Nico (The Mavericks Book 8)

brought up his laptop. Into the chat window, he typed, We need an update for the last twelve hours. Are we working with anyone locally? Does anybody know we’re here?
None, no and no.
No update?
None yet.
Nothing from the cops?
No. But Keane was first on the scene and asked us for the basics, like to run facial recognition against all street cams focusing on the hotel and even satellite footage of our crime scene. So far we haven’t seen her anywhere. Keane’s been running through the traffic cams in and around the hotel, looking for anything suspicious. Ask him for particulars.
When Nico pointed at the latest text for Keane to read, he just shook his head.
Nico swore again. Does the hotel have a security camera on her floor?
The two hotel security cams on her floor were covered up with something before she went missing, right before midnight on the day of her arrival, Thursday.
And uncovered, I presume, afterward?
Yes.
And, of course, nobody saw her or the person who covered up the cameras. What are the chances she’s still here at the hotel?
Since we can’t confirm her leaving the hotel, it’s possible, Miles said in the chat window. But I doubt they’d keep her that long at the scene of the crime. It’s been twenty hours and counting since they took her.
Nico thought about that as he cut another piece of steak.
Keane read the exchange on Nico’s laptop. “Yeah, but,” Keane added, “I was in the neighborhood and was already here, scouting out the place, as soon as we got word of her being missing, as soon after eight this morning as I could get here. Of course I’m not in uniform. But, because of the rally’s presence in their city, the cops were everywhere. I noticed an uptick of uniforms here in this very hotel. Maybe our kidnappers didn’t take that into account.”
“But still, held for twenty hours at her hotel? Surely you’d want to get her spirited away as fast as possible. What’s the easiest way to do that?”
Keane gave him a one-arm shrug and said, “That’s easy. Take her down into the laundry room, must be in the basement, and go out that way.”
Nico thought about it, then nodded, and said, “That’s almost too cinematic, but it is the simplest because how else would you move an unconscious woman? She had to be unconscious. Otherwise, no way they’d have gotten this one out of here quietly.”
“No, I think she’d have been very vocal about being mistreated.”
“I also didn’t see any martial arts skills in her file.”
“No,” Keane said, “none that I know of.”
Nico nodded and brought up the chat window again, then asked Miles about the laundry theory.
I’ll check into it. And Miles signed off.
Nico finished his steak and jotted down more requests into the chat box. With the laundry theory, let’s get fresh eyes on this and expand our viewing area. I need a four-block radius on the video feeds from an hour before she went missing to several hours afterward up until today. Like until right now, considering she may not have left the hotel as soon as we expected, he said. The easiest way to take her out would have been via the laundry chutes or a laundry bin and then with a laundry truck. I’ll sweep through them and have one of your people do the same. I’m sure a room-to-room search was already done by the hotel management or its own security staff, since the local cops aren’t in on this investigation, but that would be pretty easy to avoid anyway.
Shouldn’t have been, Miles said. But, yes, without you two doing the searching, then we must remember that the others wouldn’t have been as experienced or as good.
Nico didn’t add anything to that and just waited. He cleaned off his plate and put it on the trolley, then waited until Keane was done and said, “We need to set up a plan of action. We’re gonna look again at satellite feeds, and I’m getting more traffic cams from this area.” He stopped as he looked around. “What about helicopters?” He glanced at Keane. “We need to find out if this hotel has a helicopter pad on the roof and if it’s been used in the last twenty-four hours.”
Keane immediately brought up his laptop and started looking. “I might just have to go downstairs to the reception desk for that.”
“Go ahead. Let’s see if we can find out who has the penthouses in this hotel. It could be long-term residents. It could be a standard booking. Or it could be empty. Empty is also good.”
“Yeah, because empty to the registration desk doesn’t mean it’s truly empty.”
Glad that he and Keane were on the same wavelength, Nico waited for the links to come in. The first one arrived, and he started in on the feeds from the nearby streets to the hotel. This batch started at seven o’clock last night—three hours before the time she initially arrived last night at this hotel—around ten o’clock. He checked, writing down notes as the vehicles came and went. It was a large hotel, and it was busy. Nothing seemed suspicious.
The second link was more street cam activity from earlier today, which gave Nico a good idea of the standard activity at this hotel. At five o’clock in the morning, the laundry trucks and delivery trucks arrived. The laundry trucks went to one bay area, while the delivery trucks went to another in a completely different section of the hotel, and cameras definitely watched them come and go.
What Nico couldn’t see was what was being loaded or unloaded. They all backed up to their respective loading bays, and so he asked the chat window for a hotel camera view from inside these loading bays, only to find out there weren’t any. He didn’t understand that. “Why wouldn’t you have a camera if you have materials being moved from your own damn hotel? Isn’t that the easiest way to keep track of theft?