He had paced for a while under the motel’s big vertical sign, its red letters and white background glowing soft and hazy and dreamlike under the thick smog. He had asked himself over and over again what the hell he was doing. Every instinct Pryce had had screamed at him to jump straight back into his car and drive as fast as he could back to his apartment and climb into bed with Angie. No harm done.

But he had known turning his back on the situation was never really an option. That was why he had agreed to the meeting at the motel in the first place, even though he’d known he was risking everything—his career, his freedom, Angie. So he had walked into the motel room and sat on a bed that felt like it was filled with rocks, and he had waited for the knock on the door.

Today, it had been another phone call that had brought him back to the Dreamz Motel.

The place was a two-story dive just off Hollywood Boulevard and within spitting distance of the Walk of Fame, although the thousands of famous names immortalized in five-pointed terrazzo-and-brass stars were the closest its guests ever came to rubbing shoulders with the A-list.

The building had been a vibrant pink when Pryce had last been there, but the paint was now bleached the color of cotton candy after years of exposure to the merciless LA sun and a general lack of upkeep. Tiles were missing from the stucco roof, and white paint flaked off the metal railings of the upper level like dandruff. The big vertical sign was still there, advertising vacancies, HBO, and refrigerators in every room. These days, there was also a communal hot tub, if you weren’t too fussy about stripping down to your bathing suit with the couple having an affair in the room next door.

This time, there had been no deserted parking lot, no milky dawn light and lazily blinking neon.

Instead, he had been met by chaos.

A media chopper had circled noisily overhead, and a bunch of reporters and cameramen and photographers had congregated behind the yellow crime scene tape like a skulk of starving foxes desperately trying to sniff out a tidbit or two. He had ignored their shouted questions as he’d ducked under the tape. By the end of the day, he would have enough of his own.

His partner, Vic Medina, met him outside the motel room and handed him a pair of latex gloves and some shoe protectors. Pryce snapped on the gloves and pulled the shoe protectors over his loafers and took a deep breath before crossing the threshold.