The Hunt by Jennifer Sturman Page A

pass to buzz us into an interior room.
    At which point we encountered the bad news. Instead of a big vault of the sort you see in movies about bank heists, there were several rows of small safes mounted on a wall. Each of the safes had a digital keypad for a password the guest could set his or herself. And Hilary hadn’t bothered to write down her chosen password and leave it with the receipt in the secret compartment, which I considered a serious lapse in planning for the possibility that her friends might need to rescue her from a billionaire with personal-boundary issues.
    “Here you are,” Natasha said, checking a number on the receipt and indicating one of the safes about halfway down the row second from the top.
    “Could we have a moment alone?” I asked her. In the movies, they always left people alone with their safe deposit boxes when they went to retrieve their Nazi artifacts, incriminating documents or unmarked bills from Swiss banks.
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    Natasha didn’t seem to expect that—I guessed most people just entered their passwords, collected their things and left—but she agreed readily enough. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
    We looked around the room. The hotel’s management had posted a notice outlining its policy for items left in the safes on the wall to one side. They’d also posted instructions for setting passwords for the safes, advising users to choose a code consisting of between four and six numerals.
    “Do you have any idea what her password could be?” I asked Ben.
    “No,” he said. “I didn’t even know she locked anything up in the first place. Why would I know her password?”
    Because you’re her boyfriend, I started to say, but I managed to catch myself before the words left my head and came out of my mouth.
    I turned and contemplated the keypad on the safe Natasha had indicated, wracking my brain for memories of Hilary at the ATM, Hilary at the computer, or Hilary doing anything else that would have required her to enter a personal code, but nothing came immediately to mind. I ran through the usual sorts of considerations that guide people’s password choices, but Hilary hadn’t lived in the same place for more than a few months at a time since we’d graduated, she didn’t have any pets, and she had never cared much about birthdays—in fact, she’d been twenty-nine for several years now. Her twin passions were work and men, and these two interests tended to occupy the majority of her waking hours.
    While this line of thinking didn’t offer any brilliant insights, thinking about Hilary’s passions and her interest in men, specifically, did remind me of last night’s conversation about Party of Five.
    Which gave me an idea.
    “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Here goes.”
    I punched in five numbers and pressed the pound key. There was a pause, and I waited for an alarm to blare out and for Natasha to come running, armed with a stun gun or something like that. Instead, a small light flashed green and the word “OPEN” appeared on the screen above the keypad.
    I breathed out with surprise and relief. I really hadn’t expected that to work.
    “What was the password?” Ben asked.
    “It’s 9-0-2-1-0,” I said.
    “What’s that?”
    “Dylan’s zip code.” Ben looked confused, but this was no time to explain Hilary’s long-standing crush on Luke Perry in his career-defining role—he probably wouldn’t appreciate that the only guy ever to hold her interest on a sustained basis was a figment of Darren Star’s imagination. I twisted the latch and opened the door to the safe.
    Inside, zipped into a clear plastic bag, were two items: a pen and a photograph.
    “Everything all right in here?” asked Natasha, poking her head through the door.
    “Everything’s great,” I said. I withdrew the bag and slipped it into my purse, and we followed her out of the room.

    Peter, Ben, and I huddled on one of the sofas in the lobby, studying the