With a slightly miffed noise, Indira lowered herself to examine the lock. It wasn’t exactly high security—it was set into the doorknob, and I guessed that the real security, if you could call it that, consisted of one of those swing bars or a chain, something you set from the inside. Indira considered the lock for a moment, set one hand on the door, andfrowned.
The door popped open.
(The bobby pin never went into the lock, by the way. It never even came close.)
Chills washed over me. The sound of traffic from the bridge, which until then had been steady, dropped away.
Here’s the thing. Indira is awesome. She’s kind. She’s wise. She’s an incredible chef and even better baker. But she does have that witchy-white lock of hair, and sometimes she has this energy, like if you and Keme don’t stop wrestlingright. now.you’re going to get zapped. And I know magic isn’t real. But also, sometimes when I’m around Indira, it’s kind of hard to remember that’s a fact and not, you know, more of a guideline.
Indira looked up at me. Her eyes were lost in shadow.
“Oh my God.” My whisper was barely more than a breath. “Did you do that?”
“Of course not,” she said. “The jamb is broken. Look.”
I’m not going to lie: it was super disappointing. (Also, kind of a relief.)
I crouched by the door. Indira was right: the wood around the strike plate was splintered, with several larger pieces of wood lying on the floor. I covered my hand with my shirt to avoid leaving prints and pulled the door closed. The latch caught, but only barely. When I pressed on the door near the broken section of jamb, the door popped free again.
“Someone broke into her room,” Indira said.
I nodded.
“But who?” she asked. “And why?”
“Good questions.”
“Wouldn’t it have made a lot of noise to break down the door? Someone had to have heard it.”
Shaking my head, I pointed to scuff marks on the jamb. “They used a pry bar or a tire iron or something. You can see where they put it in. The jamb might have made a cracking noise when the wood split, but it’s not like they took this thing off its hinges with a battering ram. Even if you were in the next room, I doubt you’d have heard it, and it doesn’t seem like there’s enough foot traffic to worry about someone seeing you.”
Indira’s mouth hardened into a grim line. She reached into her purse, and instead of the bobby pin, this time she drew out the gun.
Waving Indira to the side, I inched open the door, bracing myself for—well, I don’t know. A knife-wielding maniac to come charging out of the dark. Or the muzzle flash of a gun. Heck, maybe Michael Myers. (It was Halloween, after all.)
Instead, darkness floated out to us, scented with something velvety and floral. A woman’s perfume. I wasn’t an expert, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t the drugstore variety.
After a few more seconds, I stepped inside and turned on the flashlight on my phone. Indira followed me, shutting the door behind her. She produced anactualflashlight from her purse, and between the two of us, we got a decent look at the room.
It had been torn to pieces. The double beds were overturned. A mirror that must have hung on the wall at one point was propped against the wall. The chair cushions had been slashed, and a vanity lay toppled on its side. Clothes lay everywhere, and the suitcases linings had been sliced to ribbons as well.
“Someone was looking for something,” Indira said.
As far as I knew, this was her first breaking-and-entering-slash-murder-investigation, so I decided to cut her some slack on the narration. But I nodded my agreement.
Before the destruction, it would have been a cute, albeit dated, room. The walls were knotty-pine paneling, and they would have been hung with the local watercolors that now lay on the floor, their glass shattered. The chair and the vanity looked like mid-century pieces. And like the rest of the motel, whoever had designed the place hadlovedcolor: teal carpet, mustard-colored bedding, and tangerine upholstery. Now it was a disaster zone.
I picked a path across the room toward a doorway on the far side. It connected to a bathroom, and I wanted to get there first, before Indira. I had an idea of what I might find.
But when I reached the doorway, there was no crumpled body on the shower floor. No shower curtain ripped from its rings. No—wait, was I just thinking ofPsycho? No killer monkey! (That’s from Poe.) Instead, the bathroom was small, with checkerboard tile running across the floor and three-quarters of the way up the walls, complete with a mirrored medicine cabinet, chrome towel rods, and an unopened bar of soap so tiny it wouldn’t even get the job half done. The bathroom, too, had been searched, with Channelle’s toiletry case dumped out on the floor, the medicine cabinet’s door ajar, and the cabinet itself ransacked.
“Dash,” Indira said from the other room.
When I found her, she was crouched next to the vanity, picking through pieces of something that clinked against each other. She lifted something, and in the gloom, it took me a moment to recognize it. “Roses.”
The roses had been trampled—the stems bent and broken, the flowers flattened, petals mixed in among the broken pieces of the vase. I was surprised I hadn’t smelled them, and then it made sense—the scent of the perfume was overpowering, and I guessed that like a lot of store-bought roses, these didn’t have much fragrance.
“Who buys roses after their husband is beaten to death?” I asked.
