“And what’s the kanji on this guy mean?”

“I’ll know here in just a minute,” he said. “I had the tech clean him up a bit and took a picture of it to send to-”

“Skeeter,” she interjected. Who else? Skeeter Bang Hart was a mutual friend, manga artist, and former kick-ass street punk turned good. The young woman had become part of a Defense Department black-ops team Loretta was very glad to have based in Denver and on her side. She’d saved most of the operators’ butts at one time or another as juveniles, and they made a habit of returning the favor when they could, sometimes quite handsomely. For reasons on both sides, their unspoken alliance remained just that-unspoken. They had each other’s numbers and weren’t afraid to use them. It was enough.

“Yeah.” The detective showed her the photograph on his phone, and Loretta was impressed. His phone took better pictures than her camera. Hell, she could hardly keep up with personal technology anymore.

“Well, let me know as soon as she…” Her voice trailed off, and she reached for Connor’s phone. Holding it one way into the light, and then the other, she swore under her breath. There was no doubt what she was looking at-dammit.

“What?” Connor asked.

She handed him back the phone.

“Swastika,” she said. “Those angled lines? That’s a swastika, radiating out of the kanji in the middle.”

Connor looked at his phone, then looked over at the German.

“Hell,” he said softly. “So what do you think? Aryan Nation?”

“Or just plain old Nazis,” she said. “Either way, I don’t like it. What’s Otto Von Lindberg been saying?”

Connor gave her a resigned glance. “Nothing except he wants us out of his room. He paid good money for the room and seems to have plenty left, and he wants to be left alone.”

Loretta gave a short nod. Von Lindberg had a fistful of hundred-dollar bills clutched in his right hand.

“Robbery would have been too easy,” she said.

Getting attacked and robbed was a nice, straightforward crime. Getting cut the hell up, while wearing a dog collar and a thong, and being tied to a bed, and not getting robbed-that was complex.

Most days, Loretta thrived on the complex, but she had a late date tonight, and a damned early morning tomorrow, and she wasn’t in the mood for ranting Germans.

“We’ve got a definite crime scene here, Lieutenant,” Connor said. “But Mr. Von Lindberg is saying he did this to himself.”

“Handcuffed and tied to a bed, he cut a swastika and a kanji into his back?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Connor said. “That’s his story.”

“It’s a little weak, wouldn’t you say, Detective?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve definitely heard better.”

So had she.

“Take him into protective custody. We’ll hold him as long as we can, see what we come up with. I want the window dusted. If the blonde paid for an escape route, I’m sure she used it.”

“And maybe the guy with the maid did, too,” Connor said. “Nobody saw him go back out the lobby, but there’s almost half a dozen ways out of the hotel. He could have used any of them.”

“Guy?” Loretta asked. “What guy with the maid?”

The detective had the wisdom to blanch slightly. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” He flipped over to the next page in his notebook. “I thought Weisman filled you in on the way up.”

“He did, but he didn’t tell me about any guy with the maid.”

“Young guy, in his twenties, five ten, maybe five eleven. Taller than the maid’s husband, she says, and her husband is five eight,” Connor said, consulting his notebook. “Hispanic, clean-cut, wearing jeans and a black-collared shirt, gray T-shirt, told the maid he was the police and asked her to open the door of this room for him. She did open the door for him. He walked in. She took one look, saw Von Lindberg tied to the bed, and ran the other way.”

“But this guy came in the room?”

“That’s what she says.”

“Did she see if he was carrying a knife?”

“No such luck,” Connor said. “But she did say he had a hard look about him, serious, very much in charge. She didn’t doubt for a second that he was a policeman.”

“In jeans and a black shirt.”

“She thought he was undercover.”

“Did he flash any identification?”

“No, ma’am. Not according to her.”

“And she goes around opening room doors for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes along?”

“If he says he’s a policeman, it seems so, yes, ma’am.”

Perfectly legitimate, Loretta thought. If she were an illegal immigrant shifting the sheets around in an upscale hotel, she wouldn’t be second-guessing anybody calling himself a policeman either, especially if he had a solid air of authority. It sucked, but that was the way of it.

“Take her in, get her an artist. Let’s find out what this clean-cut police impersonator looks like.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The detective’s phone beeped twice, signaling a text message, and they both looked at the screen while he opened the file. The sender was Skeeter, and only one word came up on the screen: HERO.

“Nazi hero,” Connor said, putting the two symbols together.

Well, that just about took the cake in Loretta’s book of crap she didn’t want to deal with on her beat, which was the whole damn city.

“I don’t like it,” the detective said, shaking his head, still looking at the screen on his phone.

“Neither do I, Connor,” Loretta agreed. “Neither do I.”

She was going to die. Her mind was going in circles, thoughts racing.

Her heart was pounding, pulse racing. Her legs were shaking, arms trembling, her stomach churning, lips quivering. She hated it all. She hated it so much-and yet she couldn’t stop any of it. She was going to die. She knew it with a dread certainty.

For no reason, she was going to become one of those horrifying statistics, an unsolved crime, a victim of senseless, random violence.

She only had one edge, and she was holding onto it with a death grip, using every ounce of her strength to keep her emotions frozen, to keep from crying.

The awful, terrifying man who had kidnapped her had taped her to a chair, her ankles taped to the legs, big, wide, gray duct tape, her wrists handcuffed to the arms. He’d stuffed something foul in her mouth and taped it in place, and it took every ounce of her strength not to gag. She hurt everywhere, especially where he’d hit her, backhanding her in the face, punching her in the stomach, where he’d pulled her hair out and wrenched her arm backward. She could see her blood on the front of her uniform shirt. He’d taken her name tag. She didn’t know why.

She didn’t know where he’d brought her, or why. It had all happened so fast. The huge, frightfully strong man had come out of nowhere, his attack so fast, so brutal, so unexpected, she’d never had time to react. One second, she’d been walking across the hospital parking lot, and in the next she’d been in the middle of a nightmare, caught in the maelstrom of violence, a random act of violence perpetrated by some pervert, some woman-hater.

She felt sick. She was so frightened, and she knew beyond any shred of a doubt that her situation was very, very unlikely to improve.