidence response team would be over soon to comb through the place, but until then, they wanted to have a quick look around.
“Depends,” Elizabeth said, scanning the room. Gray walls, faded bedspreads. She glanced up. Brown water stain on the ceiling that she really didn’t want to think about. “If they slipped her a fifty for a quickie, no-hassle check-in, then she probably remembers them.”
“Fifty? I’d think she’d remember for twenty.” Torres walked over to the nightstand and opened the drawer with a gloved hand. “Girl makes minimum wage.”
“The dancer at the Pussycat said these guys are big tippers.”
Elizabeth glanced at the channel guide propped on top of the TV alongside the remote control—which happened to be number one of the top five locations to look for fingerprints in a hotel room.
She sighed. “The crime-scene techs are going to hate this place.”
Hotel rooms, particularly those that weren’t cleaned well or often, yielded a mountain of forensic evidence. Fingerprints, hair, DNA—the sheer volume made it difficult to process.
Torres crouched down and looked under the bed. “I can already hear the bitching and moaning. This place hasn’t been vacuumed since 1985.”
Elizabeth peered into a trash can. Empty, but that didn’t mean the techs wouldn’t find something there. An alternative light source would probably reveal trace biological evidence.
She carefully opened the closet using only the tip of her gloved finger. A familiar scent hung in the air, and she tried to place it.
“You smell something?” she asked.
“Mildew.”
“Besides that.”
“Cheap-ass pi?a colada air freshener.”
“Besides that.” She stepped into the bathroom, home to the remaining four on the top five list for prints: faucet handle, shower handle, toilet flusher, and toilet seat, a high-probability area for male prints.
The bathroom had one of those one-piece shower stalls. This one had rust stains near the drain and was surrounded by chipping caulk where it didn’t quite meet the wall. Nothing had been left behind on the shelf, not even a microscopic bar of soap for the next Happy Trails guest.
Elizabeth stepped back into the sink area and glanced around. On the linoleum floor, she noticed a row of copper-colored droplets. She crouched down for a closer look. Then she stood and examined the sink again, where she spotted a copper-colored smear on the faucet handle.
A memory hit her, and she was inside a cramped apartment in Fairfax, Virginia, two years after her father died, during what her mother called “the lean years.” She could see her mother primping in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready for a date as Elizabeth looked on, brimming with resentment.