Cover of Night by Linda Howard Page A

reason. You have his credit card number, so he didn’t run out on his bill, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    “He left under his own steam. He didn’t bother to check out, and he left some unimportant things behind. We’ll keep checking for an accident site along the most likely routes, but in all likelihood he just—left.”
    She couldn’t see Marbury, but Cate knew he’d shrugged. “But what about his rental car?”
    “That’s between him and the rental agency. The car hasn’t been reported stolen, so there’s nothing we can do about that, either.”
    She thanked him and hung up. There was no help there; as Marbury had pointed out, no crime had been committed. If Mr. Layton had family, either he’d been in touch with them or they hadn’t expected to hear from him yet, so he wasn’t officially missing. He had just vanished.
    Maybe she was making too much of this. Maybe Mr. Layton was fine, and he simply hadn’t bothered to come back for the few possessions he’d left here.
    She thought back over the sequence of events. Yesterday morning he’d briefly come downstairs, but as soon as he realized the dining room was full, he’d stepped back from the door and returned to his room. Sometime between then and when she’d gone upstairs to check on the twins, he’d climbed out of his bedroom window and driven away.
    At the time she’d thought he simply hadn’t wanted to eat with strangers, but given his method of departure and the fact that he hadn’t returned, she now had to wonder if perhaps he’d recognized someone in the dining room that he hadn’t wanted to let know he was here. Yesterday morning had been unusually busy, but the only stranger she could remember was Joshua Creed’s client—she couldn’t remember his name. Had Mr. Layton known him? And if he had simply wanted to avoid the man—for which she couldn’t blame him—why hadn’t he just remained in his room until Creed and his client left?
    This line of reasoning at least made her feel better, because looking at it that way made it seem far more likely Mr. Layton had done exactly as Marbury thought, and simply left without bothering to take his possessions with him. If he’d wanted to avoid what’s-his-name bad enough to climb out a window and sneak away, then leaving his stuff behind probably hadn’t bothered him at all.
    But why hadn’t he turned in his rental car, if not in Boise at least in some other town where National had an office? Cate wasn’t normally a conspiracy theorist, but Trail Stop wasn’t exactly the most-traveled-to place in the state; if someone Mr. Layton wanted to avoid had followed him here, that someone, logically, had found out he’d rented a car and where he was going. There were probably all sorts of rules against that kind of information being given out, but information was bought and sold every day, and a lot of those transactions were against the rules. So Mr. Layton had to know the car was a liability; if he wanted to continue avoiding whoever had followed him, surely he would want to get rid of it. Maybe he’d parked it somewhere and walked away, since that seemed to be his modus operandi, figuring he’d just deal with whatever extra charges were tacked onto his credit card bill—
    Something the county investigator had said rang in her mind. She had already charged Layton’s credit card, so he hadn’t run out on the bill. The same circumstance applied to the rental agency; in fact, she didn’t think you could rent a car without having a credit card. So why was the rental agency trying to track Mr. Layton down? Was that standard? She had no idea what their policy was, but a reasonable person would think they’d just keep applying charges against his credit card for at least a couple of days.
    On impulse she checked Caller ID, and frowned when she read “Unknown Name, Unknown Number.” That was inconvenient. And since when did a business block its number from showing? Not only that, the