by J. D. Robb
“Dropped, wasn’t it? If you glance through, you’ll see her husband—they were estranged—came at her outside her house. He got two punches in before she wailed on him. They were both charged. His stuck, hers didn’t, particularly after her history showed multiple nine-one-one calls prior to her moving out and filing for divorce.”
“Yeah, I see it. Got popped for the ID forgery three years later.”
“And served her time. A year afterward she opened Home Safe.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He just smiled. “You’ve learned to live with a former criminal, haven’t you, darling Eve?”
She smiled back. “It’s a process.” She picked up her ’link.
“You’re contacting her now?”
“That’s right, and don’t give me the time and Earth-rotation crap. I don’t care what time it is there.”
Rising, he picked up the empty pie plates. “Put it on the wall screen, would you? I’d like to observe.”
Since he’d found the woman, Eve couldn’t think of any objection. She switched the communication mode, swiveled to face the wall screen.
“Allysa Gray,” the woman announced as she came on-screen.
Her hair, bold, bright red with a lot of gold streaks, fell in fluffy disorder around her narrow, foxy face. Eyes heavy-lidded and deep brown looked straight into Eve’s.
Eve noted she sat at a desk, and now picked up a mug, put her slippered feet on the desk, and smiled.
“Well, look at this. I know that face. What can I do for you, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve?”
“Do we know each other, Ms. Gray?”
“Never met, but I’ve seen your face, read about your work. Liked that book and vid, too. What would New York’s top murder cop want with me?”
“Do you know an Alva Quirk?”
Now there, Eve thought, was a poker face.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m the primary investigator on her murder.”
That poker face vanished into shock. Anger and sorrow came on its heels. “Alva? She went to New York? She’s dead? He killed her? How did that bastard find her after all these years?”
“Which bastard would that be?”
“If you found me, you know damn well I’m talking about that wife-beating son of a fuck Garrett Wicker.”
“I don’t believe that particular son of a fuck found her, or killed her.”
“What happened to her? Goddamn it. Give me a second, would you? Tea, my ass.” She shoved up, crossed the room—home office to Eve’s eye—opened a cupboard. A lithe calico cat leaped down from the top of it, sauntered away while Allysa poured what looked to be a glass of bourbon, neat.
She sat, lifted the glass. “To sweet Alva.” She knocked back a swallow. “What happened?”
“She suffered a severe and fatal head blow in the early hours of this morning, and was found in a dumpster on a working construction site at start of shift.”
“Aw, Jesus. How long had she been in New York?”
“I can’t say for certain. She was living on the streets.”
“On the streets.” Allysa bolted up straight. “Why? Oh, bullshit, why ask why? Fear’s why. Are you sure he didn’t find her?”
“I believe the motive for her murder wasn’t personal in that way. I will be speaking with Wicker before I’m done.”
“He tormented and beat and told her she was nothing, for years.”
“How did she get away? She told you.”
“He broke her fingers on one hand, burnt her other hand on the stove because she didn’t have dinner on the table fast enough. Then he blackened her eye for good measure. So bad she was afraid she’d never see out of it again.
“Then he raped her, and told her, like always, he hated the way she made him punish her. She told me she couldn’t think straight the next morning. That it felt like she was dreaming.”
Yes, Eve thought, she understood that. She’d lived that.
“After he went to work, she stuffed her purse with whatever money was in the house. She got in the car—she had one for running errands, and he kept track of her mileage. She drove and drove and drove. She didn’t remember how far, until she ran out of gas. Then she left the car and started walking. She didn’t remember much of that, either.
“Anyway, a woman in a pickup came by, stopped, saw the state she was in. Alva got hysterical when the woman wanted to take her to the doctor or the sheriff, so didn’t. She took her home—a ranch—and she fixed her up as best she could. She was afraid to stay, so the woman gave her a hat, sunshades to hide the eye, packed food for her, and drove her for an hour or so to a bus station. She remembers changing buses in Missouri. She had family, but—”
“I know about that. I’ve spoken to her brother.”
“Then you know what he did, how he had her brother beaten, her sister raped, and used that to keep her in line. She wasn’t thinking when she left, or she wouldn’t have. She didn’t go to them when she started thinking again because he’d find her and hurt them. In any case, a couple days later, she ended up in Dayton. She didn’t have much money left. As fate would have it, she was sitting on a bench, not sure what to do, and I walked by. She was only a few blocks from the shelter. I knew what I was looking at. I’d seen it too many times.”
She paused to drink again. “So I sat down beside her, and I told her I could help her, that I had a place she’d be safe. She was exhausted, every part of her. She went along with me like a little puppy. She was badly damaged, Dallas. Not just physically.”
“I know it.”
“So damaged, but she had this sweetness. When she healed up—her hands—she pitched in. Nobody had to tell her to help with the washing or the cooking, or give a tired mother a break and rock a baby. One of our ladies did origami, and she took right to it. Loved sitting there making little animals and flowers.”
“She kept up with that.”
“Did she? I’m glad. It gave her some joy. Are you going to ding me about the ID?”
“No. I’m not recording this, and it won’t go in the file, not that part of it. You can record what I say next as insurance.”
Allysa pursed her lips, leaned forward to manually go to record. “Okay.”
“You won’t be charged or prosecuted for any fraudulent identification you’ve generated, assisted in generating, have knowledge of, possess equipment for. None of that information will go beyond this room. If I break my word on that, you have the means to bring me up on charges.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because she deserves justice. Because the ones who hurt her, last night, years ago? Those sons of fucks need to pay. I’m going to see they do.”
For a long moment, Allysa said nothing. Then she gave one short nod. “I believe you, and I’m deleting the recording. Trust for trust. She was here six, seven months, and she knew enough about the shelter to know we always needed the room for the next. When she was ready, I made her the ID, worked with her on the background. I had some contacts and I got her a job in housekeeping at a resort in West Virginia. Pretty place, nice country, good, honest work. She’d check in pretty regular. She was happy. She was never going to be all the way right again, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“He’d broken something in her, and it just couldn’t mend all the way through. But she was happy, productive, safe. And one day she called, full panic. She was on the run. They had a big law-and-order-type convention at the resort. She saw him. I calmed her down as best I could, but she’d already bolted, sure he’d found her, he’d come for her, and begged me to wipe her ID again. I told her she could come back here, or I’d make arrangements at another shelter for her, but she just said she had to run. And that was that. I never heard from her again.”
“Do you have any documentation of her injuries when she came to your shelter?”
Allysa’s lips spread in a thin smile. “You really will go after the fucker. Yeah, we’d have photos and a medical report.
We had—and have—a doctor who comes to the shelter when and if a guest is too afraid for a hospital or health center.”
“I’d appreciate a copy.”
“I’ll dig it out when I’m at work. I’ll go in early. If you need it sooner, I’ll go in tonight.”
“The morning’s fine. Do you remember if Alva kept a notebook?”
“Alva and her famous notebooks. Yeah, she did. She told me how she started keeping one when she was a kid. Law-and-order thing, mostly a record of sibling infractions, or classmates. Around here, she modified it. She called them her Support Reports. When somebody needed a hug or somebody else to listen. When somebody went out of their way to help with a kid or some of the domestic work, that kind of thing.
“Damn it.” Allysa paused, pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Another second.”
“Take your time.”
She dropped her hands, took another drink. “She hid them away during her marriage because she kept a record of what he said she did wrong—a lot of guilt there, a lot of self-blame we tried to work through. And she kept a record of the hits, the breaks, the rapes.”
Eve felt the lift in her chest. “She wrote down what he did? When he did it?”
“Lifelong habit. She documented all of it. Do you want me to send you the notebooks?”
Eve’s spine snapped straight as a ruler. “You have them?”
“She left them behind. She said she was leaving all of that behind and starting a new life. New name, new Alva. I kept them because you just never know. I can ship them to you in the morning.”
“No.” She didn’t want to trust them to a shipping company. “I’m going to ask you for a solid, Allysa.”
“It’s for Alva. Ask away.”
“I can have a couple cops from my department on a shuttle and to your shelter within a couple hours.”
“I’ve got the books here. I kept them here, in my home office. I’ll have them ready, and the medical report and photos when your people get here. I’d like a solid back.”
“What do you need?”
“Keep me in the loop—I want to know when you nail that Wicker fucker. And when you cage up whoever killed her. One more? If her family’s going to have a service or memorial, I’d like to know. I’d like to go.”
“I’ll do all of that.”
“It’s hard to lose one, I guess you know. She had a sweet heart. A lot of hard breaks through her life, but she kept that sweet heart.”
“Her brother, possibly her sister as well, are coming to New York for her. I’d like to give them your name and contact.”
“Yes, please. I’ll wait for your people.”
“Thanks for all of this.”
“Back at you, Dallas.” Now Allysa lifted the glass in a toast. “Hunt them down.”
“That’s the plan.”
“A shuttle’s being prepped,” Roarke told her when she ended the call. “Who are you sending?”
“They can take a public…” Quicker, easier, she admitted as Roarke just waited. “Uniform Carmichael. He’ll probably take Shelby. Thanks.”
She turned back to contact Carmichael, give him the assignment and information he needed.
“Seal and label it, on the record. Take it straight into Evidence when you get back. I’ll pull it out in the morning.”
Because she hadn’t switched modes back, Officer Carmichael nodded on her wall screen. “Yes, sir. I’ll notify Shelby, pick her up on the way to the shuttle.”
Rather than his uniform, he wore a red T-shirt, buff-colored khakis. “You can go in soft clothes. Is that the game?” she asked, because she heard the distinctive thwack of bat to ball, followed by cheers.
“Long foul,” he said. “We’re bottom of the eleventh, Lieutenant, tied up at six each. It hasn’t been what you’d call a pitcher’s duel.”
“I’ll say. Text when you have the evidence in hand, Officer, and when it’s been checked into Evidence.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dallas out.”
She swiveled back to Roarke, who sat on the sleep chair with the cat sprawled over his lap. Eve ran both hands over her hair. “She wrote it all down, and the woman who gave her a fresh start, a new life—at least for a while—kept the books.”
Roarke kept stroking the cat, who purred like a jet shuttle. “I heard.”
“I’m going to crush Garrett Wicker.”
“I know.”
“I need to write this up. In the morning, I have to check with Harvo on the fabric trace, check in with Morris. I want that consult with Mira. And I guess I’m going to tap you for a goddamn jet-copter to make it easier for me to push on Yuri Bardov.”
Coming together, she thought. She could feel it coming together.
“And since they’re in the same area with their big-ass country estates, I’ll talk to Elinor Bolton Singer. I’ll round up J. B. Singer. That’ll be like a flock of birds with the one rock, and it’ll overlap both cases. It should give me some sense, some information to pull from once I close Alva’s case and move to Jane Doe’s remains.”
“I have more for you on the plans and specs and blueprints on the original building where we found those remains.”
“I’ll want them as soon as I close this one. I’m sorry, but—”
He shook his head. “Your investigation needs to be logical and focused. You know her.” Roarke gestured toward the board. “And though she didn’t die first, she comes first.”
“That’s it, but there’s going to be that overlap. There’s already a connection point with the Singers. Why don’t you give me an overview or a couple of highlights if anything applies? I can keep it working in the back of my mind. You’re not the only one who can multitask.”
“Well then, I can tell you something I found very interesting when the analyses confirmed it just a bit ago.”
“Which is?”
“After you left this morning, and we went about shutting down the project, both Mackie— You’ll remember him.”
“Sure.”
“Both he and I noticed a few things. One, already mentioned, is the proposed wine cellar’s dimensions were off—which I’ve confirmed from the original plans. The inner wall, though designed to appear as an exterior, was, in fact, three feet in from the actual exterior wall.”
“Yeah, I caught that. To hide the body.”
“A logical conclusion, yes. But what we noticed was quality and material. And so, to satisfy our curiosity, we took a few samples.”
“What do you mean you took samples? It’s a crime scene.”
His tone marked a cool contrast with her instant outrage.
“And you’ve, no doubt, taken your own and you’ll do your own lab tests, but it remains my property and I bloody well wanted to know. So I went down—”
“You went down there?”
“Appropriately sealed, though, Lieutenant, you and I both know there had already been considerable activity in that area since the murder. The remains had been removed by then, and the evidence collected. I took a few moments to take samples from the floor, what had been the ceiling, the exterior wall, and that inner wall.”
“You weren’t cleared for that. Damn it, Roarke.”
He met her angry glare with a careless shrug.
“Neither had any official document been served, at that point, to prevent me. Would you like to argue about it, or would you like to know what we found?”
“Both.”
“Multitasking.” After giving Galahad a last rub, Roarke hefted him up, set him aside, then rose. He walked over to sit on the leg of her command center. “To, perhaps, hold off the argument, let me say you had, rightfully, left the scene to go back to Alva Quirk. We had, cooperatively, begun the process of shutting down the work, relocating the workers in anticipation of the official paperwork.”
“If you’d seen something, you should have reported it to the primary investigator.”
“And so I am, though we’ve both been very busy for, what is it, s
ixteen, seventeen hours now? And the results verified what I saw while you were speaking with the brother of your victim.”
“Fuck it. What the hell did you see?”
“As you’re aware, we razed what was left of that building, and continued demolition on the concrete, into that cellar because it was unsafe. Substandard materials. That’s not unusual, as again you’re aware, for post-Urban construction, not for the three years or so before regulations locked back into place. But that inner wall, you see—or I could, Mackie could—it hadn’t crumbled as easily or in the same way. It had a different texture to the brick. And while the ceiling above the wine cellar was low-grade preformed concrete, the section, that three-foot section between the brick interior and concrete exterior wall? Top grade, poured and formed on-site to my eye, and Mackie’s.”
“Done to hide her body.”
“These weren’t discrepancies we found important prior to finding the bodies. Just idiosyncrasies of the era, the builder, or so we thought. So I took the samples, and as we suspected, everything else used, substandard. But not that single wall, not the span above it. That was built with good, solid brick—very costly at that time—and top-grade mortar, and poured concrete.”
“How come she wasn’t buried in the concrete?”
“It was formed up, you see, to the exterior wall. And then that section—and only that section—poured, leveled, left to set. The work we could see—as, if you remember from your trip down, that wall wasn’t fully down—that was on the sloppy side, with uneven joints, too much mortar or not enough. Not the work, I’d say, of a professional bricklayer or stonemason, but superior material. That single wall.”
“Needed it to hold up, willing to spend more—or steal better material —to make sure it would.”
“Precisely. You’ll have the report, or you can do your own.”
“The sweepers would have taken samples. We’re not idiots.”
“I would never think, much less say, you were. But I could, and did, expedite mine. You have necessary priorities, as does your lab. I wanted to know. The child, Eve. The woman was bad enough, but those tiny bones…”
“I want to be pissed. I am pissed, but not as much as I should be, or want to be. Because … I went down there, I looked at them up close. Tiny bones,” she repeated and had to get up, had to pace.