I Am Pilgrim(227)

But there was nothing, just a gale of fear blowing down the lonely corridors of his mind.





Chapter Twenty-three


BRADLEY AND I were in a different corridor: we were heading through the gloomy silence of the hotel towards my room.

With less than thirty minutes left before the deadline, I had wanted to walk off some of the crushing anxiety, and I had suggested to Bradley that I give him the Turkish police files concerning Dodge’s death. Knowing that they would be crucial to a future prosecution, he agreed, and we said goodnight to the lazy cat and headed across the deserted foyer. We were about to step into the elevator when I stopped – I had a strong sense we were being watched.

There was nobody around, not even the duty manager, but there was a CCTV camera mounted on a wall, trained on the reception desk and its safe, and I wondered who might be in some office nearby observing us.

Quietly, I told Ben to take the elevator while I used the stairs – a group of assailants, Albanians for instance, would find it very difficult to deal with a target which suddenly split apart. The cop looked a question at me.

‘I need the exercise,’ I said.

He knew I was bullshitting, and I jagged left as he stepped into the elevator car. I took the stairs two at a time and met him without incident just as the steel doors opened. He stared at me and raised his eyebrows – I had the Beretta 9-mil out and cocked. ‘Handweight?’ he asked, deadpan.

I lowered it, and together we headed towards my room. I still had the feeling we were being observed, but the corridor wasn’t equipped with cameras and, though I turned fast and looked behind us into the gloom, I saw nothing.

I unlocked the door and a thought occurred to me: the bellhop could still be in the building, ordered by whoever had recruited him to keep an eye on me. I closed the door behind us, bolted it and put the pistol on the coffee table, within easy reach.

‘We were in Manhattan,’ Bradley reminded me. ‘Cameron and Marilyn had decided to kill Dodge in Turkey, but there was a problem.’

‘Yeah, Marilyn needed a passport,’ I said. ‘So they started searching. They were looking for a woman in her twenties, a loner, new in town maybe, definitely somebody who wouldn’t be missed.’

‘Did they find her?’

‘Sure.’

‘Where?’

‘A gay bar, Craig’s List, Washington Square on a Sunday afternoon – I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. But Marilyn took her out on a date. Later in the evening she invited her back to the Eastside Inn with the promise of drugs and sex. Instead, she killed her.’

We looked at one another. ‘She killed her for her identity, Ben,’ I said.

Bradley said nothing, thinking about it, like any good cop trying to work out how to blow holes in it.

‘You recall a woman at your seminar?’ I continued. ‘Turquoise shirt, very intelligent, sitting at the front?’

‘Sure, I don’t think she was intelligent, though. You told her women found you sexually attractive, and she agreed.’

I laughed. ‘She said that the murder might have had something to do with identity theft, but I wasn’t concentrating. Remember, those guys arrived and sat at the back? I should have listened, though – she got it right.’

‘And you say the name of the dead woman was Ingrid Kohl?’ Bradley said. ‘That was the woman we found in the acid?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Marilyn was dead. She had no identity, so she had to destroy Ingrid’s face, her fingerprints and pull her teeth. She couldn’t allow the body to be identified – she was going to steal her name and become her.

‘Once the real Ingrid was dead, she had her wallet, her handbag and apartment keys. She cleaned out Room 89, sprayed it with industrial antiseptic, took one final pass, burnt anything else she found and headed out.’

‘You think she moved into Ingrid’s apartment?’

‘I don’t know. She chose a loner, so it was possible. Whatever happened, Marilyn would have immediately gone through Ingrid’s possessions.

‘In a few hours, she would have had a social security number and everything else she needed to get a birth certificate.’

‘And with a birth certificate you can get a passport,’ Bradley said.

‘That’s right,’ I replied, and started to assemble the files relating to Dodge’s murder.

I glanced at the digital clock on the night stand – fifteen minutes to go – and tried not to think of failure. There was still time – just one phone call and a short message was all we needed.

‘So she’s now Ingrid Kohl and has a legitimate passport with her own picture in it to prove it,’ Bradley said.