He’d made his second mistake this morning when he’d taken Jessica’s call and told her he’d gone to school with her father.

This time, telling the truth could cost him—and her—everything.

He knew she worked as a private investigator and was a damn good one by all accounts. She’d spent several years under the tutelage of a senior investigator named Larry Lutz, working out of a shop front in Blissville, before branching out on her own following Tony’s death. He knew it wouldn’t take Jessica too long to figure out Pryce had no classmates by the name of Tony Shaw.

He tried to convince himself her curiosity would have been sated by the information he had given her, that maybe she wouldn’t feel the need to dig any further. But somehow, Pryce knew she wouldn’t stop, and the thought made his stomach churn.

He slammed the palm of his hand hard against the steering wheel and cursed.

He was sitting in his Dodge Charger in the lot of the Dreamz Motel, two spaces along from Tommy Getz’s beat-up Chevy. Theirs were the only two cars in the lot. Clearly a high-profile homicide hadn’t been good for business.

Pryce turned off the engine and pocketed the keys. He climbed out of the car, swapping the refrigerator cool of the AC for a blistering heat that radiated off the sidewalks. Jessica Shaw wasn’t his only problem right now. He had another one in the shape of a 220-pound piece of lard by the name of Frank Sherman. And Frank Sherman was a problem because Pryce was convinced the man was telling the truth when he said he hadn’t killed Amy Ong.

Truth and lies.

Pryce strode toward the motel room where Amy Ong’s body had been found. Crime scene tape crisscrossed the door. It had come unstuck at the bottom edges and fluttered gently in the warm breeze. Even though Pryce knew the crime scene cleaners would have completely sanitized the room by now, he was sure he could still smell the sharp tang of her blood, could almost taste it on his tongue. He stood with his back to the door and looked out over the lot, rotating in a slow semicircle from left to right, his gaze taking in all of the surrounding properties in his line of vision.

To his left was the Dreamz Motel office with its busted camera. To the far right, beyond the stretch of rooms, was the redbrick side of a coin laundry. Dead ahead was the rear of a shiny new seven-story apartment behind an eight-foot perimeter hedge.