I felt the blood drain from my face as I checked the clock on the home screen. “Is that the time?”
Vero glanced down at Marco’s phone. “Shit!” She sprang to her feet. “Shit,Finlay! What do we do?”
“We’re not going to panic,” I said, pacing the bathroom. Of course we were going to panic! The sun would be up in less than two hours, and Vero and I were in another hotel, using dead men’s body parts to raid their electronic devices. “We have to get back before the kids wake up.”
“What are we supposed to do with Marco and Louis?”
“I don’t know!” I sputtered as I looked around the bathroom. We were wearing hair caps and gloves, and we hadn’t left any fingerprints in the suite. We could still leave and take our chances that the local police would never know we’d been here, but that felt like a risky gamble.
“What would the heroine in your books do if she accidentally stumbled into a crime scene? How would she cover her tracks?”
“She’d probably burn the place down.”
“I’ll get the matches.”
“Vero! We are not fictional characters and this is not a book! We can’t burn down a building to cover our tracks! Ricky knows we were looking for Marco, the valet at Caesars knows we were on our way tothe Villagio, and the woman at the front desk downstairs will be able to identify us in a lineup. Not to mention the fact that an entire restaurant full of people heard you threaten to kill Marco.”
“So we’ll scrub down the crime scene and make it look like an accident.”
“There are handprints around the man’s neck!”
“Then we’ll just have to keep anyone from figuring out Marco’s dead.”
“What are you doing?” I asked as she tapped open Marco’s phone.
“I’m going to call the front desk and extend Marco’s reservation. I’ll say I’m Marco’s personal assistant, that he’s sick and he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Then we’ll put up theDNDsign so no one comes looking for him while we find Javi and get the hell out of town.”
A frantic laugh slipped out of me, probably so I wouldn’t cry. There was no running from this. Our only hope for saving ourselves was to figure out who really did this and turn the evidence over to the cops before anyone realized these guys were missing and the police could open an investigation of their own. But solving a double homicide would take time we didn’t have. By tomorrow, Marco and his friend would start to decompose, and the smell would draw more than flies. Unless we could come up with some way to… “Keep them cold,” I whispered.
Vero looked up as I typed a question into the search bar of my phone.What are the stages of decomposition of a corpse?I clickedEnterand skimmed the results.
Three days.We had three days before putrefaction set in.
I shot to my feet, my mind leaping ten chapters ahead of us as I hurried to the cleaning cart we’d left in the foyer. I rummaged through the compartments for a roll of plastic bags. What if we didn’t need to solve the mystery and catch the killer? What if we only needed time to write ourselves out of the scene? I ran back to the bathroom and tore several trash bags off the roll. “Quick, drain the bathwater,” I said, handing them to Vero.
“Why?”
“There’s an ice machine on every floor. Fill the bags. The longer we can keep the bodies cold, the more time we’ll buy ourselves.”
“To do what?” she asked as I unlocked the door.
“To come up with an alibi.”
Ten minutes later, the bathroom looked like a Halloween edition ofThe Hangover.We’d managed to lift Louis into the jacuzzi with Marco, then we’d filled the remaining space in the tub with ice cubes from the machine down the hall. The men’s eyes were half-open, their heads resting at odd angles. Marco’s toupee was hanging lopsided on his head, and Louis’s tie was slung over one of his shoulders. But they were cold, and for now, that was the best we could do.
Vero called down to the front desk to check on Marco’s reservation while I dragged the cleaning cart into the suite and used every tool in it to scrub the vanity and the floor.
“Okay,” she said as I finished and closed the bathroom door behind me. “We have the suite for three more days. That ought to be enough time for us to find Javi and get the hell out of town.”
“Good. I’m going to head back to the Royal Flush. Steven and my mother are probably worried sick.”
“What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to use Marco’s phone and Louis’s tablet to make it look like they’re both still alive.”
“Great idea,” she said, putting Marco’s phone in her pocket. “I’ll go all over town. Hit a couple of restaurants, some stores, maybe a few casinos. You know, just to keep up the illusion—”
“The only place you’re going is the ice machine,” I said firmly. “Keep the dog quiet and make sure no one comes in. Dead bolt the door behind me when I go.”
