With all the guests having arrived and all hands needed elsewhere in the hotel, the front desk was—for the moment—unstaffed. The door behind it was old and not properly hung; there was enough of a gap between it and the frame to fit a hook from Sebastian’s lock-picking kit through and slip the latch open.
The coat room wasn’t precisely small, but the presence of full racks along both walls contributed to a close, confining atmosphere. At the back of the room was a row of small lockers for those valuables the guests didn’t feel safe leaving in their pockets.
Sebastian moved along the racks of coats until he found a numbered hanger matching Stoddard’s ticket. A pat-down of the pockets, however, turned up nothing.
At Sebastian’s dissatisfied look, Jay suggested, “The lockers?”
The locks on each of those were light and cheap; it only took the jiggler in Sebastian’s set of picks to get them open. He focused on the locks themselves, while Jay followed along behind him, searching the contents of each locker.
He found several handbags and satchels, but no drive.
“All right,” Sebastian muttered, closing the last locker. “Where else—?”
Behind them, the door opened.
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