It wasn’t the first time I had been bamboozled. It wouldn’t be the last. Still, I should have seen it coming: there wasn’t a woman alive who’d take a shower in a motel room without locking the door first. She’d taken us for fools because we were a couple of fools. Especially when it came to the fairer sex. Barack and I were chivalrous to a fault. We should have trusted our instincts. Instead, we’d been flustered into doubting ourselves.
The woman was long gone by the time we returned to the room. She’d left the door swinging open and the towel hanging over the back of the chair.
The towel wasn’t even wet.
“If you’ll let me know what we’re looking for, I can help,” Steve offered. He turned on a lamp; it flickered for a moment before shorting out.
“This is the first time I’ve tossed a room for evidence,” I said, lifting one of the pillows off the bed as if I was looking for change left by the tooth fairy. “Fingerprints, I guess?”
“The fingerprints would have been wiped clean by the cleaning person,” Barack said, holding one of the glasses up to the overhead light. “Although it looks like no one’s cleaned anything in this room in twenty years. It would take us weeks to dust for prints.”
“I left my fingerprint-dusting kit at home, so I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said.
“You have a fingerprint-dusting kit?” Barack asked.
I peeked underneath the bed. “The FBI gave them to everyone in Congress one year. A Christmas gift.” It took longer than usual to get to my feet, on account of my knee. “Looks like they have a little mouse problem at this establishment.”
“Find some mouse droppings?” Barack asked.
“Found a mouse,” I said. “Just a little guy.”
“You don’t seem too surprised.”
“For twenty-nine bucks a night, I’m surprised he wasn’t bigger.”
I opened and closed the drawers in the dresser, all of which, of course, were empty. They’d been cleaned out by Finn’s family, then by housekeeping…and then, possibly, by the woman who’d given us the slip. Besides the bed and a ratty green sofa chair, the room was as bare as a newborn baby’s bottom. There wasn’t a safe in the closet. There wasn’t even a closet. There was a nightstand, but no pad of paper or pen. That meant I couldn’t try out that trick from TV, where the detective rubs a pencil over the top page to get an impression of whatever the criminal had written on the ripped-off page.
I opened the nightstand drawer. Finally, something: a Gideon Bible. The familiar mottled maroon imitation-leather hardback of the Bible that was in every hotel room in the country. The same type of Bible the tattooed man had left behind in Darlene’s room. Not that this was any kind of connection. In fact, if the Bible had been missing from the drawer, that would have been something. This? This was nothing.
“Either of you ever met a Gideon?”
Barack shook his head. Steve, peeking through the curtains, said, “I got a cousin who’s a Gideon.”
“Really?” I said. “What’s their angle?”
“Spreading the word of Christ.”
“You know what their business model looks like?”
Steve pulled the curtains closed. “They pay for the Bibles with donations. That’s all I know.”
“It’s just, I’ve never seen a Gideon church,” I said. “I’d always wondered if Gideons even existed.”
“My cousin exists,” Steve said. “She lives in Cleveland.”
Barack peered out from the bathroom. “Did anyone check the bed?”
“I checked under the bed,” I said. “You actually want me to touch the sheets?”
“We’re looking for anything Finn may have left behind.”
“But the sheets?”
“Anything,” Barack said.
I shuddered. At least Barack was taking the bathroom. I didn’t want to think about what sad state it was in, but I could guess I’d been inside cleaner porta potties at political rallies.
The bedspread was pulled all the way up, with nice and tight corners. The way Jill made the bed. I pinched the top corner of the bedspread like I was picking up a dirty diaper and slowly peeled it back. I don’t know what I expected to find—blood, a bullet hole. Maybe a dirty diaper. All of the above.
Fortunately, all I found was a bleached white sheet. Not that it made me feel any better about the room. It was no place to pass an hour, let alone the final months of your life. Dammit, Finn, if only you’d told me…
Barack made his way out of the bathroom. He shook his head.
“It was worth a shot,” I said, collapsing into the chair. To me, it was undeniable now that Finn had been part of something larger. We had nothing concrete to prove it to the cops, but there was at least one person sniffing around his trail. Possibly more, if the burglary and the break-in at the motel were two different parties. Two different criminals. Not to mention the hophead in Darlene’s room. At the very least, Finn had been involved with the wrong sorts of people. At the worst…he’d been the wrong sort of people. Could he have been a criminal himself? And what mattered more: the truth, or preserving Finn’s name?
I’d promised Grace Donnelly that I’d find out what happened to her father. I hadn’t said what I’d do with that information once I found it.
“The chair’s been moved.”
I glanced up at Barack. “What did you say?”
“The chair,” he said, pointing to where I was sitting, “has been moved.” He crossed the room and knelt down. He ran a hand over the carpet. “Recently, too. There are still indents here.”
I raised myself out of the chair with only minimal wincing. The last thing I wanted was to worry Barack. He didn’t know how bad my knee was, and I intended to keep it that way.
I bent down to tip the chair to see if there was something hidden underneath it, but Barack and Steve stepped in to do the heavy lifting. “Let us young bucks do it, Joe,” Barack said.
They rolled it onto its back.
There was a twelve-by-twelve-inch section of carpet missing. The edges were frayed, as if it had been cut up with a serrated knife. The bare plywood was showing. There was a faint pink stain in the center.
My heart was beating fast, propelled by equal parts terror and excitement. None of us spoke.