“She’s in room 107,” Detective Presley declared, her eyes gleaming from her phone’s backlight. Immediately she glanced back at us, her expression almost catlike in its wariness. “Both of you stay in the car. That’s an order.”

I checked inside my jacket. “Wow, you can give us orders? Oh, I didn’t know we were police officers now. I can’t seem to find my badge at the moment...”

She gritted her teeth. “No, but I can charge you with obstruction of justice.” She glanced back nervously in the direction of the motel. “Just stay.” Presley ripped open the car and ran out in the pouring rain. She nearly slipped on the sidewalk in the process, but alas the stars didn’t align and she made it in without a scratch.

Her partner, Detective Tran, tall and lanky with several silver studs on her ears, smiled at us sheepishly and flicked off the safety of her Glock 17. “Guys, we’re really grateful for everything, but… yeah. You should probably hang back. It’ll make things way easier.” She scrambled out, pistol in hand, and ran after her partner.

I leaned back and sighed. The rain was beating down hard enough to become a haze, and I could barely make out the windows from the building across the street. Still, I could tell Tran had barely any experience with handling her pistol. The way she was holding it she’d be more likely to shoot through the ceiling tiles than a potential evildoer. Although in due fairness, I couldn’t imagine Crystal Snake coming out guns blazing.

Crystal Snake was a hacker who had been reportedly trained by the North Koreans, though I will say they weren’t very reliable reports. Nevertheless, she’d managed to get a foothold on the freelance market enough to build her own organization, also called Crystal Snake. I suppose even criminal networks can’t escape crass marketing tactics. Crystal had decided to make her group’s big debut by holding the entire Hartview borough’s electrical system for ransom. Which meant shutting down schools, subway systems… and hospitals. Not everyone was lucky enough to survive that kind of chaos.

You might assume the City’s premier detective agency had been hired to track down the City’s current Public Enemy Number One, but nope. Our client had been someone with a bone to pick against a far more everyday group of online scammers. Which is how Ryan managed to convince me to powder my face and wear a scraggly goatee in order to infiltrate a call center. It was an interesting experience. Completely soulsucking work with terrible hours and the most unfriendly coworkers known to man, but it was definitely interesting.

I probably would’ve had to spend at least an extra few weeks in there, too, but I lucked out by overhearing a conversation that revealed Crystal Snake had deemed this scamming group worthy of recruiting new members from. I guess scaling up your business comes naturally to most people after a successful few jobs. Some shadowing of their talent scout followed, which revealed a whole avalanche of new information including the name and location of the original Crystal Snake herself. It turns out hackers aren’t nearly as careful about security that can’t be enacted through a few lines of code.

This is how we ended up convincing the two detectives to follow Ms. Park Jieun to down here in the middle of nowhere. And after doing most of the work, after practically placing the entire organization at Detective Presley’s doorstep…

“She’s not even going to bring us up in the final report, is she?” I said with a sigh.

“Probably.” Ryan flicked open his pocket magnifier, then closed it again. Snick-snap.

“I mean, I’m sure we can prove we got our hands on some of that evidence. And of course we still have that fee from the client, but still I mean, that woman has some nerve! I bet she’s probably rearranged all the events in her head by now to show that she was the hero of this whole thing all along.” Snick-snap.

I glanced over at my brother. Ryan was leaning back in the car seat, staring straight at the door to the motel. The expression on his face could only be described as calculating. Snick-snap.

There was a muffled crashing sound – very muffled to my ears, especially from across the street and through a car door. My brother leaned forward and tucked his magnifier back into his pocket. “Come on, Dy.”

We crossed the street, cars and trucks whizzing past us without slowing down. The clouds above us were lightening to a paler grey, the storm pacing itself enough I could actually see beyond a few feet in front of me. The pattering of the raindrops on my umbrella, always a comforting sound, gave the whole scene something of a peaceful quality, beyond such earthly concerns as case fees and poorly named hackers.

Just as my hand reached for the door handle it was wrenched open in front of us. Presley stood in the gap, chest heaving with exhaustion. Her pristine coat and sweater were bedraggled and dusty, not to mention still dripping a little from the rain. But her expression was what was truly priceless: furious and utterly, completely confused. She glared at us both.

“Park –” She began.

“- has been murdered, I presume?” Ryan stepped past her through the doorway. “Ah, it seems I presumed rightly. Now, if you bear our presence just a little longer, I’m sure I can offer you some assistance here as well.”

————————————————————————————————-

Presley checked the window for what must have been the tenth time in the last five minutes. She clutched the hair at her temples as if she wanted to tear it out in clumps. Her eyes were wild and unfocused, seeing the dreams for her future career melting away with every stray second. “Window’s locked from the inside, has to be locked down from the inside. There’s no way… And the door was bolted, right? I mean, we had to bash the whole thing down.”

A cursory glance at the front door of the motel room certainly confirmed it had been broken open, but I studied it again anyway. It was easier on the eyes than looking at the body.

I can’t say Jieun Park had made on a good impression on me in our brief acquaintance. Leaving the hospital shutdowns outside, she’d acted arrogant and weaselly in equal measure, all the while grinning at people with a set of glittery braces. A born backstabber, that one. But I will say none of that made it less upsetting to look at her bruised neck, and those hands still curled up into claws. Her eyes were still wide open as she lay on the floor. How long had it taken for her to lose consciousness after being strangled like that? There was a businesslike cruelty to it that made my skin crawl.

Ryan was still frowning at the body. “That bruising doesn’t correspond with a rope. It has to be a wire, and not thick wire, either. A charger cable, maybe, but I don’t think one of those would make for a very effective garotte.” He took a step back, eyes examining the rest of the room. “Quick. Efficient. Didn’t let Park put up too much of a fight. At the bare minimum, someone must have planned this beforehand. I might even go far enough to say this was done professionally.”

I took a peek in the bathroom. It matched the rest of the motel, with that awful off-white wallpaper and those flimsy ceiling tiles that always house several cockroaches and often as many rats. But the sink and the shower were both completely dry. “There must be a lot of people out there who wanted her dead, huh?”

Presley put her head in her hands and groaned. With her whiny, high-pitched voice it really did remind me of a poor tuned violin. “Five minutes! We give her five minutes for her to incriminate herself in doing her stupid business deal, and she manages to get herself strangled!” She glared at us again through the gaps in her fingers. “And so very conveniently you two had a full view of the two exits of the building and didn’t see anyone come out!”

Thankfully, we were both saved from the screeching by Detective Tran’s return. Have I mentioned before how much I like Tran? She’s got at least fifteen years on the rest of us here, with crows’ feet around her eyes and grey streaks in her hair, but she also wears bright purple sweaters and remembers to bring extra coffees for us on a case, which is more than I can say for most of her colleagues. I really like Tran, but I can’t say I respect her. Presley’s managed to browbeat her into practically taking the role of her assistant in the course of their partnership. At least when I became somebody’s sidekick I wasn’t expected to do most of the work.

Tran cleared her throat loudly. “With the accident over on the fifth, forensics is going to be a delayed a bit, unfortunately. The receptionist downstairs told me that Park didn’t ask for the room key to this place. The room was rented by a Mr. Taron Costello. Pretty short guy, ‘Asian looking’ quote on quote.”

“So a meeting was set up, and Park was told to come here, presumably by the guy who killed her. And…” I frowned, looking around. “He took her laptop bag, I think? Wow, you know, I actually don’t see it anywhere.”

Presley gave a bitter chuckle, a note of hysteria still in her voice. “You only noticed that now, genius? But I guess it’s good we have a name for our perp, even if it’s probably fake. Did that Costello guy show his ID? Ah, but that’s got to be fake, too.” She groaned again. “But none of this really matters if we still don’t know how this thrice-damned locked room actually came to be locked from the inside!”

“Locked?” I said, thoughtfully. “It really is a locked room mystery, isn’t it? I didn’t think those could actually happen. Hey Ryan, wasn’t there that thing in the movie with those nails and strings that could make it look like the door was locked from the inside?” Admittedly, I could see no signs of either in the room. Yet I’ve never let a lack of evidence stop me from theorizing before.

“It’s perfectly possible to do, but the fact the door was bolted complicates that theory considerably.” Ryan opened the wardrobe of the room, sighed, and closed it. “And of course you could have some kind of contraption that could commit murder at a distance – though I think it’s best we set aside hypotheses of robots that can strangle people for now. There’s any number of possibilities here, especially for something that’s described as an impossible situation. But in this case, most of them share one flaw: why?”

Presley had her arms crossed and was tapping her leather shoe against the floor. She turned up her freckled nose at us, and while I think the idea was to look condescending the constant taptaptap made it look more frantic than anything else. “Why what?”

“Why set up a locked room in the first place? It’s a curious thing to do in this situation, especially with no list of suspects to be proven innocent. The only explanation that makes sense was that it was to buy time, especially with you and Tran capable of barging in at any moment.” Ryan held out his hand, “Dy, hand me the umbrella, please.”

I tossed it over, and he caught it by the handle, swinging the umbrella in his grip until it was pointed at the ceiling. “And that observation, of course, trivializes the whole affair to the point where only one solution could make sense.” He poked at one of those flimsy ceiling tiles with the tip of the umbrella, and we all heard a creak. He cocked his head, listening, then stepped to another corner of the room.

Presley elbowed me out of the way and walked over to the corner, still frowning. “What exactly are you saying, Neville?”

“Well, Miss Presley, the easiest answer as to why a room is locked from the inside is that the person who locked it never left.” He gave a harder poke at this spot, almost a stab, and this time we heard a louder creak.

She looked up. “Oh, there is no way anyone could ever fit in ther –”

With one final creak of judgement, that section of the ceiling collapsed under the weight. A short, rather ordinary looking guy covered in dust and wearing a laptop bag landed right on top ofDetective Presley. Tran, thankfully, had the presence of mind to put a gun to his head before he could try anything.

Ryan had stepped out of the way in time, because of course he had, and was busy brushing off any specks of dust and plaster as Presley screamed bloody murder from the floor. Our assassin (Costello, wasn’t it?) thankfully let himself be handcuffed with considerably less fuss. I sidled up to Ryan. “We’re probably going to have to pay for that roof, you know.”

“Meh, it was clearly a health hazard to begin with. But even so,” He looked at the mess on the floor and allowed himself a self-satisfied smile. “I’d say it was worth it, don’t you think?”