Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

I looked up and saw the elevator closing again as the man in the red jacket held his hand on the door-close button. I looked at his face and recognized it from the mug shot I had seen earlier that night. He was cleaned up and blond now, but I was sure it was Marc Courier. I looked back at the elevator control panel and saw a floor light glowing from the top. Courier was going back up.

I reached into the cart and yanked back the bedspread. There was Rachel. She was still wearing the clothes she’d had on earlier in the day. She was facedown with her arms and legs hog-tied behind her back. A terry cloth belt from a hotel room bathrobe had been tied as a gag across her mouth. Her nose and mouth were bleeding profusely. Her eyes were glassy and distant.

“Rachel!”

I reached down and pulled the gag down off her mouth.

“Rachel? Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

She didn’t respond. The kitchen man stepped over and looked down into the cart.

“What the hell is going on?”

She was bound with plastic cable ties. I pulled the folding corkscrew out of my pocket and used the small blade designed for cap cutting to slice through the plastic.

“Help me get her out!”

We carefully lifted her out of the cart and put her on the floor. I dropped down next to her and made sure the blood had not closed off her airways. Her nostrils were caked with it but her mouth was clear. She had been beaten and her face was beginning to swell.

I looked up at the kitchen man.

“Go call security. And nine-one-one. Now! GO! ”

He started running down the hall for a phone. I looked back down at Rachel and saw she was becoming alert.

“Jack?”

“It’s all right, Rachel. You’re safe.”

Her eyes looked scared and hurt. I felt a rage building inside me.

From down the hallway I heard the kitchen man yell.

“They’re coming! Paramedics and po-lice!”

I didn’t look up at him. I kept my eyes on Rachel.

“There, you hear that? Help is on the way.”

She nodded and I saw more life returning to her eyes. She coughed and tried to sit up. I helped her and then pulled her into a hug. I rubbed the back of her neck.

She whispered something I couldn’t hear and I pulled back to look at her and asked her to say it again.

“I thought you were in L.A. ”

I smiled and shook my head.

“I was too paranoid about going away from the story. And from you. I was going to surprise you with a good bottle of wine. That’s when I saw him. It was Courier.”

She made a slight nodding motion.

“You saved me, Jack. I didn’t recognize him through the peephole. When I opened the door, it was too late. He hit me. I tried to fight but he had a knife.”

I shushed her. No explanation was necessary.

“Listen, was he by himself? Was McGinnis there?”

She shook her head.

“I only saw Courier. I recognized him too late.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The kitchen man was standing back down the hall, now with other men dressed in kitchen clothes. I signaled them to come forward and they didn’t move at first. Then one reluctantly stepped forward and the others followed.

“Push that elevator button for me,” I said.

“You sure?” one asked.

“Just do it.”

I leaned down and put my face into the crook of Rachel’s neck. I hugged her tightly, breathed in her scent and whispered in her ear.

“He went up. I’m going to go get him.”

“No, Jack, you wait here. Stay with me.”

I pulled up and looked into her eyes. I said nothing until I heard the elevator open. I then looked up at the kitchen man I had originally spoken to. On his white shirt the name Hank was embroidered.

“Where’s security?”

“They should be here,” he said. “They’re coming.”

“Okay, I want you men to wait here with her. Don’t leave her. When security gets here, you tell them there’s another victim on the seventh-floor stairwell and that I went up to the top to look for the guy. Tell security to cover all the exits and elevators. This guy went up, but he’s gonna have to try to come down.”

Rachel started to get up.

“I’m going with you,” she said.

“No, you’re not. You’re hurt. You stay here and I’ll be right back. I promise.”

I left her there and stepped onto the elevator. I pushed the 12 button and looked back at Rachel. As the door closed I noticed that Hank the kitchen man was nervously lighting his cigarette.

It was a damn-the-rules moment for both of us.

The service elevator moved slowly upward and I came to realize that so much of Rachel’s rescue had relied on pure luck-a slow elevator, my staying in Mesa to surprise her, my taking the stairs with the bottle of wine. But I didn’t want to dwell on what could have been. I concentrated on the moment and when the elevator finally reached the top of the building, I stood ready with the one-inch corkscrew blade as the door opened. I realized I should have grabbed a better weapon from the kitchen, but it was too late now.

The housekeeping vestibule on twelve was empty except for the red waiter’s jacket I saw dropped on the floor. I pushed through the swinging doors and into the central hallway. I could hear sirens coming from outside the building now. A lot of them.

Looking both ways I saw nothing and I started to realize that a one-man search of a twelve-story hotel nearly as wide as it was tall was going to be a waste of time. Between elevators and stairwells, Courier had his choice of multiple escape routes.

I decided to go back down to Rachel and leave the search for hotel security and the arriving police.

But I knew that on the way down I could cover at least one of those exit routes. Maybe my luck would hold. I chose the north stairwell because it was closest to the hotel’s parking garage. And it was the stairwell Courier had used earlier to hide the body of the room service waiter.

I went down the hallway, rounded the corner and then pushed through the exit door. I first looked over the railing and down the shaft. I saw nothing and heard only the echo of the sirens. I was just about to head down the steps, when I noticed that even though I was on the top floor of the hotel, the stairs continued up.

If there was access to the roof, I needed to check it. I headed up.

The stairwell was dimly lit by a sconce on each landing. Each floor was broken into two sets of stairs and landings in the routine back-and-forth design. When I reached the midlevel and turned to take the next set of stairs to what would be the thirteenth floor, I saw the upper and final landing was crowded with stored hotel room furnishings. I came all the way up to where the stairs ended in a large storage area. There were bed tables stacked on top of one another and mattresses leaning four deep against one of the walls. There were stacks of chairs and mini-refrigerators and pre-flat-screen-era television cabinets. I was reminded of the filing cabinets I had seen in the Public Defender’s Office hallway. There had to be multiple code violations here, but who was looking? Who ever came up here? Who cared?

I worked my way around a grouping of standing stainless-steel lamps and toward a door with a small square window at face height. The word roof had been painted on it with a stencil. But when I got to it, I found the door was locked. I pushed hard on the release bar but it wouldn’t move. Something had jammed or locked the mechanism and the door wouldn’t budge. I looked through the window and saw a flat gravel roof running behind the barrel-tiled parapets of the hotel. Across a forty-yard expanse of gravel I could see the structure that housed the building’s elevator equipment. Beyond that was another door to the stairwell on the other side of the hotel.