Driving Needs, part seven

"This door?" asked Antoinette. 

Chris and Elyssa inhaled, looked at each other, and nodded. 

Antoinette rattled off a phrase, and Chris felt the Grey gather around her and settle into place. Luck? Armor? Some kind of protection, anyway. She'd muttered it under her breath, so he wasn't sure what she'd actually spoken. 

"I'll take the door," Elyssa volunteered. She glanced back at Antoinette. "Chris should go through first, with you ready to speak against anything that comes at him."

Antoinette nodded. "Sounds good. Do it." She muttered something else and the lock clicked.

Antoinette reached forward and opened the door. Chris slipped through, gun out and angled to cover everything he could. He was relying on sight and sound now, but nothing moved and the only sound was the very faint hum of the ventilation and the slight dripping of a leaky...

He'd expected a faucet, or something similar. It wasn't. The blood was soaked into a king-sized bed ahead and to his right, and dripping onto the tight weave of the carpet. A suitcase was open on a small stand to his left, beside the set of drawers with the large hotel television on top. A memory tried to push its way up, but he shoved it back down. 

The bathroom door to his right was open. "Cover front," he said automatically, and turned into it. Practice at working as a unit had definitely paid off. 

There was nobody on the toilet, nothing in the bathtub, no surprises under the counter. He came back out, stepped deeper into the room. 

"Closet?" asked Antoinette.

He stopped, turned to his left, and slid the door aside. Coats and slacks hung on the hangers, and there was a small metal safe tucked up onto a shelf above them, but otherwise the space was empty. He still couldn't hear anything, and so far he hadn't seen any movements. The scents, though... blood and urine and emptied bowels, the body-scent of terror still hanging in the air, and something else... something that smelled like rotting meat. He'd smelled it out in the hallway, too, but it was better to start here and be certain...

And now he was. This was definitely the place. He stopped and looked around again, but the only tracks in the room were traced in blood and emerged from the far side of the bed, racing out towards the balcony. 

"Following," said Elyssa calmly, letting him know that she'd moved into the room behind him. 

He nodded without looking back, and finished circling the bed. Lowering his gun at last, he said, "Yeah. This was the place. We missed it."

"You smell that?" asked Elyssa. 

"Same as the hallway," he confirmed. "Problem is, the scent goes both ways out there. Which way did it come in, and which way did it go out?"

Antoinette had come into the room behind Elyssa; he turned just in time to see her swallow as she focused on the bed. "So the victim was skinned here, but managed to throw himself off the ledge. We have no idea what the killer was doing when that happened, and there are two possible paths it might have followed when it left." She swallowed, then looked at Chris. "Can I trust you not to get yourself killed if we split up?"

Chris considered that for a long moment, then nodded.