A wire was embedded in his neck.
Knowles put his hands to the sides of his face and screamed.
The horror was in the present and in the past. He had seen a dead body almost identical to this one when he had worked at the San Francisco Constellation. He had transferred here because he couldn’t stand thinking about it.
That night, five months ago, the police had grilled him and criticized him for touching the body before they let him go. He’d heard that there had been other killings, strangulations with a wire garrote; in fact, there had been several of them.
That meant a serial killer had been in this hotel, standing right where he was standing now.
So Jared Knowles didn’t touch the body. He used his cell phone to call the hotel’s owner, Amelia Poole. Let her fucking tell him what he should do.
CHAPTER 7
Amelia Poole was just getting home when she got the phone call from Jared Knowles, her night manager at the Sun. She asked him to hang on until she got out of the garage, closed the door, and stood in her yard overlooking Laurel Canyon.
“It happened again,” Jared said. He was speaking in a hoarse whisper, and she could hardly make out what he was saying.
“What are you talking about?”
“It happened again. A guest in the Bergman Suite. His name is Maurice Bingham. He’s dead. He’s been killed. Just like-I can’t remember his name, but you know who I mean. At the Constellation. I’m scared because I’m a link, Ms. Poole. The police are going to think I could have done it.”
“Did you?”
“Hell, no, Ms. Poole. Believe me. I would never.”
“How do you know Mr. Bingham is dead?”
“His face is blue. His tongue is out. There’s still a wire around his neck. He’s not breathing. Anything I’ve forgotten? Because I didn’t learn anything in hotel management school that covered things like this.”