by J. D. Robb
That odd angle of Boomer’s arm. Broken, she mused, and dislocated. She had a vague, hideous memory of the brittle sound of a bone snapping, the nausea that went above the agony, the high-pitched whine that substituted for a scream when a hand was clamped over your mouth.
The cold sweat, and the bowel-loosening terror of knowing those fists would come back, and come back until you were dead. Until you wished to God Almighty that you were.
The knock at her door had her jolting, had her swallowing a yelp. Through the glass she saw Peabody, uniform pressed, shoulders straight.
Eve ran a hand over her mouth to steady herself. It was time to go to work.
Chapter Three
Boomer’s flop was better than some. The building had once been a low-rent hourly motel that had catered to hookers on a budget before prostitution had been licensed and legalized. It was four stories, and no one had ever bothered to put in an elevator or glide, but it did boast a dingy lobby and the dubious security of a surly-faced droid.
From the smell, the health department had recently ordered insect and rodent extermination.
The droid had a tick in her right eye from a faulty chip, but she focused her good one on Eve’s badge.
‘We’re up to code,’ she claimed, standing behind cloudy safety glass. ‘We have no trouble here.’
‘Johannsen.’ Eve tucked her shield away. ‘Anyone visit him lately?’
The droid’s dinky eye hitched and rolled. ‘I’m not programmed to monitor visitors, only to collect rents and maintain order.’
‘I can confiscate your memory discs and play them back for myself.’
The droid said nothing, but a faint hum indicated she was running her own disc. ‘Johannsen, room 3C, has not returned in eight hours, twenty-eight minutes. He left alone. He had no visitors in the last two weeks.’
‘Communications?’
‘He does not use our communication system. He has his own.’
‘We’re going to have a look at his room.’
‘Third floor, second door left. Don’t alarm other tenants. We have no trouble here.’
‘Yeah, it’s a paradise.’ Eve headed up the steps, noting the crumbling wood, well gnawed by rodents. ‘Record, Peabody.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Dutifully, Peabody clipped her recorder to her shirt. ‘If he was here about eight hours ago, he didn’t last long after he left. Probably no more than a couple hours.’
‘Long enough to get the shit beat out of him.’ Idly Eve scanned the walls. Several illegal invitations and anatomically doubtful suggestions were inscribed. One of the authors had a spelling deficiency and consistently left the c out of fuck.
Still, the message was clear enough.
‘Homey little place, huh?’
‘Reminds me of my granny’s house.’
At the door of 3C, Eve glanced back. ‘Why, Peabody, I think you made a joke.’
While Eve chuckled and took out her master code, Peabody flushed scarlet. She had herself back in line by the time the locks disengaged.
‘Bolted himself in, didn’t he?’ Eve muttered as the last of the three Keligh-500s opened. ‘And didn’t go for cheap. These babies cost about a week of my pay each. For all the good they did him.’ She let out a breath. ‘Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, entering victim’s residence.’ She pushed the door open. ‘Damn, Boomer, you were a pig.’
The heat was enormous. Temperature control in the flop consisted of closing the window or opening it. Boomer had opted for closed, and had trapped stifling summer inside.
The room smelled of bad food gone over, stale clothes, and spilled whiskey. Leaving Peabody to do the initial scan, Eve walked into the center of what was little more than a box and shook her head.
The sheets on the narrow bed were stained with substances she wasn’t keen to analyze. Boxes of take-out food were piled beside it. From the small mountain of dirty clothes heaped in corners, she assumed laundry hadn’t been high on Boomer’s list of household chores. Her feet stuck to the floor and made little sucking sounds as she wandered the room.
In self-defense, she fought the single window open. The sounds of air and street traffic poured in like a flood.
‘Jesus, what a place. He made decent money weaseling. No way he had to live like this.’
‘He must have wanted to.’
‘Yep.’ Wrinkling her nose, Eve eased open a door and studied the bathroom. There was a stainless steel toilet and sink, a shower stall built for the height disadvantaged. The stench roiled her stomach. ‘Worse then a three-day corpse.’ She breathed through her mouth, turned back. ‘There’s where he put his money.’
In agreement, Peabody joined Eve at a sturdy counter. On it was a pricey data and communication center. Attached to the wall above was a viewing screen and a shelf overflowing with discs. Eve chose one at random, read the label.
‘Boomer was into culture, I see. Bodacious Boobs of Bimbo Bitches.’
‘That took the Oscar last year.’
Eve snorted and tossed the disc back. ‘Good one, Peabody. You want to keep that sense of humor going, ’cause we’re going to have to run all this shit. Box up the discs, record number and labels. We’ll scan them back at Cop Central.’
Eve engaged the ’link and searched through for any calls Boomer had saved. She zipped through food orders, a session with a video prostitute that had cost him five thousand. There were two calls from a suspected dealer of illegals, but the men had merely chatted about sports, heavy on baseball and arena bash. With some curiosity, she noted that her office number was logged twice in the last thirty hours, but he’d left no message.
‘He was trying to get in touch with me,’ she murmured. ‘He disengaged without leaving a message. That’s not like him.’ She pulled out the disc and handed it to Peabody to put in evidence.
‘There’s nothing to indicate he was afraid or worried, Lieutenant.’
‘No, he was a true weasel. If he’d thought someone was going to pin him, he’d have camped on my doorstep. Okay, Peabody, I hope your immunizations are up to date. Let’s start going through this mess.’
By the time they were finished, they were filthy, sweaty, and disgusted. At Eve’s direct order, Peabody had loosened the stiff collar of her uniform and rolled up the sleeves. Still, sweat rained down her face and had her hair curling madly.
‘I thought my brothers were pigs.’
Eve toed aside dirty underwear. ‘How many you got?’
‘Two. And a sister.’
‘Four of you?’
‘My parents are Free-Agers, sir,’ Peabody explained with twin notes of apology and embarrassment in her voice. ‘They’re really into rural living and propagation.’
‘You continue to surprise me, Peabody. A tough urbanite like you springing from Free-Agers. How come you’re not growing alfalfa, weaving mats, and raising a brood?’
‘I like to kick ass. Sir.’
‘Good reason.’ Eve had left what she considered the worst for last. With unconcealed revulsion, she studied the bed. The thought of body parasites scrambled through her head. ‘We’ve got to deal with the mattress.’
Peabody swallowed hard. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I don’t know about you, Peabody, but I’m heading straight for a decontamination chamber when we’re done here.’
‘I’ll be right behind you, Lieutenant.’
‘Okay. Let’s do it.’
The sheets came first. There was nothing but smells and stains. Eve would leave them for the sweepers to analyze, but she’d already ruled out any possibility that Boomer had been killed in his own flop.
Still, she was thorough, shaking out the pillow, manipulating the foam. At her signal, Peabody hefted one end of the mattress and she the other. It was heavy as a rock, and with a grunt they flipped it.
‘Maybe there is a God,’ Eve murmured.
Affixed to the bottom of the mattress were two small packs. One was filled with pale blue powder, the other a sealed disc. She tugged both free. Cla
mping down on the urge to break open the powder, she studied the disc. It wasn’t labeled, but unlike the others, it had been carefully encased to keep it free of dust.
Ordinarily, she would have run it immediately in Boomer’s unit. She could stand the stench, the sweat, even the dirt. But she didn’t think she could maintain another minute wondering what microcosmic parasites were crawling over her skin.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
She waited until Peabody carried the evidence box out into the hall. With one last glance at the way her man had lived, Eve shut the door, sealed it, and left the red police security light beaming.
Decontamination wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It had the single virtue of being fairly short. Eve sat with Peabody, both of them stripped to the skin, in a two-seated chamber with curved white walls reflecting the hot white light.
‘But it’s a dry heat,’ Peabody stated and had Eve laughing.
‘I always figured this is what Hell’s like.’ She closed her eyes, willed herself to relax. She didn’t consider herself phobic, but closed-in spaces made her itchy. ‘You know, Peabody, I used Boomer about five years now. He wasn’t exactly the GQ type, but I wouldn’t have pegged him living like that.’ She still had the smell in her nostrils. ‘He was clean. Tell me what you saw in the bathroom.’
‘Filth, mold, scum, towels that hadn’t been washed. Two bars of soap, one unopened, a half tube of shampoo, tooth gel, an ultrasound brush and shaver. One hair comb, broken.’
‘Grooming tools. He kept himself in shape, Peabody. Even liked to consider himself a lady’s man. My guess is the sweepers are going to tell me the food, the clothes, the grunge is all about two, maybe three weeks old. What does that tell you?’
‘That he was holed up - worried, scared, or involved enough to let things go.’
‘Exactly. Not desperate enough to come in and unload to me, but worried enough to hide a couple of things under his mattress.’
‘Where no one would ever think of looking for them,’ Peabody said dryly.
‘He wasn’t terribly bright about some things. You got a guess on the substance?’
‘An illegal.’
‘I’ve never seen an illegal that color. Something new,’ Eve mused. The light dimmed to gray and a beeper sounded. ‘Looks like we’re clean. Let’s dig up some fresh clothes and go run that disc.’
‘What the hell is this?’ Eve scowled at her monitor. Unconsciously she began to toy with the weighty diamond she wore around her neck.
‘A formula?’
‘I can figure that out, Peabody.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Chastised, Peabody eased back.
‘Shit, I hate science.’ With hope, Eve glanced over her shoulder. ‘You any good at it?’
‘No, sir. I’m not even competent.’
Eve studied the mix of numbers, figures, and symbols and crossed her eyes. ‘My unit’s not programmed for this crap. It’ll have to go to the lab for analysis.’ Impatient, she drummed her fingers on the desk. ‘My hunch would be it’s the formula for that powder we found, but how the hell would a second rater like Boomer get his hands on it? And who was his other trainer? You knew he was one of mine, Peabody. How?’
Struggling with embarrassment, Peabody stared over Eve’s shoulder at the figures on the screen. ‘You listed him in several intradepartmental reports on closed cases, Lieutenant.’
‘You make a habit of reading intradepartmental reports, Officer?’
‘Yours, sir.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, sir, you’re the best.’
‘Are you sucking up, Peabody, or bucking for my job?’
‘There’ll be room when you’re promoted to captain, sir.’
‘What makes you think I want a captaincy?’
‘You’d be stupid if you didn’t, and you’re not. Stupid, sir.’
‘Okay, we’ll let that rest. Do you scan any other reports?’
‘Now and then.’
‘Do you have any clue as to who Boomer’s trainer would be in Illegals?’
‘No, sir. I’ve never seen his name attached to any other cop. Most weasels only have one trainer.’
‘Boomer liked to diversify. Let’s hit the streets. We’ll scope a few of his usual joints, see what we turn up. We’ve only got a couple of days on this, Peabody. If you’ve got anyone warming the home fires for you, let him know you’ll be busy.’
‘I’m unattached, sir. I don’t have a problem with putting in extra time.’
‘Good.’ Eve rose. ‘Then saddle up. And Peabody, we’ve been naked together. Drop all the “sirs,” will you? Make it Dallas.’
‘Yes, sir, Lieutenant.’
It was after three A.M. when she stumbled through the front door, tripped over the cat who had decided to guard the entrance hall, swore, and turned blindly for the stairs.
In her mind were dozens of impressions: dim bars, strip clubs, the steamy streets where low-level licensed companions plied their trade. All of them ebbed and flowed together in the unappetizing stew that had been Boomer Johannsen’s life.
No one knew anything, of course. No one had seen anything. The single corroborative statement she’d gleaned from her crawl through the seamier side of the city was that no one had heard from or laid eyes on Boomer in over a week, possibly longer.
But someone had laid a great deal more than eyes on him. Her time was running low to find out who and why.
The bedroom lights were on dim. She’d already stripped off her shirt and tossed it aside when she noted the bed was empty. There was an instant flare of disappointment, a faint uncomfortable tug of panic.
He’d had to leave, she thought. He was right now heading toward any possible spot in the colonized universe. He could be gone for days.
Staring miserably at the bed, she toed off her shoes and tugged off her slacks. Groping in a drawer, she pulled out a cotton undershirt and yanked it over her head.
God, she was pitiful, mooning because Roarke had to take care of business. Because he wasn’t there for her to snuggle up against. Because he wasn’t there to ward off the nightmares that seemed to plague her with more intensity and frequency as her memories of the past grew to crowd her.
She was too tired to dream, she told herself. Too busy to brood. And strong enough not to remember anything she didn’t care to remember.
She turned, intending to go to her upstairs office to sleep when the door slid open. Relief flushed through her like shame.
‘I thought you’d had to leave.’
‘I was working.’ Roarke crossed to her. In the dim light his black shirt was a stark contrast to the white of hers. He tipped up her chin and looked into her eyes. ‘Lieutenant, why do you always run until you fall down?’
‘I have a deadline on this one.’ Perhaps she was overtired, or perhaps love was beginning to be easier, but she lifted both hands to his face. ‘I’m awfully glad you’re here.’ When he lifted her up and carried her toward the bed, she smiled. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I’m tucking you in, and you’re going to sleep.’
It was hard to argue when her eyes were already closing. ‘Did you get my message?’
‘The elaborate one that said, “I’ll be late”? Yes.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘Turn yourself off.’
‘In a minute.’ She fought back the edges of sleep. ‘I only had a couple minutes to contact Mavis. She wants to stay where she is for a couple days. She isn’t going in to the Blue Squirrel either. She called in and found out Leonardo’s been by there a half a dozen times looking for her.’
‘The course of true love.’
‘Mmm. I’m going to try to take an hour personal time tomorrow and swing by to see her, but I may not make it until the day after.’
‘She’ll be all right. I can go by, if you like.’
‘Thanks, but she wouldn’t talk to you about it. I’ll take care of it as soon as I figure out what Boomer was up to. I know damn well he
couldn’t read that disc.’
‘Of course not,’ Roarke soothed, hoping to lull her to sleep.
‘Not that he wasn’t good with figures. Money figures. But scientific formulas—’ She bolted straight up, nearly bashing Roarke’s nose with her head. ‘Your unit’ll do it.’
‘It will?’
‘I got the runaround from the lab. They’re backed up, this is low priority. No priority,’ she added, scrambling back out of bed. ‘I need an edge. You’ve got scientific analysis abilities on your unlicensed unit, right?’
‘Of course.’ He sighed and rose. ‘Now, I suppose?’
‘We can access the data from my office unit.’ Grabbing his hand, she tugged him toward the faux panel that concealed the elevator. ‘It won’t take us long.’
She filled him in on the basics as they traveled up. By the time he’d coded them in to the private room, she was wide awake and revved.
The equipment was elaborate, unlicensed, and of course, illegal. Like Roarke, she used the handplate for access, then moved behind the U-shaped console.
‘You can pull the data faster than I can,’ she told him. ‘It’s under Code Two, Yellow, Johannsen. My access number’s—’
‘Please.’ If he was going to play cop at three A.M., he wasn’t going to be insulted. Roarke sat at the controls and manipulated a few dials manually. ‘Into Cop Central,’ he said and smiled when she frowned.
‘So much for security.’
‘Anything else you’d like before I focus on your unit?’
‘No.’ She said it firmly, moving behind him. Manipulating a keyboard with one hand, Roarke drew one of hers over his shoulder, to his lips, to nibble on her knuckles. ‘Showoff. ’
‘It would hardly be any fun if you just plugged me in with your code. In your unit,’ he murmured, and switched to auto. ‘File Code Two, Yellow, Johannsen.’ Across the room one of the wall screens flashed.
Waiting
‘Evidence number 34-J, view and copy,’ Eve requested. When the formula scrolled on, Eve shook her head. ‘See that? It might as well be ancient hieroglyphics.’