Page 32 of The Claiming of the Shrew
She crutched over and opened it. To her surprise, Sally was standing there, wringing her hands. The bit part actress and Leah barely knew each other.
“What?” Leah said, a little crossly.
Sally twisted her hands behind her back. “I thought I saw you go in here. Listen, I—I just wanted to tell you, I don’t think it’s fair, Maggie kicking you off the crew like that. You know, you’re great, and everyone likes you.”
“Oh.” Leah stared at her, mind going completely blank. “I, uh, thank you. I mean, really. Thank you.”
“I just wanted to tell you that.” Sally turned slightly pink. “And really, I don’t think you’re the one who did that to Gloria. It’s a stupid prank, that’s all. Someone’s gonna ‘fess up and we’ll all have a laugh about it. But I saw your face. It definitely wasn’t you.”
“Thank you,” Leah said earnestly. Now she felt bad about snooping in Sally’s room. Also, she was glad she hadn’t looked in the sex toy drawer. “I really appreciate you coming here to tell me that.”
Sally nodded, going pinker, and quickly withdrew.
Leah closed the door and found herself blinking back tears for very different reasons.
I DO have friends here,she reminded herself.
She was abruptly distracted by the sound of scrabbling claws and a thump.
Leah looked around in surprise. “Fawkes?” It hadn’t sounded big enough for a raccoon, but she was pretty sure something had just come in the window.
The room appeared to be empty.
“Fawkes, if you’re in here, this isn’t funny.”
She went over to the window, looking around as she did. A small shifter could be under the bed or in the closet. Or maybeshe’d heard a branch scraping against the wall? She leaned out and looked around, but saw nothing.
“Fawkes?” she called softly.
There was no answer. As she started to pull back inside, she sensed more than heard someone moving behind her, and as she moved to whirl around, a pair of arms clamped on her from behind.
Leah got in a good backward elbow, heard a whuff of breath, and then one of the hands clapped something soft but smothering over her mouth and nose.
In panic, she shifted, but this just caused her to fall directly into the soft, damp cloth, which smelled overwhelmingly of a sharp-scented chemical.
She was out in seconds.
FAWKES
Fawkes had spentthe evening painstakingly going over every possible angle to a) prove that someone had been in his room to plant the jewelry, and b) find out who it was.
Unfortunately the intruder, whoever they were, had been very good. He dusted the whole room for prints and found nothing but his own and a number of smudgy partial prints that probably belonged to the housekeeping staff. The lock must have been picked, but they’d left no trace—although the rooms still used old-fashioned keys rather than key cards, so all it would take to get in was a set of basic lock picks.
He ought to have set up some kind of recording device inside. Next time, he was going to bring a small webcam and have Sam monitor it.
“Okay, think it through,” he murmured aloud. “Someone set you up. It’s either the actual jewel thief, or someone else who knows why you’re here. They wanted someone to find this—Leah, the housekeeping staff, it didn’t really matter, you’d be in trouble either way.”
What he really needed to do was talk it over with Leah. Unfortunately, she seemed to have vanished after the hallway disturbance. He’d slipped off while the commotion was going on,planning to come back and talk to her after she and Maggie were done. But now he couldn’t find her anywhere. He found himself tense, on edge, in a way that was hard to explain even apart from her inexplicable absence—as if something inside him was telling him to worry. She didn’t answer his knocks at the door of Joy’s room. Leah wasn’t in her tent or her car. If she didn’t turn up soon, he would break into Joy’s room, but he was saving that as a last resort. It was possible she’d simply gone in to wait for him and fallen asleep.
It was also possible she still thought he was a jewel thief and had no intention of talking to him at all.
He was circling her campsite and considering shifting to track her by smell when he stopped abruptly. He could have smacked himself in the forehead for the obvious thing he’d overlooked.
By now it was fully dark outside. The hotel lobby remained unlocked all night, and Fawkes bounded up the stairs two at a time and let himself into his room.
One of the biggest advantages he had over a human P.I., other than the ability to get in and out of tight spaces, was his sense of smell. He had occasionally used it in the past. In this particular case, it had been useless around the trashed set because so many people had come and gone. Even the shears had smelled like too many different people to be sure of who had handled them last.
But he ought to be able to smell out whoever had been in his room. The only other smells would be himself and Leah, as well as the much more attenuated smells of cleaning staff and traces of former guests. The cleaners didn’t enter every day when a room was occupied, so the freshest scents by far should be Leah and whoever had put the jewelry in his pillowcase.
