by J. D. Robb
“Professional companions are rigidly screened. A dislike—or disdain, as you put it—is a usual reason for denial of licensing.”
“She was also clever. There was nothing in her life she wanted she didn’t find a way to have. Except happiness. She was not a happy woman,” Elizabeth went on, and swallowed the lump that always seemed to hover in her throat. “I spoiled her, it’s true. I have no one to blame but myself for it. I wanted more children.” She pressed a hand to her mouth until she thought her lips had stopped trembling. “I was philosophically opposed to having more, and my husband was very clear in his position. But that didn’t stop the emotion of wanting children to love. I loved Sharon, too much. The senator will tell you I smothered her, babied her, indulged her. And he would be right.”
“I would say that mothering was your privilege, not his.”
This brought a ghost of a smile to Elizabeth’s eyes. “So were the mistakes, and I made them. Richard, too, though he loved her no less than I. When Sharon moved to New York, we fought with her over it. Richard pleaded with her. I threatened her. And I pushed her away, lieutenant. She told me I didn’t understand her—never had, never would—and that I saw only what I wanted to see, unless it was in court; but what went on in my own home was invisible.”
“What did she mean?”
“That I was a better lawyer than a mother, I suppose. After she left, I was hurt, angry. I pulled back, quite certain she would come to me. She didn’t, of course.”
She stopped speaking for a moment, hoarding her regrets. “Richard went to see her once or twice, but that didn’t work, and only upset him. We let it alone, let her alone. Until recently, when I felt we had to make a new attempt.”
“Why recently?”
“The years pass,” Elizabeth murmured. “I’d hoped she would be growing tired of the lifestyle, perhaps have begun to regret the rift with family. I went to see her myself about a year ago. But she only became angry, defensive, then insulting when I tried to persuade her to come home. Richard, though he’d resigned himself, offered to go up and talk to her. But she refused to see him. Even Catherine tried,” she murmured and rubbed absently at a pain between her eyes. “She went to see Sharon only a few weeks ago.”
“Congresswoman DeBlass went to New York to see Sharon?”
“Not specifically. Catherine was there for a fund-raiser and made a point to see and try to speak with Sharon.” Elizabeth pressed her lips together. “I asked her to. You see, when I tried to open communications again, Sharon wasn’t interested. I’d lost her,” Elizabeth said quietly, “and moved too late to get her back. I didn’t know how to get her back. I’d hoped that Catherine could help, being family, but not Sharon’s mother.”
She looked over at Eve again. “You’re thinking that I should have gone again myself. It was my place to go.”
“Ms. Barrister—”
But Elizabeth shook her head. “You’re right, of course. But she refused to confide in me. I thought I should respect her privacy, as I always had. I was never one of those mothers who peeked into her daughter’s diary.”
“Diary?” Eve’s antenna vibrated. “Did she keep one?”
“She always kept a diary, even as a child. She changed the password in it regularly.”
“And as an adult?”
“Yes. She’d refer to it now and again—joke about the secrets she had and the people she knew who would be appalled at what she’d written about them.”
There’d been no personal diary in the inventory, Eve remembered. Such things could be as small as a woman’s thumb. If the sweepers missed it the first time . . .
“Do you have any of them?”
“No.” Abruptly alert, Elizabeth looked up. “She kept them in a deposit box, I think. She kept them all.”
“Did she use a bank here in Virginia?”
“Not that I’m aware of. I’ll check and see what I can find out for you. I can go through the things she left here.”
“I’d appreciate that. If you think of anything—anything at all—a name, a comment, no matter how casual, please contact me.”
“I will. She never spoke of friends, lieutenant. I worried about that, even as I used it to hope that the lack of them would draw her back home. Out of the life she’d chosen. I even used one of my own, my own friends, thinking he would be more persuasive than I.”
“Who was that?”
“Roarke.” Elizabeth teared up again, fought them back. “Only days before she was murdered, I called him. We’ve known each other for years. I asked him if he would arrange for her to be invited to a certain party I knew he’d be attending. If he’d seek her out. He was reluctant. Roarke isn’t one to meddle in family business. But I used our friendship. If he would just find a way to befriend her, to show her that an attractive woman doesn’t have to use her looks to feel worthwhile. He did that for me, and for my husband.”
“You asked him to develop a relationship with her?” Eve said carefully.
“I asked him to be her friend,” Elizabeth corrected. “To be there for her. I asked him because there’s no one I trust more. She’d cut herself off from all of us, and I needed someone I could trust. He would never hurt her, you see. He would never hurt anyone I loved.”
“Because he loves you?”
“Cares.” Richard DeBlass spoke from the doorway. “Roarke cares very much for Beth and for me, and a few select others. But loves? I’m not sure he’d let himself risk quite that unstable an emotion.”
“Richard.” Elizabeth’s control wobbled as she got to her feet. “I wasn’t expecting you quite yet.”
“We finished early.” He came to her, closed his hands over hers. “You should have called me, Beth.”
“I didn’t—” She broke off, looked at him helplessly. “I’d hoped to handle it alone.”
“You don’t have to handle anything alone.” He kept his hand closed over his wife’s as he turned to Eve. “You’d be Lieutenant Dallas?”
“Yes, Mr. DeBlass. I had a few questions and hoped it would be easier if I asked them in person.”
“My wife and I are willing to cooperate in any way we can.” He remained standing, a position Eve judged as one of power and of distance.
There was none of Elizabeth’s nerves or fragility in the man who stood beside her. He was taking charge, Eve decided, protecting his wife and guarding his own emotions with equal care.
“You were asking about Roarke,” he continued. “May I ask why?”
“I told the lieutenant that I’d asked Roarke to see Sharon. To try to . . .”
“Oh, Beth.” In a gesture that was both weary and resigned, he shook his head. “What could he do? Why would you bring him into it?”
She stepped away from him, her face so filled with despair, Eve’s heart broke. “I know you told me to let it alone, that we had to let her go. But I had to try again. She might have connected with him, Richard. He has a way.” She began to speak quickly now, her words tumbling out, tripping over each other. “He might have helped her if I’d asked him sooner. With enough time, there’s very little he can’t do. But he didn’t have enough time. Neither did my child.”
“All right,” Richard murmured, and laid a hand on her arm. “All right.”
She controlled herself again, drew back, drew in. “What can I do now, lieutenant, but pray for justice?”
“I’ll get you justice, Ms. Barrister.”
She closed her eyes and clung to that. “I think you will. I wasn’t sure of that, even after Roarke called me about you.”
“He called you—to discuss the case?”
“He called to see how we were—and to tell me he thought you’d be coming to see me personally before long.” She nearly smiled. “He’s rarely wrong. He told me I’d find you competent, organized, and involved. You are. I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to see that for myself and to know that you’re in charge of my daughter’s murder investigation.”
“Ms. Barrister,” Eve
hesitated only a moment before deciding to take the risk. “What if I told you Roarke is a suspect?”
Elizabeth’s eyes went wide, then calmed again almost immediately. “I’d say you were taking an extraordinarily big wrong step.”
“Because Roarke is incapable of murder?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.” It was a relief to think of it, if only for a moment, in objective terms. “Incapable of a senseless act, yes. He might kill cold-bloodedly, but never the defenseless. He might kill, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had. But would he do to anyone what was done to Sharon—before, during, after? No. Not Roarke.”
“No,” Richard echoed, and his hand searched for his wife’s again. “Not Roarke.”
Not Roarke, Eve thought again when she was back in her cab and headed for the underground. Why the hell hadn’t he told her he’d met Sharon DeBlass as a favor to her mother? What else hadn’t he told her?
Blackmail. Somehow she didn’t see him as a victim of blackmail. He wouldn’t give a damn what was said or broadcast about him. But the diary changed things and made blackmail a new and intriguing motive.
Just what had Sharon recorded about whom, and where were the goddamn diaries?
chapter nine
“No problem reversing the tail,” Feeney said as he shoveled in what passed for breakfast at the eatery at Cop Central. “I see him cue in on me. He’s looking around for you, but there’s plenty of bodies. So I get on the frigging plane.”
Feeney washed down irradiated eggs with black bean coffee without a wince. “He gets on, too, but he sits up in First Class. When we get off, he’s waiting, and that’s when he knows you’re not there.” He jabbed at Eve with his fork. “He was pissed, makes a quick call. So I get behind him, trail him to the Regent Hotel. They don’t like to tell you anything at the Regent. Flash your badge and they get all offended.”
“And you explained, tactfully, about civic duty.”
“Right.” Feeney pushed his empty plate into the recycler slot, crushed his empty cup with his hand, and sent it to follow. “He made a couple of calls—one to East Washington, one to Virginia. Then he makes a local—to the chief.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Chief Simpson’s pushing buttons for DeBlass, no question. Makes you wonder what buttons.”
Before Eve could comment, her communicator beeped. She pulled it out and answered the call from her commander.
“Dallas, be in Testing. Twenty minutes.”
“Sir, I’m meeting a snitch on the Colby matter at oh nine hundred.”
“Reschedule.” His voice was flat. “Twenty minutes.”
Slowly, Dallas replaced her communicator. “I guess we know one of the buttons.”
“Seems like DeBlass is taking a personal interest in you.” Feeney studied her face. There wasn’t a cop on the force who didn’t despise Testing. “You going to handle it okay?”
“Yeah, sure. This is going to tie me up most of the day, Feeney. Do me a favor. Do a run on the banks in Manhattan. I need to know if Sharon DeBlass kept a safe deposit box. If you don’t find anything there, spread out to the other boroughs.”
“You got it.”
The Testing section was riddled with long corridors, some glassed, some done in pale green walls that were supposed to be calming. Doctors and technicians wore white. The color of innocence and, of course, power. When she entered the first set of reinforced glass doors, the computer politely ordered her to surrender her weapon. Eve took it out of her holster, set it on the tray, and watched it slide away.
It made her feel naked even before she was directed into Testing Room 1-C and told to strip.
She laid her clothes on the bench provided and tried not to think about the techs watching her on their monitors or the machines with the nastily silent glide and their impersonal blinking lights.
The physical exam was easy. All she had to do was stand on the center mark in the tubelike room and watch the lights blip and flash as her internal organs and bones were checked for flaws.
Then she was permitted to don a blue jumpsuit and sit while a machine angled over to examine her eyes and ears. Another, snicking out from one of the wall slots, did a standard reflex test. For the personal touch, a technician entered to take a blood sample.
Please exit door marked Testing 2-C. Phase one is complete, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.
In the adjoining room, Eve was instructed to lie on a padded table for the brain scan. Wouldn’t want any cops out there with a brain tumor urging them to blast civilians, she thought wearily.
Eve watched the techs through the glass wall as the helmet was lowered onto her head.
Then the games began.
The bench adjusted to a sitting position and she was treated to virtual reality. The VR put her in a vehicle during a high-speed chase. Sounds exploded in her ears: the scream of sirens, the shouts of conflicting orders from the communicator on the dash. She could see that it was a standard police unit, fully charged. The control of the vehicle was hers, and she had to swerve and maneuver to avoid flattening a variety of pedestrians the VR hurled in her path.
In one part of her brain she was aware her vitals were being monitored: blood pressure, pulse, even the amount of sweat that crawled on her skin, the saliva that pooled and dried in her mouth. It was hot, almost unbearably hot. She narrowly missed a food transport that lumbered into her path.
She recognized her location. The old ports on the east side. She could smell them: water, bad fish, and old sweat. Transients wearing their uniform of blue coveralls were looking for a handout or a day’s labor. She flew by a group of them jostling for position in front of a placement center.
Subject armed. Rifle torch, hand explosive. Wanted for robbery homicide.
Great, Eve thought as she careened after him. Fucking great. She punched the accelerator, whipped the wheel, and kissed off the fender of the target vehicle in a shower of sparks. A spurt of flame whooshed by her ear as he fired at her. The proprietor of a port side roach coach dived for cover, along with several of his customers. Rice noodles flew along with curses.
She rammed the target again, ordering her backup to maneuver into a pincer position.
This time her quarry’s vehicle shuddered, tipped. As he fought for control, she used hers to batter his to a stop. She shouted the standard identification and warning as she bolted from the vehicle. He came out blasting, and she brought him down.
The shock from her weapon jolted his nervous system. She watched him jitter, wet himself, then collapse.
She’d hardly taken a breath to readjust when the bastard techs tossed her into a new scene. The screams, the little girl’s screams; the raging roar of the man who was her father.
They had reconstructed it almost too perfectly, using her own report, visuals of the site, and the mirror of her memory they’d lifted in the scan.
Eve didn’t bother to curse them, but held back her hate, her grief, and sent herself racing up the stairs and back into her nightmare.
No more screams from the little girl. She beat on the door, calling out her name and rank. Warning the man on the other side of the door, trying to calm him.
“Cunts. You’re all cunts. Come on in, cunt bitch. I’ll kill you.”
The door folded like cardboard under her ramming shoulder. She went in, weapon drawn.
“She was just like her mother—just like her fucking mother. Thought they’d get away from me. Thought they could. I fixed it. I fixed them. I’m going to fix you, cunt cop.”
The little girl was staring at her with big, dead eyes. Doll’s eyes. Her tiny, helpless body mutilated, blood spreading like a pool. And dripping from the knife.
She told him to freeze: “You son of a bitch, drop the weapon. Drop the fucking knife!” But he kept coming. Stunned him. But he kept coming.
The room smelled of blood, of urine, of burned food. The lights were too bright, unshaded and blinding so that everything, everything stood out in jarring relief. A doll with a
missing arm on the ripped sofa, a crooked window shield that let in a hard red glow from the neon across the street, the overturned table of cheap molded plastic, the cracked screen of a broken ’link.
The little girl with dead eyes. The spreading pool of blood. And the sharp, sticky gleam of the blade.
“I’m going to ram this right up your cunt. Just like I did to her.”
Stunned again. His eyes were wild, jagged on homemade Zeus, that wonderful chemical that made gods out of men, with all the power and insanity that went with delusions of immortality.
The knife, with the scarlet drenched blade hacked down, whistled.
And she dropped him.
The jolt zipped through his nervous system. His brain died first, so that his body convulsed and shuddered as his eyes turned to glass. Strapping down on the need to scream, she kicked the knife away from his still twitching hand and looked at the child.
The big doll’s eyes stared at her, and told her—again—that she’d been too late.
Forcing her body to relax, she let nothing into her mind but her report.
The VR section was complete. Her vitals were checked again before she was taken to the final testing phase. The one-on-one with the psychiatrist.
Eve didn’t have anything against Dr. Mira. The woman was dedicated to her calling. In private practice, she could have earned triple the salary she pulled in under the Police and Security Department.
She had a quiet voice with the faintest hint of upper class New England. Her pale blue eyes were kind—and sharp. At sixty, she was comfortable with middle age, but far from matronly.
Her hair was a warm honey brown and scooped up in the back in a neat yet complicated twist. She wore a tidy, rose toned suit with a sedate gold circle on the lapel.
No, Eve had nothing against her personally. She just hated shrinks.
“Lieutenant Dallas.” Mira rose from a soft blue scoop chair when Eve entered.