“He doesn’t come across like somebody who could do what was done to that woman tonight.”

“That much junk inside him, you don’t know what he could do. But he’s not a regular user. No way he could be a regular with that kind of habit and not have a single pop.”

Eve started back to her office. A couple of uniforms led a weeping woman away in the opposite direction. Outside the bullpen a guy wearing a torn and bloody shirt sat laughing quietly to himself while he rattled the restraints that chained him to the seat.

She swung into the bullpen while he went back to giggling. In her office she hit the AutoChef for coffee first, then sat at her desk. She gulped caffeine while she booted up the security discs from the hotel.

She ran the VIP check-in first, the elaborate parlor reserved for guests in the tonier suites and the triplexes. She ordered the computer to coordinate with the time stamped on the Asant Group’s check-in. And watched the parlor fuzz into white static. She ran it back, noted the glitch began thirty minutes before the log-in, and continued to twenty-three hundred.

The pattern repeated when she ran the security discs for the private elevator, and again when she ran the main lobby discs.

“Son of a bitch.” She turned to her interoffice ’link. “ Peabody, wake up your cohab. I need McNab in here to dig into the security discs. They’re wiped.”

If the boy genius from the Electronic Detectives Division couldn’t dig out data, she had someone who could. She contacted Roarke.

“Why are you awake?” she demanded when her ’link screen showed him at his desk.

“Why are you?”

“Oh, just a little something about a ritual murder. I thought you’d want to know that all the security discs from your hotel are compromised. Nothing but static on all starting thirty minutes before the log-in for the Asant Group.”

“Are you bringing them to me or am I coming to you?”

“I’ve got McNab coming in, but-”

“I’m on my way.”

“Wait. Listen, grab me some work clothes, will you? And my weapon harness, and-”

“I know what you need.”

Her screen went black. Pissed off, she thought, and couldn’t blame him. She imagined a few heads would roll at Roarke’s Palace, and in short order. But meanwhile, she had useless discs on her hands, a suspect with drug-induced memory blanks, and a mutilated body at the morgue.

And it was still shy of dawn.

She opened her murder book, set up her board. According to the hotel records, the Asant Group had booked the triplex two months prior, and secured it with a credit card under the name of Josef Bellor, who carried an address in Budapest.

She fed the data into her computer, ordered a standard run. Only to learn Josef Bellor of Budapest had died there five years before at the ripe age of one hundred and twenty-one.

“Gonna be hard-pressed to get him to pay the bill,” she muttered.

One night’s booking, she thought, going over the notes. All room service delivered through the suite’s AutoChefs or pre-ordered and delivered prior to check-in. Five cases of wine, several pounds of various European cheeses, fancy breads, caviar, pâtés, cream cakes.

No point in ritual murder on an empty stomach.

So they ate, drank, orgied, she thought, pushing up to pace the small space of her office. Popped whatever illegals suited their fancy. Three floors of revelry, soundproofed high-collar digs with the privacy shades activated.

Would’ve saved the best for last, she decided. The sacrifice would’ve been the evening’s crescendo.

Just how did a nice girl from Indiana end up the star of the show? How did a transplanted young doctor from Pennsylvania get invited and left behind?

“Lieutenant.”

She turned to the sleepy-eyed McNab in her doorway. He wore pants of screaming yellow that matched the fist-sized dots shrieking over a shirt of eye-tearing green. His long blond hair was pulled back from his thin, pretty face into a tail. She wondered if the hank of it somehow balanced the weight of the tangle of silver loops in his ear.

“Doesn’t it ever give you a headache?” she wondered. “Just looking in the mirror.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Discs.” She gathered them from her desk, pushed them at them. “Find something on them. Roarke’s on his way.”

“Okay. Why?”

“They’re his discs. Palace Hotel security. I’ve already shot a report to your unit in EDD. Read it, work it. Get me something.”

He stifled a yawn, then focused on her board. “Is that the vic?”

Eve only nodded, said nothing when he came in to study the board. He’d work better and harder, she knew, if he was invested. “That’s fucked up,” he said. “That’s seriously fucked up. And that’s gotta be more than one killer.” He slipped the discs into one of the pockets of his pants. “If there’s an image on these, we’ll get it.”

If there were no images, she thought when McNab left, it meant the security had been compromised on site. Knowing how tightly any ship in Roarke’s expansive fleet ran, that would’ve taken some serious magic.

She turned toward her ’link with the idea of tagging Roarke on his way in. And he walked into her office.

“That was quick.”

“I’m in a hurry.” He set a bag on her visitor’s chair. “Where are the discs?”

“I just passed them off to McNab. Wait.” She shot out a hand as he turned. “If the security was breached on site, how could it be done?”

“I don’t know until I see the discs, do I?”

“Be pissed off later. How could it be done?”

He made an obvious effort to settle himself, then walked to her AutoChef to program coffee for himself. “It would have to be through security or electronics, and one of the top levels. Most likely both, working in tandem. No one at that level would consider a bribe of any kind worth their position.”

“Threat, blackmail?”

“Anything’s possible, of course, but doubtful. It would be more to their advantage to come to me with the problem than to circumvent security.”

“I’ll need names anyway.”

He set the coffee aside, took out his PPC. After a moment’s work, he nodded toward her machine. “Now you have them. And if any of my people had a part in what happened to that girl, I want to know when you know.”

He walked out, his barely restrained fury leaving a bolt of energy behind. Eve blew out a breath, and since he’d forgotten his coffee, picked it up and drank it herself.

Though she had no doubt Roarke’s screening process was more stringent than the Pentagon’s, she ran the names he’d given her. She got clean and clear on all. If, she decided, the word from EDD was an on site screwup, she’d run their spouses, when applicable, and family members.

But for now she couldn’t put off informing next of kin.

It took, Eve thought when she’d finished, under thirty seconds to shatter the world of two ordinary people, with ordinary lives. More time, she reflected as she turned back to her board, than it had taken to slash Ava Marsterson’s throat, for her brain to process the insult. But not much. Not much more.

She rubbed the heels of her hands over eyes gritty with fatigue, then checked the time. A couple of hours until she could bitch at the lab for any results, or go to the morgue for the same on the victim’s autopsy.

Enough time for a shower to clear her head before nagging EDD. She picked up the bag Roarke had left her.

“Take two hours in the crib,” she ordered Peabody when she stepped back into the bullpen. “I’m going to grab a shower.”

“Okay. I ran the Asant Group from every possible angle. It doesn’t exist.”

“It’s just a cover.”

“Then I tried a search for any occult holidays, or dates of import that coordinate with today-or yesterday now. Nothing.”

“Well, that was good thinking. Worth a shot. It was a damn party, that’s for sure. Maybe they don’t need an occasion. No, no,” Eve corrected herself. “It was too elaborate, planned too far in advance to just be for the hell of it.”