Mrs. Caulfield leaned forward, lowering her voice like a conspirator sharing secret plans. “But the next morning, when I was checking out of the hotel,” she told them, drawing out each word, “I saw an exterminator’s truck pulling up.”
“And this happened during your third stay?” Brianna asked. Sometimes, she’d found, events seemed to link up in a witness’s mind, yielding information that the witness didn’t even know they possessed.
“Yes!” Mrs. Caulfield declared excitedly. And then, suddenly, her face clouded over. “Oh, goodness, you don’t think—” The woman’s hazel eyes widened in complete horror.
There was no way the woman had heard people in the walls, Jackson thought. But she looked so appalled, he felt sorry for her.
“Most likely what you heard were rats in the walls,” he told Mrs. Caulfield. “They can make a lot of noise and sound like they’re everywhere.”
Mrs. Caulfield nodded, allowing Jackson to calm her.
“Rats,” she echoed. “Yes, you’re right. That’s probably it,” she agreed, her eyes darting back and forth between Jackson and his partner. “That young man at the desk probably didn’t want to admit that was the problem. Bad publicity and all that.”
“So there’s nothing else that you can recall that seemed out of the ordinary?” Brianna asked.
Mrs. Caulfield shook her head. “No, nothing. I even called all the guests who had attended Katie’s wedding and asked them if they had a good time. Funny thing, I never got an answer from Tina.”
“Tina?” Brianna repeated, wondering if this was just another rambling sidebar the woman was going to launch into.
The strawberry-blond head bobbed up and down. “Tina Rutherford. She was my husband’s young cousin. Flirty little thing,” Mrs. Caulfield confided nonjudgmentally, then chuckled. “It looked like she and one of the other guests were really connecting. I even tried calling her a second time a couple of days later to find out how that turned out, but she never returned my call,” Mrs. Caulfield concluded with a resigned sigh.
“Didn’t that concern you or your husband?” Jackson asked.
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Caulfield assured him. “Tina was given to taking off on a whim. We just thought that Tina was just being Tina, that’s all.”
“Did you ever hear from her after that?” Brianna asked her.
Mrs. Caulfield thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, no. But then, we weren’t close or anything,” she explained quickly.
“Did she come to your husband’s funeral?” Brianna pressed.
“We couldn’t reach her to tell her. Her phone had been disconnected by then,” Mrs. Caulfield answered.
Brianna exchanged looks with Jackson. She could see that he appeared to be thinking the same thing: that they had, just possibly, stumbled across the name of one of the victims unearthed by the wrecking ball.
“Roberta,” Jackson said in a conversational tone, “we have a few more questions for you.”
“Of course, of course,” she said quickly, adding, “Anything I can do to help, just name it.” Her eyes shifted between them. It was obvious that she could barely contain herself. “This is so exciting—awful,” she was quick to add, “but exciting.”
Beaming, the older woman pushed the platter of chocolate chip cookies closer to the handsome young detective.
* * *
“I think she was actually batting her eyes at me,” Jackson said as he and Brianna left the woman’s homey little apartment almost forty-five minutes later.
Brianna pretended to consider his observation. “Could have been the sunlight making her squint,” she deadpanned.
She expected Jackson to respond curtly, but instead, as they reached his vehicle, he said, “By the way, thanks for the save.”
Brianna got in on the passenger side. “Come again?”
“Telling her that I couldn’t have too much sugar,” he reminded her. “Quick thinking.”
She looked at him, stunned. Muldare was actually complimenting her. She was close to speechless for a moment.
“Those had to be the worst cookies I’ve ever had,” he said, starting up his car. As he pulled out, he asked, “How did you eat two of those things?”
Brianna shrugged. “I felt sorry for her, and I have a cast-iron stomach.” She paused, thinking about the information they’d managed to glean. “So what do you think? Was Tina Rutherford one of the hotel killer’s victims?”
“The hotel killer?” he repeated. “You’ve labeled him?”
“For now, until something better comes along. So what do you think about Cousin Tina?”
“She could have been a victim,” he allowed. “Or maybe she never called back because she just didn’t want to risk having to eat any of Mrs. Caulfield’s cookies.”
Brianna humored him for a second. “A definite possibility.” And then she grew serious. “But I’m still going to have Valri in the computer lab see if she can track down this woman from the information that Mrs. Caulfield gave us.”
“Meanwhile—” he indicated the list of names that sat on his dashboard “—we’ve still got all these people to talk to.”
Brianna slanted a wicked look in his direction. “Good thing we don’t have to do it on an empty stomach,” she said.
Jackson groaned. He could swear that his gut was grumbling in protest over the cookie he’d been forced to ingest. “Don’t remind me,” he said.
* * *
The rest of the morning and afternoon were one huge blur as she and Jackson systematically went down the list, interviewing as many of the former hotel guests who currently resided in Aurora as they could.
A number of other guests lived in the outlying cities. Brianna decided that they would get to those people after they’d had the opportunity to talk to the ones who lived in the immediate area.
The guests who now lived out of state would get phone-call interviews. Brianna didn’t feel that phone calls were as effective as face-to-face interviews, but for now the phone calls would have to do—unless the phone call caused a red flag to go up.
This, she told Jackson, was the plan for now. He went along with it.
Over the course of that
