The Hunt (6 page)

“I know what to expect,” I assured him, “and I know it’s not your fault.” Hilary never did anything halfway, and that included making a mess. In college, this had been a convenient way for her to ensure she would be awarded the first available single bedroom in any of our living quarters, and apparently she’d seen no reason to change her habits since then. It looked as if her suitcase had exploded over the room’s otherwise sleek interior. A neat roller-bag standing in the corner was Ben’s, but every other surface was strewn with Hilary’s belongings.

Peter’s expression upon entering the room combined horror and awe. “Are you sure nobody’s ransacked the place?”

“Nope, this is standard. In fact,” I said, “it’s pretty tame. She clearly hasn’t been here long enough to settle in.”

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“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he said, “so maybe I’ll just leave you to it.”

“Coward,” I said.

“Yep,” he agreed good-naturedly, picking his way across the cluttered floor. He leaned against the window, took out his cell phone and dialed.

“Can you get reception in here?” asked Ben. “I couldn’t.”

“It seems to be going through,” Peter told him.

“Must be my carrier,” said Ben, taking a seat on the bed and picking up the phone on the nightstand. A moment later, Peter was asking his mother about the valet service from the party and Ben was asking to speak to hotel security.

I began sorting through Hilary’s things. Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this was to pick each item up and put it away in a more orderly fashion so I could catalog what was there and what wasn’t. I examined each piece of clothing before draping it over the back of the desk chair, seeing nothing but the usual assortment of jeans and tops along with a few more formal outfits and finding nothing in her pockets except a jumble of gum wrappers, coins and receipts. There were a couple of books on the desk—an account of the late Nineties’ dot-com boom and bust, which was probably background for her article, and a history of jazz which I guessed was Hilary’s somewhat disturbing idea of pleasure reading—but, as Ben had said, no laptop and no notebook.

Of course, the dresser drawers were completely empty, as it would never have occurred to Hilary to actually use them for storage when the floor worked so well for her. I opened the closet door, but there I found only a folded luggage rack leaning against one wall, dangling hangers, the plush terry robes provided by the hotel and extra pillows on a high shelf. The only other items in the closet were an iron and an ironing board, but I was confident Hilary wouldn’t have thought to even touch either of those—her domestic skills were nearly as limited as my own, and her taste in clothes ran to fabrics of the clinging but nonwrinkling variety.

I moved on to the bathroom. Hilary wore her hair short and limited her cosmetics regimen to the liberal application of brilliant red lipstick, but she was always experimenting with different skin lotions and creams. I lined up the bottles and tubes on the vanity, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary, although I did sample an absurdly expensive eye cream I’d seen advertised in a magazine. The ad guaranteed an immediate and dramatic reduction in dark under-eye circles, so I patted in the recommended pea-sized dollop below each eye and then stared at my face in the magnifying mirror, waiting for the reduction to begin. After thirty seconds, nothing had happened, and seeing my pores blown up several times their actual size was too troubling to watch any longer. Then I sampled Hilary’s lipstick, to see if the bright color would distract from my under-eye circles, but that didn’t seem to help, either, and the red clashed miserably with my own red hair.

Sighing, I used a tissue to wipe my lips clean and turned to head back into the bedroom. If there were useful clues to Hilary’s whereabouts anywhere to be found, the anywhere didn’t seem to be in the hotel room.

But then I spotted Hilary’s jewelry pouch, partially buried under a hand towel. It was a flat-bottomed drawstring bag made of patterned silk, gaping open to reveal a tangle of earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. “Aha,” I said, to myself, since I could still hear both Peter and Ben talking on their respective phones in the other room.

I had a jewelry pouch that was nearly identical except for the pattern of the silk—Hilary had bought several of them in Thailand years ago and given them to her friends as gifts. The silk was pretty, and the pouches were useful, but she was mostly excited by a special feature each had: a fake bottom that could be pried out to reveal a small secret compartment below. Of course, with the exception of the occasional murder, my life was too dull to have much call for secret compartments, but perhaps Hilary had made use of hers.

I spilled the jewelry out onto the marble counter and tried to work a fingernail into the inner seam where the silk-covered cardboard at the bottom met the edge of the bag. Unfortunately,
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this was a job for a long tapered fingernail rather than the sort of fingernails I had. I rummaged through the items on the vanity but found nothing suitable until I saw the small sewing kit supplied by the hotel. I would never have used any of its contents to actually sew—such matters were better left in the hands of those less accident-prone than myself—but the kit included a needle that worked perfectly to pry open the false bottom. It lifted out easily to reveal the compartment below, and nestled within was a piece of folded ivory paper. “Aha,” I said again, pleased with my success.

“What have you got?” asked a voice behind me.

I nearly screamed but managed to strangle the noise to a muted yelp. I’d been so absorbed in the task and so busy congratulating myself on my cleverness that I hadn’t heard Ben come in or even glimpsed his image reflected next to mine in the mirror. “I didn’t realize you were here,” I said, recovering with an embarrassed laugh. “You scared me.”

“Sorry about that.”

“No problem,” I said, although my heart was still racing. I showed him the jewelry pouch and its false bottom before withdrawing and unfolding the piece of paper.

It was a receipt, on Four Seasons letterhead, dated two days earlier and made out to Hilary for an item she’d left in the hotel safe.

The obvious next step was to retrieve whatever it was Hilary had considered sufficiently important to require such high-security treatment. However, it was unclear whether the hotel would release the safe’s contents only to Hilary. I could try to impersonate her, but that wouldn’t work if I was asked for identification. Even if we did have her driver’s license, and even if a short blond wig and green contact lenses had been readily available, Hilary was more than a half-foot taller than me, and there wasn’t any practical way for me to impersonate that.

We discussed calling downstairs to ask about the procedure for redeeming an item from the safe so we could plan accordingly, but we quickly discarded that idea. It would only make the staff think twice when someone actually showed up a few minutes later to redeem something from the safe. Nor, for similar reasons, did we call to ask if the same staff members were on duty as on Friday. Instead we decided to brazen it out and headed for the lobby. If I was asked for ID, we would try to talk our way through any challenge with Ben’s identification since he was registered to the same hotel room.

Peter hung back as Ben and I approached the woman behind the front desk. Her hair was pulled into an elegant knot at the nape of her neck, and a tag on her suit jacket lapel told us her name was Natasha. I resisted the urge to make any Rocky and Bullwinkle jokes and rested the hand holding Ben’s room key and the receipt on the counter with what I hoped was a proprietary air.

“Hi,” I said. “We need to pick up something we left in the safe.”

“Of course,” Natasha said smoothly. “You have the receipt?”

“Of course,” I answered, equally smoothly. I handed her the piece of paper and prepared myself to lie about not having any identification with me. But the good news was Natasha didn’t ask for it. Instead, she led us to a discreet side door and used a pass to buzz us into an interior room.

At which point we encountered the bad news. Instead of a big vault of the sort you see in movies about bank heists, there were several rows of small safes mounted on a wall. Each of the safes had a digital keypad for a password the guest could set his or herself. And Hilary hadn’t bothered to write down her chosen password and leave it with the receipt in the secret compartment, which I considered a serious lapse in planning for the possibility that her friends might need to rescue her from a billionaire with personal-boundary issues.

“Here you are,” Natasha said, checking a number on the receipt and indicating one of the safes about halfway down the row second from the top.

“Could we have a moment alone?” I asked her. In the movies, they always left people alone with their safe deposit boxes when they went to retrieve their Nazi artifacts, incriminating documents or unmarked bills from Swiss banks.

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Natasha didn’t seem to expect that—I guessed most people just entered their passwords, collected their things and left—but she agreed readily enough. The door closed behind her with a soft click.

We looked around the room. The hotel’s management had posted a notice outlining its policy for items left in the safes on the wall to one side. They’d also posted instructions for setting passwords for the safes, advising users to choose a code consisting of between four and six numerals.

“Do you have any idea what her password could be?” I asked Ben.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t even know she locked anything up in the first place. Why would I know her password?”

Because you’re her boyfriend, I started to say, but I managed to catch myself before the words left my head and came out of my mouth.

I turned and contemplated the keypad on the safe Natasha had indicated, wracking my brain for memories of Hilary at the ATM, Hilary at the computer, or Hilary doing anything else that would have required her to enter a personal code, but nothing came immediately to mind. I ran through the usual sorts of considerations that guide people’s password choices, but Hilary hadn’t lived in the same place for more than a few months at a time since we’d graduated, she didn’t have any pets, and she had never cared much about birthdays—in fact, she’d been twenty-nine for several years now. Her twin passions were work and men, and these two interests tended to occupy the majority of her waking hours.

While this line of thinking didn’t offer any brilliant insights, thinking about Hilary’s passions and her interest in men, specifically, did remind me of last night’s conversation about Party of Five.

Which gave me an idea.

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Here goes.”

I punched in five numbers and pressed the pound key. There was a pause, and I waited for an alarm to blare out and for Natasha to come running, armed with a stun gun or something like that. Instead, a small light flashed green and the word “OPEN” appeared on the screen above the keypad.

I breathed out with surprise and relief. I really hadn’t expected that to work.

“What was the password?” Ben asked.

“It’s 9-0-2-1-0,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Dylan’s zip code.” Ben looked confused, but this was no time to explain Hilary’s long-standing crush on Luke Perry in his career-defining role—he probably wouldn’t appreciate that the only guy ever to hold her interest on a sustained basis was a figment of Darren Star’s imagination. I twisted the latch and opened the door to the safe.

Inside, zipped into a clear plastic bag, were two items: a pen and a photograph.

“Everything all right in here?” asked Natasha, poking her head through the door.

“Everything’s great,” I said. I withdrew the bag and slipped it into my purse, and we followed her out of the room.

Peter, Ben, and I huddled on one of the sofas in the lobby, studying the photograph. It was of three people in their mid-to-late twenties, two men and a woman, standing on steps that led up to the columned portico of a stone building. The man in the center we all recognized easily—it was Iggie, back in the days when he still wore thick glasses, cut his own hair, and dressed without the assistance of an overly adventurous stylist. The Lasik and the professional haircut were definitely an improvement, but I was less sanguine about his updated wardrobe.

“That’s probably Biggie on the left,” I said, then explained to Ben about Iggie’s ex-wife and Caro’s and Alex’s comments the previous night. The image in the photo matched their description perfectly: a heavyset woman with big brown eyes and masses of brown hair shielding much of her face.

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“The building behind them looks sort of familiar, too,” said Peter. “I can’t quite place it, but I think I’ve seen it before.”

But none of us recognized the person standing to the right of Iggie, a bulky but relatively nondescript guy with nearly as much hair as Biggie, and there were no helpful names or dates written on the back of the picture to indicate who he might be.

“So what does this mean?” asked Ben.

For an FBI agent—essentially a professional investigator—sometimes he seemed a little slow to connect the dots, I thought. But then I admonished myself. My withdrawal was making me uncharitable, as well as blunt and cranky, and Ben was not only hungover, he had just gotten dumped. I reminded myself again that a lesser person would have washed his hands of the matter and hightailed it home.

“That Hilary put an old picture of Iggie and his ex-wife in a safe?” I said. “Probably that she thought there was a juicy story about them. And maybe it involved the other guy in the picture, too. And maybe she started asking Iggie about whatever she thought the story was, and he was happier letting sleeping dogs lie. At least, that’s my theory.” I slipped the photo back into the plastic bag for safekeeping and started to return the bag to my purse.

“Wait,” said Peter. “What about the pen?”

“What about it? It’s just a pen.” It was a metallic color and a bit thicker than usual, but without a brand name or any other markings. While it was a step up from a disposable ballpoint, it was hardly a Mont Blanc, or even a Sharpie. I’d removed the cap and even checked that it wrote with ink and not some sort of magic clue-revealing substance, but as far as I could tell that was the extent of its usefulness.