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A lot can happen in three days, and on the other side of the Atlantic, Stillwell Hobbs and Harper Nash, the father-anddaughter contract killers, had a new target, a woman called Louise Durose. Louise was a senior sanitation engineer for the city of San Diego but advised departments up and down the West Coast. Her specialty was landfill construction and management. She was currently in New Jersey, having delivered a series of well-attended lectures on the most modern and innovative ways of layering and venting landfills.

Hobbs and Nash planned a variation of the Hank Reynolds murder, the guy whose suicide-by-hanging they’d staged in Coos County, Oregon. This time they were aiming for an overdose. Prescription pills. Louise had lost a vicious custody battle over the dog she and her ex jointly owned. Dexter, a chocolate Labrador, had been the love of Louise’s life. She’d fed Dexter, she’d walked Dexter, and she’d taken care of Dexter’s veterinary bills. Her ex hadn’t given a rat’s ass about the dog, but as is the case in many breakups, the object of custody disputes was more about hurting your ex than protecting your own interests. And somehow, her ex, a dull-eyed wannabe actor from Delaware, had convinced the family court judge that shared custody of Dexter was only fair. Hobbs thought Louise’s friends would be shocked but not surprised by her suicide. People were weird about their pets.

But for the first time in a while, they’d made a mistake.

Harper had slipped into Louise’s hotel room while she was lecturing and readied it for her father. There was no fruit bowl, so no bananas to worry about this time. But there was a mass-production print on the hotel wall: Van Gogh’s Chair . That couldn’t stay. The painting was of a rustic chair with a simple woven rush seat. The floor was tiled, and Van Gogh had painted a pipe and tobacco pouch on the seat. He didn’t always sign his work, but in this painting an onion box in the background had the word ‘Vincent’ stencilled on the side. Like it was the firm’s name. Harper wasn’t sure what to do with it. She couldn’t turn it around. It would be suspicious – to Louise, but more importantly to the investigators as well. She could try replacing it with a more suitable print, but that would mean breaking into another room. She dismissed that option immediately. It was likely the hotel had bought Van Gogh’s Chair in bulk. It might be in every room. In the end, she decided to remove it completely. Hope neither Louise nor the investigating officers noticed it was missing.

She took it off the wall and removed the print from the cheap frame. She folded it up and put it into her bag. Next, she pushed out the glass and tapped it with the butt of her Ruger LCP II pocket pistol. The glass broke into six pieces, all small enough to fit into the bag. The frame came apart easily, and the backboard snapped in two without much effort.

Harper left the room as quietly as she’d entered. When she was out of the hotel grounds, she sent her father an encrypted message: ‘ROOM CLEAR.’ Hobbs had been in the conference centre lobby, ready to warn his daughter if Louise left early. He waited for her, and without exchanging so much as a look, they swapped places. Harper would wait at the conference centre and send Hobbs a message when Louise left. She would then trail her back to her hotel. Hobbs would be waiting for her in her room. And fifteen minutes later Louise Durose would be dead.

But as Hobbs would tell his daughter afterwards, the only thing they could control was how much they prepared. After that they were dealing with that most unpredictable of things: human nature. Everything they knew about Louise Durose indicated she was a quiet, studious woman. She would deliver her talk, eat a meal at a decent restaurant, then go back to her hotel. Nothing in the exhaustive checks they’d completed indicated that Louise would hook up with a colleague.

But that’s what she did.

Staging Louise’s suicide only worked if she was alone. Harper sent her father the abort code. He wouldn’t ask why; he trusted her judgement. They had a problem, though. The next name on the list was already lined up, and delays in New Jersey would have knock-on effects. Louise had to die tonight. Simple as that.

Harper trailed Louise and her new friend for a block and a half before she had an idea. She entered a pharmacy and made some purchases. If the woman behind the counter had questions, she kept them to herself. By the time Harper was back on the street, Louise was out of sight. That was OK. Harper knew where she was headed.

She also knew a shortcut.

Louise Durose was having second thoughts. She never hooked up with random guys, and she didn’t think it was a good idea to start now. She was in her forties. It wasn’t dignified. And she still had to prepare the next day’s workshop. Landfill management was becoming increasingly complex, and unless some of her ideas were taken on board, garbage was going to become a big problem. When a hole is full, it’s full.

She was figuring out how to say goodnight when a young girl staggered out of an alley. She was a skinny thing. Covered in tattoos with a weird birthmark on her face. Her eyes were wet, and her vest was ripped. For some reason she was wearing disposable nitrile gloves.

‘You OK, honey?’ Louise asked.

The girl didn’t answer. She pointed into the alley, then burst into tears.

Louise never knew if the guy she’d hooked up with acted out of genuine concern, or through a misguided attempt at increasing his chances later, when he marched into the alley. But that’s what he did. Louise followed him and the skinny girl followed her. The guy got to the end. There was no one there. He looked at Louise and shrugged.

‘Boy, did you get horny at the wrong time,’ the skinny girl said to the man.

She then brought out a brick from behind her back and smashed it into Louise’s mouth. Louise collapsed like her strings had been cut. Her teeth scattered like cheap pearls. She gurgled. The guy stared in horror, his brain failing to comprehend what had just happened. By the time he realised the danger he was in, it was too late. The skinny girl was on him. She swung the brick and caved in his skull. She hit him again. And again. She hit him until his skull was softer than warm ice cream.

She jogged over to Louise and checked her pulse. It was weak and fast. She raised the brick again and brought it down onto her temple. She did it a couple more times to be safe.

After throwing the brick behind a dumpster, somewhere she knew it would be found, she removed the nitrile gloves and put them in her pocket. She slipped on another pair, then took a roll of condoms and a packet of over-the-counter erectile dysfunction pills from a different pocket. She put them both in Louise’s purse, then left the alley without a backwards glance.

Ten minutes later, after Harper had told her father what she’d done, he said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder.’