Chapter 10 - Three Knocks
Lena motioned everyone back. The knocking came again. Three hard blows, a pause, and three more.
"Police," she called. "Who's there?"
A muffled voice answered. "Help."
The housekeeper supervisor began crying. Maintenance staff fetched tools, and officers forced open the narrow service panel behind the minibar. Rosa stumbled out of the cramped maintenance cavity, pale and shaking but conscious.
I caught her arm before she fell.
"They thought I was Lucia," she whispered. "They kept asking where she put the copies."
"Copies of what?"
"Invoices. Guest records. I didn't know."
Paramedics arrived. Rosa told Lena that a maintenance contractor had pushed her into the access space and shut the panel while another man erased the cameras. It had been nearly an hour.
The locked trunk contained shredding bags, wiped hard drives and stacks of invoices. I saw Daniel's name on an authorization form. The signature was almost perfect, except for the letter V. Daniel always made the left stroke longer than the right. This one was neatly symmetrical.
"That's a forgery," I said.
"We'll have someone examine it," Lena replied. "Please don't touch anything."
My phone rang. Naomi. "We found Lucia. She agreed to speak, but she's terrified. Clara, Larkspur billed the hotel for renovations that never happened. It's at least four million dollars over three years."
"Why 904?"
"We don't know. But there's another problem. Your trust's quarterly board meeting was moved to tomorrow morning. Martin filed a motion to suspend your voting rights, citing incapacity."
I looked at the forced-open wall, the forged signature, and the frightened housekeeper on the gurney.
The man stealing from my hotel wasn't running away.
May you like
He was preparing to take it from me in daylight.
Rosa apologized to everyone as the paramedics examined her. She apologized for having knocked on the panel, for slowing the officers down, even for spilling water on the carpet when they brought her a cup. I told her she owed no apology for trying to survive. She stared at me as though nobody in management had ever said that before. Mateo stood by the doorway, his hands trembling. He admitted he'd ignored odd camera outages for months because supervisors told him they were scheduled maintenance. Lena asked him to document the dates he remembered. He did it without being asked twice. Watching them, I began to understand how an entire institution could become unsafe one small silence at a time.
