‘If you want to walk out of here,’ Rader said, ‘and forget it, and I don’t hear from you in years, that doesn’t need to be the end. You know that.’
‘I do know that,’ she said. ‘You found any mob links?’
‘Still looking.’
‘What about that girl?’ Jill said. ‘You met her crew?’
Rader shook his head. ‘You said you’d found some information.’
Jill glanced around, leaned in. ‘You still need it, if there’s this hotel hit about to go down?’
‘Let’s hear it.’
She moved closer, gazing at Rader’s eyes. ‘This is straight from a couple of magazine articles. Maybe I’m covering old ground. He’s fifty-nine, born into a working-class community in Cleveland, Ohio to a single mom. Lack of college education didn’t stop him. The guy bought his first hotel at twenty-four with a loan from an unknown source.’
‘Anything on the source?’
‘It’s nowhere to be found,’ she said, ‘but I’d guess there’d be plenty dead-end roads leading into the underworld, if anybody wanted to try.’
‘Okay,’ Rader said. ‘What have you got that’s personal?’
‘There’s two ex-wives, one deceased—a recent suicide, by the way—and the other lives in Seattle with his three children. They’re totally estranged from him—he gave up on visitation rights—and there’s been a few quotes in the newspapers where they’ve expressed revulsion at their father. None of them are wealthy people, and they don’t want a penny of his $600 million fortune.’
Rader was silent now. He wondered about the effect on his mentality of having three children who hate him.
‘You feel like you know him yet?’ she said.
Rader nodded. ‘So what’s his weakness?’
‘He’s greedy. He loves admiration, attention. He craves publicity, even bad publicity. He makes enemies all the time. He has a monstrous ego and surrounds himself with young women to feed it on an hourly basis. He is almost entirely empty and lonely and—’
‘But what would wreck his judgment?’
‘He posts a lot of photos of himself on social media—in his hotels, in his helicopter, restaurants—and there’s usually at least one blond around him. In recent posts he always mentions a girl called Cathy Higgins.’
Rader thought about it. ‘Doesn’t mean anything.’
‘I ran a search, and it sounds like she dated a Pittsburgh guy called Tony Duncan.’ Jill shrugged.
Rader frowned, sat back. He was thinking about that name when Jill started speaking again.
‘One more thing,’ she said, lower now, eyes darting around the room before returning to Rader. ‘There’s a freelance journalist, Sylvia Merlino. She had no interest in him beyond a standard interview for some obscure Midwest magazine. They meet up and he’s hungry for a lot of things. He talks national newspapers, maybe Rolling Stone magazine... She gets excited, and he sees this. They meet in his various penthouses and high-roller bungalows, but he keeps trying to turn it sexual. Finally he loses patience and she has to flee—I mean run.’ Jill paused, and then said, more quietly: ‘There are a lot of rumors about what she got on tape.’
‘You know any more about her?’
Jill shook her head. ‘No, but I had nightmares about him last night. Does he know about you?’
‘He knows something.’
She folded her arms. ‘Are you actually going back there? I don’t think you should.’
‘One more night, then we’ll see.’
‘So about the girl?’ Jill said. ‘Is she really any good, for the client’s needs?’
‘That angle’s good,’ Rader said, ‘but not great. The Merlino angle could do serious damage.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Kerri,’ Rader said, ‘but that could change.’
‘Good but not great. Looking for a quick score. Does she know anything about you?’
‘She’s curious,’ Rader said, ‘about a lot of things.’
‘That could get her in trouble sooner or later.’
Rader said, ‘It could.’
He stopped at a diner on the way back, and wondered about the stuff he’d left in his room at the Highlights Motel. There was some money, not very much; he had most of it on him. There was a razor, clean socks, nothing with his name. Rader often left fake ID in any rented room. That way the wrong eyes had a bad start to an investigation. Anything real, anything valuable—and there was never much of that in his world—was stashed some place no one would find it. Under the floor, in some cases. In a cabin in the wild land north of Renovo, in others. His clothes, his comb, seventy bucks—wasn’t worth going back there for. The kid who signed him into that place near the Flyaway Lounge wouldn’t give a damn about a guest who failed to return to a forty-dollar room, and the housekeeping would pocket the money. So he ate his food and stopped wondering. That room, that stuff—history. He’d stop at the local store again for anything he was missing.
Rader drank black coffee as he watched another tractor-trailer roar past on the highway. The diner was at most a quarter mile from the motel in an area of flatlands and forests and light traffic near the northwestern state line. He had selected it after driving around in the morning while Kerri slept. Sleeping in a motel on the main road was not an option on the night he killed one, maybe two of Skylar’s guys. There was his car, for a start. A Shelby GT was more recognizable than many vehicles. And then there was the possibility of somebody connected to the hotel seeing him. This area was suitable because it was lost in the backroads of farm and logging country.
It was mid-afternoon and Kerri would be awake now, probably. He still had to decide how to handle things with her. It would mean finding out more about the job she was on, and the people she worked with.
Rader left his table in the diner—back corner, no direct view from the road, the entrance straight up at the end—and walked past a lot of empty seats. He collected the take-out coffee and pulled-pork sliders that he’d ordered for Kerri, and drove the last stretch back to the motel.
The slow-crawling shadow of the second-floor terrace railings fell across the empty lot. The sun was high, no clouds, and Rader wore his shades as he walked down the row of windows and doors to his own room. He tried the handle; the door was locked. Hand on the gun inside his pocket, Rader entered, finding everything as he’d left it, then he backed away, still holding the gun, towards the next room, Kerri’s.
He knocked lightly, and glanced back around the lot. There were a few cars passing down there on the road, but he couldn’t see them because a semi had stopped just outside the lot. Rader knocked again, louder, and when Kerri didn’t answer he moved to the window, removing his hand from the gun to shield his eyes as he peered inside. But the draperies were closed. Rader, the take-out food in a brown bag in one hand, turned back, glancing to the road. That truck was still there.
Rader returned to his car, leaving the take-out in the footwell. No tools with him, but he found a paperclip inside the glove box. Twisting it into the shape of a pick, he walked back to the door and inserted it into the lock. Turning it, feeling for the pins bolted into the cylinder, he kept pivoting, manipulating; but one pin didn’t move. Could’ve been the heat, or it could’ve been the pliant composition of the paperclip. Rader removed the paperclip, re-shaped it, and tried again. He found the first pin, rotating hard against it; then the second pin sprang free, and he turned the handle, gun in his hand, moving fast into the room.