“Who are you talking to?” she asked pleasantly.
“Oh…it’s the office.”
“On Sunday?”
“Everyone is working overtime to get ready for an audit,” he said in a rush. “Do you need something?”
“We’re going to do a walk-through of the other room,” she said, sounding amazingly normal. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Should I go, too?”
“No need,” she assured him. “It’s routine.”
“When you get back, we’ll go do something fun, just the two of us,” he promised.
“Sounds good.” She smiled, then turned and headed back to where Jack and Coop were waiting.
Carlotta put her hand over her mouth to suppress nauseating fear. Flashing dots danced before her eyes. She’d been right to withhold information from Peter about talking to her father and why she wanted to go to Vegas.
“Everything okay?” Coop asked.
Carlotta looked up to see him standing near the open door, waiting. Gratitude welled in her chest. She nodded, flustered. “That’s what I get for drinking whiskey on an empty stomach.”
Coop reached into his pocket and withdrew a protein bar. “Knock yourself out.”
“Thanks.” She blinked back sudden tears.
“Hey, something is wrong.”
She pulled back her shoulders as she peeled open the snack. “No…it’s just what you said earlier about Rainie—that she’s ‘easy.’ That sounds so nice.”
He winked as she walked through the door. “I don’t believe you’d be satisfied with easy. I think you tried that once.”
He was referring to their brush with romance—she deserved that. Instead of responding, she took a bite of the protein bar and looked around the empty hallway. “Where’s Jack?”
“He went ahead.”
Jack had been eager to put some space between them, she presumed. And if Jack was going to have a family, she needed to get used to lots of space between them.
As she munched on the snack, she felt Coop’s inquiring gaze trained on her, but thankfully, the crowded elevator car prevented further conversation as they rode to the appropriate floor. When they alighted, she led Coop down a hallway to the room she and Peter had first checked into. On the door was a sign reading the room had been decommissioned and no admittance.
Coop knocked, and the door was opened by the head of hotel security. He recognized Carlotta from the previous night and waved them inside.
The gold and white suite was rendered a little less spectacular by the addition of black and yellow crime-scene tape. Coop followed her through the bedroom and down a hallway toward the walk-in closet where Jack was inspecting the safe and comparing it to notes from a file folder.
“Hey,” he said in acknowledgment. “Carlotta, do you want to fill in the blanks?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“What time did you check into this room?”
“Around 7:45 p.m. I looked in the safe when I unpacked around eight, and it was empty.”
“Did you put anything inside?”
“No.”
“Was there anywhere else he could’ve been hiding?”
“Sure. We didn’t look in every closet, or under the bed.”
Jack’s mouth twitched down. “Then what?”
“Then Peter and I went to dinner, and when we came back, I came in to put the ring in the safe. I opened the door and the man rolled out at my feet.”
“What time was that?”
“About ten o’clock, just before I called you.”
“Was the safe door locked?”
“No, just closed. I hadn’t reset the combination, so I pulled up on the handle and it opened.”
“And you could tell the man was already deceased?” Coop asked.
“Yes. He was cold.”
“It looked to you as if he’d suffocated?”
“It certainly looked that way.”
“Yet there’s a door release lever inside that’s hard to miss…and it appears to be working.”
“And there were no marks on his hands to indicate he’d tried to get out,” she added.
Jack raised his eyebrows.
“I checked,” she murmured.
“So maybe someone killed him earlier and put him in the safe?” Jack mused aloud. “We won’t know the time of death until we get the results of the autopsy.”
“I checked his eyelids,” Carlotta offered, “and there was no rigor, so he’d definitely been dead for less than two hours.”
The men stared at her, then Jack looked to Coop for confirmation. He nodded.
Jack scowled, then made notes on the sheet he was reading. “I hate to denigrate fellow police officers, but this documentation is slipshod. And the pictures are terrible—all eight of them.”