Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
“Gotta go,” he said.
Her eyes dropped to his laptop, but they came back to him when he bent to press a kiss to her lips.
“You’re good to—?” he began.
“Go,” she urged.
He didn’t delay.
He strode to the bedroom. He strapped on his guns and shrugged on his blazer.
Back to her, he slapped the laptop shut, nabbed it and gave her one last kiss before he prowled out the door.
He texted Moran in the elevator.
Then he got his key fob from the valet and jogged to his vehicle himself.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tracks
Moran was at the motel before he was.
Rus parked next to his cruiser and angled out of his SUV with his laptop under his arm.
“Got the key?” he asked.
Moran, who’d walked to Rus, held out a key with one of those large, old-fashioned, diamond-shaped, plastic, motel keychains.
Rus took it but moved to the hood of his SUV, opened his laptop on it and hit a button so it would wake. He typed in his password.
The email came up.
He stabbed a finger at it to indicate to Moran he needed to read it.
Then he jogged to room seven.
He yanked off the crime scene tape.
He opened the door, walked in and used his elbow to flip on the overhead light.
Brittanie gone. Plastic gone. The bed was rumpled, but otherwise, the room looked ready to rent.
To Rus, it still felt like death.
He walked straight through to the bathroom.
Above the toilet, a window. Opaque glass.
It was closed.
It was a sash.
It was also plenty big enough for a man to fit through.
And a woman.
In fact, you could stand, take a piss, and look at that cloudy glass right in front of you, and you didn’t have to be as tall as Rus.
Which meant you could get in without a ladder, the bottom ledge maybe three inches above the back of the toilet.
I was instructed to keep my window unlocked so they could get in…
I park at the back and walk all the way around on the outside so I don’t have to go by that crime scene tape.
The Seattle team didn’t fuck around, there was fingerprint powder all around the frame of the window and all over the toilet.
He pivoted and nearly ran into Moran.
“Jace is gonna fucking lose his mind,” Moran gritted.
He had Rus’s laptop under his arm.
“Yep. That’s why he can’t know.”
Moran’s head jerked in surprise.
Rus pushed through the sheriff and walked back outside, beyond his SUV, and stood in the middle of the parking lot.
Making slow circles, he took everything in.
The motel was L-shaped. Lobby in front, fourteen rooms, swimming pool with high chain link fence surrounding it. The pool was to the side but closer to the front of the property, better to be seen by cars passing by.
The lobby and nine rooms down the long side, five rooms down the foot of the L. Open breezeway at the angle where there were vending machines and ice.
Rooms big enough for two parking spots in front of both.
Sign out front by the street, about twenty feet from the front edge of the fence to the pool.
There was another chain link fence that closed off the motel property from the open-nature, grass-scrub-and-boulder-filled lot beyond the pool to the side. The fence ran the length of the property and ended before the steep incline of the mountain that was the backdrop of the motel.
One entrance from the street to the property. It was wide.
No true reception area for a car. No overhang. You parked in one of the spots outside the lobby to check in.
But the concrete that covered all the property the hotel sat on, save a narrow rectangle of grass around the decking of the pool, ran across the front of the building too.
This was how Brad drove around back to park his vehicle without having to pass Brittanie’s door.
Moran had joined him, and Moran silently followed when Rus jogged to the front of the motel and stopped.
The desk clerk on duty was watching them through the panorama windows.
Rus ignored her.
The lobby was all windows, but the ones to the side of the building, which would be the back of the units, were covered with display units that had pamphlets for local attractions and businesses. Also obscuring the view, from what he could see, there was a bulletin board covered likely with advertisements and event announcements.
You couldn’t see out those windows.
In the dark, you might not think there was anything to see from what was on that other side.
All that shit there would also muffle noise coming from that direction.
There was no additional street entrance on that side and nothing but nature that led to the sheer wall of another very steep mountain about twenty yards out. And by nature, he meant it was more tall grass, scrub, brush, and big boulders. Impossible to drive through, even if you had an ATV. A tank couldn’t make it through that mess.