by J. D. Robb
“Where were they meeting for drinks last night?”
“The goddamn Rainbow Room. Bry picked it out because she thought it was romantic.”
When Eve came out of the dressing area, she found Peabody staring, a bit wistfully, at a display of lacy bodysuits.
“Those wouldn’t be comfortable for more than five minutes,” Eve pointed out.
“If it works, you wouldn’t have it on over five minutes. Droid said you were back in the dressing area with Plunkett.”
“Yeah. Dude goes by the name of Dante, heavy on the poetry and pink rosebuds. I’ll fill you in.”
“Where are we going?”
“The morgue, by way of the Rainbow Room.”
“That sounds so . . . weird.”
It was, if you compared the chrome and marble temple of one with the dingy white box of the other. But the best Eve could get from the landmark lounge was the names and addresses of the waitstaff on duty the night before.
She had more immediate luck at the dead house.
“Ah, my favorite cop come to scold me.” Morris, Chief Medical Examiner, switched off his laser scalpel and beamed. He wore his long, dark hair in a half dozen braids, covered now with a clear surgical cap. A natty plum-colored shirt and slacks were protected from distressing splashes of body fluids by a transparent lab coat.
“That’s not my case you’re slicing up there, Morris.”
“No, more’s the pity.” He glanced down at the body of a young black man. “This unfortunate fellow appears to have backed into—numerous times—a sharp, long-bladed instrument. You’d think he’d have stopped after the first, but no. He just continued to ram himself back into the knife until he keeled over dead.”
“Slow learner.” She pursed her lips as she studied the corpse’s very impressive hard-on. “From the looks of that boner he’s carrying, I’d make an educated guess that he’d popped some Exotica laced with Zeus. The combo can make a guy’s tool stay in use long after he’s gone flat otherwise.”
“I tend to agree, particularly since your associate Detective Baxter reports that our recently deceased was employing that tool enthusiastically on his brother’s wife.”
“Oh yeah? And I guess he just decided to stop fucking and dance into a knife as a change of pace.”
“According to his brother, and the wife who is still among the living and recovering from a nasty fall that broke her jaw.”
“Takes all kinds. If Baxter’s got the brother in custody, and you’ve got cause of death, why aren’t you working on my case?”
“Come with me.” Morris crooked a finger and walked through a set of swinging doors into another autopsy room. What was left of Bryna Bankhead was the single occupant. She was laid on a stainless steel slab with a thin green sheet covering her to the neck.
That would have been Morris’s touch, Eve thought. He could be very respectful with the dead.
“I imagine she was an attractive young woman once.”
Eve stared down at the ruined face. She thought of the bathroom mirror, the ruthlessly organized drawer of enhancements. “Yeah. Tell me how she died, Morris.”
“I think you know. Your time of death measurement was accurate. She was spared the fear of falling, the insult of the pavement, even the knowledge that she was dying.” He touched sealed fingertips, very gently, to her hair. “She’d ingested, over a period of two and a half to three hours, more than two ounces of the synthetic hormonibital-six, an expensive and very difficult to acquire controlled substance.”
“Street name Whore. An inhibition blocker,” Eve murmured. “Commonly used in date rape once upon a time.”
“Not commonly,” Morris corrected. “Its derivatives are more common, and much less potent and effective. What she had in her was pure. Two ounces, Dallas, would have a street value of more than a quarter million. If you could find it on the street, which you can’t. I haven’t come across traces of it in a body for more than fifteen years.”
“I heard about it when I was in school. Mostly urban legend shit.”
“And most of it was urban legend shit.”
“Did it kill her? An OD?”
“Not by itself. The combination with alcohol was dangerous, but not fatal. But our hero went overboard. Half the amount he slipped her would’ve been enough to ensure her full cooperation. What she had in her would, most likely, have kept her under for eight, maybe ten hours. And she’d wake up with the mother of all hangovers. Headache, vomiting, the shakes, blackouts, lost time. It would take up to seventy-two hours to purge her system.”
It made Eve sick to think it. “She was spared that, too. How?”
“He gave her too much. It would make her lethargic. I’m assuming he wanted a more active fuck because he doctored the last glass of wine with a little cocktail of aneminiphine-colax-B. Wild Rabbit.”
“Covered his bases, didn’t he?” she said quietly.
“It bombards the nervous and respiratory systems, and hers was already compromised. The combination overtaxed her heart. It gave out on her within twenty minutes of ingestion. She’d have been too doped by the earlier doses of Whore to know what was happening.”
“Could she have taken it willingly at that point?”
Gently, Morris lifted the sheet over Bryna’s face. “After the first ounce of inhibition blocker, nothing this girl did was willing.”
“He drugged her, he raped her, and the combination killed her,” Eve said. “Then he tossed her out the window like a used doll in an attempt to cover up what happened.”
“In my esteemed and renowned medical opinion, that’s the scenario.”
“Now make my day, Morris, and tell me he left sperm in her. Tell me you got his DNA.”
Morris’s face went bright as a boy’s. “Oh yeah, I got it. You bring him in, Dallas, and I’ll help you lock the cage.”
Chapter 3
“Sick bastard creep ought to have his balls scooped off with a rusty spoon.”
Eve settled back in her car. “Don’t hold back, Peabody. Tell me how you really feel.”
“Goddamn it, Dallas, it got to me in there, looking at her on that slab, remembering how pretty she was, how excited when she called her pal about going out to meet this fuckhead. Thinking she was meeting someone romantic and, damn it, nice. Someone nice and the whole time he’s planning to . . .”
“Fuck her to death? I don’t know that he planned that going in, but that’s how it worked out. Could be we get him on Murder One, using the illegals as the murder weapon. More likely, it’s going to Second Degree. And don’t blow your cortex, Peabody, we wrap him on that, add in the sexual assault and his attempt to dispose of the evidence, he’s not going to see daylight again.”
“It’s not enough.” She shifted in her seat, appalling them both because there were tears in her eyes. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem to be enough.”
Eve stared through the windshield to give them both time for Peabody to pull herself together. A pack of kids, sprung from school, were cruising over the crosswalk on airboards, wreaking havoc on the bipeds they wove through.
There was something painfully innocent, painfully alive about the flash and color of them, a half a block away from a house of dead.
“It’s enough,” Eve said, “because it’s what we can do. Our job is to stand for Bryna Bankhead and bring in the man who killed her. After that . . .” She remembered her session in court, the defense attorney’s slippery twist on the law. “After that, we trust the system to give her justice, and we put it away. You don’t put it away, they pile up. The dead pile up,” she added when Peabody stared at her, “until you can’t see past them, and you can’t do the job.”
“Do you put it away? Can you?”
It was a question Eve tried not to ask herself—and asked herself too often. “A lot of murder cops, they’ve only got so many years in them. So many dead. Then it starts eating at them until they’re used up. I can’t do anything else but this, so it’s not going to use me up
.” She let out a long breath. “But in a perfect world, we’d have the rusty spoon option.”
“When I started working with you, I thought Homicide was the most important thing I could do. It’s been about a year now. I still think that.”
“Okay.” She jammed her way into traffic like a battering ram. “I need to make a stop down at the Canal Street Clinic. Let’s see if the boys in EDD have made any progress.”
She used the in-dash ’link to contact Feeney’s office, and felt Peabody stiffen when McNab’s pretty face appeared on-screen.
“Hey, Lieutenant.” Eve watched his gaze shift over, saw his lips stretch into a smile every bit as stiff as Peabody’s shoulders. “Peabody.”
“I need your captain,” Eve told him.
“He just stepped out.”
“Tell him to tag me as soon as he comes back.”
“Hold it, hold it, hold it.” His face filled the screen as he leaned in. “Don’t eject till you hear the tune. The captain put me on your electronic account search.”
Eve punched her vehicle through a narrow opening, switched lanes, and gained half a block. “Pretty basic e-work for a hotshot, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, well, it got bumped up to hotshot level when the tech ran into some snags. Your cyber-Casanova put in some blocks and walls. I scaled them, being a hotshot, and came up with an address.”
“Are you going to stop bragging long enough to give it to me?”
“I would, Lieutenant, but you’d be wasting your time. Address is in the Carpathian Mountains.”
“Where the hell is that?”
“Mountain range, Eastern Europe. I know,” McNab said, with a frisky toss of his long blond ponytail, “because I looked it up. And before you ask me what the hell our perp’s doing on a mountain in Eastern Europe, he’s not. It’s a dummy. Address is bogus as my cousin Sheila’s tits.”
“It doesn’t sound like you scaled a wall to me, McNab.”
“Dallas, I scaled a fucking mountain here. I got a bounce from the fake address, and I’m following the echo. Should have it nailed in another hour.”
“Then don’t talk to me until you set down the hammer. And McNab? Any guy who knows anything about his cousin’s tits is a perv.”
She broke transmission on his hoot of laughter. “He may be irritating,” Eve said to Peabody, “but he’s good. He’ll nail it. And if it’s taking him this long, that tells me our suspect is an above-average hacker. He protected himself going in, which in court will be, to overuse an image, another nail in his coffin.”
She glanced at Peabody’s profile. “Don’t sulk.”
“I’m not sulking.”
Hissing, Eve flipped down the passenger visor so the mirror dropped down. “Look at your face. You want him to know you get bent when you have to deal with him? Snag a little pride, Peabody.”
Studying herself, Peabody saw sulk move into pout mode at Eve’s words. She flipped the visor back up. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”
Eve made the swing onto Canal, pitching through its bazaarlike sector where the offerings were plentiful and cheap and the Black Market did the lion’s share of business. Tourists were routinely scammed, then they filed complaints against shops that changed venues more often and with greater efficiency than a tent circus.
Then again, Eve figured if you were stupid enough to believe you could buy a Rolex for the same price as a large pizza, you deserved the skinning.
Within a few blocks, the carnival gave way to the dumping ground for the homeless and the disenfranchised. Sidewalk sleepers erected their boxes and tents in pitiful little communities of despair. Those with beggar’s licenses, and many without them, wandered across town to shill enough credit tokens to buy a bottle of home brew to get them through another night.
Those who didn’t make it through the night would be transported to the morgue by the NYPSD unit not-so-affectionately known as the Sidewalk Scoopers.
No matter how many were loaded up, cremated at city expense, more came to replace them.
It was a cycle no one, particularly the city fathers, seemed to be able to break. And it was here, in the midst of the filth and despair, that Louise Dimatto ran the Canal Street Clinic. She didn’t break the cycle either, Eve thought, but she made the spin on it a little less painful for some.
In an area where the shoes on your feet were considered fair game, it was a risky business to park a car unless you then surrounded it by droids wearing body armor and hefting rocket lasers. Patrol cars were manned by exactly that.
The good news was, parking places were plentiful.
Eve pulled to the curb behind what might have been a sedan at one time. But since all that was left of it was part of a chassis and a broken windshield, she couldn’t be sure.
She stepped out, and in the hot, stinking steam that gushed up from a subway vent, engaged all locks, activated all alarms. Then she stood on the sidewalk, scanned the street in all directions. There were a few loiterers hulking in doorways and one pitifully skinny street LC trying to drum up customers.
“I’m Lieutenant Dallas, NYPSD.” She didn’t shout it, but raised her voice enough to cause faces to shift in her direction. “This piece of shit is my official city vehicle. If said piece of shit is not in this exact spot, in this exact condition when I come back, I’ll bring a squad of door-bangers down here to roust every living soul in a five-block radius, along with illegals-sniffer dogs who will find and confiscate all the goodies you’ve got stashed. I guarantee it will be a very unpleasant experience.”
“Bitch cop!”
Tracking the direction of the comment, Eve lifted her gaze to a third-floor window in a building across the street. “Officer Peabody, will you verify the asshole’s opinion?”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant, the asshole is correct. You are the supreme bitch cop.”
“And what will happen if anyone lays hands on my vehicle?”
“You will make their life a living hell. You will make their friends’ lives a living hell, their family’s lives a living hell. And, sir, you will make people’s lives who are complete strangers to them a living hell.”
“Yes,” Eve said with a cold and satisfied smile. “Yes, I will.” She turned away and walked to the door of the clinic.
“And you’ll enjoy it.”
“Okay, Peabody, point made.” She pulled open the door, stepped inside.
For an instant she thought she’d walked into the wrong door. From her visits over the past winter, she remembered the jammed waiting room, the dingy walls, the tattered, inadequate furniture. Here instead was a wide space partitioned by a low wall where glossy green plants thrived in simple clay pots. Chairs and sofas were ranged on either side, and though nearly every seat was taken, there was a sense of order.
The walls were a pale, pretty green decorated with framed pictures obviously drawn by children.
There was the hacking, wheezing, the soft whimpering of the ill and the injured. But there was not, as there had been the previous winter, an underlying sense of anger and hopelessness.
Even as she scanned the room a woman in a jumpsuit the same color as the walls came through a doorway. “Mrs. Lasio, the doctor will see you now.”
At the shift in patients, Eve crossed over to the reception window. Through it she could see updated equipment and the same sense of ordered efficiency that permeated the waiting areas.
There was a young man at the station with a face as cheerful and harmless as a daisy. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, Eve thought as he beamed up at her.
“Good afternoon. How can we help you today?”
“I need to see Doctor Dimatto.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid Doctor Dimatto is fully booked for the rest of this afternoon. If this is a medical emergency—”
“It’s personal business.” Eve laid her badge on the counter. “Official business. If she’s tied up, have her contact me when she’s free. Lieutenant Dallas, Cop Central.”
“Oh, Lieutenant Dallas. Doctor Dimatto said you might come by. She’s with a patient, but if you don’t mind waiting just a few minutes? You can wait in her office, and I’ll tell her you’re here.”
“Fine.”
He buzzed her through the door. She saw what she assumed were examining rooms on either side of a hallway, and the hallway opened into a wide pass-through where lab equipment stood on counters. From somewhere nearby, she heard a child laughing.
“You guys expanded.”
“Yes. Dr. Dimatto was able to purchase the building that adjoined the original clinic.” Still beaming smiles he led them across the pass-through, into another hallway. “She expanded and updated the clinic and its services and added pediatrics. We have six doctors now, two full-time and four on rotation, and a fully equipped lab.”
He opened a door. “Doctor Dimatto is the angel of Canal Street. Please, help yourself to the AutoChef. She’ll be with you as soon as she can.”
Louise’s office hadn’t changed much, Eve noted. It was still small, still cramped, still crowded. And reminded Eve very much of her own space at Central.
“Jeez, she’s really done something here,” Peabody commented. “It had to run her a couple million.”
“I guess.” And since Eve had only donated—okay, bribed Louise with—a half a million for the clinic, she figured the angel of Canal Street had done some very intense, very successful fund-raising in a very short amount of time.
“This place is better equipped, and I bet better run, than my local health center.” Peabody pursed her lips. “I might switch.”
“Yeah, well.” To Eve’s mind one health facility was the same as another. They were all voids of hell. “You got an e-memo on you? We’ll just leave the doctor a message. I want to get back to Central.”
“Maybe. Somewhere.” And as Peabody dug into her pockets, Louise rushed in.
“Got five. Need coffee.” She made a beeline for the AutoChef. “Fill me in while I refuel.”