Michael Prescott - Next Victim

"I was using the rest room."

"Well, you can go upstairs anytime you want."

Do I need a hazmat suit? she almost asked. But she preferred not to let Andrus know what she had found out, at least not quite yet. Not that she didn’t trust him, but…well, actually she didn’t trust him. He had been withholding information from her, and she didn’t know why. Andrus was a good manager, and he kept the standard bureaucratic ass-covering office politics to a minimum, but he’d never been what might be called a stand-up guy.

"Who else is up there?" she asked.

"Michaelson. A couple of techs."

"Gaines wasn’t invited? How about DiFranco, Collins, anybody else?"

"We don’t need a hundred people tramping through the room."

"Maybe you just don’t want a hundred people to know what’s in the room."

He winced. "Tess, I would share everything with you if I could."

She wasn’t sure she believed this. She didn’t know what to believe right now.

"I know, Gerry," she said with her best fake smile. "I understand."

She didn’t understand, of course. Not yet.

But before long, she promised herself, she would.

Tess knew exactly what to expect even before she stepped into room 1625. The details of Mobius’s crime scenes never varied. Even the brand of duct tape was always the same.

What she couldn’t anticipate was her reaction. That was what scared her, what set her heart pumping hard as she left the elevator and walked down the hall.

She had not been to a room like this since the night of February 12. She wasn’t sure what it would do to her. Crazily she feared she would throw up or faint or run out screaming.

The door to the room was open. A Santa Monica patrol officer stood guard. Michaelson was inside, along with a crime-scene photographer and an evidence technician from the field division’s crime lab, unpacking his gear as he prepared to bag and tag, dust, and vacuum.

Tess showed the cop her creds, then crossed the threshold. During her bureau-mandated bereavement counseling, she had learned several techniques for managing stress. Among these was a breathing exercise-a slow intake of breath, a pause, and an even slower exhalation. The method helped her sometimes. She tried it now.

Breathe in…

The corpse on the bed, wrists taped to the headboard, head lolling, eyes wide, mouth hidden behind a strip of tape slapped over her lips, a semicircular wound across the throat, a spillway of dark brown blood descending like a bib.

Hold the breath…

The woman was naked, her legs twisted in a pose of writhing. Her complexion was smooth and pale. Even in death, her eyes were oddly bright. She looked determined, somehow. There was a silent, still intensity to her face that made Tess think of that term soldiers used-the thousand-yard stare.

Breathe out…

Patches of purple lividity mottled the exposed portions of her back, where the blood, no longer circulating, had settled heavily. She had lain there for perhaps seven hours, more or less; the medical examiner would give a more precise estimate. Most likely she had died around two o’clock, later than Mobius’s other kills. Tess thought of William Hayde, detained at the field office until after midnight. He might have had enough time to drive over here-it was only a ten-minute trip from Westwood-then slip on a disguise and pick up this woman.

It was unlikely, though. She was probably just getting desperate.

Breathe in…

The woman’s clothes were scattered on the bed in what appeared to be evidence of hectic lovemaking. Tess scanned the sheets for a semen stain but saw none. There would be no semen in the vaginal canal, either. Mobius practiced safe sex.

Hold the breath…

The sheet under the woman was dark with sweat-the residue of sex and, later, fear. Her sweat, not his. He would have been on top throughout the encounter. He needed to be dominant, needed to be in control.

A tremor worked its way through her. She fought it off. She would not yield to some idiot reaction of her body. She would be stronger than her emotions.

Breathe out…

She couldn’t look at the woman anymore. The corpse, the staring eyes, the bloody neck-it was too much like Paul. She turned away and focused her attention elsewhere.

A minibar. She took a quick inventory of its contents. Nothing appeared to be missing.

Notepad of hotel stationery on an occasional table. No writing on any of the pages.

What else? Drapes drawn shut over a balcony door. Armchair. Table strewn with magazines of local interest. Bureau and desk chair. Small suitcase, its contents scattered.

"Her bag, I assume," she said to Michaelson.

The Nose sniffed at her as if deciding whether she was worthy of an answer. "Yes," he said finally, without looking at her.

"When did she check in?"

"Didn’t."

"What?"

He expelled a loud sigh, an audible expression of his impatience with her stupidity. "It’s not her room," he said.

"So whose is it?"

"His. He checked in."

"Mobius took this room?"

"That’s correct, Agent McCallum. He signed for it under the name Donald Stevenson, using a credit card he’d recently obtained for that identity. If you’d been in the lobby when the AD briefed me ten minutes ago, you’d know all this. But I suppose you were off applying lip gloss or something."

Tess didn’t wear lip gloss. "When did Mobius check in?"

"Yesterday morning."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why? So he would have a place to do this." Michaelson jerked a thumb at the dead woman on the bed. "Why the hell do you think?"

She wouldn’t be put off that easily. "It doesn’t make sense. If he came here, he was planning to pick up a woman at the hotel bar. Odds are, any woman he met there would be a guest of the hotel. She would have a room of her own."

"Unless she was a hooker."

"This place doesn’t strike me as a hangout for hookers."

"All hotels are hangouts for hookers. And a hooker would use the john’s room. He had to be prepared for that."

"I suppose." It added up, but she wasn’t entirely convinced.

"Anyway," the Nose added, "this lady wasn’t checked in at the hotel."

"Well, she wasn’t a prostitute. Not if she had a suitcase with her. Where’s her ID?"

"Gone. Her purse was here, but the other squad took it."

"Without sharing?"

"I don’t think their mothers taught them to share."

"That doesn’t bother you?"

"Sure, it bothers me. It also bothers me that we’re wasting time talking about it when we have a crime scene to work."

Tess wasn’t interested in the scene. She was interested in Tennant and his DTS squad. "We’re not going to learn anything from this room," she said. "He hasn’t left us any leads. He never does."

"With that kind of attitude"-the Nose was turning his back on her-"it’s no wonder you’ve been spinning your wheels in Denver."

"What does that mean?"

He shrugged, not bothering to face her. "After Black Tiger you were on the fast track, sweetheart. Denver should have been a stepping-stone to LA or New York, then to Ninth Street. Instead you got stuck there. Now I know why."

"Do you?"

"You’ve lost your edge. No surprise. Happens to the best."

"You don’t know a damn thing."

"You let RAVENKIL ruin you. Losing Voorhees was a tough break, I admit. But you should’ve handled it. We get paid to handle tough breaks. Some of us earn our pay. Some of us don’t."

She burned with fury. "You asshole."

"Sticks and stones," he said with casual insolence. "Face it, darling. You flunked the test. You got kicked off the island."

"You call me sweetheart or darling again, and I’ll bring you up on charges."