by J. D. Robb
“Where are you going?”
“I want to go back to the scene, walk through it, then I’ll pick up the runs at home. Copy the data from Columbia to my home unit.”
“Okay. If I hit anything, I’ll let you know.”
Eve downed more coffee, and tagged Roarke. “Any progress?”
“This won’t be quick or easy.”
“I’m done here. I’m going to go back to the scene, do a walk-through, then take the rest home.”
“I’ll meet you in the garage.”
“Not quick or easy, remember?”
“With the captain’s blessing, I’m having some of the units sent to my lab at home. I’ve got better equipment. Five minutes.”
He clicked off.
She loaded up what she needed, sent copies of all reports, notes, files to her home unit. On the way to the garage she took a tag from one of the officers on the knock-on-doors. All residents on the victim’s block had been located and interviewed. And not one of them had seen anyone enter or exit the MacMasters home, save Deena herself, over the weekend.
Maybe Baxter and his faithful aide, Trueheart, would have better luck, she thought. Or she and Peabody would get a hit from the morning circuit of the park. But when a man left no trace of himself at a rape murder, when he took hours to complete the task and left nothing behind, the likelihood of him being careless enough to be seen with his victim was low.
Still, someone somewhere had seen them. Remembering was a different matter.
They’d walked, talked, eaten, played in the city, and over a number of weeks. She only had to find one venue, one person, one crack in the whole to pry open.
She walked to her car, leaned back against the trunk as she took out her memo book to key in more notes.
Columbia. Student ID.
Georgia. Southern accent.
Truth or lie? Why truth, why lie?
Missing pocket ’link, PPC—possible e-diary?—handbag. Other contents of handbag important? Protection and trophy?
She looked up when Roarke crossed the garage. “When you worked a mark, did you ever fake an accent?”
“A cop shop’s an odd place to discuss such matters from my standpoint. Since you’re working, I’ll drive.”
He waited until they were in the vehicle before he answered the question. “Yes, now and then, tailoring such to suit the mark. But more often the Irish suited well enough. I might layer it on—switching to a thicker West County brogue, or posh it up with public school tones.”
“But, especially if it was a long con, or some job that would take several weeks and a lot of communication with the mark, it would be easier and safer to stick close to natural. Posh it up or thicken it up, but stay with the basics.”
“That’s true enough,” he agreed as he headed uptown. “One slip and the whole thing can fall apart.”
“Guy tells her he’s from Georgia. She likes the accent, tells her friend that part. He’s smart, so the smart thing is to use what you have, what you’re comfortable with. Maybe he lived in the south, at least for a while. He tells her he goes to Columbia, so maybe he did, or he knows enough about it to be able to speak intelligently when she says, hey, I have a friend who goes there. No point in getting tripped up on those kinds of details. It’s hard to believe he’s nineteen, and has this kind of patience and control, this kind of focus.”
She glanced at Roarke. “Though some do.”
He switched lanes to slide into a narrow gap in traffic. “At nineteen I had a lifetime behind me, of being a street rat, of running games, thieving, and aiming toward getting the fuck out. So by then I’d honed some skills, and learned the need for that patience and control.”
“Murder’s different from thievery.”
“It is indeed entirely different. And more yet when it’s the deliberate murder of an innocent girl. It would be all in the motivation, wouldn’t it? To plan it, run it, execute it this way would take a strong motive. But for some, the motive’s all in the thrill, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t feel like a thrill killing. It’s too exacting for that. And too cold.”
He said nothing for a few moments as he nipped around a Rapid Cab and through a light seconds before it flashed red. “When I went for the men who’d tortured and killed Marlena, it was cold. Cold-blooded, cold-minded. Some might have looked at the results and thought otherwise, but there was no thrill involved in it. None of it.”
Eve thought of Summerset’s young daughter—a girl Roarke had thought of as a sister, and who’d been used and murdered as a warning to him. “Deena wasn’t executed. If there’s a similarity it’s between her and Marlena. The payback. It keeps ringing for me. On the other hand, he could have taken her out other ways, at other times. Abducted her, put MacMasters through that agony before killing her.”
“He liked playing the boyfriend, you’re thinking. Stringing it out, making her care. He likes the game maybe. If there was a thrill, it would’ve been in that stage of it. Cold blood and a cold mind. You’d need both to be able to romance a girl, to use that for the express purpose of taking her life.”
When he pulled up in front of the MacMasters home, Eve got out to stand on the sidewalk.
“It’s later than it would’ve been when he walked here. He had to walk, nothing else makes sense. He could’ve come from either direction, even through the park. Until we find somebody who saw him that night, we can’t know. He had the cuffs, he had the drug. Warm night, but he could’ve been wearing a jacket. A lot of kids wear them more for style than need. Restraints in a pocket, maybe, same with the drug. But he’d need tools, wouldn’t he, for the security. Maybe he had a satchel, a bag, a backpack. Or he’s just got the tools in another pocket. McNab wears pants that have a million of them.”
“With a jacket you could hook the cuffs in the back, cover them, as cops often do.”
“I think he strode along, a young guy with somewhere to go. Just another teenager or college type, good-looking, clean, upscale clothes. Nobody pays attention. I think he tagged her from a block or two away, got her on the ’link, the way you said. Maybe just to say, ‘I’m nearly there,’ maybe, yeah maybe to pretend he wasn’t sure of the house. That would be smart. She’d guide him in, keep her eye out for him, open the door to greet him even as he makes the turn for the steps.”
“She would want him in quick and smooth, too, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t want one of the neighbors mentioning to her parents how they’d seen the boy visiting while they were away.”
“Good point.” Eve narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, good point. They may have even worked it out ahead, when he talked her into having him over. ‘I’ll tag you when I’m close, so you can watch for me.’ Their little secret.”
She saw it in her head as she went up the steps, broke the police seal, used her master to open the locks.
“Still, somebody might see. He’s not worried about anyone mentioning it. She’ll be dead, game over. But he’d have to take precautions about what they see. So yeah, I’m betting jacket, probably a cap, shades. Keep your head down, hands in your pockets, using an earbud or headset. Maybe they can ID the clothes, but you’d ditch those. Maybe they can give a general idea of your height and build. Your coloring. So what? Even eye wits rarely get it just right. He’s just a boy going to see a girl.”
She stopped to stand in the foyer, to keep it rolling through her head. “She’s excited. He kisses her hello. Still the shy guy, still the sweet boy. He needs to keep that up so he can take her without a struggle, so she doesn’t have a chance to fight or get away or scrape any pieces of him off. She’s got music on, she likes music. They like music. Maybe show him some of the house, at least take him back to the kitchen so you can get the drinks, the food.”
She walked back, with Roarke beside her. “It’s fun, it’s exciting to have dinner, just the two of you. He’s careful not to touch anything, or if he has to touch something to make note of it and wipe it down after. But hands in the pockets again. Shy g
uy. You’re kids so you eat in here, in the kitchen. Right over there.”
She walked over to a bright blue table with padded benches that offered a view of a small courtyard backed by a high wall.
“Sit across from each other so you can talk. So you can look in his eyes as you talk. Eat, laugh, joke, flirt. Oh hey, do you want another fizzy? Sure he does, and when you go to get it, he slips the drug in your drink. It’s so easy. You feel woozy for a minute, you feel off, but with the Zoner to kick it, mellow, too. You just slide out, slide under. And he carries you upstairs.
“She weighed one-thirteen and change. Deadweight, but not that much for a young, healthy man to carry up a flight of stairs.” She continued as she followed the path to the kitchen stairs. “Makes more sense to take her up the back. Why waste the energy? If he’d scoped out the house, and he damn well would have, he’d know which room was hers. He’d have seen her through the window anytime she didn’t use the privacy screen. Even if he wasn’t sure, it’s so easy to make which room is hers. The color, the posters. It’s all girl.”
Roarke said nothing, not yet. He knew what she was doing, walking it through as both victim and killer. “You’d want to restrain her first, take no chances. The cuffs, the sheets. Tight on the sheets; you want her to feel it. You want to leave marks. You hope she struggles. She will. You know she will. So you go down and clean up. Dishes, but for her glass, in the machine. Run it on sterilize, wipe out any trace. Check out the security door. No point working on that. She’s going to give you the code. You’ll make sure of it. Strip down, seal up.”
She circled around, shook her head in annoyance. “No, no, out of order. You’d do that downstairs, even before you bring her up. Nothing of you up here. All your things in a neat pile, careful, very careful. After you finish with her, get her bag, check the contents, take it down to put it with your stuff. Upstairs again, go through the room, make sure, very sure there’s nothing of you, nothing on her comp, on the bedroom ’link. Anywhere . . .”
She paused, wandering the room, opening drawers she’d already searched. “Would he take something to make sure he got hard? Multiple rapes take a lot of energy, a lot of wood. That’s a thought, that goes in the wonder pile. Maybe he doesn’t need it. Maybe her thrashing around trapped in the nightmare he gave her, helpless and scared, even unconscious, maybe that gets him up.
“Then she starts coming around, and the fun begins.”
“Don’t put yourself through that.” It clawed through his heart, left it bleeding. “We know what happened then, so don’t.”
“It’s part of it. Has to be. She’s . . . bewildered. The drug makes her mind musty at first, then the headache, the stabbing pain of it.”
She looked at the bed, stripped down to the mattress now. “It occurs to me he could’ve made it easier. Given her a dose of Whore or Rabbit. That was a choice. He didn’t want her to participate, even under a date rape drug. He wanted her terrified and hurting. Does he tell her what he’s going to do, or is it right down to business? I can’t see him yet. Just can’t figure him yet. She cries. She’s only sixteen, and that part of her cries and asks why, and doesn’t want to believe the sweet boy is a monster. But the cop’s daughter knows. The cop’s daughter sees him now. He’d want her to.
“She fights—that has to be satisfying—even during the rape she fights. She fights even while she screams and cries and begs. She’s a virgin; nice bonus. She bleeds from where you’ve broken her, from her wrists, from her ankles. She’s strong and she fights hard.”
He stood by, his guts in knots, as Eve went through it, step-by-step, horror by horror. She moved around the room, circling the bed where that obscenity had taken place. Even as she described the last moments of a young girl’s life, her voice stayed steady.
He didn’t speak again until she’d finished and had started another search of the room.
“Even after all this time with you, I don’t know how you can do it, how you can put yourself in these places, make yourself see these things the way you do.”
“It’s necessary.”
“That’s bollocks. It’s more than an objective, observational sort of thing. You do what you do, how you do it for them. You do it for Deena and all the others who’ve had their lives stolen. It’s more than standing for the dead, which is vicious enough to bear. But you walk with them through it. With all I’ve done in all my life, I don’t know if I’d have the stomach to do what you do, every day.”
She stopped for a moment, let herself stop, pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I can’t not do it. I don’t know if it was ever a choice, but I know it’s not one now. I can’t see him. It’s not just because we haven’t found anyone alive who has. It’s who he is, why he is, why he did this and in this way. I can’t see him. He’s murky. Walking through it helps clear some of the murk.”
She rubbed her eyes again, refocused. “How long would it take you to retrieve the discs from a system like the one here, and wipe the hard drive?”
“It has two fail-safes, and requires a code for disc retrieval. But I know the system.”
“Yeah, one of yours, I checked. But he’d know it. Bank on that.”
“Well then, it would take me about thirty seconds for the retrieval, and another one or two to do the wipe. But he infected it to corrupt. We’ve got that much from today’s work. A complicated virus to corrupt the drive and wipe out the data and imagery, and that would take some time to upload, and skill or money to obtain.”
“He’s not as good as you—not a pat on your back, but he doesn’t have your experience. If he passes for nineteen, I doubt he’s hit thirty. So maybe two or three times longer for the retrieval, maybe twice on the wipe since he’s using a virus.”
“What are you looking for, Eve? If I had an idea I might be able to do more than stand here.”
“I don’t know. Something. You gave me coffee.”
“Sorry?”
“A token, something to charm her. A little gift, nothing too important. You sent me coffee right after we met.”
“And you interviewed me as a murder suspect.”
“It worked. The coffee, I mean. Hit the right button. So what did he give her? What . . . I knew it. I fucking knew it.” She held up a music disc taken from the hundred or so in a holder. “Happy Mix 4 Deena, that’s the label. And look here, she added this sticker thing—a big red heart, and initials inside.”
“DM, for her, DP for him.”
“For the name he gave her anyway,” Eve confirmed. “David, Jo said. Never as smart as they think. He should’ve looked for this, taken it. It’s a link, and the only one so far.”
She bagged it.
“I have to say the odds of tracing that disc—as it’s a common sort—are astronomical.”
“He made it. A link’s a link.” She looked around again, satisfied for now. “Okay, the scene doesn’t have any more to tell me. At least not now. I need to go work it.”
6
AS SUMMERSET MADE NO APPEARANCE WHEN they walked into the house, Eve lifted her eyebrows. “Where’s Mister Scary?”
The look Roarke sent her managed to be both resigned and mildly scolding. “Summerset has the night off.”
“You mean the house is Summerset-free? Damn shame we have to waste it with work.”
He slid a hand down her back, over her ass. “A break wouldn’t be uncalled for.”
“Nope. I’ve got over thirty runs to do. Plus I put off reporting to Whitney hoping we’d catch a miracle.” She started up the steps, then stopped dead when she spied the cat sitting on the landing, staring at her with unquestionably annoyed eyes.
“Jesus, he’s almost as bad as your goon.”
“He dislikes being left on his own.”
“I’m not going to start hauling him to crime scenes. Deal with it, pal,” she told the cat, but stopped to crouch and stroke when she reached the landing. “Some of us have to work for a living. Well, one of us has to. The other one mostly does it for fun.”<
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“As it happens I need to go have a bit of fun. After which I’ll put in some time in the lab.”
“Work, on Peace Day—or pretty much Peace Night now, I guess.”
“A little something I started this morning when my wife left me on my own.”
They continued up together with the cat prancing between them.
“Can you make a copy of this disc?” she asked him. “I need to keep the original clean.”
“No problem.” He took the evidence bag. “We’re eating in two hours,” Roarke decreed as he walked past her office toward his own. “Meanwhile, you can feed the cat.”
She didn’t bother to scowl, it was energy wasted. She moved through her office, and again stopped dead when she saw the stuffed cat Roarke had given her—a toy replica of Galahad—sprawled on her sleep chair.
She looked at the toy, at the original, back to the toy. “You know, I don’t even want to know what you were doing with that.”
In the kitchen she fed the cat, programmed a pot of coffee.
At her desk she booted up her comp then sat to organize her notes, the reports, and start the first ten runs from the Columbia list. While the computer worked, she looked over the report she’d drafted for Whitney.
She refined it, read it again. Hoping he’d be satisfied, for now, with the written, she sent copies to both his home and office units.
She ordered the computer to display the runs, in order, on screen. Sitting back with her coffee she studied data, images.
Young, she thought, all so young. Not one of her initial runs had so much as a whiff of criminal, no juvie bumps, no illegals busts, not even so much as an academic knuckle rap.
She ran the rest, then started over from another angle.
“Computer, run current list for parents, siblings with criminal record and/or connection to MacMasters, Captain Jonah, as investigator or case boss.”
Acknowledged. Working . . .
Payback, if payback it was, came from different roots, she thought. While the run progressed, she rose to set up yet another murder board.