He showed Jessica the photo. Frozen in time was Eleanor Lavelle emerging from a bar or a club, laughing and leaning into a white-haired man. He had his arm around her shoulder, and she had her own arm snaked across the front of his fat belly. Holliday tapped what looked to be part of a neon sign shaped like a palm tree in the top-left corner of the shot.

“What is it?” Jessica asked.

“The logo for a topless bar in Hollywood,” Holliday said. “I’ve been there before. I know exactly where this place is.”

21 PRYCE

21

PRYCE

Medina looked like a guy who’d just walked into a bar only to be told last orders had already been called.

“I still think Fat Frank is involved,” he said, sulking.

Both detectives were studying the surveillance footage from Urban Heights on Pryce’s computer screen. Pryce froze the image of the figure in black and tapped it with his pen.

“We both agree this guy is not Frank Sherman, yeah? I know they say TV cameras add ten pounds, but I’ve never heard of a situation where someone looks almost a hundred pounds lighter.”

“Okay, not Sherman,” Medina agreed.

Pryce let the footage run on and hit the pause button again when the motel door opened. He zoomed in on the flash of white in the doorway.

“Lots of grain, but I think we can also be as sure as we possibly can be that Amy Ong answered the door while wearing the white bathrobe, so she was still alive when Sherman left the motel.”

Medina was silent for a few seconds. “Maybe Sherman was working with this guy? Like a tag team. Or he paid someone to kill her? Could be Amy Ong was trying to blackmail Sherman, threatened to tell his wife what he was up to, and he had to shut her up.”

Pryce shook his head. “If this was a paid hit, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near that motel room himself. And he definitely wouldn’t have left his prints all over the scene.”

Medina’s shoulders hunched in dejection. “I thought we had this one nailed.”

Pryce turned back to the computer screen. He swapped the surveillance footage for his email inbox and hit refresh. No new emails. He pulled up the surveillance footage again and sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head.

“Let’s run through some alternative scenarios that don’t involve Frank Sherman.”

Medina said, “Okay, shoot.”

“An opportunist killer who picked a motel room at random and struck gold when a defenseless young woman answered the door.”

Medina dismissed the theory immediately. “The change of clothing and knife suggest a degree of planning that doesn’t fit with a random attack.”

“I agree,” Pryce said. “How about another one of her regular johns, someone like Sherman? Something happened, and things went bad quickly.”