At eight o'clock three men approached from across the lobby, one of them quite inebriated. They were in their forties, white, casually dressed. As they got closer, the shortest one — the drunk one — did his best to focus on the table, on the name tags, and finally on Jessica.
'Whoa!' he said, reeling a little.
'Welcome,' Jessica said.
'My name is Jukka Tolonen,' the tall blond man said, introducing himself.
'Jay Bowman,' said the other. Jessica scanned the table, found the name tags she was looking for, handed them both a tag and a program.
'Thanks,' the two men said in tandem, both sounding a little embarrassed for their friend.
'You know,' the drunk one said, 'I've been coming to this convention for, I don't know, five years? Most of the women look like Mrs. Marble.'
Jessica was pretty sure the man meant Miss Marple. 'What's your name?' she asked.
The man looked at his friends. 'You hear that? She asked my name, dude. She's hitting on me!'
'I think she wants to give you your name tag,' Tolonen said. He had an accent. Maybe Finnish. 'Oh.'
The drunk man made a production of reaching into his pocket for his wallet. He pulled it out, made a bigger deal of extracting one of his business cards, a big smile on his face as if this were the cleverest bit ever. 'It looks like I'm somebody named Barry Swanson,' he said. 'Like the frozen dinner.'
Like the frozen adolescence, Jessica thought. She handed Barry Swanson his ID and a program. Swanson immediately dropped it all on the floor. Tolonen picked up the material, clipped the name tag on his wobbly friend.
'Sorry,' Bowman said to Jessica. 'He's a forensic chemist. He doesn't get out much.'
Jessica watched them walk away, wondering how crimes ever got solved.
When Jessica was relieved by a member of the task force, a detective out of West Division named Deena Yeager, she walked over to the front desk, surveyed the crowded lobby. David Albrecht had not gotten permission to film inside the ballroom, but he was allowed to shoot footage in the lobby and out on the street. Jessica saw that he had snagged some talking-head interview time with some pretty heavy hitters.
Just about everyone in the room had some connection to law enforcement. There were retired detectives, prosecutors, forensic professionals of every discipline, men and women who worked in the processing of fingerprints, hair and fiber, blood, documents. There were pathologists, anthropologists, psychologists, people who worked in behavioral science and mathematics. She'd heard there was a small contingent from Keishicho, the Metropolitan Tokyo Police Department.
She saw Hell Rohmer and Irina Kohl, pretending to be merely colleagues. It didn't take a seasoned detective to detect the occasional brush of hands, or the more than occasional longing glance. She saw judges, lawyers, bailiffs, along with a handful of ADAs.
She did not see Kevin Byrne.
Chapter 75
Lucy Doucette stood at the end of the hallway on the twelfth floor.
Her shift ended at six-thirty, but she asked Audrey Balcombe if there were any credits to be had and it turned out that three of the guests had requested housekeeping twice a day. She imagined these people were in some kind of lab or forensic work and had a serious germ phobia. Regardless, she was able to stay on for an extra two hours. Now she was just killing time.
Lucy knew that the moment she swiped her card in the electronic lock on the door to 1208 it would go on the record. She was scared out of her wits to go back in there, but she had been scared so long it just didn't matter anymore.
She looked over her shoulder. The hallway was deserted, but Lucy knew she was not alone, not technically. She had once been in the main security station and had seen the big monitors. All staff knew where the closed- circuit cameras were. At least, the cameras they knew about, the obvious ones on the ceiling. At the end of each hallway was a sideboard and a mirror, and Lucy always wondered if the mirrors were two-way mirrors and maybe had a camera behind them.
Before she could stop herself, Lucy knocked on the door to Room 1208.
'Housekeeping.'
Nothing. She knocked again, repeated the word. Silence from within. She leaned closer to the door. There was no sound of a TV, a radio, a conversation. The general rule was two announcements, then enter.
Lucy tried one last time, got no response, then swiped her card, eased open the door.
'Housekeeping,' she said once more, her voice barely above a whisper. She slipped inside, let the door close behind her. It shut with a loud and final click, meaning that the lock had irrevocably registered that she was in Room 1208.
The room looked exactly the same as it had the last time. The minibar was untouched, the bed had not been slept in, the wastebasket beneath the desk was empty. She peeked into the bathroom. Nothing had been disturbed in there, either. The toilet paper was still in a point, the soaps wrapped. Sometimes the nicer guests tried to hang the towels back the way they were, but Lucy could always tell. They never got them exactly right. She could also tell if someone had taken a shower or bath, just by the smell, the damp sweetness of body gel and shampoo that hung in the air.
She stepped back to the door, put her ear to it, listened for sounds in the hallway. It was silent. She walked to the closet, opened the door. The garment bag hung there like a body at a gallows. She reached out slowly, turned over the ID tag, her hand shaking.
This bag belongs to George Archer.
Lucy felt a chill ripple through her body. His name was George Archer. All these years she had tried to imagine her kidnapper's name. Everyone had a name. Whenever she read a newspaper or a magazine, whenever she watched a movie or a TV show, whenever she was in a place like a doctor's office or the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and someone said a name out loud she wondered: Is that his name? Could that person be the man in her nightmares? Now she knew. George Archer. It was, at the same moment, the most benign and the most frightening name she'd ever heard.
She closed the closet door, walked quickly over to the dresser, her heart pounding. She eased open the bottom drawer. The same shirts were inside — one blue, one white, one white with thin gray stripes. She mind- printed the way they were arrayed in the drawer so she could put them back in precisely the same manner. She bunched the three shirts together, lifted them. They seemed almost hot to her touch. But when she looked beneath the shirts, she saw that the picture was gone.
Had she imagined it?
No. It had been there. She had never seen that particular photograph before, but she knew where it had been taken. It had been taken at the ice-cream parlor on Wilmot Street. It was a photo of her mother, and her mother was wearing the red pullover sweater that Lucy had taken from Sears at the mall.
Lucy turned, looked at the rest of the room. It suddenly seemed foreign, as if she had never been here before. She put the shirts back in the drawer, arranging them carefully. She noticed something in the pocket of the shirt on top, the blue one. It was a piece of paper, a piece of Le Jardin notepad paper.
Lucy slipped her fingers gently into the pocket, took out the paper. It read:
Meet me here on Sunday night at 9:30. Love, Lucy.
It was her handwriting.
It was a note she had written and had left in the room for Mr. Archer to find.
She looked at her watch. It was 9:28.
The room began to spin. It felt for a moment as though the floor beneath her was about to give way. She slammed the drawer shut. It no longer mattered if she didn't get everything back the way it was supposed to be. The only thing that mattered was getting out of this room.
She recoiled from the dresser as if it were on fire, and suddenly heard — the bell.
Her bell. Her special bell.
