“Can I help you find something?” she asked him.
“Some place to sit might be helpful,” he answered, still looking around.
“And I suppose you want a desk to go with that,” Brianna quipped.
Jackson stopped scanning the area and instead glanced at her. “I see that you still have that droll sense of humor.”
“I’ve got something better than that. I’ve got a chair and a desk for you. It’s right over there.” She pointed to it. “Come with me.”
He fell into place behind her. “Don’t have much choice, do I?”
“Nope.” She led Jackson over to a desk a couple of aisles over from her own. Gesturing toward it, she asked, “How’s this?”
Jackson surveyed the desk. “Isn’t someone sitting there?”
“Yes, you, for the next two weeks,” Brianna answered.
He frowned. “How about the person who goes with the papers, the books and those photos over there?” he asked, gesturing toward a couple of framed photographs on the side of the desk.
“That would be Will Jefferies. Right now he’s at a seminar, his eyes glazing over, for a week, and then he goes on vacation for another week.”
Jackson eyed her skeptically. “So you think we’re solving this in two weeks?”
“Hopefully,” Brianna responded. “If not, then we’ll find another empty desk for you. And we’ll keep on finding empty desks until we solve this damn thing.” She saw Jackson dubiously eyeing the cluttered desk. “Just put all that either on the floor or in the drawers. He’s certainly not going to mind.”
“What about his computer?” Jackson pointed out. “Isn’t it password protected?”
Brianna pressed her lips together to suppress a laugh. “Jefferies wouldn’t know a password if it bit him. That’s part of the reason he’s away, taking that seminar.” That problem solved, she began to turn away. “I’ll let you get settled in. I need to talk to Del Campo to find out if he had any luck tracking down the hotel’s last guest lists.”
“Wait,” he called after her. She stopped and half turned, waiting. “Settling in will take me less than five minutes,” he said. “What do you want me to do after that?”
A smile slowly spread across her lips. “You could try calling your brother back.”
Brianna walked away before he could respond to that. She was fairly sure that he wasn’t going to respond happily or politely.
“Any luck, Francisco?” Brianna asked as she approached Del Campo’s desk.
The detective swung his chair away from his computer to look at Brianna. The eight-year veteran of the force looked rather pleased with himself.
“Some,” he answered. “I tracked down the hotel’s last assistant manager. And before you ask, the hotel’s last manager died in a car accident a year and a half ago, so he wasn’t available for comment.”
“Not without a séance,” she quipped. “So, what did you get from the assistant manager?”
Del Campo laughed drily. “You mean besides attitude?”
“Why attitude?” she asked, perplexed.
Del Campo handled himself rather well. Unlike some detectives, he knew how to ask questions and get people talking, so the attitude couldn’t be in response to questions that Del Campo had asked.
“Suffice to say that Ryan Holt—that’s the assistant manager—didn’t have any glowing words of praise for the hotel’s owners.”
“Owners?” Brianna repeated. “Plural? I thought the hotel belonged to Winston Aurora.”
“Turns out that it belonged to all three of the Aurora brothers,” Del Campo informed her. “And they’re not quite as generous to their employees as they would like the world at large to believe.
“Half the time I talked with Holt, he was complaining about how small his salary had been, making the monthly pension he’s receiving now pretty paltry. Seems he wasn’t too keen about the benefits the Auroras paid their employees, either.”
She rested a hip on the corner of his desk, crossing her arms before her as she took the information in. “Do you think he might have been responsible for sealing in those bodies into the hotel walls?” she asked Del Campo. “Wouldn’t be the first time a disgruntled employee got back at his bosses by framing them for some kind of a crime.”
Francisco shook his head. “Not unless he had someone else doing the heavy work for him. The guy’s built like a giant toothpick. He would have had trouble dragging a five-pound bag of potatoes ten feet, much less depositing it behind a wall.”
Okay, so they’d struck out there. “Did he offer up anything useful?”
“Oh, yeah!” Del Campo answered with enthusiasm. “Seems that the guy hung on to every scrap of paper he put his name to when he worked at the hotel. I’ve got a ledger with the names of the last five years’ worth of guests to stay in it.” A wide smile broke out. “Hey, this might interest you,” he told her, thumbing through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “Two of the guests in that ledger were permanent.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that. “You mean that they had rooms reserved for them year-round?”
“No, they were in hotel rooms year-round,” Del Campo told her. Then he explained, “They lived in the hotel instead of in an apartment or house.”
“That’s kind of expensive,” she commented. “Not to mention kind of transient.”
“Well, it’s definitely too rich for me, but not for people who have money and enjoy being pampered and fussed over. Think about it. Someone makes your bed for you every day and cleans your suite the second you go out. You get room service if you don’t feel like eating in the hotel dining room. You don’t have to cook ever again. Hell, there are people who live on cruise ships all year round. Here at least you don’t risk getting seasick—or, more important, sinking,” he emphasized.
Brianna laughed as she shook her head. That way of life definitely did not appeal to her. Living in a hotel room or on a cruise ship would make her feel
