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just…”

Silence.

“Then the guy in the Rolls told me to get out. He didn’t call me dirty names like some of them do when they’re done. He was very calm. But I’ll never forget those words. ‘I have no more use for you, hole.’

“He said ‘hole,’ not ‘whore.’ I could hear it. He made sure I heard it. I still hear it. He said, ‘When you close the door behind you, it is as if I have flushed the toilet.’ And then he said: ‘You see?’ He was talking to the baby. ”

By then, her hands were shaking too violently to pull a cigarette out of her pack. A hand reached into the frame, holding one out to her, already lit. A web-fingered hand.

The hooker took a long, deep drag. Closed her eyes. Said: “Please don’t make me talk about this anymore. You promised me, if I told you everything, you’d take care of—”

“That’s already been done,” Pryce’s undisguised voice said.
    * * *
    “T hat’s it?” I asked him. Knowing it wasn’t.

“Three more. Cross-confirmed.”

“And you think this one is mine because…?”

“You’re the pattern-master,” he said. “The feds have a billion bucks’ worth of computers, but they’re working with ten cents’ worth of data. They’ve got a lot of different names for what they do, but it all comes down to the same thing: Guessing for Dollars. That’s fine for proposal writing, but, in your world, it’s what suckers do with bookies. People come to you for only one reason: because you know. ”

I stopped fencing, asked: “You have a chronology?”

“The one you saw was the third of the four. But we assume many others had preceded her.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Way too stylized. You think he was going to keep escalating?”

Pryce shrugged; guessing wasn’t his game, either.

“But there’s at least one you know about that you don’t have on tape.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she’s not talking,” I said, not guessing. “Was she paid off or…?”

“The other.”

“Got a body?”

He shook his head “no.”

“But enough of a spoor so that you know it was him, right?”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“And any evidence that did exist, your guy has the scratch to have it erased.”

“Given the known data, such a scenario meets the criteria for both validity and reliability,” he acknowledged. “But on paper, it didn’t happen.”

“This prince of yours, he knows about your ‘data’?” I asked.

Pryce gave me a blank look. He wasn’t confused; he was drawing a line.

Being me, I stepped over it. “A working girl’s gone. One you don’t have on tape, but you’re sure your guy had…contact with her, right? That means some pimp never got his merchandise back.”

“How do you know she wasn’t just some—?”

“How about we stop, okay? No way we’re talking about some underage runaway scooped off the street. You already said your guy was riding an escalator, and you don’t find girls who turn edge-tricks down on the sidewalk. You want one of those, that’s the penthouse—reservations-only territory.”

“You’re the expert; you tell me.”

“Okay. Those girls never work blind. They don’t go out every night, or even every week. Takes time for the marks to heal. Surgical repairs take even longer. So every rental brings mammoth money, but there’s a long turnaround time between them. A manager loses a girl like that, costs him a lot of cash, at both ends.”

He looked a question at me.

“Front-end investment. You have to set up contact points for clients to find you. Web sites are for dominas, not subs…at least not the kind that can command major bucks for a single session. You need all kinds of screening mechanisms to protect your merchandise. Serious security. You need a way to wash the cash. Accountants. Lawyers. Offshore men. All that money is spent to make money. An investment, understand?”

“So, if a trick does go too far, it’s the perfect blackmail scenario—is that what you’re saying? Because his identity would already have been verified, and—”

“Not this