“We’d just spent the night together. I don’t know what it meant to her, but I was so hopeful that maybe it might be something more, but now…”
He said it out loud, practicing. It sounded convincing to him.
Killed her with my cock. Well, damn. That’s a far shot from a swoon, Nadine, old gal. You done paid Little Billy the ultimate compliment, you have. How many men can claim to have killed a woman with pleasure?
He took one last look at her face and realized he needed to check under her head.
Tough to do. Any movement could lock her face into position in the wrong way. Might as well pin a note on her that read BODY MOVED AFTER DEATH.
He brushed her hair from her ear so that he would have a clear view of her neck for lifting…
… and groaned.
No need to move her. Right there on the pillow was a single red dot. Blood, Billy knew.
He crouched down and angled the bedside lamp, holding her hair aloft and away to prevent casting shadows. Just under her ear, almost perpendicular to the splotch of blood, was a tiny pinprick.
Well, that was it, then. Billy’s tallywhacker was off the hook for this particular homicide. Nadine had died not from a night of good and thorough fucking (better and more thorough than she’d deserved, truthfully), but rather from an injection of something incompatible with the human organism.
Billy rocked back on his heels and clucked his tongue. “No style at all,” he muttered. “Not a lick of it.”
Didn’t matter. Whether she’d died pretty or ugly or boring, she was dead, and he was stuck.
She hadn’t struggled much—the sheets were in a postcoital disarray, not a fight-for-your-life tangle—so whatever she’d been injected with had probably contained a fast-acting paralytic. Maybe vecuronium, mixed in with one of the high-end narcotics. Stir in a little ketamine… Sure, that would work. Get it into the vein—as it appeared the mystery man had done—and she’d be out within thirty seconds. Less for a skinny little thing like her.
He mused for a while on the possible drug combinations, but there were too many. Shaking himself out of his chemistry reverie, he cast about for any other clues. The carpet pile was too shallow to bear footprints, and his own shoes would have perturbed any that had remained anyway. Footprints made him think of fingerprints… which couldn’t help him. Fingerprint dust was nasty, messy stuff that would only shout that someone had been here before the cops. In any event, what would he compare prints to?
They’d be useless anyway—it was a hotel room, and there would be dozens of prints from dozens of guests. Unless this joint had the world’s most dedicated cleaning crew, which he doubted.
Shaking his head, he chuckled. No wonder the cops never caught him. Half their tools were from a fucking Fisher-Price play set.
He located her cell phone on the nightstand. Hesitated a moment. He could explain his prints on the door handle, the toilet lever, the sink and faucet, even on her body. But he couldn’t explain them on her cell phone.
Scrounging in the bathroom again, he came up with a thin plastic shower cap, provided by the helpful staff of the Castle by the Sea. He stuck his hand in it and picked up the phone.
No calls since he’d seen her at the bar. He checked her sent e-mail folder, but that was similarly useless.
Billy resisted the urge to gnaw at his lower lip. Over a hard-fought lifetime, he’d disciplined himself not to give in to physical tics while prospecting. Bite your fingernails? Hell, you might leave one behind, and there’s your DNA for the bastard cops. Bite your lip? Might draw some blood. More DNA. How stupid do you have to be?
He tried to invert his thinking. When leaving a crime scene, he did his best to think like the cops who would be coming after him. He would imagine how they would see the crime scene and what they would do. Then he would take steps to neutralize everything they did. Now he had to do it in reverse—imagining what the cops would do and do it, not stop it.
Surveillance cameras.
Question the staff.
Those were the first and most obvious tactics, but Billy could avail himself of neither. Not without pretending to be a cop, which was like wading deeper into the quicksand.
She’d been alive when he left her, that much he was sure of. So that meant the killer had offed her somewhere in that meager space of time that he was gone. The killer couldn’t have known that Billy was coming back, so he was one lucky sonofabitch to get in and out in those ten or so minutes.
How had the killer gotten in? Billy could think of several ways, but then again, he had a particular talent for breaking and entering that he’d honed and nurtured over the years. Most involved what the young peckerheads these days called “social engineering.” Not everyone had those skills. So what would your average dumb-ass killer do to get in?
He paced back to the door and tried to imagine. Knocking. Calling through the door in an authoritative voice that it was the hotel manager and something was amiss…
No. It didn’t track. She’d have to get up to let him in, and she had been naked. She would have had to put something on before answering the door, and then the killer would have had to strip her again. Did the killer have enough time to talk his way in, kill her, remove whatever she’d thrown on, and get out before Billy came back?
No. He didn’t think so. Getting clothes off a dead body was more time-consuming than it might seem at first blush, as Billy knew from hard-won personal experience. One time, in Ohio, he’d wasted damn near three minutes trying to figure out how to get a girl’s skirt off. She was pretty damn dead and, thus, no help to him at all in this particular area. No matter where he looked, he couldn’t find any sort of a zipper or clasp, until he finally realized that the goddamned thing wound around her like a mummy’s wrap.
Three minutes didn’t sound like much time, and it wasn’t—to a prospect. But to a man with Billy’s vocation, those minutes were crucial. Stepping off a time line could mean the difference between life as a free man and life in prison. After that debacle, he’d undertaken an intensive three-month study of women’s clothing, including an online fashion course for which he’d registered under an assumed name and used high-grade privacy tools to block his IP address. He knew his culottes from his jorts, and he would never be caught off guard again.
Staring down at Nadine, he was doubly certain that she hadn’t dressed after he’d left. Not just because of the time line, but also the fact that there was no sign of a struggle. The killer hadn’t talked his way in. He’d come upon her unawares and jabbed her with his special cocktail of kill-juice as she slept.
Billy’s lip curled. Drugs. He didn’t think much of them. A useful tool for incapacitating, yes, but to kill with them? It lacked imagination. It lacked the personal touch. Damn near anyone could do it.
And besides, what was the fun in killing so quickly and painlessly? The whole point was the pain and the lingering.
Once again, he pulled himself back to the present and the matter at hand. If she didn’t get up to let the killer in, then how had he gotten in? Billy knew he’d closed the door firmly behind him, so it wasn’t a crime of opportunity.
Maybe it was an employee? Someone with a master key or a dupe?
No. Too risky. Keycards were tracked. Billy always assumed that the keycards at hotels were imprinted with all manner of his personal information. When not on vacation—when traveling on business—he always took them with him, shredded them, then melted the remains in the furnace at home.
Had there been another man? Someone else she’d been seeing or interested in or sleeping with? An ex-boyfriend at the same hotel, or a friend with benefits? Someone else who came by first thing in the morning, fucked her, then killed her?
No. Absolutely zero evidence of it.
Then again, Billy had done plenty of things in the past that had left no evidence.
He slid back the blackout curtain, grimacing at the bright spill of sunlight that intruded on the room. Nadine’s room overlooked the p
ool, four stories below. Across the way, another hotel’s windows peered this way. Not wanting to be seen or photographed, Billy quickly checked the locks on the window.
Only there were no locks.
Because the window couldn’t open.
He pulled the curtains back into place with a stronger tug than was strictly necessary. Damn it! He’d exposed himself for nothing.
No one was looking out the window for you. Stop being paranoid. No one was watching. You’re at the beach, not in some slum tenement.
His eyes flicked to the bed.
Except she’s dead. And you didn’t do it for a change, so someone else did, and who knows where—
He nearly clucked his tongue but stopped himself. Those unconscious, involuntary physical reactions. They’ll get you every time.
The killer hadn’t come in through the door. Couldn’t come in through the window.
Which left only one possibility.
The killer had been here all along.
The whole time.
After hanging the DO NOT DISTURB tag on Nadine’s door—and double-checking that no one was in the hall—Billy slipped into the corridor and hastened to the lobby, where the hotel’s free breakfast buffet was still in full swing. He needed to be seen, just in case he had to establish an alibi later.
Piling a plate high with runny scrambled eggs and burnt hash browns, Billy settled in at a small table with two chairs, his back to a half-wall topped with greenery. He forced himself to eat the disgusting mess slowly and methodically. Food was fuel, and fuel kept the brain-gears turning.
The killer had been in the room the whole time. It was the only explanation that fit the facts. The closet Billy had dutifully checked in the morning had been occupied all night because the killer hadn’t slipped in when Billy left—he’d been there when Billy left. He’d been there while Billy slept.
While Billy fucked.
His ego told him it was impossible, but Billy’s sense of self-preservation had no trouble overriding his ego. Someone had been in the room when he’d gotten there the previous night with Nadine, and that person knew Billy’s face, his voice.
Questions assailed him: Did Nadine know the killer was there? Had this been some sort of weird setup or a sex game gone awry? What were the odds of someone deciding to murder Billy’s one-night stand before he even bedded her?
The combination of unanswerable questions and greasy, grotesque buffet chow spun his head and roiled his gut. Billy rolled his temples with his forefingers. Nothing made any sense. And still, a dead girl doused in his DNA was up on the fourth floor, hidden only by the insufficient and insignificant shield of a flimsy, laminated DO NOT DISTURB sign.
A bright, sharp image of Jasper knifed through the shadowy queries and hazy images of Nadine’s room. His boy. He had to figure this out for his boy. If Billy went away, who knew what would happen to Jasper? He could hear the clang and complaint of his mother in the kitchen, echoing in his near-perfect memory. No good.
He surreptitiously glanced around the lobby. Any of these people could be the killer. Any one of them, and any one of the hundreds of others elsewhere in the hotel. Assuming the killer hadn’t already fled. Which… Why wouldn’t he? Why not run off after doing the deed?
Unless he wants to stick around to see what’s what…
Billy suddenly realized he might have a target on his own back. Kill the only witness…? Sure.
But…
It just wasn’t making any sense. If the killer was in the closet all night, why not come out and shoot up Nadine and Billy with kill-juice? Remove the possibility of Billy’s remembering something or tattling to the cops, narrowing the time frame. It just didn’t make sense to keep Billy alive. Even for an amateur.
Unless this wasn’t a murder; it was a game.
He dumped his tray at the trash cans. The Crows—that secret society of serial killers to which he belonged, of which Janice even now fought her way to the top—played games all the time. It was how they winnowed out the winners from the losers, the real deals from the pretenders.
Billy was known throughout the Crows. He was not to be trifled with, especially now that his wife was in contention to be the next Crow King.
But hell—some serial killers didn’t follow rules all that well.
What if…
On a whim, he stopped at the front desk. “’Scuse me,” he said with his most winning smile to the middling-attractive clerk. “I saw a Jeep with a Third Infantry bumper sticker out in your parking lot that looks a hell of a lot like the one my buddy I served with drives. Wonderin’ if we ended up at the same place by coincidence. Can you tell me if you have a Jack Dawes registered?”
She hesitated just a moment. Billy amped up his smile and threw in a dose of eagerness for good measure. Her fingers clacked at a hidden keyboard for a moment.
“No Jack Dawes, sir. No Dawes at all, actually.”
“Well, thanks for checkin’.”
“Thank you for your service,” she said with great sincerity.
Billy, who had spent nary a day in uniform, nodded gravely in return.
Back in his room—the safest spot in the hotel, though that wasn’t saying much—Billy paced and pondered. The Dawes routine had been a long shot, but one with little downside and great upside potential. Those were the sorts of opportunities Billy liked. Sure, you were often disappointed, but rarely were you harmed. Crows often used the alias Jack Dawes for all sorts of purposes, and if some Crow had decided to call out Billy, there was a good chance he’d set out a flag with the name.
The more he thought about it, the more confused he became. If Billy was the target, then a Crow made sense. But if Nadine was the target, then… Who? Why? The idea of his first (consensual) fuck in months being killed almost under his nose just seemed a coincidence beyond even the most fecund imagination.
So someone had to be taking aim at him. Sending him a message. It had to be about Billy.
He knew the weaknesses of killers. He’d studied them in others, discovered them in himself, then ruthlessly purged them. Returning to the scene of the crime… He understood its pull and succumbed once or twice, but never again, not in all his long years of killing.
Now he had no choice. It wasn’t his crime, but returning was no less fraught. Still, he went back to Nadine’s room, positive he’d missed something. This time, he took with him the plastic bags from his room’s ice bucket, as well as the tongs, just in case he needed to collect evidence without leaving any more fingerprints. Yeah, his prints were already in the room, but no sense leaving even more and making it even easier for the cops, right?
He opened the drawers in the nightstands—Bible, envelopes, nothing more. Checked under the desk and in the trash can. Went through the bathroom again. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
Her phone lay on the room’s little desk, just where he’d placed it after checking it before. He skimmed through her contacts, just in case any familiar names came up, but it was mostly a list of first names, punctuated by occasional scatological commentary.
No new e-mails or phone calls. So at least no one was checking up on her.
He tapped the little SMS icon. He’d forgotten all about text messages. He didn’t use ’em himself—better for kids and illiterates—but someone Nadine’s age probably lived most of her life in texts.
The first thing he saw when the SMS app opened was a picture of himself.
His grip tightened ever so slightly on the phone. The photo originated from a phone number he didn’t recognize, and the sender must not have been in Nadine’s address book, because no name was associated with it. He flicked at the screen, but there was no history. The mystery phone number had sent exactly one message, the photo, and nothing else.
He flinched involuntarily at his own visage on the tiny screen. Seeing Outside Billy always unnerved him. He didn’t like photographs of him existing at all, preferring to be a ghost in the machinery of the world. This evidence that others could se
e him, could capture and repeat him, disturbed him as little else in the sad world of the prospects could.
Worse yet: He realized after a moment that the photo was recent. Him, checking into Castle by the Sea.
Someone had stood in the hotel lobby and snapped a photo of Billy as he’d stood at the front desk. And Billy had been completely unaware.
His rage boiled within, flaring his nostrils, quickening his breath. It took every tool at his disposal to calm himself, to regulate his lungs and his heart back into the normal range. With great focus and control, he steered himself away from the deadly shoals of abject panic. He’d spent years studying different forms of meditation, seeking the ultimate mastery over his own body, and now that education paid off. A lesser man—a prospect—might have ranted. Hurled the phone to the ground or against the wall. Screamed. Hyperventilated.
All useless detritus of the pointless emotions of fear and anger at this point. None of that would help Billy achieve what he had to achieve: Tracking down whoever had taken this photo and ending him.
After deleting the photo and replacing the phone, Billy retreated to his room and contemplated the mystery phone number. He hadn’t written it down or entered it into his own phone—that would just prove to someone that Billy had seen the number in the first place, tying him into this whole mess even deeper. No, Billy just memorized it. Memorizing had always come easy to him. He could still remember the phone number, the license plate number, and the bra size of his first successful kill. Not even intentionally. Things just fell into his brain and stuck there, usually forever.
Like this phone number.
No way in hell would he call it from his cell, or even from his room phone. Not a chance, Charlie. He’d lived too long leaving no way for anyone to track back to him; he wouldn’t start Hansel-and-Gretel-ing at this late date.
Made no sense to call from Nadine’s cell, either—the killer knew she was dead, and so would absolutely not pick up a call from that number. Nor from her room, for the same reason.