Free Too Hot Four Hula: 4 (The Tiki Goddess Mystery Series) by Jill Marie Landis

hall. When he turned the corner he disappeared from view.
    A few seconds later a group of five—a couple with three children of various ages—came into view. They were animated and chatting to each other as they hurried along. One of the little ones skipped ahead of the rest.
    “Right there,” Kim said, pointing to the screen. “See that?”
    “I do.” Em nodded. Someone in a dark hoodie sweatshirt, baseball cap, and pants trailed close behind the family. He was carrying what appeared to be an ABC Store shopping bag. When they passed Louie’s door, the person slipped inside.
    “That has to be your thief,” Kim said. “Appears to be a man.”
    “Right.”
    Kim fast forwarded the video again to the point where the man in the hoodie slipped back out into the hallway and headed in the opposite direction of the camera. They had no glimpse of his face. He was still carrying the bag. Em had Kim run the video back to his entrance to the room. The bag looked considerably heavier when he walked out.
    Almost immediately after the man stepped out of the door and was in the hall, Louie turned the corner and was walking toward the thief. Louie nodded genially when they passed, but the encounter lasted no more than a second. Em was surprised Louie had remembered as much detail as he had.
    The man with the bag continued on to the end of the hall and turned the corner.
    “There’s no elevator at that end of the hall,” Kim said. “He doesn’t come back into view at all, so he had to have taken the emergency stairs to exit the building. My guess is he shed the outfit, probably put it in the bag, and walked out of the building.”
    “If he had on board shorts and a T-shirt he would blend in without ever being noticed,” Em said.
    “Unfortunately that’s probably the case,” Kim agreed. “In a city of one million it’s easy to hide in plain sight. We can pretty much assume that notebook is gone for good unless you can think of someone who might have it out for your uncle.”
    Em frowned, thinking. “I was hoping he’d forgotten to bring it and that there was no thief. Now we’re going to have to focus on who might have wanted it, which leads me to think it had to be someone who wanted to sabotage Louie’s chances of winning the contest.”
    “One of the other contestants.”
    “Right. Someone probably staying here at the Hilton.”
    13
    AT ELEVEN, EM left the Hilton and headed on foot to meet Phillip at Orchids, an upscale restaurant in the Halekulani beachfront hotel not far away. After last night’s fiasco and the missing Booze Bible, she definitely wasn’t looking forward to seeing her ex, but at the moment anything was better than being at the hotel waiting for the Hula Maidens’ next misadventure.
    Little Estelle hadn’t shown up all night. Her daughter was so beside herself with worry that Kiki gave her two Valiums and put her to bed. Now Big Estelle couldn’t stay awake more than ten minutes at a stretch.
    In the middle of the night Little Estelle had sent a mass text message to all of the Maidens saying she was A-Okay and not to worry. Lillian was locked in her room, letting her Facebook fans and her private fan club in Iowa know that she was all right after one of them posted the KITV news clip of her arrest. The pitiful on-camera plea for help with bail was burning up the social media websites.
    Uncle Louie, certain he was going to come in last in the Shake Off, was still worrying about the fate of his missing Booze Bible. Until she saw the man in the hoodie on the video, Em had convinced herself that he’d lost it somewhere between Kauai and checking into their room.
    The Halekulani looked a lot closer on her map of Waikiki. By the time Em walked into the casually elegant oceanfront restaurant which appeared to be quite popular, not to mention expensive, she was beyond glowing. She was downright sweating.
    As she took in the posh interior of the room complete with a baby grand piano, she hoped her ex