Chapter Twelve

“The earthquake did a lot of structural damage,” Amelia said, “but it was the fire that gutted the central section of the hotel, where the clinic was located.”

“I can see that,” Gideon said.

He and Amelia were standing in what had once been the sweeping front drive at the entrance to the Lucent Springs Hotel. The ruins stood alone in the desert, a few miles outside the small community of Lucent Springs. The structure was a sprawling two-story monument to the 1930s Southern California architectural mash-up of Art Deco and Hollywood’s version of Spanish Colonial architecture.

Amelia had explained that the hotel had originally been built as an upscale sanatorium for wealthy patients suffering from tuberculosis. The medical theory at the time had held that the warmth of the sun and the dry air of the desert were the best therapies for the disease.

By the 1940s the hotel had been converted into a luxury resort that catered to the rich and famous. In its day it must have been an impressive destination, he thought. Nevertheless, in the end the rich and famous had chosen Palm Springs, Burning Cove, and Phoenix for their winter playgrounds. Several attempts had been made to renovate the hotel in the ensuing years but they had failed.

The gardens had long since disappeared beneath cacti and tumbleweeds but some of the colonnaded walkways still stood. Most of the windows in the central structure and the two side wings were either studded with jagged shards of glass or empty entirely. The remaining room doors hung on rusted hinges. The walls were crumbled in places and badly charred in others.

The history of the hotel was interesting, but in that moment he was focused on Amelia’s reaction to the ruins. Her tension level had increased with each mile of the trip from San Diego to Lucent Springs. It had probably been a mistake to tell her about his stalker, but he’d had no choice. He’d had to explain the wedding veil.

He knew she was exerting a lot of willpower now in an attempt to appear calm and in control. He wondered if she was going to have an anxiety attack and then he wondered what he could do if she did. He had some skills, but offering comfort was not one of them. He could send her straight into a nightmare but he did not know how to pull her out of one.

And she thought she had a depressing talent.

“Walk me through everything you can remember about the day you arrived here for what you thought was a job interview,” he said.

She gave a small start, as if she had been somewhere else in her head.

“Right,” she said, recovering quickly. “Talia, Pallas, and I had never met before we arrived that afternoon. We had each received an invitation to take a contract with a hotel corporation that planned to renovate the property and turn it into a destination spa. Pallas is an interior designer. She was going to restore the interiors to their former glory. Talia was supposed to chronicle the history of the place with a view toward marketing. I was asked to do a series of before-and-after photographs to record the transformation.”

“How were the business arrangements handled?”

“Everything was done online until the day we met here. There was a professional website that made the hotel company look legit. The corporation claimed that it owned several luxury resorts in Asia and the South Pacific.”

“Were all the supposed holdings offshore?”

“Yes. This was supposed to be their first American property.” Amelia shook her head in disgust. “Later, of course, we realized we had been scammed. The business existed only on the internet. Afterward every trace of the company vanished. The website, the emails, the texts, the electronically signed paperwork and the drafts of the contracts simply disappeared. Our producer, Phoebe, is very good with tech. She’s trying to find whatever may be left in the way of digital tracks.”

“Has she picked up any leads?”

“Nothing we’ve been able to use,” Amelia said.

Her fury and frustration were unmistakable but so was her fierce determination. He resisted the impulse to give her a reassuring hug for two reasons. The first was that he did not have anything to offer in the way of actual reassurance. The second was that it was always bad policy to hug a client. Not as dumb as having an affair with a client but still a really, really bad idea.

“Tell me the rest of what you remember,” he said. He knew he sounded brusque and unfeeling but that seemed like the best way to handle the fraught moment.

She squared her shoulders. “I have no clear memories of what happened after we walked through the front door. Talia, Pallas, and I woke up early the next morning strapped to gurneys inside the old sanatorium clinic.”

He studied the dark entrance of the lobby. “Where is the clinic?”

“At the rear of the center section of the hotel. I’ll show you.”

She started toward one of the outdoor colonnaded walkways. He followed, interested by how confidently she moved through the ruins.

“Looks like you know your way around,” he said.

“I’ve been here a number of times in the past several months,” she said over her shoulder. “My friends think I’m obsessing on this damned hotel and they’re right. But I keep returning because I’m certain I’m overlooking something important.”

“In addition to the key?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea what that might be?” he asked.

“No.”

She stopped at the far end of the central building and indicated a shattered window.

“We woke up inside that room,” she said. “The ground was still shaking. We could hear things falling and crashing around us. The fire was already going strong. We could smell the smoke. It was nearly dawn.”

He walked to a shattered window and studied the interior of the burned-out space. The walls were blackened with soot. Ash covered the floor. The sight of the charred and twisted gurneys lined up against one wall sent an icy rage splashing through his bloodstream. Amelia had been strapped to one of those gurneys.

“How did the local police respond?” he asked.

He did not realize that he had allowed some of his emotional reaction to seep into his voice until he saw Amelia flinch. Great. Now he was frightening the client. That is not good for business, Sweetwater .

“The authorities did not believe us,” Amelia said, her voice far too neutral. “They assumed the three of us had come out here to do some designer drugs or get drunk and accidentally started a fire.”

“Was there an investigation?”

“No. Lucent Springs is a very small town. The fire department is staffed by volunteers. There are no investigators. Not that the local authorities saw any reason to conduct an investigation.”

“Let’s see if we can find the origin point of the fire.”

They went back along the walkway, checking the interiors of the various rooms they passed. The burn patterns led to a room in the middle of one of the wings.

“This is where it started,” Gideon said.

“Earthquakes often spark fires,” Amelia pointed out.

“Not in this case,” he said. “Someone set this one. Kids, maybe, or a transient.”

“Okay, assuming you’re right, what does that tell us?”

Gideon looked at her. “It tells us there may have been a witness to what happened to you and your friends that night.”

“Whoever it was didn’t come forward at the time. Probably afraid they would be blamed for the fire.”

“It doesn’t mean we can’t persuade an eyewitness to talk,” he said.

Amelia brightened. “With a bribe, you mean. I hadn’t thought about that approach.”

“Neither had I,” he admitted.

“What?”

“I was thinking of a more straightforward method of convincing someone to talk,” he said. “But you’re right, bribery is a much better idea.”

Her momentary flush of enthusiasm faded almost immediately. “I don’t have a lot of cash. Business has been a little slow in the past few months. What do bribes cost?”

“Let’s worry about that if we come up with an actual eyewitness.”

She sighed. “What are the odds?”

“We won’t know until we start looking. We’ll start with our best lead.”

“Which is?”

“The key you found in the ashes. I think it’s a good bet that it opens a room in a small single-story motel, one that hasn’t bothered to go to the expense of upgrading to key cards. We can probably assume that management didn’t want to pay a locksmith to rekey the room. The place we’re looking for will be somewhere nearby, because whoever booked it wasn’t looking for a luxury destination resort. They wanted a location that was convenient to the Lucent Springs Hotel.”

She blinked. “You’re sure that key belongs to someone who was involved in what happened to Talia, Pallas, and me, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because your intuition is telling you that it is connected,” he said, striving for patience.

“That’s enough for you to go on?”

“For now.” He frowned. “What? You don’t trust your intuition?”

“Seven months ago, my intuition is what convinced me to apply for the job here at the Lucent Springs Hotel.”

“Well, there’s no such thing as one hundred percent certainty.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“Best I can do for now.” He walked toward the SUV. “Let’s go find the motel room that fits this key.”

“How do you plan to do that? Drive to every motel and resort in the area and try the key in all the rooms that have a number ten on the door? We’d probably get arrested.”

“We’ll limit our search to the motels that meet our criteria,” Gideon said. “Small, located nearby, minimal security, few amenities, and—”

“And what?”

“There may or may not be a cactus garden on the premises.”

She raised her brows. “Is your intuition telling you there may be a cactus garden because of the partial sketch of a barrel cactus on the key?”

“I admit I’m winging it with the cactus garden guess.”