The Hotel Manager Who Remembered Everything
Chapter 09 - The Hotel Manager Who Remembered Everything
Laura returned to the Seabriar Resort with Dana and a private investigator named Miles Carter.
The spa manager cooperated after receiving a formal preservation request.
Six private suite bookings had been made under a corporate account.
Four included Evan and Marisol.
Two did not.
"Who was with him the other two times?" Laura asked.
The manager checked archived notes.
"A man named Richard Cole."
Dana and Miles exchanged a look.
Richard Cole was the acquisitions director for Harbor Meridian Group.
The supposed buyer.
Suddenly the spa was more than the scene of an affair.
It had also been a meeting place.
The resort's general manager, an older man named Mr. Whitaker, remembered Evan well.
"He asked whether private treatment suites were monitored," Whitaker said. "He seemed unusually concerned about confidentiality."
"What did you tell him?" Miles asked.
"That treatment rooms do not have cameras, but common hallways do for security."
Miles requested preservation of the hallway footage.
The recordings would not reveal conversations, but they could prove meetings had occurred.
Then Whitaker remembered something else.
"Mr. Mercer left an envelope at the concierge desk in March for Mr. Cole."
Laura's pulse quickened.
"Do you still have a record?"
The hotel kept scanned delivery logs.
The envelope had been signed out by Richard Cole on March 18.
A note described it as "development maps and authority forms."
Laura sat back.
For months, Evan had been building a trail he believed pointed toward her approval.
But every lie required another lie.
Now the layers were beginning to expose him.
Before leaving, Laura paused outside the spa door where she had found Evan and Marisol.
Twenty-four hours earlier, she had thought that room contained the worst moment of her life.
May you like
Now she understood something stranger.
Walking through that door might have saved everything her mother left her.
