by J. D. Robb
Data complete . . .
“On screen.”
Now there were some bumps and busts, and a few whiffs. Eleven on her list had illegals hits, some more than one. And yet, she noted, none of those had any connection to MacMasters.
Considering, she ordered a run on the investigating officer or team. Maybe the connection with MacMasters was more nebulous.
Once again, she hit zero. And paced.
She’d ask MacMasters directly. Maybe one of the investigators was an old childhood friend, or a third cousin once removed.
Waste of time, that wasn’t it, but they’d cover the ground.
She recircled the murder board, coming from another angle, but saw nothing new. She shook her head as Roarke came in.
“Daughter,” she said. “Payback—if we run with that—was to kill MacMasters’s daughter. Is it a mirror? Is MacMasters somehow responsible—in the killer’s mind—for the rape or death of his own daughter—child. Make it child as MacMasters only had a daughter.”
“If the killer is anywhere near the age he pretended to be, he’d be a very young father. What if he’s the child, and MacMasters is, to his mind, responsible for the rape or murder of his parent? Or, for that matter himself. He might perceive himself as a victim.”
“Yeah, I’m circling those routes, too.” She dragged both hands through her hair. “Basically, I’m getting nowhere. Maybe taking that break, clearing it out of my head for an hour, is a good idea.”
“I copied the music disc.”
Something in his tone had her looking away from the board, meeting his eyes. “What is it?”
“I ran an auto-analysis while I was working on the other e-business. It’s both audio and video, which is very unusual. Performance art is often a part of a disc like this. But there was an addition made this morning at two-thirty, and another at just after three.”
“He added to it. Son of a bitch. Did you play it?”
“I didn’t, no, assuming you’d disapprove of that.”
She held out her hand for the disc, then took it to her comp. “Play content from additions, starting at two-thirty, this date. Display video on screen one.”
Roarke said nothing, but went to her, stood with her.
The music came first, something light and insanely cheerful. The sort of thing, she thought, some stores play in the background. It always made her want to beat someone up.
Then the image slid on screen—soft focus, then sharper, sharper until every bruise, every tear, every smear of blood on Deena MacMasters showed clearly.
She’d been propped up on the pillows so that she reclined, half-sitting, facing the camera. Probably her own PPC or ’link, Eve thought. Her eyes were dull, ravaged, defeated. Her voice, when she spoke, slurred with exhaustion and shock.
“Please. Please don’t make me.”
The image faded, then bloomed again.
“Okay. Okay. Dad, this is your fault. Everything is your fault. And, and, oh God. Oh God. Okay. I will never forgive you. And I hate you. Dad. Daddy. Please. Okay. You’ll never know why. You won’t know, and I won’t. But—but I have to pay for what you did. Daddy, help me. Why doesn’t somebody help me?”
The image faded again, and the music changed. Eve heard the cliché of the funeral dirge as the camera came back, panned up, slowly, from Deena’s feet, up her legs, her torso, to her face. To the empty eyes.
It held on the face as text began to scroll.
It may take you a while to find this, play this. Your dead daughter sure liked her music! I played it for her while I raped the shit out of her. Oh, btw, she was an idiot, but a decent piece of ass. I hope our little video causes you to stick your weapon in your mouth and blow your brains out.
She didn’t deliver her lines very well, but that doesn’t diminish the truth. Your fault, asshole. If it wasn’t for you, your deeply stupid daughter would still be alive.
How long can you live with that?
Payback is rocking-A!
For the crescendo, the audio blasted with Deena’s screams.
“Computer, replay, same segment.”
“Christ Jesus, Eve.”
“I need to see it again,” she snapped. “I need it analyzed. Maybe he said something that we can pick up, maybe there’s something that picks up his reflection.” She moved closer to the screen as it began its replay.
Roarke crossed over to open the wall panel. He pulled out a bottle of wine, uncorked it.
“There’s no mirror, no reflective surface. Her eyes? The way he’s got her sitting, maybe he can get a reflection off her eyes.”
“Alive or dead? I’m sorry,” Roarke said immediately. “I’m sorry for that. Truly.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. She’s so young, and so afraid, so helpless.”
“She’s not me.”
“No. Not you, nor Marlena. But . . .” He handed her a glass of wine, then took a long drink from his own. “I’ll see if I can get something off it. I’d have a better chance with the original than a copy.”
“I need to log that in, in Central, run it through Feeney.” Time, she thought, it all took time, but . . . “No shortcuts on this.”
“All right then.” Roarke gestured to the screen. “You won’t show this to the father.”
“No.” She drank because her throat was dry. “He doesn’t need to see this.”
Because he needed to, needed the contact, Roarke took her hand in his as they studied the screen together. “It seems revenge, your payback, holds as motive.”
“It had to. I couldn’t see it any other way.” Again, and again, she read the final text, that ugly message from the killer.
“It’s boasting,” she said quietly. “He couldn’t resist digging in the knife. Leaving the music disc wasn’t the mistake. But adding this, that’s a big one. He doesn’t care about that, but it’s a mistake.”
“It wasn’t enough even to torture that child, to force her to say those words—her last—to her father. He had to add his own.”
“Exactly right. That’s a crack in control, in logic, even in patience.”
“The kill,” Roarke suggested. “For some it’s a spike, a rush.”
“That’s right. He was so damn pleased with himself. All those weeks, those months of preparation coming to a head here, in what he sees as his victory. So he has to do his little dance. It’s a mistake, a weakness,” she said with a nod. “He put too much of himself in there, couldn’t resist claiming that much responsibility for her. It’s the kind of thing that gives us a handle.”
Personal, she thought. Deeply personal. “He needed MacMasters to know, and to suffer for the knowing. It gives us a focus. We concentrate on MacMasters, his case files, his career. Who has he taken down, what cops has he kicked over the years. Everything he did up to that was cold, controlled. This part? It’s cocky, and even while it’s smug, it’s really pissed off. It helps.”
Because he’d had enough, maybe too much, Roarke turned away from the screen. “I hope to God it does.”
“We’ll take a break.”
“Which you’re doing now for me.”
“About half.” She ordered the screen off, ordered a copy of the disc. “You’re right, it hits really close to home. I need it out of my head for a little while.”
He went back to her wondering why he hadn’t seen how pale she’d gone, how dark her eyes. “We’ll have a meal. Not in here. We’ll step away from this. We’ll have a meal outside, in the air.”
“Okay. Yeah.” She let out a breath that eased some of the constriction in her chest. “That’d be good. I need to inform Whitney, and the team. I have to do that now.”
“Do that, and I’ll take care of the meal.”
When she came down, stepped out on the terrace, he stood with his glass of wine on the border between stone and lawn. He’d switched on lights that illuminated the trees, the shrubs, the gardens so they glimmered under the moon. The table was set—he had a way—with flic
kering candles and dishes under silver covers.
Two worlds, she supposed. What they’d closed away inside for a while, and what was here, sparkling in the night.
“When I built this house, this place,” he began, still looking out into the shimmering dark, “I wanted a home, and I wanted important. Secure, of course. But I think it wasn’t until you I put secure in the same bed as safe. Safe wasn’t a particular priority. I liked the edge. When you love, safe becomes paramount. And still with what we are, what we do, there’s the edge. We know it. Maybe we need it.”
He turned to her now, and he was both shadow and light.
“Earlier I said I didn’t know how you could bear doing what you do, seeing what you see. I expect I’ll wonder that a thousand times in a thousand ways through our life together. But tonight, I know. I don’t have the words, no clever phrases or lofty philosophy. I simply know.”
“When it’s too much, bringing it home, you have to tell me.”
“Darling Eve.” He stepped to her, danced his fingertips over her messy cap of hair. “I wanted a home, and I wanted important. I managed the shell of it, didn’t I? An impressive shell for all that. But you? What you are, what you bring into it—even this, maybe due to this, you make it important. And for me, for what I might add to it? Well, it might balance the scales a bit.”
“Are you looking for balance?”
“I might be,” he murmured. “So.” He leaned down to brush a kiss over her brow. “Let’s have our meal.”
She lifted one of the silver tops and studied the plate below. A chunk of lightly grilled fish topped a colorful mix of vegetables with a spray of pretty pasta curls.
“It looks . . . healthy.”
He laughed, kissed her again. “I wager it’ll go down easy enough. Then you can wipe the healthy out with too much coffee and some of the cookies you’ve stashed in your office.”
She gave him a bland look as she sat down. “Stashed indicates concealed. They’re just put away in such a manner that certain people whose names rhyme with Treebody and McBlab can’t grab them and scarf them down.” She stabbed some fish, ate it. “It’s okay.”
“As an alternative to pizza.”
“There is no alternative to pizza. It stands alone.”
“Do you remember your first slice?”
“I remember my first New York pizza—the real deal. Out of school, of age. Shook myself out of the system and hit New York, applied to the Academy. I had a couple weeks, and I was walking the city, getting my bearings. I went into this little place downtown, West Side—Polumbi’s. I ordered a slice. They had a counter that ran along the front window, and I got a seat there. I bit in, and it was like, I don’t know, my own little miracle. I thought, I’m free, finally. And I’m here, where I want to be, and I’m eating this goddamn pizza and watching New York. It was the best day of my life.”
She shrugged, stabbed more of the delicately grilled fish. “Damn good pizza, too.”
It both broke his heart and lifted it.
For a time they spoke of inconsequential things, blessedly ordinary things. But he knew her, her mind, her moods.
“Tell me what Whitney said. It’s inside your head.”
“It can wait.”
“No need.”
She toyed with the vegetables. “He agrees there’s no point in showing MacMasters the disc, or—at this time—informing him of it. We’ll focus on MacMasters’s cases, current and prior, see if we can hook any of them to his threat file. But . . .”
“You’re thinking he’s too smart to have threatened outright.”
“He’s made one mistake, he’ll have made another. But I don’t think we’ll find him there. Baxter and Trueheart hit the one name MacMasters came up with, a dealer he’d helped bust. There’s nothing there,” she said with a shake of her head. “It doesn’t play. When you . . .”
He angled his head when she trailed off and scooped up more fish. “Finish it off.”
She looked into his eyes, already sorry she would take him—them—out of the shimmering night and into the blood and pain of the past. “Okay. The men who killed Marlena, who brutalized her and killed her to strike at you . . .”
“Did I let them know I intended to hunt them down and kill them?” he finished. “It makes you—what’s the most diplomatic word under the circumstances—uncomfortable to ask, or to delve too deep into the fact that I did hunt them down, and I did kill them. Everyone who’d tortured and raped and beaten and broken her.”
She picked up her wine while the raw edge of his tightly controlled anger stabbed at her. But she kept her eyes steady on his. “Comfort isn’t always a part of this, what I do, what we are.”
“What was done to that girl we watched on the screen upstairs was done to another, even younger girl. By more than one. Over and over, again and again. For the same reason, it seems. To strike out at someone else. With Marlena, it was me. She was family to me, and they ripped her to pieces.”
“I told you to tell me when bringing it home is too much. Why the hell don’t you?”
He sat back making an obvious—it was so rare for it to be obvious—effort to settle himself. “We’re too entwined for that, Eve. And I wouldn’t change it. But there are times, Christ Jesus, it’s like swallowing broken glass.”
It struck her suddenly, and made her want to spring up and punch him. “Goddamn it, I’m not comparing what you did to what this bastard’s done. You didn’t kill an innocent to punish the guilty. You didn’t act out of blind revenge, but—whether or not I agree—out of a sense of justice. I asked, you idiot, because you were young when it happened, and youth is often rash, impatient. But you countered that with patience, with focus until you’d . . . done what you’d set out to do. Which wasn’t, for Christ’s sake, raping and murdering a kid to get your rocks off.”
He said nothing for a moment, then gave an easy shrug. “Well, that’s certainly telling me.” Even as she scowled at him, candlelight flickering between them, he smiled. “The fact, the singular fact, that you can know what you do of me and accept is my great fortune.”
“Bollocks,” she muttered, and made him laugh over her co-opting one of his oaths.
“I adore you, every day. And I realize I needed more than the meal and the break. I needed to get that out of my system. So, to your question, Lieutenant.”
“What the hell was the question?” she asked.
“Did I threaten or boast or transmit to the men who’d killed Marlena that I intended to make them pay for it? No. Nor did I leave any trace so any of those involved would know the why of it.”
“That’s what I thought.” Calmer, she nodded. “But then, it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t revenge. That’s part of the difference, and part of the need here. The reason for the video, the message.”
“Aye. I’d agree. That kind of revenge? It’s thirsty.”
“Thirsty,” she murmured, and ran the message back through her head. “Yeah. That’s a good word for it.”
“Generally you’d leave enough so the target of that revenge knew which quiver the arrow came from. Otherwise, there’s no point in that victory dance.”
“Yeah, but we have to check it out. We’ll need to comb through the university, that’s an angle. And we’ll analyze the disc. Feeney needs to take that.”
“Am I being demoted?” Roarke asked lightly.
She arched her brows. “We’re too entwined for that,” she said. “But it’s a cop’s kid. We need to be careful. I want the head of EDD in charge of that piece of evidence. We’ve got an unlimited budget, unlimited manpower—and there will be those, in the media, even in the department, who question that.”
A faint line of annoyance rode between her eyes. “How come this case gets so much time and effort? Why didn’t Civilian Joe get the same treatment? The answers are simple. You come after a cop or a cop’s family, we come after you. And it’s more complex. You come after a cop or a cop’s family, it puts us all in the crosshairs and m
akes it goddamn hard to do the job for Civilian Joe. We live with that, but this intensifies. MacMasters had partners through the years, and as a boss, men under his command. How many of them might be vulnerable? And more, when we catch this bastard, every piece of evidence, every point of procedure has to be above reproach. We can’t have anything questionable in court, nothing some defense attorney can hang us on.”
She ate a bite. “That said, if you had the time and the inclination to work with the copy, nobody’s stopping you. As expert consultant, civilian, assigned to EDD, you report to Feeney.”
“Which isn’t nearly as fun as reporting to you. But message received.”
“One of the most valuable things you do is let me bounce stuff off you. Listen, give opinions. Just talking it through opens up angles for me. That’s why I asked the question.”
“Understood. Now you have another, so bounce.”
“Okay, I have to play all the lines—pull, tug. One of them that keeps circling for me is the Columbia connection. Maybe, maybe it was just more bullshit. But it feels like he’d have played it with roots in truth. Just like you said about the accent. So he went there, or worked there, or knows someone who did. Alternatively he scoped it out, maybe—what is it—monitored classes. Got the feel so he could talk about it to her. Maybe he faked his name, but he probably picked something that felt natural to him, or meant something to him. He’s not going to give her too much truth, but those roots again.”
“With a school that size, even with the security, it’s not difficult to get on campus, study the layout, gather particulars. Names of instructors, times of classes. He could get most of the information online or simply by requesting it.”
It was more, she thought. Something more.
“He studied her, so he knew she had a friend who went there. It was, I’m dead sure, one of his angles. One of the ways he used to get her to talk to him. In those first stages, she’s got no motivation to keep it all secret. So she might say to Jamie how she met this guy who goes there.”
“Ah.” Following her lead, Roarke nodded. “And if he’d been studying her, he would know her friend Jamie’s interest in e-work, police work. Wouldn’t he want to cover himself there, if Jamie got it into his head to check out this boy who put stars in the eyes of his good friend?”