Watch Me by James Carol Page A

He led the way up to the second floor and we walked along a narrow corridor to the door at the far end. Hannah was right. The room was no suite. But it was clean and tidy, and the mattress was firm, and there were no alien life forms growing in the bathroom. It would never feature in my top ten, it probably wouldn’t even figure in my top fifty, but I’d stayed in a hell of a lot worse.
    The drapes were pulled to keep the heat out and the way the material glowed reminded me of a Chinese lantern. Taylor had dumped my case on the bed and was standing there staring at me.
    ‘I want answers, Winter.’
    ‘I’m betting you do. If you didn’t, it would mean I’ve completely misjudged you.’
    ‘Seriously, I want some answers.’
    ‘And you’ll get them. First, though, there are a couple of things you need to get for me.’
    I reeled off my list then handed him the key for the Senator’s Suite at the Imperial. Taylor narrowed his eyes at me as if he was trying to peer inside my head.
    ‘If you want, I can write that all down,’ I offered.
    Taylor just stared.
    ‘And change your clothes. That uniform’s got to go.’
    Taylor’s stare turned into a glare, then he walked over to the door. He stopped with his hand on the handle and glanced over his shoulder.
    ‘When I get back I want those answers.’

10
    The door clicked shut and Taylor’s footsteps faded away. I spent the next five minutes rearranging the room, fussing and moving stuff around and getting comfortable. Then I plugged in my laptop speakers and set the computer to play some tracks at random.
    The first act of The Marriage of Figaro filled the room. The act opens with Figaro measuring the space where his bridal bed is going to go. This was Mozart at his most playful and it never failed to make me smile. Even when things got really dark this had the power to bring light back into the world.
    I phoned down to Hannah and asked for the Wi-Fi password and some coffee. In addition to the usual junk, my inbox contained an email from Chief Olina Kalani of the Honolulu Police Department, and a new request from the New York Police Department.
    Requests like the one from the NYPD came in on a daily basis. Two or three requests wasn’t unusual. The problem was that there were too many for me to deal with, so inevitably I ended up letting down more people than I helped. This was something I’d had to learn to live with, but it wasn’t easy. Some days I feel like that Dutch kid who tried to stop the leaks in the dyke with his fingers, but instead of water it’s blood leaking through my dam.
    The tone of the email from Chief Kalani was polite but pissed. The media had jumped on the story of his rapist, and the news was filled with scare headlines. An investigation like this was bad enough without fear being added into the mix. I typed out a quick reply asking him to send everything he had on the case, and signed off by saying that if anything jumped out at me I’d let him know. Once that was done, I logged onto the webpage the unsub had set up.
    07:22:20.
    For a whole minute I just watched the screen, the seconds ticking away, those numbers marching ever closer to zero. During that time another six pixelated stick figures went off to meet their maker. It was one of the longest minutes I’d ever known.
    I put the laptop to one side then lay down on the bed and closed my eyes and thought about what I’d learned so far. While The Marriage of Figaro played in the background, I thought about Gulfstreams and brand-new cop cars, and a small-town sheriff’s department that could afford to issue me with a blank cheque. I thought about paintwork that gleamed and windows that shone. Mostly I thought about Sam Galloway’s final moments, about flames licking at his skin, and that infinitely slow slide into agonised madness. I thought about the minutes leading up to his death and wondered about what he might have seen. In particular, I wondered about who he might have