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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE ROOM WAS A STANDARD American hotel room, depressingly familiar, right down to the faint smell of cleaning agents. “This place will have been cleaned six times over since they moved the body,” I said. “There’ll be nothing left to find.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Harper quartered the room with her gaze. “Shut the door.”

I shut the door. “Can I move?”

Harper rolled her eyes at me. She moved around the room. Lifted the mattress and prodded at the base carefully. Felt underneath the frame. Squeezed and patted down every pillow. “Make the bed again,” she told me, moving on.

She pulled out the metal grid over each furnace vent in the floor and carefully probed inside. Then the air conditioning outlet, up by the ceiling, standing on the one chair in the room. She pulled out every drawer and opened every cupboard and felt around inside. She tapped the bottom of each drawer before handing it to me to add the bible and the other few items back into them and returning them to where they belonged.

She pulled back the short pile rug lying between the bed and the bureau the big screen TV sat on. “Meet Calloway,” she said. “What’s left of him.” The carpet beneath the rug was stained. The patch was dark brown. A cleaner had been over it more than once, for the pile of the carpet was brushed back and forth, showing clear tracks where the head of the cleaner had passed over it.

We were in the right room. Although I hadn’t doubted it. Harper dropped the rug back in place.

In the next twenty minutes, she moved around the room in slow circles, testing and examining everything. She even lifted up the heavy floor-to-ceiling drapes and felt along the thick hems, then repeated the exercise on the top hems, while balancing on the chair, one boot planted on the top of the back of the chair.

“You’re not checking the back of the paintings,” I pointed out.

Harper looked amused. “Knock yourself out.” She waved toward them.

I went over to the indifferent pastel water color depiction of mountains and a lake and gripped the frame. It didn’t move an inch.

Harper laughed at my expression. “You don’t get out much, do you?”

“They screw them down?”

“How else can they stop guests from stealing them?”

“The pictures in my rooms aren’t screwed down.”

“Because all dryads yearn to hang a bad Mona Lisa knock-off on their mother tree.”

“It’s not a bad knock off,” I protested.

“It’s the ugliest rendition I’ve ever seen,” Harper replied. She put her back to the door and her hands on her hips. “That’s all the obvious places.”

“Where are the unobvious places?”

“They’re unobvious for a reason.” She was back to scanning the room. “He would have left it nearby. The reception area is too busy and too open. It might be out in the carpark, but that’s too far away and unlikely.”

“Why is it unlikely?”

“Too impersonal, too public. You can’t plant anything there without risking being noticed.”

“You’re assuming he left something at all. Maybe he didn’t.”

Harper shook her head. “He was looking for me. Why, I have no fucking idea, but that’s why I know he left something for me to find.”

“He knew you’d come here?”

“He was covering his ass. It’s not like he could leave me a letter. And you never know when something or someone might catch up with you. Pure common sense, leaving word for someone to find if the worst happens.”

“You, or another hunter?”

“Uh-huh.” She blew out her breath. “We know the Feds didn’t find it. It’s still here. But where the fuck he put it….”

“You were pretty sure you could find it.”

She glowered at me. “Gonna cast a spell, Crackstone? Prove me wrong?”

The suggestion surprised me. And it irked me. Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner? And the sense of unreality I had been experience for weeks now washed over me once more. Anna Crackstone, witch . It still seemed surreal.

But a finding spell…that was one of the first Trevalyan had taught me, because it was simple. It didn’t require ingredients. “Let me try it.”

Harper snorted and crossed her arms. “Go on.”

I held up my hands and recalled the words. They were, Trevalyan had told me, ancient Egyptian, because that was where magic had been discovered. I didn’t know what the words meant. I remembered them because of their sounds and the rhythm of speaking them. I cleared my throat, while Harper watched me. I could feel I was blushing as I spoke the words. As I spoke, I moved my forefinger through the air, making a circle.

The spell left me in a little rush of power that felt cold, as if refrigerated air was racing through my veins. I tingled from head to foot.

I lowered my hands and opened myself up to listen. I stopped tingling and my body heat returned to normal, which actually felt warm, now.

Too warm. My skin was prickling with sweat. My neck grew damp. I wiped my cheeks dry. Was this going to happen every time?

“What’s the matter? Hot flash?” Harper asked.

I gasped. “The thermostat!”

“I didn’t touch the damn thing,” Harper assured me. “They’re too small, nothing can fit under them.”

“No, that’s where it is.” I could feel it now. Beckoning. Tugging at me.

“Where is the thing, anyway?” Harper asked, turning a slow circle.

“Behind the curtain. You pulled the curtain back and it covered the thermostat.” I moved over to the narrow piece of wall between the door and the window and shoved the heavy gray drape aside. The thermostat was beneath, as I had known it would be. It wasn’t a little, narrow metal band mounted on the wall, the way modern ones appeared. It was bigger. Not by much, but it looked older, just as this hotel looked older, the more you studied it. Honeywell was printed across the top.

“I tested it,” Harper said, coming up behind me. “It hasn’t been touched in years. Look at the screws. They’re grimy.”

“It’s under this cover,” I said flatly. “Maybe the top comes off without disturbing the screws.”

Harper narrowed her eyes. Then she bent and pulled out her knife. “Let me at it.”

I moved out of the way and held the curtain aside. She tapped the lid with the hilt of her knife, then flipped it and probed along the edges. “Huh…” she said softly. She gripped the knife, placed the thin tip under the edge of the cap, and patted the hilt in soft hammering movements.

The cap loosened with a dull cracking sound. She grabbed the edges and pulled it out of the way. Underneath was a mess of wiring and a circuit board. And jammed between a red and a green wire was a small sliver of plastic.

“Damn…” Harper breathed. She reached in, gripped the plastic and drew it out. She laid it on her palm and showed it to me. “A thumb drive.”

It was one of the tiny drives, which were all USB connector, with a quarter inch of plastic mounted on top.

I could feel the heat that had surrounded me like an invisible sauna easing off. Cool air touched my cheeks. “That’s it.”

Harper bounced the thumb drive on her palm, then slid it into one of her inner pockets. “Best read it later. We’ve been here way too long. Put everything back the way it was, and let’s get out of here.” She turned to replace the thermostat cover.