Content: possible murder charges against esteban
They found Maddox Cane’s phone. Not his body, which was already long gone in a pool of acid. Not his blood, which Esteban had spent hours ensuring was down the drain, not a trace of it left over. Just the phone, wedged beneath the dresser in Suite 902, screen cracked down the middle like a spiderweb.
Esteban looks at it through the clear evidence bag and feels, for one second, nothing at all.
Then Detective Alvarez says, “We recovered a deleted video.” She opens a laptop, hits a key, and turns it around to face Esteban.
Esteban blinks as his own voice fills the room.
“Good evening. This is Esteban Julio Ricardo Montoya de la Rosa Ramírez, general manager of the world-famous Tipton Hotel…”
Detective Alvarez watches him as he stares at the screen, his own face staring back at him.
Esteban does not move. Not when his recorded self says Maddox was warned, or when the camera pans to Maddox curled up on the carpet, or when the video ends with Esteban smiling softly and saying, “Stay tuned.”
But the video doesn’t show the bathtub, the knife, the blood. It doesn’t show Esteban dragging him to the bathroom or shoving him into a storage tote right after. It only shows Esteban recording a man who was clearly uncomfortable being recorded, giving him a taste of his own medicine before seeking vengeance for Jasmine.
When it is over, the detective closes the laptop, and for a moment, no one speaks.
Then she asks, “Care to explain that?”
“He broke into a closed room,” Esteban says. “He was filming my hotel, my staff, my guests, without permission. He was harassing people in my hotel. I wanted to scare him.”
“You wanted to scare him.”
“Funny,” Alvarez says. “No camera shows that.”
Esteban smiles politely. “The cameras here have always been temperamental.”
“Mr. Ramírez,” Alvarez says with a firm voice, “you were the last person to see Maddox Cane alive. As of right now, you are our primary suspect in his disappearance.”
Primary suspect. The words should scare him more than they do. He thinks about the phone, the video, his own face on Maddox’s screen, smiling like he forgets that evidence can always exist outside of his control.
“What evidence do you have besides a video on a phone?”
Alvarez stares. “That video, showing you alone in Suite 902 with a very scared Mr. Cane, you telling him that he was warned, the disappearance of Maddox Cane, all gives us enough for a search warrant.”
For eighteen years, Esteban cleaned rooms, scrubbed blood from tiles, wiped names from logs, and turned cruel men into early checkouts. But Maddox Cane had done what nobody else had; he brought an entire audience into Suite 902. Esteban seems calm on the outside, but inside, his heart is thumping hard against the knife he keeps in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The knife that is fully cleaned and sanitized after every use, but still the knife regardless.
Detective Alvarez watches his reaction, which is nothing more than a raised eyebrow. “You don’t seem surprised.”
Esteban folds his hands in front of him. “I manage a famous hotel, detective,” he says. “People make accusations. Have you seen the comments?”
“People don’t usually disappear after being recorded, alone, in a closed suite.”
“No,” Esteban says softly. “I suppose they don’t.”
Esteban shakes his head. “I wish I knew.”
By sunset, Detective Alvarez leaves the Tipton with Maddox Cane’s phone, three hours of useless security footage, and one deleted video of Esteban Ramírez smiling into a dead man’s camera. It’s not enough to arrest him, not yet anyways. Across the lobby, Esteban watches the gold doors close behind her.
For the next three days, the Tipton remains the most watched building in Boston.
Reporters linger across the street with cameras pointed at the gold doors. True crime TikTokers film themselves whispering outside the lobby like the hotel is a graveyard instead of a business. BookTok girlies hover in the lobby with their phones out, hoping to catch glimpses of Esteban. Some guests cancel reservations, other guests book rooms specifically because they want to sleep somewhere a man disappeared.
By the fourth morning, Detective Alvarez enters the Tipton once more. Not to arrest him, but to inform him that, for the time being, he is no longer their primary suspect. Esteban stands in his office with his arms folded in front of him, staring out the window at the St. Mark Hotel across the street, and then back at Alvarez.
Alvarez does not sound pleased. “A witness confirmed your whereabouts during the time frame we believe Mr. Cane disappeared.”
Esteban does not need to ask who the witness is… He already knows.
The next morning when Esteban arrives, Muriel is waiting in his office when he returns.
She sits in the chair across from his desk with one leg crossed over the other, a coffee in her hand and a cigarette tucked behind her ear. Esteban closes the door behind him.
Muriel takes a sip of coffee. “Good morning to you too.”
“You told Detective Alvarez I was with you.”
“No,” Muriel says. “You were busy being stupid. A celebrity, Esteban? Really?”
For a moment, the room is quiet except for the low rumble of the air conditioning and the distant piano drifting in from the lobby. Muriel’s face softens, just barely.
“Because I found your cousin,” she says.
Esteban just stares at Muriel.
Muriel looks down at her coffee. “I found Isabela. I saw what that did to you. And I’ve watched you spend eighteen years trying to make sure it never happens to another girl in this place.”
Esteban looks away first. In lying to the police to cover for him, Muriel is now an accomplice. Just simply knowing about it is one thing, but this was an entirely different thing.
“You should not have lied for me,” Esteban says.
Muriel takes a sip of coffee. “Probably not.”
“You understand what this makes you,” he says quietly.
