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“I work for the Queen of Louisiana. She sent me down to get it,” I said.

“Your name?”

“Sookie Stackhouse.”

“Hey, Joe!” he called to a fellow employee, a heavy guy who was sitting behind a really ugly desk on which sat a battered computer. “Check out the name Stackhouse, will ya?”

“Sure thing,” Joe said, wrenching his gaze from the young Iowan, who was just barely visible over on the other side of the cavernous space. Joe regarded me with the same curiosity. When he saw that I’d noticed, he looked guilty and tapped away at the keyboard. He eyed the computer screen like it could tell him everything he needed to know, and for the purposes of his job, maybe he was right.

“Okay,” Joe called to the guard. “She’s on the list.” His was the gruff voice that I remembered from the phone conversation. He resumed staring at me, and though all the other people in the cavernous space were having blank, neutral thoughts, Joe’s were not blank. They were shielded. I’d never encountered anything like it. Someone had put a metaphysical helmet on his head. I tried to get through it, around, under it, but it stayed in place. While I fumbled around, trying to get inside his thoughts, Joe was looking at me with a cross expression. I don’t think he knew what I was doing. I think he was a grouch.

“Excuse me,” I asked, calling so my question could reach Joe’s ears. “Is my picture by my name on your list?”

“No,” he said, snorting as if I’d asked a strange question. “We got a list of all the guests and who they brought with them.”

“So, how do you know I’m me?”

“Huh?”

“How do you know I’m Sookie Stackhouse?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what you bitching about? Get outta here with the damn suitcase.” Joe looked down at his computer, and the guard swung around to face the elevator. This must be the legendary Yankee rudeness, I thought.

The bag didn’t have a roller mechanism; no telling how long the owner had had it. I picked it up and marched back over to the door to the stairs. There was another elevator close to the door, I noticed, but it wasn’t half as large as the huge one that had access to the outside. It could take up coffins, true, but perhaps only one at a time.

I’d already opened the stair door when I realized that if I went up that way I’d have to pass through the service corridor again. What if Eric, Andre, and Quinn were still there? What if they’d ripped each other’s throats out? Though just at the moment such a scenario wouldn’t have devastated me, I decided to forgo the chance of an encounter. I took the elevator instead. Okay, cowardly, but a woman can handle only so much in one night.

This elevator was definitely for the peons. It had pads on the walls to prevent cargo from being damaged. It serviced only the first four floors: basement levels, lobby, mezzanine, human floor. After that, the shape of the pyramid dictated that to rise, you had to go to the center to catch one of elevators that went all the way up. This would make taking the coffins around a slow process, I thought. The staff of the Pyramid worked hard for their money.

I decided to take the suitcase straight to the queen’s suite. I didn’t know what else to do with it.

When I stepped off at Sophie-Anne’s floor, the lobby area around the elevator was silent and empty. Probably all the vampires and their attendants were downstairs at the soiree. Someone had left a discarded soda can lying in a large, boldly patterned urn holding some kind of small tree. The urn was positioned against the wall between the two elevators. I think the tree was supposed to be some kind of short palm tree, to maintain the Egyptian theme. The stupid soda can bothered me. Of course, there were maintenance people in the hotel whose job it was to keep everything clean, but the habit of picking up was ingrained in me. I’m no neat freak, but still. This was a nice place, and some idiot was strewing garbage around. I bent over to pick the darn thing up with my free right hand, intending to toss it into the first available garbage can.

But it was a lot heavier than it should