Judgment

29

It was past midnight, but she was wide awake. A terrible panic had seized her, electrified her blood. The Honda Accord hurtled along the Mass. Turnpike. It was not the route she’d have taken, but she was too distraught to say anything to the Lyft driver. Was she leaping to conclusions? Might she have dropped her sunglasses in her car? She was pretty sure she hadn’t. She kept her car tidy and would have noticed. No, she was increasingly certain that they’d fallen out in the hotel room and were still there, probably under the desk.

Assuming the police hadn’t been called, she was then faced with the problem of getting into the hotel room. That was a tough one. All the housekeepers would have left for the day. Hotel security? A low-cost, bare-minimum hotel like the Home Stay Inn probably didn’t have security. Just someone at the front desk.

Well, there had to be a way. She would figure something out.

From a block away she saw the flashing blue lights of the police cruisers double-parked in front of the hotel.

Her mouth went dry. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “Can you take me back to Boston?”

The driver, a Vietnamese man with an unusually wrinkled face, gave her a baffled look and pulled a U-turn on the deserted street.

Her thoughts raced. The housekeeper must have notified her manager, who called the police. She was pretty sure it would be treated by the police like a possible homicide, the room designated a crime scene.

Her sunglasses. Even a rudimentary search of the room would turn them up. But they wouldn’t know whose they were, would they? There was no way to connect them to her. Was there?

Fingerprints. Her prints were all over the sunglasses. And her ten prints had been in the system since she joined the US Attorney’s office, however many years ago. It might not happen immediately, but the crime scene techs would put the glasses in an evidence bag and run the prints, and her name would come right up. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in the next few days. Then she would be connected to Matías Sanchez no matter what she did.

She stared out the window at the whizzing cars, the streaking lights. What a goddamned rookie mistake it was to go back to his hotel room! She was finding it hard to think clearly. Were there any strings to pull? Somehow she had to keep her name out of this investigation. Was that even possible?

The worlds of the Boston Police and the Superior Court barely overlapped, except when a cop wanted a warrant approved. She wouldn’t know whom in the police to call. And what could she hope to accomplish? The police would want to know why her sunglasses were there. The housekeeper had surely already told the police that she’d discovered the body while letting in a woman who claimed to be his wife. It wouldn’t take long for the police to figure out she’d been in his room earlier that day. They’d want to question her; she couldn’t get around that. They’d want to know why she’d been there.

What kind of an answer could she give them? Anything she told them would drag her in, force her to disclose what had happened, and that had to be avoided at all costs.

If she made calls to anyone, she’d just be incriminating herself. There was nothing she could do.

By the time she arrived back at the Ritz and took the elevator to the seventh floor, it was almost one in the morning. Martie, who’d given her a key, had left a few lights on for her. Lucy barked a few times, shrilly, but then, fortunately, stopped. She flipped off the lights and found her bedroom, and very quickly she was asleep.