When she regained consciousness, she was slumped in the chair, which had been set upright again. Either the sensualist or his pearl-toothed companion had taken pity on her.
Her wrists were taped to the arms of the chair in such a fashion as to allow her to wrench loose if she applied herself diligently. She needed less than ten minutes to free her right hand, much less to slip the bonds on the left.
She used her own cuticle scissors to snip through the tape wound around her head. When she gingerly pulled it off her lips, it took far less skin than she expected.
Liberated and able to talk, she found herself at the telephone with the receiver in her hand. But she could think of no one whom she dared to call, and she put the phone down.
There was no point in warning the hotel’s night manager that one of his employees or guests was in danger. If the gunman had kept his threat to impress her with a senseless, random killing, he had pulled the trigger already. He and his companion would have left the hotel at least half an hour ago.
Wincing at the throbbing pain in her neck, she went to the door that connected her room with theirs. She opened it and checked the inner lace. Her privacy deadbolt latch was backed by a removable brass plate fixed in place with screws, which allowed access to the mechanism of her lock from the other side. The other room’s door featured no such access plate.
The shiny brass looked new. She was certain that it had been installed shortly before she checked into the hotel—by the gunman and his companion acting either clandestinely or with the assistance of a hotel engineer. A clerk at the front desk was paid or coerced to put her in this room rather than any other.
Barbara was not much of a drinker, but she raided the honour bar for a two-shot miniature of vodka and a cold bottle of orange juice. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely pour the ingredients into a glass. She drank the screwdriver straight down, opened another miniature, mixed a second drink, took a swallow of it—then went into the bathroom and threw up.
She felt unclean. Withdrawn less than an hour away, she took a long shower, scrubbing herself so hard and standing in water so hot that her skin grew red and stung unbearably.
Although she knew that it was pointless to change hotels, that they could find her again if they wanted her, she couldn’t stay any longer in this place. She packed and, an hour after first light, went down to the front desk to pay her bill.
The ornate lobby was full of San Francisco policemen—uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives.
From the wide-eyed cashier, Barbara learned that sometime after three o’clock in the morning, a young room-service waiter had been shot to death in a service corridor near the kitchen. Twice in the chest and once in the head.
The body had not been discovered immediately because, curiously, no one had heard gunfire.
Harried by fear that seemed to push her forward like a rude hand in the back, she checked out. She took a taxi to another hotel.
The day was high and blue. The city’s famous fog was already pulling back across the bay into a towering palisade beyond the Golden Gate, of which she had a limited view from her new room.
She was an aeronautical engineer. A pilot. She held a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University. She had worked hard to become the only current female IIC working air crashes for the National Transportation Safety Board. When her husband had walked out on her seventeen years ago, she had raised Denny alone and raised him well. Now all that she had achieved seemed to have been gathered into the hand of the sad-eyed sensualist, wadded with the cellophane and the peels of red wax, and thrown into the trash can.
After cancelling her appointments for the day, Barbara hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She closed the draperies and curled on the bed in her new room.