Grant and I walked to the nearest gas station and procured some bottled cold brew coffee, milk, and yellow sweetener packets. He muttered something about a liquor store. As tempted as I was, it didn’t do to mix a long boring job with alcohol.
He grabbed a bagful of junk food, and we made our way back to the hotel. I had to ring the bell twice to get the desk clerk—a young guy, scrawny and with a patchy beard—to come shuffling out from the little office behind the desk. He looked at me through grease-speckled glasses.
“Help you?”
“I’m with the DWF,” I said.
“The what?”
“The wrestling company that’s taking up half the rooms in your establishment right now.” I leaned forward. “And I need to look at the front-desk security tape from today.”
He blinked behind his glasses, taking them off to rub the bottom of his shirt ineffectually against them. When he put them back on the grease was, at least, more evenly applied.
“I, uh, don’t know if I have the authority to let you do that.”
“You have as much authority in this life as you give yourself…Kevin,” I said, having paused just long enough to read his name-tag, which was similarly spattered with the detritus of whatever fast food he’d had for dinner. “Seize it. Grasp it with both hands. Don’t let anyone take it away from you.”
“Uh. Okay.”
“Great,” I said. An investigator’s rule; when it seems even for a second like you’re getting the answer that grants you access to something you probably shouldn’t have, proceed full steam ahead. Redline the engine. Make the boilers glow as you shovel coal into them. I pointed to the doorway that led behind the desk. “Meet you back there?” I started walking, dragging Grant behind me with one hand.
By the time we were around the other side of the desk, Kevin clearly had no idea what to do or what he was dealing with. I wasn’t necessarily above using a little physical intimidation if I had to, but Kevin looked like he went about six-foot-one and one-forty, soaking wet. It would’ve been like yelling at a puppy.
He led us to a small nook with a computer set on a folding table. The monitor, once he woke it up with a shake of the mouse, showed live feeds of the various cameras scattered around the hotel.
He pulled out the rolling desk chair and minimized the live feeds, then went to a folder marked “Cameras” and rooted around in it for a while.
“Okay,” he said. “The last eight hours of the front desk should be in that file,” he said, pointing to a QuickTime icon in a subfolder labeled FRONT, with today’s date. “Good luck, I guess.”
He left, then suddenly stuck his head back in. “Uh. Maybe don’t tell the manager I let you do this?”
“Aren’t you the manager, Kevin?”
“I’m the assisting night desk supervisor,” he replied.
“Man’s gotta have goals, Kevin. You think like a manager, act like a manager, tell yourself you’re a manager, and someday it’ll be true.”
I gestured Grant into another seat, set my almond butter and my coffee down on the desk, and started fast forwarding through footage.
Movies and TV tend to gloss over just how mind-numbing—and how unlikely to help—going through security tape is. Sure, in the case of a stickup or a bank robbery, provided the perpetrator is dumb enough not to take any steps, it can easily lead to breaks in the case. And if an area is blanketed with closed circuit cameras like some places are, a criminal is almost guaranteed to give away some kind of helpful detail.
But the cameras at this particular hotel were not state of the art high-definition, nor were there an abundance of them. The camera sat right behind the desk and did show the faces of people who stopped and stared into it—but if an employee stood in the wrong place it would easily block the sightline.
I fast forwarded until any activity came along. It was so seldom my thumb started to get a friction burn. Eventually I would let up on the keys in order to eat a careful spoonful of almond butter.
Grant had blown through his entire bag of jerky, string cheese, chips, popcorn, and pork rinds by the time I was eating a third spoonful.
“Man, are you really just eating peanut butter for dinner?”
“Almond butter,” I said. “And on a normal day it’s what I eat for two, maybe three meals a day. I mean, not always this particular brand. But it’s one of my favorites.”
“Damn dude. Are you measuring it?”
He’d caught me in the act of scraping the excess out of the spoon I was using against the side of the jar.
“Helps me count the calories.”
“Jeez. What are you training for? A Spartan race or something?”
“You know, the Spartans lost more wars than they won? They pretty routinely got their ass kicked. That their reputation is what it is today just goes to show you what good PR will do for you.”
He laughed and said, “Hell yeah. PR is the wrestling business, bro. The more you can get people talking about you, the better every match is gonna be.”
I stopped the playback and turned to him. “That so?”
He nodded.
“Then why the hell not report this to the cops?”
“I told you, man,” Grant said. “Nobody wants cops crawling around them much.”
“Look. I get that most of the road crew are probably holding. What about the talent?”
“You know,” he said with a shrug. “Everybody needs a little pick me up, something to ease the pain…something to make workout recovery easier. Something to keep you in the ring.”
“PEDs.”
“Man,” Grant spoke in a hushed whisper. “Don’t say that the fuck out loud.”
“You on anything, Grant?” I set down my almond butter. “This might be relevant later.”
He let out a little sigh. “I cycled down before the tour started, okay? You know how fuckin’ hard it is to stay in this kind of shape?” Then he waved a hand vaguely at me. “You telling me you keep those arms without any gear? Not even a few T patches now and then?”
“My use of pharmaceuticals is solely restricted to the kind that help me calm down and sleep a little better,” I said. “Or maybe once in a while I need to make a movie or some music more interesting. That’s all.”
“Well, you wouldn’t call the cops if you were holding, were you?”
“In Maryland? It’s a ticket, basically. Nothing to worry about.”
“Yeah, well,” he shrugged. “We aren’t always in Maryland.” He waved at the screen. “Can we get back to this, please?”
“Fine.”
I went back to fast forwarding through the nonsense. People came in to the hotel. People left the hotel. Pizza delivery guys came to the front desk and then proceeded on into the hotel, then left.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—someone acting squirrelly. Someone dropping a single piece of mail off. Someone coming in from another entrance and blocking their face while at the desk. Someone who didn’t seem to have a clear purpose.
Whatever it was I was looking for, I didn’t see it.
I plunged my spoon into the almond butter and stirred it around. I took the last sip of a long since warmed-up can of cold brew coffee and desperately wished it was beer.
In the chair behind me, Grant had nodded off, the detritus of his convenience store dinner littering the floor around him. I sighed and shoveled it all into the bag, which woke him up.
“You find the bad guy yet?”
“Nope. Doesn’t look like there’s any pay dirt here.”
“Then why’d we waste all this time?”
He stood up, stretching. I held out the bag of trash. When he didn’t take it, I stuffed it into the front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.
“If I knew exactly where to go and what to do in order to find the bad guy, this would all be a lot easier. But so far as I can tell, whoever wrote this letter probably didn’t drop it off at the front desk. How else does mail get to the company?”
“Could’ve dropped it off at the show. Maybe slipped it to someone else to bring in a giant package?”
“Fanmail can be dropped off at the show?”
“Sure. People take it to the security guys or the crew all the time.”
“Goddamnit,” I said. “Why didn’t you and Daphne tell me that right away?”
“Uh. You seemed pretty focused on this? And it was in the hotel pile.”
“Yeah, but there’s nothing saying a member of the crew didn’t dump it into the hotel pile when they got back. Who sorts all this stuff? Who is alone with the pile? Who has access to it that nobody oversees?” I stuck my hands over my eyes for a minute, biting back the urge to scream.
“Alright,” I said, when I finally dropped my hands, and took a deep breath. “Tomorrow I’ve got to spend the day talking to as much of the crew as I can.”
“Man, they’re not gonna like talking to a detective. Even a private one.”
“I don’t have the time to care about that anymore,” I said. “This isn’t a one-person job, but I’m the only one on it. So I’m gonna do it.”
“Good luck.”
We retreated to our hotel room. Grant immediately threw himself on the bed and went to sleep, on top of the covers, with socks on, like some kind of unbelievable freak.
Meanwhile, I debated a “you up” text to Gen, but it was Monday, and she wouldn’t be. And even if she was, I was hardly in a position to follow up.
So I settled for trying to write her an email. I got a few words into it before I gave up, deleted the draft, and tried to sleep.
I debated for a long time about what to do with the weapons I was carrying while I slept. The Taser I slipped into the nightstand drawer. The baton I set atop it, right next to my phone, where I could grab it in a moment’s notice.
The gun, I locked in the room’s safe. I saved the code in a note on my phone labeled “grocery list.” The odds I’d need it in the middle of the night were slim to none, and the odds were pretty good I’d just wind up shooting Grant or myself if I went for it in the dark.
Then I sat and stared at the wall and tried to think about how good the money for this was.
It wasn’t as comforting a thought as it ought to have been. I was nearly asleep when a bike backfired in the parking lot, or on the street.
Suddenly I saw those Blood Eagle crime scene photos again, and every time I closed my eyes, they came back.
I got the gun back out of the safe and left it in the drawer of the nightstand, right next to the Gideon Bible.