elevators. Lyle propped up the wall next to the stairs. Russ tried to look relaxed, but there wasn’t any way to disguise two cops hanging around waiting for someone to show. The blond mother-daughter pair stared as they gathered up their tiny purses and headed for the door. Lyle waggled his fingers and winked. Jesus. That guy would hit on anything.
The elevator dinged. He tensed, but it was only an elderly couple, who looked at him warily and sidled past him before heading downstairs to the spa. He resumed his watch. He envisioned Nichols collecting his wallet and his key card. Maybe putting his shoes back on. Leaving the room. Walking down to the elevator. Pressing the button. Waiting. Waiting.
The elevator dinged again. The far set of doors opened, but no one stepped out. Russ strode toward the car, slapping his hand against the side of the door to keep it from closing, but there was no need. The thing was empty. He glanced over at Lyle, who ducked around the corner of the stairs. He reappeared a few seconds later. Shrugged.
Russ crossed the expanse of lobby again, making for the manager’s office. LeBlanc met him at the door. “Did you reach him?” he asked.
“Yes, right after you and I talked. He said he’d be right down.” She glanced at the thin gold watch on her wrist. “He should have made it by now. Do you want me to try him again?”
“No. Can you shut down the elevators for a few minutes?” She blanched, then nodded and disappeared into her office. When she came back, she dangled a rectangular metal key from her ring. “Follow me,” he said. “He’s not coming down,” he told Lyle.
“Stairs or elevator?”
“I’ll take the stairs. Ms. LeBlanc”-he turned to the manager-“I want you to shut down every elevator except the one Deputy Chief MacAuley is using. Got it?”
“I’m coming with you.” Before Russ could object, she went on. “I’m the manager. What happens here is my responsibility.”
He compressed his lips. “All right-but stay behind Lyle, and do what he says.” She nodded. They headed for the elevator bank. Russ hit the stairs.
If it had been ten years ago, he would have taken the steps two at a time. If it had been two years ago-well, no, two years ago he’d been in a bed in the Washington County Hospital, recovering from two.357 bullets in his chest and one in his thigh, but the rehab and the PT and the exercise program his therapist had put him on had left him in the best shape he’d been in since leaving the army. His heart rate was up, and his knees twinged, but he could make five stories without breaking a sweat. As long as he wasn’t trying to carry Clare at the same time.
The interior stairwell terminated at the fifth floor, which was just what he wanted to see. No way to go but down. He pushed through the heavy door into the hallway, in time to see Lyle and the manager walking toward him. Lyle’s face was grim. “He’s flown.”
“How?” He frowned at LeBlanc. “Could he have cut the door alarms downstairs?”
She shook her head. “They’re wired into the electrical system, not after-market add-ons. We’d have to have a complete power failure to turn them off.”
“Then he’s got to be hiding in the stairwell on the other side of the building.”
“Or he’s on one of the other floors.” Lyle’s face creased in frustration. “The two of us aren’t going to be able to smoke him out. We can’t cover all the exits.”
“The only way out is through the lobby or one of the alarmed fire doors. We can-”
“Oh, no.” Barbara LeBlanc slapped her hand over her mouth. “There is another way.” She shouldered through the stairwell door, kicked off her heels, and scooped them up one-handed.
“What?” Russ followed her.
“The second floor.” She hiked her already short skirt up and bounded down the stairs two at a time. Russ and Lyle clattered after her, their boots thudding and echoing up and down the stairwell. “We have a collection room there,” she shouted, already a flight and a half ahead of them. “So we don’t have to haul loads of dirty linens through the lobby.”
She was out the second-floor doorway before she could say any more. Russ burst though, Lyle right behind him. LeBlanc was pelting noiselessly down the hall, the thick carpeting absorbing even the vibrations of her passage. They caught up with her as she skidded to a halt in front of an unmarked door next to the elevator. She snapped the key ring off her waist and thrust a plastic card into the flat lock pad. The door clicked.
A teen in a maid’s uniform looked up from a rolling cart, her hands full of tiny soaps. The collection room was the size of a guest bedroom, lined with towers of toilet paper and gallon jugs of disinfectant. Canvas-and-steel cleaning carts jammed end to end, filling the center of the room. In the back corner, Russ could see white-painted double metal doors. A freight elevator.
“Kerry,” LeBlanc said, “did a man come through here?”
“Yeah. Just a few minutes ago. He said he was security.” She stared at Russ and Lyle. “Did I… should I have…?”
“Don’t worry about it.” LeBlanc weaved through the carts to the elevator.
“Where does this go?” Russ asked as she jabbed at the button.
“Broadway. The main behind-the-scenes corridor in the basement. It opens onto the kitchen, shipping and receiving, the employees’ lounge-”
“Could he get out from there?” Lyle asked.
“Yes. The employees’ exit and the door next to receiving are exterior-locking only. You can’t lock them from the inside.”
The elevator doors rattled open. Unlike the wood-and-mirror-paneled guest elevators, the service car was lined with hanging furniture pads. Russ and Lyle followed LeBlanc in.
“No alarms?” Russ said.
“No, of course not.”
Russ pointed to the walkie-talkie hanging off her waist. “Check in with the departments he might have reached from Broadway.”
The manager twisted the mike off its clip and triggered it. By the time the elevator shuddered to a stop, she had confirmed that no one had seen a stranger going through the kitchen, the receiving dock, or the spa.
“He must have split out the employees’ exit,” Lyle said. They stepped out into a concrete-floored corridor, inadequately lit by long fluorescent tubes high overhead, crowded on either side by crates and canisters stacked three and four atop one another. It looked like a pessimistic paranoid’s bomb shelter.
“I don’t understand how he found the collection room in the first place,” LeBlanc said. “There’s nothing to indicate it. It doesn’t appear on any of the hotel maps.”
“He was looking for it.” Russ didn’t like the level of thought and preparation that went into Nichols’s flight. In his experience, innocent men didn’t make escape plans.
“The employees’ exit is this way.” LeBlanc led them to where the corridor T-stopped at a set of steel doors. “This is the kitchen.” She pointed. “Employees’ exit to the right, stairs to the spa and the lobby to the left.”
“This place is blown,” Lyle said. “He’s headed for his vehicle.”
Russ nodded. “Get to your unit. Have Harlene send a car to Tally McNabb’s house. I’ll take the back way.” Lyle jogged toward the stairs. “Thanks, Ms. LeBlanc. I don’t think he’ll come back here, but if you spot him, let us know.” Russ turned toward the employees’ exit.
“It’s always exciting seeing you, Chief,” she called after him.
The employees’ way out was another nondescript door, marked only by a red exit sign and a litter of papers and posters taped on either side. Russ walked into blinding sunshine-no columned portico on this side-and found himself on a gravel path wide enough to accommodate a golf cart. It curved through manicured grass until it rose and disappeared into the trees that ringed the resort. The employee parking lot was somewhere back there, he guessed, tucked out of sight of the guests whose rooms overlooked the rear of the spa.
Would Nichols have stashed his vehicle there? He doubted it. Easier and less obtrusive to park in front. A quicker exit if things went south. He jogged up the walkway as far as the corner of the building, then struck out across the grass. He stayed tight to the hotel, avoiding the rock gardens and flower beds scattered across the lush lawn.
At the front of the hotel, a solid, waist-high yew hedgerow separated him from the looping drive. It was there he finally saw Nichols, in khakis and a polo shirt, a windbreaker in one hand, a leather-and-canvas attache case in
