Thankless in Death

the other.
    The elevator doors opened. “Get them off.”
    “We’re actually taking them down to—”
    “Now.”
    “Yes, sir.” Hauling them up, the uniforms pulled the now weeping and wailing LCs off the car.
    “Well now, that was entertaining.” Roarke took out a handkerchief, caught Eve’s chin in his hand.
    “What?”
    “Just a little back-blow from the nail swipe. “There, that’s better.”
    “God” was all she said until they reached the garage level.
    “You drive,” she told him. “I want to check on some things on the way.”
    He got behind the wheel. “Such as?”
    “I want to make sure Morris is on the third DB. I can put together how and when, I sure as hell know who and why, but it keeps it consistent. And I want to alert Harpo—hair and fiber queen—at the lab. Mira thinks he took some of the vic’s hair. That’s a personal trophy if so. And I want to check on the probabilities I had Peabody run on his next victim.”
    “You believe there’ll be a next.”
    “He’s got one picked out. If we don’t net him soon, we’ll have another DB for Morris.” She paused long enough to scrub her hands over her face. “If he put half this time, effort, and thought into any one of the jobs he’s blown through, he’d be at least middle management by now.”
    “This is more fun.”
    “You got that right. He’s found himself. They have sites, right? Conduits, avenues, to hype yourself as a kill-for-hire, or to look for one.”
    He sent her a sidelong glance.
    “You’d know … people who know people.”
    “Possibly. That was never my avenue nor did I buy rounds at the pub for those who drove along it.”
    “But you know people.”
    “I do.”
    “It’s just a side angle, but he
likes
this, and so far it’s working for him. He likes the high life and he likes killing. Right now he’s killing people he knows, has some grudge against, but most of them aren’t going to keep him in the high life. Why not make your hobby your profession? He might think that.”
    “It’s an interesting side angle. I’ll ask around.”
    “He shouldn’t have gotten this far.” She let her head rest back. “He hit it lucky with Nuccio. She picks today to be out of reach, get a new ’link and number. Without that, I connect with her, and I’d have asked about the locks. On top of it, he tried her old number, I know he did. We’d have had that, even on a clone, I’d have known he was trying to find her. Everything just played in his favor.”
    “Luck’s a potent thing. Skill’s better.”
    He pulled up in front of the Grandline.
    The doorman hustled forward. “Lieutenant Dallas? They’re waiting for you inside. Mr. Wurtz at the desk.”
    The place struck her as very clean and entirely too bright. Busy even at this hour, the lobby throbbed with movement. Business people, she judged, coming in from late transpo, going out to same. Others sat slack-jawed with fatigue mumbling into hand or ear ’links.
    A striking man with a face too young for the silver mane of hair—and maybe that was the point—stepped around the long black counter at her approach.
    “Lieutenant, Michael Wurtz. I’m the night manager. I have the security feed you requested. The clerk informed me you’d inquired about Jerald Reinhold. No one registered under that name. We have the alert in place.”
    “He got a cab out front at just before sixteen hundred today. So I need to see that feed.”
    “I have it set up in my office. Just this way. I admit to being unnerved when Rissa told me. I’ve followed the reports on this man all day.”
    He opened a door behind the big counter into a small warren of rooms and cubes, then turned into an office.
    “People often take advantage of the cab line here,” he continued. “In any case, security made copies of the times you requested.”
    “Take the lobby cams first,” Eve told him.
    Wurtz used a remote, started the feed on his wall screen.
    Eve spotted Reinhold at 8:23.
    “That’s him. Ball cap, sunshades, the two suitcases.”
    “Oh dear. One moment.” He turned to a comp, operated it manually, and with a very swift touch. “We checked in a guest named Malachi Golde at eight-twenty-eight. He requested a day room. He showed ID, paid cash up front as it says in these notes his credit card had been compromised at the transpo center. Oh dear,” he repeated.
    “What?”
    “I see here the ID card is invalid—it’s over a year out of date. The clerk didn’t check