Of course, that would all hinge on whether or not she actually knew anything, and she hadn’t struck me as the type to stay up on current events that weren’t a part of her immediate future. Besides, at the rate she’d been going, she had most likely already found someone in need of her particular brand of personal services by now, and I would have to wait until I could catch her between clients. In my mind, standing around waiting for that to happen wasn’t exactly an enticing prospect considering the fact that I was sure to be faced with extricating myself from another sort of proposition yet again. On top of that, it didn’t sound particularly safe either. But, in the end it wasn’t fear or even the distaste that kept me from making the U-turn. There was a niggling hunch in the back of my head, and it kept telling me that I needed to look somewhere else. So, I listened to it.

I had seen the crime scenes in Saint Louis; therefore, I knew the types of venues the killer chose. While they were certainly establishments of the hourly rate persuasion, they were more along the lines of seedy in a quaint, un-redecorated sense-things like outdated, mismatched furniture and paint or wallpaper that hadn’t been in style for over twenty years. But, the important point was that they were clean. They definitely weren’t anything on the order of the squalid hole where I had taken up temporary residence.

There was a gut feeling I had about Annalise, or maybe it was her alter ego, Miranda, for all I knew. Perhaps both. It was the product of an ethereal connection I’d made at the second Saint Louis crime scene, and all I could say was that I had picked up an impression. That impression had now formed itself into a theory. To me, it seemed she saw herself as above such a place as the Airline Courts. In fact, I was dead certain she perceived herself as above most everything and everyone.

Even so, she still picked motels well known for clandestine meetings of a sexual nature for her kills. There could be a handful of logical reasons for this, not the least of which was the fact that she could almost count on absolute privacy, given the nature of the business. But, logic wasn’t what drove a serial killer. Something the experts liked to call a stressor was the motivational culprit.