by J. D. Robb
I’M SORRY, THAT ITEM IS CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK. WOULD YOU CARE TO MAKE ANOTHER SELECTION?
“Don’t kick it!” Peabody said hurriedly even as Eve reared back. “You’ll lose your vending privileges again. Try this one. It’s really good.” Before her lieutenant could do any damage, Peabody chose another item.
YOU HAVE SELECTED A GOOEY-CRUNCH BAR, THE YUMMY-TUMMY TREAT WITH THREE LAYERS OF CHOCOLATE SUBSTITUTE, A COOKIE CRUNCH, AND A CREAMY NONDAIRY FILLING.
Eve snatched it out, moving away while the machine detailed the ingredients along with fat grams and caloric contents.
“Can I ask you something about the Stibbs’s case?” Peabody asked, jogging to keep up.
“Walk and talk.”
“I’ve been studying the file and I’m about ready to bring her in for an interview, but I thought maybe I should surveil her when I can manage it, for a day or two. Get her rhythm, you know. And I wondered if I should let her make me or not.”
With some effort, Eve adjusted her line of thought. “Stay in uniform, let her make you. It’ll keep her off-balance.”
“And I’m going to try to talk to a couple of the people who gave statements about the homicide, people who knew all three subjects. It won’t hurt if she hears about it?”
“Goes to keeping her shaky, wondering what’s up. She’ll be primed when you bring her in.”
“I want to wait until you’re back from Texas before I bring her in. In case I screw up.”
“Wait until I’m back, but you’re not going to screw up. I don’t work with screwups,” she added, and made Peabody smile as they parted ways in the bull pen.
In her office, Eve took a moment to steady herself, bit off a chunk of the candy bar and decided it was pretty much a yummy-tummy treat. With Roarke’s schedule in her head, she put in a call to his midtown offices.
“I know you’ve got a meeting in five,” she began when he came on. “Christ knows how you stand meeting all those people every day of your life.”
“I’m just a people person, Lieutenant. An amiable soul.”
“Yeah, right. How much hassle is it going to be for you to ditch all those meetings tomorrow?”
“What’s the point of being master of all you survey if you can’t ditch meetings when it suits you? What do you need?”
“I want to leave for Dallas in the morning. First thing.”
“All right, I’ll take care of it.”
“I don’t know how long it’ll take, but we should be able to get it done and get back all in the same day. An overnight at the most.”
“Whatever it takes. Eve, you’re not alone anymore.”
She nodded, and though it felt foolish, touched her fingers to his face on the screen. “Neither are you.”
Chapter 10
PROBABILITY ROARKE IS NEXT TARGET IS FIFTY- ONE-POINT-FIVE EIGHT PERCENT. . . .
Eve stood, staring out her skinny office window.
The fifty-fifty chance given in the computer’s soulless tones didn’t comfort her.
“Where will she come at him?”
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR PROBABILITY. . . .
“I wasn’t asking you,” she grumbled and pinched her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Think,” she ordered herself. “Think, think. What’s in her head?”
More impact, Eve decided, if Julianna went for Roarke when his cop was close. At home then, or at a public or private social event they’d both attend. She called his schedule back on-screen and studied it. Again.
She didn’t know how any one person managed that many meetings, deals, conversations, and contacts in one day and stayed sane. But that was Roarke.
All those people, she thought, that he brushed against in any given day. Business associates, staff, employees, waiters, assistants, and assistants to assistants. However brilliant his security, there was always a crack to slither through.
But he was aware of that, she reminded herself, on the most elemental level. The way a tiger would be aware of both predator and prey in his own jungle.
And if she allowed herself to worry into fear over him, she’d miss something.
She sat again, cleared her mind.
In the first wave of Julianna Dunne’s killings, she had assumed the role of society princess. A young, glamorous butterfly who’d flitted among the abundant blooms of the wealthy. As one of them, Eve mused.
Her new pattern was efficient employee. Smart, Eve conceded. People rarely took full notice of those who served them. She would stick with that, Eve thought. Almost certainly stick with that level. Server, clerk, domestic.
Whoever the next target, she would likely find her way into his business or his home through his company.
Preferred method, poison. Old-fashioned poison, Eve added. Why? You didn’t get your hands dirty that way, and most usually had the opportunity to watch it work. See the shock, confusion, pain. The victim understood a blaster or a blade when it came for him. But poison was subtle, even elegant. And it confused.
But you didn’t bop into your local 24/7 and pick up a bottle of cyanide. It was time to track down the source.
Before she did, there was a little business to clear up. She put in a call to Charles Monroe.
The handsome licensed companion picked up on his pocket-link. Eve could hear the murmuring of voices, the quiet clink of china and crystal of a classy restaurant as his face filled the screen.
“Lieutenant Sugar.” He beamed. “What a nice surprise.”
“You got company?”
“Not quite yet. Client’s late, she usually is. What can I do for my favorite avenger of the law?”
“Have you got any professional pals or associates in the Chicago area?”
“Dallas, when one is in the oldest profession, one has pals and associates everywhere.”
“Yeah. Well, I need one who’s willing to go to Dockport Rehabilitation Center, do a conjugal for an inmate, for the standard police scale.”
His face, his tone, went all business. She saw him move, glance down, and knew he’d taken out an e-book. “Male or female companion?”
“Female inmate seeks attractive man with staying power for conjugal episode.”
“Time frame?”
“Within the next couple of weeks would be good. Sooner the better. The budget will spring for a two-hour call, no frills, and basic transpo.”
“Since I doubt the police are overly concerned with this woman’s sexual health, I assume this is payment for information or cooperation in some ongoing investigation.”
“Assume whatever.” Her face, her tone, mirrored his now. “I need the contact. Can you reach out to an associate in that area? One who can handle himself. She’s just after a solid bounce, but she has a violent tendency and I don’t want to put anybody green in this situation.”
“I could, but why don’t I just take care of it for you? I’m certainly not green, and I owe you enough favors to cover this.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe you Louise,” he corrected, and everything in his face brightened on her name. “Give me the information I’ll need, and I’ll work it into my schedule. On the house for you, Lieutenant Sugar.”
She hesitated. It felt weird to book him for sex. To think of his developing romance with the dedicated Dr. Louise Dimatto while she arranged to send him off for a conjugal with Maria Sanchez.
This friendship gig was almost as complicated and boggy as the marriage gig.
It was his job, Eve reminded herself. And if it didn’t bother Louise, why should it bother her?
“You’ll get scale. I want to keep this on the books. Maria Sanchez,” she began, and gave him the information he’d need. “I appreciate this, Charles.”
“No, you’re embarrassed, and that’s very sweet of you. Give my love to Peabody, and I’ll give your best to Louise. My lunch and bounce client’s just walked in. If there’s nothing else, I’d as soon not be talking to a cop when she gets to the table. These are the things tha
t can mar the delicate balance of a romantic afternoon.”
His lips curved when he said it, and made Eve shake her head. “Let me know when you’ve nailed down the date and time and if you get any hassles with the arrangements at Dockport. Warden there’s an asshole.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Later, Lieutenant Sugar.”
When he ended transmission, she made the next call on her list. Directing it, purposefully, to Nadine Furst’s voice mail, Eve left a terse message.
“You got a one-on-one, my office, sixteen hundred. Sharp. No live feed. If you’re late, I’ll have something better to do.”
She pushed away from the desk, strode out, and swung by Peabody’s cube. “With me” was all she said.
“I’m getting nowhere trying to track a supplier for the cyanide through standard sources.” Peabody hustled into the elevator behind Eve. “Even considering the number of legal sources for that kind of controlled substance, it’s necessary to show authorization with prints. Prints are run through a stringent search and scan. Dunne’s are on file, and would have popped.”
“Illegal sources?”
“I’ve run cyanide poisonings through IRCCA. Stuff’s more popular than you might think, but most got their supply through a legal source. The dude in East D.C. where Dunne previously shopped was the major on-planet player, and he’s dead. The others on record are mostly small-time, and the majority of them are doing time—primarily illegals distribution, with poisons as a sideline. Research indicates poisons aren’t very cost effective, narrow profit margin, and are generally not a specialty.”
“Possible she found a way through to a legal source but let’s try the other route.” Eve strode to her vehicle, paused. “A lot of talk and jive in prison, and she might have followed up on a contact there. Plus, she had her finger on the world through computer access. Plenty of time to search and research. Her source might not be in New York, but people know people who know people. We’re going underground.”
Peabody, a stalwart soldier, paled. “Oh boy.”
Beneath New York was another world, a seamy city of the lost and the vicious. Some went under to toy with that keen edge, the way a child might play with a sharpened knife, just to see how it would slice. Others enjoyed the elemental meanness, the stink of violence that permeated the air as thickly as the stench of garbage and shit.
And some simply got lost there.
Eve left her jacket in the car. She wanted her weapon in full view. Her clutch piece was strapped to her ankle, and she’d shoved a combat knife into her boot.
“Here.” She tossed Peabody a small shock bat. “Know how to use it?”
She had to gulp once, but nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Hook it to your belt, keep it in plain sight. You kept up with your hand-to-hand?”
“Yeah.” She blew out a breath. “I can handle myself.”
“That’s right.” Eve not only wanted her to say it, she wanted her to believe it. “And when you step down there, you remember you’re one bad bitch cop, and you drink blood for breakfast.”
“I’m one bad bitch cop, and I drink blood for breakfast. Yuck.”
“Let’s go.”
They headed down filthy steps and veered off from the subway entrance into the rat hole of a tunnel that led to the underground. Lights glowed dull red and dirty blue in a kind of snarling carnival of sex, games, and entertainment suited for the cold and the cruel.
Eve caught the stink of vomit and glanced over to see a man down on his hands and knees, puking horribly.
“You okay?”
He didn’t look up. “Fuck you.”
Feeling other eyes on her, she squeezed into the passageway behind him, then gave him a solid shove with her boot that sent him facedown in his own vomit. “Oh no,” she said pleasantly, “fuck you.”
Her knife was out of her boot with its honed point at his filthy throat before he could curse her again. “I’m a cop, asshole, but don’t think I won’t slice your useless throat ear-to-ear just for the fun of it. Where can I find Mook today?”
His eyes were fire-red, his breath amazing. “I don’t know no mother-fucking Mook.”
She risked all manner of vermin, fisted a hand in his stringy hair, and yanked his head back. “Everybody knows mother-fucking Mook. You want to die here, or live to puke another day?”
“I don’t keep tabs on the cocksucker.” His lips peeled back as the point of the knife pressed against his jugular. “Maybe VR Hell, fuck do I know?”
“Good. Go right on back to what you were doing.” She released him with just enough force to send him sliding into the muck again, then made a show of slapping the jagged-edged knife back in her boot for the benefit of the onlookers lurking in the shadows.
“Anybody here wants trouble, I’m happy to oblige.” She lifted her voice just enough to have it echo, to have it punch through the mean flood of viper rock pumping out of doorways. “Otherwise my business is with Mook, who’s been described by this fine example of humanity as a mother-fucking cocksucker.”
There was a slight movement, shadow in shadow, to her left. She laid her hand on her weapon, and the movement stilled. “Anybody hassles me or my uniform, we start busting asses, and we aren’t particularly delicate about how many of those busted asses end up in the city morgue, are we, Officer?”
“No, sir, Lieutenant.” Peabody prayed her voice wouldn’t crack and embarrass both of them. “In fact, we’re hoping to win the pool on morgue count this week.”
“What’s that up to, anyway?”
“Two hundred and thirty-five dollars. And sixty cents.”
“Not too shabby.” Eve cocked a hip, but her eyes were keen as a blade. “Could use it. When we’re finished kicking the shit out of anybody who gives us grief,” Eve added pleasantly. “There’ll be a squad down here shaking down what’s left. Which will really irritate me as I’d have to share the pool with them. Mook,” she said again, and waited ten humming seconds.
“VR Hell,” someone said in the dark. “Dancing with the S&M machines. Asshole.”
Eve merely nodded, deciding to attribute the asshole comment to Mook rather than herself. “And where do I find VR Hell in this delightful and intriguing paradise many of you call home?”
There was another movement, and she whirled, braced, felt Peabody go on full alert beside her. At first she took him for a boy, then saw he was a dwarf. He was crooking his finger.
“Back-to-back,” Eve ordered, and they started down one of the dripping tunnels, facing out, guarding each other’s backs.
The dwarf moved fast, skittering along in the steaming, stinking tunnels like a cockroach on shoes that flapped against the damp stone floor. He zipped past the bars, the clubs, the joints and dives, twisting and turning through the labyrinth of the underworld.
“Morgue pool was a nice touch,” Eve said under her breath.
“Thanks.” Peabody resisted swiping at the sweat dripping down her face. “I live to improvise.”
From somewhere deeper in the dank, Eve heard a woman scream in pain or passion. She saw a huge man crumpled on the ground sucking on a filthy brown bottle of home-brew. Against the wall beside him a man and woman copulated in an ugly parody of lovemaking.
She smelled sex and piss, and worse.
The tunnel widened, opened into an area jammed with video, VR, and hologram dens.
VR Hell was black. Its walls, its windows, its doors all coated with the same unrelieved, and somehow greasy black. Across it, in letters she assumed were supposed to reflect the devil’s fire, was its name. A poorly painted image of Satan, complete with horns and tail and pitchfork, danced over the flames.
“Mook’s in there.” The dwarf spoke for the first time in a voice like a bass drum constructed from sandpaper. “Digs on the Madam Electra machine. Bondage shit. Sick fucker. Got fifty?”
Eve dug for credits. “Got twenty. Blow.”
He showed his grayed, pointy teeth. The twenty disappeared, then so did h
e.
“You meet such interesting people down here,” Peabody said shakily.
“Stay close,” Eve ordered. “Anybody moves in, bang ’em.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.” With her hand gripped tight on her bat, Peabody followed Eve into Hell.
The noise was awesome: screams, sirens, grunts, and groans from dozens of clashing machines and patrons. The lighting was an ugly red that shimmered and swayed. It flashed her back to a freezing room in Dallas, made her stomach pitch before she controlled it.
She heard the ragged breathing, the hissed words of violent sex. She’d heard those in that room, too, before the end. Heard them in too many rooms to count where the walls were thin as tissue and brutality was only a whisper away.
The sound of flesh striking flesh. Gleeful punishment.
Stop it! Goddamn you, Rick, stop! You’re hurting me!
Whose voice was that? Eve wondered as she stared around blindly. Her mother’s? One of the whores he’d used when he wasn’t using his daughter?
“Dallas? Lieutenant?”
The uneasy tremble in Peabody’s voice snapped her back. This wasn’t the time to lose her focus. It wasn’t the time to remember.
“Stay close,” Eve repeated, and began to thread through the machines.
Most were too intent on the game, on the world they’d created to notice her. But others still had instincts sharp enough to make a cop. Though plenty of those people were armed, nothing was aimed in their direction, for the moment.
She passed a tube titled Whips and Chains where a woman, thin as a stick, wearing VR goggles, screamed in ecstasy. Sweat poured down her body like oil, over the tight leather loincloth, beaded on the restraints that locked her arms and legs to the console of her machine.
“Looks like we’re in the right section. There’s Mook.”
He, too, was locked in a tube. Stripped down to a black leather cock sheath and studded dog collar, his impressively muscled body jerked, his throat worked with gasps. His hair was candlelight gold, shoulder-blade length, and damp with sweat.