Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

now. Let’s boot up Sam’s computer and see if that’s his home number.”
    “Do you have access to her computer?”
    “Not exactly.”
    ‘Then what?”
    “I’m a detective, aren’t I?”
    “You’re going to break into Sam’s room?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Then what?”
    “By a stroke of good fortune, a friend of mine, well, this thief I happen to know, stole a passkey for me.”
    “Was that the other room you were referring to earlier? You said not to return the key because there was at least one more room you had to get into.”
    I nodded.
    “Rachel, you’re working for Sam. Why do this behind her back? Why not just ask her for access?”
    “She’s already lied to me once. At least, I’m pretty sure she has. I’d rather be able to check this out myself without Sam breathing down my neck. There’s a conflict of interests here. She needs to keep this thing going, because she’s spent a fortune on it. I need to find out all I can, no matter where it leads. Or to whom. It doesn’t matter who’s paying me. The truth is all that counts. Because that’s the only thing that’s going to stop this.”
    I folded the phone records and put them back in that inside pocket. “Come on. If we go now, we still have time to do this while Sam’s at lunch.”
    We put the dogs on leash and headed out of the park. Waiting for the light to change, we stood next to a boy with a white rat hanging halfway out of his shirt pocket, its nose vibrating a mile a minute—like there aren’t enough rats in the city already, you have to go out and buy one.
    Once inside, we rang for Jimmy, then waited for the elevator with a woman who had blue hair and who exhaled in disgust when either of the dogs looked at her. Dashiell, who thought she was trying to play one of his favorite games, began to sneeze. “Four,” she told Jimmy when the gate opened.
    “Five, please,” I said.
    “She’s not there,” he said. “She’s at lunch. All of them are.”
    “I know. We have to pick up something from her room.”
    He nodded and closed the gate.
    We knocked first. You never know. Then I took the passkey out of my pocket and unlocked Sam’s door. She had a suite. We walked into what looked like a living room. The door to the bedroom was off to the left. Her laptop and printer were sitting on the large desk that was against the wall to our right.
    I sat at the desk and turned on the computer, waiting for it to boot up before I could search for her seminar records. Chip walked over to the window to check the view from a higher floor, whistled softly, and then came back to the desk, pulling a chair from next to it around to the front so that he could see the screen too.
    “Maybe the history of who Sam booked where will explain some of this,” I said, and we started calling up the seminar lists from the last two years.
    “It looks as if, until this week, she never booked any of the men together,” Chip said.
    “Still, they all knew each other. Or at least, they knew of each other.”
    I pulled a small pad out of my pocket and began to make notes, dates and speakers, who was where when, and then I checked the list of names of attendees, just to see if something looked like a connection we hadn’t thought of.
    “Look at this,” I said. “Audrey and Alan worked together late last year. After that, she attended two of his seminars.”
    “Really?Audrey and Alan?”
    “Maybe Audrey was the one who gave Alan his big send-off.”
    “Which send-off do you mean?” he asked.
    I looked away from the screen and into his eyes. “Maybe both, for all we know.”
    I kept scrolling through her records.
    “I wonder if Cathy and Martyn ever met before.”
    “It looks like Sam almost always booked Martyn alone. He’s probably a big enough draw.”
    “I think you’re right He does so much lecturing here, he’s probably got”—I stopped in mid-sentence—“he probably had a really strong following. Sam was talking about people who follow their heroes from talk to talk, from state to state.”
    I scrolled down the lists of people in the audience for Martyn’s talks.
    “Cathy’s name doesn’t show. Looks like she’d never attended any of his talks. But when he finally met her, it was lust at first sight. „
    “How the hell did you—”
    “I was sitting a row behind them. I couldn’t have missed it. I saw Cupid flying around over Cathy’s head, and then, whomp, the arrow hit her right in the chest.”
    “I wonder who