Strangled - Brian McGrory [122]
I hated the idea of some nervous hotel manager arguing with me about disturbing guests, possibly summoning police to join us in this search, and then ending with six or eight people walking in on Elizabeth Riggs’s body all at once. I wanted to see her alone, or at least only with Hank, as macabre as that might seem.
So I pointed to Hank. Before I could even drop my arm, his foot slammed against the door at its most vulnerable point. The door, in turn, flew open, bounced off a door stop, and started closing again. But by the time it had come back, Hank’s foot was already inside. He had a gun drawn. And he stepped into the room, firmly reciting the words “Law enforcement. Hands up. We’ve got a whole crew here.”
He stood in the shadowy entryway, illuminated only by the dim hall sconces behind us, as I forged past him. The lights were off, and I ran my hand up and down a nearby wall, looking for a switch. When I found one, I said to Hank, “I’m turning them on.”
And I did.
I was expecting the absolute worst, and why shouldn’t I have been? Every time I received a driver’s license from the Phantom Fiend, or a video, a pretty young woman was dead, the body left in some gruesome manner by a publicity-seeking killer who immediately reported his misdeeds to me.
My eyes first settled on the bed, assuming that’s where he’d probably leave her. And so I was shocked to see that the bed, apparently turned down by the maids that evening, was completely empty — just a comforter wrapped in a white duvet cover stretched tight across the wide expanse.
Hank repeated himself: “Law enforcement. Get your hands up before we shoot.” As he said it, he was holding his gun out like he was Don Johnson on Miami Vice.
The room, by the way, was a big, elegant affair, what some lesser hotels might describe as a junior suite. The carpet was royal blue, the walls were a pale yellow, and the furniture, every piece substantial in size, was tasteful in an Old World kind of way. The entire room flowed toward a sitting area tucked inside a bow window that overlooked the grassy park at the center of Copley Square.
And right now, it appeared entirely empty.
Well, not entirely. As I slowly walked through it, I could see the signs that we were, in fact, in the right place — Elizabeth’s computer case, an overnight bag that I remember loading in the trunk of the car so many times, a barn jacket that I had bought her tossed across an upholstered chair. Another telltale sign: an empty bottle of Tab on her dresser. Who else in this life still drinks Tab?
As I walked toward the windows, which were near the bathroom entrance, Hank held his big, bearlike hand up to me, the one without the gun. I stopped. He looked under the bed. Then he began slowly walking toward the bathroom door, the gun poised at his side.
“You’ve got two seconds to come out,” he said.
No reaction. He arrived at the door, which was slightly ajar, and pushed it slowly with his foot, the door swinging into the dark bathroom. I squinted, remembering full well that at least one of the Boston Strangler’s victims back in the sixties was found in a bathtub. Hank reached his hand inside the door, flicked on the overhead light, and scanned the small space with his gun.
Again, nothing.
He looked at me and said in that easy voice of his, “Well, son, at this point, anything that’s not bad is good.” And don’t ask me how, but that made all the sense in the world.
Now, suddenly, I felt like an intruder, a feeling that was reinforced when two beefy gentlemen in ill-fitting button-down shirts, apparently security guards, showed up at the broken doorway, saying, “If you move another inch you’ll regret it.”
Hank doesn’t seem to know regret, which is one of the many things I love about the guy, so he walked calmly and casually toward them, gun at his side. One of the guards barked at him, “Hey, Gramps, stop