Chapter 8 - The Room with Two Locks
Tara answered on the first ring. "He's here," she said. "He's asleep on the pullout. I locked the door and put the chain on."
"Don't open it for anybody. I just got a threat."
Her voice sharpened. "Send me a screenshot. Then call Renee. I'll ask hotel security to keep an eye on the hallway."
Detective Brooks took the messages seriously without pretending she could identify the sender from a number alone. She arranged for a patrol officer to check the hotel, documented the threats, and told us to preserve every message.
At midnight Owen woke from a nightmare. Tara called me on video. I saw the dinosaur blanket he'd packed and the tired face peering out from under it.
"Did you get married?" he asked.
"No, buddy. The wedding is over."
"Is she mad at me?"
"She's responsible for what she does. You aren't."
He drew the blanket to his chin. "She said if I ruined the wedding, people would stop believing me about everything."
I felt a pressure behind my eyes. "I believe that you were scared. And I believe you heard something important. But next time, we work out a safe way together. No needles. No secrets."
"Okay," he said. "There's something else I sent Mom last night."
Tara pulled up a message from Saturday at 10:02 p.m. Owen had forwarded the audio file to her, before he'd shown it to me. She hadn't played it because she'd been driving home from the rehearsal dinner.
"It's the same clip," she said.
"Listen after the part about Eli," Owen told us. "The man says why he's scared."
The recording crackled. Colin's voice came through, lower than I remembered: "He found the rejected doors. If he talks, Daniel calls the fire marshal and the whole transfer dies."
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Tara stared at me through the screen. "What transfer?"
Before I could answer, somebody knocked twice on her hotel-room door.
