by J. D. Robb
It was foolish to feel useless. She could have done nothing to prevent what Julie Kopeski and Tray Schuster had endured. She could do nothing to change how that trauma would change them.
She knew Isaac McQueen’s pathology, his particular style of torture. He was adept at instilling a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in his victims, at convincing them to do exactly what they were told, how they were told, when they were told.
She hadn’t been one of his, but she understood the victimology as well.
She’d been someone else’s.
It did no good to remember that, or to think about the girls she’d saved. Or the ones who’d been lost before, twelve years before, when she’d looked into the eyes of a monster and had known him.
Instead, she drew Tray aside at the hospital.
“They need to examine her, and Julie needs to talk to the rape counselor.”
“Oh God. God. I shouldn’t have left her.”
“If you hadn’t, she’d be dead, and so would you. She’s alive. She’s hurt and she’s been violated, but she’s alive. You’re going to want to remember that, both of you, because alive’s better. You said he was there when you woke up.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about that.”
“We overslept, or I thought . . .”
“What time did you wake up?”
“I don’t know exactly. I think it was about eight. I rolled over thinking, ‘Holy shit, we’re both going to be late for work.’ I felt off, strung out, like we’d partied hard the night before. But we didn’t,” he said quickly. “I swear. Julie doesn’t even toke zoner.”
“We’re going to need to screen both of you,” Eve began.
“I swear, we didn’t use anything. I’d tell you. He gave Julie something, he said, but—”
“It’s probable he drugged you both. We’ll screen to see what he used. Nobody’s going to hassle you about illegals, Tray.”
“Okay. Okay. Sorry.” He scrubbed hard at his face. “I’m just screwed up. Can’t think straight.”
“What did you do when you woke up?”
“I . . . I told Julie to get moving, gave her a nudge, you know. She was really out. I kind of rolled her over, and I saw tape over her mouth. I thought she was pulling a joke, started to laugh. He was just there, man, that’s all I know. He grabbed me by the hair, yanked my head back, and put a knife to my throat. He asked if I wanted to live. If I wanted Julie to live. He said there wasn’t any need for anybody to get hurt. I just had to do what he told me. I should’ve fought back.”
“McQueen has a good seventy pounds on you, maybe more. He had a knife to your throat. If he’d killed you, do you think Julie would be alive?”
“I don’t know.” Tears kept leaking out of his eyes, faster than he could swipe at them. “I guess maybe not. I was scared. I told him we didn’t have much money, but he could take whatever he wanted. He thanked me, real polite. That was scarier. He had some of those plastic restraints and told me to put them on, and to sit on the floor at the foot of the bed. So I did, and Julie’s still out. He told me he’d given her something to make her sleep while the two of us got acquainted. He told me to hook the restraints to the leg of the bed, and handed me another set to put on my ankles. He put tape over my mouth. He said to sit and be quiet, and he’d be back in a minute.”
“He left the room?”
“I tried to get loose, but I couldn’t.” Absently, he rubbed at the abrasions on his wrists. “I could smell coffee. The bastard’s in the kitchen making coffee. He comes back with it, and with a bowl of cereal. He takes the tape off my mouth and sits down. He starts asking me questions while he has his freaking breakfast. How old am I, how old is Julie. How long have we been together, what are our plans. Have we had the apartment long. Did we know its history.”
Tray had to suck in a breath, let it out in a shudder. “He kept smiling, and he’s, like, earnest. Like he really wanted to get to know us.”
“How long did you talk?”
“He did most, and I don’t know. It’s, like, surreal, you know. He told me it was his apartment, but he’d been away a long time. He didn’t like the color we’d painted the bedroom. Christ.”
He paused, looked at the exam room door. “How much longer before I can go in?”
“It takes some time. Did Julie wake up?”
“He finished breakfast, and even took the dishes away. When he came back he gave her something else. I think I went crazy. I was screaming, I guess, and I tried to get loose. I thought he was going to kill her. I thought—”
“He didn’t. Remember that.”
“I couldn’t do anything. He slapped me a couple times. Not hard, just light taps. That was scary, too. He said if I didn’t behave he’d, Jesus, he’d cut her left nipple off, and did I want to be responsible for that? He had one of these hooks Julie uses to hang plants and stuff, and he screwed it into the wall. He used the sheets to tie her up, and hung them over it so she was sitting up when she came out of it. She was so scared. I could hear her trying to scream behind the tape, and she was struggling against the sheets. Then he put the knife to her throat, and she stopped.
“He said, ‘That’s a good girl.’ He said to me that two things could happen. He could cut Julie, nipples, fingers, ears, little pieces of her could fall on the bedroom floor until she was dead. Or I could have one hour to go to the Homicide Division of Cop Central and speak to Lieutenant Eve Dallas, deliver a message, and bring her back. If I took longer, he’d kill Julie. If I spoke to anyone else, he’d kill Julie. If I tried to use a ’link instead of talking to you in person, he’d kill Julie. I told him I’d do anything he wanted, but to please let her go. Let Julie go deliver the message instead of me.”
He had to rub fresh tears from his eyes. “I didn’t want to leave her with him. But he said if I asked that again, or anything else, if I questioned him in any way, he’d take the first piece off her so I learned my lesson. I believed him.”
“You were right to believe him, Tray.”
“He told me what to say, made me repeat it over and over while he held the knife on Julie. He cut me loose, kicked some clothes and the flips over. Sixty minutes, he said. If it took sixty-one, she’d be dead because I couldn’t follow instructions. I had to run. I didn’t have money or plastic or credits, nothing for a cab, for a bus. Maybe if I’d gotten another cop, quicker, he wouldn’t have had time to hurt her.”
“Maybe. And maybe he’d have slit her throat. That doesn’t take much time. She’s alive. I know this man, and you can believe me when I tell you he could have done worse.”
She pulled out her card, passed it to him. “You’re going to want to talk to someone about what happened to you. Someone who’s not a cop. You can tag me when you’re ready, and I’ll give you some names.”
She walked away, thinking of paperwork. She’d wished for murder, she remembered, and had gotten worse.
At Central, Eve used the bullpen for a brief, gritty briefing on Isaac McQueen.
“The subject is a thirty-nine-year-old male, brown and blue—though he changes both regularly. Six feet, three inches, at two hundred and twenty pounds. He has studied and is adept at hand-to-hand, including several areas of martial arts, and he kept in shape in prison.”
She flashed his prison ID on screen, studied the lines a dozen years in a cage had dug into his face. Women found him handsome and charming, she knew, with his slow, flirtatious smile. Young girls trusted his almost feminine features, the full shape of his lips, the twinkle of dimples.
He used that, all of that, to lure his prey.
“He favors knives as weapons and as a means of intimidation. His mother was an addict, a grifter of considerable skill who taught him the ropes. They had an incestuous relationship, often working a mark as a couple. She also fed his addiction for young girls. Together they abducted, raped, tortured, and subsequently sold or disposed of their victims until Alice McQueen’s body was pulled out of the Chicago River
in the fall of 2040. Her throat had been slashed. Though McQueen never admitted to the murder, he is believed responsible. He would have been nineteen.
“He is also believed responsible for the abduction of at least ten minor females in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas, and the murder of Carla Bingham, Philadelphia, and Patricia Copley, Baltimore. Both women, ages forty-five and forty-two, respectively, were addicts McQueen partnered with, lived with, and hunted with during his time in those cities. Both were found in rivers with their throats slit. Due to lack of evidence or lack of balls by the respective prosecuting attorneys, McQueen has never been charged with these crimes.”
But he did them, she thought. And more yet.
“Between 2045 and 2048, he used New York as his hunting ground, partnered with Nancy Draper—age forty-four, funky-junkie. During this period he’d refined his skills, added some flourishes. He and Draper lived in an apartment on the Lower West Side, financing their habits and lifestyles by running games and identity theft and electronic fraud—other skills he’d developed. He no longer sold his prey, but kept them. Twenty-six girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen were abducted in New York, raped, tortured, beaten, and brainwashed. He kept them shackled in a room in the apartment. The apartment itself was soundproofed, with the prison area shuttered. During his New York phase, he tattooed his vics, with the number indicating their abduction status inside a heart over the left breast. Twenty-two were found in that room.”
And she could see them still, every one.
“The remaining four have never been found, nor have their bodies been recovered. Even their identities are unknown as he often preyed on runaways.
“He is a highly intelligent and organized sociopath, a predatory pedophile, a narcissist with the ability to assume numerous personas. He uses his mother-substitutes for support, cover, for ego, then eliminates them. Nancy Draper’s body was recovered from the Hudson River two days after his capture. She’d been dead for three days. It’s likely McQueen was preparing to move on, either out of New York or simply to a new partner.”
She favored the new-partner theory, always had.
“He confessed to nothing, even after intense interrogation. He was convicted on multiple counts of kidnapping, forced imprisonment, rape, battery, and was sentenced to consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole on-planet, at Rikers, where the reports state he was a model prisoner.”
She heard one of her men give a sound of disgust and derision, and since she felt the same, made no comment.
“Right up until yesterday when he slit the throat of a medical and escaped. Since that time he returned to his former apartment, bound the couple living there, threatened them, and after forcing the male vic to leave to find me, beat and raped the female, leaving her with the heart tattoo numbered twenty-seven.
“He left them alive because he wanted them to deliver messages. He’s back, and he intends to pick up where he left off. This isn’t homicide,” she added. “It’s not officially our investigation.”
She saw Baxter straighten at his desk. “LT—”
“But,” she continued in the same tone, “when a fuck like McQueen sends me a message, I’m going to pay attention. I expect every one of you to do the same. Read his file. Take his picture. Whatever you’re working on, whoever you’re talking to—a wit, a weasel, a vic, a suspect, another cop, the guy selling you a soy dog from the corner glidecart, you show it. Keep your eyes and ears open. He’s already hunting for number twenty-eight.”
She headed to her office—she needed a minute—and only closed her eyes briefly when she heard Peabody’s footfalls behind her.
“I have to write up the report, Peabody, and touch base with the commander. Read the file.”
“I’ve read the file. I studied the case, in depth, when I was at the Academy. You were barely out of the Academy yourself when you found him. Still in uniform. It was your first major collar. You—”
“I was there, Peabody. I remember the details.”
Peabody’s dark eyes stayed steady, her square face sober. “You know who he is, what he is, how he is. So you know he broke pattern to send you a message. You cost him twelve years, Dallas. He’s going to come after you.”
“Maybe, but I’m not his type. I went through puberty a long time ago. I’m not naive, stupid, or defenseless. It’s a lot more likely he’ll consider it a competition—he needs to beat me. And there’s a city full of young girls for him to pluck from to make me pay for those dozen years.”
Tired, she sat. “He doesn’t want me dead, Peabody, at least not right off. He wants to show me he’s smarter than I am. He wants to humiliate me, at least for a while. That’s how he’d see this, a humiliation for me when he starts his new collection.”
“He’d have studied you. He thinks he knows you, but he doesn’t.”
“He will, before it’s over. Look, we’re getting tight on time. Go change into your uniform.”
“We can postpone the ceremony, start working the case.”
Though having a medal pinned on her chest was the last thing Eve wanted with Tray Schuster’s grieving face and Julie Kopeski’s shockglazed eyes in her head, she shook her head.
“We’re not postponing anything, and it’s not our case.” But she intended to make a hard pitch for it. “Now get out of my hair. I have to change, too. You’re not the only one getting a medal today.”
“I know it’s not your first. Is it still a big to you?”
“This one is. This one’s a big. Now go away.”
Alone, she sat a moment. Peabody was right, she thought, McQueen didn’t know her. She wasn’t humiliated. She was sick—in the heart and the belly, in the mind. And thank God, she realized, she was working her way toward pissed.
She’d work better pissed.
2
In the locker room with its familiar perfume of sweat and soap and someone’s cheap aftershave, Eve tied on the hard black uniform shoes. She hated them—always had—but regulation was regulation. She flexed her toes a moment, then pushed off the bench, reached for her uniform cap. Turning to the mirror, she fixed it squarely on her head.
She could see herself as she’d been a dozen years before, green as spring, with a shine on her shield and on those damned hard black shoes.
A cop, then and now, without any question, any hesitation over what she was meant to be. Had to be. She’d thought she’d known, but she hadn’t known, really hadn’t begun to know what she would see and do, what she would learn and come to accept. What she would live through and live with.
A lot of corners turned, she thought, and one sharp, jagged corner had been turned the moment she’d stepped into apartment 303 at 258 Murray one sweltering day in late September barely six weeks after she’d graduated from the Academy.
She remembered the fear, the coppery smear of it in her throat, and she remembered the horror like a red haze.
Would she do anything differently now, now that she did know, now that she was no longer green? She couldn’t say, she decided, and wondered why she’d ask herself the question.
She’d done the job. That was all any cop could do.
She heard the outer door open, stepped away from the mirror, shut her locker. And when she turned, there he was.
She’d told him not to change his schedule, but then Roarke most often did what suited him. Seeing him settled her, brushed away the question she couldn’t answer, dimmed the light on the past she wished she could will away.
He smiled at her—beautiful, just fucking beautiful in his slick business suit, the black mane of his hair gleaming nearly to his shoulders.
She knew every plane and angle of that amazing face, every line of the long, rangy body. And still, there were times just looking at him stole her breath as nimbly as the thief he’d once been.
“I love a woman in uniform.” Ireland wove through his voice like a shimmer of silver.
“The shoes suck. I told you that you didn’t have to come. It�
�s just a formality.”
“It’s so much more, Lieutenant, and I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. When I think of all the years I spent dodging cops, and never once considered how bloody sexy a woman could be in dress blues. Or maybe it’s just my woman. My cop.”
He stepped forward, brushing his thumb over the shallow dent in her chin as he lifted her face. He kissed her, very lightly, and his stunning blue eyes searched hers. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just work.” He saw, she knew, what others didn’t. “Something came up.”
“You’ve caught a case?”
“Not exactly. I don’t have time to get into it right now. But I’m glad you came. It won’t take long. You’ll only have to put off buying a couple third-world countries and listen to the mayor make a boring speech.”
“Well worth the price.” He kept his hand on her face a moment. “You’ll tell me later then.”
“Yes.” She would. She could. He was another corner turned, the biggest and the best. She’d met him at another ceremony, one for the dead, she the primary investigator on a murder, he a suspect with a shady past, a dubious present. A man with the face of a fallen angel and more money and power than the devil himself.
Now he was hers.
She took his hands, felt the shape of his wedding ring against her palm. “It’s a long story.”
“We’ll make time for it.”
“Later.” She shrugged it off. “You’re right. This is more than a formality. It’s important for Peabody, and for Detective Strong. The moment’s more than the medal, and a hell of a lot more than the boring speech. They earned it.”
“And you, Lieutenant.”
She spoke her earlier thoughts. “I did the job.”
She walked with him to the door. It opened even as she reached for it. Peabody’s main squeeze, Ian McNab, stood, not in the usual wild colors and patterns of the fashionable e-geek, but in spiffy dress blues. He’d even tucked his long tail of blond hair under the cap.