by J. D. Robb
“She matters,” he shot back. “She matters to you. Doesn’t it occur to you that she could matter to me?”
“Women are a business to you.”
“When they pay me to be my business. It isn’t like that with Delia. For Christ’s sake, we don’t even have sex.”
“What? She can’t meet your fee?” As soon as it was out, she hated herself. Hated herself more when she saw those cool eyes register simple hurt. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That was wrong. That was way off.”
“Yeah, it was.”
Suddenly tired, she scooted down and sat on the floor with her back against the wall. “I don’t want to know this stuff. I don’t want to think about this stuff. I like you.”
Intrigued, he lowered to the floor, his back to the counter so their knees almost brushed. “Really?”
“Yeah, mostly. You’ve been seeing her since before Christmas, and you haven’t . . . What’s wrong with her?”
He laughed, and this time it was easy and rich. “Jesus, Dallas, which way do you want it? I have sex with her, I’m a bastard. I don’t, I’m a bastard. Roarke was right.”
“What do you mean, Roarke was right?”
“You can’t figure women.” He took a drink of his wine. “She’s a friend. It just happened that way. I don’t have many friends who aren’t clients or in the business.”
“Watch yourself. They start to multiply when you’re not paying attention. It complicates your whole damn life.”
“You’re a good friend. One more thing,” he said and gave her foot an easy pat. “I mostly like you, too, Lieutenant Sugar.”
The nightmare came. She should have expected it. Areena’s talk of dreams and blood and terror triggered it. But even knowing, she could never stop it once it slid into her mind.
She saw him come into the room. Her father. That nasty little room in Dallas, so cold, even with the temperature gauge stuck on high. But seeing him, smelling him, knowing he’d been drinking, but not drinking enough, had sweat popping out on her chilled arms.
She dropped the knife. She’d been so hungry, so hungry it had been worth the risk of finding a snack. Just a little piece of cheese. The knife fell out of her hand, took days, years, centuries to reach the floor. And in the dream, the clatter of it was like thunder that echoed. Echoed. Echoed.
Across his face as he walked to her, the red light from the sign washed red, then white, then red.
Please don’t please don’t please don’t.
But it never did any good to beg.
It would happen again and again and again. The pain of his hand smashing almost casually across her face. Hitting the floor so hard it rattled her bones. And then his weight on top of her.
“Eve. There now. Eve, come back to me. You’re home.”
Her breath burned in her throat, and she struggled, bucking, shoving against the arms that held her. And Roarke’s voice seeped into the dream, warm, calm, lovely. Safe.
“That’s right. Hold on to me.” He gathered her closer in the dark, rocking her as he would a child until her shudders quieted. “You’re all right now.”
“Don’t let go.”
“No.” He pressed his lips to her temple. “I won’t.”
When she woke in the morning, the dream only a vague smear on her mind, his arms were still around her.
chapter seven
Eve beat Peabody into Central. It was deliberate, and it cost her a full hour’s sleep that morning. She hoped to file her updated report, then move on, before her aide showed up. If she was lucky, there would be no discussion involving Charles Monroe.
The detective’s bullpen was buzzing. It turned out that Detective Zeno’s wife had given birth to a baby girl the night before, and he’d celebrated by bringing in two dozen donuts. Knowing detectives, Eve snagged one before the unit fell on them like hyenas on scavenged meat.
“Who won the pool?”
“I did.” Baxter grinned around a cinnamon twist with raspberry jelly. “Six hundred and thirty smackeroos.”
“Damn it. I never win the baby pool.” Consoling herself, Eve snagged a cruller. Taking the first bite, she grinned at him. Good old Baxter, she thought. He could be a pain in the ass, but he was meticulous and sharp with details.
He was just perfect. “Looks like this is your lucky day.”
“No shit. I’ve had my eye on this new auto-entertainment system. The six bills plus is going to go a long way toward putting that baby in my ride.”
“That’s great, Baxter, but I mean it’s really your lucky day.” She pulled a clear file of discs out of her bag, those gathered from the uniforms and detectives who’d logged witness names the night of the Draco homicide. “You get the grand prize. Run standard backgrounds and probabilities on these individuals, re Draco. We got close to three thousand names here. Grab a couple of detectives, a few uniforms if you need them, and get statements. Let’s see if you can cut that number in half by the end of the week.”
He snorted. “Very funny, Dallas.”
“I have orders from Whitney to tag somebody for this duty. Tag, Baxter. You’re it.”
“This is bullshit.” When she dropped the file on his desk, his eyes wheeled. “You can’t dump this nightmare on me, Dallas.”
“Can, have, did. You’re dropping crumbs, Baxter. You should remember to always keep your area clean.”
Pleased with the morning’s work, she headed for her office with his curses following her.
The door was open, and the sounds of riffling came clearly into the hall. Eve pressed her back to the wall, danced her fingers over her weapon. The son of a bitch. She had him this time. The sneaking candy thief’s ass was hers at last.
She charged into the room, leading with her fist, and caught the intruder by the scruff of the neck. “Gotcha!”
“Hey, lady!”
She had six inches and a good twenty pounds on him. Eve calculated she could squeeze him through her skinny window without too much trouble. He’d make an interesting smear on the pavement below.
“I’m not going to read you your rights,” she said as she bounced him against the file cabinets. “You won’t need them where you’re going.”
“Call Lieutenant Dallas!” His voice piped out like a rusty flute. “Call Lieutenant Dallas.”
She hauled him around, stared into his jittery eyes, doubled in size behind microgoggles. “I am Dallas, you candy-stealing putz.”
“Well, jeez. Jeez. I’m Lewis. Tomjohn Lewis, from Maintenance. I got your new equipment.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Let me smell your breath. You got candy breath, I’m going to pull out your tongue and strangle you with it.”
With his feet dangling an inch from the floor, he puffed out his cheeks and blew explosive air in her face. “Cracked wheat waffles down to the Eatery, and—and the fruit cup. I ain’t had candy. Swear to God.”
“No, but you might want to consider a stronger mouthwash. What’s this about new equipment?”
“There. Right there. I was just finishing the transfer.”
Still holding him off the floor, she turned her head. Her mouth fell open seconds before she dropped Lewis in a heap and leaped on the industrial gray shell of the computer. “Mine. It’s mine.”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant sir. She’s all yours.”
With her arms possessively circled around the unit, she looked back at him. “Look, maintenance boy, if you’re toying with me, I’ll bite your ears off and make them into stew.”
“I got the order right here.” Moving cautiously, he reached in his pocket for his logbook, punched in the code. “See, here, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, Homicide Division. You got yourself a new XE-5000. You requisitioned it yourself.”
“I requisitioned it two goddamn years ago.”
“Yeah. Well.” He smiled hopefully. “Here she is. I was just hooking her to the mainframe. You want I should finish?”
“Yeah, I want you should finish.”
“Okay. Hav
e it done in a wink, then get right out of your way.” He all but dived under the desk.
“What the hell kind of name is Tomjohn?”
“It’s my name, Lieutenant. You got your complete owner’s manual and user’s guide in that box over there.”
She looked over, snorted at the foot-high box. “I know how it works. I have this model at home.”
“It’s a good machine. Once you’re linked to the main, all we gotta do is transfer your code and data from your old equipment. Take about thirty minutes, tops.”
“I got time.” She skimmed her eyes over her old unit, dented, battered, despised. Some of the dents had been put into it by her own frustrated fist. “What happens to my old equipment?”
“I can haul it out for you, take it down to recycle.”
“Fine—no. No, I want it. I want to take it home.” She’d perform a ritual extermination, she decided. She hoped it suffered.
“Okay by me.” Since he figured his tongue and his ears were safe again, he began to whistle with his work. “That thing’s been obsolete for five years. Don’t know how you managed to get anything done with it.”
Her only response to that was a low, throaty growl.
When Peabody came in an hour later, Eve was sitting at her crowded desk, grinning. “Look, Peabody. It’s Christmas.”
“Whoa.” Peabody came in, circled around. “Whoa squared. It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah. It’s mine. Tomjohn Lewis, my new best friend, hooked it up for me. It listens to me, Peabody. It does what I tell it to do.”
“That’s great, sir. I know you’ll be very happy together.”
“Okay, fun’s over.” She picked up her coffee, jerking her thumb toward the AutoChef so Peabody knew she was welcome to a cup of her own. “I did a run-through on Draco’s apartment last night.”
“I didn’t know you planned to do that. I would have adjusted my personal time.”
“It wasn’t necessary.” Eve had a nasty image of the scene in Areena’s apartment if Peabody had come along.
“Draco kept a stash of illegals in his penthouse. A variety pack that included nearly an ounce of pure Wild Rabbit.”
“Creep.”
“You bet. Also a number of inventive sex toys, some of which were out of the scope of even my wide range of experience. He had a collection of video discs, and a large percentage of them are personal sexual encounters.”
“So we have a dead sexual deviant.”
“The toys and the discs are personal choice, but the Rabbit shuffles him over into SD territory. It could go to motive, or motives, since they’re piling up like Free-Agers at a protest rally. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“We’ve got, as potentials, ambition, personal gain, money, sex, illegals, woman or women scorned, and all-around general dislike. He enjoyed preying on women, generally pushing members of both sexes around. He had a regular illegals habit. He was also an irritating son of a bitch, and had everyone who knew him wanting to string him up by his intestines. It doesn’t cut the list by much. But.”
She shifted in her chair. “I started running probabilities last night. Made some headway. My handy new XE- 5000 will copy that data to you so you can continue to run scans. I have a consult with Mira shortly. That may help shave the working list down. Set up a conference with our pals in EDD for eleven.”
“And the interviews this afternoon?”
“Go as scheduled. I’ll be back in an hour, two at most.” She pushed away from her desk. “If I get held up, contact the lab and nag Dickhead into verifying the illegals I sent down this morning.”
“A pleasure. Bribe or threat?”
“How long have you worked with me now, Peabody?”
“Almost a year, sir.”
Eve nodded as she strode out. “Long enough. Use your own judgment.”
Mira’s area was more civilized—Eve imagined that was the word—compared with the warrens and hives of the majority of Cop Central. A bubble of calm, she supposed, especially if you didn’t know what went on behind the doors of Testing.
Eve knew, and she hoped eons passed before she was forced to step through them again.
But Mira’s individual space was a world away from the depersonalizing and demoralizing cage of Testing. She favored shades of blues in her cozy scoop chairs, in the soothing ocean waves she often set on her mood screen.
Today she was dressed in one of her soft and snazzy pastel suits. A hopeful green, the color of spring leaf buds. Her hair waved back from a face of composed beauty Eve constantly admired. There were teardrop pearls at her ears that matched the single dangle on a gold-linked chain at her throat.
She was, to Eve’s mind, the perfect example of gracious femininity.
“I appreciate you fitting me in this morning.”
“I feel a vested interest,” Mira began as she programmed her AutoChef for tea. “Being a witness. In all my years attached to the NYPSD, I’ve never witnessed a murder.” She turned with two cups of floral-scented tea in her hand and caught the dark flicker in Eve’s eyes. “Richard Draco was not a murder, Eve. It was an execution. An entirely different matter.”
She took her seat, handing Eve the tea they both knew she’d barely sip. “I study murder. Murderers. I listen to them, and I analyze them. I profile them. And as a doctor, I know, understand, and respect death. But, having a murder take place right in front of my eyes, not to know it was real. Well, it’s given me some bad moments. It’s difficult.”
“I was thinking ingenious.”
“Well.” A ghost of a smile curved Mira’s lips. “Your viewpoint and mine come from different angles, I suppose.”
“Yeah.” And Eve’s angle was often standing over the dead with blood on her boots. It occurred to her now she hadn’t taken Mira’s state of mind into consideration that night at the theater. She had simply drafted her onto the team and used her as it seemed most efficient.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it. I never gave you a choice.”
“You had no reason to think of it. And at the time, neither did I.” She shook it off, lifted her tea. “You were backstage and at work very quickly. How soon did you realize the knife was real?”
“Not soon enough to stop it. That’s what counts. I’ve started my interviews, concentrating on the actors first.”
“Yes, the crime’s steeped in theatrics. The method, the timing, the staging.” More comfortable with the analytical distance, Mira ran the scene in her mind. “An actor or someone who aspires or aspired to be one fits the profile. On the other hand, the murder was clean, well produced, carefully executed. Your killer is bold, Eve, but also cool-headed.”
“Would they have needed to see it happen?”
“Yes, I think so. To see it, under the lights, on the stage, with the audience gasping in shock. That, in my opinion, was as important to this individual as Draco’s death. The thrill of it and the ensuing act. Their own shock and horror, well rehearsed.”
She considered. “It was too well staged not to have been rehearsed. Draco was touted as one of the greatest actors of our time. Killing him was one step. Replacing him, even if only in the killer’s mind, was an essential second.”
“You’re saying it was professionally motivated.”
“Yes, on one level. But it was also very personal. If we look at an actor, or an aspiring one, professional and personal motives could be easily blended.”
“The only one to tangibly benefit from Draco’s death, professionally, is Michael Proctor. The understudy.”
“Logically, yes. Yet everyone onstage or attached to that performance benefits. The media attention, the names fixed in the minds of the public, that indelible moment in time. Isn’t that what an actor aspires to? The indelible moment?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand people who spend their lives being other people.”
“The work, the skill, is in making the viewing audience believe they are other people. The theater is more th
an a job to those who do it well, who devote their life to it. It is, just as your job is to you, a way of life. And on the night Draco was murdered, the spotlight shone a little brighter for everyone in that play.”
“In the play, or involved with the play. Not in the audience.”
“With current data, I can’t eliminate audience members, but am more inclined toward a person or persons closer to the stage.” Mira set her cup aside, laid a hand over Eve’s. “You’re concerned about Nadine.”
Eve opened her mouth, shut it again.
“Nadine’s a patient, and she’s very open with me. I’m fully aware of her history with the victim, and I’m fully prepared, should it become necessary, to give my professional opinion that she isn’t capable of planning and executing a violent crime. If she’d wanted to punish Draco, she would have found a way to do so through the media. She’s capable of that, very capable.”
“Okay, good.”
“I’ve spoken with her,” Mira went on. “I know you’re interviewing her formally today.”
“After I leave here. Just me, Nadine, and her lawyer. I want it on record that she came to me with the information. I can bury the statement for a few days, give her some breathing room.”
“That will help.” But Mira scanned Eve’s face, saw more. “What else?”
“Off the record?”
“Of course.”
Eve took a sip of the tea, then told Mira about the video disc in Draco’s penthouse.
“She doesn’t know,” Mira said immediately. “She would have told me. It would have troubled and infuriated her. Embarrassed her. He must have taped it without her knowledge.”
“Then the next line would be: What if he showed it to her when she went to see him the day he was murdered?”