and managed, with trembling hands, to convince his computer that Michael and I should have it. I breathed more easily when he finally handed over a pair of card keys.
As I headed off to liberate our luggage from police custody, I passed the bridal party returning to the lobby. This time the husband was dragging both suitcases.
“‘Oh, no!’” the bride was saying, in a voice clearly intended to mimic her groom. “‘They’re not heavy; we can carry them ourselves.’”
“I’m sure it’ll be down that corridor,” her husband replied.
She stopped in the lobby, hands on hips, looking round and nodding, as if the scene before her summed up some long-festering doubt about the wisdom of the day’s proceedings.
“I’ll get directions,” her husband said, and began picking his way through the squatters. “Pardon me. Oh, sorry, sir; I didn’t mean to step on your light saber.”
His wife suddenly spotted something that made her jaw drop. Since I had paused to eavesdrop anyway, I sidled to a new vantage point where I could see what she was staring at.
A convention poster, with giant photos of Michael, Walker, and the QB arched across the top.
I frowned, and then realized, with a combination of relief and indignation, that she was gaping at Walker’s photo, not Michael’s. Well, to each her own. As I watched, she picked up her skirt at both sides and began sprinting down the corridor toward the ballroom.
“Jen?”
I turned to see the husband, still trailing the suitcases, looking around with a tired, puzzled expression on his face.
I shrugged, and continued on to our former room. Or the neighborhood of our former room, anyway. The POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape blocked the door. I stuck my head in one of the two nearby rooms that the police had commandeered for their operations center. The good-natured sergeant who seemed to be in charge told me that they’d packed our stuff and had it ready in the next room.
“Check it over,” he said, waving to the connecting door. “Let me know if you see anything we’ve missed.”
More useful to let me search our old room, I thought, but presumably that was against the rules.
While I was checking the luggage, as ordered, I heard voices in the other room: Detective Foley and his partner. Okay, I’m nosey. I stopped rummaging through the suitcases, kept very still, and strained to hear.
“—but I’m still in charge of this investigation,” Foley was saying, “and that’s not the way I think it should be handled.”
The partner, whose voice was less penetrating, said something I couldn’t decipher.
“Then he’s an ass,” Foley said.
I could hear the partner’s chuckle, but not what he said next.
“No, not at all,” Foley said. “If we make an arrest and the suspect still has it, it’ll be a nice little bit of circumstantial evidence. But odds are it’s history already. Or will be, pretty damned quick, if word gets out that we’re looking for it.”
Looking for what? Foley had the sort of nice, booming voice that’s every eavesdropper’s delight, but his attention to detail left much to be desired.
The partner rumbled again. Voice and diction lessons for that one, I fumed.
“You can tell him that I’m very suspicious of watches that stop at the time of death, convenient deathbed confessions, killers’ names scrawled in blood on the walls, and especially critical bits of evidence found clutched in the victim’s hand,” Foley said.
Ah. The comic book scrap.
“Anyway, we’re out of here,” Foley said. “I want to get an early start here tomorrow.”
I could hear him as he walked down the hall, complaining about how long it would take him to get home, and how much longer to get back here on Saturday morning. When he was safely out of earshot, I stuck my head in the other room.
“If there’s anything you missed, I’m too tired to notice,” I said. “Any chance you could call down for a bellhop to help me move the stuff?”
He not only called the desk for me, but when they told him it would take a while—maybe the bellhops were still in parrot awareness training—he offered to have the luggage moved. I left one of our new room key cards with him and went off with the other to find Michael.
Back in the ballroom, the concert was still in full swing. Up on stage, Walker was doing his best Mick Jagger impression, strutting and leaping about with manic energy. Several dozen women clung to the edge of the stage; including, I noticed with a sigh, one slender figure in a bridal gown whose trailing hem was getting a little ragged.
Maggie was still dancing with the energy of a teenager in the center of the dance floor. The Amazon security guard recognized me and passed me into the backstage area, which drew hisses and venomous stares from the women clustered near the stage.
Thank goodness, the police had finally released Michael.
“There you are,” he said, spotting me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I only just finished bullying the front desk into handing over the keys to the promised new room.”
“Great. Let’s go. Not that way,” he said, as I headed for the way I’d come in. “We’d never make it though the crowd. We can go the back way.”
“Will the back way lead us past the front desk?” I asked, yawning. “It just dawned on me that I have no idea where the new room is.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered,” Michael said. “Just tell me the room number.”
Since when had Michael become good at finding his way around this maze? But I didn’t have the energy to protest, so I just handed him the card key folder so he could see the room number.
Michael’s back way led through a narrow, shabby corridor into the kitchen, where Michael and the few employees on graveyard shift greeted each other like old friends. Another utilitarian hall led to a room where two middle-aged maids stood in front of a pair of washing machines, arguing in machine-gun Spanish. Michael asked directions in his slower but capable Spanish and one of the maids ended up escorting us to our new room, fuming the whole way at how
“It doesn’t have a balcony, and it’s not a crime scene, and odds are we won’t be awake long enough to care,” Michael said, as if he’d read my mind.
While Michael brushed his teeth, I copied the photos from the camera onto my laptop. I wasted some time trying to find a program that would let me look at them in larger than thumbnail size, but evidently my nephew Kevin hadn’t expected that I’d want to do anything with photos but send them to him. So that’s what I did. I managed to attach the two photos of the torn comic to an e-mail, telling Kevin enough about them to pique his interest without getting so graphic that my sister would object if she looked over his shoulder, and asking him to figure out a way for me to get some printed blowups.
Michael was asleep before I logged off, and I didn’t plan to be far behind him. Still, it was past 2:00 A.M. before I fell asleep. Thank goodness Michael didn’t have any panels until 11:00 A.M. Saturday, I thought, as I drifted off. I had to be in the dealers’ room at ten, but I needed much less prep time. So we could actually sleep in until nine. Which wasn’t all that great, considering how late we’d stayed up. Still, it was better than Friday morning.
The phone woke us up a little before eight.
Chapter 19
Michael pulled the pillow over his head. I growled, and reached for the phone.
