I glanced around the area, looking for the little black squares, but none appeared to be mixed in with all the debris. I then peered under the table, and there were no flat black squares to be found.
“What is it?” Heath asked when I stood up again and scratched my head.
“The magnets,” I said, lifting up the bit of fabric. “They’re all gone.”
Heath came over to me and inspected what was left of the sweatshirt. “Where’d they go?” he wondered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But my theory is that someone knew about their power over spirit energy and ripped them off the sweatshirt, which likely gave the demon full rein to do whatever it wanted in here.”
There was a little squeak behind us, and I turned to see Knollenberg with his wide eyes and pale complexion staring at us in horror. “You mean to tell me that whatever did this to this room is roaming free in my hotel?”
Neither Heath nor I answered him right away, and I think our silence told him more than words could have, because the poor man simply covered his mouth and shook his head. “This is awful!” he said. “We can’t afford this! What am I supposed to tell our guests? I cannot expose them to this kind of danger!”
“I don’t think it’s time to panic just yet,” I said, surveying the room again and feeling a rather sick feeling settle into my stomach. “I know you’re worried about your hotel guests, but if you’ll give us just a few hours I think we can determine whether anyone is truly in danger. But first, we’ll need to find Gopher and let him know what’s happened. I’m sure he won’t be very happy to learn that some of his equipment’s been damaged, and I’ll ask him about why he left this room unattended. Then Heath and I will conduct a thorough search of the hotel—if there’s a violent poltergeist loose in this building, we’re the ones who will attract it first.”
“What will you do with it when you encounter it?” Knollenberg asked, and I saw how his eyes roved to the cigar box I held in my hands, which did seem a little pathetic against something powerful enough to destroy a large conference room.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” I reassured him, and I really hoped I sounded confident . . . ’cause that wasn’t at all how I felt. “For now, maybe you should have your staff alert you if anything out of the ordinary gets reported to the front desk. If anyone sees or hears anything unusual, come find one of us and we’ll go investigate.”
“But what if one of my guests is injured?” Knollenberg insisted, his eyes moving to Heath’s shoulder, where he knew there were deep cut marks.
I contemplated his predicament for a moment or two. The poor GM was damned if he listened to us, and damned if he didn’t. Finally, I shrugged my shoulders. “I understand this could put you in a very vulnerable situation. So I’ll leave it up to you. If you want to go ahead and evacuate your guests, then do what you and the hotel attorneys would be comfortable with. In the meantime, we’ll be on the hunt for this thing, and with any luck, we’ll find it before anyone else does.”
Knollenberg hardly looked reassured, and he muttered something about phoning the hotel’s owner to get his take on it before hurrying out of the room.
“Do you think that was the right call?” I asked Heath as we took one last look around the rubble of the Renaissance Room.
“M.J.,” Heath said soberly, “nothing about this thing feels right.”
And as an unexpected chill went up the back of my spine, I had to agree.
Chapter 7
We didn’t linger long in the Renaissance Room, deciding it was better to go find Gopher as soon as possible.
After stopping at the front desk to call the producer’s room and discovering that he didn’t answer the phone, I spotted Tracy, the production assistant, having a drink at the bar in the lobby.
I motioned to Heath and we walked over to her. “Hey, there,” I said to get her attention. “Have you seen Gopher?”
Tracy looked up at me, and her eyes appeared to struggle to focus. From the cluster of shot glasses next to the nearly empty bottle of beer she was downing, I could easily guess why. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I’ve seen him.”
I waited, but Tracy didn’t seem as if she was going to put forth any more information unless I prodded her. “Can you tell me where?”
The young woman downed another shot of liquor before answering. “He’s upstairs,” she said with a sneer. “Humping his way through the production staff.”
I decided not to tell Tracy that was a little too much information for my taste and kept my questions on track. “Do you happen to know what room he’s in?”
Tracy swayed in her seat. “Why do you need to know, exactly?”
“Someone got into the Renaissance Room and vandalized some of the cameras and equipment. Gopher needs to be notified immediately.”
Tracy’s head wobbled on her thin neck as she swiveled to look in the direction of the conference room. “Where’s Mike?” she said.
“Who?” I asked.
“The staff assistant,” she said. “He was left to watch over the room.”
I looked at Heath in alarm. We hadn’t seen anyone else in the room. “I have no idea,” I said, feeling a small pit of trepidation form in my stomach. “No one was in there when we looked.”
Even through her drunken haze Tracy seemed to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and she blinked several times before digging through her purse to retrieve her cell phone. Clicking through what I assumed was her contact list, she settled on one and put the phone to her ear. After a few more seconds she said, “Yo, Mikey, where the hell are you? I got the ghost lady here telling me that the room’s been wrecked. Call me back, pronto.”
Tracy then scrolled back through the contacts on her phone and punched the send button with a bit of flourish and a heck of a sneer. Putting the phone to her ear, she waited out the rings while her fingers drummed the bar. “Yo, asshole,” she said by way of a friendly greeting. “Maybe you can stop screwing Leslie long enough to get down here. Your equipment’s been vandalized and you’re on the hook for it, so I guess there is justice in the world!” With that she punched the end button and snickered before dropping her phone on the bar.
“I’m assuming that was Gopher?”
Tracy picked up her beer and took the last long gulp before giving me a winning smile, which I assumed was an affirmative. She then got up and teetered on her high heels before she announced, “I gotta pee. Watch my stuff, will you?” And without waiting for an answer she trooped off in a zigzag toward the restrooms.
We watched her totter away, and no sooner had she pushed through the door to the ladies’ room than her cell phone began to ring. I took the liberty of answering it, as the caller ID said it was Gopher. “What the hell kind of a message was that?!” yelled an angry voice the moment I said hello.
“If you’re looking for Tracy, she’s in the ladies’ room,” I replied calmly.
There was a pause, then, “Who is this?”
“M.J.,” I said. “And we need you down here right away, Gopher. The Renaissance Room has been vandalized, and a lot of your equipment has been wrecked.”
There was a flurry of profanity that followed, and I pulled the phone away from my ear. Placing my free hand over the receiver, I said quietly to Heath, “He seems upset.”
“What happened?” I heard after the rain of profanity had stopped.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But you need to get down here and take a look.”
“Where’s Mike?”
“We don’t know. When we went into the room no one was there.”
“What happened to the knife?”
I thought that was a rather odd question to ask. It just seemed out of place, but I replied with what I knew, which wasn’t much: “It’s gone.”
“Shit,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”
I clicked off Tracy’s cell and tucked it back into her purse. “He’s coming down,” I told Heath.
Heath and I waited by
the bar for Tracy to get back and for Gopher to show up. The bartender asked us if we’d like anything, and I ordered a Coke and Heath ordered a cappuccino. We talked a little bit about the disarray of the conference room, and I could tell that Heath was as nervous about going after the demon as I was. “This is just so far beyond anything I’ve ever encountered,” he was saying.
“I know,” I said, looking over my shoulder as we sat at the bar to see if Tracy had managed to come out of the ladies’ room yet. My eye fell instead on Gopher, who was just coming out of the elevator looking a bit rumpled, as though he’d dressed very quickly. Behind him and wearing a baseball cap was another young woman whom I thought I remembered being on the shoot that morning.
Gopher made a beeline for Heath and me, and when he got to us he said, “Did Mike show up?”
“No,” I said. “Was he supposed to?”
“Goddamn it!” Gopher swore. “I’ve been calling his cell every thirty seconds since I got off the phone with you. I keep getting his voice mail.”
“We haven’t seen him,” I said. “But the manager of the hotel is calling the police to file a report on the vandalism.”
“Is that thing still in there?” he asked, a bit nervously.
“You mean the demon?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“We didn’t see or feel anything in the room when we were there,” I said. “I think that whatever it was that caused the damage—be it demon or person—has left the area.”
“Okay, come on,” he said to us. “You guys might as well show me what happened.”
I looked down at Tracy’s purse still on the bar. “Heath, you go with Gopher. I’m going to take Tracy her stuff and I’ll join you in a minute.”
“Got it,” said Heath, and he, Gopher, and the other production assistant walked away.
I gathered up all Tracy’s belongings and told the bartender that I was going to check on her in the ladies’ room.
“Whoa,” he said. “I can’t let you leave without paying the tab.”
“We already paid you for the Coke and the coffee,” I reminded him before motioning to the clutter of shot glasses on the bar. “This was that other lady’s tab.”
“Yeah, well, I haven’t seen her in the last ten minutes. I’ll need something like a credit card to hold on to before I can let you take her purse.”
I rolled my eyes and fished around in Tracy’s handbag, coming up with a wallet and a credit card. “I don’t feel right about digging through her stuff like this,” I muttered.
“I won’t charge the card unless she doesn’t come back,” the bartender reassured me. “Just let her know that I’m holding on to it, okay?”
I nodded and got up from the bar stool, carrying Tracy’s purse over to the ladies’ room. She’d seemed drunk enough to have either gotten sick or passed out, and I was hoping that I didn’t have to deal with a lot of that drama when I found her.
I pushed open the door to the ladies’ room and called out, “Tracy?” No one replied. I then went inside and looked around.
The powder room was a peach tile with mint green accents. There were four stall doors, and over the four sinks was another mirror with a golden frame and intricate carvings, a twin to the one I’d seen in the conference room. As I was turning to the stalls, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced up at the reflection in the mirror. A woman was coming into the powder room, and I think she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She had long dark hair that fell in waves down her back, and her face was heart shaped, with full lips and large brown eyes. I smiled at her reflection and she nodded back.
I suddenly felt self-conscious about staring, so I turned to the stalls and bent down to check whether any of them were occupied. “Yoo-hoo,” I called again as I walked along the stalls. “Tracy, are you in here?”
In the last stall I spotted a pair of legs wearing the same high heels I’d seen on the production assistant, and I knocked softly on the door. “Tracy, are you okay in there?”
She didn’t answer, and I knocked a second time. “Tracy?” I said, pushing against the door to see if it would open. It was locked from the inside. “Come on, honey,” I encouraged. “Wakey, wakey!” Still no reply, so I bent down again and tried to peer under the door. And that was when I saw Tracy’s arm dangling at an odd position, and dripping down her arm and pooling in a small puddle was a thin line of red blood. “Ohmigod!” I shrieked, and stood up quickly.
Reflexively I turned toward the door to ask if the woman who had just come into the powder room could go for help . . . but there was no one else in the room. I then realized that I hadn’t heard the woman enter any of the other stalls. Pushing that out of my mind for the moment, I shoved my shoulder into the door as hard as I could. It hurt like a bitch, but the lock on the other side held. “Tracy!” I yelled, backing up from the door. “Honey, hang on!” I then karate-kicked the door and it banged open, revealing the dead body of the production assistant covered in blood, her lifeless eyes open and horrified as a knife handle stuck straight out of her chest.
I reeled away from her and my back hit the sink hard, but I didn’t feel it until later, when the police came. For the moment I was really finding it hard to breathe. I opened my mouth to scream, but the sound wouldn’t form. All that I seemed to be able to manage was to take in large gulps of air. I turned and fled the powder room, crashing through the door out to the mezzanine. I must have looked as terrified and panic-stricken as I felt, because people were openly gaping at me, and one of those people was Gilley.
“M.J.?” he said, looking at me in alarm. “What’s the matter?”
I pointed to the powder room and struggled to breathe. I knew in the back of my mind that I was hyperventilating, but I was powerless against it. Instinctively I doubled over, grabbing my knees and working to hold the intake of breath in my lungs for a few seconds before exhaling. In the background I heard Gilley shout, “Steven! Come quick! I think M.J.’s hurt!”
Gilley arrived at my side and bent down to peer up at my face. I shook my head and felt tears well and drop to the floor . . . just like Tracy’s blood when it ran down her arm. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the horrific image just continued to play out in my mind’s eye.
“Sweetheart,” said Gilley, “what’s happened to you?”
“Where does it hurt?” I heard Steven ask urgently.
I opened my eyes and looked up at my partner and pointed to the ladies’ room. I fought to have my lips form the word murder, but all that came out was a “Mah . . . Mah . . . Mah!” sound.
“Man?” said Gilley. “A man did this to you?”
I shook my head and sank to my knees. The world was closing in around me, and I was dizzy and close to fainting. Tears continued to leak out of my eyes, and I felt a sob forming in the base of my throat. “Tray . . .” I said. “Hurt!” I finally managed.
“Someone hurt you with a tray?” Gilley tried, and I felt like swatting him.
I shook my head again and pointed back to the ladies’ room. “Go . . . there!” I gasped just as Steven put something over my mouth and pushed my head forward.
“Breathe into this bag,” he said calmly. “You’re hyperventilating, M.J. Just slow down for a second, okay?”
I took several breaths, squeezing my eyes closed and trying to concentrate on the regular exchange of air. When I felt a little less light-headed I pulled the bag away and pointed yet again to the powder room, saying, “Go there!”
I saw Steven and Gilley look sharply at each other; then they each turned to the ladies’ room. Gilley got to his feet and quickly walked to the door, knocking loudly from outside. He looked over his shoulder at me, as if to ask permission to go in. I nodded vigorously.
Steven was rubbing my back gently and trying to get me to calm down. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re okay now, cariña; just keep breathing into the bag.”
Steven didn’t have a chance to say anything more, because not a second late
r everyone in the vicinity heard a high-pitched squeal that sounded like a howler monkey screaming for its life.
In the next instant, Gilley came crashing out of the powder room, shrieking and flailing his arms. “Murder!” he shouted. “She’s been murdered!”
For the next hour the scene around us would have been comical if it weren’t so tragic. The police arrived in short order, and my new friend Detective MacDonald was the first to take command of the situation. Crime-scene tape was set up in a large rectangle from the bar all the way to the ladies’ room, forcing the hotel guests to find other ways in and out of the building.
A line slowly formed at the front desk, where guests demanded their money back and a quick checkout as word spread that the second fatality in two days had taken place at the hotel. Murray Knollenberg had gone from pale to ashen, and a light sweat dampened his brow. He teeter-tottered back and forth between his harried staff at the counter and the police investigators taking over the lobby.
Heath and Gopher had joined us on the couch in the lobby, where we were all ordered to sit and wait to be interviewed, and to his credit Gopher looked intensely upset over Tracy’s tragic end. “She was such a good kid,” he blubbered as a few leaky tears ran down his cheeks. “Why would anyone want to hurt her?”
Gopher also got a call from Mike, who phoned him from the airport to say that he had heard some strange noises coming from the room he’d been left to guard, and decided to hightail it out of there. He apparently didn’t need the job that badly.
Gil was sitting next to me and not at all happy that I’d sent him into the powder room to discover the body. “You could have given me a little warning,” he snipped irritably.