“Gee, thanks.” His lips moved against her neck, sending goose bumps over her sensitive skin.
“Even when I’m being impatient, I always love you.”
“That’s good to know, because I always love you, too. It was hard to watch you suffering when Ethan was missing.”
“Thank you for staying with me through it all.”
“Nowhere else I want to be. Ever.”
* * *
After spending hours at the hotel reviewing the results of the canvass and speaking to the hotel manager—and what a joy that had been—Freddie was now back at HQ and sitting with Sergeant Walters as they reviewed the video from the lobby and sixth-floor hallway. He’d never given much thought to how tedious it was to sift through hours of video until he offered to help Walters and found out how mind-numbing the process could be.
“How do you guys do this all day, every day?” he asked as he stifled a yawn.
“You get used to it.”
“I’m not sure I would. I’m cross-eyed after a couple of hours.”
Walters chuckled and then sat up a little straighter. “Cruz, look at this.”
Freddie rolled his chair closer to Walters’s desk and leaned in for a closer look at a man in a black hoodie with a black knit hat entering the lobby. He was tall, thin, white and had acne on the lower part of his face. Freddie noted that he kept his sunglasses on as he made his way to the elevators.
They lost him when he was inside the elevator but were able to match the time stamp on the sixth-floor footage to see him stepping into the hallway and making his way to Carver’s room. He knocked on the door and was admitted.
“That’s our guy,” Freddie said with the rush of excitement that came with identifying a suspect, even if they were a long way from having what they needed to issue an arrest warrant.
They watched the sixth-floor footage, waiting for something to happen, for close to thirty minutes before Dale Carver emerged from the room, ice bucket in hand, and made his way toward the ice room.
“Wait a minute,” Freddie said.
“The guy is still in his room when Dale goes to get the ice?”
“I didn’t see him leave.”
“So that’s not our guy.”
They watched Dale walk down the carpeted hallway and enter the ice room.
Freddie stared without blinking, waiting to see someone approach, but that never happened. “The killer was waiting for him inside the ice room.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“Can we back up the hallway footage to get to where we can see the person go into the room?”
“Yep.” Walters reversed the video by ten minutes, looking for the moment when someone entered that room to wait for Dale. When they didn’t see anyone, he went back further until they saw a shadowy figure dressed similarly to the other guy emerge from the stairwell and duck into the ice room. At no time could they see his face, which meant he’d been there before and figured out where the cameras were. Shortly after Dale entered the ice room, the man left as efficiently as he’d entered and escaped down the stairwell.
“This was a setup. Two guys working together. Take me back to Dale’s room from the time he left to get the ice.”
They watched his door until it slowly opened. The guy in the dark clothing took a look up and down the hallway before he left Dale’s room and went down the same stairwell the other guy had used.
Freddie rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. “Well, now we know how it went down. What doesn’t make sense to me—well, in addition to the murder, which will never make sense—was why did the guy in the room leave the heroin? If this was a drug deal gone south, why wouldn’t he take the product?”
“Maybe the whole point was to show what Dale had been up to before he was killed.”
“Yeah, that’s possible, but who would care enough about a recovering addict to want to set him up that way?”
They glanced at each other.
