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“Marlo, don’t touch anything.”
“I’m just going to take the recording. It must be in her purse. It’s right here. If the police find it, they could think—Matthew, they could think we killed her, or fought with her, or... It’s not here. There’s nothing here. Does she have a pocket? Is it on her somewhere?”
“Marlo, stop. Stop. She doesn’t have anything. She must’ve lied. Just lied, and now she’s dead.” His words came out as if they’d been scraped against a rasp. “She’s dead, and we’re not doing anything.”
“You did everything you could.” Marlo dropped down beside him, stroked his dripping hair. “She must’ve hit her head and fallen in. She was drunk, and she fell and drowned. Look, there’s her glass, some wine spilled and a broken glass. It was an awful accident. God, Connie’s going to be sick about it. We should go down now. Come on, baby, let’s go down, get help.”
“Yeah. Yeah. What do we tell them, Marlo?”
“The truth. We came up, and we found her. You pulled her out, and you couldn’t save her. We don’t have to tell anybody the rest. It doesn’t matter to anybody but us.”
“You’re right. I wanted to hurt her, Marlo. I wanted to see her squirm. I don’t know how to feel about that now.” He took a breath, took another, got to his feet. “How did you feel when I told you she was dead?”
“What? Horrible. Horrified. Scared. Sick.”
“Okay, that’s what you feel when we go down. We haven’t had time to calm down any, or think about it. We found her, pulled her out, tried CPR, then went down for help. None of the rest changes what happened, right?”
“No. No, it doesn’t.” She picked up her purse. “Ready?”
“Ready. We should run.”
They said nothing as they ran downstairs. The record continued as they played it out for Eve. At some point Marlo laid her bag aside. For a time there was a snatch of conversation, the partial image of someone going by. Then the record announced end of time.
“It’s the way they said it happened,” Peabody said.
“Yeah. They’re both pretty good at their work, so... We make sure it’s legit. I want Feeney to run the original through all the tests. We’ll make a copy for the files.”
She ordered the copy, drummed her fingers. “It’s a disrupted view, but it angled well enough. No blood. The blood had already been washed off when this recorded. I couldn’t see the vic’s purse, whether it was open or closed when Marlo went at it. We’ll see what she says about that detail.”
“If this was real, the killer cleaned up the blood, took the recording—so he or she knew about the recording.”
“Assuming there was a recording. And assuming there was, let’s go find it.”
•••
By Eve’s order K.T. Harris’s hotel suite and trailer had both been locked and sealed. The hotel manager wasn’t happy about it.
“The police seal is upsetting to our guests,” she told Eve as she escorted them—at her insistence—to the suite.
“I bet the need for the police seal probably bums out your former, now dead, guest.”
The manager flattened her lips as she strode briskly out of the elevator on high, thin heels. “All of us at the Winslow are very sorry about Ms. Harris’s death. But we do have a responsibility to our guests. It’s not as if Ms. Harris was killed here. The suite isn’t a crime scene.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No, I’m the manager of this hotel.”
“Okay, here’s the deal. I won’t tell you how to manage your hotel. Don’t tell me how to manage a homicide investigation.”
At the door, Eve broke the police seal. “I want the data from the key card or cards for this suite for the day before yesterday, yesterday, and today.”
“No one has entered this room since it was sealed last night by two police officers.”
“Then the data will so confirm, won’t it?”
“If you’re doubting my word, or the security of this hotel—”
“I’m not doing either—yet,” Eve said as her patience went as thin as the manager’s lips. “I’m doing my job. Now you can unlock the door as you brought your master, or I can use mine. Either way you can go back to doing your job.”
