rang, causing him to jump and drop the map. He saw that it was Daniel and answered on the second ring. “Hey, did any of that help?”
“Not much,” Daniel replied. “The women must be local. The cars are all rentals for the day and will be returned by midnight tonight. Looks like they’re all pretty, rich girls, so it seems strange that they’ve rented cars. What kind of news have you got?”
Noah told him what he’d done and gave him the address of the place where Prissy was holed up. “Whoa! Wait a minute. Got some action going on. Don’t hang up.”
Prissy came out wearing a bright-red suit, cut pretty much like the others had been, with the short skirt, only her bra was ivory and matched her high-heeled shoes. She drove away in a little low-slung sports car. That seemed strange to Noah. Why would the other three use rental vehicles and Prissy drive something different?
“I’ll get back to you in a little while,” Noah told Daniel and ended the call. He flipped the map over into the back seat without folding it and drove off behind the sleek black Corvette.
He followed her all the way to Paris, Texas, where she got off the highway and nosed the fancy little car into a parking spot in front of a hotel, right beside the three gray vehicles that had driven away from the house in the first place. She took time to check her makeup in the rearview mirror before she got out, flipped all her luxurious blonde hair over her shoulder, and went inside.
“Probably some kind of woman thing, like a makeup party,” he grumbled as he nosed his truck into a spot at the back of the lot and walked up to the lobby.
“Can I help you?” the cheerful little lady behind the counter asked.
“My friend will be checking in pretty soon. I came from a distance and got here early. All right if I wait in the lobby?” he asked.
“No problem,” she answered. “There’s coffee and cookies.”
“Thank you.” He sat down in what looked like a comfortable chair, but it turned out to have a hard seat and a back so straight that he couldn’t find a good position no matter how he wiggled. He situated his phone on his lap so he could take pictures with a touch, picked up a magazine from the coffee table, and pretended to look at it.
After two hours the shift changed, and a guy took the girl’s place. Evidently, he thought that Noah was a guest because he simply nodded at him and started reading a book between phone calls.
At six o’clock on the button, the redhead got off the elevator and took a seat beside him. Within five minutes, the blonde and brunette joined her. Then Prissy came through the lobby, and they all three followed her outside. Each of them handed Prissy something that looked like an external hard drive, and they drove off in their cars.
Noah waited another five minutes, and then a man stepped out of the elevator, turned in his room key, and left. Over the next several minutes, three more did the same thing, and not a single surreptitious photo showed a smile. After what evidently had gone on upstairs, he’d have thought they’d be a lot happier. Once the last one had gone, Noah went straight to his truck and fired all the pictures off to Daniel.
“Looks like the client was right. His wife is having an affair, but not like he thought. Those are credit card machines that the women gave her. Priscilla has been very naughty. She’s running a little escort service on the side.”
“My! My!” Daniel chuckled.
“Are you going to turn all this over to her husband?” Noah asked.
“He’s my client and he’s paid for the information, so the answer is yes, I will. What he does with it is his business. He can cause a dustup with the guys or the girls, involve the police or whatever, but he gets all this. It’s not on us to judge or make decisions,” Daniel said. “That’s the dirty little side to this business. I did some digging while I waited on you to send more pictures. That house they left from used to belong to her grandmother and was left to her when the old gal died last year.”
“Then my job is done?” Noah asked.
“Not really, because we didn’t actually catch her in the act,” Daniel said. “She could make up