Chapter 1 - THE OWNER IN SUITE 904
The elevator doors closed before Patrick could finish apologizing.
Lily stirred against my shoulder.
“Mom?”
“I’m here.”
Her eyes opened halfway.
“Are we at Daddy’s hotel?”
My chest tightened.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
Technically, it had once been her father’s hotel too.
Daniel Vance and I had bought the property eleven years earlier, when the building still smelled like drywall and ambition. After Daniel died, I became majority owner of Vance Hospitality Group.
I also stopped visiting this particular property.
Too many memories.
Too many hallways where Daniel’s laugh still seemed possible if I turned quickly enough.
Suite 904 opened with one keycard.
Lily immediately curled beneath the comforter.
I placed the roses in water.
Then I stood at the window overlooking downtown Chicago.
Tomorrow’s gala would present the hotel as the crown jewel of Vance Hospitality.
Investors would hear about record occupancy.
Improved margins.
Guest-satisfaction scores.
Expansion.
Patrick had no idea the exhausted woman he suggested send to a roadside motel owned fifty-eight percent of the company paying his salary.
But humiliating him publicly would have been easy.
Too easy.
I wanted to know why he behaved that way when he believed nobody important was watching.
At 11:47 p.m., I opened my laptop.
The corporate dashboard showed something strange.
This hotel’s guest-satisfaction score was 94 percent.
Impossible.
I had just witnessed a front-desk failure serious enough to trigger retraining at minimum.
I opened complaint records.
Almost none.
Three complaints in six months.
A 412-room luxury hotel had supposedly received only three documented complaints.
I frowned.
Then I checked housekeeping turnover.
Thirty-seven percent.
Front desk turnover:
Fifty-two percent.
That was not a healthy hotel.
Happy hotels did not bleed employees.
I pulled internal anonymous surveys.
Several were missing.
Not low-scoring.
Missing.
Then I noticed something else.
The corporate executive reservation block had been manually modified that afternoon.
My reservation had not disappeared accidentally.
Someone removed it from the primary search screen.
At 6:18 p.m.
I enlarged the audit trail.
User ID:
PGARNER.
Patrick Garner.
I stared at the screen.
Patrick had not merely failed to find my reservation.
He had changed the system before I arrived.
The question was why.
Then another record appeared.
He had modified six other executive reservations that month.
All women.
All traveling alone.
Three had filed informal complaints through corporate email.
Those complaints were marked:
RESOLVED AT PROPERTY LEVEL.
The person closing them was not Patrick.
It was the general manager.
Robert Ellison.
The man Patrick claimed was “occupied.”
I leaned back.
May you like
Patrick’s mistake was not that he failed to recognize the owner.
His mistake was giving me a reason to look closely enough to realize somebody had been hiding what was happening inside my hotel.
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