Are you an insurance agent or something?” She looked Sam over and offered a flirtatious smile.
“No, I am not with insurance. I’m a detective with the Carolina Beach Police, and I was just assigned to the case after a few days’ leave. I suspect that the manager already told the other officers what he knew. I wanted to hear your version since you were on duty that night.”
Sam pulled out a business card and handed it to the woman. She took the card and reviewed its contents, then stuffed it into the pocket of her khaki skirt. Sam noticed that her shirt was the same color as her blue eyes, and the contrast from her tanned skin made her none too difficult to look at.
“I can only talk for a few minutes. I have a lot of work to do.” She turned her full attention to Sam.
“Let’s start with the car. The clerk next door said you heard a car in the parking lot outside before it crashed through the fence. How could you have heard it in here? It seems well-insulated.”
“I wasn’t actually inside the lobby,” Tracey offered. “I was taking a break and stepped out to smoke a cigarette when I heard a car screaming across the parking lot. The car came from the south side of the building, over there.” Tracey walked to the end of the desk and pointed around the corner of a hall and out to the ocean. Yellow tape was running across the doorjamb to two of the rooms.
“Screaming?” Sam repeated.
“Yes, well, more like a rumbling. The police asked me to imitate what I heard…RUTTata, RUTTata, RUTTata—oh, this is silly. Anyway, my manager saw it and said it was a Camaro like one he’d had when he was younger. He said that it was a collector’s dream…at least it was before it nosedived into the water.
“Then I saw it plow through the fence on the north side of the building, and the car jumped over what little dune there is there and ran into the base of what’s left of the pier. The city never replaced it after Hurricane Fran got it, but they didn’t pull out the pilings, either. By the time I climbed over the fence that the car knocked down, the car was halfway in the water. Like I told your buddies on the force, I ran back to the lobby, and as soon as I opened the door, I smelled smoke coming from the hallway. Alarms were going off everywhere, and people were running out of the place! It was a zoo! But the firemen got here in a hurry and put out the fire. We only had a little damage.”
“Any ideas of what started it?”
“More like ‘who’—the fireman who was in there first brought out a smoking file drawer and the computer’s hard drive before another fellow turned the hose on the room. They didn’t say, but I think somebody got in there and set the place on fire intentionally.”
“Do you know what happened to it?”
Tracey just smiled. “You sure don’t know too much about your case, Detective.”
“Well, I just wanted to get your ideas. You were on the desk that night, so I thought maybe you saw something no one else did. Did you happen to see what the fireman did with the file drawer?”
“No. He just took it out of here in a heavy blanket of some kind—I guess to put the fire out without destroying whatever it was that set it off.”
“What do you think was in there? I mean, what should have been in there—hotel records?” Sam leaned on the desk and smelled Tracey’s perfume, a sweet scent of lilacs like his grandmother used to wear.
Just then, the phone rang. Tracey politely excused herself and answered it, turning back to the reservations computer.
Sam slowly moved away from the desk and down the hall to the first of the two closed doors. The doorframe was charred at its base. The lingering smell of smoke mingled with the stench of burnt carpeting as Sam opened the door and squatted under the yellow police tape. His eyes teared up for a second as he entered the room that had been an office. Charred remnants of an older model computer monitor sat on a warped plastic desk, and a four-drawer file cabinet minus one drawer leaned on its melted frame. Sam pulled hard at one of the drawers, but he couldn’t get it open. He tried the second