checked in, and we’re waiting for him to come in.”
“Do we know if there was anyone staying in the rooms on either side of this one?”
“There was a couple next door. I spoke with them earlier, and neither of them heard or saw anything,” he says, and I follow him out to the hall and slip off the covers on my shoes and my gloves, dropping them in the trash bin next to the door.
“Cal, Herb, we got something on video,” Steve, one of the uniformed officers, says as he comes down the hall toward us.
“We’re coming,” Herb calls back, and Steve turns around as we follow him to the elevator and get in to head down to the lobby.
“What do we got?” I ask, studying the grainy image on the TV monitor in the manager’s office.
“The picture is shit, but it’s obviously a woman getting on the elevator a little after midnight, and we see her again, walking through the lobby and out to the parking lot. We lose her then, but a silver Mustang is visible in one clip a few minutes later.”
“Please tell me we got a plate number?”
“No plate, but watch this,” he says, pressing play on the video, and it shows the inside of the empty elevator. The door opens, and a woman steps on and looks directly at the camera in the corner.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I hiss, staring at the black-and-white image of Sandy Burton, the same woman who came to speak with me after Chris Davis’s murder.
“Doesn’t Sandy drive a silver Mustang?” Herb asks, and I look over my shoulder at him. “And I’ll have to check with Rachel, but I’m pretty sure she set up a book club, because she’s big into romance novels.”
I look back at the screen and shake my head, finding it hard to believe that she would have it in her to commit murder, especially after seeing the violence involved in Paul’s death. “We need to bring her in for questioning.”
“Let’s hit the road and track her down. I know she works out of her house. If we’re lucky, she’ll be there,” Herb says. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and leaves the room.
“Steve, can you email me those clips?”
“Yeah, man, I’ll send them now.”
“Thanks.” I pat his shoulder.
I meet Herb at his SUV and get in on the passenger side. “Rachel confirmed that Sandy drives a Mustang and is a huge fan of romance books. She even said she carries a paperback with her wherever she goes, which she said is weird, because everyone else she knows uses e-readers, unless they’re going to the beach or something.”
“Do you think she did this?”
“I don’t know, but she was there,” he says as he backs out and drives through the hotel lot toward the exit.
“She was, but what did she use as a weapon? We know Paul was stabbed multiple times, and the murder weapon wasn’t left at the scene. I don’t know of any object that’s normally left in a hotel room for a guest that could be used as a weapon, which means if she did this, she had to have had it on her.”
“Do you think she planned it?”
“I’m not sure.” I run my fingers through my hair, my mind spinning.
“Are you thinking what I am about her coming in and asking about what happened to Chris?”
“That she was fishing to see if we had any leads?”
“Yeah,” he says as he turns onto the highway that leads to the area in town where Sandy lives.
“If she killed Paul and Chris, what would her motive be?”
“I don’t know. I guess that’s a question only she could answer. Do you know who Paul was having an affair with?”
“His wife said it was someone from their town. That said, he traveled a lot for work, so who knows if he had multiple affairs that she didn’t know about.”
“Idiot.”
“Yeah,” he agrees with a shake of his head.
We drive the rest of the way in silence. I’m sure, like me, he’s trying to fit the puzzle pieces together, even the ones that don’t fit so easily. When we pull up in front of Sandy’s house, the first thing I notice is her Mustang in the driveway, the same year and model from the surveillance video.
“How do you want to play this?” I ask as we park.
“This is just routine questioning. She was seen on video, and we want her to come in to find out if