SEVENTY-EIGHT
Ramirez drives us to a swanky hotel on the outskirts of town. It looks like the sort of hotel that has a spa in every room and linen that gets replaced every hour on the hour. In other words, it’s a hotel that I could never afford in my wildest dreams.
A valet takes his keys to park the car, and we walk together into the hotel and up to the concierge desk. Ramirez reaches into his pocket and pulls out his badge, sliding it across the table. “My name is Detective Ramirez of the NYPD. I’m looking for a guest of the hotel named Suzette Lowell.”
The concierge picks up the phone and calls Suzette’s room. When he reports that a member of the NYPD is here to see her, we are immediately granted access to the room. “Up to the tenth floor and all the way down the hallway,” the concierge tells us.
I walk purposefully in the direction of the elevator, and Ramirez hurries to keep pace with me. The elevator walls are entirely mirrors, which makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. Or maybe I’m sick to my stomach because I’m visiting the wife of a man who threatened both my children and she just let it happen. God knows what he would have done to Nico if Ada hadn’t intervened.
“I don’t know about all this, Millie,” Ramirez says. “I’d rather do this by the book when she’s at the station.”
“Please give me a chance to talk to her,” I say to him. “This is our best shot at getting my family off the hook. We have to try.”
He just shakes his head.
The elevator dings as we reach the tenth floor. I dismount the elevator and stride in the direction of Suzette’s room—Ramirez has to jog to keep up with me. I don’t stop until I have reached her door. I lift my fist to knock while Ramirez sighs and shakes his head.
“Just a moment!” a voice calls out from behind the door.
A second later, the door to the hotel swings open. Suzette is standing there, wearing a white fleece bathrobe with the name of the hotel printed on the lapel. She had managed a pleasant smile on her painted lips, but that vanishes when she sees me standing at the open doorway.
“What are you doing here?” Suzette hisses.
“Mrs. Accardi is with me, Mrs. Lowell,” Ramirez says.
She looks between the two of us, and for a moment, I’m certain she’s going to slam the door in our faces. And that would be her right. “Are you really with the NYPD?” she asks him.
“I assure you, I am,” he says. “And if you’ll allow me and Mrs. Accardi to come inside, I’d like to make you an offer that can save us all a great deal of grief moving forward.”
She puts her hand on her hip. “Show me your ID.”
Ramirez obligingly reaches into his pocket again to pull out his badge. He shows it to her, and she takes a moment to examine it, as if she could possibly tell the difference between a fake ID and a real one. But if that makes her feel better, she can knock herself out.
“Fine,” she says stiffly. “You can come in for a minute, but I was about to take a shower.”
“I bet they have nice showers here,” Ramirez says as he strolls into her hotel room. Suzette has a chance to slam the door in my face, but she doesn’t take it, and I manage to slip inside with him. “Not as nice as the ones in your house though.”
“Thank you,” Suzette says stiffly. “I can’t go in there right now, for obvious reasons.”
“Oh, I know.” He stops when he gets to the giant, king-size bed. “You want to take a seat, Mrs. Lowell?”
“I don’t think we need to get too comfortable.”
One side of his lips quirks up. “Fair enough.”
“So what did you want to talk to me about, Detective?”
“Well, actually,” he says, “it’s about your house. The police were in there, you know.”
She rolls her eyes. “That’s how it works with a crime scene, I assume.”
“And they saw every part of it.”
Her eyes narrow, and I detect a tiny flicker of fear. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean,” Ramirez says, “they saw the room below your stairwell.”
If I hadn’t been staring at Suzette’s face, I would’ve missed the way she blanched. I swear to God, if Ramirez weren’t standing next to me right now, I would scratch that woman’s eyes out. I would rip her heart right out of her chest.
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Suzette sputters.
“No?” Ramirez arches one of his dark eyebrows. “So you didn’t know there was a room below the staircase on the first floor of your house concealed behind a bookcase?”
She shakes her head slowly. “I think I saw some sort of storage room when we first moved in, but we never ended up using it.”
“That’s so strange,” he muses.
“Not really,” she says. “Jonathan already owned the house when I moved in, so I never went through the floor plans.”
“Even though you’re a real estate agent, you never looked at the floor plans of your own house?”
She shrugs. “We already owned it and weren’t considering selling. Why should I have? Is that a crime, Detective?”
“Here’s the thing though.” Ramirez levels his eyes at her. “Your fingerprints are all over that room. So if you didn’t know about it, how did that happen exactly?”
When he first came in, she had declined the offer to sit. But now she sinks onto the mattress, her face ashen. It’s gratifying to see how terrified she looks. She deserves it.
“You know what else the police found in that room?” Ramirez asks her.
