Running Cold: A Novel, page 14
“Detective?”
“How quickly can you get me a search warrant?”
“I’m dealing with a citywide power outage.”
“I have a suspect. If I find what I’m looking for, I can make an arrest tonight.”
Banff was a tourist town. Christmas was coming. We needed someone in custody.
“Give me ten minutes.”
CHAPTER 33
Remy
The warrant to search Julie’s room came in on my private fax machine. Detective Montpelier, or “mont-peel-yur,” as she improperly pronounced it, was standing over me like an umbrella in a rainstorm, waiting for it to roll off the machine. She ripped it out of my hands the moment it finished printing.
“I’m going to need you to let us in that room,” she said, waving the paper in front of my face.
“Of course.”
I did not mean to be uncooperative. I wanted their suspect in custody, but not for the same reasons the police did. I wasn’t afraid for myself or my guests. We weren’t dealing with a serial killer here. Ceci’s death was personal. Anybody who knew her could tell you that. The police wanted to catch the killer to keep people safe. That was their job. It was my job to run a hotel. Once news of the murder got out, the guests would panic. The only thing that would stop a mass exodus was an arrest, so if I could help them make one, I would.
The Banff Springs was one of the only hotels in town with enough generator power to keep all the lights on and the drinks flowing, and the place was hopping. I belonged in the lobby, mingling with guests, charming them to come back next year. But I couldn’t trust anyone else to babysit this search. I wanted to be there when they found what they were looking for, as I knew they would. I’d been in there and seen it myself.
I had also seen what they’d just watched on video. I wasn’t stalking Julie. I just wanted to talk to her, to let her know I’d chatted with her friend Isabel, but not to worry—I hadn’t, and would never, say anything about her working here. I also wanted to make sure she didn’t tell her friends I was her boss, so that in a few weeks, when my money came in, we could come out as the power couple we were destined to be. People forever associate you with the job you had when they met you. I didn’t want to be known as that failed athlete turned hotel manager who got lucky with an investment—even though that’s what I was. If our future life was going to include these friends, I wanted them to see me as a catch, not a consolation prize.
So I went to talk to her after she’d returned from shopping with her friends. When I saw her getting into the elevator wearing her uniform and pushing a cart, I almost called out to her. But then the doors closed. I watched the digital display as the elevator climbed, two, three, four, five, six . . . all the way to the top floor. Ceci’s floor. She wasn’t on the clock. I was confused why she would go there. Until I wasn’t.
Julie’s room was two hallways and three turns from my office. I took the detective and her posse through the back-of-hotel, where only staff members are allowed. There was no need to parade them through the guest areas and churn up concern.
“Here we are,” I said as we reached Julie’s room. Detective Montpelier pushed past me and pounded on the door. I knew Julie wasn’t home, but I kept my mouth shut. The less you say, the less they can pin on you. And while not an accomplice, I was not innocent either.
“This is the RCMP—open the door,” Montpelier shouted. When there was no answer, she stepped aside so I could unlock it.
“Wait outside,” the detective ordered as the light went from red to green. She and her two goons had their guns drawn, and I was all too happy to get out of their way.
“RCMP!” Montpelier shouted into the room. “We’re coming in!”
The next part happened fast. I stood with my back against the wall as the three officers charged into the room like racers from the starting gate.
I heard their boots thumping across the carpet, the sound of doors opening with force.
“Closet clear!”
“Bathroom clear!”
I heard dresser drawers opening and closing, the hollow whoosh of clothes hangers scraping across a metal bar.
“Detective!” one of the dogs shouted. And the scuffling abruptly stopped.
There was a beat of silence. Did they find it? I peeked in the door to see that, in fact, they had.
“This is Chief Hendricks,” a voice boomed out of the detective’s open mic.
“I need an arrest warrant, and I need it now,” Detective Montpelier told the chief. “I found the murder weapon.” And I knew as bad as things had been for Julie Weston Adler, they were about to get a lot worse.
CHAPTER 34
Monique
I never watched boxing or UFC. The idea of someone beating another person into a bloody pulp for sport was vulgar and inhumane to me. I always thought athletes like fencers, archers, target shooters, and biathletes were different: disciplined, skilled, nonviolent. But when I saw that .22-caliber rifle under Julie Weston Adler’s bed, I questioned my assumption. Perhaps it says something about a person if they are drawn to a sport that entails mastering a deadly weapon? Or maybe the process of mastering it conjures fantasies of using it in other ways?
I asked Delatour to put hotel security on room 901 so I could have Jarvis back, then gathered my three-person team outside the suspect’s room. The idea that Julie Weston Adler would come back to the scene of the crime seemed crazy, but so did murdering a woman in cold blood. I had no idea what Adler’s next move would be, only prayed to God it wasn’t to kill again.
“This is our suspect,” I said, pulling up a picture of the former Olympic biathlete on my phone. I used her hotel-ID photo because it was the most recent, but there were hundreds of others to choose from—on the podium with medals around her neck, shooting a rifle identical to the one we’d found in her room, walking down the aisle to wed her now-dead husband. And what about that dead husband? His death had been ruled a suicide, but given this new development, was it worth a closer look?
With the issuing of the arrest warrant came an APB to all the police forces within a hundred kilometers of Banff. Because of the power outage and subsequent shutdown of the hotel’s security cameras, we had no idea when, or even if, the suspect had left the hotel. But if she had, it was unlikely she would get very far in this storm. Still, we wanted her picture on the walls of every precinct from Calgary to Kicking Horse. The good news about the mountains is that there’s only one way in and one way out. Assuming you’re traveling by car—which, in this particular suspect’s case, was not a given. The Canadian Rockies were full of adventure trails. They weren’t for the faint of heart, but neither was chasing Olympic gold, so we couldn’t rule them out as an escape route.
There were countless unknowns and no time to waste. The longer we took to act, the farther our suspect could travel. Of course it was also possible that she was still right under our noses. We were already here, so that’s where we would start.
“OK guys, we need to track the suspect’s movements after the murder,” I said. “It’s possible she left the premises, but we can’t assume it. We have no indication that she’s armed or dangerous, but even if she is, you’re trained for this. I have full confidence that if a situation arises, you’ll know what to do.”
Stafford—perhaps subconsciously—reached for his sidearm like you pat your pocket to check for your keys.
I looked at my veteran. “Jarvis, I need you to start talking to staff. Start with the front desk clerks and work your way backward through the hotel. Did anybody see her this evening? What time? What was she wearing? Who was she with? You know the drill.”
He nodded. “Copy that.”
“Go.”
Jarvis jogged off down the hall. Born and raised in Banff, J. J. knew as much about the town and this hotel as anybody. Easygoing and personable, he was well suited to the task of getting people to open up.
“Purdy, I need you in the security office watching all the entrances,” I said. The main building had nine doors to the outside. I’d thought about having Sydney disable Adler’s key—they can reprogram them remotely—but that might tip off our suspect and send her running off into the storm. No, better to have her inside the hotel, where we could corner her and make the arrest.
“If you spot her, do not leave your post. I need your eyes on the monitors until she’s arrested.”
“Copy that.” And then he, too, was off.
“Stafford, you’re staying here.”
“Outside her room?”
“No, in it. Look for clues to where she might have gone. Check the pockets of her coats, her trash can, her dirty-clothes basket. Collect any handwritten notes, photographs, receipts. I want you to become an expert on Ms. Julie Weston Adler.”
“And if she comes back while I’m in there?” he asked. And the answer was simple.
“Make the arrest.”
CHAPTER 35
Monique
I had a bloody bullet. I had a rifle capable of firing said bullet. I had video of the owner of that rifle sneaking into the victim’s room less than an hour before she was found dead. While we couldn’t see the rifle in the video, that laundry cart was big enough to accommodate it. So I could explain how she’d snuck the weapon in and out. There was only one thing I didn’t have: a motive. So while my staff cased the place to track down Julie Weston Adler’s whereabouts, I went to work on why she’d done it.
Just like it takes two to tango, it takes both a suspect and a victim to formulate a motive. To convict someone of a crime, it’s not enough to know if your suspect is capable, you have to know what your victim did to provoke them. Which meant learning about the victim.
Delatour had said that Ceci Rousseau went to the bar every afternoon for happy hour. So I took myself to the bar. The place was hopping. There was one empty stool by the servers’ station, so I took it.
“What can I get you?” the bartender said as I sat down on the padded leather stool. I glanced at his name tag to see his name was Johnny.
“I’ll have a Coke.” He bent over to grab a glass. The woman to my right was clutching a mojito, her back to me as she canoodled with her fella. I would have preferred to talk to the bartender in private, but there was no time to wait.
As bartender Johnny put the Coke down in front of me, I placed my badge on the bar top.
“What’s that? Are you a cop?”
“Detective Monique Montpelier. I was hoping to ask you a few questions.”
“I’m kind of busy.”
“You can work while we talk.”
An order was coming in. He glanced over to look at it.
“What do you want to know?” he asked as he reached for a glass.
“There’s a woman who comes here every day for happy hour,” I said, careful to use present tense. I hadn’t told anyone but my guys someone had died here. That was the chief’s job.
“You don’t mean Ceci?” he asked as he opened a bottle of beer and set it on the servers’ station.
“So you know her?”
“Everybody knows her.”
“So she’s popular.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
Another drink order came through the machine. He turned his back on me to tear the paper off the ticker.
“What’s her drink?” I asked as he pulled a bottle of gin from the top shelf. I wanted to see how well he remembered her. Also, I was curious.
“Who, Ceci? Manhattan, usually. Sometimes she has me make her an old-fashioned. To match her hair, she likes to joke.”
“So she’s a jokester.”
“When she’s not chewing someone a new asshole,” Johnny said, squeezing a lime into that gin and tonic. He slid the drink toward a waiting cocktail waitress.
“Does she give you a hard time?”
“Nah, we get on pretty good. She’s nicer to men. It’s women she likes to rough up.”
“Any in particular?”
He took a towel off his waist.
“There was a waitress here—her name was Madelaine,” he said as he wiped the counter. “Pretty girl. On the young side. If Ceci was in her section, she would send me to take the order. They eventually moved Maddy to the Chop House.” The Chop House was the steak house in the hotel. I’d never eaten there—it was two stars above my price range.
“So Mrs. Rousseau was rude to her?”
“More than just rude. She would accuse her of bringing the wrong drink, or spill it and say it was Maddy’s fault, stuff like that.”
“Are you talking about Ceci Rousseau?” a woman said, and I looked over to see front desk attendant Sydney from Sydney standing over my shoulder. She had let down her hair and changed out of her blazer. I guessed she was off duty and here for an after-shift drink.
“Do you know her?”
“Not really.” She hesitated, like she wanted to tell me something but wasn’t sure she should.
“I’m hearing that she wasn’t such a nice person,” I said, to open the door she had cracked. She waited for Johnny to move off, then leaned in close.
“Did something happen to her?” Sydney was the one who’d escorted me to the ninth floor when I first arrived. She said she’d been told there was some sort of emergency. I was relieved that so far that was all she knew.
“I can’t comment on an open investigation.”
And then she said something that surprised me.
“Did she hurt someone?”
My pulse quickened. She knew something.
“What makes you ask that?”
“She has a temper. Just the other day, she called some poor room attendant down to the lobby and yelled at her in front of everybody.”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Guests, staff, the manager.”
“You mean Remy Delatour?” She nodded, and I found it . . . curious that he’d never mentioned that.
“What was the argument about?”
“I’m not sure. I just know Ceci was furious. She called the poor woman all sorts of names.”
“Did she try to get the room attendant fired?”
“Remy wouldn’t do that. He knows guests can be crazy. He has our backs.”
“Do you know who the room attendant was?”
“Yeah, the new girl.” I raised an eyebrow. I needed her to say her name.
“Which new girl?”
“I think her name is Julie.” And if my heart skipped a beat when she said her name, it skipped two more after what she said next. “A couple of the other staffers told me she used to be famous.”
“Famous for what?”
“They said she was in the Olympics or something.” Boom! I pulled out my phone and showed her a picture.
“Yeah, that’s her,” Sydney confirmed.
And I had my motive.
This case was all but open and shut. The only thing left to do was arrest Julie Weston Adler. As I went to put my phone back in my jacket pocket, it buzzed in my hand.
“What’s up, Jarvis?”
“Boss, you’re not going to believe this,” he said. “But our perp just walked through the front door.”
CHAPTER 36
Julie
He tried to tell me. Not just after he’d slept with her, but also before. “This isn’t a marriage,” he’d said. “We need to try harder.” He accused me of shutting down, running from hard conversations, not loving him anymore. And two of those three things were true. I loved Jeff with every bone in my body—which was why I did those other two things.
I had a teammate named Todd who was crazy about dogs. If he saw a dog on the trail, he would always stop to pet it. All his spare toonies went to dog-rescue charities. He even had a dog-of-the-month calendar inside his locker. One day I asked him, “Why don’t you get a dog, Todd?” And he put up a hand and shook his head. “I can’t go through the pain of losing another one. It’s too hard.” And I understood.
Jeff and I were long-distance lovers for the first two and a half years of our relationship. We didn’t even live in the same country until we got engaged. And then it was a whirlwind of house shopping, wedding planning, merging our friends and our lives. During those first few months in California, life was an amusement park and Jeff was my guide. But after we got married and there were no more roller coasters to ride, all that was left to discover was each other. My husband had a vision of us as two trees growing side by side, branches and roots all intermingled. He wanted to know my deepest thoughts, my dreams for the future, what moved me, what scared me. Problem was, what scared me was him. I’d been vulnerable once—loved with my whole heart, as all children do with their mom and dad. And like my friend Todd, I couldn’t do it again.
Jeff was in a pressure cooker at work. He needed to vent, fret, be held by loving arms. But the more he tried to climb into my heart, the more scared I got. He needed something I couldn’t give him. Something my best friend had in abundance.
Izzy was passionate, generous, caring, and the most fun person you could ever hope to meet. Her arms were always open, it’s no wonder Jeff fell into them. Fate may have stopped her from confessing, but I knew what she had done. It was so obvious now. Jeff had been trying to tell me for weeks. There was only one reason my husband would get a hotel room the night of Christa’s wedding. Yes, I saw the charge. The only thing I didn’t know was who had joined him. Until now. If the one-night stand had been a cry for help, I’d refused to answer it. Just like I’d refused to see the signs of the other thing he’d done.
The storm in my head was as fierce as the pounding snow as I drove down the hill into town. Izzy had betrayed me, but hadn’t I betrayed her too? I pretended I was invincible, while my world was crumbling. The lies between us were like rot on wood. If we tried to strip them away, would there be anything left of our friendship?
The girls were still buzzing with excitement and relief as I drove us to the hotel. I didn’t know what to say to them, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Good evening,” the valet said as I pulled into the drive.
“Good evening,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
