Born in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “So fucking what?”

  “When did you last have contact with your stepsister, Ms. Marrow?”

  “Well, Christ.” The lump moved, shoved at the mad thatch and revealed a pale face with sleepy and improbable purple eyes heavily lined with black, and full lips where the lip dye had faded to splotches of crimson. “How the bleeding hell should I know when it’s eight bleeding o’clock in the bloody morning? Who the hell are you again?”

  “Lieutenant Dallas, in New York.”

  “Cops? What do the cops want with Tandy? New York? I haven’t had my sodding coffee.” Briar Rose scrubbed at her face with her hand, then pressed it over the sheet in the vicinity of her belly. “Oh, fuck me, how many orgasms did I have last night?”

  “That would be your personal business.”

  The woman snorted. “The drinks, more’s the pity. Why are you waking me up on a Sunday morning about Tandy?”

  “Are you aware she’s been living in New York for the past several months?”

  “New York? Well, fuck me. You serious? Handy Tandy in New sodding York.”

  “I take it you haven’t spoken to her recently.”

  “Not since…” She scratched her fingers in her hair, and crawled across the bed to a little table where she shoved around at debris and came up with some sort of cigarette. “I’m trying to think. June maybe. Why? You’re not going to tell me she’s done something illegal. Not our girl.”

  “She’s missing.”

  “Missing what?” She fumbled with a lighter, then lowered it before it sparked. “Missing? What do you mean, missing?”

  “She hasn’t been seen since Thursday.”

  “Maybe she had herself a massive piss-up.”

  “Which would be?”

  “You know, a bender? A drinking binge. Though that isn’t much like Tandy.”

  “I doubt it, particularly given her condition.”

  “Condition of what?”

  “Are you aware Tandy’s pregnant? Due to give birth in a matter of days?”

  “What? What the fuck? Up the duff? Tandy? Oh, bollocks to that.” But the sleepiness cleared out of her eyes. “Just a bloody minute.” She rolled out of bed, and to Eve’s mild relief was at least wearing underwear. She grabbed some sort of baggy red shirt out of a pile of clothes and dragged it over her head. “You’re telling me Tandy’s knocked up, and nobody knows where she is?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. You said you hadn’t spoken to her since June. Is that usual? That long a gap?”

  Briar Rose walked back to sit on the side of the bed. This time she lit the cigarette. “Listen, we were steps less than a couple of years, really. Her widower father married my stone bitch of a mother when I was about fourteen. He was all right, too, nice sort. Then he ups and gets killed in a pile-up on the M4.”

  She paused a moment, let out a long breath and a cloud of smoke. “Tandy was finishing up at University, and already had a job. My mother dragged me off to Sussex for Christ’s sake. Tandy made some tries at keeping up a kind of relationship, but the stone bitch wasn’t interested. I moved back to London first chance, but I was in a phase, you know? Mostly interested in piss-ups and getting laid. I didn’t want the big sister deal, especially with one who was bog standard while I was busy shagging wankers and gits. Cocking up right and left. I’d see her now and again, if she cornered me.”

  She drew deep on the cigarette. “Even when I got myself a decent job and eased back some, we just didn’t have much in common. I saw her last spring, it was. She rang me up, said she needed to talk to me.”

  “And you talked about?”

  “We didn’t, not really. I knew she was wound up about something, and thought she’d probably got herself engaged, or got a bloody promotion, again. I acted a pillock because the bloke I’d been seeing turned into a berk and dumped me for some bit of fluff. And bollocks to him. I just met her for coffee and had a right go at her and buggered off. Bloody hell.”

  It was a challenge, but Eve thought she’d picked her way through the foreign slang and idioms to the meat of it. “No contact after?”

  “Well, I felt a right arse, didn’t I? A couple weeks later, I did penance and went by her flat, but she’d moved. All they said was she’d moved, maybe to Paris. It pissed me off that she didn’t let me know where she’d gone but there was bugger all I could do about it. She’s having a baby?”

  “That’s right. Do you know Aaron?”

  “Met him a couple of times. They were all but shacked up. Is he there in New York with her?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Do you have his full name, a contact number or address?”

  “Aaron Applebee, in Chelsea, I think. He’s a writer for The Times. You telling me that git got her up the duff, then turned her out?”

  “I’ll have to speak to him about that. Was she seeing anyone else?”

  “Tandy? Not our girl. One at a time for her, and they’d been tight for months and months. Bastard. Maybe she’s come back home, come back to confront him. I’ll ring up a few people. A girl wants to be home, doesn’t she, when she’s about to be a mum.”

  “I appreciate the information. If you think of anything else, or find out anything about her whereabouts, contact me.”

  Eve did a search for Aaron Applebee and got his number and address.

  When she hit his voice mail, she did a standard run on him instead.

  Applebee, Aaron, the computer recited, DOB June 5, 2030, Devonshire, England.

  It listed his parents, and a complicated series of half-sibs through each side. He was employed, as Briar Rose had said, as a staff writer for the London Times, and had been employed there for eight years. No marriage on record, no criminal. Several pings for traffic violations. He’d resided at the same address, in Chelsea, for five years.

  His ID photo showed an attractive blond man with a long jaw. A height of five feet ten inches, a weight of one-sixty.

  On the surface, he looked steady, ordinary. A regular bloke, she mused.

  “Want to talk to you, Aaron.”

  She tried his home ’link again, bounced to voice mail and clicked off. After looking up the name of the investigator on the like crime in Rome, she began to wind her way through the maze of the Italian cops until she found one in his unit who not only spoke perfect English but agreed to contact Inspector Triveti, and ask him to get in touch.

  She updated her notes, then rose to add the printout of Aaron Applebee’s ID photo. When she turned toward the kitchen, Roarke stepped out of his office.

  “No more coffee,” he said, definitively.

  “Just one more hit. I’m waiting for a callback from Rome.”

  “Then order a cappuccino—decaf—and make it two.”

  She very nearly pouted. “Decaf’s got no punch.”

  “The depth of the shadows under your eyes makes it look like you’ve already been punched. What’s in Rome?”

  “A like crime, and a cop who I hope speaks English.” Since Roarke followed her into the kitchen, she couldn’t sneak real coffee. “I talked to Tandy’s stepsister.”

  She relayed the gist of the conversation as the AutoChef served up two frothy coffees. “How are you on Brit slang?”

  “Reasonably fluent.”

  “I could’ve used you as an interpreter. What’s ‘bog standard’?”

  “Boring, basically.”

  “I wasn’t far off. She had this Aaron’s full name—it’s Applebee. He works for the London Times, lives in Chelsea. Both parents married or cohabbed multiple times, but not currently with each other. Got a brood of half- and stepsibs.”

  “Which might put a man off the idea of marriage or family.”

  “Might. Reporters have a lot of sources. If he’d wanted to find Tandy, it seems he could and would have. Maybe he decided he wanted the kid, and they’re just off playing kissy-face. Or maybe he found out she was having it when he thought she wasn’t, and he came over pissed. Or he’s just at home, sleeping
off a Saturday Night Special and not answering his ’link.”

  “Or, it’s still possible she just walked away. She’d done it before, leaving London.”

  “Yeah, there’s that.” And the probability run she’d done on that angle had given her a near fifty-fifty. “But I’m betting when she left London, she packed her things, all nice and neat. She gave her landlord and her employer notice. I already know she did none of those things here. No, she didn’t work all day, leave the shop, and decide somewhere between Madison and Fifth to just keep walking.”

  “No.” Roarke laid a hand on Eve’s shoulder and rubbed. “She didn’t.”

  “So.” She struggled with a yawn. “You getting anywhere with the numbers?”

  “A couple of interesting things. I want to come at them from another angle, then I’ll put it together for you.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Look, why don’t you pack it in for now, go on to bed? I’ll just wait for the Italian, then head in, too.”

  “Not a chance. If I leave you on your own, I’ll come back in a few hours and find you facedown at your desk, snoring.”

  “I don’t snore.”

  “Wake the dead.”

  “I do not.” Did she?

  He only smiled, then wandered off to study the Willowby side of the board. “You’ve gathered quite a bit in a short amount of time.”

  “Nothing that points to where she is and why. In the Italian case, they never found the woman, or the kid.”

  “They didn’t have you.” Nor had his mother, he thought. She’d had no one, and there was nothing that could change it. He turned to Eve. “Look at you. You’re running on empty, and pushing at two fronts.”

  “It may already be too late for her.” She nodded at Tandy’s photo. “Pushing’s all I can do.”

  When her ’link signaled, she spun around to answer. “Dallas.”

  “Triveti. I am returning to you.”

  His accent was thick and exotic, his face lean and handsome. “Thank you for getting back to me so quickly, Inspector.”

  “I am pleased. My English, scuzi, it is small.”

  “My Italian’s smaller.” She glanced toward Roarke. “I have someone with me who can help if we get in a bind. You investigated a Missing Persons case a couple years ago. A pregnant woman.”

  “Sophia Belego. You have the same.”

  “Tandy Willowby,” she told him, and gave him the bones of the case, with Roarke refining some of the details in Italian when the Inspector expressed confusion.

  “Like yours, my Sophia, she had no close family, no ties to the city where she disappeared in. She left her—momento—her, ah banking account. It had not been used, or her credit cards, since the time of her disappearing. Her clothes, her possessions remained in her apartment. In this place, her neighbor speaks to her that morning when she is leaving. The statement says that Sophia was—what is lieto?”

  “Happy,” Roarke translated.

  “Si, she is happy and full of excite. She is going to see her dottore.”

  “Doctor,” Roarke translated.

  “And she will shop for the baby. She sees the dottore, and is well. Healthy. Her spirits are good, and she makes the appuntamento?”

  “Appointment.”

  “Appointment,” Triveti repeated, “in one week. She is very great with child, you see?”

  “Yes,” Eve told him.

  “But she does not shop for the baby, not in Rome. I am talking to everyone in these places. Some, they know her from other times, but not from that day. She is not seen after she leaves the dottore. There is none of her at transportation—bus, train, shuttle. There is no use of her passport, and I find it in her apartment. There are no messages, no communications that take me to leads.”

  “Nothing in the hospitals, the birthing centers, the morgues?”

  “Nothing. I look for the father of the child, but no one knows. Not in Rome, not in Florence. In all our efforts, she is not found.”

  Using Roarke, Eve took Triveti through the steps again, squeezed out a few more details. She requested a copy of his file, and agreed to reciprocate with hers.

  After, she sat frowning at the notes she’d taken. “I need to write all this up.”

  “Sleep first.”

  “I told the LT in MPU that I’d copy her all reports and notes. I need to—”

  “You think she’s sitting by her comp waiting for your report at…” he glanced at his wrist unit, “…four forty-eight on bloody Sunday morning.”

  “No, but—”

  “Don’t make me haul your ass up and drag you to bed. I’m tired, and I might rap your head against the wall on the way. I’d hate to damage the paint.”

  “Ha-ha. Okay, okay. Just let me try Applebee one more time. Listen, listen, if she’s gone off to see him, I can go to bed with a clear head.”

  “You know damn well she hasn’t. One more, and that’s the end of it.”

  “You get bitchy when you’re tired.”

  “I get bitchier yet when I watch you run yourself into the ground.”

  She tried Aaron again, and again got voice mail. “Damn it.”

  “Bed. Sleep. Or being in a bitchy frame of mind, I might hold you down and pour a tranq into you.”

  “You and what army?” She got to her feet, and the ensuing head rush told her he was right. She needed to put the circuits on pause for a few hours.

  Two hours, she thought, three tops. And she glanced back at Tandy’s picture on her board as she walked out with Roarke.

  “It’s harder than homicides,” she stated.

  “Is it?”

  “They’re already gone. You’re there to find who took their life, to find out why if you can, to build a case that will give the dead justice. But this, you just don’t know. Is she alive, dead, hurt, trapped, or did she just say screw it and walk? If she’s alive and in trouble, you can’t know how much time you have to find her. And if you don’t, not in time, she may end up being yours again, as a homicide.”

  “We’re going to find her.”

  Eve glanced at the bedroom clock. Seventy-one hours missing, she thought.

  15

  EVE CAME OUT OF THE BLANK BLACK OF EXHAUSTED sleep into a bright flash of white. There were babies crying, women screaming, and though they seemed to be all around her, she was alone in the white box. She pushed at the walls, but they were strong as steel, and all she managed was to smear bloody handprints against the white.

  Looking down, she saw that her hands were covered with fresh blood.

  Whose blood? she wondered, and reached for her weapon. But in her harness was only a small knife, already gorey. She recognized it—of course she did. She’d used that very knife to hack her father to death once upon a time.

  If it was good enough for him, it would be good enough now.

  Shifting it to a combat grip, she began to walk along the white wall.

  Did they ever stop crying? she wondered. She supposed she couldn’t blame them. Babies were squeezed and pushed out of the nice, warm dark and dumped into the cold hard light of reality. With pain, she thought, and with blood. With their mothers screaming through it.

  It was a tough start.

  The wall angled, and she followed it as the box narrowed into a tunnel. Not unlike the morgue, she noted. Birth and death, the beginning and the end of the human journey.

  Angling again, she saw Mavis stretched out on the floor.

  “Hey! Hey!” But as she rushed forward, Mavis smiled, waved at her.

  “I’m good, I’m fine. Next to magolicious. Just cooking the bun ’till it’s done. You better go help the others.”

  “What others? Where are they?”

  “That’s the big problem, right? You gotta fix it so you can get back before I pop. You remember all the stuff from the class?”

  “I got an A.”

  “Knew I could count on you. B-day’s coming, Dallas. Don’t be late. Tandy’s counting on you, too.”

  A whit
e stork flew overhead, a white sack swinging from its beak. Eve ducked and cursed.

  “There goes another one!” Mavis laughed. “Maybe it’s Tandy’s. Better go after it, better hurry. Could be a COD!”

  Eve started off at a jog, glanced back. Mavis was standing on her head, her feet propped on the white wall. “I’m keeping it in the oven until you finish.”

  “That can’t be right,” Eve muttered, but chased after the stork.

  In a cube built into the wall, Natalie Copperfield was tied to a desk. Her eyes were blackened and bloody and running with tears. There was a blue robe belt wrapped tight around her throat.

  “It won’t add up,” she sobbed. “It won’t come out right. I have to make it right. That’s my job. They killed me for it,” she said to Eve, “but it still has to add up.”

  “You have to give me more than that.”

  “It’s all right there, all right there in the numbers that won’t add up. Haven’t you found her yet? Haven’t you found her?”

  There was a door. Eve yanked at it, then kicked it in when it refused to give way. Inside was a white room, and Tandy, strapped to a labor/ delivery chair like the one used as a demo in the birthing class.

  Blood stained the sheets, her face was shiny with sweat. Her engorged belly rippled obscenely.

  “The baby’s coming,” she panted out. “I can’t stop it.”

  “Where’s the doctor? Where’s the midwife?”

  “I can’t stop it,” she repeated. “Hurry, hurry.”

  Even as Eve ran forward, Tandy vanished.

  The floor opened under her feet. As she fell, the babies were crying, the women screaming.

  She landed hard, heard and felt the bone snap in her arm. The room was cold, so cold, and washed with a dirty red light.

  “No.” Shuddering, she pushed to her hands and knees. “No.”

  He was lying in a pool of his own blood, the same blood that dripped from her hands, from the blade of the little knife she still gripped.

  And as she watched, her father turned his head, and those dead eyes smiled at her. “It always comes back to the beginning, little girl.”