Read In Death 12 - Betrayal in Death for Free Online Page A

Mortified, she cleared her throat. "Never mind," she muttered and cut transmission.
    The man who'd been born Sylvester Yost, who had strangled a young maid while under the name of James Priory and was currently carrying identification as Giorgio Masini, sipped his second glass of unblended scotch and watched the recording of the evening's Yankee game.
    If he'd been the type to kill for personal reasons, he'd have hunted down the Yankee pitcher and gutted him like a fish. But since murder was a business, he merely sat, cursing quietly in a surprisingly feminine voice.
    There had been some who'd made cracks about the thin, high pitch of his voice. If he was on a job, he ignored them. If he was on his own time, he beat the living hell out of them.
    But even that was simply a matter of principle. He wasn't a passionate man, not about people or principles. The lack of passion made him an excellent killing machine.
    The money for the night's work had already been deposited in an account under yet another name. He had no idea why the girl -- because she'd been hardly more than that -- had been targeted. He simply accepted the contract, fulfilled it, took the money.
    This particular job had only just begun, and promised to reap him a considerable fee. As he was considering retirement, quite seriously considering it, it was a delightful little cushion.
    Over the years, those fees had allowed him to develop, and indulge, a refined and cultured taste. He could afford the best, so he had studied and experienced and discovered just what the best entailed.
    Food, drink, art, music, fashion. He'd traveled all over the world, and off planet as well. At fifty-six he could speak three languages fluently, which was yet another sterling job tool, and could, when the mood struck, prepare a brilliant gourmet meal. What's more, he could play the piano like an angel.
    He hadn't been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but the silver wire had made up for it.
    At twenty, he'd been the minor thug that Eve had seen beneath the polish. He'd killed because he could, and it paid.
    Now he was a virtuoso of murder, a performer par excellence who had never disappointed his paying customers, and who left his own individual stamp on each target.
    Pain -- the beatings. Humiliation -- the rape. The silver wire. Murder with class. For Sly, it was a tidy little three-act play, with only the set and the second lead as variables.
    He was, always, the star of the show.
    Sly 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