it’s Darling. I hope you’re not busy right now.”
She heard him snort. “Is that your way of trying to ask me out? We both know how well that works,” he said, all humor.
“Well, not quite.”
“Where are you calling from?” he asked after a pause. She knew him well enough to recognize something close to suspicious concern creeping into his tone.
“The Mulligan Motel,” she paused for a moment and then dove in. “There’s a body in room 212, wrapped up in the tub.”
“A body?”
She nodded. Then, realizing he couldn’t see her, she said, “And Derrick? The last person seen leaving the room was Nigel Marks.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Stay there and tell Dan don’t let anyone else in that room,” he finally said. “And I mean it, Darling. No one else goes in there.”
Darling agreed to his no-tampering-with-a-crime-scene rule. Suddenly her morning indiscretion didn’t seem as bad. She even bet Oliver’s need to question her would disappear when he found out.
Oliver.
She pulled his card out of her back pocket and looked at his number.
If Nigel did kill whoever it was in the tub, where did that leave Oliver?
Oliver didn’t answer when Darling called him.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt she owed it to him to give him a heads-up that the man he had promised to guard was about to need a lot more protection than he could offer. Oliver had said she wasn’t a threat, vouching for a woman he no longer knew. Plus, it was no fun to be blindsided. She knew that from experience.
“This is Oliver Quinn. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible,” his voice mail recording answered. Darling felt her face heat up after the beep to leave a message came and went. She realized then that giving him a heads-up might also give Nigel one before the cops were even able to see the body in the tub. She didn’t want to be the one responsible for giving the number one suspect time to lawyer up or possibly run. Although he probably had already done one or the other. It wasn’t as if the body could have gone unnoticed for too long.
“Um, hi, it’s Darling,” she floundered. “I need you to call me as soon as you get this. Something’s happened. Thanks.” She let out a long sigh as she ended the call. She liked to believe she was a very confident and sure woman, but mix any part of Oliver into her life and she suddenly felt off her game.
Darling went back up to the second floor to find Dan, trying to push thoughts of her ex clear out of her head. She had walked into the crime scene that, most likely, her current client’s husband had created. That gave her a new set of problems and concerns without adding the complication of the man from her past.
“I talked to Deputy Derrick,” Darling told Dan, who was standing in the doorway to room 212. “He said no one else needs to go in there until they get here.”
Dan didn’t answer right away. His eyes were stuck on a point somewhere in the main room. She wondered if he had peeked in the bathroom yet. When he met her gaze, she knew he had. He looked haunted.
“Do you think he really did it?” he asked. “Nigel. Do you think he really killed her?”
Darling shrugged. “I can’t say for certain, but I can make the leap and say I think there’s a pretty good chance he did. You said yourself that he stayed the night here.”
Dan nodded, but there was no enthusiasm in it.
“Do you want me to wait in the lobby and send the cops up when they get here?” she asked when it was clear Dan wasn’t going to talk. He nodded again and returned to staring into room 212. She patted him on the shoulder and made the walk back, thinking a dead body in your hotel couldn’t be good for business.
Darling sat behind the desk again but didn’t let her mind wander. Instead she thought about Elizabeth Marks, the only other woman who knew about her husband’s affair. Or, at least, she had thought so. If Nigel went to jail for murdering his mistress, she’d be in the clear to take what was hers, and possibly his, and leave without any strings attached.
A coldness seeped into Darling’s heart.
She pulled her phone out and went to her email. Searching through discount offers and social media updates, she found the itinerary Elizabeth had sent to her after she had signed on to the case. During the duration of Nigel’s work trip, Elizabeth would be with her mother in the Bahamas. She claimed that if she were far away with no chance of accidentally spotting Nigel and his mistress, he might get careless. It would be easier to catch him, she had said with vigor. If the schedule Darling was looking at was correct, the two women would have left for the trip on Sunday, two days ago. That meant Elizabeth wasn’t even in the country when the woman had checked in.
Plus, why would you hire a private investigator if you were just going to kill the problem?
All at once, Darling realized there was an easy way to figure out who the mistress was.
Jumping up, she hurried to look out the door to make sure no one was coming. Derrick had been at the police station when she had called, which meant she had very little time left before he arrived. She ran back behind the front desk and pulled a big leather-bound registry book out. Dan hated leaving it on the desktop because he claimed it got in the way of his crosswords. He only pulled it out when a new guest had already handed over the money. It was also the only way he kept tabs on the people who checked in and out. Darling could have slapped herself. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of looking at the registry as soon as she had come in.
She flipped through a few pages until she found the entries from the night before. Three people had checked in. All were after 6:00 p.m., and none of them were Nigel Marks. A car door shut in the parking lot, and for the second time that day, Darling took a picture of something she probably shouldn’t have. This time it was with her phone, but that reminded her she needed to hide her camera or else Derrick would take it from her. He was always suspicious of her, which, she guessed, was deserved in this case. She grabbed the camera, put it in the bottom drawer of the desk and replaced the registry seconds before Deputy Derrick came into the office.
“Two times in one day, huh?” she greeted him. Derrick didn’t think it was funny. She sobered. “Sorry, it’s been a weird day.”
Whatever he had been about to say, he must have changed his mind. His face softened.
“What room?” he asked.
“Room 212. Dan is waiting outside. I told him not to go back in, like you said.”
Derrick nodded. Behind his knitted brows, he was probably running through police procedures.
“You okay?” he asked when she kept staring. “I mean, like emotionally,” he tacked on. He had never been that great at talking about feelings, so the question surprised her.
“Yeah, I didn’t really see much.”
