The wallet wasn't in the bag.
Cal shook the small black pouch as if the cards might have become lighter overnight. A pencil, two batteries, the little cleaning cloth Juno kept folding instead of replacing. He put them on the table and looked into the pouch again.
It was five minutes to eight. The sun had reached the high window of their equipment room, showing dust along the edge of the duct. Someone had put a fresh pot of coffee outside the door with a stack of paper cups. He'd poured one on the way in, and it stood beside the laptop, making a small wet circle on the table.
He had come to watch the suite recording.
Last night he'd taken C off its stand, stopped it and carried it to the work table. Juno was still there, finishing. He had put the used C pair beside the card wallet and gone upstairs with his main camera and the key card in his bag. The rest of the kit would stay in the locked workroom. She knew the morning schedule. He had said good night without asking whether she was finished.
Upstairs he'd showered, sitting on the edge of the tub to get his shoes off, then stood under the water until it stopped feeling like anything. He'd set the phone to charge, put the empty camera on the desk and slept. He had not watched A's private recording or asked Juno to make him a review copy.
Now he opened the laptop. A little ceremony sequence appeared, stopped on Adrian trying to free the lining of his pocket. Cal clicked the next project. It asked for the silver drive.
He looked beneath the table.
The silver drive wasn't there. Neither was the black one. The cables lay in their usual loops, ends tucked through themselves so they wouldn't tangle. Juno's little laptop was gone with her bag. The camera cases remained. B lay in its fitted space, C on the table where he'd left it. Both had empty used-card slots.
Cal picked up the phone and called her.
It rang until the call stopped. He called again, then sent a message asking where the drives were. He watched the little mark beside it instead of drinking the coffee.
There were still pictures. His own laptop had the small reviews, the exported toast, the portraits they'd shown on Friday. His phone had Lena's hands coming forward and Felix's shoulder going out of the frame. Gideon had that too. Other people had their own little pieces of the wedding. None of those showed what Adrian had said upstairs after Cal left.
He opened a drawer. Spare cables. A roll of tape. The packet of unused cards. He looked under it and shut the drawer too hard.
Juno had known which pair he wanted kept. She had written the label while he stood there.
He typed: I need the 604 file now.
He read it twice before sending it.
Someone knocked on the open door.
The hotel manager stood outside with a uniformed officer. Cal had seen the manager last night trying to make a tableful of men speak quietly. He looked older in the morning.
“Mr. Mercer. Could you come with us?”
“I've got someone with the media. I need to—”
“There's been an incident in the hospitality suite.”
Cal put the phone down on the table. “What incident?”
The manager looked at the officer. The officer asked if Cal could take a seat in the small meeting area near the lobby. He didn't say anything about the camera bag. Cal left it where it was and took the phone.
In the passage, two staff members had stopped beside a cart with the breakfast things still on it. One was speaking into her radio, hand cupped over her mouth. Farther down, Emilio stood against the wall with his arms at his sides. His face was blank. He looked at Cal and then at the floor.
“Who's in there?” Cal asked.
The officer said they would talk in a moment.
Detective Quinn waited in the meeting area. There was another officer beside her, holding a notebook. She asked Cal to sit. The hotel manager stayed until she thanked him, then went back down the passage without meeting Cal's eye.
“Gideon Sloan is dead,” Quinn said.
Cal sat down before he'd decided which chair to take. The edge caught the back of his knees.
“In 604?”
“The hospitality suite.”
He looked at the doorway behind her. The room would still have the flowers in the bucket, the phone on the sofa. He had left Gideon with a wet cloth against his mouth. He could see the skin beneath it, white from the cold.
“When?” he asked.
“He was found this morning.”
“I left him sitting up.”
Quinn waited. Cal could hear someone at the breakfast table asking whether they had hot plates.
“He was alive when I left.”
“Tell me about last night,” she said.
He began with Adrian asking him to take Gideon upstairs. He heard himself use the words before and after, putting them in firmly, trying to make a safe place between them. Gideon had been drinking. Adrian wanted to speak to him away from the reception. Cal had helped him up.
“Helped him,” Quinn repeated, looking at her notes.
“Got him upstairs.”
“Did you hit him?”
Cal's phone lit in his hand. Not Juno. An ordinary reminder about the farewell shoot. He silenced it.
“There was a problem at the bar.”
“Did you hit him?”
“Once.”
The other officer wrote something. Cal watched the pen move.
“What happened after that?”
“He wanted to go up. We went in the elevator.”
“Who else was there?”
“Emilio. Someone from the kitchen. They got out on five.”
“And you and Mr. Sloan went to six.”
He nodded.
Quinn asked how he had entered the suite. He told her about the event key, the equipment and gift cases, the water Emilio had put there. Asked where Gideon had gone, he described the sofa. Asked what he had done, he said he'd brought water and ice.
“Did he go into the bedroom while you were there?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
“To get the ice. The cooler was through there.”
The note-taking stopped for a moment, then began again. Cal could see the unoccupied bed, the garment bag on the chair. He wanted to put those things on the table between them and make the officers look at them.
“He was on the sofa when I left. Talking. On his phone.”
“Talking on the phone?”
“No. Holding it. Looking at it.”
Quinn asked for the time. Cal gave her the pickup message. He opened the phone and showed the text to Juno, sent at 23:42. He kept his thumb beside the words about the bag, as if he could make the part about the camera less visible by touching it.
“You left equipment?” she asked.
“My bag.”
“With A in it?”
“That's what we call the main camera.”
“Was it recording?”
He saw the moment in the room, his hands taking the loose strap away from the lens. He had wanted Adrian's conversation. He had gone downstairs believing he would get it.
“Not when I left,” he said.
Quinn looked at his face. He held the phone still until she turned her eyes back to her notes.
“Your assistant collected it.”
“Yes.”
“What time?”
He scrolled to Juno's reply, then stopped before turning the screen toward her. Got the bag. You left A running.
“Just after midnight. She'll have the time.”
Quinn waited. He put the phone in his lap.
“Is she here?”
“Not yet.”
“Where is she?”
“She's got the drives. The media. She's been doing the offloads.”
“Have you spoken to her this morning?”
“I've called.”
Quinn turned to the other officer. “Speak to Ms. Blake. She gave me the inventory yesterday. We need to know where it is now.”
He went to the door with his phone. Cal watched him go.
“The Friday pairs she listed, the two drives,” Quinn said. “Are those with her too?”
“Yes.”
Quinn asked when he'd last seen Adrian. Cal told her about the table and the cake, the cuff he'd helped button. He didn't tell her how much he'd wanted to be sitting there.
“Before or after your assistant collected the camera?”
“Around the same time.”
“Did he say he'd spoken to Mr. Sloan?”
“We didn't talk about it.”
“You took someone upstairs for him. You came back. Did you tell him where Mr. Sloan was?”
“He knew the room.”
“Did you see him go up?”
“No.”
Cal looked toward the breakfast table beyond the glass. Adrian had said he'd come. Then he had come back, cuff twisted, wanting Cal to sit with him. Cal had let the question lie because a camera was asking it for him. The camera wasn't here now.
“He said he'd speak to him,” Cal added.
Quinn wrote that down too.
She asked him to go through the movement from the bar once more. This time she asked where his hands had been. How long Gideon had resisted. Who had filmed. Cal gave her Juno, the man at the bar with the phone, the fixed reception camera. He did not say that permission made it harmless. He watched the picture form out of his own answers and wanted to stop supplying it.
When she asked what the disagreement had been about, he said Gideon was making trouble for the couple. She asked what kind of trouble. Cal said business, he thought. He had seen more than he said, heard more than he gave her. The bargain with Lena stayed in him, unchanged by this second dead man.
Quinn closed the notebook in front of her. She said she needed to speak to other people and to follow up with him. She asked where he would be. He pointed toward the workroom and said they had been preparing the farewell shoot. She told him they needed the recordings, including the originals already discussed, and asked him to keep his phone with him.
He stayed in the chair after she got up. No one had told him to leave the hotel. No one had told him this was finished either. The other officer went with her, and Cal could hear their shoes fade toward the elevators.
He went back to the workroom.
The coffee was still beside the laptop. He picked it up and drank before remembering that he didn't want it. The three camera cases looked untouched, company name bright on the lids. He opened B's case again, found the empty slots and shut it.
Juno had not answered.
He called her once more. Then he opened their conversation and began writing what he needed, too quickly, making mistakes he had to go back and fix.
Gideon's dead. Police are asking for everything. Call me.
He sent it. For a moment he could see the little short film waiting on his own screen: Lena's hands, the edge of Felix's jacket, his price already paid. He turned the phone over and sat beside the place where the drives had been.