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shouldn’t be touching the victim. But I was in that hotel to find out whom Claire had been coming to see, and I still didn’t know. Right or wrong, the answer was only a few feet away.
    Angling my phone near the sink, I spotted and grabbed a face towel to prevent my leaving any fingerprints as I turned off the shower. I knelt down at the edge of the bathtub and began looking for a wallet, or anything else that would ID the guy. One hand was still holding my phone for light, the other searching his pockets. It would’ve been a lot easier if he hadn’t been wearing jeans.
    The front two pockets didn’t turn up anything except perhaps a measure of guilt. Most of Claire’s sources were people doing the “right thing” in one way or another. Whistle-blowing on corruption, setting the record straight, things like that. Some of them risked their lives in doing so. Now here was one, it seemed, who’d paid the ultimate price.
    Until I searched his back pockets.
    At first, I thought it was his wallet I was feeling. It wasn’t, but it was certainly a form of ID. Even drenched and bunched in a ball as it was, I knew right away what I was holding in my hand. A ski mask. Looked like the same one from the taxi surveillance video.
    This wasn’t the guy Claire had been going to see.
    This was the guy who killed her.
    All at once, the rest of the pieces came together before my eyes. Underneath the guy’s gray sweatshirt was the same black turtleneck I’d seen in the video. There was also a black baseball cap on the tile floor next to the tub.
    There was no doubt this was him, whoever he was, and all I could think of, all I wanted to do in that very instant, was to bring him back to life just so I could kill him again myself.
    I’d never known such a feeling. Vengeance was an abstraction to me, the melodramatic word that always seemed a bit too much. Now it wasn’t nearly enough.
Where have you taken me, Claire?
    I stood up, looking at the cord of the hair dryer knotted around the towel bar. The tub had been full, the water running. As a plan, it was brilliant in its simplicity. Claire’s source had known he was in danger, and had known enough to turn the tables. Damn good for him. Now if I only knew where he’d gone.
    Claire would’ve been all over me for assuming that only a guy would’ve had the wherewithal to outwit a killer, and she would’ve been right. He could’ve easily been a she.
    Any proof either way, though, was nowhere to be found as I searched the rest of the room. It was spotless. The two queen beds were made, the wastebasket was empty, nothing had been disturbed. Except for the dead guy in the bathtub, of course.
Now
it was time to call the police.
    But before I could even reach for my phone again, I suddenly had a brand-new problem. It was the distinct sound of things about to spiral hopelessly out of control.
    Someone was knocking on the door.

CHAPTER 14
    THE FIRST thing I did was freeze. There was no second thing. At least, not right away. I had no idea what to do.
    Instead, it was all about what not to do. There was no way I was opening that door. No way I was asking, “Who’s there?”
    But I did need to know. If it was anyone from the hotel, they weren’t necessarily going away if no one answered.
    About twenty feet of that beige carpet separated me from the door, the final few feet drenched with water. I had to time it just right.
    Quickly, I tiptoed right up to the door of the bathroom. Then I waited. I couldn’t cover up the squishing sound of my last footsteps on my own. It would take some help, and I knew it was coming.
    The second knock on the door—even louder than the first—was all I needed to get right up next to the peephole. I held my breath and took a fast look before peeling off to the side.
    Damn.
There were two possibilities. One, the peephole was somehow broken. Two, it was working just fine.
    Either way, all I could see was black. As I reached over and oh-so-silently swung the