Not Quite Mine (Not Quite #2)(56)
Author: Catherine Bybee

“But I didn’t see you go in.”

“Exactly.”

Katie sat back in her chair. “So how did you get in?”

“Apparently rich people love their privacy nearly as much as they do their security.”

Katie nodded. “I can agree with that.”

“The angle of the cameras aren’t directly on the door to the suite. You’ve lived in hotels most of your life. I’m sure you’ve snuck in late at night before.”

“Yeah, when I was a kid. We’d hug the wall and slip inside.” A friend of hers who was sleeping with a would-be rock star had told her about the hotel cameras. There were nights when she was a teenager that she snuck in, or had someone else sneak in. Katie had stopped hiding from the cameras years ago.

“I snuck into your suite by staying out of direct line with the cameras. The motion detectors inside the room would have triggered, notifying security that someone was in your room, but that didn’t happen because Jack was already inside.”

“I think there are motion detectors in the halls, too,” she told him.

“Yeah, but the only thing security will do once the motion detectors are tripped is look at the video feed. If they don’t see anything, or the inside of the room isn’t tripped, they’ll most likely ignore it. The night the mom left Savannah, you and Monica were home. Security would ignore the motion detectors entirely with the two of you walking in and out.

“OK…so how did the mom get into the foyer? She didn’t use the elevator.”

“There are usually two penthouse suites in your bigger hotels. The one in Houston across from yours was vacant the night of the wedding. So we know that the mom wasn’t in there. There was no footage of a woman with a baby walking the halls of the hotel late at night. But there isn’t a multitude of cameras in the staff areas. My first thought was the mom used a fire escape. A stairwell. But they are all locked on the main floors. You can come down a stairwell, in case of a fire, but you can’t go up. Chances are there is some kind of trigger on the doors, something electronic, that opens the locks if the fire alarm is screaming.”

“There weren’t any alarms going off that night. Besides, taking the stairs up twenty-plus floors with an infant is a long hike.”

“Right. But if the mother was staying in the hotel…say a few floors below yours…not such a chore, if she could gain entry to the upper floors.”

Katie murmured her agreement. She hadn’t considered that.

“I don’t think she hiked up the stairs at all,” Patrick said.

“She didn’t?”

“No. She used the staff elevators. A trick you might know something about.”

Katie’s eyes widened. Yeah. She knew how to get around the hotel without detection. She’d grown up in them. “How would she know where the staff elevators even are? They aren’t on a guest map of the hotel and they’re not accessible from the inside of the guest halls.”

“How she knew about the staff routes I can only assume. Someone told her about them is my guess. Who knows, maybe the mom worked in a hotel at one point. I considered that angle for a while. Thought maybe mom was a maid, someone who knew who you were…left her baby for you to raise.”

Katie had considered that scenario as well. “But the letter…a staff member wouldn’t know those details about me.”

“I agree.”

“So the mom befriended a staff member? Learned the lay of the hotel from someone working in Houston?”

Patrick shook his head. “Doubtful. Look, this is what she did. She rented a room at the hotel and arrived a day early. You never saw her arriving or leaving the hotel because she didn’t do it on the day you were looking at the videos. There are five hundred thirty-three rooms at the Houston Morrison. She knew you wouldn’t look for a single woman registering without a child.”

“I didn’t even consider that she was a guest. I figured she dropped the baby and ran.”

“She obviously brought the baby in later. Somehow, she got her hands on a room service staff uniform. Not very hard to do. The laundry service is seen going in and out of the hotel daily. She could have gotten her hands on one either on site by finding the staff room or by following a truck to where the laundry is washed. Either way, she manages to get a uniform. This tells me a couple things about our girl. She’s smart, and very determined to keep her identity a secret.”

“Obviously.”

“As a guest, she then orders room service. A tray arrives and the waiter leaves the rolling cart in the room to be picked up later. Instead of asking room service to clean up her mess, or leaving the cart in the hall, she keeps the food on the plates and waits. She waits until she knows you’re back in your room. She then changes into a uniform and loads up Savannah…under the cart and hidden by the tablecloth…and wheels her down the hall to the service door. She travels the path to your suite in a service elevator and waits outside the penthouse hall door. She hears you and Monica coming home and then tucks in behind the camera angle before knocking on your door and leaving Savannah.”

Katie pictured everything Patrick was saying…easily mapping out the woman’s path. “So she was hiding behind the service door the whole time Monica and I were standing in my doorway.”

“Yep.”

“Do we have any footage of her?”

Patrick moved from his chair to the sofa and sat beside her before turning on his tablet. “I do. In one shot, she’s wearing what is clearly a wig…in another she’s not.”

Katie clenched her fists in her lap. She’d waited forever for this moment. “Do I know her”

“You have to tell me.”

Patrick played the footage. “I looked through hours of this…hallway footage of room service trays being rolled in and out of rooms. There aren’t that many single women checking into the hotel who aren’t a part of a convention. There weren’t any going on when all of this was happening. I only had to focus on a few floors. Here is the tray being rolled in.” Katie watched as guest services arrived at a room and stepped inside. The person who opened the door was out of the frame.

The tape cut and started back up again. “Here it’s after midnight.”

Sure enough, a woman with dark hair was leaving the room pushing the tray. Her head was down but that didn’t stop Katie from squinting her eyes to try and see her features. She was petite…for a new mom. About the same height as her. The woman in the video kept looking around as if she was nervous.