The Last Empress of Mars

track down those responsible, because having lost his own father to an assassin’s bullet when he was only 2 years old, made him carry a cross all his life. He had never been able to identify that killer or track him down, so the next best thing was to hunt for similar types and in a way, this almost gave him a sense of closure. Albeit a temporary one, until he came across the next victim who left an orphaned child behind. Both victims had been surgically slashed by what appeared to be a large knife or a medium sized machete. Hilda showed deep cuts on her arms as well. The type of defensive wounds typically exhibited by people attacked with a machete, a knife or a blade of some kind. Daniel, on the other hand, apparently never saw it coming, because he only had that one major cut across his throat. Maybe he was caught by surprise, or possibly, was too inebriated to react. One thing was clear, whoever killed him expected to find what they were looking for in the room, since it didn’t appear that they had bothered to keep the victims alive long enough to question them. From the looks of things, they simply came in, finished them off and then proceeded to turn the room upside down and left. The question remained, did they find what they were looking for and, even more important, did they leave any kind of evidence that could be used to track them down. He would have to examine the hotel security tapes, unfortunately, those were only used on the ground floor and not on the upper floors where the rooms were located, so that meant a lot more possible suspects would have to be investigated. Well, maybe he would get lucky and see someone suspicious talking to Mr. Daniel Walker on the tapes. Nothing in the bathroom seemed out of the ordinary. There was some aspirin, suntan lotion and the usual assorted toiletry items one would bring on a trip. Strangely enough there did not appear to be any used condoms, condom or Viagra packaging around. The room did not offer up anything unusual either, some empty bottles of Imperial beer and a nearly empty quart sized bottle of Johnny Walker Black, the remains of some roasted chicken, a few French fries plus all the assorted clothes and shoes strewn about on the carpeted floor. Checking the entry stamp on the passport, Daniel had entered the country Friday morning, three days ago almost to the hour. This was probably not how he saw himself, three days later, when he arrived at the Juan Santamaría International Airport that