the Prostitutes' Ball (2010) by Stephen - Scully 10 Cannell Read Free Book Online Page B

right, you're right.
    "An apology would be nice," he prompted.
    "I'm not gonna apologize to you just because you did your job, Hitchens."
    "Why not?"
    "Because I don't want to."
    "Courtesies of a small and trivial character strike deepest in the grateful heart," he said.
    "Who said that? Sure doesn't sound much like Einstein."
    "Henry Clay. You should start reading more than department wanted fliers." He snap-shifted the Porsche and we sped on.
    Sumner pulled in at a pancake house restaurant located in a strip mall off Mission Road near the medical examiner's building. It was after one A . M . I'd called on my cell and knew Alexa would be waiting.
    Hitch chirped the car lock and we walked past a space where my Acura was parked.
    Inside, as we approached a back booth where Alexa was sitting, I could see a worried look on her face. Before we even sat down I knew she had more bad news for us.

    Chapter 10.
    "Both of the dead girls were high-dollar Internet prostitutes," Alexa said as soon as we slid into the booth with her. "The blonde was named Chrissy Sweet. Her working name was Slade Seven. The brunette was Paula Morgan, working name Steel Cavanaugh. These were five - thousand-dollar dates. They worked for Yolanda Dublin, the Mulholland Madame. This hooker angle is gonna be media catnip so the case just got more sensitive, if that's even possible."
    "Doesn't Yolanda Dublin run an Internet site called the Double Click Club?" Hitch asked.
    "Right," Alexa said. "And from their pictures on that site, the girls were both gorgeous."
    The waitress came and Hitch and I ordered coffee, along with ha m a nd eggs and orange juice because we were probably going to be up all night, working through breakfast.
    After the waitress left, Alexa continued. "The way her Internet site works, a client gets thoroughly screened by Yolanda first. Then, if you pass muster, you're issued a password which allows you access to the exclusive services section of the site. There, you can scroll the girls' pictures and streaming videos. The rates are listed on each girl's page as a modeling or therapist's fee. If you're a preferred client, once you double-click on a girl, the date is made."
    Hitch was writing this down in his journal.
    "Detective," Alexa said, and Hitchens looked up. "Hopefully this won't be talked about to third parties operating outside the scope of the investigation."
    "What exactly does that mean, Captain?"
    "UTA," I said. "Jamie Foxx. Studio development execs."
    He smiled at her and nodded. "Me and Shane already been through this," he said, collegially.
    "Good." Alexa smiled.
    "Anything from Ballistics?" I asked.
    "There were nine bullets, three in each body. All of them were 9 x 18 mm Makarov slugs. The most common machine gun weapon that fires those is a Russian-made Bizon. Ballistics says a Bizon uses a standard sixty-four-shot helical mag and can burn through six hundred rounds a minute. According to the people who heard the gunshots, and from the number of brass shell casings we retrieved so far, I think he must have gone through most of that magazine."
    "Is Ballistics trying to confirm the weapon?" I asked.
    "We're going to test fire a Bizon to see if the ejection striations on the brass are similar," Alexa said. "Tomorrow you guys are going to have to get back out there on the crime scene with CS1 and some metal detectors and find all the stray slugs and brass. We need to know exactly how many rounds he squeezed off."
    Hitch looked up with a thoughtful expression on his handsome face. "We can't ignore the idea that this could have been a contract hit and if it was, then we probably have only one primary target. That would probably be Scott Berman, which would make the two other vies collateral damage."
    He looked down at the notes he had made in his red leather journal, then clicked his pen and tapped it on the tabletop. "There could be a lot more going on here than we can see on the surface."
    That last remark sounded to me like