If that wasn’t him before, he was here now. Complaints would have come piling in from guests when the power went out, especially after they noticed it was isolated to their rooms and not a city- or block-wide issue.
We gave the summoner’s room one last chance to prove useful, but we turned up nothing new.
Halfway to the office, a harried man with an impressive beard shoved out the door on his cell.
“This is my livelihood. I need power restored now. Keep screwing with me, and I will forward all complaint calls to this extension.” He ended the call with a growl, then he spotted us. “The power’s out. I got it. I can see it for myself.” He stomped off toward the parking lot. “Thanks.”
“We’re not here about the power.” Asa prowled up behind him. “We’re here about a long-term guest.”
“Shit fire and hold the mayo.” The man spun, found Asa in his personal space, and puffed out his chest. “I don’t know who you think you are, but—”
“Agent Montenegro, with the FBI.” Asa held his badge an inch from the man’s nose. “We need to ask you a few questions.”
“Yeah.” He ruffled his hair. “I knew this would bite me on the ass.” He gestured us back the way he had come. “Let’s do this in the office.” He let us in and sank into a chair behind a small desk. “Hang on. I’ve got flashlights in here somewhere.” He produced four, turned them on, and set them at the corners of his desk. Their shine bouncing off the ceiling did a decent job of lighting the room. “Okay, shoot.”
“What do you know about—” Asa consulted his phone, “—Johnathan Smithfield?”
“He works in IT,” the man said. “He travels a lot for work. My boss has strict policies about long-term renters. He’s against it. Doesn’t want any squatter problems down the line, you know? But this guy, Smithfield, he paid me in cash for the month.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Plus a little extra.”
“Your boss doesn’t know about him, I take it.” I watched him. “Or the kickbacks you’re taking.”
“Kickback,”he insisted. “I’ve never broken the rules, not until now.”
“What made this offer special?”
“I don’t know.” He scratched his chin through his beard. “I told him no, that a week was as good as I could do, but then…” He frowned. “He came back, made the same offer, and I took him up on it.”
A light persuasion spell or charm was nothing compared to the complexity of the magic the summoner was already using. There was a chance this guy had stuck to his guns but that our black witch swayed him with magic.
“Did you see or talk to him otherwise?” Asa asked. “Did you interact with him after that?”
“No.” He jiggled his leg. “He had food delivered, but that was it. He never left his room that I saw, but I keep weird hours, mostly catching up on maintenance crap. This place is falling down around my ears, but the boss don’t want to hear that.”
After he finished venting, we encouraged him back on topic, but he didn’t have much to add.
Most of their bookings were handled online, through the same app as the others. Smithfield had shown up in person. He also paid in cash, so there was no ID or credit card on file. Effectively, he was a dead end.
Once that lead was exhausted, I made our goodbyes, and we climbed into the SUV where I called Clay.
“Tell me something good.”
“The crunchy outer edge of a brownie.” He made a dreamy sigh. “Makes me crave your brownie brittle.”
“I’ll bake some when we get home,” I promised, “but that’s not what I meant.”
“Old Man Fang’s handler is more powerful than the others.” He quit joking. “He used a spell to come and go without being seen at the hotel, but Colby found the one time he couldn’t disappear himself.”
“At check-in?”
“Yep.” Clay’s glee was tangible. “The hotel was at two-thirds capacity with lots of pool activity. He had to play it safe and let himself be seen. He made multiple trips to his car to bring in his luggage, a seriously nice desktop computer setup, bags of junk food, and boxes of energy drinks.”
“The maintenance guy says the owner has a limit on how long he allows guests to stay at the motel, but he awarded Smithfield an open-ended stay anyway. His confusion, paired with what we know so far, leads me to believe Smithfield used persuasion on him.” Smithfield had to appear in person for that to work, which was dicey, but it kept his identification off the books. “That lends weight to your theory that he’s more powerful than the others.”
“Ladies and gents,” Clay announced in a booming voice, “we might have found our ringleader.”
As tidy as that would be, I had my doubts. “Unless the sequence of summonings is meant to escalate.”
“I prefer my idea,” he grumbled, sinking into the certainty things would get worse before they got better.