Ashley turned on the engine and adjusted the heat. “Now what?”
“Let me guess. Put on our seat belts and turn on the radio?”
She stared at me blankly before breaking into a smile. “Cute. No, really.”
“Is it too early for lunch?”
She clicked on her seat belt. “That depends. Where do you have in mind?”
I grinned, already knowing her response. “I need comfort food—with protein. Shake Shack?”
She held out her fist for a bump. “It’s never too early for Shake Shack.”
We zipped down the Avenue bantering about what we were going to order. We pulled into an empty parking lot, a red flag. We parked and jumped out of the car, only to find the door locked. Our groans echoed each other’s disappointment.
Ashley read the restaurant’s hours printed on the glass door. “They don’t open for another twenty minutes.”
I pouted and sighed. “I guess it can be too early for Shake Shack.”
We decided to wait in the car and pass the time on our phones checking our email and social media accounts.
“Wow. Tons of people responded to your Instagram post about Milo.”
“Yeah, I saw that. But no leads so far. At least people are sharing the post and being nice and supportive.”
“Good they’re spreading the word. Sooner or later something’s bound to come up.”
Before we knew it, the Shake Shack doors opened. By the time we picked up our order of cheeseburgers, fries, and milkshakes, the place was getting crowded. We navigated our trays to a booth and dug in. We plowed through our food in silence, relishing the fact that, for a few minutes at least, our biggest concerns were condiments, napkins, and straws.
I was bagging our trash when Adrian called. I put it on speaker.
“Can you meet me at the hotel lobby? I want to take a look at the rock and the other evidence.”
“Definitely. We’re at the Shake Shack on the Avenue. It’ll take us about ten minutes to get there.”
“Cool. I’m rolling from the station now. See you soon.”
It actually took us more like fifteen minutes since we got held up at a train crossing two blocks away from the Promenade. We waited five solid minutes for the cargo cars to rumble by. Once the crossing barrier lifted, it was clear sailing to the hotel. We entered the same remote lot where the hooded figure appeared on the surveillance footage. Today the lot was nearly full, making it seem less isolated and sinister.
I pointed to a car pulling out. “They must be having some function here today.”
Ashley parked in its place, one of the last remaining spots. “Good thing we came here yesterday and took pics before all the clues were driven over.”
I led the way through the Secret Maze, the fastest and most direct route, but only if you knew its twists and turns. Most people followed the pathway around its perimeter. We trotted down the long outdoor corridor and arrived at the lobby just as Adrian walked in from the front of the hotel.
“Sorry—”
“We know. The train. Us too.”
Ashley tugged a stray wisp of hair off her face and smiled in a slightly simpering and uncharacteristic fashion. “Better safe than sorry, that’s what I always say.”
I gave her the side-eye. I’d never once heard her utter that phrase in the umpteen years I’d known her, and it made no sense in this context. I cut her some slack since many of us spewed nonsense when we flirted. I subtly cocked my head at her and raised my brows as if to say, “This is your best game?”
She furrowed her brows momentarily and jerked her head toward me in a silent message, “Stop it! I’m rusty and trying my best.”
Seemingly unaware of our secret sign language, Adrian followed us back to where we’d found the rock in the Secret Maze. It was still there. Right where we last saw it. Adrian took some photographs of it and then retrieved a few tongue depressors, a pack of plastic bags, and latex gloves from his backpack. He snapped the gloves before pulling them on. He poked at the rock with a tongue depressor and flipped it over. A larger stain was on the underside of the rock. But that wasn’t all. Underneath the rock was a SIM card. A nervous rush went through my body, knowing it could possibly answer what happened to Milo.
Adrian poked at the SIM card. It was cracked and almost broken in half. He let out an expletive as he pulled a plastic bag from the pack and carefully deposited the SIM card in it. “We’ll let Sarah take a look at it to see if she can get something off of this, but I doubt it.”
Ashley patted my hand.
Adrian poked around in the gravel near the rock with two tongue depressors.
I couldn’t stand the suspense. “Does it look like blood to you?”
Adrian carefully bagged the rock. Then he scooped some gravel up, using the tongue depressors, and put it into another bag and placed both bags into his backpack, along with the SIM card. When he raised his head to look at me, I didn’t like what I saw. His expression had changed. His face was somber. His mouth was set in a grim line, and his eyes hardened into a determined stare. The atmosphere in the maze had flipped from morbid curiosity to serious business in a split second. “Yup. The lab will analyze it and tell us for sure.”
Ashley squeezed my arm, and I mouthed a swear word to her in response.
“You said you talked to one of the groundskeepers about hearing an argument? Did you catch his name?”
“Yeah. Only his first name—Octavio.”
Adrian zipped his backpack. “Let’s see if we can find Octavio.” He turned to me. “Why don’t you lead the way since this is your stomping ground.”
We silently tromped through the hedges of the maze to the Hidden Garden exit. As luck would have it, Octavio was planting some azaleas.
Adrian flashed his badge. “I understand you heard an argument in the maze yesterday?”
Octavio stood straight, knocking dirt off his gloves. “Yes, sir.”
“Could you hear what they were fighting about?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you hear or see anything else out of the ordinary?”
“No, sir. Like I told these ladies yesterday, only the loud voices arguing. Oh, and the rustling in the bushes before that. I guess that was one of the guys or both of them running through the maze before they met.”
“What’s the watering schedule here at the hotel?”
The tension that had gripped Octavio’s face eased as the topic turned to more familiar ground. I groaned at my pun silently. I swore I’d probably have a pun on my tombstone, something like “I told you I was dead tired,” or some such nonsense.
Octavio adjusted his wide-brimmed straw hat. “The grounds are controlled by several control centers and each center has five or six zones. Like the Hidden Garden here—it has five zones.”
Adrian nodded. “What about the hedges in the maze?”
“Oh, those have a drip system. No sprinklers.”
“Do you know the drip schedule? Or is it continuous?”
Octavio’s facial muscles tightened into defensive mode. “We keep to the city’s drought schedule. We only water on the drought schedule days, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.”
Because of our drought conditions in California, the city imposed rules for when and how everyone could water so as to optimize water conservation. As a landscape architect, it was part of my professional responsibility to keep up to date on all the latest regulation iterations.
“And you also adhere to no watering between daytime hours of nine to five, right?” I nodded to him encouragingly.
“Yes, ma’am. Always.” He offered a tepid smile.
We waited for Octavio to continue, but he seemed done.
Adrian handed Octavio his card. “Please give me a call if you remember anything else. Appreciate your help.”
As we walked away, I turned to Adrian. “Octavio looked terrified when the watering schedule was questioned. Like he thought he was going to get in trouble for breaking the watering rules.”
Adrian bobbed his head. “Yeah, I noticed that too.”
“You know what’s weird, though? Yesterday was Saturday and, theoretically, a non-automatic watering day, yet the maze was super saturated when Ashley and I found the phone. Also, we were there around three thirty but drought rules mandate manual hosing be limited to the hours between four in the afternoon and ten thirty in the morning.”
Ashley shouldered herself between us. “Yeah, Tory’s right. It was so squishy we had to walk on our tippy toes to keep our heels from constantly sinking.”
Feeling validated, I threw her a quick smile. “Which leaves us with a couple of explanations for why the maze was so wet.”
Adrian twisted toward me. “The drip system could have a leak. Although it wasn’t muddy today, so that would rule out that explanation.”
“Good point.” Ashley touched his arm lightly.
His eyes twinkled at Ashley. “Or someone could have hosed it down for some reason.”
The phrase “for some reason” hung over us like a dark cloud. He didn’t have to elaborate. What with the bloodied rock and what I suspected was blood in the gravel sample he’d collected, we all knew “for some reason” was to wash away blood.
“Look, I’m not going to lie, Tory. It’s not looking good. But that being said, this evidence is still open to interpretation.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, even if we think the evidence suggests Milo might have been attacked and abducted, I know some of my more skeptical colleagues will theorize Milo smashed his own phone because he’s staging it to look like a kidnapping, especially since he disappeared moments after you were legally married. We always look at motive early on, and your family’s business is a symbol of wealth in Santa Sofia. In other words, kidnappers look for victims whose families have the means to pay a ransom. And you said you only knew Milo for a short time before he proposed, correct?”
I nodded as my face warmed.
“They’ll look at your brief relationship as an opportunistic move on his part to create a strong bond quickly so you would want to pay a ransom to get him back. Again, let me be clear. I don’t believe that. I just know my fellow officers and want to give you a heads-up. They might say the same thing about all of this alleged evidence—the SIM card and rock—that it’s been planted to make it look like Milo is the victim. But let’s find out if it’s blood first and if any data can be retrieved from the SIM card. We’ll worry about theories later.”
I flinched like I did when the ophthalmologist puffed air at my eyes. I was shaken, reeling in both body and spirit. I appreciated Adrian’s honesty and guessed their cynicism served them well as cops. I almost wished he was right, because then, at least, Milo would be alive, albeit despicably so. But my heavy heart and pounding headache told me otherwise. I believed Milo had been killed. I just knew it.
The buzz of Adrian’s phone broke my thoughts. He wasn’t on the call for more than a minute. “That was Sarah. She’s managed to retrieve the deleted portion of the surveillance video. Meet me back at the station?”
Adrian headed back in the direction of the lobby. Ashley and I meandered back through the maze to the parking lot. Patrolling the lot was the hotel security guard, B. Brockett, a.k.a. Barbie. She greeted us with a hearty hello.
“Thank you so much again for sending the footage over to SSPD so quickly. Adrian was here with us just a minute ago. The tape had a blank part but his tech person has retrieved it and we’re going back to watch it at the station right now.”
“Yeah, I know. Luckily, our CCTV video is automatically saved on a hard drive. Sarah took a look at our hard drive and found the missing footage. Apparently, it was a computer glitch or software issue, who knows. Glad I could be of help.”
Had we been in a western movie, I pictured her tipping her cowboy hat.
Ashley and I waved goodbye to Brockett, jumped in the car, and hightailed it back to the police station.
Once again, we gathered around Adrian’s computer. Adrian started the video. The hooded figure opened the car trunk and then went out of view. The hooded figure came back with a huge wheelbarrow filled with plants. Adrian paused the tape on the hooded figure. The longer I studied the hooded figure, the more I was convinced it couldn’t be Milo. The person looked bulkier than Milo. But I still couldn’t be sure. At least it wasn’t Milo in the wheelbarrow.
Ashley hit my arm. “That’s what the tracks we saw were—from a wheelbarrow, not a bike.”
I nodded. “I should have thought of that.”
“I know. Me too.”
The video continued. After all the plants were unloaded from the wheelbarrow to the car trunk, the hooded figure bent over and reached into the wheelbarrow. It looked like a jumbo-sized black trash bag. The figure struggled to load it into the trunk. It was long and looked heavy. It looked like a body.