A slow chill crawled down my back.
I called Marianne and asked where the bellhops store the luggage for guests who arrive early, or who need the hotel to hold their bags until a later checkout time.
She told me the location-a room on the lower level near the storage room where I’d been shot. I didn’t tell Marianne what I suspected, just asked her to meet me there, then I ended the call.
And, trying to convince myself that I was wrong to suspect what I did, I left for the basement.
“Here we are,” Mr. Lees declared as he and Tessa arrived at the hotel’s control center.
It’d taken her longer than she’d thought it would to convince him to take her to Patrick, but finally she’d told him how upset Special Agent Bowers FROM THE FBI would be if he found out the hotel’s president wasn’t allowing his daughter to see him, and Mr. Lees had asked her to kindly follow him.
“I believe our head of security is meeting with him right now.” He knocked on the door, and a moment later, a slim, sharp-dressed woman in her late twenties appeared.
Mr. Lees said, “Marianne, this is Tessa Ellis, Agent Bowers’s stepdaughter.”
“I need to talk to him right away,” Tessa said.
“Well, I’m on my way to meet him now. Why don’t you come along?”
I made it to the luggage storage area before Marianne, and I decided not to wait for her.
After clearing all the bellhops out of the room, I entered it alone and closed the door.
In contrast to the splendor and extravagance of the rest of the hotel, this was a vast, boxy concrete chamber that smelled of dust and mold and stale air. Industrial florescent lights. No carpeting. No windows.
Twelve luggage carts stood empty and waiting in a line along the east wall. Filling the rest of the room were piles of suitcases of various shapes and sizes. With nearly a meter of space between each stack, they’d clearly been arranged to keep the items of the different guests separated.
Yesterday, I’d only momentarily seen the suitcases on the luggage cart that the bellhop was pulling down the hallway, and I wasn’t certain what brand they were. So now, as I scanned the piles, I started by looking for the luggage collection with the biggest suitcases. I figured that would be the most likely And I saw it.
At the far end of the room.
A cluster of large suitcases that, as I thought about it, did appear to match the style of the ones I’d seen on the luggage cart.
We’d been looking for Mollie’s body.
Her whole body.
But that might not be what we were going to find.
I crossed the room toward the pile of suitcases.