Ten minutes later
I was striking out.
Marianne had started out by telling me she didn’t have records from that far back. “When the hotel went through its renovations last year, we switched to a new computer system-by the way, are you okay? Weren’t you shot yesterday?”
I patted my left arm gently. “It’s just a scratch. So, you’re telling me the computer records didn’t transfer?”
“No, they transferred, it’s just that the management decided to only keep records for the last five years-and I’m not just talking about video footage. All the guest room records.” She shook her head. “I beat my head against the wall trying to convince them to archive everything, but they wouldn’t listen to me.”
Working with so many disparate agencies over the years, I knew all too well that arbitrary and ill-informed decisions happen all the time. Often we don’t even know why we ourselves do what we do, let alone understand the motivations of others-still another reason why probing for motives is so unreliable.
I explored a few other ideas with Marianne, seeing if either the congressman or former vice president had stayed at the hotel recently or if there’d been any other constitutional law conferences in the last few years related to the one that the vice president had been scheduled to speak at when Hadron Brady tried to kill him.
Nothing.
Okay, so where does that leave us?
“Lien-hua mentioned the maids,” I said. “Did she and Margaret talk to you about that?”
“Already looked into it. Housekeeping made up more than twenty rooms on the eighth floor between 2:00 and 4:00, not in any particular order, just as they received word from their superiors. As far as I know, EAD Wellington had agents look through all the rooms on the floor again-some were already occupied-nothing suspicious.”
“What about when the hotel was remodeled-could there be a dumb waiter? Some kind of panic room, something like that put in to room 809?”
“The renovations were mostly cosmetic.” She brought up a floor plan of the building prior to and after the renovations, overlaid them. Nothing of note.
I tried to think of what else I could do here and came up blank.
Maybe you should just get going, find out what’s bugging Tessa. See if Rodale and Fischer forwarded the files to you.
I flicked my eyes across the computer monitors one last time and saw that the cameraman and reporter had finished interviewing Mr. Lees and were packing up their things. He was standing just a few feet away from them. Watching them.
Hang on.
The hotel might not have footage concerning the assassination attempt, but every news network in the country would have covered the story, and I was willing to bet that the producers at WXTN didn’t trash their footage after six years.
I jogged back to the atrium to catch the news team before they left the hotel.