At the back of the house, he carefully put down the bag then moved to a small rockery in the corner. One of the stones was fake, its hollow interior containing a key to the back door. The investigator’s notes had read, ‘Hill is a classic absentminded professor. He forgot his house keys on two of the five days I observed him.’
He prowled through the ground floor, allowing himself a few minutes’ grace to get a feel for Tony Hill, the weird little bastard who had thought he could get one over on Vance. Billy No Mates, according to the investigator. Carol Jordan seemed to be the only friend in his life. So the more he hurt Carol Jordan, the more he would hurt both of them.
Under the stairs was the door that had to lead to the basement. There were bolts on the door, but they were undone. So too was the mortice lock. The door opened to the touch. So much for the fiction that theirs was the formal relationship of landlord and tenant. These two were in and out of each other’s space, as unterritorial as a flock of sparrows.
The converse never occurred to him: that here were two people who each respected the other’s privacy so much they had no need for locks to enforce it.
Vance ran lightly down the stairs to Carol’s domain, almost tripping over an elderly black cat who still got up to greet new arrivals in his world. ‘Fuck,’ Vance yelped, staggering, desperate not to drop his burden. He managed to right himself, giving his shoulders a shake.
He placed the holdall on the floor and set off on a tour of the premises. He found what he was looking for in the tiny utility room off the hallway. On the floor, a bowl of dried cat-food and another of water. Next to them, a plastic bin half-full of dried cat-food. Vance gave a little giggle of delight. How beautiful it was when things went according to plan.
He brought the holdall through and unzipped it, closing the door behind him to keep the cat out. First he emptied the cat-food into a carrier bag. He took out a powerful coiled metal spring, held together by a plastic clip. He placed that in the bottom of the bin, attaching the clip to a sensitive mechanism connected to its rim. He took out a pair of acid-proof gauntlets and pulled them over his gloves. Then with infinite delicacy, he opened the polystyrene container in the holdall and lifted out a glass vessel. Clear oily liquid sloshed gently against the sides as he lowered it on to the spring. He removed the lid, exposing the sulphuric acid to the air. Finally, he fixed a photoelectric cell to the mechanism inside the bin and closed the lid.
The next time Carol Jordan opened the cat-food bin, the spring-loaded container of acid would be catapulted upwards into her face. It probably wouldn’t kill her. But the acid would burn into her skin, destroying her features, leaving her disfigured and scarred. She would almost certainly be blinded and in hideous pain. Just the thought of it made Vance feel excited. She would suffer. God, how she would suffer.
But Tony Hill would suffer more, knowing this time he’d failed to stop Vance in his tracks. The perfect double whammy, really.
Kevin was fed up. There were, in his opinion, far too many motels near the airport. And Stacey had apparently tracked down addresses for every last one of them. There was a wide range, both in terms of cost and of facilities. Not to mention willingness to cooperate with a pushy cop at a busy time of day. It was a bastard of a chore and it pissed him off that yet again he was assigned to the scut work. He’d made one professional mistake that had cost him his inspector’s rank, but that had been years ago. It seemed that he was never going to be forgiven. Maybe leaving the MIT behind would finally be the route back to promotion.
He’d split the accommodations into three rough groups. Top of the line were the budget chains, but paradoxically, their front-desk security was often questionable. They were so accustomed to turning a blind eye to groups of students and football fans trying to save money by squeezing eight people to a room that a troupe of lap dancers could have high-kicked their way from the entrance to the lifts without anyone paying attention. The killer would have found it relatively easy to check in with Suze Black without attracting attention, but getting her out might have been more of an issue.
There was one possibility, where one of the lifts went straight down to a basement car park. Kevin thought it was a long shot – there were too many elements of risk for it to fit with the care this killer took in every other aspect of his operations. But he filed it away as somewhere to come back to if he didn’t make any progress elsewhere.
At the opposite end were the places that were little more than glorified guest houses. Kevin didn’t even bother ringing the doorbell of those. Suze Black wouldn’t have got across the threshold alive, never mind dead.
That left a tranche in the middle – privately owned, mostly struggling to keep going in a recession, mostly willing to turn a blind eye to what was going on in their rooms. But still, Kevin reckoned they would mostly also draw the line at a man dragging a dripping corpse across the foyer and out to the car park.
He was on the point of giving up when he finally struck gold. The Sunset Strip had sunk so low beneath the horizon it was hard to imagine how it had ever been a hopeful twinkle in anyone’s eye. It was a two-storey building covered in peeling terracotta stucco, an irregular quadrangle sketched around parking spaces marked out in peeling whitewash. The units were like individual apartments. On the ground floor, you could practically drive right up to your door. Perfect for stashing a dead prostitute in your boot without anybody catching sight of what you were up to.
Kevin parked by the office, which occupied the first ground-floor unit on the left. The fat kid behind the counter looked barely old enough to shave, never mind drink. He had sallow skin, bumpy with subcutaneous spots and eyebrows that bristled in five directions at once. Nondescript brown hair gelled up on the top of his head made him look like a refugee from a comedy sketch show. He barely looked up from the comic book he was reading. ‘Yeah?’ he grunted.
Kevin flipped open his ID. It took thirty seconds for the kid to realise there was something he was supposed to be looking at. He shifted a wad of chewing gum from one cheek to the other and assumed an expression of weary boredom. ‘Yeah?’ again.
This was clearly not a time for small talk. ‘Were you working here on the third?’
More gum shifting, a little light chewing. A hand that looked like an inflated latex glove yanked a drawer open and took out a sheet of paper marked out in boxes. He poked a finger at the third box on the top line. KH, BD, RT. ‘That’s me. RT. Robbie Trehearne.’
‘Do you remember anything particular about that night?’
Trehearne shook his head. ‘Nope.’
‘Can I see the register?’
‘What about a warrant? Are you not supposed to have a warrant?’
