“While CPD was conducting their sweep of the room, they stumbled onto something hidden behind the television across from the bed. A video camera.”

“Do you have the murder on tape?” Cameron asked. If only all crimes came to prosecutors so neatly wrapped up.

Jack shook his head. “No. What’s on the tape is the stuff that took place before the murder.”

“Before the murder?” Cameron thought about the raucous sex noises she’d heard through the wall. “That must be quite a tape.”

“It is,” Jack agreed. “Especially since the man on the tape is a married U.S. senator.”

Cameron’s eyes widened. She had not expected that. She asked the obvious next question. “Which senator?”

Agent Wilkins pulled a photograph out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to Cameron.

She glanced at the photograph, then back at Jack. “This is Senator Hodges.”

“So you recognize him?”

“Of course I recognize him,” Cameron said. Bill Hodges had represented the state of Illinois in the U.S. Senate for over twenty-five years. And lately she’d seen his face in the news more than usual—he had just been appointed the chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Cameron thought back to the redheaded woman she had seen on the paramedics’ gurney. “That wasn’t the senator’s wife in room 1308, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jack said.

“Who was she?”

“Let’s just say that Senator Hodges was paying to have a lot more than his hardwood floors done last night.”

Nice. “A prostitute?”

“I think women at her level generally prefer to call themselves ‘escorts.’ ”

“How do you know this already?”

“We have the escort service’s records. The senator had been seeing her regularly for almost a year now.”

Cameron got up and paced before the bed, working the scenario like a new case she’d been handed. “So what’s with the camera? Don’t tell me the senator was stupid enough to think he could keep a sex tape secret.” She stopped, thinking quickly. “No . . . of course. Blackmail. That’s why CPD called you guys.”

“Having reviewed the tape, it’s obvious that Senator Hodges had no clue he was being filmed,” Wilkins said.

“You’re the one who got stuck reviewing the tape? Lucky you,” Cameron said.

“Not exactly. But Jack was busy playing bad-cop with Senator Hodges.”

“And here I thought that was special for me.”

Wilkins grinned. “Nah—he likes to break that out with everybody. It usually works, too, with that whole dark and glowering thing he’s got going on.”

Cameron peeked at Jack, who was back at his post in the corner of the room. “Glowering”—she liked that description. It was certainly more insightful than the generic “asshole” she’d been going with for the past three years.

She wondered if Jack Pallas ever smiled.

Then she remembered that she frankly didn’t give a damn whether he did or not.

“Given the content of the tape, Senator Hodges would normally be CPD’s primary suspect,” Jack said to her. “In fact, the police probably would’ve arrested him already, if it wasn’t for you.”

“Is that so?”

Jack pushed away from the wall and stormed over. He yanked the photo out of Cameron’s hands and held it in front of her face.

“Let’s cut through the crap. The guy you saw leave the room five minutes before hotel security found the girl dead—is there any possibility it’s this man?”

Cameron hesitated, momentarily caught off guard by the suddenness with which Jack had gone into attack mode.

He shoved the photo even closer. “Come on, Cameron—is there any possibility it was this man?”

Cameron felt an odd flip in her stomach, hearing Jack say her first name. They’d once, very briefly, been on a first-name basis before. She brushed this off and focused on the photo he held before her. Really, she didn’t even need to look. Senator Hodges was not only a shorter man, but if she had to guess—and apparently she did—she’d say he weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. She might not have gotten the best look through her peephole, but she knew enough to know one thing.

“It’s not him,” she said.

“You’re sure?” Jack asked.

“I’m sure.”

Jack stepped away from her. “Then Senator Hodges owes you one hell of a thank you. Because your word is the only thing keeping him from being arrested for murder.”

A silence fell over the room. “Doesn’t he have some sort of alibi?” Cameron asked.

Jack remained silent. That clearly fell into the I’m-not-answering-no-stinking-questions category.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Cameron said. “How about if instead of questions, I just see if I can fill in the blanks? So this escort who’s been sleeping with Senator Hodges, the married senior senator from Illinois—”

“Who just happened to be appointed the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee,” Wilkins threw in. When he caught the look of death Jack shot him, he shrugged. “What? I don’t have your issues with her. Besides, I heard what Davis said—we’re supposed to share, remember?”

Much glowering ensued.

“So this escort decides to get the senator on tape and use it as blackmail,” Cameron continued. “He meets her tonight, they do the deed—many times—I’m still going with the Viagra theory on that, by the way—and the senator leaves. Twenty minutes later, our mystery man shows up. There’s a struggle, and he kills the woman. And since there’s no sign of forced entry, we can assume the girl knew the murderer and let him into the room. How am I doing so far?”

Wilkins nodded, impressed. “Not bad.”

“What I think,” Jack told her, “is that you’ve had a long night, and we don’t want to take up any more of your time. The FBI appreciates your cooperation, Ms. Lynde. We’ll be in touch if there’s anything further we need.”

Cameron watched as he turned and headed toward the door, apparently with the mistaken impression that there was nothing left for them to discuss.

“Actually, I do have another question, Agent Pallas,” she said.

He looked back at her. “What might that be?”

“Can I finally get out of this hotel room?”

Four

WHEN AGENT WILKINS suggested that he and Jack drive her home from the hotel, Cameron reluctantly accepted. As much as she was eager to put some distance between herself and Jack, she didn’t want him to think that his attitude was getting to her.

Sitting in the back of Wilkins’s car—at least she assumed it was Wilkins’s car since he was the one driving and she couldn’t picture Jack owning a Lexus—she rested her head against the cool leather seat and looked out the window. She’d been stuck in that hotel room for so long that the brightness of the daylight had been jarring and surreal when she’d first stepped outside. It was nearly noon, which meant she now was going on almost thirty hours without sleep. She doubted even Starbucks had a fix for that.

Fighting the lulling motion of the car, she turned away from the window. With her head against the backseat, she observed the man sitting in front of her through half-lidded eyes.

Jack Pallas.

She might have laughed at the irony of the situation, if she wasn’t so damned tired. And also, as a general rule, she found it prudent to refrain from strangely laughing to oneself while sitting in a car with two FBI agents—one of whom already distrusted her with an intensity that was palpable.

Not that Cameron was surprised Jack still felt that way. She recalled all too well the look on his face when she’d told him they weren’t going to file charges in the Martino case.

It had been three years ago, late on a Friday afternoon. Earlier in the day, she had been called into a meeting with her boss, Silas Briggs, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. He’d told her that he wanted to talk about the Martino case, and she assumed they were going to discuss the charges she planned to pursue against the various members of Martino’s organization. What Silas told her instead came as a shock.