Act of Darkness(42)

Gregor’s head shot up. “It can’t be locked. None of the doors on this floor can be locked from the outside. And you’re out here.”

“Well, maybe it’s got one of those trick catches and I didn’t realize it. You know, I pulled the door to and it locked by itself.”

“It’s got a bolt, Bennis. You pointed that out to me yourself. It’s got to be thrown from the inside.”

“So maybe the maid threw it and forgot about it. We can get in through your room. We’ve got a connecting door.”

“If the bolt is thrown on the connecting door, I’m going to call the police.”

Bennis shot him a look of long-suffering exasperation. Gregor paid no attention to her. He opened his own door, went in first, and then went immediately to the connector.

It was unbolted.

He opened it and looked through, down the narrow connecting hall. He saw one corner of Bennis’s bed, made up, and a wastebasket with a pair of pantyhose dripping over its rim. Nothing else.

Bennis came up behind him, looked inside, and said, “It all looks okay to me.”

Gregor went on into the room. The bed was indeed made up, and Bennis’s bags had been put away. A quick look in the closet showed that her clothes had been hung and not left to wrinkle in her luggage. A quick look at the vanity showed that her makeup had been arrayed, in almost military fashion, on a silver makeup tray that lay under a large mirror. Gregor looked back at the pantyhose in the wastebasket and frowned.

“Did you throw a pair of pantyhose away this morning?”

“No,” Bennis said, “but I really wouldn’t get too worked up about it. The maid probably found a pair with runs in them when she was putting away my clothes.”

“Check,” Gregor said.

“Check what?”

“Check to make sure they’re your pantyhose.”

The look Bennis gave him this time said that he’d surely lost his mind, and he didn’t blame her. There was really no reason to think the pantyhose were anyone’s but hers. The room was in admirable order and nothing looked touched in any way it shouldn’t have been touched. She had every right to tell him where to get off. Gregor was relieved when she did as he had told her instead, moving over to the bed, sitting down, taking the pantyhose out of the wastebasket. She searched around the waistband until she found a small tab and put it close to her eyes to read it.

Then she blinked.

“Oh,” she said. “I’ll be—Gregor, you were right. These aren’t my pantyhose.”

“How do you know?”

“They’re not the right brand, for one thing. They’re also not the right size. I wear L’Eggs, the kind you buy in the supermarket and they come in a plastic egg. These are expensive. And they’re size eight. I’d have to be four inches taller than I am not to have them dripping around my ankles like pudding.”

“All right,” Gregor said, as calmly as he could. “Now put them back in the wastebasket.”

“What?”

“Do exactly what I tell you, Bennis. Put them back in the wastebasket. Then get that floor plan you showed me this morning. We may need it.”

Bennis put the pantyhose back in the wastebasket, and went to the vanity, and got the oversize brochure from the center drawer. Then she got the floor plan out from under the gold paper clip attached to the brochure’s back cover. She looked thoroughly bewildered.

“Now what?” she said.

“Now we go knocking on doors,” Gregor told her. “Find Stephen Fox’s room for me.”

“He’s on the other side of you. But he’s not in there, Gregor. His door’s open. I noticed it when I came up.”

“All right.”

It wasn’t all right, but Gregor couldn’t think of anything else to say. He didn’t think he’d ever felt worse in his life. Even digging into the mass graves that were so often the first evidence the Bureau had of the career of a serial killer was better than this, because there was no uncertainty. You knew what you were looking for and you knew what you were going to find. More important, you knew that you were going to find.

He went into the hall from Bennis’s door, counted two to the right, and walked down to the room assigned to Senator Fox. As Bennis had said, the door was open, not all the way but not just a crack, either. Gregor pushed it in.

There was a bed, just like Bennis’s, just like Gregor’s. It had been made up. There was a vanity table, recently dusted. There was a chair. There was a wastebasket, empty. There was nothing else.

Gregor turned around and looked up and down the hall. Bennis’s door was closed. His own door was closed, and had been when they came in. He remembered opening it. All the rest of the doors were open, just as Stephen Fox’s had been, except one.