Born in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “Could, yeah. Thing is, nobody who knows her sees that.”

  “But you don’t,” Smith pointed out, “know her. Really.”

  “No. But I met her myself, twice, and I got a good gauge of her. I wouldn’t peg her to rabbit, or even to take a few days off somewhere. Not without telling anyone, missing an event she was juiced about, leaving all her things behind.”

  “You said you checked her ’links. No communication in or out that indicated any plans.” Smith pursed her lips. “An appointment she didn’t keep, a party where she didn’t show—with the gift wrapped and waiting. Okay, looks like you’ve got one to me.”

  “Time line and circumstance point to something going down after she left work, before she got home.”

  “I’d agree with that.” Sitting back, Smith sipped her dark, strong tea. “But you don’t want me to open a file and move on this?”

  “This friend of mine? The other pregnant one? She’s turned around about this, and she…” Eve blew out a breath. “Okay, she put me on a spot with this. So I’m going to ask you to let me handle the case.

  “I’m not looking to elbow you out,” Eve continued, when Smith frowned over her mug. “And I’d welcome any help or direction you could give me, but Mavis is holding one of those emotion-heaped plates, too, and she’s looking to me to take care of it.”

  “Knows you, doesn’t know me or anybody in the unit.”

  “That’s the big of it, yeah. Mavis and I go back a long time. I don’t want her any more screwed up over this than she has to be.”

  “How far along is she?”

  “Mavis?” Eve pushed at her hair. “Heading to the final countdown. Couple more weeks, I guess. I told her I’d do this. I’m asking you to let me keep my word.”

  “This would be Mavis Freestone, music sensation?”

  “It would.”

  “I got an eighteen-year-old daughter who’s a major fan.”

  Eve felt the tension in her shoulders ease. “She might like backstage passes next time Mavis performs in the city. Or anywhere, for that matter, if you wouldn’t mind her being transported by a private shuttle.”

  “I’d be her hero for life, but that sounds suspiciously like a bribe.”

  Now Eve grinned. “And a damn good one. I had booze or sports lined up if I needed them. I appreciate this, Smith.”

  “I’ve got friends, too, and I don’t like to let them down. Here’s what I’d need. You’d copy me on every report, every statement, every note you make. I’m apprised of every step of your investigation as you make it. I’ll keep my own file on her here, and if I feel at any point I need to step in, or assign someone to step in—to work with you, or to take over—I don’t want to hear the squawk.”

  “You won’t. I owe you one.”

  “Find them—the woman and the baby—and we’ll call it even.” Smith dug up a card. “I don’t have anything current that mirrors this one, but I’ll do a search, see if there’s anything in the city that reflects a like crime.”

  “Appreciate it. All of it.”

  “The missing’s who matters, not who runs the show from here. My home ’link, pocket ’link numbers are on the back. Day or night.”

  Eve took the card, offered her hand.

  Back in her office she found Roarke at her desk working on her comp. He glanced up at her, lifted his brows in question.

  “I’m clear. I got lucky.”

  “That’s good then. I got started on your background checks. Do you want to work here or at home?”

  “Neither, not yet. Right now we’re going to see a man about a bus.”

  The bus driver’s name was Braunstein, and he was about two hundred pounds of hard fat in a New York Giants football jersey. He was fifty-two, married, and was spending his Saturday evening watching a post-season game on-screen with his brother-in-law and son while his wife, his sister, and niece took in some—in his words—“girlie vids” at a local theater.

  His irritation at having his viewing interrupted was obvious, until Eve mentioned Tandy’s name.

  “London Bridge? That’s what I call her. Sure I know her. Rides with me most every night. Always has her fare card ready, lots don’t. Got a nice smile. She sits right behind me. Somebody takes that seat, I make ’em get up, give it to her. Her delicate condition and all.

  “She gave me a nice tin of cookies for the holidays. Made them herself. She got trouble?”

  “I don’t know that yet. Did she ride with you Thursday evening?”

  “Thursday.” He scratched his chin, which badly needed a shave. “Nope. Funny now you mention it, ’cause I remember her saying, ‘See you tomorrow, Mr. B,’ when she got off at her stop on Wednesday. She calls me ‘Mr. B.’ I remember because she was carting this box wrapped in funny paper with a big-ass bow on it.”

  He glanced around as both of his companions erupted with rage at a call on the field. “Offside, my rosy red ass,” one of them shouted.

  “Goddamn refs,” Braunstien muttered. “’Scuze the language. Anyway, I asked her about it—the box—when she got on, and she said how she had a baby shower on the weekend. Listen, that little girl get hurt or something? I told her she ought to take the maternity leave, close as she was. She okay? She and the baby okay?”

  “I hope so. On the bus, you ever notice anyone paying too much attention to her? Hanging too close, keeping an eye? Anything like that?”

  “No, and I woulda.” He scratched his prominent belly. “I kinda looked out for her during the run, you know? Got some regulars, and some of them might strike up a conversation with her the way people do when a woman’s carrying a bun. You know, ‘How you feeling?’ ‘When are you due?’ ‘Pick out any names,’ that kind of thing. But nobody bothered her. I wouldn’a let them.”

  “How about people who got off at her stop?”

  “Sure, there’d be some. Regulars and otherwise. Never noticed anybody looking funny, though. Someone hurt that girl? Come on, I feel like her uncle or something. She hurt?”

  “I don’t know. No one’s seen her, as far as we can tell, since Thursday, at around six o’clock.”

  “Well, Jesus.” This time Braunstien showed no reaction to the shouts and curses coming from the living room. “Jesus, that’s not right.”

  People like her,” Eve said as she drove. “Like people liked Copperfield and Byson.”

  “Bad things happen to likable people,” Roarke pointed out.

  “Yeah, yeah, they do. I’m going by where she worked. Walk from there to her bus stop. Get a feel.”

  Outside the White Stork, Eve watched traffic zing uptown on Madison. It was later than it would have been when Tandy left work, and a Saturday rather than a weekday. But it would’ve been going dark at six, and, as she recalled, that day was gloomy.

  Streetlights on, she mused, headlights cutting through the dank light.

  “Cold,” she said aloud. “People bundled up, like they are now. Walking brisk, most of them walking brisk. Want to get home, or get where they’re going. Early dinner, after-work drinks, errands to do on the way home. She comes out. Has to walk over to Fifth to catch her bus. Two blocks down, one block over.”

  Eve started to walk it with Roarke beside her. “She’s going to move with the lights. If she hits the walk, she’ll go on down the second block, then over. If she doesn’t, she’ll do the cross-town block first. You want to keep moving.”

  “No way to know which way she did it.”

  “No.” But since they caught the light, Eve continued through the intersection. “Least likely place to snatch her—if it was a snatch—is the corner. More people, closer together. You want to come up behind her.”

  She demonstrated when they were near the middle of the block, falling back a few steps, then coming in quick, banding an arm around Roarke’s waist.

  “Using a weapon?” he speculated. “Otherwise she’d react—call out, struggle. Even the most jaded would stop when an obviously pregnant woman is in trouble.”

/>   “A weapon,” Eve agreed. “Or it was someone she knew. Hey, Tandy!” Eve shifted her arm, firmed it tight around Roarke. “How’s it going? Boy, you sure are carrying a load there. How about a lift home? Got my car right down there.”

  “Possibly.” He turned west as she did to walk to Fifth. “Who does she know?”

  “Customers, neighbors, someone through the birthing class or center. Someone from back in England. Baby’s father. Had to be force or familiarity. Maybe both. Had to be quick and quiet, because, yeah, somebody’s going to notice a pregnant woman struggling with someone. We’ll show her picture around this area, in case someone did.”

  Once they hit Fifth, she turned north to walk back on the alternate route.

  “Probably took her on the cross street,” Eve said. “Always less foot traffic than the avenues. Had to have a vehicle, or possibly…” She scanned up, frowning at the apartments overhead. “Possibly a place close by. But then you’ve got to get her inside without anybody making note of it. I don’t like that one, but it could be.”

  “And why wouldn’t she resist once she was in a vehicle?”

  “Force? She could have been sedated, or she was afraid. Maybe there was more than one abductor. Familiar, she could have been pleased to see someone she knew, and to be off her feet, catch a ride home.”

  She scanned the area as they crossed back to Madison. Most people moving quickly, most with their heads or at least their eyes down. Thinking their thoughts, bubbled inside their own worlds.

  “Somebody willing to take a risk, moving quick and smooth. Sure, you could pluck a woman right off the sidewalk. It happens. One of the cross streets,” she repeated. “Makes the most sense, but you can’t be sure which one she’ll use. Wouldn’t park the vehicle, if you’re using one, on the street. Not if you’re doing the snatch alone. And if you were lucky enough to find a spot anyway. Closest parking lot to her work, that’s what you’d use.”

  “Logical,” Roarke agreed, and took out his PPC. He tapped a few buttons, nodded. “There’s a lot on Fifty-eighth, between Madison and Fifth.”

  “That’d be handy, wouldn’t it? You’d only have to walk her a couple of southbound blocks. Let’s go have a look at it.”

  She wanted to walk it, again taking the most logical route. It was an automated lot with no attendant, human or droid, and on this Saturday evening, at capacity.

  It boasted a security cam, but even if it worked, she knew the disc would have been dumped every twenty-four hours. She noted down the number posted for contact. “Maybe we’ll get lucky on the security disc,” she told Roarke. “They should have records, in any case, of payments. We’ll want ID on any vehicles leaving the lot between eighteen and nineteen hundred on Thursday.”

  She dipped her hands in her pockets. “Or he could’ve had a partner circling the blocks, and we’re screwed on this angle.”

  Or they paid in cash, Roarke thought. Used a stolen vehicle. Eve would be considering those possibilities as well, he knew, so didn’t bother to comment. “If she was taken the way you’re theorizing, it was planned out, timed. Do you think she was stalked?”

  “I’d say the probability of it being a random snatch is low, but I’m going to run it. Somebody knew her routine, her schedule, her routes. Somebody wanted her and/or the baby she’s carrying specifically.”

  “Leans toward the father, then, doesn’t it?”

  “High on the list. All I have to do is identify him.”

  “I’d like to think that would mean he’d be less likely to hurt her or the child, but that’s probably not true.” He thought of his own mother, and what she’d suffered at the hands of his father, and tried to shake that off. “I’ve seen too much of what happens in these circumstances with the women at Duchas.”

  “Primary COD in pregnant women is violence at the hands of the father.”

  “That’s a bloody sad state of affairs.” He looked out over the street, over the people who rushed by in the cold, blowing air. But for a moment he saw the alleyways of Dublin, and the hulking figure of Patrick Roarke. “A bloody sad commentary on the human condition.”

  Because she thought she understood where his thoughts had gone, she took his hand. “If he took her, we’ll find him. And her.”

  “Before he does for her—or them.” He looked at her now, and she saw the past haunting his eyes. “That’s the key, isn’t it.”

  “Yeah. That’s the key.” Eve shook her head as they continued to walk. “She told somebody who he was. Maybe not once she moved to New York, but back in England. Somebody knows who he is.”

  “She might have moved to New York to get away from him.”

  “Yeah, I’m circling that. So, let’s go home and try to arrow in.”

  Tandy Willowby, age twenty-eight.”

  Eve sat at her desk in her home office, reading the data Roarke had already run. “Born London. Parents Willowby, Annalee and Nigel. No sibs. Mother deceased, 2044. Tandy would’ve been twelve. Father remarried, 2049, to Marrow, Candide—divorced with one offspring from first marriage. Briar Rose, female, born 2035.”

  She continued scrolling. “Willowby, Nigel, deceased 2051. Bad luck. But that leaves her with a stepmother and stepsister still alive and kicking. Computer, contact information for Willowby, Candide, or Marrow, Candide, and Marrow, Briar Rose, London. Use birth dates and identification numbers in file already running.”

  Working…

  “Eve, if you’re thinking of contacting them now, I’ll remind you it’s after one in the morning in England.”

  She scowled, glanced at her wrist unit. “That’s such a pisser. Okay, we take that in the morning.”

  The computer told her Candide now lived in Sussex while Briar Rose retained a London residence.

  “Okay, back to Tandy. See here, she was employed over six years at this dress shop in London. Carnaby Street. Position, manager. Kept the same apartment there—”

  “That would be ‘flat,’” Roarke interrupted.

  “Why would it be flat? How can you live—oh.” She rubbed the back of her neck as she cued in. “Right, she’d call it a flat, which makes no sense to me. But she kept it, just like she kept the same employer, for more than six years. She settles in, she roots, she’s habitual. We’ll want to talk to the owner of the shop.”

  Now she leaned back, stared up at the ceiling. “If she had a guy, I bet she kept him a good chunk of time, too. She doesn’t bounce around. But she relocates not just to another part of England, even of Europe, but goes three thousand miles. Gives up her longtime home, longtime job. That’s not a whim, not for someone like Tandy. That’s a big step, and one she would have thought about a lot, one she had to have a strong reason for taking.”

  “The baby.”

  “Yeah, I’d say it comes back to that. She put an ocean between someone or something and the kid. Strong reason, or she’d be nesting in her flat in London.”

  “A creature of habit,” Roarke put in. “As were your other two victims.”

  “Let’s hope Tandy makes out better than they did. I’m going to set up a board for her, and do a timeline.”

  “All right. Unless there’s something specific I can do for you here, you might send me some of those blind accounts on the Copperfield/ Byson case. I’ll start looking at numbers.”

  The fact was, he wanted to step away—at least for the time being—from the thought of a woman so completely vulnerable at the mercy of someone who wished her harm. Someone, he thought, she might have loved once.

  Eve stopped for a moment, turned to him. “If I’d been in your place on that one, I’d’ve told Whitney to kiss my ass.”

  “What?” He pulled himself back, into the now. “Ah, well, all in all, I’d rather have your lips in that vicinity than his.”

  “Find me something useful, they might find their way there.”

  “And my incentive keeps rising.”

  She swiveled away from the screen, looked him in the eyes. “Are you all right on th
is? The Tandy thing.”

  Foolish, he admitted, to believe she didn’t see, didn’t know. More foolish, he supposed, for him to try to block it from her, or from himself. “I’m not, actually, not completely. It resonates a little too deep for me. I don’t know if it’s anger or grief I’m feeling. It must be both.”

  “Roarke, we don’t know Tandy’s in the same kind of situation as your mother was.”

  “We don’t know she isn’t.” Idly, he picked up the little statue of the goddess Eve kept on her desk. A symbol of the female. “He waited until after I was born to murder her, my mother. But she was trying to protect me, do what she thought best for me. As I expect Tandy is doing, whoever has her now.”

  He set the statue down. “I just want my mind off it for a while.”

  He so rarely hurt, she thought. So rarely let himself, she corrected. “I can take this one back to Central. Keep it out of here.”

  “No.” He moved to her then, taking her face in his hands. “That won’t do, not for either of us. What once was made us who we are, one way or another. But it can’t stop us from doing what we do. They’ll have won then, won’t they?”

  She put her hands over his. “They can’t win. They can only screw with us.”

  “And so they do.” He leaned down, pressed his lips to the top of her head. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll steep myself in numbers for a while. They always clear my head.”

  “God knows how. I’m going to make coffee. All around?”

  “If I had some cake to go with it. I got shafted on that end of the deal.”

  “Cake?” Her mind circled around. “Oh, right. Mavis. I think there was some left. Those women were like vultures when something had icing on it. Maybe the Dark Shadow stocked some of the leftovers in the AutoChef. I could probably choke down a piece myself.”

  And thinking that sugar and caffeine kept the blood moving, she made it a large piece along with strong, black coffee. He’d be all right, she told herself, because he wouldn’t let himself be otherwise. But she’d keep a finger on the pulse, and if she didn’t like the beat, she’d move the Tandy investigation out of the house.