Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Sixty-Three

With no car and no job, Josie sat on a bench across the street from the station house, staring at what just hours ago had been her domain. Her mind raced as her body went numb. Heinrich was dead. Her childhood bogeyman was gone. Finally. How many times had she wished for him to be punished for what he’d intended to do to her? Even though Needle had saved her from going into that bedroom, she still had nightmares about what might have been. She had to admit to feeling a small sense of peace now that this monster had been vanquished. But mostly she felt empty. Heinrich’s death changed nothing. Her soul remained scarred. He wasn’t, after all, the one who had made the deal. Lila had.

She tried to shift her focus away from the conflicting feelings raging inside. Lila was still out there, working to destroy Josie’s life; and then there was Trinity. There were at least a half-dozen things she needed to do immediately, but she had no transportation. It would take a couple of days for her vehicle to be returned to her, and she had a feeling that Tara would do all she could to stretch that timeframe even longer. She didn’t even have a way to get home, or to Noah’s to pick up the things she had left there. Her texts to Trinity went unanswered, and when she called Trinity’s cell phone, it went straight to voicemail. Josie didn’t leave a message.

“Boss?”

She looked up to see Sergeant Lamay standing beside the bench. She hadn’t even noticed him leaving the station house or crossing the street.

“I’m not your boss anymore, Lamay,” she said.

“Would you say we’re friends then?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go—” She stopped, blinking to bring him into focus, concentrating on his eyes, which glinted with mischief. “I mean, of course we’re friends, Dan.”

He held out a set of keys to her. “Then the mayor wouldn’t have an issue with me lending my friend my car. Right, Josie?”

Josie couldn’t help the grin that spread across her face. As her hands closed around the keys, tears of gratitude stung the backs of her eyes. Her arm froze in midair, keys jangling. “Wait,” she said. “I can’t borrow your car. You need it. Your wife has chemo—”

“My daughter is away at college,” Lamay interrupted. “She left her car at our house. We’ll just use that until you get yours back. My wife and I pay the insurance on it anyway.”

Before she could think about it, she leapt to her feet and squeezed Lamay in a quick hug. “Thank you, Dan,” she said. “I won’t forget this.”

She drove to the Eudora, sneaking past a long line of people waiting to check in at the front desk, and made her way up to Room 227. She banged on the door several times, but there was no answer, and Josie could hear no movement behind the door. Back in the lobby, Josie waited behind the last guest in line. Once the concierge had checked the man in, Josie stepped up. The young blond man with the permanent toothy smile recognized her at once, the genial look in his eyes instantly replaced with contempt. She had stood in this very spot six months ago while working a case involving a casino mogul who had rented out the hotel’s penthouse.

“Chief Quinn,” the man sneered, his painted-on customer service smile still in place. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Her suspension hadn’t been made public, and the concierge hadn’t asked for her credentials. “I’m here for a welfare check on one of your guests—Trinity Payne in Room 227. I tried knocking on her door. There’s no answer. No one has heard from her in twenty-four hours, and we have reason to believe she might be in trouble.”

He eyed her skeptically. “Well, if you’ve knocked on her door, and she didn’t answer, there’s not much more I can do to help you, I’m afraid.”

“You can have someone on your staff check the room,” Josie said.

“We don’t like to violate the privacy of our guests.”

“I’m not asking you to violate the privacy of one of your guests, I’m asking you to check and make sure she’s not dead or injured inside that room. What is hotel policy, by the way, if you believe one of your guests may be in imminent danger? How many hours are you required to wait before you check inside the room?”

His fake smile never faltered and yet, somehow, he managed to glare at her. “Is it the Denton Police Department policy to send the chief of police to do welfare checks?” he asked.

Josie leaned her elbows onto the counter, moving closer to him. “Trinity Payne is a close personal friend of mine. She’s also a bit of a celebrity, as I’m sure you know. If she is, in fact, injured or dead inside her room, do you really want to bear the scrutiny of nationwide press because you refused to allow the police to do a proper welfare check when they made it clear to you that Ms. Payne may be in danger?” Josie read off an invisible headline above his head. “Concierge refuses welfare check. National news reporter, Trinity Payne, dies. I can see that going viral.”

With a sigh, he tapped the keyboard of the computer. Then a keycard appeared in his hand. “Let me have my associate take you to her room.” He made a phone call, and five minutes later a different man led Josie back to room 227.

Wordlessly, he let her into the room and stood by the door with his hands clasped at his waist while he watched Josie nose around. The bathroom and closet were clear. Trinity wasn’t there. Josie felt both reassured and anxious. She hadn’t really expected to find Trinity’s dead body in the hotel room, but she was relieved all the same. But if Trinity wasn’t in her hotel room, then where the hell was she? Where had she gone after killing Heinrich?

“Are you finished?” the man asked.

“Just a second,” Josie said. Trinity’s open suitcase lay across the bed. On the small circular table in the corner of the room was a closed laptop, a Gucci purse, a set of car keys, and Trinity’s phone. The sight of her phone sent a prickle up Josie’s spine. Trinity never went anywhere without her phone. Josie pulled a pair of latex gloves from her jacket pocket—even as chief, the habit had never died—snapped them on, and picked up Trinity’s phone, pressing its power button to bring up the lock screen. It asked for a password.

Josie had no idea what Trinity might use as her password, and she couldn’t spend much time trying to think of it. Tara was clearly focused on Josie for Heinrich’s murder, but Josie knew that once she let Gretchen and Noah out of her sight, their first line of inquiry would be Trinity Payne. They’d be on her heels any moment. Gretchen would know how to get the phone unlocked, Josie was certain.

Josie turned to the man. “I’m going to need to see your CCTV of this hallway, the entrance, and possibly the parking lot.”

The man looked bored. “Let’s go back to the lobby,” he told her. “I’ll call the manager.”

The manager, a balding blond man in his forties, was both more personable and more helpful than both the concierge and the man who had let Josie into Trinity’s room. He didn’t ask for her credentials either, and within moments of meeting him, Josie understood why. “I saw you on TV after the Lloyd Todd arrest,” he said. “You’re much more attractive in person—and I don’t mean that in an inappropriate way.”

Josie smiled uncomfortably as they stood behind one of his staff members in the CCTV room behind the lobby, waiting for the young woman to pull up any footage of Trinity she could find. The manager prattled on, “Anyway, I just wanted to personally thank you. My son has been hooked on drugs for years now. We haven’t been able to help him. Turns out his dealer was one of Todd’s guys. Soon as those guys were arrested, my son went into rehab.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Josie said.

“Who knows if he’ll stick with it, but we’re very hopeful. You know, since the day he was born, he was always giving us trouble.”

Before the manager could launch into the story, the employee seated in front of the screens said, “Here you go—she left her room yesterday afternoon around two p.m.”

On screen, they watched Trinity emerge from her hotel room wearing the same clothes she had on in the Heinrich surveillance. She held nothing in her hands as she rushed down the hallway. At the elevators, she pressed the down button frantically and was through the doors before they were even fully open.

“Here she is in the lobby,” the woman said, pointing to a different screen. Both Josie and the hotel manager watched as Trinity exited the elevator in the lobby. She made a beeline for the door, walking so fast she was nearly jogging.

“And here she is in the parking lot,” the employee added. She indicated three of the other screens, and they watched Trinity make her way through the parking lot to the outermost edge of the camera’s view, where she walked rapidly off-screen. “I’m afraid that’s it,” the woman said. “That’s as far as these cameras go.”

Where had Trinity been rushing off to without her phone or car keys or even a purse?

“What about the rest of the day and night? Can you see if she ever came back to her room?” Josie asked.

The employee turned her attention to the screen showing the hallway outside of Trinity’s room, fast-forwarding the footage until it caught up to present time. Trinity never returned.

Josie turned to the hotel manager. “Thank you for your help,” she said. “My colleagues will be back to collect some evidence. If you hear from Ms. Payne, please call the police department immediately.”

“Of course,” he said.

As Josie drove out of the parking lot in Sergeant Lamay’s ten-year-old Camry, she passed Gretchen with a patrol car trailing behind her. Neither Gretchen nor the patrol officer even glanced her way.