Bump in the Night

by J. D. Robb

  “Of course, I forgot for a moment.” He shifted his gaze to Eve with a smile. “My business keeps me so much in the past, current events sometimes pass me by.”

  “I bet. And speaking of the past,” Eve continued, “we’re interested in any letters, journals, diaries you might have that pertain to Bobbie Bray.”

  “That’s a name I’ve heard countless times today. Maeve might have told you that’s why we decided to work from home. And here she is now.”

  Maeve wheeled in a cart holding china pots and cups.

  “Just what we need. I’ve put the ’links on auto,” her father told her. “We can take a short break. Letters.” He took a seat while Maeve poured coffee and tea. “We do have a few she wrote to friends in San Francisco in 1968 and 1969. And one of our prizes is a workbook containing drafts of some of her song lyrics. It could, in a way, be considered a kind of diary as well. She wrote down some of her thoughts in it, or notes to herself. Little reminders. I’ve fielded countless inquiries about just that this morning. Including one from a Cliff Gill.”

  “Hopkins’s son?”

  “So he said. He was very upset, nearly incoherent really.” Buchanan patted Maeve’s hand when she passed him a cup. “Understandable under the circumstances.”

  “And he was looking specifically for letters?” Eve asked.

  “He said his father had mentioned letters, a bombshell as he put it. Mr. Gill understood his father and I had done business and hoped I might know what it was about. I think he hopes to clear his family name.”

  “You going to help him with that?”

  “I don’t see how.” Buchanan spread his hands. “Nothing I have pertains.”

  “If there was something that pertained, or correspondence written near the time of her disappearance, would you know about it?”

  He pursed his lips in thought. “I can certainly put out feelers. There are always rumors, of course. Several years ago someone tried to auction off what they claimed was a letter written by Bobbie two years after her disappearance. It was a forgery, and there was quite a scandal.”

  “There have been photos, too,” Maeve added. “Purportedly taken of Bobbie after she went missing. None have ever been authenticated.”

  “Exactly.” Buchanan nodded. “So substantiating the rumors and the claims, well, that’s a different matter. Do you know of correspondence from that time, Lieutenant?”

  “I’ve got a source claiming there was some.”

  “Really.” His eyes brightened. “If they’re authentic, acquiring them would be quite a coup.”

  “Were you name-dropping, Peabody?” Eve gave her partner a mild look as she slid behind the wheel.

  “Roarke’s done business there before, and you guys went there together. But he doesn’t mention Roarke at all. And being in business, I figured Buchanan would keep track of his more well-heeled clients, you know, and should’ve made an immediate connection.”

  “Yeah, you’d think. Plausible reason he didn’t.”

  “You’d wondered, too.”

  “I wonder all kinds of things. Let’s wonder our way over to talk to Cliff Gill.”

  Like Bygones, the dance school was locked up tight. But as Fanny Gill lived in the apartment overhead, it was a short trip.

  Cliff answered looking flushed and harassed. “Thank God! I was about to contact you.”

  “About?”

  “We had to close the school.” He took a quick look up and down the narrow hallway then gestured them inside. “I had to give my mother a soother.”

  “Because?”

  “Oh, this is a horrible mess. I’m having a Bloody Mary.”

  Unlike the Buchanan brownstone, Fanny’s apartment was full of bright, clashing colors, a lot of filmy fabrics and chrome. Artistic funk, Eve supposed. It was seriously lived in to the point of messy.

  Cliff was looking pretty lived-in himself, Eve noted. He hadn’t shaved, and it looked like he’d slept in the sweats he was wearing. Shadows dogged his eyes.

  “I stayed the night here,” he began as he stood in the adjoining kitchen pouring vodka. “People came into the studio yesterday afternoon, some of them saying horrible things. Or they’d just call, leaving horrible, nasty transmissions. I’ve turned her ’links off. She just can’t take any more.”

  He added enough tomato juice and Tabasco to turn the vodka muddy red, then took a quick gulp. “Apparently we’re being painted with the same brush as my grandfather. Spawn of Satan.” He took another long drink, then blushed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, what can I get you?”

  “We’re fine,” Eve told him. “Mr. Gill, have you been threatened?”

  “With everything from eternal damnation to public flogging. My mother doesn’t deserve this, Lieutenant. She’s done nothing but choose poorly in the husband department, which she rectified. At least I carry the same blood as Hopkins.” His mouth went grim. “If you think along those lines.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know what I think any more.” He came back into the living area, dropped onto a candy-pink sofa heaped with fluffy pillows. “At least I know what to feel now. Rage, and a little terror.”

  “Did you report any of the threats?”

  “She asked me not to.” He closed his eyes, seemed to gather some tattered rags of composure. “She’s embarrassed and angry. Or she started out that way. She didn’t want to make a big deal about it. But it just kept up. She handles things, my mother, she doesn’t fall apart. But this has just knocked her flat. She’s afraid we’ll lose the school, all the publicity, the scandal. She’s worked so hard, and now this.”

  “I want you to make a copy of any of the transmissions regarding this. We’ll take care of it.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He scooped his fingers through his disordered hair. “That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? I’m just not thinking straight. I can’t see what I should do.”

  “You contacted the owner of a shop called Bygones. Care to tell me why?”

  “Bygones? Oh, oh, right. Mr. Buchanan. My father sold him some memorabilia. I think maybe Buchanan was one of the backers on Number Twelve. My father mentioned him when I gave him the five hundred. Said something like Bygones may be Bygones, but he wouldn’t be nickel-and-diming it any more. How he’d pay me back the five ten times over because he was about to hit the jackpot.”

  “Any specific jackpot?”

  “He talked a lot, my father. Bragged, actually, and a lot of the bragging was just hot air. But he said he’d been holding onto an ace in the hole, waiting for the right time. It was coming up.”

  “What was his hole card?”

  “Can’t say he actually had one.” Cliff heaved out a breath. “Honestly, I didn’t really listen because it was the same old, same old to me. And I wanted to get him moving before my mother got wind of the loan. But he said something about letters Bobbie Bray had written. A bombshell, he said, that was going to give Number Twelve just the push he needed. I didn’t pay much attention at the time because he was mostly full of crap.”

  He winced now, drank again. “Hell of a thing to say about your dead father, huh?”

  “His being dead doesn’t make him more of a father to you, Mr. Gill,” Peabody said gently.

  Cliff’s eyes went damp for a moment. “Guess not. Well, when all this started happening. I remembered how he talked about these letters, and I thought maybe he’d sold them to Bygones. Maybe there was something in them that would clear my grandfather. Something, I don’t know. Maybe she committed suicide and he panicked.”

  He lowered his head, rubbed the heel of his hand in the center of his brow as if to push away some pain. “I don’t even care, or wouldn’t, except for what’s falling down from it on my mother. I don’t know what I expected Mr. Buchanan to do. I was desperate.”

  “Did your father give you any indication of the contents of the letters?” Eve asked. “The timing of them?”

  “Not really, no. At the time I thought it was just saving
face because I was giving him money. Probably all it was. Buchanan said he hadn’t bought any letters from my father, but I could come in and look at what he had. Waste of time, I guess. But he was nice about it—Buchanan, I mean. Sympathetic.”

  “Have you discussed this with your mother at all?” Peabody asked him.

  “No, and I won’t.” Any grief seemed to burn away as anger covered his face. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but by dying my father’s given her more trouble than he has since she divorced him. I’m not going to add to it. Chasing a wild goose anyway.” He frowned into his glass. “I have to make some arrangements for—for the body. Cremation, I guess. I know it’s cold, but I’m not going to have any sort of service or memorial. I’m not going to drag this out. We just have to get through this.”

  “Mr Gill—”

  “Cliff,” he said to Eve with a weak smile. “You should call me Cliff since I’m dumping all my problems on you.”

  “Cliff. Do you know if your father kept a safety deposit box?”

  “He wouldn’t have told me. We didn’t see each other much. I don’t know what he’d have kept in one. I got a call from some lawyer this morning. Said my father’d made a will, and I’d inherit. I asked him to ballpark it, and the gist was when it all shakes out, I’ll be lucky to have enough credits to buy a soy dog at a corner cart.”

  “I guess you were hoping for better,” Peabody commented.

  Cliff let out a short, humorless laugh. “Hoping for better with Rad Hopkins would be another waste of time.”

  Nine

  “You have to feel for the guy.” Peabody bundled her scarf around her neck as they walked back outside.

  “We’ll pass off the copy of his ’link calls to a couple of burly uniforms, have them knock on some doors and issue some stern warnings. About all we can do there for now. We’re going back to Central. I want a quick consult with Mira, and you can update the Commander.”

  “Me?” Peabody’s voice hit squeak. “Alone? Myself?”

  “I expect Commander Whitney would be present as you’re updating him.”

  “But you do the updates.”

  “Today you’re doing it. He’s going to want to set up a media conference,” Eve added as she got into their vehicle. “Hold him off.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Twenty-four hours. Make it stick,” Eve added and pulled out into traffic as Peabody sat pale and speechless beside her.

  Mira was the top profiler attached to the NYPSD for good reason. Her status kept her in high demand and made Eve’s request for a consult without appointment similar to trying to squeeze her head through the eye of a needle that was already threaded.

  She had a headache when she’d finished battling Mira’s admin, but she got her ten minutes.

  “You ought to give her a whip and a chain,” Eve commented when she stepped into Mira’s office. “Not that she needs one.”

  “You always manage to get past her. Have a seat.”

  “No thanks, I’ll make it fast.”

  Mira settled behind her desk. She was a sleek, lovely woman who favored pretty suits. Today’s was power red and worn with pearls.

  “This would be pertaining to Number Twelve,” Mira began. “Two murders, nearly a hundred years apart. Your consults are rarely routine. Bobbie Bray.”

  “You, too? People say that name like she’s a deity.”

  “Do they?” Mira eased back in her chair, her blue eyes amused. “Apparently my grandmother actually heard her perform at Number Twelve in the early Nineteen-seventies. She claimed she exchanged an intimate sexual favor with the bouncer for the price of admission. My grandmother was a wild woman.”

  “Huh.”

  “And my parents are huge fans, so I grew up hearing that voice, that music. It’s confirmed then? They were her remains?”

  “Lab’s forensic sculptor’s putting her money on it as of this morning. I’ve got the facial image she reconstructed from the skull, and it looks like Bray.”

  “May I see?”

  “I’ve got it in the file.” Eve gave Mira the computer codes, then shifted so she, too, could watch the image come on-screen.

  The lovely, tragic face, the deep-set eyes, the full, pouty lips somehow radiated both youth and trouble.

  “Yes,” Mira murmured. “It certainly looks like her. Something so sad and worn about her, despite her age.”

  “Living on drugs, booze and sex tends to make you sad and worn.”

  “I suppose it does. You don’t feel for her?”

  Eve realized she should have expected the question from Mira. Feelings were the order of the day in that office. “I feel for anyone who gets a bullet in the brain—then has their body closed up in a wall. She deserves justice for that—deserves it for the cops who looked the other way. But she chose the life she led to that point. So looking sad and worn at twenty-couple? No, I can’t say I feel for that.”

  “A different age,” Mira said, studying Eve as she’d studied the image on screen. “My grandmother always said you had to be there. I doubt Bobbie would have understood you and the choices you’ve made any more than you do her and hers.”

  Mira flicked the screen off. “Is there more to substantiate identity?”

  “The bones we recovered had a broken left tibia, which corresponds with a documented childhood injury on Bray. We extracted DNA, and I’ve got a sample of a relative’s on its way to the lab. It’s going to confirm.”

  “A tragic waste. All that talent snuffed out.”

  “She didn’t live what you could call a careful life.”

  “The most interesting people rarely do.” Mira angled her head. “You certainly don’t.”

  “Mine’s about the job. Hers was about getting stoned and screwing around, best I can tell.”

  Now Mira raised a brow. “Not only don’t you feel for her, you don’t think you’d have liked her.”

  “Can’t imagine we’d have had much in common, but that’s not the issue. She had a kid.”

  “What? I’ve never heard that.”

  “She kept it locked. Likelihood is it was Hop Hopkins’s offspring, though it’s possible she got knocked up on the side. Either way, she went off, had the kid, dumped it on her mother. Sent money so the family could relocate—up the scale some. Mother passed the kid off as her own.”

  “And you find that deplorable, on all counts.”

  Irritation shadowed Eve’s face, very briefly. “That’s not the issue either. Female child eventually discovered her heritage through letters Bray allegedly wrote home. The ones shortly before her death, again allegedly, claimed that she was planning to clean up her act—again—and come back for the kid. This is hearsay. The daughter relayed it to her two children. Purportedly the letters and other items were sold, years ago, to Radcliff C. Hopkins—the last.”

  “Connections within connections. And this, you believe goes to motive.”

  “You know how Hopkins was killed?”

  “The walls are buzzing with it. Violent, specific, personal—and somehow tidy.”

  “Yeah.” It was always satisfying to have your instincts confirmed. “The last shot. Here’s what he did to her. There’s control there, an agenda fulfilled, even through the rage.”

  “Let me see if I understand. You suspect that a descendent of Bobbie Bray killed a descendent of Hopkins to avenge her murder.”

  “That’s a chunk of it, buttonholed. According to Bray’s granddaughter, the murder, the abandonment, the obsession ruined her mother’s health. Series of breakdowns.”

  “You suspect the granddaughter?”

  “No, she’s covered. She’s got two offspring herself, but I can’t place them in New York during the time in question.”

  “Who does that leave you?”

  “There was a grandson, reported killed in action during the Urbans.”

  “He had children?”

  “None on record. He was pretty young, only seventeen. Lied about his age when he joined up�
�a lot of people did back then. Oddly enough, he was reported killed here in New York.”

  Pursing her lips, Mira considered. “As you’re one of the most pragmatic women I know, I find it hard to believe you’re theorizing that a ghost killed your victim to avenge yet another ghost.”

  “Flesh and blood pulled the trigger. I’ve got Yancy aging the military ID. The Urban Wars were a chaotic time, and the last months of them here in New York were confusing from a military standpoint. Wouldn’t be hard, would it, for a young man, one who’d already lied about his age to enlist in the Home Force, to put his official ID on a mangled body and vanish? War’s never what you think it’s going to be. It’s not heroic and adventurous. He could’ve deserted.”

  “The history of mental illness in the family—on both sides—the horrors of war, the guilt of abandoning his duty. It would make quite a powder keg. Your killer is purposeful, specific to his goal, would have some knowledge of firearms. Rumor is the victim was shot nine times—the weapon itself is a symbol—and there were no stray bullets found on scene.”

  “He hit nine out of nine, so he had some knowledge of handguns, or some really good luck. In addition, he had to reload for the ninth shot.”

  “Ah. The others were the rage, that slippery hold on control. The last, a signature. He’s accomplished what he meant to do. There may be more, of course, but he has his eye for an eye, and he has the object of his obsession back in the light.”

  “Yeah.” Eve nodded. “I’m thinking that matters here.”

  “With Bobbie’s remains found, identified, and her killer identified—at least in the media—he’s fulfilled his obligation. If the killer is the grandson—or connected to the grandson, as even if he did die in the Urbans, it’s certainly possible to have produced an offspring at seventeen—he or she knows how to blend.”

  “Likely to just keep blending,” Eve added.

  “Most likely. I don’t believe your killer will seek the spotlight. He doesn’t need acknowledgment. He’ll slide back into his routine, and essentially vanish again.”

  “I think I know where to find him.”