Brian catches her wrist. “Tess, Christ, don’t—”
“It’s fake! Franklin messes with Delores all the time. She’s his favorite target. Look at the soaps, the empty water bottle on the floor, the ladder right there. He was sticking the soaps together. He’s done it before.”
“And to give his prank a one--two punch, he squirts some fake blood on the floor.” Brian brings her dripping fingertip to his nose. He smells it. “Smell it,” he says. “Don’t taste it. Smell it.”
Tessa does. Her lip curls in faint revulsion. “Right. So?”
“So, they don’t usually bother to make fake blood smell like blood.”
Brian releases her hands, steals the toilet paper, and wipes her fingertip clean while Tessa says, “Fine. One of two things happened. Either our head of security caught Franklin at it and intervened—”
“Intervened?” Brian echoes. “And caught him how?”
“I don’t know. That’s not my department. I’m design and logistics.” She steals the toilet paper back and wipes the stain, though Brian protests. “Franklin’s right now having his ass handed to him. Hopefully getting fired, though that’ll make the next few days a living hell for me, finding a replacement.”
“What about the smell?” Brian says, standing when Tessa does. He watches her toss the bloody paper in the trash.
“Ha!” she says. She reaches into the garbage can, most of her top half disappearing. She lifts out the soap ball. “That creep is fired.” She drops it, and a duo of thuds suggests it bounces in the bottom of the can.
Brian repeats, “What about the smell? And you said one of two things happened.”
“Someone cut themselves,” Tessa says, reorganizing the soaps on the housekeeping shelves. She spots the collapsed stacks of dryer sheets and fixes those. “Vivica. She came down for a snack, was checking on—I don’t know, something—in this room, she cuts herself, overcooks her food—”
“You’re reaching,” Brian says.
“What else would it be?”
The buzz of fluorescent lights fills a telling silence.
Brian says, “That’s not food. It’s meat, but it’s not.” He blows all his breath at the floor and forces himself to look up. “On the circuit. When there was a crash and gas spilled and a guy got burned—big--time burned; we’re talking ass grafts to the face—this is how it smelled.”
Tessa looks sick, but she stands up straighter. She turns and leaves the housekeeping storage area for the employee break room. She does so professionally, shoulders back, expression controlled, until she’s no longer in front of Brian. Then her forehead crimps, and she presses on her mouth. Tessa is an ambulant contradiction. She is at once strikingly strong and heartrendingly vulnerable. The paradox makes a natural protector desperate to protect her. The best security is invisible security. The most thorough safety is safety one’s object of protection doesn’t know about. She shakes her head at a dirty dish in the employee break room sink, rinses it, and sets it in the drying rack. This seems to focus her, and she rounds the long break room table to stand in front of the lockers. Employees are assigned a padlock. Tessa turns her combination.
Brian bangs his forehead on the housekeeping storage area’s wall, once, and goes to follow Tessa. He pauses at the table where the maids fold sheets. Runs his finger along the edge. His finger comes away flecked red.
He looks around the room, his eyes landing on the dryers.
Tessa pulls on her padlock, but it doesn’t pop open. Franklin cut off all the padlocks with bolt cutters, on orders from his phone contact, at a quarter after five o’clock today. He then replaced the employees’ padlocks (labeled with employees’ names) with other padlocks. He then hid the bolt cutters in a conference room on the second floor. Tessa tries her combination again.
Brian is opening the first dryer. He wears the grim resignation of a man who feels foolish and yet knows he is right. The dryer is empty but still warm. He touches the ridges inside and spins them. He scowls, shuts the door. And looks at the rest of the row.
He moves to the second dryer. He looks markedly different—threatening, worlds apart from the golden--retriever--like persona he’s been using on Tessa this afternoon. His lips pucker and his eyebrows angle and he opens the second dryer. It’s empty, cool. He checks the third, fast: empty.
Brian inches sideways. He’s shaking his head. His lips are moving in false, rapid--fire consolations that what he knows is inside isn’t inside. He’s reaching for the fourth dryer.
The Killer is still on the toilet, on the seventh floor.
The other Killer is still playing solitaire, on the twentieth floor.
CAMERA 6, 13, 4, 5, 12, 33
Brian grips the handle of the fourth dryer. If he finds Franklin’s body, he might not scream. He might hurry to Tessa, shush her, drag or carry her to the foyer. Maybe—barely—he could do this before the other Killer notices, summons the secret elevator to the twentieth floor, boards it, and presses the button for the first floor.
The other Killer has abandoned his game of solitaire. The red of his cards is so vibrant against the thin gray rug that the colors throb like strobes. The twentieth floor was designed to be boring—no, it was hardly designed at all. It’s a monitor bank on the north and south side and thin carpet and wraparound tinted windows and space and space and space and a conference table and a coffee station and, now, four dead bodies. The other Killer stands at the secret elevator, his finger poised over the “Down” button. He watches Brian.
In the employee break room, Tessa checks her padlock’s underside and sees her name is not on it.
Brian hears swearing and a loud rattle of metal. His hand retreats from the fourth dryer, and he runs. “Tess?” he says, arriving in the employee break room.
Tessa is checking all of the padlocks for labels, finding none. “I am going,” she says, “to murder that rotten little sneak the second I see him, I swear on my life.” Brian is set to ask a question, but Tessa says, “Franklin locked up our stuff. I was going to use my cell and call Charles and fill him in on how Franklin crossed the line and is fired.” She screams the word.
Brian goes near her, but does not touch her. He’s smarter than he looks. “Landline’s out, right?”
Tessa says, “Right” through her teeth.
Brian perches on the back of a break room chair. “I don’t like this.”
The other Killer is terrible at solitaire. He cheats, so he always wins. He’s dealing a new game, his motions like those of a grand-father clock, which will count seconds as long as it has to, and not a moment longer, and not a moment less.
Tessa and Brian are arguing. Brian is asking her why he smells burned flesh and keeps finding red stains, and Tessa is cutting him off by saying she doesn’t want to hear about how his deathsport (she says it like that, like one word) has made him an expert on the smells of burns and blood. She is endeavoring not to cry, but this time, she does not allow Brian to hold her. She says something regarding the stairs.
Henri is turning his music way up, to motivate his cooks.
The other Killer, on the twentieth floor, is wearing the same mask and coveralls as the Killer, on the seventh floor. This makes it difficult to distinguish between them. The other Killer, as he plays solitaire, often rests his masked head on his fist. When he does this, he resembles Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker. The Thinker is—still—playing solitaire, and the Killer is—again—sitting on the bed in Room 717.
US Weekly sprawls, forgotten, beside the toilet.
Brian insists on preceding Tessa down the stairs to the foyer. He enters the stairwell in a stance of intense suspicion, his head snapping upward at the echo of Justin’s dead sprint past the eighteenth floor, up one more flight, to the ballroom (where Justin tears through the door, hearing the manic squall of a concertina, perceiving an opportunity to be of use, and Justin’s very excited about this because now he can save Jules’s ears to make up for betraying her trust), and Brian signals Tessa to wait, wait a second, until the door from the stairs to the ballroom slams, the specter of far--off music hushes, and Brian decides, incorrectly, that silence means they’re safe. He signals Tessa to come on.
Brian moves like an athlete, but an athlete in an effeminate sport, like gymnastics. His body suggests a complete willingness to take a blow or a wound or any discomfort, really, for Tessa, his arm to his side and in front of her, like a mother in a minivan braking suddenly and acting as a human seat belt for her child. The hesitance in his sideways arm suggests he feels stupid. He doesn’t trust his instincts, not enough. He has seen some hell; he has walked through it. But it requires many prolonged sojourns in hell to learn that instincts are the animal inside that wants nothing but to survive. To propagate.
Henri’s French accordion ballads blast on. Justin is touching Henri’s shoulder and yelling. Justin’s mouth shapes, “Turn it—down!”
Jules has cranked the volume dial to the left. “They need the musique!” shouts Henri, though his sous--chefs rub white--sleeved wrists on their ears.
“He’s always in here,” Tessa says. She has broken her own rule and is standing in Franklin’s office. “I’m telling you, security busted him. He’s being fired right now.” She wilts against a filing cabinet. “A thousand more things for me to do.”
Brian’s hands are in his jacket pockets again, chastened. There is no evidence of foul play in Franklin’s office. “How’d he get hired if he’s such a crap employee?”
“He knows a guy who golfs with Charles’s uncle.” Tessa has slid a piece of paper from Franklin’s printer, has clipped it to her clipboard, is writing items down. “Actually, he fucks a guy who golfs with Charles’s uncle.”
“Charles,” Brian says, nodding, distracted.
“Yeah.” Tessa is too distracted to note he’s distracted.
The intercom barks: “Zut, alors!” and “Tessa, come in, Tessa.” Jules is sort of laughing.
Tessa goes to the intercom on the wall two feet to Brian’s left and hits a button. Brian doesn’t move, as most people would when Tessa looks severe like this. “Talk to me.”
“We need you in the kitchen. Henri’s gone whatever’s French for ‘loco.’ ”
“Right up.” Tessa walks past Brian. He follows her. She stops in the middle of the foyer, where chandelier light burnishes the marble. It burnishes her, too—the curtain of her hair a long copper river, the line of her body a black slash in the white room. “Brian, I can’t do this. With Franklin fired, the opening’s in meltdown, and I can’t call Charles to tell him about it. So I need you to—”
“I’ll stay.” Embarrassed. Indifferent to embarrassment, or as close as he can manage. “I won’t get in the way. I’ll quit bugging you about what I came for, I’ll make an appointment to talk to you later, when you’ve got the time, but”—he shoots defiant distaste around the gleaming first floor—“I’m staying.”
“Why?” Tessa pretends this question is perfunctory, an annoyance. She does want to get upstairs as quickly as she can, but she also wants . . . Her body seems to change its mind millisecond by millisecond, limbs angling toward Brian and at the same time away.
Brian puts a hand to the small of her back and guides her toward the main elevator. He hesitated for a moment. He looked guilty. He looked afraid. He is fantastically readable, like Tessa. Most people are fantastically readable. That’s why masks are a great idea for killers.
“I’m learning about hotels,” Brian says, pressing the “Up” button. “You know how I love to learn.” He leaves his hand at the small of her back a few seconds longer than necessary. Not that his hand at the small of her back was ever necessary. He smiles. At her, and then at the floor. Then at her, and he keeps smiling at her. Tessa tries to mirror Brian’s sentiment, his light heart, but she has no talent for denial. The elevator arrives; they board. There is quite a long silence.
Then Tessa says, “Troy shouldn’t have pulled you out of school.”
“Mitch wouldn’t have gone without me.”
“Mitch shouldn’t have gone, then.”
Brian looks out of the glass elevator. They are passing the fifth floor. “Mitch hated school. When Troy took us along, summers, you saw. Mitch just lit up. Then Troy got the idea for the Domini Twins, and that was it. It wasn’t even a question.” He prods her with his elbow. “There are more kinds of education than what happens in a classroom.”
“Like the kind that teaches you how charred flesh smells?” Tessa regrets it the instant she says it. But she doesn’t take it back.
Brian watches the seventh floor pass. Room 717 is around a corner. The door is closed anyway.
Tessa hugs her clipboard. “Was Mitch—did he get burned when . . .”
“No.”