Big Jack

by J. D. Robb

  She’d been a mass and a maze of demands then, too, he remembered. All heat and motion, driving him toward frenzy so that he’d burned to ram himself into her and batter them both toward release.

  But he’d wanted more. Even then, he’d wanted more of her. And for her. He gripped her hands, drawing her arms over her head, and she arched, pressing center to center until his pulse was a pounding of jungle drums.

  “Inside me.” Her eyes were blurred and dark. “I want you inside me. Hard. Fast.”

  “Wait.” He knew what it would be now, where they would take each other, and control was a thin and slippery wire. He cuffed her wrists with one hand. If she touched him now, that wire would snap.

  But he could touch her. God, he needed to touch her, to watch her, to feel her body gather and quake from the assault of pleasure. Her skin was damp when he ran his free hand down her. The moan trembled from her lips, then broke with a hoarse cry as he used those clever fingers on her.

  He watched those blurry eyes go blind, felt the scramble of her pulse in the wrists he held and heard her release a sob in the air before she went pliant. Wax melted in the heat.

  Again, was all he could think as his mouth came down on hers, fierce and frantic. Again and again and again.

  Then her arms were free and banded around him, and her hips pistoned up. He was inside her as she’d demanded. Hard and fast.

  She knew, with the part of her brain that could still reason, that he’d gone over, gone where he could so often send her. Somewhere beyond the civilized and sensible, where there were only sensations fueled by needs. She wanted him there with her, where control was impossible and pleasure saturated both mind and body.

  As her own system quivered toward that last leap, she heard his breath catch, as if on a pain. Wrapping around him, she gave herself over. “Now,” she said, and pulled him with her.

  She stretched under him, curled and uncurled her toes. She felt, Eve discovered, pretty damn good. “Okay.” She gave Roarke a noisy slap on the ass. “Recreational break’s over.”

  “Christ. Christ Jesus.”

  “Come on, you’ve had your thirty.”

  “I’m sure you’re wrong. I’m sure I have five or six minutes left. And if I don’t, I’m having them anyway.”

  “Off.” She gave his butt another slap, then a pinch. When neither budged him, she shifted her knee over, and up.

  “Son of a bitch.” That moved him. “Mind the merchandise.”

  “You mind it. I’ve already used it.” She was smart enough to roll over and away before he could retaliate. She landed on her feet, rolled up to the balls, back to the heels. “Man, I’m revved.”

  He stayed where he was, flat on his back, and eyed her. Long, lean, naked, with her skin glowing from the energetic recreational break.

  “You look it.” Then he smiled, slyly. “I wonder if Feeney’s finished his swim.”

  The color drained out of her cheeks. “Oh jeez, oh, shit!” She made a dive for her clothes. “He’ll know. He’ll just know, and then we’ll have to avoid looking at each other while we pretend he doesn’t know. Damn it.”

  Roarke was laughing as she dashed with her bundle of clothes into the bath.

  Feeney beat her into her office, and that made her wince. But she strode in briskly and moved straight to her desk to set up files.

  “Where were you?”

  “Just, ah, you know . . . dealing with a couple things.”

  “I thought you were gonna . . . ” He trailed off with a sound she recognized as embarrassed horror not quite suppressed. She could feel her skin heat and kept her attention trained on her computer as if it might leap off the desk and grab her by the throat.

  “I think I’ll—um—” His voice cracked a bit. She didn’t glance over but she could feel him looking frantically around the room. “Get some coffee.”

  “Coffee’s good. That’d be good.”

  When she heard him escape to the kitchen, she rubbed her hands over her face. “Might as well be wearing a sign,” she muttered. “ ‘Just Got Laid.’ ”

  She set up her disks, her case board, then shot Roarke a vicious glare when he strolled in. “I don’t want that look on your face,” she hissed.

  “Which look?”

  “You know which look. Wipe it off.”

  Relaxed, amused, he sat on the corner of her desk. When Feeney walked in, he could see the fading flush. Feeney cleared his throat, very deliberately, then set the second mug of coffee he carried on the desk. “Didn’t zap you one,” he said to Roarke.

  “It’s all right. I’m fine for now. How was your swim?”

  “Fine. Good.” He rubbed a hand over the drying sproings of ginger and silver hair. “Good and fine.”

  He turned away to study the board.

  Weren’t they a pair? Roarke thought, two veteran cops who’ve waded through blood and madness. But put a bit of sex on the table between them, and they’re fidgety as virgins at an orgy.

  “I’m going to bring you both up to date,” Eve began. “Then I’ll work on my angles while you work on yours. You see the artist’s sketch on the board, and on screen.”

  She picked up a laser pointer, aimed it toward the wall screen. “Detective Yancy did the Ident, but isn’t confident enough in this rendering for us to pass it to the media. But I think it gives us some basics. Coloring and basic facial structure, in any case.”

  “Looks, what,” Feeney asked, “range of thirty?”

  “Yeah. Even if Crew’s son has spent the better part of a fortune on face work and sculpting, I don’t think a guy in his sixties is going to look this young. And the witness never put him over forty. We may be looking for a family connection, or a young friend, protégé. We have to pursue the connection. It’s the most logical, given pattern and profile.”

  “Yeah, and it opens it up instead of narrowing it down,” Feeney commented.

  “We caught a break on narrowing it.”

  Eve told them about the trace evidence, and her field-work to date attempting to find the location of the Cobb crime scene.

  “It’s the first trace he’s left. When we nail this down, we’ll have another link toward identifying this creep. He chose the place, so he knows the place. He knew he could get in, do what he wanted to do in private and clean it up enough to have the crime undetected.”

  “Yeah.” Feeney nodded agreement. “Had to splash some blood around. He cleaned up, or there’d be a report. A construction crew’s not going to strap on tool belts with blood all over the damn place.”

  “Which means he had to spend time doing so. Again in private. Had to have transpo, had to know there was a handy dump site and access to the flammable.”

  “Probably didn’t seal up for that one,” Feeney commented. “Why bother?”

  “Not an efficient use of his time,” Eve agreed. “He’s going to burn the body and destroy any possible trace to him, or so he believed. Why bother to avoid any trace on the scene as long as it’s reasonably cleaned? Particularly if he had some legitimate reasons for being there.”

  “Could own the place, work or live in it.”

  “Could be a building or construction inspector,” Roarke put in. “Though if he is, it wouldn’t have been bright of him to forget about the fire sealant.”

  “You got the data I asked for, the properties being built or rehabbed in that area. Is what you sent me the whole shot?”

  “It is, yes. But that doesn’t take into account ones that are under the table. Small jobs,” he explained. “A private home or apartment where the owner might decide to do some work, or hires a contractor who’s willing to forgo the permits and fees and work off the books.”

  Eve visualized the map of her investigation suddenly crisscrossed with hundreds of dead ends and detours. “I’m not going to worry about side deals until we exhaust the legitimate ones. Sticking with that, don’t they sometimes use gas on construction sites?”

  “For some of the vehicles and machines.�
�� Roarke nodded. “As it’s inconvenient to transport it from one of the stations outside the city, you might use a storage compartment on-site or nearby. You’ve a fee to pay for that as well.”

  “Then we follow that down, too.”

  “Bureaucrats in Permits and Licensing are going to make you jump through hoops,” Feeney reminded her.

  “I’ll deal with it.”

  “You’re going to need to put the arm on these guys, get the warrants and assorted paperwork and other bullshit. We get lucky with the matches, you’ll cut back on that.” Feeney considered, pulled on his nose. “But you got a lot to wade through one way or the other. I can put my leave off a few days, until this is closed.”

  “Leave?” She frowned at him until she remembered his scheduled vacation. “Crap. I forgot all about it. When are you going?”

  “Got two more days on the clock, but I can juggle some things around.”

  She was tempted to take him up on it. But she paced it off, heaved out a breath. “Yeah, fine, you do that and your wife will eat both our livers for breakfast. Raw.”

  “She’s a cop’s wife. She knows how it goes.” But there wasn’t much conviction behind his words.

  “Bet she’s already packed.”

  Feeney offered a hangdog smile. “Been packed damn near a week now.”

  “Well, I’m not facing her wrath. Besides, you’ve already juggled enough to give me this much time. We can handle the rest of it.”

  He looked back at the board, as she did. “I don’t like leaving a case hanging.”

  “I’ve got McNab and this guy.” She jerked a thumb toward Roarke. “If we don’t wrap it before you have to go, we’ll keep you in the loop. Long distance. Can you give me a couple more hours tonight?”

  “No problem. Look, why don’t I get back to it, see if I can work some magic?”

  “Do that. I’ll see if I can wrangle some warrants. Okay with you if we brief here tomorrow, oh-eight hundred?”

  “Only if it comes with breakfast.”

  “I’ll be right along,” Roarke told him, and waited until he was alone with Eve. “I can save you time with the red tape. A little time on the unregistered, and I can have a list of permits for you.”

  She jammed her hands into her pockets as she studied her murder board, as she looked at the faces of the dead. Roarke’s unregistered equipment would blind the unblinking eye of CompuGuard. No one would know he’d hacked into secured areas and nipped out data with his skilled hands.

  “I can’t justify it for this. I can’t shortcut this just to save myself a little time and a lot of aggravation. Gannon’s secure. To my knowledge she’s the only one who might be in immediate jeopardy from this guy. I’ll play it by the book.”

  He stepped up behind her, rubbed her shoulders as they both looked at the images of Jacobs and Cobb. Before and after.

  “When you don’t play it by the book, when you do take that shortcut, it’s always for them, Eve. It’s never for yourself.”

  “It’s not supposed to be for me. Or about me.”

  “If it wasn’t for you, or about you, in some sense, you wouldn’t be able to go on day after day, facing this and caring, day after day. And if you didn’t, who would pick up the standard for people like Andrea Jacobs and Tina Cobb and carry it into the battle?”

  “Some other cop,” she said.

  “There is no other like you.” He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “There’s no other who understands them, the victims and those who victimize them, quite like you. Seeing that, knowing that, well, it’s made an honest man out of me, hasn’t it?”

  She turned now to look him straight in the eye. “You made yourself.”

  She knew he thought of his mother, of what he’d learned only a short time before, and she knew he suffered. She couldn’t stand for Roarke’s dead as she did for those of strangers. She couldn’t help him find justice for the woman he never knew existed, for the woman who’d loved him and died at the brutal hand of his own father.

  “If I could go back,” she said slowly, “if there was a way to twist time and go back, I’d do everything I could to bring him down and put him away for what he did. I wish I could stand for her, for you.”

  “We can’t change history, can we? Not for my mother, not for ourselves. If we could, you’re the only one in this world I would trust with it. The only one who might make me stand back and let the law do what the law does.” He traced his finger down the dent in her chin. “So, Lieutenant, whenever you do take one of those shortcuts, you should remember there are those of us who depend on you who don’t give a rat’s ass about the book.”

  “Maybe not. But I do. Go help Feeney. Get me something I can use so we can make him pay for what he did to them.”

  She sat alone when he’d gone, her coffee forgotten and her gaze on the murder board. She saw herself in each of the victims. In Andrea Jacobs, struck down and abandoned. In Tina Cobb, robbed of her own identity and discarded.

  But she’d come back from those things. She’d been created from those things. No, you couldn’t change history, she thought. But you could sure as hell use it.

  Chapter 11

  She lost track of time when she worked alone. Eve supposed, if pressed on the subject, she lost track of time when she worked with others, too.

  But there was something soothing about sitting in or pacing around her office by herself, letting the data and the speculations bump around in her head with only the computer’s bland voice for company.

  When her ’link beeped, she jerked out of a half trance and realized the only light in the room was from her various screens.

  “Dallas. What?”

  “Hey, Lieutenant.” McNab’s young, pretty face popped on screen. She could see the slice of pizza in his hand. Hell, since she could all but smell the pepperoni, it occurred to her she’d missed dinner. “Were you asleep or something?”

  She could feel her embarrassment scale rising just because another cop had tagged her when she’d been drifting off. “No, I wasn’t asleep. I’m working.”

  “In the dark?”

  “What do you want, McNab?” She knew what she wanted. She wanted his pizza.

  “Okay. I put in some OT on the ’links and d and c’s.” He took a bite of pizza. Eve was forced to swallow her own saliva. “Lemme tell you, these dink units are tougher than the pricey ones. Memory’s for shit, and the broadband—”

  “Don’t walk me down that path, McNab. Bottom-line it.”

  “Sure. Sorry.”

  He licked—the bastard actually licked sauce from his thumb.

  “I got locations on two of the transmissions we believe the killer sent Cobb. One of them matches the location of an aborted trans sent to the Gannon residence and picked up by the answering program on the night of Jacobs’s murder.”

  “Where?”

  “The location that hit both is a public ’link in Grand Central. The other, generated from a cyber club downtown. Oh, and there’s a second aborted to the Gannon residence, ten minutes after the first, from another public three blocks from her residence.”

  Public places, public access. Phony accounts. Careful, careful, careful. “You with Peabody?”

  “Yeah. She’s in the other room.”

  “Why don’t you check out the club? See if you can pinpoint the unit he used. Maybe you can get us a better description.”

  “No problem.”

  “We’re going to brief at my home office, eight hundred hours.”

  His mouth might’ve been full of pizza, but she recognized a groan when she heard one. Served him right for eating on her empty stomach.

  “You get anything hot, I want to hear right away. No matter what time it is. That’s good work on the ’links.”

  “I am the wizard. You guys got any of that real bacon?”

  She cut him off. Sitting back in the blue-shadowed dark, she thought about diamonds and pizza and murder.

  “Lieutenant.”

&nb
sp; “Hmm?”

  “Lights on, twenty-five percent.” Even in the dimness, Roarke watched her blink like an owl. “You need to eat.”

  “McNab had pizza. It broke my focus.” She rubbed her tired eyes. “Where’s Feeney?”

  “I sent him home, not without a struggle. His wife called. I think she’s going into a low-level state of panic that he’s going to do what he suggested to you earlier and postpone this family trip.”

  “I won’t let him. You got anything for me?”

  “The first stage of matching’s done on Judith Crew, nearly so on the boy. Once that’s done we’ll . . . ” He remembered who he was talking to and edited out the techno jargon. “Essentially, we’ll cross-match and reference the two sets. If she kept her son with her until he came of age—and it certainly seems she’d do so—we should be able to locate that match, or matches.”

  He cocked his head at her. “Is it going to be pizza for you, then?”

  “I would give you five hundred credits for a slice of pepperoni pizza.”

  He sneered. “Please, Lieutenant. I can’t be bought.”

  “I will give you the sexual favor of your choice at the next possible opportunity.”

  “Done.”

  “Cheap date.”

  “You don’t know the sexual favor I have in mind. Did you get your warrants?” he called out as he went into the kitchen.

  “Yeah. Jesus, I had to tap-dance until my toes fell off, but I’m getting them. And McNab’s pinned locations on transmissions. He and Peabody are going to check out a cyber club tonight where one was zipped to Cobb.”

  “Tonight?”

  “They’re young, able and afraid of me.”

  “So am I.” He brought her in a plateful of bubbling pizza and a large glass of red wine.

  “Where’s yours?”

  “I had something with Feeney in the lab, and foolishly assumed you’d feed yourself.”

  “You’ve already eaten and you still fixed me dinner?” She scooped up pizza, singed her fingertips. “Wow, you’re like my body slave.”

  “Those roles will be reversed when I collect my payment. I think it may involve costumes.”