In the bathroom, Pryce peeled off his shirt, pants, and underwear and dumped them in the laundry basket. He turned the heat of the shower as high as he could stand it, relishing the near pain of the hot needles of water stabbing his back and shoulders. He soaped himself from head to toe and tried to scrub the stench of the crime scene from his skin. Rid himself of that all-too-familiar copper tang of blood, the unmistakable scent of death. If only he could wash away the memories along with the stink, he thought. Watch as the fragmented images swirled away down the drain along with the soap and shampoo.

What had happened to Amy Ong was bad, but it wasn’t the worst Pryce had seen in almost thirty years on the job. He knew what was really bothering him wasn’t just what had happened to her; it was where it had happened.

The Dreamz Motel was a place he’d sworn he would never set foot in again. He had been there once before, one night a long time ago, and he had spent more than half his life trying to forget about it.

It had been a night much like this one. Warm and sticky, with the curtains flapping gently in the barely there breeze from the open window of his tiny apartment. Angie, his new girlfriend, lying in bed next to him. He remembered being woken sometime before dawn by the shrill ringing of the telephone on the nightstand and the panicked whispered conversation that had followed. He had somehow managed to convince Angie to go back to sleep, that there was nothing to worry about, even though his hands were shaking so badly he’d struggled to fasten his belt.

He had stopped at a pay phone outside an all-night liquor store on Sunset on the way to the motel and made a call of his own. One that he couldn’t risk Angie overhearing. At that hour, the only other people around were transients bundled under flattened cardboard and sleeping bags in doorways or early-morning cleaners making their way to silent, empty office blocks. No one had taken any notice of Pryce.

His short, tense conversation had been punctuated by the occasional scream of a siren in the distance, and he’d kept his back to the traffic for fear of being recognized by a colleague in a passing cruiser. After hanging up, he’d quickly gotten back into his Ford Taurus, grateful the car was dark and anonymous, and headed toward La Brea and the Dreamz Motel.