by J. D. Robb
“Only half?” he interrupted with a glimmer of a smile. “I’ll have to speak to my accountant.”
“Anyway, I could stand here and tell you it’s not personal and you shouldn’t take it personally, but that’s pretty much bullshit because it is personal to you. I get that, and I’m sorry.”
“So am I. For what happened here and for almost looking forward to taking it out on you. Now that that diversion’s been avoided, I’ll tell you again, I had a number of things to see to. The event downstairs being one.”
He held out his glass of wine, but, as he’d expected, she shook her head. “The Palace and the upcoming auction are about to experience a media crisis,” he continued. “Reporters salivate when a murder takes place in a well-known hotel, and you add all the star power downstairs and you have one hell of a story. It needs to be spun as quickly as we can manage. I also wanted to see that Hilo was taken care of.”
“It made a difference,” Eve said quietly. “It’ll go easier for her because you took the time.”
“She’s worked for me for ten years.” And for him, nothing else had to be said. “Word’s already spread through the staff, and some panic needed to be avoided before it could set in. There’s a young man on the bellstaff. Barry Collins.”
“The boyfriend.”
“Yes. He’s taking it hard. I had him taken home. And before you slap at me for it,” he said even as she wound up, “he was with two other of the bellstaff, dealing with luggage from an incoming medical convention during the time of the murder.”
“And how do you know the time of the murder?”
“Brigham saw to it I was informed of the contents of the security discs. Did you think he wouldn’t?”
“No, I didn’t, but I still have to talk to the boyfriend.”
“You wouldn’t have gotten anything out of him tonight.” His voice softened, the way it could that made it something like music. “He’s twenty-two, Eve, and he was in love with her. He’s broken to pieces. Christ,” he murmured as pity stirred. “He wanted his mother. So that’s where I sent him.”
“Okay.” She couldn’t fight it. “I’d probably have done the same. I can talk to him later.”
“I assume you’ve run James Priory.”
“Yeah, and I assume you already know the results, so I’ll just say I’m having him run through IRCCA. He’ll be in the system. This isn’t his first.”
“I can get the data for you quicker.”
He could, she thought, at home in the locked room that held his unregistered equipment. “Let’s do it this way for now. He strolled out of here like a man who knew he had some place cozy to go. I’ll find out where soon enough. The real question is why. He came here with a purpose. The fake ID, room booked well in advance, two nights. A time pad in case something didn’t work out the first night. He settled down in his room and he waited for her. Darlene specifically? If so, that’s another why. Any housekeeper? Why again. I might get some of that from his history.”
But it troubled her. “He didn’t care that we made him. That’s a puzzler. Unless I’m way off and we don’t find a sheet on him, it doesn’t make sense he wouldn’t have taken more precautions.”
“Giving you, or possibly me, the finger.”
“Yeah, sometimes it’s just that simple. I have to go to New Jersey, notify next of kin before I go downtown to file my report. How about a lift?”
“You astonish me, Lieutenant,” he said with surprise.
“Maybe I just want to keep my eye on you.”
“Good enough.” He set down his wine and, going to her, cupped her face in his hands. Pressed his lips to her forehead. “This one’s going to be difficult for both of us. I’ll apologize now for any hard words I might say before you close this.”
“Okay.” Marriage, she thought. It was some ride. She cupped his face in turn and gave him a long hard kiss on the mouth. “That’s because I’ll probably say meaner ones.”
His arms slipped slyly around her. “Say something mean now, really mean. Then since we happen to be in a hotel room, you can make up for it on the spot.”
“Pervert,” she said, and with a laugh shoved him away.
“Ouch.” He followed her to the door and out. “That’ll cost you later.”
Notification of next of kin was the most miserable part of being a homicide cop. With a few words you cut slices out of lives. No matter how they were put back together later, they were never the same. Once pieces were missing from the whole, the pattern was forever altered.
Eve tried not to think about it on the way back from New Jersey, where she’d left Darlene French’s mother and younger sister devastated. Instead, she moved on to the steps that would bring them justice, if not comfort.
“If there were any like crimes in the city or other boroughs, I’d have heard about it.” Still, she used the in-dash computer in Roarke’s spiffy little 6000XXX to do a scan for them. “We got your strangulations, we got your rape, and we got your battery,” she began.
“I love New York.”
“Yeah, me, too. We’re sick. Anyway, we have each of the basic elements here and there over the last six months, but none that include all three. And none with a silver wire used as a garrote. Nothing in a hotel either. But the fact that he used one means he could have hit other cities, countries, even off planet. I’ll widen the scan when—”
She broke off as the communicator in her purse signaled. “Dallas.”
“Can’t you take one goddamn night off?”
She stared into Feeney’s mournful eyes. “I was working on it.”
“Well, work harder. You take one, maybe some of the rest of us get one. I was all kicked back with a bottle of brew, a bowl of cheese chips, and the Yankee game on-screen when Peabody tagged me.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, well, the sons of bitches lost, lost to the freaking Tijuana Tacos. Burns my ass.” He blew out a breath, scratching his fingers in his wiry thatch of graying russet-colored hair. “Anyway, something about your guy rang some bells when Peabody shot the image through. Couldn’t bring it together at first. Had to run him through IRCCA with disc image only. No prints. Sweepers say he musta sealed up. We’ll get his DNA though, from the blood and skin under her nails, and the semen. Didn’t seal up his dick.”
“Yeah, I know how you guys hate putting a coat on your best friend.”
He gave her a sour smile. “I don’t figure he’s worried about the DNA. Sealed up, I expect, to buy a little time to relocate. Take us a few hours to get the DNA results.”
“Did you get a pop through IRCCA?”
“I’m getting to it. So I run him, image only. Get me some likelies with probable face-sculpting work. I fiddle around with them some on the morphing system, and I got a real pretty picture. Added in the murder weapon, and rang those bells. Name’s Sylvester Yost. Sly Yost. Got him a shit pot load of aliases, but that’s his birth name.”
“Was Priory one of his a.k.a.s?”
“Not until now. I got it added into the mix. Anyhow, about fifteen years back I worked a case—serial strangulations, silver wire. Five victims scattered all over the damn planet. We had one in New York. Female. Licensed companion. Second-rate license. She had ties to the black market. So did the other four victims. Not the same organization. But every victim was a key player in something mucky. We got a line on Yost, but never tugged him in on it. The murders stopped, and the case sat there going stale.”
“A hired hammer?”
“We figured, but who hired the bastard? He hit every major cartel. No bias there. He comes up most likely on no less than twenty strangulations before and since. And he did time in the thirties for assault with deadly.”
“Yeah, I knew he’d seen what a cage looks like from the inside. Only one arrest?”
“Just the one. Records show he’d have been twenty when the Miami cops reeled him in. Looks like he’s gotten better at his work over the years.”
“I’m pulling into Centr
al now. Send me everything you’ve got on him.”
“Already did. I’m going to work it some more. Get you an update in the morning. I’d like a second shot at this guy.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Tomorrow, then. Hey, Dallas?”
“What?”
“What’s that stuff in your hair?”
“What stuff?” She reached up, dragging fingers through, and felt the little raindrop diamonds. “It’s just—I was out . . .” Mortified, she cleared her throat. “Never mind,” she muttered and cut transmission.
The man who’d been born Sylvester Yost, who had strangled a young maid while under the name of James Priory and was currently carrying identification as Giorgio Masini, sipped his second glass of unblended scotch and watched the recording of the evening’s Yankee game.
If he’d been the type to kill for personal reasons, he’d have hunted down the Yankee pitcher and gutted him like a fish. But since murder was a business, he merely sat, cursing quietly in a surprisingly feminine voice.
There had been some who’d made cracks about the thin, high pitch of his voice. If he was on a job, he ignored them. If he was on his own time, he beat the living hell out of them.
But even that was simply a matter of principle. He wasn’t a passionate man, not about people or principles. The lack of passion made him an excellent killing machine.
The money for the night’s work had already been deposited in an account under yet another name. He had no idea why the girl—because she’d been hardly more than that—had been targeted. He simply accepted the contract, fulfilled it, took the money.
This particular job had only just begun, and promised to reap him a considerable fee. As he was considering retirement, quite seriously considering it, it was a delightful little cushion.
Over the years, those fees had allowed him to develop, and indulge, a refined and cultured taste. He could afford the best, so he had studied and experienced and discovered just what the best entailed.
Food, drink, art, music, fashion. He’d traveled all over the world, and off planet as well. At fifty-six he could speak three languages fluently, which was yet another sterling job tool, and could, when the mood struck, prepare a brilliant gourmet meal. What’s more, he could play the piano like an angel.
He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but the silver wire had made up for it.
At twenty, he’d been the minor thug that Eve had seen beneath the polish. He’d killed because he could, and it paid.
Now he was a virtuoso of murder, a performer par excellence who had never disappointed his paying customers, and who left his own individual stamp on each target.
Pain—the beatings. Humiliation—the rape. The silver wire. Murder with class. For Sly, it was a tidy little three-act play, with only the set and the second lead as variables.
He was, always, the star of the show.
Sly enjoyed traveling, and had several scrapbooks filled with postcards he picked up as he did so. Occasionally he would page through them, sipping a drink, smiling over the reminders of places he’d been, and the trinkets he’d collected there.
The meal he had in Paris that summer after he’d dispatched the electronic’s manufacturer, the view from his hotel window on a rainy evening in Prague before he’d strangled the American envoy.
Good memories.
He was confident that, though his current employment would keep him in New York for the run of the show, it would provide many more of those good memories.
chapter three
In the morning, Eve sat at her desk in Cop Central and reviewed all the data Feeney had sent her the night before. With a few hours’ sleep, a fresh eye, and a third cup of coffee she let a picture form in her mind of one Sylvester Yost.
A career criminal. A stone killer, sired by a second-string gunrunner who’d disappeared, and was presumed dead, during the Urban Wars. Birthed by a diagnosed mental defective who’d had a penchant for boosting cars and slicing the unhappy owners with a switchblade. She’d died of a drug overdose in a recovery ward when her son had been thirteen.
Sly had apparently decided to carry on the family tradition, with his own style of mayhem.
She had his juvenile file now. He’d toyed with knives, cutting the ear off his caseworker two weeks after he’d been sucked into the system. He’d sampled rape, assaulting one of the girls in his group home and leaving her battered.
But he’d found his true calling with strangulation, and had apparently practiced on small dogs and big cats before graduating to the human species.
At fifteen, he’d escaped from the juvie facility. He was now fifty-six. In those forty-one years, he’d spent only one in a cage, and was suspected of forty-three murders.
The information on him was sketchy, despite files compiled by the FBI, Interpol, the IRCCA, and the Global Bureau for Interplanetary Crimes.
The subject was a suspected killer-for-hire who had no living family, no known friends or associates, no known address. His habitual weapon of choice was wire of sterling silver. But victims attributed to him had also been strangled manually, with silk scarves and with gold rope.
In the early days, Eve noted as she read. Before he settled on his signature style.
Victims were both male and female, of all ages, races and financial groups. Bodily violence, including torture and rape, were often employed.
“Good at your work, aren’t you, Sly? And I bet you don’t come cheap.” She sat back, studying the disc image of Yost at the check-in desk of The Roarke Palace Hotel. “Who the hell would hire you to kill a young maid who lived with her mother and sister in Hoboken?”
She rose, paced the crowded box of her office. There was a possibility he’d made a mistake, but that was slim.
You don’t last forty-odd years in the assassin game by plucking at the wrong target.
Logically, Yost had done what he’d been paid to do.
So, who was Darlene French, and who was she linked with?
Roarke’s connection was there, no question, but while the death would cause him personal unhappiness and some professional inconvenience, it just didn’t make that much of a ripple in the big ocean of Roarke’s holdings.
Back to the victim. Had Darlene heard or seen something, without even being aware she’d heard or seen it? Hotels were busy places, with a great deal of business being done.
But if the girl had brushed up against something, why have her murdered in such an obvious and dramatic fashion? Take her out quietly and be done with it.
An accident, a botched mugging, everyone’s shocked and sorry. The cops take a glance, offer their sympathies. And it all goes away.
Though the theory didn’t gel for her, Eve decided she’d need to go back to the hotel and take a close look at who’d stayed in the rooms under Darlene’s care for the last several weeks.
She stopped by her skinny window, watched the morning insanity. Sky and street traffic were vicious. An airbus lumbered by, jammed port to port with commuters who didn’t have the luxury or the good sense to work out of their homes. A one-man traffic cam hovered with a scissor snap of blades as the rush hour was analyzed, reported, and broadcast to those already suffering through it.
The media needed to fill airtime with something, she supposed. She’d already ignored over a half dozen calls from reporters hoping for a comment or break on the murder. Until she was pushed into giving a statement by her commander, she was leaving the media spin to Roarke.
No one did it better.
She heard the unmistakable sound of cop shoes slapping against ancient linoleum, and continued to stare out her window.
“Sir?”
“There’s a woman on this airtram out here with a lap full of flowers. Where the hell is she going with all those flowers?”
“It’s coming up on Mother’s Day, Lieutenant. Could be paying her duty call a little early.”
“Hmmm. I want to run the boyfriend, Peabody. Barry Collins. If
we swing with this being a hired job, somebody’s footing the bill. I don’t think a bellman’s got the wherewithal for Yost’s fee, but it could be he’s the connection to someone who does.”
“Yost?”
“Oh, sorry. You’re not up-to-date.” She corrected that oversight with her back to the room and her eyes on the sky.
“Captain Feeney’s coming in on the investigation? Are you going to pull in McNab?”
Eve glanced over her shoulder. Peabody was working hard to look casual, but that square, earnest face wasn’t fashioned for bluffing. “Not so long ago if I’d hinted about pulling McNab into an investigation, you’d have whined and bitched.”
“No, sir. I’d have started to whine and bitch, then you’d have slapped me down. After that I’d have whined and bitched mentally.” She broke into a grin. “Anyway, times change. McNab and I get along better now, mostly since we’re having sex. Except . . .”
“Oh, don’t. Don’t tell me stuff about it.”
“I was just going to say he’s been acting a little weird.”
“If you look up McNab in the dictionary, weird is the common definition.”
“Different weird,” Peabody corrected, but filed that little gem away to use on him at the first opportunity. “He’s . . . nice. Really nice. Sort of sweet and attentive. He brings me flowers. I think he’s stealing them out of the park, but still. And just a few days ago, he took me to the movies. A chick flick I’d made noises about wanting to see. He hated it, and made sure I knew it after, but he sprang for the admission and everything.”
“Oh, man.”
“So anyway, I think—” Peabody stopped, snorted out a laugh as her cool-eyed and courageous lieutenant let out a short shriek and stuck her fingers in her ears.
“I can’t hear you. I don’t want to hear you. I’m not going to hear you. Go do the run on Barry Collins. Now. That’s an order.”
Peabody simply moved her mouth.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Yes, sir,’” Peabody explained when Eve unplugged her ears. She walked to the door, judged her timing. “I think he’s setting me up for something,” she said and fled.