The door suddenly flew open, its leading edge striking Paco Esteban in the forehead and causing a great deal of blood to start flowing down his face. He staggered back as in strode a tall muscular Hispanic male in black boots, pants, shirt, and hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up on his head.

Hanging from a thin black sling on his right shoulder he had what El Nariz thought looked oddly like a long pistol or a short rifle. Whatever it was, it was futuristic-looking, unlike any weapon he’d ever seen.

In the man’s left hand, El Nariz saw what looked like a wet brown ball hanging from a black rope-although, with Esteban’s vision blurred, he could not tell if the blood he saw belonged to the object or to him.

“Rosario! Where is Rosario?” the man called out in almost happy singsong Spanish as he trained the muzzle of the weapon on El Nariz, then walked purposely past and on to the front of the building. Then his tone changed. “Rosario! Where the fuck are you?”

When the man reached the big room of washers and dryers, the workers moved to the side, out of the man’s way, in effect creating a path for him. The man looked to the end of this path, to the folding station along the far wall, and grunted at what he saw.

He held up the grotesque ball by its black rope.

“Let this be a lesson to all of you,” he bellowed as he swung it around.

Then he slung it, in a fashion oddly like that of a bowling ball, down the polished concrete floor toward Rosario, then turned to walk out the way he had come.

As he passed El Nariz, who was trying to get up from being down on his hurt left knee, his right hand holding his bloody forehead, the man again waved the muzzle of his futuristic-looking gun at him-but this time let off a burst of fire. The fifteen rounds loudly made a neat arch of pockmarks in the newly painted white brick above El Nariz’s head, pelting him with chips of masonry.

The man went out the door, and moments later the minivan roared off in a squeal of tires.

The bloody object had slid the length of the room and left a long, sloppy trail. As the crew of workers had recognized what exactly it was, they started wailing and shrieking-and running past El Nariz to the back door.

The object had stopped just short of Rosario’s feet, and when she looked down and saw that the rope was a ponytail and the ball was the bludgeoned decapitated head of Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez, its lifeless gaze staring up at her, Rosario Flores fainted to the floor.

III

[ONE] Room 52 The Philly Inn Wednesday, September 9, 6:05 A.M.

“Detective, it’s murder, is what it is,” Javier Iglesia said. “No question in my mind.”

Homicide Detective Anthony Harris, standing outside the motel room and looking in through the hole that once held a plate-glass window, was watching the technicians from the Medical Examiner’s Office work the scene.

The masonry walls and ceiling of the interior-and practically everything therein-had been burned at such a high temperature that there were no distinct colors and almost no shades-just the grayish-white hue of ash everywhere. Harris saw that the mattresses had been scorched to such a degree that only their metal frames and coils remained, and these were melted almost to a point of being unrecognizable.

Two shiny black vinyl body-transport bags-open on the floor in the middle of the room, each containing a charred body-were a stark contrast to their surroundings, as were the technicians methodically documenting the scene.

One representative of the Medical Examiner’s Office was a photographer, an attractive black female in her midtwenties wearing slacks and a dark blouse. She had slender features, and stood right at five feet, maybe a hundred pounds. She moved with her camera-a bulky professional-grade Nikon digital model, its strobe firing off flashes that washed the room in a pulsing light that bordered on the surreal-in such a graceful fluid manner that it looked to be a natural extension of her.

Harris had worked crime scenes with Javier Iglesia, the lead technician, and was aware of his well-earned reputation for being somewhat loquacious. He was a beefy but fit thirty-year-old of Puerto Rican ancestry. He wore black jeans, a white knit polo, and a frayed and stained white thigh-length lab coat with two big patch pockets on the front. Both he and the photographer had transparent blue plastic booties over their black athletic shoes and tan-colored synthetic polymer gloves on their hands.

“It’s Shakespearean, is what it is,” Iglesia then announced.

Harris shook his head, not understanding. “It’s what, Javier?”

“ ‘Cut his weasand with thy knife.’ From The Tempest. William Shakespeare. Weasand’s another word for the windpipe, which is the trachea.” He paused. “Of course, it’s for Dr. Mitchell to decide if death was ultimately caused by loss of breath. Or by loss of blood. Or by the blast.”

Dr. Howard Mitchell was the medical examiner. Harris knew the balding, rumpled man, usually found in a well-worn suit, likely would be the one performing the autopsy. Or certainly overseeing it.

Iglesia squatted between the body bags. He pointed to the one on his right.

“But I can tell you that that one died from the blast,” he said, then reached over to the body bag on the left. He pulled down on its opening so that Harris, standing outside the window, could have a better view of the remains. “And this one had what I call a circumcision.”

The photographer chuckled.

Harris said, “What the hell are you talking about, a circumcision?”

Iglesia put two gloved fingers under the dead man’s chin and applied pressure. It caused the head to tip back and reveal the grotesque gap that was a slit across the neck.

“See?” Iglesia said with a grin. “A circumcision, ’cause he’s a damned dickhead.”

The photographer snorted her agreement.

The gash was so big that Harris could easily see that the carotid artery had been neatly severed, too.

That certainly meets the Latin meaning of “homicide”-homo for “human being,” caedere for “cut to kill.”

So then the fire was a cover for a murder?

But who did it?

So far as we know, only one person came out alive.

And he’s not looking like he’s going to make it to lunch.

Iglesia pulled back his fingers and the head bobbed back forward.

He then reached into one of the patch pockets of his lab coat.

“I’m betting,” he said, “that the cut pattern of the flesh will be consistent with the wavelike serrations on the blade of this. And of course that makes it murder.”

He held up a heavy clear plastic bag that contained what was left of a folding pocketknife. It was open, and its blade looked to be about three inches long, the sharpened edge serrated the whole length. The intensity of the heat had discolored the metal of the knife and turned the plastic handle into a melted blob of black goo, at least what remained of it.

Good luck getting a print off that, Harris thought.

“Me, personally?” the talkative Latino went on without prompting, “I’d like to see more of them die, is what I’d like. These drug dealers, they’re all scum-”

“Amen to that,” the photographer chimed in as she fired off another series of shots.

“And you know what they’re doing now, man?” Iglesia went on. “These damn dealers?”

Harris realized that Iglesia had paused, and then it occurred to him that the reason for the pause was that Iglesia was trying to engage him. He wanted Harris to answer.

Which I really don’t want to do, because it’ll only encourage Javier to go on.

And on and on…

After a moment, Harris reluctantly said, “What, Javier?”

With more than a little anger, Iglesia said: “They’re now getting teens, young ones, hooked on horse, is what they’re doing. Kids in my neighborhood doing Mexican black tar heroin, man. And not knowing it, ’cause it’s mixed with candy sugar.” His face showed genuine disgust as he shook his head. “I hope these bastards kill each other, every last one of them. And I can’t think of a better way for them to go down than getting blown up in their own damn meth lab.”