his return to New York, he passed away.”
A flicker of sympathy in the clerk’s eyes. That was good. Drake forged ahead.
“This is her goodbye to him, understand? And she’s going to have it. I’m sure most of the damage in the room has been cleaned up. Are the windows broken?”
“No, but I—”
“Everything else is cosmetic. Send a maid up there to put fresh sheets on the bed and give her the damn key to 213. You can charge us twice the normal rate. Call it a surcharge, whatever you want. But she’s going to have that room before the next hour expires or things are going to get really messy.”
7
It was closer to twenty minutes when they escorted Jada to Room 213. The maid had come and gone. There were clean sheets on the bed and fresh toiletries in the bathroom, but the entertainment center had a gaping hole where the television ought to have been and the lid was missing from the toilet tank. The in-room safe had been forced open and not yet replaced. A single piece of art—a piece of papyrus covered with a primitive painting of a hunting scene—hung from the wall. Two other hooks were conspicuously bare, with squares of paint around them that didn’t match the rest of the walls, which had faded in the sunlight. Other art obviously had hung there, keeping the paint from being bleached by the sun.
“I’ve stayed in worse,” Jada said, tossing her duffel onto the bed and then flopping beside it. She seemed to have forgotten the gun she carried, but Drake thought it was a bad time to remind her.
Sully made a circuit of the room while Drake went straight to the windows. The room had a water view, and he could still see the go-fast boats out there, drifting. He opened the French doors and stepped onto the small balcony, searching the railings and beneath the chairs and the little round table for anything Luka might have left behind.
When he reentered the room, Jada was by the door, fiddling with the knob that controlled the old ceiling fan. It began to rotate slowly, making him realize just how hot it was in the room. He went to the small air-conditioning unit in the corner and found that it was broken. More accurately, someone had taken it apart and it hadn’t been properly put back together again.
“Whoever ransacked the place, they did a job on the AC. It’s screwed. You’re going to be sweating tonight,” he told Jada.
“The fan will help,” she said. “I’ll open the windows. With a breeze off the water, it’ll be fine once the sun goes down.”
Sully stood back with his hands on his hips, staring at the bureau. He had pulled the drawers out and set them on the floor, working much more neatly than whoever had broken in and searched the room before they arrived.
“Get the bed, will you?” Sully asked.
Drake dropped to his knees, searching underneath, then stood and stripped the fresh bedclothes, checking under the mattress. They both knew there was no point to the search. If there had been anything here, whoever had ransacked the place would have found it already. But he looked just the same, checking the seams of the mattress to see that nothing had been cut and re-sewn. If they were going to look, they might as well be thorough.
While Drake went over the bed, Sully moved the bureau and then the entertainment center, then went into the bathroom. Jada watched the proceedings with fascination at first and then with growing amusement.
“I hope you’re going to remake the bed,” she said, pushing her magenta hair behind her ears.
Drake frowned at her. “We’re looking for—”
“Anything my father might have left behind,” Jada finished for him. She kneeled on the mattress, hands defiantly on her hips. “Do you think I’m stupid, Nate? If someone tossed this room, they were looking for something. Stands to reason that there’s something to look for. Whoever Henriksen has working for him, they must know a lot of things we don’t. My father came here, he figured something out.”
“We knew that part already,” Sully said.
They both looked up to see him standing in the bathroom door with his arms crossed.
“Yeah, but if they’re searching, it doesn’t just mean he was on to something,” Jada continued. “It means they knew it, and he knew—or at least suspected—that someone was going to try to take those secrets from him. They think he was