In Death 12 - Betrayal in Death

enjoyed traveling, and had several scrapbooks filled with postcards he picked up as he did so. Occasionally he would page through them, sipping a drink, smiling over the reminders of places he'd been, and the trinkets he'd collected there.
    The meal he had in Paris that summer after he'd dispatched the electronic's manufacturer, the view from his hotel window on a rainy evening in Prague before he'd strangled the American envoy.
    Good memories.
    He was confident that, though his current employment would keep him in New York for the run of the show, it would provide many more of those good memories.

CHAPTER THREE
    In the morning, Eve sat at her desk in Cop Central and reviewed all the data Feeney had sent her the night before. With a few hours' sleep, a fresh eye, and a third cup of coffee she let a picture form in her mind of one Sylvester Yost.
    A career criminal. A stone killer, sired by a second-string gunrunner who'd disappeared, and was presumed dead, during the Urban Wars. Birthed by a diagnosed mental defective who'd had a penchant for boosting cars and slicing the unhappy owners with a switchblade. She'd died of a drug overdose in a recovery ward when her son had been thirteen.
    Sly had apparently decided to carry on the family tradition, with his own style of mayhem.
    She had his juvenile file now. He'd toyed with knives, cutting the ear off his caseworker two weeks after he'd been sucked into the system. He'd sampled rape, assaulting one of the girls in his group home and leaving her battered.
    But he'd found his true calling with strangulation, and had apparently practiced on small dogs and big cats before graduating to the human species.
    At fifteen, he'd escaped from the juvie facility. He was now fifty-six. In those forty-one years, he'd spent only one in a cage, and was suspected of forty-three murders.
    The information on him was sketchy, despite files compiled by the FBI, Interpol, the IRCCA, and the Global Bureau for Interplanetary Crimes.
    The subject was a suspected killer-for-hire who had no living family, no known friends or associates, no known address. His habitual weapon of choice was wire of sterling silver. But victims attributed to him had also been strangled manually, with silk scarves and with gold rope.
    In the early days, Eve noted as she read. Before he settled on his signature style.
    Victims were both male and female, of all ages, races and financial groups. Bodily violence, including torture and rape, were often employed.
    "Good at your work, aren't you, Sly? And I bet you don't come cheap." She sat back, studying the disc image of Yost at the check-in desk of The Roarke Palace Hotel. "Who the hell would hire you to kill a young maid who lived with her mother and sister in Hoboken?"
    She rose, paced the crowded box of her office. There was a possibility he'd made a mistake, but that was slim.
    You don't last forty-odd years in the assassin game by plucking at the wrong target.
    Logically, Yost had done what he'd been paid to do.
    So, who was Darlene French, and who was she linked with?
    Roarke's connection was there, no question, but while the death would cause him personal unhappiness and some professional inconvenience, it just didn't make that much of a ripple in the big ocean of Roarke's holdings.
    Back to the victim. Had Darlene heard or seen something, without even being aware she'd heard or seen it? Hotels were busy places, with a great deal of business being done.
    But if the girl had brushed up against something, why have her murdered in such an obvious and dramatic fashion? Take her out quietly and be done with it.
    An accident, a botched mugging, everyone's shocked and sorry. The cops take a glance, offer their sympathies. And it all goes away.
    Though the theory didn't gel for her, Eve decided she'd need to go back to the hotel and take a close look at who'd stayed in the rooms under Darlene's care for the last several weeks.
    She stopped by her skinny window, watched the morning insanity. Sky and street traffic were vicious. An airbus lumbered by, jammed port to port with commuters who didn't have the luxury or the good sense to work out of their homes. A one-man traffic cam hovered with a scissor snap of blades as the rush hour was analyzed, reported, and broadcast to those already suffering through it.
    The media needed to fill airtime with something, she supposed. She'd already ignored over a half dozen calls from reporters hoping for a comment or break on the