The In Death Collection, Books 16-20

by J. D. Robb

  Something flickered in her mind. “Okay, how could they be sure Moss would be the one to engage the engine? What about the wife?”

  “Didn’t drive.”

  “Not good enough. Even private lots can make a few extra fees by renting out a vehicle. You got to factor that in. And Kirkendall would want a hundred percent success rate. I want the lab to take another look. I’m betting there was a fail-safe on it. That he had control, and could detonate or abort by remote if necessary. Clinton’s their E and B man,” she stated. “That’s the specialty that pops out of his data, but Kirkendall would want the control.”

  “I’ll give the lab a push,” Baxter agreed. “We also spoke with the primary on the Duberry murder. Now there’s a guy who’s dug in.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He figured the ex-boyfriend. He still figures the ex-boyfriend. I’m not going to say he missed anything on the investigation, but I’ll be going over it again myself. He homed on this guy and that’s that.”

  “Boyfriend alibied?”

  “Right and tight. Get this.” He wiggled a fry at her, bit it in two. “He’s home alone, and the building’s scan cams are crap. So yeah, you might think, hey, he could slip out, do the deal, slip back, no big. But in the apartment above him, there’s this guy with this big-ass water bed. Snuck that in past building regs. Weighs a fricking ton. Top it off, he likes to party. Got himself two economy-sized ladies up there for a three-way. And while they’re surfing, they get pretty enthusiastic. Bed pops, and you got yourself a frigging ocean. Water comes gushing through the ceiling, and nearly drowns the guy below. Big altercation between upstairs and down, all witnessed by neighbors—and taking place at the time Duberry was strangled.”

  “Huh.” Eve stepped over, stole one of Baxter’s fries.

  “Primary’s sure the guy was behind it. You got a woman with no known enemies, ordinary life. You got no sexual assault, no burglary, so you gotta figure personal.”

  “Ex-boyfriend’s going to rape her—high probability,” Eve put in. “Do some damage to her face, too. That’s personal.”

  “Yeah, but the primary figures he hired somebody to do her. But the guy doesn’t have the financials for a hit. He’s barely making rent. And this was a prime hit. He’s got no priors, no known association with the dark side. The guy’s not in it, Dallas. We started the interviews again. Nobody comes up with any motive, nobody remembers the vic talking about any worries. Her communication and data equipment is long gone, but EDD did the scans, and came up zip.”

  “Okay, clock out for the night. Peabody and McNab are out talking to Kirkendall’s former sister-in-law. We’ll brief here, oh eight hundred.”

  “Good enough. Listen, Trueheart and I thought we could take the night shift on the kid. We can bunk here.” He shrugged a shoulder when Eve frowned at him. “She’s a cutie. Gets to you. Rough day for her. We could hang out with her awhile, take her mind off it.”

  “Talk to Summerset about where you should bunk. I appreciate the extra duty.”

  “No problem.” He lifted the burger to his mouth again, then paused. “Where did Peabody head to interview the sister-in-law?”

  “Nebraska.”

  “Nebraska.” He bit in, chewed thoughtfully. “Do people really live there? I thought it was one of those myths. You know, like Idaho.”

  “People live in Idaho, too, sir,” Trueheart told him.

  “Step out.” Baxter laughed, and swept a fry through ketchup. “The stuff you learn.”

  The two-passenger shuttle landed in a small cargo station in North Platte. As per Roarke’s memo, there was a vehicle waiting for the last leg of the trip.

  Peabody and McNab stood in the chilly evening air, staring at the sleek black jewel.

  “Oh my God. I thought the shuttle was mag.” Heart skipping, Peabody circled. “You know, the sleep chairs, the comp stations, the menu on the AutoChef.”

  “The speed,” McNab added with a dopey grin.

  Peabody sent him one back. “Yeah. Way uptown. But this—”

  “It’s a beast.” McNab trailed his fingers over the hood. “Man, this baby’s gotta wing.”

  “Bet your ass.”

  But when she started to open the driver’s-side door, he took her arm. “Wait. Who says you get to pilot?”

  “My partner’s primary.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Her husband provided the transpo.”

  “Not even,” he said with a shake of his head. “I’ve got a grade on you, Detective Baby.”

  “I wanna.”

  He laughed, and dug into one of the many red pockets on his baggy pants. “I say we flip for it.”

  “Let me see that credit first.”

  “This level of trust is sad,” he said, but handed it over.

  She studied it, turning it over, and back. “Okay, you call, I flip.”

  “Tails, due to how much I like yours.”

  “Fine, I’ll take heads due to the fact yours is so empty.” She tossed the credit, snatched it out of the air, and slapped it on the back of her hand. “Damn it!”

  “Woo-wee! Strap it in, She-Body, ’cause we’re going to orbit.”

  She sulked as she walked around to settle in the passenger’s side. Not that it wasn’t bodacious, even in that position. The seat molded to the tail McNab admired, like a lover’s hands, and the dash was a gleaming curve armed with enough gauges to make his claim of going into orbit not out of the realm.

  Still pouting, she engaged the map, programmed the desired location. And was told in the computer’s melodious male voice the most direct route, given an ETA of twenty minutes at posted speed limits.

  Beside her, McNab put on black-framed sun shades with hot red lenses. “We gonna beat that down cold.”

  He was right, she thought. The beast did wing. The thrill of it infected her enough to order the sky roof open.

  “You pick the tunes,” McNab shouted over the roar of engine and wind. “And pump it up!”

  She went for trash rock—it seemed to fit—and screamed along with the song as they tore south.

  The insanity that was McNab cut the travel time nearly in half. She took a portion of the time saved to rake at what was now a bird’s nest on her head, and tame it down to her usual ruler-straight bowl cut. McNab pulled a folding brush out of another pocket and whacked at his knotted ponytail.

  “Nice place,” he commented, looking around the yard, the field of corn that ran alongside it. “If you go for rural.”

  “I do. To visit anyway.” She studied the neatly painted red barn, the smaller, trimmer outbuilding, and the pasture where a few spotted cows grazed. “Somebody takes good care of this.”

  She got out, looked at the narrow patch of lawn, the ordered beds of fading fall flowers that led to a two-story white house with a covered porch.

  There were festive pumpkins, two with grinning faces carved out, on the steps, reminding her Halloween was only days away.

  “Do some dairy,” she observed. “Some row crops. Probably got some chickens out back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This stuff I know. My sister’s farm’s bigger than this, and she does okay. Hard work, you have to love it to do it, I think. Place like this is small, but well-run. Mostly they self-provide, sell some of the harvest and the by-products at a local market for transport. Maybe they got a hydro out back, too, so they can grow through the winter. But that costs.”

  He was out of his element. “Okay.”

  “She was an exec at one of the top communication companies in New York. Fast track. Husband was a producer—daytime drama. Individually they were pulling down double our combined salaries.”

  “Now they’re working a farm in Nebraska.” He nodded. “I get you.”

  “Somebody already knows we’re out here.”

  “Yeah.” Behind the shades, his gaze tracked to the dot of yellow blinking above the front door. “They got motion and cams, bet it’s a three-sixty sc
an. More on the fence lines, east and west. A lot of security for a little farm in West Bumfuck, Nebraska.”

  They went to the door, knocked. Steel-reinforced, MacNab thought, and noted the shimmer on the windows. Lockdown alarms.

  “Yes?” The voice through the intercom was female, and firm.

  “Mrs. Turnbill? We’re the police. Detectives Peabody and McNab with the New York City Police and Security Department.”

  “That’s not a police vehicle.”

  “No, ma’am, it’s private.” Peabody held up her badge. “We’d like to speak with you, and will wait until you verify our IDs.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You spoke with my partner, Lieutenant Dallas, earlier today. I understand your caution under the circumstances, Mrs. Turnbill, but it’s important we speak with you. If you refuse, we’ll contact the local authorities and arrange for a warrant. I don’t want to do that. We’ve gone to some trouble to keep this visit quiet, to insure your safety.”

  “Wait.”

  Like Peabody, McNab kept his badge up, and watched the thin red light shimmer out, scan both. Somebody, he thought, isn’t just cautious, but scared. Right into the bowels.

  The door opened. “I’ll speak with you, but I can’t tell you any more than I told Lieutenant Dallas.” As she spoke a man came down from the second floor. His face was grim, his eyes cold.

  “Why can’t you people leave us alone?”

  “The kids?” his wife asked him.

  “Fine. I told them to stay upstairs.”

  He was stocky in the way that told Peabody he did manual labor routinely. His face was tanned, squint lines scoring out from his eyes, his hair bleached by the sun.

  Six years, she thought, had made him more farmer than urbanite. And the way he kept one hand in the pocket of his work pants warned her he was carrying.

  “Mr. Turnbill, we’ve come a long way, and not to harass you. Roger Kirkendall is wanted in connection with seven homicides.”

  “Only seven.” His lips twisted. “You’re way off.”

  “That may be, but it’s the seven that concern us at the moment.”

  Taking his cue, McNab kept his voice as brittle as Turnbill’s, and drew crime scene photos from his field bag. “Here’s a couple to start.”

  He’d gone straight to the kids, and saw by the way Roxanne paled, it had been the right move. “They were sleeping when he cut their throats. I guess that’s a mercy.”

  “Oh God.” Roxanne wrapped her arms around her belly. “Oh my God.”

  “You’ve got no right to come in here and do this.”

  “Oh yeah.” McNab’s eyes were merciless as they met Turnbill’s. “We do.”

  “McNab.” Peabody murmured it, deliberately reached out and pulled back the photos. “I’m sorry. Sorry to disturb you, sorry to upset you. We need your help.”

  “We don’t know anything.” Turnbill put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “We just want to be left alone.”

  “You left high-powered, high-paying jobs six years ago,” McNab began. “Why?”

  “That’s none of your—”

  “Joshua.” Roxanne shook her head. “I need to sit down. Let’s just sit down.”

  She turned into a living room showing the chaotic debris of young children, the comfortable wear of family. Roxanne sat, gripped her husband’s hand. “How do you know he did it? He’s gotten away with so much for so long, how do you know?”

  “We have evidence linking him to the crimes. Those children, their parents, and a domestic were all murdered in their beds. Grant Swisher was your sister’s attorney in her divorce and custody case.”

  “Six years ago,” she replied. “Yes, he could wait six years. He could wait sixty.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is?”

  “None. He leaves us alone now. He leaves us alone. We’re not important anymore. We don’t want to be.”

  “Where’s your sister?” McNab demanded, and Roxanne jerked.

  “She’s dead. He killed her.”

  “We believe he’s capable of doing so.” Peabody kept her eyes level on Roxanne’s. “But he hasn’t. Not yet. What if he finds her before we find him? What if you have some information and refuse to cooperate with us, impede our investigation long enough for him to hunt her down?”

  “I don’t know where she is.” Weary tears filled Roxanne’s eyes. “Her, my nephew, my niece. I haven’t seen them in six years.”

  “But you know she’s alive. You know she got away from him.”

  “I thought she was dead. For two years. I went to the police, but they couldn’t help. I thought he’d killed them. And then—”

  “You don’t have to do this, Roxie.” Her husband drew her closer. “You don’t have to go through this again.”

  “I don’t know what to do. What if he comes here? What if he does, after all this time? Our babies, Joshua.”

  “We’re safe here.”

  “You’ve got a good security system.” McNab drew Turnbill’s attention back to him. “So did the Swishers. The nice family on the Upper West Side he slaughtered. Their good security system didn’t help them.”

  “We’ll help you,” Peabody assured them. “We’ll arrange for police protection for you, for your family. We took private transpo out of New York, under the radar. He doesn’t know we’re here. He doesn’t, at this time, know we’re looking for him. The longer it takes to find him, the better the chance he’ll know.”

  “When will this be over?”

  “When we find him.” McNab shut down on compassion as the tears slid down Roxanne’s cheeks. “We’ll find him sooner with your help.”

  “Joshua. Please, would you get me some water?”

  He studied her face, then nodded. “Are you sure?” he asked as he rose. “Roxie, are you sure?”

  “No, but I know I don’t want to live like this.” She took slow breaths as he left the room. “It’s worse for him, I think. Worse. He works so hard for so little. We were happy in New York. Such an exciting city, full of so much energy. We both had careers we loved, we were good at. We’d just bought a townhouse. Because I was pregnant. My sister . . .”

  She trailed off, managed a smile when her husband came in with a glass of water. “Thanks, honey. My sister was damaged, I guess you could say. He damaged her. Years of abuse, physical, emotional, mental. I tried to get her to leave, to get help. I’d talk to her, but she was too afraid, or too entrenched, and I was the little sister who didn’t understand. It was her fault, you see. I did a lot of studying on battered syndrome in those days. I’m sure you’ve seen your share of it.”

  “Too much,” Peabody agreed.

  “He was worse than anything, than anybody. Not just because she was my sister. It’s not that he likes to cause pain, to harm. It’s that it means nothing to him. He might snap the bone in her finger for having dinner on the table two minutes late—according to his schedule—then sit down and eat a hot meal without a single flicker of emotion. Can you imagine living like that?”

  “No, ma’am. No,” Peabody repeated, “I can’t.”

  “She was property to him, Dian and the children. It was when he began to hurt the children that she was able to pull out of the mire. He’d already damaged them, too, but she thought she was protecting them, keeping the family together. He brutalized them, punishments, his brand of discipline. Solitary confinement, he’d call it, or he’d make them stand in cold showers for an hour, deny them food for two days. Once he cut off all of my niece’s hair because he said she’d taken too long brushing it. But then he began to beat Jack, my nephew. Toughen him up, he claimed. One day, when Roger was out, she found her son with Roger’s army-issue stunner. He’d put it on full, he was holding it here . . .”

  She pressed her fingers to the pulse in her throat. “He was going to kill himself. This eight-year-old boy was going to end his own life rather than face another day with that monster. It woke her up. She left. She took the kids, nothing else.
She didn’t even pack a bag. There were shelters I’d told her about, and she ran to one.”

  Roxanne closed her eyes, drank deeply. “I don’t know if she’d have gone through with it, expect for the children. But once she did, it was like a miracle. She got herself back. And a few weeks later, she hired a lawyer. It was horrible, going through the trial, but she did it. She stood up to him, and she won.”

  “She never intended to adhere to the conditions, to stay in New York, to allow him to see the kids again,” Peabody said.

  “I don’t know. She never told me, never even hinted, but no, I think not. I think she must have planned to run all along. I don’t know how else she could have managed to get away from him.”

  “There are undergrounds, for people in her situation.”

  “Yes. I didn’t know then. When she vanished, I was sure he’d killed her and the kids. He’s not only capable, but he has the means, the training. Even when he took me, I thought—”

  “He abducted you?”

  “I was on the subway coming home, and I felt a little sting.” She cupped a hand around her biceps. “I felt sick and dizzy—and I don’t remember. I remember waking up, still sick. It was a room, a big room. No windows and just this ugly greenish light. He’d taken my clothes, all of my clothes.”

  She pressed her lips together until they went white, reached blindly for her husband’s hand. “I was on the floor, my hands in restraints. And as I woke I was lifted up, by some sort of pulley, so that I was standing, had to stand on my toes. I was six months pregnant with Ben.”

  Turnbill pressed his face into his wife’s shoulder, and Peabody could see now that he wept.

  “He stepped in front of me. He had some sort of rod. He said, ‘Where is my wife?’ Even before I could answer, he pressed the tip of the rod here.” She laid a hand between her breasts. “Horrible pain, electrical shock. He told me, very calmly, that he had the rod on low, and would up the power every time I lied.