Embassy Suites,Synergy Square is the downtown hotel designated to host the Midwest’s biggest summer careers day on June 5, 2010. Its public promise of jobs and recession relief makes it the key location in K. William Hodges’s discovery that Brady Hartsfield intends to repeat the central pattern of his earlier mass murder by targeting the unemployed.

Setting and Public Announcement

A press release displayed on K. William Hodges’s computer identifies the venue as the downtown Embassy Suites at 1 Synergy Square. The careers day is scheduled for Saturday, June 5, 2010, with doors opening at 8 a.m. Admission is free, and prior registration is encouraged but not required.

The announcement presents the event as a broad employment fair for career professionals and military veterans. It advertises hundreds of jobs, listing customer service, retail, security, plumbing, electrical work, accounting, financial analysis, telemarketing, and cashier positions. Attendees are told to bring a résumé and dress for success; job guides and seminars are promised in the conference rooms. The release calls the gathering a recession-busting effort and closes with the appeal, “TOGETHER WE WILL BEAT THIS RECESSION!”

Discovery of the Venue’s Significance

Jerome Robinson asks what Hodges thinks of the press release, and Hodges recognizes the careers day as the likely target. The prospect brings him relief: the suspected attack is not the concert, a crowded downtown dance club, or the next night’s minor-league baseball game. The carefully specified job fair, he concludes, fits Brady Hartsfield’s plan.

Hodges understands the choice as a deliberate return to the beginning of Hartsfield’s murderous career: Hartsfield means to end it by killing the city’s jobless, the same vulnerable population he targeted when he began. The hotel’s role therefore changes in the investigation from a venue named in a promotional notice to the location that gives the anticipated attack a date, a public gathering, and a likely victim group.

Intended Response and Uncertainty

Hodges tells Holly Gibney that the password-protected laptop no longer matters because they have the location. He plans to contact his former partner after the immediate situation in Lowtown has settled, report what they have learned, and have police issue a BOLO for Hartsfield and his car. He expects that if Hartsfield is not caught before Saturday morning, authorities may intercept him as he approaches the job fair.

The plan remains prospective rather than resolved in this account. Later, while examining a customized vest found in a garbage bag, Hodges considers whether Hartsfield abandoned it because he changed his plan to the careers day. He suspects the explosives may be in Hartsfield’s car, but the evidence does not confirm their location or establish what would happen at the hotel. Embassy Suites remains the focal point of the threatened attack, not the site of an event shown as having taken place.