“Well, Ranger, let’s just say I pick up all kinds of friends on my travels, and I rarely inquire about names so I can claim ignorance when the wife asks.” He was sitting on the edge of the king-size bed, close to swinging his hairy legs back under the covers, clearly waiting on Darren to leave. “That all, Ranger?”

His cool indifference in the presence of law enforcement also bothered Darren, but he couldn’t rightly say why. There didn’t appear to be a single thing the man had done wrong, but the whole exchange left Darren unsettled. He’d heard something. Hadn’t he? He actually doubted himself for a moment. Could he trust anything he’d seen or heard this evening? Between exhaustion and the cheap hotel-room beer, he’d conjured a ghost in his room. Maybe he’d imagined the noises too. Maybe he’d drunk more than he thought. Maybe this backslide was more dangerous than he realized. It was two o’clock in the morning, and he was standing in a strange man’s room in his underwear. “I didn’t get your name,” Darren said.

But it turned out he already knew it.

“Sandler Gaines,” he said.

The man who was buying Hopetown.

12.

12.

FIRST THING in the morning, Darren checked the man’s story.

The woman working the front desk was wearing a frilly white shirt tucked into a slim black skirt, and she had a red velvet ribbon around her ponytail that looked like it had been snipped right off the curtains. She typed into a rather large gray desktop computer and within a few seconds confirmed for Darren that rooms 209 and 207, the two flanking Mr. Gaines’s suite, were indeed both empty last night. “And all three rooms were rented to Mr. Gaines?”

The desk clerk, who was in her twenties, stared at the screen and then frowned. “Well, no,” she said slowly, eyes scanning the computer’s monitor. “Room two-oh-seven was rented to another guest.”

And yet Sandler Gaines had had a key to the room.

“And the guest’s name?”

The clerk shook her head, the swirl of her honey-colored ponytail swinging. “We’re not allowed to give out that kind of information, sir.”

Darren set his badge on the counter and smiled. “It’s okay.”

Seeing the shiny glint of the five-point-star badge, the girl let out a tiny Oh in surprise, a gasp of excitement, and for a moment Darren thought he had her.

But then the clerk gave Darren a sweet, pitying frown, like a kindergarten teacher telling her kids to stop jumping down the slide, that rules keep everybody safe. “I believe you’d need a court order or something like that to see private hotel records. Discretion is one of the pillars of service the Cardinal Hotel prides itself on,” she said, rattling off chunks of text from an employee-training binder.

“And you’re sure the room was empty?”