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Chapter Twenty-two

It was one o’clock in the morning. The rooms in the Cactus Garden Motel were dark except for the thin edges of light that framed the shade covering the window of Amelia’s room. There was not a lot of nightlife in the town of Lucent Springs to keep visitors out late, and evidently none of the handful of motel guests were insomniacs, Gideon thought.

He made his way to the manager’s office through the shadowy parking lot. Pete Ellerbeck’s truck was parked in back of his residence but the windows were dark. There were no flickering lights indicating late-night television or internet activity.

The lock on the back door of the office succumbed to the pick. There was no alarm system. It was easy to get careless about security matters when you lived in a small town.

He stood quietly for a moment, absorbing the feel of the empty space before he went behind the counter, took out a penlight, and started going through files.

It did not take long to find what he was looking for. Satisfied, he went back out into the night.

An electric frisson of awareness whispered across the back of his neck. For a moment he went very still in the shadows, his senses wide open.

Nothing moved. No one jumped out from behind a parked car. But he had done enough watching from the shadows to know when he was the one being watched.