When they arrived at the service area, Corey grabbed her arm just as she was about to slide the key through the laundry room door’s reader. “What if somebody comes along and catches us?”

“They won’t,” she assured him, pushing the door open.

The room was large, with walls of stainless steel industrial washers and dryers, and intensely hot. A stainless steel folding table ran against one wall, and shelving held jugs of bleach and laundry detergent. A wheeled canvas cart was pulled up in front of one of the machines, and Drue shuddered.

“They found that poor girl’s body shoved into a cart like that one,” she told Corey, her voice hushed. “It could even be the same cart.”

“Thanks for that visual. This place gives me the creeps,” Corey said. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

Drue walked around the room, looking down at the floor and up at the ceiling. She pointed at a spot above the doorway, where a metal bracket was bolted to the wall, and wires sprouted from the plasterboard. “Our firm’s investigator said there wasn’t a working video camera in this room when Jazmin was killed. But it looks like maybe there was one here at some point.”

“Let’s just go, okay?” Corey said, his hand on the doorknob.

She took out her phone and snapped a few quick shots of the room, zooming in on the area where a wall-mounted camera might have been, and then pulled the door open again.

“God,” Corey breathed, when they were well away. “It must have been a hundred and ten degrees in there. How do the housekeepers stand working in there without air-conditioning?”

Drue turned to look at him. “Good point. If I were in there doing laundry, where there’s no air-conditioning? I’d leave the door open, to at least get some fresh air. Maybe Jazmin left it open that night, and that’s how her attacker got in.”

“If that’s so, the killer could have been anybody,” Corey said. “Even a guest.”

As they were walking away they heard a rumble of wheels on the concrete walkway. A housekeeper in a white uniform smock was trundling a huge canvas laundry cart toward them, her body nearly dwarfed by the piles of rumpled linens.

“Busted,” Corey whispered. “Almost.”

But Drue wasn’t listening. She was walking toward the housekeeper, a friendly smile pasted on her face. When she got close enough to speak, she noticed the housekeeper’s name tag. LUTRISHA. Wasn’t that the name of one of the employees Zee had interviewed?

“Excuse me,” Drue said. “Could I speak to you for a couple minutes?”

The woman was young, in her mid-twenties, Drue guessed, with short reddish-purple hair and sallow skin ravished with angry red acne.

“What about?” she said, instantly wary.

“Weren’t you working here when Jazmin Mayes, one of the other housekeepers, was killed a couple years ago?”

“Yeah.”