by J. D. Robb
“You can just forget about jumping me to take your mind off them. Look, Peabody, if you’re not prepped for the exam by now, you’re not going to be.”
“That doesn’t do a lot to calm me down.” She brooded out the window as Eve drove through the gates. “I don’t want to tank. Embarrass myself, you.”
“Shut up, you’re giving me the damn jitters. You’re not going to embarrass anybody. You’re going to do your best, and it’s going to be good enough. Now pull yourself together so I can brief you on Smith before we talk to him again.”
Listening, making her own notes, Peabody shook her head. “None of this stuff is in his official biographical data, or on any of the unofficial fan sites. I don’t get it. Guy’s a total publicity hound, and he likes to go for the heartstrings. So why not play up how he came from an abusive home, overcame it, and believes in the power of love, cha-cha-cha.”
“Cha-cha-cha?” Eve repeated. “I can think of a couple reasons. First, it doesn’t fit his image. Strong, handsome, romantic male of the so-clean-I-squeak variety. Doesn’t mesh with the poverty level, physically abused son of a part-time LC—who’s still tapping him for money.”
“I get that, but you could play that angle and sell discs out the yang.”
“Yang. Does that go with cha-cha-cha?” Eve wondered. “Okay, yeah, it might make some women feel sorry for him, even respect him, and plunk down the price of a disc. But that’s not what he wants.”
“What does he want?” Peabody asked, though she thought she was beginning to connect the dots.
“It’s not money. That’s just a handy by-product. He wants adulation, hero worship, and fantasy. He boinks young groupies because they’re less likely to be critical, and he plays to older women because they’re more forgiving.”
“And he surrounds himself with female staff because he needs to be taken care of by women, because he wasn’t taken care of by the woman who should have done so when he was a kid.”
“That’s how it shakes for me.” Eve turned a corner and swung around a maxibus that was lumbering its contingent of commuters to their hives and cubes. “The public image doesn’t want to have to overcome anything, but just to be. The man of your dreams isn’t some kid who got knocked around by his mother after she turned a trick. Or I should say, his view of the man of your dreams isn’t. He’s built himself into an image, and he has to stick with it.”
“So, theoretically, the pressure of concealing all that, his resentment, and the cycle of violence could have caused him to snap. And snapping, he killed two parts of the person who abused him. The LC and the mother.”
“Now you’re thinking.”
It was kind of like a sim, Peabody thought. She was a little slow, but she hoped she was picking her way through it. “You said a couple reasons. What’s another?”
“Another is he just wants to bury it, put it away. This isn’t relevant to his life now—that’s what he tells himself. He’s wrong, it’s always part of the whole, but it’s private. It’s one thing he doesn’t want chewed over by a lip-smacking public.”
Peabody slid her gaze toward Eve, but there was nothing to read on her lieutenant’s face. “So he could just be an abuse survivor who’s made a successful life for himself despite all the trauma and the violence.”
“You’re feeling sorry for him.”
“Yeah, maybe. Not enough to spring for a disc,” she added with a chuckle. “But maybe some. He didn’t ask to be hurt, and by the one person who should have been looking out for him most of all. I don’t know what it’s like to have a parent turn on you like that. Mine . . . well, you’ve met mine. My mom, she can pin your ears back with a look, but she’d never have hurt any of us. And my parents may be nonviolent New Agers, but you can believe they’d have ripped into anybody who tried to hurt us. That’s what I know,” Peabody added. “But it’s not all I know, because I’ve seen the other side. Handling double Ds before I transferred to you. Just being on the streets in uniform. And what I’ve worked on since I’ve been in Homicide.”
“Nothing wipes the all-American family image out of a cop’s head faster than their first couple of domestic disturbances.”
“One of the best reasons to be off patrol,” Peabody agreed, with feeling. “What I’m saying is I’ve seen what it can be like, and it’s toughest on the kids.”
“Everything’s always toughest on the kids. Some get over it, under it, through it. Others don’t. And another theory on Smith is he feeds on the female adulation in one part of his life—and revels in it. Meanwhile he considers them whores and bitches—and he kills them in the most vicious and theatrical way he can devise.”
“I guess that’s a pretty decent theory.”
“Either way, he’s not going to like me throwing his background up in his face. So be ready.”
Taking Eve at her word, Peabody rested a hand on her stunner as they walked from the vehicle to Smith’s front door. “Not that ready, Peabody. Let’s try to play nice first.”
They were admitted by the same woman, and walked into the same music. At least Eve thought it was the same. How could you tell, she wondered, when everything the guy sang had the same sugar rush to it?
Before they could be led into the room with floor cushions and the fluffy white kitten, Eve laid a hand on the woman’s arm. “Any place in here have actual chairs?”
Li’s mouth turned down in disapproval, but she nodded. “Of course. Come this way, please.”
She showed them into a room with wide, deep chairs done in pale gold, accented with tables of clear glass. On one table was a small fountain where blue water burbled over smooth white rocks. Another held a white box filled with white sand where some linear patterns had been drawn with, Eve assumed, the little rake that lay beside it.
The curtains were closed, but when they entered the room the rim of the tables illuminated.
“Please be comfortable.” Li gestured to the chairs. “Carmichael will be with you in just a moment.”
Ignoring her, Eve studied a mood screen. Soft pastels dripped down in this one, melting from pinks into blues into golds into pinks again. Smith’s voice crooned in the background.
“I already feel queasy,” Eve muttered. “I should’ve pressed to have him come into Central, where things are normal.”
“I heard you dislocated some mope’s jaw yesterday.” Peabody kept her face sober. “Some people don’t consider that actually normal in the day to day.”
“Some people don’t know diddly.” She turned back as Smith made his entrance.
“How nice to see you both again.” He made a flowing movement with his arms to indicate chairs. It had the wide sleeves of his shirt fluttering. “We’re having something cool and citrus. I hope you’ll enjoy it.”
He arranged himself in a chair as one of his staff placed a tray on a long glass table. “I’m told you’ve been trying to get in touch,” he continued as he poured liquid from pitcher to glasses. “I can’t imagine why, but must apologize for being unavailable.”
“Your rep called my commander,” Eve said. “So I imagine you have some idea.”
“Another apology forthcoming.” He picked up one of the glasses, held it in both of his handsome hands. “My agent is overprotective, which, naturally, is his job. Just the idea that the media could get wind that I’d spoken to you regarding such a terrible matter worries him. I told him I trusted you to be absolutely discreet, but . . .” He shrugged elegantly, sipped.
“I’m not looking for publicity, I’m looking for a murderer.”
“You won’t find one here. This is a place of peace and tranquillity.”
“Peace and tranquillity.” Eve nodded, watching his face. “I’d guess that sort of thing’s important to you.”
“Vital, as it should be to everyone. The world is a canvas, and on it is painted great beauty. All we have to do is look.”
“Peace and tranquillity and beauty are more vital to someone who grew up without them. To a man who was
systematically and regularly abused as a child. Battered and beaten. Do you pay your mother to keep quiet about it, or just to keep her away?”
The glass in Smith’s hand shattered, and a thin line of blood dripped down his palm.
Chapter 14
Shards of glass hitting the floor had, in Eve’s opinion, a more interesting musical note than the continued coo of Smith’s recorded voice.
She doubted any of his fans would recognize him now, with all the negative energy twisting his face. His bloody hand still clenched the shattered drinking glass.
She could hear his labored breaths before he sprang to his feet. She got to her own, slowly, and prepared to deflect any assault.
But he simply threw his head back, like a great dog about to bay, and howled out for Li.
She came on the run, bare feet slapping the floor and filmy robes flapping the air.
“Oh, Carmichael! Oh, you poor thing. You’re bleeding. Should I call the doctor? Should I call an ambulance?” She patted her own cheeks in rapid tat-tats.
While tears welled in his eyes, he held out his bleeding hand. “Do something.”
“Jesus.” Eve stepped forward, grabbed his injured hand, twisted it over to take a look at the cut. “Get a towel, some water, antiseptic, bandages. It’s not deep enough to worry the MTs.”
“But his hands, his beautiful hands. Carmichael is an artist.”
“Yeah, well, he’s an artist with a cut across his palm. No puncture. Peabody? Got a handkerchief?”
“Right here, Lieutenant.”
Taking it, Eve wrapped the cut while Li raced off, probably to call up a cosmetic surgeon.
“Sit down, Carmichael. You’re barely scratched.”
“You have no right, no right to come into my home and upset me this way. No right, no decency. You can’t come here, upset the balance. Threaten me.”
“I don’t recall threatening you, and I’ve got a pretty good memory for that kind of thing. Officer Peabody, did I threaten Mr. Smith?”
“No, sir, you did not.”
“You think because I live an ordered and privileged life I don’t know the darker corners.” His lips curled now, and he held his injured hand to his heart in a loose fist. “You want to extort money from me, payment to keep quiet about matters that are none of your business. Women like you always want to be paid.”
“Women like me?”
“You think you’re better than men. You use your wiles or your sex to control them, to suck them dry. You’re nothing but animals. Bitches and cunts. You deserve to . . .”
“Deserve to what?” Eve prompted when he stopped himself, when she watched the war for composure rage over his face. “To suffer, to die, to pay?”
“You won’t put words in my mouth.” He collapsed in the chair again, holding his hand by the wrist and rocking as if for comfort.
Li rushed back in carrying a fluffy white towel, a bottle of water, and what looked to be enough bandage to wrap an entire squadron after a bloody battle.
“Let my aide take care of it,” Eve told him. “She’s just going to mess it up, and hurt you considerably while she’s at it.”
Smith nodded curtly, and turned his head away from Peabody and the blood.
“Li, please go out now. Close the door.”
“But, Carmichael . . .”
“I want you to go.”
She blinked at the slap in his voice and fled.
“How did you learn about . . . her?” he asked Eve.
“It’s my job to learn about things.”
“It could ruin me, you know. My audience doesn’t want to know about that sort of . . . They don’t want the unseemly, the unattractive. They come to me for beauty, for romantic fantasy, not for the ugliness of reality.”
“I’m not interested in your audience or in making any information public, until and unless it applies to my case. I told you, I’m not interested in publicity.”
“Everyone is,” he retorted.
“Think what you like, it doesn’t change why I’m here. Your mother was an LC. She was abusive to you.”
“Yes.”
“You support her, financially.”
“As long as she’s taken care of, she stays away, and out of my life. She’s smart enough to know that coming forward, selling her story, might net her some quick money, but it would kill the golden goose. If my income suffers, so does hers. I explained this to her, very carefully, before the first payment was made.”
“Your relationship with your mother is adversarial.”
“We don’t have a relationship. I prefer not to think of the connection. It unbalances my chi.”
“Jacie Wooton was an LC.”
“Who?”
“Wooton. The woman who was murdered in Chinatown.”
“It has nothing to do with me.” More composed now, he waved it all away with his uninjured hand. “I also choose not to dwell on the darker shades of the world.”
“A second woman was murdered on Sunday. The mother of a grown son.”
He flashed her a look now, and there was a hint of fear in it. “That doesn’t have anything to do with me, either. I survived violence. I don’t perpetuate it.”
“Victims of abuse often become abusive. Children who were beaten often become violent adults. Sometimes a killer is born, sometimes he is made. A woman hurt you, a woman who had control over you, authority over you. She hurt you for years when you were helpless to stop her. How do you make her pay for that pain, for that humiliation, for all the years you lived in fear?”
“I don’t! She’ll never pay. Her type never pays. She wins, again and again. Every time I send her money, she wins again.” Tears tracked down his cheeks now. “She wins because you’re standing there pushing her into my head again. My life is not an illusion because I made it. I created it. I won’t let you come into it and try to shatter it, to smear it.”
Empathy rolled into her stomach. His words, the passion behind them, could have been her own. “You have a home here, and one in London.”
“Yes, yes, yes! What of it?” He jerked his hand, and glanced down at the tug of Peabody’s. When his gaze landed on the bloody cloth, his face went white as bone.
“Go away. Can’t you go away?”
“Tell me where you were Sunday morning.”
“I don’t know. How can I remember everything? I have people to take care of me. I’m entitled to be taken care of. I give pleasure. I take pleasure. I deserve it.”
“Sunday morning, Carmichael, between eight and noon.”
“Here. Right here. Sleeping, meditating, detoxifying. I can’t live with stress. I need my quiet times.”
“Were you alone?”
“I’m never alone. She’s in every closet, under every bed, waiting in the next room to strike out. I lock her away, but it doesn’t mean she isn’t waiting.”
She hurt, looking at him. Understanding the words, she hurt. “Did you leave the house on Sunday morning?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you know Lois Gregg?”
“I know so many people. So many women. They love me. Women love me because I’m perfect. Because I don’t threaten them. Because they don’t know that I know what they are under it all.”
“Did you kill Lois Gregg?”
“I have nothing more to say to you. I’m going to call my attorneys now. I want you to leave my home. Li!” He put his injured hand behind his back as he rose, swaying a little. He stepped carefully to the side, away from the blood-smeared towel.
“Li, make them go away,” he ordered, as she hurried into the room again. “Make them leave. I have to lie down now. I don’t feel well. I need my quiet room.”
“There now, there.” Cooing, she put an arm around his waist, took his weight. “I’ll take care of everything, don’t you worry. Poor baby. Don’t you worry.”
She shot a vicious look at Eve over her shoulder as she led Smith from the room. “I want you gone when I get back. If not, yo
ur superior will hear about this.”
Eve pursed her lips, listening to Li’s voice fade as she cooed Smith away.
“Guy’s got some serious problems,” Peabody commented.
“Yeah. Maybe he thinks he can cover it up with meditation, herb drinks, and mind-numbing music.” Eve shrugged. “Maybe he can. He couldn’t look at the blood,” she added, studying the towel. “Made him sick to see blood. Hard to do what was done to those two women if blood makes you sick. Then again, maybe it’s just the sight of his own blood that does it.”
She checked the time as they left the house. “We’re running a little early.”
“Yeah?” Peabody perked right up. “Then maybe we could hit a cart, or a 24/7. I missed breakfast.”
“Not that early.” When Peabody’s face fell, Eve sighed. “You know I hate that kicked puppy look. Whatever we pass first. And you have one minute to do the transaction, which will include getting me coffee.”
“Deal.”
They hit a cart, so Peabody settled for a scrambled egg wrap that Eve assumed tasted better than it smelled. The coffee didn’t but that was par. “We’re going to talk to Breen’s wife. I got a hassle when I called her office for her schedule, so I pulled in the reserves.”
Peabody’s response was an egg-substitute–filled mumble. She swallowed. “I’m supposed to arrange the appointments.”
“You’re going to bitch because I cut you a break?”
“No.” But she had to fight the pout. “I don’t want you to think I can’t fulfill my duties because I’ve got all this stuff going on.”
“If I have a complaint about your work, Peabody, you’ll be the first to know.”
“That’s a given,” Peabody muttered and took a slug of her orange-flavored energy drink. “You said reserves?”
“Julietta does fashion. I happen to know somebody in the fashion forefront. Ms. Gates’s schedule miraculously cleared when she got a call from Leonardo’s main squeeze.”
“You tagged Mavis. Mag.”
“It’s not a girl outing, Peabody, it’s a murder investigation.”
“Silver linings, sir. I like a nice silver lining.” Peabody washed down egg substitute with reconstituted citrus product. “I can’t wait to tell her we’re going to be neighbors. At least until she has the baby. I guess they’re going to want a bigger place.”