Next Victim by Michael Prescott Page B

her, she had used it as fuel to stay awake and alert and on the move, twenty hours a day, as the task force was assembled and deployed.
    All the obvious avenues of investigation had been followed. Angie Callahan’s coworkers had been questioned. The bar had been staked out on the chance that the killer would return. Undercover ops were carried out in a variety of bars and nightclubs on Melrose Avenue. Linda Tyler had been the bait at one nightspot tonight. Tess, with agents Collins and Diaz, had been backing up another female agent working undercover at a different bar. So far none of the operations had yielded results—unless Hayde was their man.
    Physical evidence retrieved from the victim’s body had established that Mobius had engaged in antemortem intercourse—probably consensual, as there was no sign of rape. The murder weapon had been taken, and since none of Angie’s cutlery was missing, it was believed to be a pocketknife carried by the killer. The width of the wound channel matched the cuts inflicted on the Denver victims, suggesting that Mobius was using the same knife he’d employed before.
    The wound itself, like the earlier ones, said a great deal about Mobius’s mind-set. He had slit Angie Callahan’s throat with care, avoiding the carotid arteries, so that the blood trickled out, bringing on death by slow degrees.
    And what had Mobius done during that long interval when Angie had felt her life bleeding away? Had he spoken to her or kissed her, or had he simply watched?
    Tess turned back to face the monitors. Michaelson was asking about William Hayde’s movements throughout the evening, and Hayde was answering in his bored, contemptuous voice, his free hand tracing slow circles in the air, the pearl-and-silver cuff link still winking as if it knew a secret it would not share.
    Tess wanted him to be Mobius. She wanted it so much.
    Please, God , she thought. Please let this man be a monster .
    Was that so much to ask?
     

 
    7
     
     
    "Do we tell the AD?" Jarvis asked.
    "Not yet."
    "I thought he wanted to be informed—"
    "We’ll inform Andrus later. Right now we’ve got higher priorities."
    Nobody contradicted him, which was just as well. Jack Tennant wasn’t used to being contradicted.
    Tennant was sixty years old, three years past the bureau’s ostensibly mandatory retirement age. He was tall and thick-muscled and bull-necked, and with his buzz-cut gray hair he looked like an aging drill instructor. In point of fact, he had been a drill instructor in the Marines during the Vietnam War, preparing the troops on Parris Island, and he still knew how to fire off an order in his gruff bulldog bark.
    Restlessly he paced an office in the FBI’s resident agency at LA International Airport. Seven faces were arrayed before him—two agents he’d brought with him from DC, and five more who were among the twenty supplied by the field office in Portland, most of whom were out canvassing all hotels within a two-mile radius of LAX.
    Last night, when Amanda Pierce had stopped at a motel in Salem, Oregon, after four hours on the road, she had received a call on her cell phone. The phone was a black-market model equipped with powerful encryption features, and the signal could not be tapped. But a long-range microphone aimed at Pierce’s motel room had picked up scattered words of her end of the conversation. It appeared that her contact in LA had called to change the details of their scheduled rendezvous. The microphone had caught Pierce saying, "…meet you at the hotel…"
    The next words had been lost in the drone of ambient noise from freeway traffic and buzzing air conditioners. There was no way to know what hotel it was, but possibly it was near the airport.
    The squad members from Portland were on the telephone, using either their secure cell phones or the office landlines, talking quietly and rapidly and taking notes. Five taxi companies handled nearly all pickup and delivery of passengers at