“Marcy.” Terry was smiling at her. “Take it easy. You know what I tell the boys—one base at a time.”
“I want to ask you something,” Howie said. “Just a shot in the dark.”
“Ask away.”
“They claim to have all sorts of forensic evidence, although the DNA’s still pending—”
“That can’t come back a match,” Terry said. “It’s not possible.”
“I would have said that about the fingerprints,” Howie said.
“Maybe someone set him up,” Marcy blurted. “I know how paranoid that sounds, but…” She shrugged.
“But why?” Howie asked. “That’s the question. Can either of you think of someone who would go to such extraordinary lengths to do that?”
The Maitlands considered, one on each side of the scuffed Perspex, then shook their heads.
“Me, either,” Howie said. “Life rarely if ever imitates the novels of Robert Ludlum. Still, they’ve got evidence strong enough for them to have rushed into an arrest I’m sure they now regret. My fear is that, even if I can get you out of the machine, the shadow of the machine may remain.”
“I was thinking about that most of last night,” Terry said.
“I’m still thinking about it,” Marcy said.
Howie leaned forward, hands clasped. “It would help if we had some physical evidence to match theirs. The Channel 81 tape is fine, and when you add in your colleagues, it’s probably all we need, but I’m greedy. I want more.”
“Physical evidence from one of the busiest hotels in Cap City, and four days later?” Marcy asked, unaware that she was echoing Bill Samuels not long before. “That seems unlikely.”
Terry was looking off into space, brows drawn together. “Not entirely unlikely.”
“Terry?” Howie asked. “What are you thinking about?”
He looked around at them, smiling. “There might be something. There just might be.”
15
The Firepit was indeed open for brunch, so Ralph went there first. Two of the staff who had been working on the night of the murder were currently on duty: the hostess and a crewcut waiter who looked about old enough to buy a beer. The hostess was no help (“We were mobbed that night, Detective”), and while the waiter vaguely remembered serving a large group of teachers, he was equivocal when Ralph showed him Terry’s picture from the previous year’s FCHS yearbook. He said that, yes, he “sorta” remembered a guy who looked like that, but he couldn’t swear it was the guy in the picture. He said he wasn’t even sure the guy had been with that bunch of teachers. “Hey, man, I might have just served him a Hot Wing Platter at the bar.”
So that was that.
Ralph’s luck at the Sheraton was at first no better. He was able to confirm that Maitland and William Quade had stayed in room 644 on Tuesday night, and the hotel manager was able to show him the bill, but it was Quade’s signature. He had used his MasterCard. The manager also told him that room 644 had been occupied every night since Maitland and Quade checked out, and had been cleaned every morning.
“And we offer turn-down service,” said the manager, adding insult to injury. “That means on most days the room was cleaned twice.”
Yes, Detective Anderson was welcome to review the security footage, and Ralph did it without any complaints about how Alec Pelley had already been allowed to do so. (Ralph was not a Cap City police officer, which meant diplomacy was the better part of valor.) The footage was in full color, and sharp—no elderly Zoney’s Go-Mart cameras for the Cap City Sheraton. He saw a man who looked like Terry in the lobby, in the gift shop, doing a quick Wednesday morning workout in the hotel’s fitness room, and outside the hotel ballroom, waiting in the autograph line. The stuff from the lobby and gift shop was iffy, but there could be little doubt—at least in his mind—that the guy signing in to use the exercise equipment and the guy waiting in line for an autograph was his son’s old coach. The one who’d taught Derek to bunt, thus changing his nickname from Swiffer to Push It.
In his mind, Ralph could hear his wife telling him that forensic evidence from Cap City was the missing piece, the Golden Ticket. If Terry was here, she’d said—meaning in Flint City, committing murder—then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
“None of it makes sense,” he muttered, looking at the monitor. On it was a frozen image of a man who certainly looked like Terry Maitland, caught laughing about something as he stood in the autograph line with his department head, Roundhill.
“Pardon?” asked the hotel dick who had shown him the footage.
“Nothing.”
“Can I show you anything else?”
“No, but thanks.” This had been a fool’s errand. The Channel 81 tape of the lecture had pretty much rendered the security footage moot, anyway, because it was Terry during the Q-and-A. No one could doubt it.
Except in one corner of his mind, Ralph still did. The way Terry had stood to ask his question, as if he’d known that a camera would be on him… it was just so goddam perfect. Was it possible that the whole thing was a set-up? An amazing but ultimately explicable act of legerdemain? Ralph didn’t see how it could be, but he didn’t know how David Copperfield had walked through the Great Wall of China, and Ralph had seen that on TV. If it was so, Terry Maitland wasn’t just a murderer, he was a murderer who was laughing at them.
“Detective, just a heads-up,” said the hotel dick. “I’ve got a note from Harley Bright—he’s the boss—saying all the stuff you just looked at is supposed to be saved for a lawyer named Howard Gold.”
“I don’t care what you do with it,” Ralph said. “Mail it off to Sarah Palin in Whistledick, Alaska, for all I care. I’m going home.” Yes. Good idea. Go home, sit in his backyard with Jeannie, split a six with her—four for him, two for her. And try not to go crazy thinking about this goddam paradox.
The dick walked him to the door of the security office. “News says you got the guy who killed that kid.”
“News says a lot of things. Thank you for your time, sir.”
“Always a pleasure to help the police.”
If only you had, Ralph thought.
He halted on the far side of the lobby, hand out to push the revolving door, struck by a thought. There was one other place he should check, as long as he was here. According to Terry, Debbie Grant had booked for the women’s room as soon as Coben’s lecture ended, and she had been gone a long time. I went down to the newsstand with Ev and Billy, Terry had said. She met us there.
The newsstand, it turned out, was a kind of auxiliary gift shop. An overly made-up woman with graying hair was behind the counter, rearranging bits of inexpensive jewelry. Ralph showed her his ID and asked her if she had been working the previous Tuesday afternoon.
“Honey,” she said, “I work here every day, unless I’m sick. I don’t get anything extra from the books and magazines, but when it comes to this jewelry and the souvenir coffee cups, I’m on commission.”
“Would you remember this man? He was here last Tuesday with a bunch of English teachers, for a lecture.” He showed her Terry’s picture.
“Sure, I remember him. He asked about the Flint County book. First one to do that in Jesus knows how long. I didn’t stock it, the darn thing was here when I started running this place back in 2010. I should take it down, I guess, but replace it with what? Anything way above or way below eye-level doesn’t move, you find that out quick running a place like this. At least the stuff down low is cheap. That top shelf is your expensive stuff with photographs and glossy pages.”