The Innocent

The investigative team, in cooperation with the Newark Police Department, would squeeze the prostitution trade. Someone would know what happened. They’d talk.

Case solved.

Loren put down the report. Wine’s theory made sense if you didn’t know about Darrow’s fingerprints being found in Sister Mary Rose’s room. Still, now that Loren knew that the lead theory was crap—what did she have left? Well, for one thing, this was probably a pretty clever setup.

Play it out for a second.

You want to kill Darrow. You get in a car with him. You put a gun to his head. You tell him to drive to a sleazy part of town. You make him pull down his pants—anyone who’d ever watched any forensic TV show would know that if you pulled the pants down after the shooting, the blood splatters would show that. Then you shoot him in the head, take his money and jewelry, make it look like a robbery.

Trevor Wine had bought it.

In a vacuum Loren probably would have come to the same conclusion.

So what would be the next logical step?

She sat up in bed.

Wine’s theory had been that Max Darrow had done some cruisin’ and picked up the wrong girl. But if that wasn’t the case—Loren was sure of that much—how did the killer get in the car with Darrow in the first place? Wouldn’t it be most logical to assume that Darrow was with his killer from the beginning of his car trip?

That meant Darrow probably knew his killer. Or at least did not view him as a threat.

She checked the mileage again. Only eight miles. Assuming he used it the day before, well, that meant that he hadn’t driven very far.

There was something else to consider: Another set of fingerprints had been found in Sister Mary Rose’s room—more specifically, on her body.

Okay, Loren thought, suppose Darrow was working with someone else—a partner maybe. They’d stay together, right? Or near each other, at the very least.

Darrow had been staying at the Howard Johnson’s.

She checked the file. The rental car company LuxDrive—they had a counter at the same hotel.

So that was where it all started. At the Howard Johnson’s.

Most hotels have security cameras. Had Trevor Wine checked out the ones at the Howard Johnson’s yet?

Hard to say, but it would definitely be worth it for her to check it out.

Either way, it could wait until morning, right?

She tried to sleep. She sat in bed and closed her eyes. She did this for well over an hour. From the other room, she heard her mother’s snores. The case was heating up. Loren felt the buzz in her blood. She pushed back the covers and got out of bed. There was no way she could sleep. Not now. Not when there was something of a clue in the air. And tomorrow she’d have a whole new set of problems, what with Ed Steinberg calling the feds and Trevor Wine getting involved.

She might be taken off the case.

Loren threw on her sweats, grabbed her wallet and ID. She tiptoed outside, started up her car, and headed for the Howard Johnson’s.

Chapter 27

NOTHING WORSE than crappy porn.

Lying in the motel room bed, that was what Charles Talley had been thinking before the phone rang. He’d been watching some weirdly edited porno on the Spectravision Pay-Per-View channel. It had cost him $12.95, but the damn movie cut out all the good stuff, all the close-ups and, well, genitalia both male and female.

What the hell is this crap?

Worse yet, the movie, in order to make up for the lost time, kept replaying over and over the same parts. So the girl would be like sliding down to her knees and then they’d show this guy’s face tilting back and then they’d go back to the girl sliding down, the guy’s face, the girl sliding down . . .

It was maddening.

Talley was about to call down to the front desk, give them a piece of his mind. This was the friggin’ United States of America. A man has a right to watch porn in the privacy of his own hotel room. Not this chicken-ass soft stuff. Real porn. Hardcore action. This stuff, this soft porn—might as well be put on the Disney Channel.

That was when the phone rang. Talley checked his watch.

About time. He’d been waiting for this callback for hours now.

Talley reached for the phone, put it to his ear. On the screen the girl was panting the exact same way for, what, ten minutes now. This crap was beyond boring.

“Yeah.”

Click. Dial tone.

A hang-up. Talley looked at the receiver as if it might give him a second response. It didn’t. He put the receiver down and sat up. He waited for the phone to ring again. After five minutes passed, he started to worry.

What was going on here?

Nothing had turned out as planned. He’d flown in from Reno, what, three days ago now? Hard to remember exactly. His assignment yesterday had been clear and easy: Follow this guy named Matt Hunter. Keep a tail on him.

Why?

He had no idea. Talley had been told where to start off—parked outside some big law office in Newark—and to follow Hunter wherever he went.

But the guy, this Matt Hunter, had spotted the tail almost immediately.

How?

Hunter was strictly an amateur. But something had gone very wrong. Hunter had made him right away. And then, worse—much worse—when Talley called him a few hours ago, Matt Hunter knew who he was.

He had used Talley’s full name, for chrissake.

This confused Talley.

He didn’t handle confusion well. He placed some calls, tried to find out what was going on, but nobody had picked up.

That confused him even more.

Talley had few talents. He knew strippers and how to handle them. He knew how to hurt people. That was pretty much it. And really, when you thought about it, those two things went together. You want to keep a strip joint running and happy, you need to know how to put on the hurt.

So when things got muddled—as they were now—that was always his fallback position. Violence. Hurting someone and hurting them bad. He had spent time in prison for only three assault beefs, but in his life Talley guessed that he’d probably beaten or maimed fifty plus. Two had died.

His preferred method of putting on the hurt involved stun guns and brass knuckles. Talley reached into his bag. First he pulled out his brand-new stun gun. It was called the Cell Phone Stun Gun. The thing looked, as the name suggested, exactly like a cell phone. Cost him sixty-nine bucks off the Web. You could take it anywhere. You could have it out and put it to your ear like you were talking and bam, you press a button and the “antenna” on the top wallops your enemy with 180,000 volts.

Then he pulled out his brass knuckles. Talley preferred the newer designs with the wider impact area. They not only spread out your area of collision, they put less pressure on your hand when you laid into someone good.