Secure Location - By Beverly Long Page 0,40

stack of yellow legal pads, some red pens and settled the little girl on the leather couch. “Can you please watch her?” she asked Sanjoi.

“Sure. I got one her age at home.”

Cruz stepped aside, letting Meg go first. It was her office, after all. But at the last second, he grabbed her hand and hung on. Her fingers were cold.

“Meg. Detective Montoya.” Detective Myers greeted them.

It was a repeat of her apartment, sans food. The glass on all the pictures had been broken, books had been shoved off shelves, and the walls and curtains sprayed with paint. Her desk had held up, even though it appeared, based on the dents and nicks in the wood, likely caused by a hammer or a similar tool, that the intruder had tried valiantly to break open the locked drawers.

Everything that had been on the desk was now on the floor. Cruz couldn’t focus on that, however. He was too busy looking at the desk. He’d been prepared. After all, they’d been told there was blood. But he hadn’t been prepared for the extent. The entire surface of the large desk was covered. A thick mat that had dried, in rough waves and ridges.

The intruder had taken his hand in a circular motion, like he was waxing a car.

“Whose blood is that?” Meg asked, her voice subdued.

Myers shook his head. “Not even sure it’s human,” he added.

Cruz could feel Meg’s grip loosen and he wondered if she was going to faint. “You’ve seen enough,” he said. “Go sit with Jana.”

She shook her head. “I left here at shortly after five, just a little over two hours ago. There are cameras in the hallway. He made a mistake. This time we should be able to identify him.”

“Your security department has already pulled the tape.” Myers walked over to the television and built-in DVD player that hung on Meg’s wall. He pressed a button.

The good news was that the camera had been working. The clarity was actually pretty good, certainly better than the grainy image that some cameras captured. The bad news was that the guy had been smart.

He’d worn a jogging suit with the hood up. He’d had a towel draped around his neck and a backpack slung over one shoulder. Anybody walking past him wouldn’t have given him a second look—would have just assumed that he’d been working out in the hotel gym. He kept his head down the entire time, never giving the camera a look at his face.

The black-and-white tape supported the theory that today’s intruder was likely the same person who had pushed Meg toward the canal and then run up the stairs. He was the same height, weight and moved with the same fluid grace.

He opened the outer office door with a key.

When Cruz saw that, he spun around to face Sanjoi who was standing in the doorway. “How would he have gotten a key?”

The man shrugged his thin shoulders. “I don’t know. All the executives and their administrative assistants have a key to their own office suite and then there are a few master keys that can unlock any door. But we keep them on a tight string. None of our keys have come up missing lately.”

“That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have been copied.”

The man shook his head. “They’re all clearly marked as a Do Not Duplicate key.”

With the right amount of money, that wouldn’t have been too big a problem to get around. And Tom Looney in Maintenance and Troy Blakely in Security would probably have both had access to master keys. He doubted somebody from Accounts Payable would have had that same access but Mason Hawkins had something better perhaps—the Charlotte connection.

“You have your key?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay. We need to ask Charlotte that same question. What’s her address?”

“She lives with her mother. She’s a lovely lady. I don’t want her getting upset.”

He cocked his head.

“Oh, fine.” She grabbed a sheet of paper off Charlotte’s desk and scribbled something down. “Can you not tell her that I know about her and Hawkins? At least until I decide what I should do?”

“I’ll do my best.” He flipped a button and watched the tape again. When the intruder came out, the camera got a good view of the backpack. Cruz assumed that’s where he’d been carrying the blood. It was hard to tell if it looked lighter.

It looked...new. Yes, definitely new.

Cruz studied the intruder. In fact, everything the man had on looked new. His white athletic shoes didn’t have a