Free Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) by Blake Pierce

she
thought.
    She had heard that
sometimes women pursuing an education chose prostitution as a way of paying
tuition. With the money she was making, she might not have to go too deeply in
debt. Still, it struck Riley as strangely unsettling.
    “I’ll try to keep
this short,” Riley said. “I just want to know more about Nanette.”
    Koreen’s expression
suddenly turned pensive. “Poor Nanette,” she said.
    But Mitzi seemed
unperturbed. “What happened to Nanette’s got nothing to do with us,” she said.
    “I’m afraid it does,”
Riley said. “We have good reason to believe that her murderer is a serial
killer. And I can tell you from years of experience, serial killers are
relentless. He’ll kill again. And one of you might be his next victim.”
    Mitzi frowned
disdainfully.
    “Not a chance,” she
said. “We’re not like Nanette.”
    Now Riley was
shocked. Could these women possibly be naive enough to think that what they did
for a living was safe?
    “But you work for
the same business, doing the same kind of work,” Riley said.
    Mitzi was starting
to get defensive.
    “Hey, I thought you
weren’t here to judge,” she said. “You can look down your nose at us if you
like. But what we do is as respectable as this kind of thing can be. And as
safe. We can turn down any clients we don’t like. We keep the sex safe, and we
get regular check-ups, so we don’t have diseases. If a guy gets too kinky or
violent, we can walk away. But it usually doesn’t come to that.”
    Riley wondered about
that word “usually.” Surely their business sometimes took them into pretty dark
territory. And how “safe” could hired sex possibly be? How long could they
continue without falling prey to AIDS?
     “As far as Nanette
goes,” Mitzi continued, “she was on her way down. She’d lost all her class. She
was meeting clients outside of the service, shooting smack, losing her health
and her looks. She wouldn’t have lasted at Ishtar’s a lot longer. She’d have
been fired for sure.”
    As Riley took notes,
she eyed the women, trying to understand them better. Little by little, she
sensed something behind their placid expressions. She was pretty sure it was
denial. They refused to accept that theirs was a losing way of life, and that they’d
all fall into the same decline as Nanette sooner or later. Their dreams of
family, education, and success were ultimately doomed. And deep down, they knew
it.
    Riley noticed that
Tantra had gotten quiet and was looking off into space. She had something to
say, but hadn’t yet said it.
    Riley said, “We
believe that Nanette was killed about a week ago, probably on Saturday. Do you
know who her client was that night?”
    Koreen shrugged. “I’ve
got no idea.”
    “Me, neither,” Mitzi
said. “Actually, that’s none of our business, you’d have to ask Ishtar about
that.”
    Riley knew that the
local agents were already looking for the escort service owner and would bring
her in for questioning.
    “What about other
places of work?” Riley asked.
    “We’re contracted to
Ishtar,” Mitzi said firmly. “We’re not allowed to follow our line of work
through any other agency or on our own.”
    The other two women
were looking downward, avoiding Riley’s eyes. She asked the question more
directly.
    “Did Nanette ever do
extra work anywhere else? Did she ever go out on her own without having a date
made through Ishtar?”
    The room was silent.
Finally, in a barely audible voice, Tantra said, “She told me she’d just
started working at Hank’s Derby.”
    “What?” Mitzi said,
sounding surprised.
    “She didn’t want me
to tell anybody,” Tantra told the other women.
    “Jesus,” Mitzi said.
“So she was turning into a lot lizard. She was in worse shape than I’d thought.”
    Riley’s mind was
buzzing with questions.
    “What’s a ‘lot
lizard’?” she asked.
    “It’s the lowest
class kind of whore,” Koreen said. “They work truck stops, like Hank’s