Chapter 5: Fourteen

The records room door had a brand-new padlock on it, as thick as my wrist.

Someone had squeezed glue into the old keyhole underneath and let it harden.

I stood on B-level at six in the morning with my father's brass key in my hand and nowhere to put it.

Through the wire-glass window I could see steel shelves.

Empty, every one of them, all the way to the back wall.

"Told you," said the night supervisor, passing behind me with a laundry cart. "Nothing in there."

"Then why lock it?"

He didn't answer that.

I put the key back on the string around my neck, under my shirt.

By nine I had an office on the mezzanine with a dead fern and a window over the porte cochere.

By ten I had a login.

By eleven I had found Saltmarsh Holdings.

Saltmarsh had billed the Bellweather six point two million dollars since October for renovating the fourteenth floor.

Twelve suites. New bathrooms, new wiring, custom millwork from Louisiana.

Every invoice approved by Damon Halberd.

Every invoice paid within three days, which nobody in the hotel business has ever done for anyone.

The fourteenth floor had been closed to guests since November.

I took the service elevator up.

The doors opened on a hallway that smelled like old carpet and the sea.

The carpet was the same green-and-gold pattern I'd crawled across as a kid playing hide and seek.

No plastic sheeting. No tools. No dust.

I pushed open the door to 1404, the corner suite.

The wallpaper was peeling at the seams, the way it had been when I was in college.

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