Free Diagnosis Murder 4 - The Waking Nightmare by Lee Goldberg

call in the SID techs to gather forensic evidence, and then wait for the arrival of the medical examiner to gather the body. In the meantime, he took Lissy's statement and sent out uniformed officers to question the neighbors.
    Steve had hoped to keep the favor he was doing for his father quiet. He figured that he'd take care of it on his way to work and nobody would have to know about it.
    Fat chance of that now.
    He left the apartment a few minutes after Amanda arrived and drove straight out to Hollywood, to the Paradise Hotel and the door that would fit the key he found in the dead man's pocket.
    During the drive, Steve tried to figure out the best way to explain to his captain how he happened to discover a corpse in an apartment in Culver City. No matter how Steve looked at it, he was in trouble.
    But now he was no longer doing a favor for his dad; he was investigating a murder, and this next stop was official business. He wanted to know who the dead guy was and what he had to do with the attack on Lissy and, perhaps, the suicide attempt by Rebecca Jordan.
    The Paradise Hotel was on a grimy side street off Hollywood Boulevard. If the hotel was somebody's idea of paradise, Steve couldn't imagine what their vision of hell was like.
    The building was a rotting tenement, strewn with trash and reeking of urine. And that was just the impression Steve got from the street. It got worse once he went inside. Hookers, drunks, and junkies were draped over soiled furniture like discarded garments. The desk clerk was asleep or unconscious, facedown on his scribble-covered desk blotter, four cigarette butts floating in the filthy cup of murky coffee that he still gripped in his hand.
    Steve walked past him, taking the stairs up to room 17. He pressed his ear to the door and heard someone moving around quietly behind it. He drew his gun and tested the doorknob with his other hand. The door was unlocked.
    He threw open the door and burst into the room, training his gun on the biggest rat he'd ever seen, scurrying across the floor and disappearing into a hole in the cracked, water- stained wall.
    Steve holstered his gun and took in the empty room. He saw the lopsided bureau and its uneven drawers. He saw the sagging bed and its thin, soiled mattress. He saw the curl of smoke coming from a cigarette dropped hastily on the floor. And just as he was realizing what it meant, she came at him, springing from her hiding place behind the door, a table knife in her fist. He sidestepped her, almost by reflex, grabbing her wrist, wrenching the knife free and using her momentum to slam her face-first against the wall.
    He glanced down at the knife on the floor. It wasn't sharp enough to cut a slice of bread. He kicked it under the bed anyway and another rat scurried out, disappearing into the same hole as the other one.
    "Paradise," he muttered to himself, then glanced at the woman, who was facing him now, feral anger in her eyes, her nose bleeding, thin rivulets of blood rolling over her lips and dripping onto her faded denim shirt.
    She looked a lot like the guy he'd just seen in a body bag, only she was still breathing. She had pale, sunken cheeks and oily, matted hair that hung on her shoulders in tangled clumps. Besides the shirt, which reeked of body odor, she wore only a pair of panties. Her bony legs were blotched and bruised, her thighs covered with scratches and needle marks.
    She was either a junkie or a reanimated corpse, not that there was much of a difference.
    Even though she'd attacked him with a dull knife, he felt guilty for hurting her. He did, after all, bust into her room unannounced with a gun in his hand. It was only natural that she'd tried to defend herself.
    He leaned towards her, offering her his hand. "I'm sorry I crashed in here like that, I'm—"
    She flung herself at him with a primal yelps fingers bared like claws, her mouth open wide as if revealing fangs in stead of her yellow, crooked teeth. He pinned her easily