by J. D. Robb
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Before your request came in this morning, I was going over the reasons—excuses—not to come back yet. Another week, maybe two. I wasn’t sure I was ready to be here, to face this place, to handle the work. But you asked for me. You trusted me, so what choice do I have but to trust myself?”
“She needs you.” On that single point Eve had Lopez’s unassailable faith. “Deena MacMasters needs you. You have a good team here, good people. But she needs you. She needs us.”
“Yes. So . . .” He stunned her by brushing his lips, very lightly on hers. “It’s good to see you.”
“Um. Likewise.”
He gave her arm a quick squeeze, then released it. “And where is the estimable Peabody?”
“Field work. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“Then we’ll begin. I know MacMasters, of course. He’s solid. This will have put a hole in him.”
“He’s maintaining.”
“What else is there? Her name is Deena.” He glanced at Eve, got her nod. “Sixteen-year-old female in exceptional health prior to her death. She took care of herself, and was cared for. The scan showed no prior injuries of any note, and confirms excellent nutrition. Her last meal, consumed at approximately six-thirty p.m., was pizza with a topping of peppers, mushrooms, black olives, and about six ounces of cherry fizzy. As you flagged tox, I’ve determined the barbiturate she ingested with the meal was mixed with the drink.”
“He drugged her.”
“I can’t say, only that she ingested the barb, and there are no signs of regular use of same in her scan. All to the contrary. Given her weight, and the assumption she wasn’t accustomed to taking drugs, the dose would have been enough to render her unconscious, for perhaps as much as an hour.”
“Plenty of time for him to get her upstairs, restrained, then shut down the cameras and take the discs. If he did so in that order. Plenty of time. She’d have been groggy, disoriented when she came to.”
“Yes. She ingested another dose—smaller—at about midnight.”
“A second dose?”
“Yes. Her hands were cuffed behind her back at the wrists—there’s deep bruising, lacerations indicating she struggled against them, quite violently. The marks on her ankles indicate a different restraint. Probably cloth.”
“Bedsheets.”
“That’s consistent. She fought those, too. And if you look.” He paused to pick up a second pair of microgoggles, gave them to Eve. “Here.” They bent over the ankles together. “The bounds were extremely tight, digging into the skin. Here, here, here.”
“Tied, retied, tied again.” She saw it in her head as well. “Tied, raped, untied, turned, tied, sodomized. Untied, turned, raped again?”
“It would be my conclusion. Multiple rapes, multiple sodomy, all extremely violent. As you can see . . .”
He moved up the body. A line of sweat, icy cold, slid down Eve’s spine. But she moved with him, slammed more locks on her memories, and studied the damage.
“The tears, the trauma. Her hymen was intact before the rape. So young,” he murmured. “And so mercilessly used. I found no semen. He sealed up, and was cautious enough to do so with each rape. We’ve no trace of him in or on her. I’d speculate he removed his own genital hair, possibly all his body hair before the act. Otherwise, even sealed, with multiple, violent rapes, we should have found a stray hair. There’s some bruising on her legs, her torso from his hands. Deeper bruising on her shoulders where it appears he held her down more forcibly. On her throat—”
“He choked her. Watched her face while he did. Watched until she passed out. Between the rapes, between them because he wouldn’t want to risk going too far, taking her out too soon, spoiling the fun.”
She could see it, in the room with the soft violet walls and the glossy white furniture. See the terror, the horror. Feel the pain.
“He chokes her while she struggles, fights for air, goes out. Then he unties her legs, shoves her over, secures her again. And waits for her to come to so she can feel him sodomize her. No good if she’s out. He wants to hurt her. Needs to hurt her. Maybe he gets off that way. On her pain, her struggles, her pleas.”
“You’ve gone pale.” Morris touched her arm. “Step back, sit.”
She shook her head, brushed him off. She would get through it. Staring into her own past as much as Deena’s, Eve swiped the cold tube over her brow.
“Then what he does, when he’s finished, however many times he feels inclined, when she’s lying there, quivering or when she’s gone somewhere else, somewhere she can’t feel the pain, he pushes her face into the pillow, holds her down, smothering her until she passes out again. Then he can turn her over, tie her again. He worked her for about eight hours, a full day’s work. So he could let her lie there a while until he could get it up again.
“Maybe he promised to let her go if she gave him the passcode for the control room. But I think he may have already taken care of that. Either way, lots of time. She’d ask him why, why he was doing this. He’d tell her, tell her exactly. Because he was going to kill her, and he’d enjoy telling her why.”
“Why?” Morris spoke softly, watching her face.
“Don’t know. Not yet. But he’d make sure she knew it wasn’t because he wanted her. Not because he liked her. If he made all this time, took all this effort to hurt her physically, again and again, wouldn’t he want to hurt her emotionally, mentally? Break her down, carve her away, every inch. In addition to the rape, and all that does to your body, your mind, your fucking soul, he’d want to make sure she knew she meant nothing. That he’d played her. Taking her out, holding her hand, being a shy guy. Making her feel like a fool? Nice bonus.”
She kept her breathing even, she could do that, even if she couldn’t stop the pulse from hammering in her head.
“Mask’s off. No need for it now. He’d want her to see who he was. He’d want her to know what’s inside her when he rapes her, what’s tearing and ripping her. Young healthy girl, strong girl, so he can drag it out for hours, until the last time he put his hands around her throat, the last time she looks in his eyes as he starts to squeeze. Until he ends it.”
She did step back now. She didn’t tremble, though she wanted to. Still, she took a long, slow drink of the now-lukewarm Pepsi. “He leaves the cuffs. Cop cuffs. Standard issue. He unties her legs, but leaves her hands cuffed. Because that’s a message to her father. That’s an extra punch to the gut. It wasn’t her, not about her. She was just an instrument. A weapon. He could’ve killed her dozens of times before this, in dozens of ways. He wanted it to be in that house, inside the house where the cop believed his little girl would always be safe.”
She studied the face. “The second dose, that was for MacMasters, too. He wanted to make sure we found the drug in her system. As far as he knew, at the time of the murder, her parents weren’t due back until the afternoon, mid- to late afternoon. We wouldn’t have gotten to a tox yet on that time frame. We wouldn’t have gotten to one until evening, even flagged and expedited. Just another boost to make sure we found it. That’s why he left the glass.”
“Glass?”
“It’ll be her glass he left on the counter in the kitchen, and there’ll be traces of the barb there for the lab to find. It’s like . . . thumbing his nose. An insult to kick it all down. Look what I can do in the sanctity of your own home, to your precious daughter, using the very thing you work against every day of your life. It wasn’t about her, about Deena. That’s worse, isn’t it?”
She looked at Morris again, composed again. “It’s worse for MacMasters knowing it wasn’t about her. She was just the conduit.”
“Yes. It would be worse.” And what were you? he wondered. What were you to the one who used you this way?
But he didn’t ask. He knew her too well, understood her too well, to ask.
Later, she stood outside, breathing in New York, drawing in the sticky heat of a day that deci
ded to soar to summer. She’d gotten through it, she told herself, gotten through what should be the worst of it. She got back in her car and drove to the lab.
She expected to butt heads with Chief Lab Tech Dick Berinksi. In fact, she looked forward to the tension relieving ass-kicking she hoped to give the man not so affectionately known as Dickhead. “He’s a fuck, but he’s the best,” she’d say about him.
She found the lab empty but for a handful of lab rats tucked in their glass cubes or dozing over paperwork. And the egg-shaped head plastered with thin black hair of the chief bent toward a comp screen while his clever, if creepy, fingers played over both screen and keyboard.
“Status.” She said it like a dare.
He shot her a resentful glare. “I had tickets to the ball game. Boxed seats.”
Bribes, no doubt. “Captain MacMasters had a daughter. Now ask me if I give a flying shit about your box seat.”
“She wouldn’t be less dead if I was chowing on a dog, sucking down a brew, and watching the Yankees on freaking Peace Day.”
“Gee, you’re right. It’s too bad she got raped, sodomized, raped again, terrorized, and choked to death on freaking Peace Day just to inconvenience you.”
“Jesus, chill.” The murderous gleam in her eye must have gotten through his own ire as he waved those spider fingers in the air. “I’m here, aren’t I? And I already ran the glass. You got cherry fizzy and barbs. The mickey comes up as Slider, liquid form, with a small kick of powdered Zoner.”
“Zoner?”
“Yeah, just a touch. Didn’t need it, not with the Slider, but the combo gives the user freaky dreams. Usually, you wake up with a mother of a migraine. I don’t see an upside to sucking down this particular cocktail, but it takes all kinds.”
“So, she’d have suffered even when she was out. And come back in pain.”
“He’d wanted to just knock her out, the Slider’d do it. You have to figure he wanted the edge. I got DNA and prints, and both match the vic’s. I was just sending it over. You could’ve saved yourself the trip.”
“What about the sheets, her clothes?”
“I’m not a freaking machine. I’ve got them logged in, and I’m going to run them. Sweepers lit them up on scene—just like I figure you did—no semen. He suited up most like. But we’ll give them a full scan. If his suit sprang a leak the size of a pinhole, or he drooled, we’ll find it. Before you ask, the cuffs are standard issue. I took a gander and they look new. Or at least they hadn’t seen any use to speak of before this. Blood and tissue match the vic’s. No prints. Fibers caught in them, probably from the sheets. Harpo can take those in the morning.”
She couldn’t argue. He’d done the job. “Send the report on the glass—and another as soon as you finish with the sheets, her clothes.”
She left it at that and headed to Central with the low hum of a headache at the base of her skull.
Even on Peace Day, cruising toward evening, Central buzzed. Protect and serve meant 24/7, and peace be damned. Bad guys, in their various forms, on their various levels, didn’t take time off. She imagined there were precincts across the island filled with not-so-bad guys who’d had too much holiday brew, indulged in some holiday pushy-shovey, or had their wallets lifted in the parade crush.
She took the glides rather than the faster elevators to give herself just a little more time to level out.
She wished she had something to pummel. Wished she could take twenty to swing into one of the on-site gyms and tune up a sparring droid. But eight hours after the tag from Whitney, she strode into the bullpen in Homicide, and straight through to her office.
Coffee, she thought—the real deal—would have to substitute for the release of punches and sore knuckles.
He sat in her visitor’s chair, one she knew was miserably uncomfortable because she didn’t want anyone to settle into her space too long.
But he sat, working on his PPC, his sleeves rolled up, his hair tied back as it was when he prepared to dive into some thorny task or was already in the thicket.
She shut the door.
“I thought you’d be with Feeney.”
“I was.” Roarke sat where he was to study her face. “They haven’t been back from the scene long. They’re setting up in the conference room you booked.”
She nodded, walked straight to her AutoChef to order coffee. “I just want a minute to organize my thoughts for the briefing. You can tell them I’m on my way.”
She’d wanted to brood out her skinny window while downing the coffee, but brooding required being alone. Instead, she turned to walk to her desk.
He’d risen and stepped behind her. He made less noise than their cat. And he took the mug of coffee out of her hand to set it aside.
“Hey. I want the kick.”
“You can have it in a minute.” All he did with those strong, seeking blue eyes on hers was touch his fingertips to her cheeks.
“Okay.” Letting go, just letting go, she stepped into his arms. She could close her eyes and be enfolded, be held, be loved and understood.
“There now.” He turned his head to press his lips to her hair. “There.”
“I’m okay.”
“Not quite. I won’t ask if you’ll pass this on. You wouldn’t even if a colleague hadn’t asked you for help.” At the shake of her head, he kissed her hair again, then eased her back so their eyes met. “You need to prove you can get through it.”
“I am getting through it.”
“You are. But I think you forget you need to get through nothing alone.”
“She was older than I was. Twice my age. Still . . .”
He stroked her back when she shuddered, just one hard tremor. “Still. Young, defenseless, innocent.”
“I’d already stopped being innocent. I was . . . When I was at the morgue, I looked at her, and I thought, that could’ve been me on the slab. If I hadn’t put him on one first, it could’ve been me. He’d have killed me sooner or later, or worse, turned me into a thing. Putting him there first had to be done, and that’s that. She didn’t have a chance, not even the chance I did. A good home, parents who loved her, and who’ll be broken, some pieces of them always broken now. But she didn’t have the chance I did. I could never pass her on.”
“No, you never could.”
She held and was held another minute, then stepped back. “I was wishing I had time to go beat the living crap out of a sparring droid.”
“Ah.” He had to smile. “A never-fail for you.”
“Yeah. This was better.”
He picked up her coffee, handed it to her. “Taking a blocker for the headache would be better yet.”
“It’s not so bad, not so bad now. I’ll work it off.”
“The pizza I ordered should help.”
“You ordered pizza?” The part of her that yearned warred against the part of her that wanted to maintain discipline. “I’ve told you not to keep buying food for my cops. You’ll spoil and corrupt them.”
“There’s only one cop I’m interested in spoiling and corrupting, and pizza happens to be a weakness of hers.”
She drank her coffee doing her best to scowl at him over the rim. “Did you get pepperoni?”
5
FEENEY CHOMPED DOWN ON A LOADED SLICE. He stood at the conference table, focused on the pie while Jamie and McNab attacked a second one. Her former partner, now captain of the Electronic Detectives Division managed to balance what was left of the slice and what appeared to be a tube of cream soda while studying crime scene photos Peabody had yet to tack to the murder board.
He’d had his hair chopped recently, Eve noted, but it did little to combat the spring of ginger and wires of gray that spooled through it. His face, weathered and worn, drooped like a sleepy hound’s. She figured he’d bought the shit-brown jacket he’d paired with wrinkled trousers before his best boy, McNab, had been weaned from his mother’s tit.
In contrast, the young EDD ace and Peabody’s cohab sizzled in atomic red c
argos and a tee the color of radioactive egg yolks scrambled with lightning bolts. His long blond hair was tucked back from his thin, pretty face in a slinky braid.
Since it was there, Eve scooped up a slice.
“You okay having Jamie work on this?” she asked Feeney.
“He’s going to push on it anyway. It’s better if he does it where I can keep my eye on him.” He took a swig of cream soda. “He’s going to be rocky right off, but he’ll steady up. I knew Deena, too. Good kid.” He kept his eyes on the crime scene photos. “Sick fuck. This one’s going to spread through the department. You’ll have more cops lining up for detail on this than you can use.”
“How well do you know MacMasters?”
“We worked a few together, knocked back some brews together. Good cop.”
It was, she knew, Feeney’s highest praise.
“You look at this, Dallas, and you think—as a cop, as a father—you can do everything right, do the job, keep it clean, and you still can’t protect your own kid from something like this. You think you can, even though you know what’s out there, you have to think you can. Then something like this brings it right home, right in the front door. And you know you can’t.”
He shook his head, but it didn’t budge the anger on his face. “We want to believe we can protect our own.” Then he paused, took another long drink. “I was going to head out with the wife to New Jersey this afternoon, a cookout at our boy’s. New Jersey for Christ’s sake,” he added with the deliberate disdain of a native New Yorker.
“Well, look at it this way, traffic would’ve been a total bitch.”
“That’s fucking A. Anyway, the wife’s bringing me back a plate.” He looked down at Deena again. “This little girl had a lot more than a holiday barbecue taken from her.”
“He went for her, Feeney, knew how to get to her. There has to be a reason. We work from there.”
“Payback.” Feeney nodded. “Could be. He’s been a cop a long time, LT of Illegals near ten years, I guess. Captain now. He closes cases and doesn’t take any bullshit. Good cop,” he repeated. “Good cops make enemies, but—”