by J. D. Robb
“We pursue the investigation as if they are. We figure out one, we've got the other.”
“I could tag McNab, have him meet me, go by the theater where she was supposed to work. Lloyd covered it,” Peabody added, “but we could try fresh eyes on it.”
“Good thinking. Send me whatever you get.”
She needed thinking time, Eve told herself as they split up. A stop at the morgue to confirm TOD — which was just stupid, since she'd been right there at TOD — to see if Morris or the lab had been able to get a handle on the type of blade used, if the sweepers had found any trace evidence.
Deal with the facts first, she thought as she got in her vehicle — then move on to theory. But she sat a moment, suddenly tired, suddenly angry. It felt as if something pushed inside her brain, trying to shove her thoughts into tangents.
Not enough downtime, she decided. No time to take some good, deep breaths between cases. So she took them now, just closing her eyes for a moment, ordering her mind and body to clear.
Alive. Trapped. Help.
Keep your promise!
The voice was so clear in her head she jerked up, had a hand on her weapon as she swiveled to check the seat beside her, behind her. Her heart pounded painfully against her ribs, in her throat, in her ears as she lowered her unsteady hand.
“Stop. Just stop,” she ordered herself. “Do what you have to do, then get some sleep.” She pulled away from the curb, but gave in to need and called home.
And her heart slowed, settled a little when Roarke's face flowed on-screen.
“Lieutenant, I was hoping I'd — What's wrong?”
“Nothing. Well, nothing except having some old Hungarian woman bleed out under my hands. Tired,” she admitted. “I've got to head down to the morgue because there was a glitch with the TOD. I need to get it straightened out, then talk to a bunch of cops about a Russian ballet guy. Sorry,” she added. “This one literally fell in my lap.”
“I'll meet you at the morgue.”
“Why?”
“Where else does a man meet his wife — when they're you and me?” She looked pale, he thought, her eyes too dark against her skin.
“Yeah, okay. I'll see you there.”
When she broke transmission, Roarke stared at the blank screen of his 'link. Not even a token protest? More than tired, he thought.
His lieutenant was not herself.
She got lost. She would have deemed it impossible, but she couldn't find her way. The streets seemed too crowded, too confusing, and the blare of horns when she hesitated at a light had her jumping in her seat. Frustration turned to sweaty fear that ran a snaking line down the center of her back. Battling it back, she ordered the dash navigator to plot her route, then gave in and put her vehicle on auto.
Tired, she assured herself and closed her eyes. Just tired. But there was a lingering unease that she was ill — or worse.
Need a boost, she thought, nearly shuddering with relief as she arrived at the morgue. She'd grab a tube of Pepsi at Vending, down some caffeine. Maybe even choke down a PowerBar because, Jesus, she was starving.
What was wrong with the air in here? she wondered as she started down the white tunnel. The lights glaring off the tiles slapped into her eyes and made them ache. It was frigid, an icy blast after the heat of the summer night. Yet under her chilled skin her blood beat hot, like a fever raging.
She headed for Vending, digging into her pockets, her mind on food and caffeine. A woman sat on the floor beside the machines, her face in her hands, weeping.
“I'm scared. I'm scared,” she repeated. “Nobody sees me now.”
“What's the problem?” As Eve crouched down, the woman dropped her hands. Her face, livid with bruising, shone with shock and what might have been hope.
“You can see me?”
“Of course I can see you. You need medical attention. Take it easy. I'm going to get someone, then — ”
“It's too late.” Tears ran down the swollen face as the woman dipped her head again. “Look what he did to me.”
Eve froze as she stared at the gaping wound on the back of the woman's head, at the dried blood matting the hair, soaking the blouse.
“Hold on. Just — ” Eve reached out, and her hand passed through the woman's arm. “Jesus God.”
“It was Rennie.” Sniffling, she pushed the heels of her hands through the tears.
“What are you? What is this?”
“I don't know, but I have to tell somebody. It was Rennie,” she repeated. “The bastard. He was mad at me 'cause I helped Sara get away from him. He must've followed me from work, and when I was in the park, he was just there. And he yelled and he hit me. He kept hitting me, and I couldn't get away. Nobody came to help. Nobody saw, and he hit me and hit me, and I fell. And he picked up a rock and he killed me. It's not right. What am I going to do now? I'm scared to be here. I'm scared to be dead.”
Eve couldn't swallow, could barely breathe. “This has to stop.”
“Rennie killed me.”
The woman — the hallucination — held out her hands. Tore them up, Eve thought in some cold part of her brain. Tore them up when she fell, when she tried to crawl away.
“He killed me, and now I won't ever get married or eat ice cream or buy new shoes and have drinks with Sara. Rennie Foster killed me with a rock in Riverside Park, and maybe he'll kill Sara next. What's going to happen?”
“I don't know.”
“Aren't I supposed to go somewhere? I don't want to stay here. It's cold here. It's too cold and it's too bright. Can you help me? I'm Janna, Janna Dorchester, and I didn't do anything wrong. Is this hell?”
“No.” But she wasn't entirely sure.
Maybe hell was cold and bright. Maybe hell was losing your mind.
“Eve.” Roarke dropped down beside her, took her arms. “Christ, you're burning up. Come on now.”
He started to lift her, but she resisted. “No. Wait.” She sucked in a breath, shuddered it out. “You don't see her?”
He pressed a hand to her forehead. “I see you, sitting on the floor of the morgue looking like a ghost.”
“At one,” she murmured.
“I guess he can't see me because I'm dead and everything,” Janna said. “Why do you?”
“I don't know. I need Morris,” she told Roarke. “And God, I need something to drink.”
“Don't leave me,” Janna begged, dropping her head again so Eve could see the ugly wound that killed her. “Please don't leave me here alone.”
“I'm just going to sit here. Bring Morris, will you? I just . . . need to sit here.” Deal, she ordered herself. Deal with what's in front of you, then figure out the rest. “Could really use something cold to drink.”
Roarke rose, cursing under his breath as he ordered a tube of Pepsi.
“He's gorgeous.” Janna smiled a little even as she knuckled at tears. “Mega frosted. Is he your boyfriend?”
“We're married,” Eve murmured.
“Seriously icy for you,” Janna said as Roarke glanced down.
“So we are,” he said. “And I'll be taking my wife to a doctor in short order. I'll get you Morris first, but then you're done here.”
“He's got a really sexy voice, too.” Janna sighed as Eve took the tube Roarke had opened, drank.
“Thanks. I'm going to sit right here,” she said as much to Janna as Roarke, “while you get Morris.”
And while she sat wondering if she had a brain tumor or had dropped into some strange, vivid dream, she put on the cop and interviewed the dead.
Minutes later, Morris hurried down the tunnel with Roarke.
“Dallas.” He knelt, laid a hand on her brow as Roarke had. “You're feverish.”
“Just tell me if you've gotten a body in — female, mixed race, midtwenties, ID'd as Janna Dorchester. Beating death in Riverside Park.”
“Yes. She's only just come in. How did you — ”
“Who caught the case?”
“Ah . . . St
uben's primary.”
“I need to contact him. Can you get me his contact data?”
“Of course. But you don't look well.”
“I'm feeling better, actually.” Odd, she thought, how the cop approach steadied her, even when her interviewee was dead. “I think I'll feel better yet once I talk to Stuben. I'd appreciate it, Morris.”
“Give me a minute.”
“Eve.” Roarke took her hand as Morris strode away. “What's going on here?”
“I'm not sure, and I need you to give me a really open mind. I mean wide-open. Yours is already more open than mine about, you know, weird stuff.”
“What sort of weird stuff is my mind going to be wide-open about?”
“Okay.” She looked into his eyes, so blue, so beautiful. Eyes she trusted with everything she had. “There's a dead woman sitting right beside me. Her name's Janna Dorchester, and some asshole named Rennie Foster bashed her head in with a rock in Riverside Park. She's worried her friend Sara might be next on his list. So I'm going to pass the information to the primary. I can read Russian.”
“I'm sorry?”
“I can read Russian. I think I can speak it, too, and I'm pretty sure I can make Hungarian goulash. And maybe borscht, possibly pierogies. The old woman, the one who fell into my lap and happened to be a Gypsy speaker for the dead, did something to me. Or I have a brain tumor.”
Staring into her eyes, Roarke cupped Eve's face in his hands. “Kak vashi dela?”
“U menya vsyo po pnezhnemu. Hey, you speak Russian?”
He sat back on his heels, rocked right down to the bone. “A handful of phrases, and certainly not as fluently as you, apparently. And despite your answer, I doubt you're fine.”
They looked up as Morris came back. “I have what you need.”
“Great.” Eve took out her 'link, and staying where she was, contacted Detective Stuben. “Lieutenant Dallas,” she said, “Homicide, out of Central. I've got some information on your vic, on Janna Dorchester.” She looked at Janna as she spoke. “You're going to want to find Rennie Foster and get some protection to a Sara Jasper. Let me lay it out for you.”
When she had, she answered his question on how she came by the information by claiming a confidential informant.
“Unless Stuben's an idiot — and he didn't strike me that way — that should do it.” Eve got to her feet. “It's all I can do.”
“I'm still dead, but I'm not as scared. It's not so cold anymore.”
“I don't think you have to stay here.”
“Maybe for a little while. It helped to talk to you. I still wish I wasn't dead, but . . . ” She trailed off, shrugged.
“Good luck.” Eve turned to Morris. “I don't know how to explain it. I need to see Gizi Szabo.”
“Dallas, did you just have a conversation with the dead?”
“It sure felt that way. And I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't spread it around. I need to work, I need to keep going, or I'm pretty sure I'm going to go crazy. So . . . ” She started forward, glanced back, and saw Janna lift a hand in good-bye. “I need to confirm TOD on Szabo.”
“I've run it three times, using various components. It's still thirteen hundred.”
“It's not possible.” She shoved through the doors of the autopsy suite. “I was there. Lopez was there, hours later. She fell off the curb, we administered first aid. She — ”
“Eve,” Roarke interrupted, “you just spoke with a woman killed more than two hours ago, and you're questioning the possible?”
“I know the difference between dead and alive.” She stepped up to the body. “Why can't I see her? Why can't I talk to her? I look at her, and I feel . . . rage and frustration. And . . . obligation.”
“I spoke with Chale,” Morris told her. At the sink he ran cold water over a cloth, wrung it out. Then he came to her and smoothed it over her face himself to cool it.
“He said the same, but he also said that she took your hand, spoke to you, and there was a light — a blast of light and energy. And for a moment after it, you seemed to be blank. Just blank. He said something seemed to pass between you.”
She took the cloth, mildly embarrassed he'd tended to her — that she'd let him. “You don't believe that kind of thing.”
“The science says this woman died at one this afternoon — irrefutably — but there's more in the world than science.”
Maybe, she thought — hard to argue about it right at the moment. But it had been routine and order that had gotten her through the experience with Janna. So she'd stay there as long as she could.
“Let's stick with science for the moment. What can you tell me about the weapon?”
“All right. A thin, double-edged blade. Seven and a quarter inches in length.” He turned to a screen to bring up the image he'd reconstructed from the wounds, then turned back to the body. “You see here where the killer thrust it fully into her, the bruising from the bolster.”
She leaned in, studying the gouges, the slices. “A dagger.”
“Yes. He hit bone. The tip will be chipped.” Morris showed her a tiny piece of steel, sealed in a tray. “I recovered this.”
“Okay, that's good. He stabbed her in the back first — back of the shoulder.” She remembered the shocking, tearing pain. “Because he's a coward, and because he feared her. She didn't see his face — he wore a mask or makeup. A kind of costume, because he's theatrical. A devil,” she murmured, “because it's a role he plays, or wants to. Because it's powerful, because it instills fear, because he wanted that image to be the last she saw.”
“Why?” Morris asked.
“He has something she wanted, and she wouldn't have stopped until she got it back. Exposed him. Punished him. Deprived him.”
“Now you'll get it back.”
She turned to Roarke, nodded. “Yeah. I will. I need to go home. You could drive while I talk to some cops.”
“Dallas,” Morris said, “I'd like to talk about this at some point.”
“Yeah. At some point.” She hesitated, handed him back the cloth, then closed her hand over his for just a moment. “Thanks.”
Cooler, steadier, she walked down the tunnel with Roarke.
“Is she there?”
Eve paused, looked down at the floor where she'd sat with Jenna. “No. I guess she's gone wherever she had to go. Jesus, Roarke.”
He took her hand firmly. “Let's get to the bottom of this, because right now I don't know if you need a doctor or a bloody priest.”
“A priest?”
“For an exorcism.”
“That's not funny,” she muttered.
“It's not, no.”
Seven
Roarke gave her the time she needed while he drove. He said nothing, listening to her talk with a handful of cops about someone named Alexi Barin. Since her color was back, and her skin no longer felt as though it might burn off her bones, he checked the impulse to take her straight to a health center.
He considered his wife, among other things, cynical, stable, and often annoyingly rooted in reality and logic.
When she told him, straight-faced and clear-eyed, she'd had a conversation with the dead, he leaned toward believing her. Particularly adding in her unhesitating response to his simple How are you? in Russian.
She clicked off her 'link again, said, “Hmmm.”
“How do you make Hungarian goulash?”
“What? I'm not making goulash.”
“I didn't ask you to make it, but how you would.”
“Oh, it's a test. Well, you'd cut up some onions and brown them in hot oil — just to golden brown, then you'd take this beef you'd cut in cubes and coated with flour, add that and some paprika to the oil and onions. Then — ”
“That's enough.”
“Why would you coat good meat with flour? I thought flour was for baking stuff.”
“Which proves you know less about cooking than I do, which is next to nothing, and yet you can toss off a recipe for goulash.”
<
br /> “It's weird, and it's pretty fucking irritating. Which is why I'm going home instead of in to Central. I'm not going to find myself talking to some dead guy or whatever in front of other cops.”
“You're still you,” he murmured, foolishly relieved. “You're more embarrassed than frightened by the situation you appear to be in.”
“I don't even believe this is happening, but I know it is. I'm not sure I wouldn't rather have a brain tumor.”
She took a breath, then another. “I'm going back over it in my head. She was walking — staggering — bleeding all over the place. Science says she was dead, but Lopez saw her, too — and the medics when they got there. She talked to me. She looked at me.”
She moved back to the scene. “But she'd walked that way for blocks — I followed the blood trail back. And no one helped her, no one called for help. I can't buy that, so, using the twisted logic of this whole deal, I have to conclude no one saw her.”
“Continuing with that so-called twisted logic, she came to you. She had enough left in her to cross your path, to leave you a trail, to give you what you'd need to help her.”
“You could theorize. And the first thing she said was the girl's name: Beata. That she was trapped, needed help. She told me her name, and when I asked who'd done this to her, she said the devil. And . . . ”
“What?”
“She said I was the warrior. Her eyes were so dark, black eyes, so intense. She said I had to take her in, let her in. She asked me, begged me. Take me in, so I said sure. I just wanted to keep her calm and alive until the MTs got there.”
“You agreed.”
“I guess I did.” Huffing out a breath, she dragged a hand through her hair. “I guess I did, then she grabbed my hand, and bam — blinding light and like this electrical shock. These voices. I saw her face — the girl — Beata. Next thing I know, Lopez is calling my name, the medics are there, and Szabo's dead. Cold and dead.”
“Because, scientifically at least, she'd died hours earlier.”
“It's fucked up,” was Eve's opinion. “I felt shaky and off. I guess I haven't felt all the way steady since. I recognized things I shouldn't have and didn't recognize things I should. God, Roarke, I got lost driving to the morgue. I just couldn't remember the streets.”