I could think of several reasons, but I got his point. Francones was the kind of guy who did not have to pay for sex. If you believed the gossip, he’d had women throwing themselves at him for—
Something puzzled me. “Where’s the hooker he was with?”
We looked under the bed. We even lifted Francones’s body to see if she’d been pinned beneath him. But she hadn’t.
“Suppressor,” Sampson said, breaking me out of my thoughts.
“Again?” I said.
“Killer must have used a suppressor on the gun. Or Francones would have heard the shots and been up and facing the door.”
I saw what he was saying, replied, “So the three in the outer room die first. Then the killer comes down the hall, finds victim number four, shoots to incapacitate, and then to kill.”
“Sounds professional.”
I nodded, studying the Mad Man’s wounds again, thinking trajectories. “He’s kneeling when he takes the first shot, and then falls forward. So again, where’
s the hooker?”
“And what’s with the cleanser?”
“Maybe the killer doesn’t like the smell of death?”
“Or maybe the killer gets off on the citrus smell.”
“Definitely not a robbery,” Sampson said, gesturing toward the Breitling watch on Francones’s wrist.
I picked up the Hall of Famer’s pants, rifled the pockets, and came up with a gold money clip holding a thousand dollars in fifties, and then something I didn’t expect to find. The vial held at least three grams of white powder but was capable of holding twice that. I tasted it. My tongue and lips numbed at the bitter taste of high-grade cocaine.
Showing the vial to Sampson, I said, “I don’t remember anything to do with the Mad Man and drugs.”
“Maybe he wasn’t all naturally amped up and crazy.”
We bagged the cocaine as evidence.
“You seeing a phone?” Sampson asked.
“No,” I said. “And no car keys, either. And no third woman.”
We went through the rest of the Superior Spa. The manager’s office had been lightly tossed. Oddly, however, the unlocked strongbox was untouched and contained nearly four thousand dollars. Untouched as well were a wallet with six hundred dollars and IDs that pegged the manager as twenty-nine-year-old Donald Blunt of College Park, a grad student at the University of Maryland. The only thing we could determine as missing was the hard drive that recorded the feed from the lobby security cameras.
In the women’s locker room we found clothes, cash, three cell phones, and documents that identified the two female victims. The woman in the red hot pants was Kim Ho, a twenty-year-old Korean national who’d come to the United States three months before on a temporary work visa. The woman who’d died in the fetal position was An Lu, also Korean, nineteen, also in the United States on a short-term work visa.
“Third cell phone,” Sampson said.
“Third hooker,” I said, nodding as my mind flashed back to the wound on the Mad Man’s lower back, imagining how he had to have been kneeling when—
“Detective Cross?” Officer Carney said.
Sampson and I spun around. The patrolman was standing in the doorway, wearing surgical booties.
“Officer, I clearly asked you to stay outside and maintain the perimeter.”
Carney’s head retreated by several inches. “I’m sorry, sir, but I thought you’d want to know that there’s a hysterical young woman outside who says she knows at least one of the people working in here tonight.”
Chapter
8