The In Death Collection, Books 16-20

by J. D. Robb

  “The last one. She’s a pincher, all right, and worse. You get a lot of her type in the foster system. Somebody like her wouldn’t consider she had a mentally or emotionally twisted charge as long as the kid presented the illusion of submission.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not so much, but I could when it was worth my while. And I know a lot of kids, most kids, come through something like that and lead normal lives. Renquist could be one of them. His sister might very well have been clumsy. But I don’t like coincidence. I’ve got to mull this over and I’ve got to go meet the Boston cop.”

  “I’ll drop you.”

  “No, better I catch a cab or take the underground. This guy sees me show up in a hot car with a fancy piece behind the wheel, he’s not going to like me.”

  “You know how I love being referred to as your fancy piece.”

  “Sometimes you’re my love muffin.”

  He managed a strangled laugh. She could, at the oddest times, surprise him. “And I try my very best to earn the name. In any case, I’ve got some business I can take care of. Why don’t you contact me when you’ve finished, and let me know what comes next?”

  “You’re pretty amenable for a fancy piece.”

  He leaned down and kissed her lightly. “I’ve been thoroughly disciplined.”

  “My ass.”

  “Which is certainly part of the package. No rush,” he added as he slid into the car. “I’m going to be at least an hour myself.”

  It took Eve over a quarter of that to travel through the hideous Boston traffic. It still put her at the bar and grill a half block from Haggerty’s station house ahead of time.

  It was a typical cop haunt—good, cheap food and drink with no fancy notes. Booths, a scatter of two and four tops, and plenty of stools along the bar.

  There were a number of off-shift cops, in and out of uniform, winding down from the day. Attention slid her way when she entered, the brief beat of observation, then recognition of breed. Cop to cop.

  She’d expected Haggerty to come in early—marking his territory—and wasn’t surprised by the signal from a lone man at a table.

  He was toughly built—bull-chested, big-shouldered, with a ruddy, square face topped by a short crop of sandy hair. He studied her as she crossed the room.

  There was a beer, half gone, in front of him.

  “DS Haggerty?”

  “That’s me. Lieutenant Dallas.”

  “Thanks for making time.”

  They shook hands; she sat.

  “Want a beer?”

  “Could use one, thanks.”

  She let him order it, since it was his territory, and let him take his time sizing her up.

  “You got an interest in one of my open cases,” he said at length.

  “I got a vic. A strangulation, rape with object. A run-through IRCCA for like crimes turned up yours. My theory is he was practicing, perfecting, before he did the New York job.”

  “He wasn’t sloppy in Boston. Neither am I.”

  She nodded, sipped her beer. “I’m not here to bust balls, Haggerty, or to question your investigation. I need a hand. If I’m right, the guy we’re both looking for is working in New York now, and he’s not done. So we help each other, and we shut him down.”

  “And you get the collar.”

  She drank more beer, let it simmer. “I take him in New York, I get the collar. That’s the way it works. But your boss will know if any information you share with me aided in the arrest and conviction of this son of a bitch. And you’ll close your case. Your cold case,” she added. “Unless you’re a fuckup, you’ll be able to hang another murder on him. When this goes down, there’s going to be a lot of media. You’ll get your share of that, too.”

  He sat back. “Pissed you off.”

  “I start off my day pissed off. My investigation has led me to believe this asshole has killed at least six people to date. I suspect there are more, and I know goddamn well there will be more.”

  He sobered. “Stand down, Lieutenant. I was testing the waters. I don’t give a skinny rat’s ass about the media. Not going to say I don’t care about the collar. Fucking right I do. My vic was beat to shit before he tied his goddamn bow around her neck. So I want him, and I got nothing. I worked the case hard, and got nothing. Yeah, officially it’s cold, but it ain’t cold to me.”

  He took a long drink of beer. “It’s under my skin, and I work it whenever I get the chance. So you tell me you got a case in New York, and it brings you back here, to mine, I want a piece of it.”

  Because she understood, she lowered her hackles and took the first step. “He’s imitating historic serial killers. One of the reasons he hit Boston—”

  “Boston Strangler?” Haggerty pursed his lips. “I played with that awhile. Copycat thing. Had enough of the same elements. I studied up on those cases, looking for an angle to work. Nothing gelled, and since he didn’t hit again . . .”

  “He did a homeless woman in New L.A. before Boston, and he’s hit New York. He’s also killed three LCs, Paris, London, New York, by emulating Jack the Ripper.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “It’s the same man. He left me notes with my two.”

  “Nothing like that with mine,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “Don’t have a single witness. The security system on the building, if you can call it that, was taken out the day before he killed her. Nobody got around to fixing it. Let me get out my notes.”

  She took her own from his. Before she’d drained her beer they’d agreed to exchange case files.

  She checked the time, calculated. A call to the West Coast netted her a meet with the primary there. Another got her Roarke.

  He seemed to be in some sort of a bar himself, but from the pretty lights, the quiet hum, and the glint of what she thought was crystal, it was several steps away from Haggerty’s hangout.

  “I’ve wrapped up here,” she told him. “I’m on my way to transpo. How much time do you need?”

  “Another half hour on this will do me.”

  “Fine. Just meet me there. I’ve got enough to occupy myself with until you show. Any problem for you if we head straight to the West Coast from here?”

  “I believe I can find something to occupy myself with there as well.”

  She didn’t doubt it. By the time he walked onto the shuttle, she’d reread her notes and was writing a report on her Boston leg for her team and her commander.

  Roarke set his briefcase aside, cleared the shuttle to take off when ready, then ordered them both a meal.

  “How do you feel about basketball?” he asked her.

  “It’s okay. Lacks the poetry of baseball and the sheer meanness of arena ball, but it’s got speed and drama. What’d you do, spend your hour buying the Celtics?”

  “I did, yes.”

  She looked up. “Get out.”

  “Actually, it took a bit more than an hour. We’ve been in negotiations for a few months now. Since I was here, I gave it the last push and we finalized it. I thought it would be fun.”

  “I spend an hour drinking a lukewarm beer and talking murder, and you buy a basketball team.”

  “We should all play to our strengths.”

  She ate because it was there, and filled Roarke in.

  “Haggerty’s thorough. Bulldog type, not just in build. In mindset. He hasn’t let go of the case, and a lot of cops would have after this amount of time. He’s kept picking at it but hasn’t gotten anywhere. I just can’t see what he missed. Might catch something when I see the full file, but he did the steps.”

  “And how does that help you?”

  “Knowing he was here. Being sure of it. The dates. I can backtrack there, see if anybody on my list was in Boston, or just unaccounted for on the corresponding dates. See if maybe, just maybe, there’s a connection between any of them and Haggerty’s victim.”

  “Someone else is a bulldog,” Roarke commented. “Not in body type, but certain
ly in mindset. I could check the transportation angle for you. See if any of your names show up on public or private transpos for those dates.”

  “I don’t have the authorization for that. Yet. I’m going to get it. I pull the New L.A. and the European murders into the mix, and I’ll get it. Any and all of my current suspects are high-profile enough that if I brush too close to the line, they could use it to get evidence tossed in trial.”

  “That’s assuming they, or their attorneys, saw the brush strokes.”

  They wouldn’t see Roarke’s, Eve knew. No one would. “I can’t use the evidence if I don’t have the authorization to seek the evidence.” But she’d know enough to be able to narrow the list. Enough, potentially, to save a life.

  “I take him down, give him any wiggle room in the courts and he gets off, he’ll kill someone else down the road. He won’t stop until he’s stopped. Not only because he enjoys it, he needs it, but because he’s been working toward this for a long, long time. If I screw this up, all I do is put a hitch in his stride. Once he gets his rhythm back, whoever he kills is on me. I can’t live with that.”

  “All right. I understand that. But, Eve, look at me now, promise me that if he kills someone else before you’re able to stop him, you won’t feel the same way.”

  She did look at him. “I wish I could” was all she said.

  Detective Sloan was a young, eager beaver who’d caught the case with his older, more experienced, and less interested partner. The partner had since retired, and Sloan was partnered with a female counterpart who’d come along for the ride for the meet with Eve.

  “It was the first homicide where I was primary,” Sloan told Eve over chilled juices in a health bar. New L.A.’s version, she supposed, of the cop haunt.

  The place was bright and cool, done in crisp colors and boasting a cheery waitstaff who were bouncy on their feet.

  Eve thanked God she lived and worked on the other coast, where waiters were appropriately surly and never felt obliged to offer you something called Pineapple-Papaya Phizz as the special of the day.

  “Trent gave it to me as a training exercise,” he added.

  “He gave it to you so he didn’t have to lift his fat ass off his desk chair,” the partner put in.

  Sloan grinned amiably. “Might’ve played into it. The victim was one of the disenfranchised. I did track some family after we identified her, but nobody cared to claim the body. I got conflictings from the witnesses I managed to convince to talk to me. Though they were impaired by some form of illegals, the most substantial described a male—race undetermined—wearing a gray or blue uniform who was seen entering the building at or around the time of the murder. Victim was squatting, and since anybody else in the building was also there illegally, everybody worked at ignoring everybody else.”

  “You’ve got a hot one back in New York with a similar MO.” The new partner’s name was Baker, and both she and Sloan were attractive, healthy specimens with sun-bleached hair. They looked more like a couple of professional surfers than cops.

  Unless, Eve mused, you looked at the eyes.

  “We, ah, did a little research after you contacted me,” Sloan explained. “Get a better handle on what you were looking for, and why.”

  “Good, saves me time explaining myself. You could reach out on this and let me have a copy of your case files, and walk me through the steps of your investigation.”

  “I can do that, and I’d like quid pro quo. My first case as primary,” Sloan added. “I’d sure like to close it.”

  “We’d like to close it,” Baker corrected. “Trent cashed it on his twenty-five, plans to spend the rest of his life fishing. He’s not in this.”

  “Fair enough,” Eve said.

  This time when she was finished, she let Roarke pick her up. To her mind, any cops who weren’t embarrassed to be seen drinking papaya juice couldn’t blink at a fellow officer getting into a sleek little convertible. She stashed her growing bag of notes and discs behind her seat.

  “I want to run by the scene, take a look at the setup.”

  “We can do that.”

  She gave him the address, waited until he’d programmed it into the onboard computer. “So, did you buy the Dodgers?”

  “I’m afraid not, but you have only to ask.”

  She leaned her head back, let her thoughts circle while he drove.

  “Can’t figure out why anybody lives out here,” she said. “Just because they’ve had the big one doesn’t mean there’s not another big one just waiting to flatten them.”

  “Nice breeze though,” Roarke commented. “And they’ve certainly battled back the smog and noise pollution.”

  “Whole place feels like a vid, you know? Or a VR program. Too much peachy, pinky, white. Too many healthy bodies with perfect smiling faces on top of them. Creeps me.

  “And I just don’t think you ought to have palm trees waving around in the middle of a city. It’s just not right.”

  “This should please you then. The building you want appears to be suitably shabby and unkempt, and the locals seem to be satisfactorily shady.”

  She sat up, stifled a yawn, and looked around.

  Only about half the streetlights were working, and the building itself was dead dark. Some of the windows were riot-barred, others boarded. Several people skulked and slithered around in the shadows, and in one she spotted an illegals deal winding up.

  “This is more like it.” Cheered, she stepped out of the car. “This thing got full security?”

  “It’s loaded.” He put the top up, engaged locks and deflectors.

  “Her flop was on the third floor. Might as well poke around since we’re here.”

  “It’s always a pleasure to poke around in a condemned building where someone might stab, bludgeon, or blast us at any moment.”

  “You’ve got your kind of fun, I’ve got mine.” She scanned the area, selected her target. “Yo, asshole!”

  The chemi-head in the long black jacket rocked to the balls of his feet.

  “If I have to chase you, it’s going to piss me off,” Eve warned. “Then I’ll probably slip so that my foot ends up planted in your balls. Just got a question. You got the answer, it’s worth ten.”

  “Don’t know nothing.”

  “Then you won’t make the ten. How long you flopped around here?”

  “While. Not bothering nobody.”

  “Were you around when Susie Mannery got strangled, up on three?”

  “Shit. I don’t kill nobody. I don’t know nobody. Prolly the men in white done it.”

  “What men in white?”

  “Shit, you know. The guys from under the world. Turn themselves into rats when they want, then kill people in their sleep. Cops know. Some prolly be cops.”

  “Right. Those men in white. Blow,” she told him, and started into the building.

  “Where my ten?”

  “Wrong answers.”

  She didn’t get any right ones on her way to the third floor. Mannery’s room was occupied again, but the current resident wasn’t at home. There was a ripped mattress on the floor, a box of rags, and a very old sandwich.

  Like the chemi-head outside, nobody she managed to roust inside had seen anything, knew anything, done anything.

  “Wasting our time,” she said at length. “This isn’t my turf. I don’t know who to push. And if I did, I don’t know what help it would be. Living like this, people think you’ve given up. But Mannery hadn’t. Sloan gave me a list of her personal effects. She had clothes, and a cache of food, and a stuffed dog. You don’t haul around a stuffed dog if you’ve given up. She was probably zoned out when he came in on her, but she was still breathing. And he had no right.”

  Roarke turned her so that she faced him in the hot, filthy room. “Lieutenant, you’re tired.”

  “I’m okay.”

  When he simply stroked her cheek, she closed her eyes a moment. “Yeah, I’m tired. I know about places like this. A couple of times, when
he ran thin, we’d flop in places like this. Hell, it might’ve been here for all I know. I don’t have all of it back.”

  “You need to shut down for a bit.”

  “I’ll catch some sleep in the shuttle. No point in staying out here. I probably think better in New York anyway.”

  “Let’s go home then.”

  “I guess I reneged on the out-of-town nookie.”

  “I’ll put it on your account.”

  She dozed in the shuttle as it flew over the country, and dreamed of rats who become men dressed in white. Of a man without a face who strangled her with a long white scarf, and tied it with a pretty bow under her chin.

  Chapter 17

  Marlene Cox worked the ten to two shift, three nights a week at Riley’s Irish Pub. It was her uncle’s place, and his name was actually Waterman, but his mother had been born a Riley, and Uncle Pete figured that was close enough.

  It was a good way to help finance her post-grad work at Columbia. She was studying horticulture, though her plans for what she wanted to do with the degree once she’d earned it were vague. Mostly she simply liked college, so she remained a student at twenty-three.

  She was a slight and pretty brunette with long, straight hair and a pair of guileless brown eyes. Earlier in the summer her family had worried so much about her—several college students in New York had been murdered—that she’d canceled her summer classes.

  She had to admit she’d been a little scared herself. She’d known the first girl who’d been killed. Only slightly, but still, it had been a shock to have recognized the face of a fellow student in the media reports.

  She’d never known anyone who’d died before, much less known anyone who’d died violently. It hadn’t taken much persuasion to convince her to stick closer to home, to take extra precautions.

  But the police had caught the killer. She’d actually known him a little, too. That had been not only a shock but also a little exciting in a weird way.

  Now that things had quieted down again, Marlene didn’t give much thought to the girl she’d known slightly, or the killer she’d chatted with briefly at a cyber-club. Between her family, the part-time job, and her studies, her life was as normal as normal got.