"Here I am complaining about being famous. I have no right to. I have so many good things in my life." She switched subjects. "I'll go through her clothes if you want to check her suitcase and drawers. Then we can go through her toiletries."

My search was quick and revealed nothing. Sabrina, though, had better luck.

"Del, look at this. I found it in a pair of jeans."

It was a keycard. I looked at her expectantly.

She said, "I'll bet the police had the same reaction you did, and I'll bet nobody looked at it carefully."

I took another look. And then I saw it. It wasn't for the Residence Inn, it was for a Hyatt in downtown Chicago.

"Do you think she stayed there before coming here?" I asked. "Or maybe she had a 'friend'," I made quotations marks in the air, "who was staying there."

"Both of those are possible, although if she had a friend at the Hyatt, why didn't they just stay in the same hotel? Here's another theory. What if she had two rooms? Did she know someone was on her trail. What if she booked a second room to try to throw them off? It's an idea."

"Possible," I said, but I know I had a doubting look on my face. "It was here that she was staying, so if the other was a diversion, it's probably empty."

"Not necessarily," Sabrina replied. "What's odd about this room?"

I guess this was why she was the mystery author and not me. Nothing popped out at me. "I don't know. What's odd?"

"You can probably be forgiven," she said, "because you're not a woman. Men don't think along those lines. It's her lack of clothes. Look, she has a small carry-on with very few items in it. I count one pair of jeans, one piece of underwear, one pair of socks, a long-sleeve shirt, and in the closet, a jacket and a pair of shoes—which don't go with the jeans and sweater, by the way. For toiletries, she has the bare minimum. She checked in almost a week ago! No woman—and I bet no man either—would check in for four or five days with only a carry-on. She was only going to be in Boston for one night and only took another carry-on. I saw it. It was as empty as this. So where is all her stuff? There has to be a suitcase somewhere."

"You make a compelling argument."

"Want to take a ride over to the Hyatt?"

We took the Hyatt keycard and headed out to the parking lot, always on the lookout for suspicious people. On the drive over, I was mulling things over in my head when I heard in the background, "Earth to Del." Sabrina was looking at me.

"You were deep in thought," she said. "Care to share?"

"I was thinking about the guys who killed Izzy and tried to kill me. When did they come into the picture? I'd bet anything that Izzy knew them. So were they friends or hires who double-crossed her, like you suggested? There had to be a connection between them."