Alex pulled on latex gloves and then knocked. “Housekeeping.”

Shane watched for movement through the window.

Nothing stirred. He nodded to Alex who slid the master key into the deadbolt and eased the lock open. He turned the handle and pushed the door wide. The stench hit them immediately.

Shane twisted away and swallowed hard. They both silently kitted up before going inside. The bedroom was empty. The scent of bleach was apparent beneath that of decay. He pushed open the bathroom door and forced back a gag.

Alex didn’t flinch.

A body of a man was in the bathtub, his head covered in a transparent plastic bag that was taped tight around his neck. The smell of bleach was even stronger here and it looked as if the killer had sprinkled some over the man’s torso. Shane hoped the guy had been dead at the time.

“Wayne Stockwell? The night clerk?”

Alex backed up a step. “Looks like.”

They headed outside, closing the door before walking over to a nearby patch of grass to steal a few lungfuls of cold clean air.

“That guy was, what, nineteen?” asked Shane.

Alex stared unseeing into the distance. “Took the job to help pay his way through college.”

Shane fixed his gaze on the horizon. “EG is killing anyone who can identify him.”

Alex nodded curtly. “I need to call Frazer. See if the profilers can come up with something more solid to go on. You call Sloan and inform her we have yet another crime scene.” He paused. “You know, if those rumors were true, these are the sorts of monsters I’d have gone after. Psychopaths like Evi1Geni-us.”

Shane nodded. He wouldn’t have blamed him one bit. The wind rustled the brown grass as a crow cawed loudly from gnarled branches. The charcoal clouds and nearby woods had an ominous feel now that seeped into Shane’s flesh and ran down his spine like a trickle of ice. As if this killer had left a residual malevolence behind that marred the landscape and tainted the very air they breathed.

Yael copied the footage first and made sure she kept the files isolated from her own machine until she could take a deep dive into the metadata. She wouldn’t put it past EG to plant some worm or virus in the surveillance images to attempt to gain access to her machine again.

It took much less time to copy than she’d anticipated and then she realized why. The timestamp jumped from Tuesday afternoon, all the way until early this morning.

The bastard had somehow wiped any footage that might have exposed his identity and delayed the cameras from restarting until this morning. She wasn’t sure if he’d done it remotely or in person but there was no obvious footage of him.