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was cold and it felt stiff against his back. He started the car and got the engine going. Turned on the heater. Switched the setting to defrost.
    ‘Yes and no,’ he finally said. ‘Sure, it looks bad. No doubt about that. But what do we really have here to suggest this is anything other than a suicide? And by that I mean non-circumstantial evidence.’
    ‘Non-circumstantial?’
    ‘The physical evidence all points to a suicide.’
    ‘That someone filmed .’
    Striker nodded. ‘I’m not arguing that; hell, I’m the one who found the guy. It’s creepy, no doubt. But what really is that? We got a guy in the next suite filming Mandy with a set-up video camera. Why? For all we know, he had a thing for her and was videotaping her before her death. For all we know, he was there trying to get the camera back before we found it.’
    ‘Or maybe he was filming us, for that matter,’ Felicia said.
    That notion bothered Striker. It was a possibility he hadn’t thought of. But a legitimate reality. ‘You could be right about that,’ he said. ‘One of these YouTube idiots. Or maybe another media-seller.’
    ‘Sounds weak when you say it.’
    ‘And it might well be,’ he said. ‘All I’m saying is that we don’t know why this happened. Hell, we don’t even have possession of the camera.’
    ‘What about the leather strip we found on the broken window?’
    Striker nodded. ‘I have no doubt Ident will match it to the glove I tore off the suspect – the material is the same colour and texture. But even then, so what? What does it actually prove?’
    ‘It proves we got a sicko on our hands.’
    Striker grinned darkly. ‘The world is full of sickos, Feleesh. Again, what does it prove? That someone who filmed Mandy was in the next-door apartment. He was also in the house across the way. Could’ve been a squatter, for all we know.’
    ‘I doubt that.’
    ‘I doubt it, too. But that’s what we got right now. We need more.’ He turned silent as he thought things over, and he revved the engine a few times to warm it up faster. After a long moment, something occurred to him and he turned to face Felicia once more. ‘If Mandy was forced to eat those pills, then they were already ground up into powder when she took them – I saw the paste in her mouth.’
    ‘Saliva over time can do that,’ Felicia said wryly.
    Striker gave her one of his I’m not a moron looks. ‘There was pill dust around her lips as well, and she also had bits of it on the corners of her mouth. The pills were crushed, Feleesh; she didn’t chew them. So either she hated taking medicine in pill form and always ingested them as powder – or someone made her take them. It’s one or the other.’
    Felicia crossed her arms to keep warm. ‘If there was a struggle, you’d think she’d have fought back.’
    ‘There are no defensive wounds.’
    ‘Could she have been bound?’
    Striker bit his lip as he thought that over. ‘I looked for that, and I didn’t see any ligature marks. But if something happened to her first – if she were held down, or bound, or drugged – then that would explain it. My bet would be drugs.’ He flipped through the pages of his notebook, then wrote down a few theories. ‘You can damn well zombify a person with a lot of over-the-counter meds – sleeping pills, Valium, anything they can crush up and slip into someone’s drink.’
    ‘GHB,’ Felicia noted.
    Gamma Hydroxybutyric Acid was the most common daterape drug on the market.
    ‘That shit renders victims damn near immobile,’ she added.
    ‘And it can kill in larger doses,’ Striker said. ‘That might end up being another avenue we need to pursue. For all we know, this could end up being a case of a date rape gone wrong.’ He wrote this down in his notebook. ‘Tox tests will help.’
    Striker was about to say more when his cell phone buzzed. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his iPhone. Across the screen were two words: Larisa Logan . He saw