Survivor in Death

by J. D. Robb

  The insanity that was McNab cut the travel time nearly in half. She took a portion of the time saved to rake at what was now a bird’s nest on her head, and tame it down to her usual ruler-straight bowl cut. McNab pulled a folding brush out of another pocket and whacked at his knotted ponytail.

  “Nice place,” he commented, looking around the yard, the field of corn that ran alongside it. “If you go for rural.”

  “I do. To visit anyway.” She studied the neatly painted red barn, the smaller, trimmer outbuilding, and the pasture where a few spotted cows grazed. “Somebody takes good care of this.”

  She got out, looked at the narrow patch of lawn, the ordered beds of fading fall flowers that led to a two-story white house with a covered porch.

  There were festive pumpkins, two with grinning faces carved out, on the steps, reminding her Halloween was only days away.

  “Do some dairy,” she observed. “Some row crops. Probably got some chickens out back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This stuff I know. My sister’s farm’s bigger than this, and she does okay. Hard work, you have to love it to do it, I think. Place like this is small, but well-run. Mostly they self-provide, sell some of the harvest and the by-products at a local market for transport. Maybe they got a hydro out back, too, so they can grow through the winter. But that costs.”

  He was out of his element. “Okay.”

  “She was an exec at one of the top communication companies in New York. Fast track. Husband was a producer—daytime drama. Individually they were pulling down double our combined salaries.”

  “Now they’re working a farm in Nebraska.” He nodded. “I get you.”

  “Somebody already knows we’re out here.”

  “Yeah.” Behind the shades, his gaze tracked to the dot of yellow blinking above the front door. “They got motion and cams, bet it’s a three-sixty scan. More on the fence lines, east and west. A lot of security for a little farm in West Bumfuck, Nebraska.”

  They went to the door, knocked. Steel-reinforced, MacNab thought, and noted the shimmer on the windows. Lockdown alarms.

  “Yes?” The voice through the intercom was female, and firm.

  “Mrs. Turnbill? We’re the police. Detectives Peabody and McNab with the New York City Police and Security Department.”

  “That’s not a police vehicle.”

  “No, ma’am, it’s private.” Peabody held up her badge. “We’d like to speak with you, and will wait until you verify our IDs.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You spoke with my partner, Lieutenant Dallas, earlier today. I understand your caution under the circumstances, Mrs. Turnbill, but it’s important we speak with you. If you refuse, we’ll contact the local authorities and arrange for a warrant. I don’t want to do that. We’ve gone to some trouble to keep this visit quiet, to insure your safety.”

  “Wait.”

  Like Peabody, McNab kept his badge up, and watched the thin red light shimmer out, scan both. Somebody, he thought, isn’t just cautious, but scared. Right into the bowels.

  The door opened. “I’ll speak with you, but I can’t tell you any more than I told Lieutenant Dallas.” As she spoke a man came down from the second floor. His face was grim, his eyes cold.

  “Why can’t you people leave us alone?”

  “The kids?” his wife asked him.

  “Fine. I told them to stay upstairs.”

  He was stocky in the way that told Peabody he did manual labor routinely. His face was tanned, squint lines scoring out from his eyes, his hair bleached by the sun.

  Six years, she thought, had made him more farmer than urbanite. And the way he kept one hand in the pocket of his work pants warned her he was carrying.

  “Mr. Turnbill, we’ve come a long way, and not to harass you. Roger Kirkendall is wanted in connection with seven homicides.”

  “Only seven.” His lips twisted. “You’re way off.”

  “That may be, but it’s the seven that concern us at the moment.”

  Taking his cue, McNab kept his voice as brittle as Turnbill’s, and drew crime scene photos from his field bag. “Here’s a couple to start.”

  He’d gone straight to the kids, and saw by the way Roxanne paled, it had been the right move. “They were sleeping when he cut their throats. I guess that’s a mercy.”

  “Oh God.” Roxanne wrapped her arms around her belly. “Oh my God.”

  “You’ve got no right to come in here and do this.”

  “Oh yeah.” McNab’s eyes were merciless as they met Turnbill’s. “We do.”

  “McNab.” Peabody murmured it, deliberately reached out and pulled back the photos. “I’m sorry. Sorry to disturb you, sorry to upset you. We need your help.”

  “We don’t know anything.” Turnbill put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “We just want to be left alone.”

  “You left high-powered, high-paying jobs six years ago,” McNab began. “Why?”

  “That’s none of your—”

  “Joshua.” Roxanne shook her head. “I need to sit down. Let’s just sit down.”

  She turned into a living room showing the chaotic debris of young children, the comfortable wear of family. Roxanne sat, gripped her husband’s hand. “How do you know he did it? He’s gotten away with so much for so long, how do you know?”

  “We have evidence linking him to the crimes. Those children, their parents, and a domestic were all murdered in their beds. Grant Swisher was your sister’s attorney in her divorce and custody case.”

  “Six years ago,” she replied. “Yes, he could wait six years. He could wait sixty.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is?”

  “None. He leaves us alone now. He leaves us alone. We’re not important anymore. We don’t want to be.”

  “Where’s your sister?” McNab demanded, and Roxanne jerked.

  “She’s dead. He killed her.”

  “We believe he’s capable of doing so.” Peabody kept her eyes level on Roxanne’s. “But he hasn’t. Not yet. What if he finds her before we find him? What if you have some information and refuse to cooperate with us, impede our investigation long enough for him to hunt her down?”

  “I don’t know where she is.” Weary tears filled Roxanne’s eyes. “Her, my nephew, my niece. I haven’t seen them in six years.”

  “But you know she’s alive. You know she got away from him.”

  “I thought she was dead. For two years. I went to the police, but they couldn’t help. I thought he’d killed them. And then—”

  “You don’t have to do this, Roxie.” Her husband drew her closer. “You don’t have to go through this again.”

  “I don’t know what to do. What if he comes here? What if he does, after all this time? Our babies, Joshua.”

  “We’re safe here.”

  “You’ve got a good security system.” McNab drew Turnbill’s attention back to him. “So did the Swishers. The nice family on the Upper West Side he slaughtered. Their good security system didn’t help them.”

  “We’ll help you,” Peabody assured them. “We’ll arrange for police protection for you, for your family. We took private transpo out of New York, under the radar. He doesn’t know we’re here. He doesn’t, at this time, know we’re looking for him. The longer it takes to find him, the better the chance he’ll know.”

  “When will this be over?”

  “When we find him.” McNab shut down on compassion as the tears slid down Roxanne’s cheeks. “We’ll find him sooner with your help.”

  “Joshua. Please, would you get me some water?”

  He studied her face, then nodded. “Are you sure?” he asked as he rose. “Roxie, are you sure?”

  “No, but I know I don’t want to live like this.” She took slow breaths as he left the room. “It’s worse for him, I think. Worse. He works so hard for so little. We were happy in New York. Such an exciting city, full of so much energy. We both had careers we loved, we were good at
. We’d just bought a townhouse. Because I was pregnant. My sister . . .”

  She trailed off, managed a smile when her husband came in with a glass of water. “Thanks, honey. My sister was damaged, I guess you could say. He damaged her. Years of abuse, physical, emotional, mental. I tried to get her to leave, to get help. I’d talk to her, but she was too afraid, or too entrenched, and I was the little sister who didn’t understand. It was her fault, you see. I did a lot of studying on battered syndrome in those days. I’m sure you’ve seen your share of it.”

  “Too much,” Peabody agreed.

  “He was worse than anything, than anybody. Not just because she was my sister. It’s not that he likes to cause pain, to harm. It’s that it means nothing to him. He might snap the bone in her finger for having dinner on the table two minutes late—according to his schedule—then sit down and eat a hot meal without a single flicker of emotion. Can you imagine living like that?”

  “No, ma’am. No,” Peabody repeated, “I can’t.”

  “She was property to him, Dian and the children. It was when he began to hurt the children that she was able to pull out of the mire. He’d already damaged them, too, but she thought she was protecting them, keeping the family together. He brutalized them, punishments, his brand of discipline. Solitary confinement, he’d call it, or he’d make them stand in cold showers for an hour, deny them food for two days. Once he cut off all of my niece’s hair because he said she’d taken too long brushing it. But then he began to beat Jack, my nephew. Toughen him up, he claimed. One day, when Roger was out, she found her son with Roger’s army-issue stunner. He’d put it on full, he was holding it here . . .”

  She pressed her fingers to the pulse in her throat. “He was going to kill himself. This eight-year-old boy was going to end his own life rather than face another day with that monster. It woke her up. She left. She took the kids, nothing else. She didn’t even pack a bag. There were shelters I’d told her about, and she ran to one.”

  Roxanne closed her eyes, drank deeply. “I don’t know if she’d have gone through with it, expect for the children. But once she did, it was like a miracle. She got herself back. And a few weeks later, she hired a lawyer. It was horrible, going through the trial, but she did it. She stood up to him, and she won.”

  “She never intended to adhere to the conditions, to stay in New York, to allow him to see the kids again,” Peabody said.

  “I don’t know. She never told me, never even hinted, but no, I think not. I think she must have planned to run all along. I don’t know how else she could have managed to get away from him.”

  “There are undergrounds, for people in her situation.”

  “Yes. I didn’t know then. When she vanished, I was sure he’d killed her and the kids. He’s not only capable, but he has the means, the training. Even when he took me, I thought—”

  “He abducted you?”

  “I was on the subway coming home, and I felt a little sting.” She cupped a hand around her biceps. “I felt sick and dizzy—and I don’t remember. I remember waking up, still sick. It was a room, a big room. No windows and just this ugly greenish light. He’d taken my clothes, all of my clothes.”

  She pressed her lips together until they went white, reached blindly for her husband’s hand. “I was on the floor, my hands in restraints. And as I woke I was lifted up, by some sort of pulley, so that I was standing, had to stand on my toes. I was six months pregnant with Ben.”

  Turnbill pressed his face into his wife’s shoulder, and Peabody could see now that he wept.

  “He stepped in front of me. He had some sort of rod. He said, ‘Where is my wife?’ Even before I could answer, he pressed the tip of the rod here.” She laid a hand between her breasts. “Horrible pain, electrical shock. He told me, very calmly, that he had the rod on low, and would up the power every time I lied.

  “I told him I knew he’d killed her, and he shocked me again. And again and again. I begged, I screamed, I pleaded, for myself, for my baby. He left me there, I don’t know how long, then he came back and did it all again.”

  “He had her over twelve hours.” Turnbill sucked in breath, ignored the tears on his face. “The police—you can’t file a report, a missing person’s, that soon. I tried, but they said it wasn’t enough time, when I called. But it was a lifetime, for both of us. It was a miracle she didn’t miscarry. When he was done with her, he dumped her on the sidewalk in Times Square.”

  “He believed me, finally. He must have known that I would’ve told him anything just to stop the pain. So he believed me, and before he knocked me out again, he told me if I went to the police—if I implicated him in any way—he would find me again. He would cut the brat out of my belly and slit its throat.”

  “Roxanne.” Peabody spoke quietly. “I know this is very hard for you to speak about. But I need to know: Was Kirkendall alone when he held you?”

  “No. He had that bastard with him. They were joined at the hip, claimed to be brothers. Isaac, Isaac Clinton. They were in the army together. He . . . he sat at some sort of console, controls. I don’t know. I think he was studying some kind of readout. They had some sort of hookup on me, like in a hospital. He sat, the whole time Roger tortured me, and he never spoke. Not one word. At least not when I was conscious.”

  “Was there anyone else?”

  “I’m not sure. Sometimes I thought I heard voices, maybe a woman’s. But I was out of my mind. I didn’t see anyone else, and I was unconscious when they took me out, when they tossed me onto the street.”

  “You didn’t tell the police that you knew your abductors?”

  “When I . . . when I came out of it, I was in the hospital. I was afraid for my life, for my baby’s life. So I said nothing. I told them I couldn’t remember anything.”

  “What do you expect—” Turnbill began, but Peabody sent him a look of such sympathy his voice broke.

  “I expect I would have done exactly the same,” she told him. “I expect my only clear thought would be to protect my child, my husband, myself.”

  “We said nothing,” Roxanne continued, her voice a little stronger. “We left New York, we left our lives there, and came here. My parents live nearby. I realized she’d run—Dian—but I thought he’d find her. Kill her. Two years, I was sure she was gone. Then I answered the ’link. She’d blocked the video, but she said my name. She said my name and we’re safe. That’s all. She broke the connection. I get those calls every few months, sometimes more than a year between. That’s all she ever says.”

  “When was the last time she contacted you?”

  “Three weeks ago. I don’t know where she is, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you, for the same reasons I said nothing after the abduction. We’ve made a life here. We have two sons now, and they’re happy. This is their home. And still, we live in a prison because of this one man. I’m afraid every day, every single day.”

  “We’re going to find him, Roxanne, and when we do, you won’t have to be afraid again. Tell me about the room where they held you,” Peabody said. “Every detail you remember.”

  19

  EVE WAS BACK AT HER DESK WHEN ROARKE CAME into her office. He immediately sniffed the air.

  “You had a burger?”

  “What? No. Baxter, Trueheart. Let cops loose near food, it’s a free-for-all. They’d want a place in the city, wouldn’t they?”

  “Baxter and Trueheart? Is there something about their relationship I’ve missed?”

  “What?”

  “You keep saying that. You need to eat.”

  Her mind cleared slightly as he moved into the kitchen. “I’m not talking about Baxter and Trueheart.”

  “I’m perfectly aware of that. And yes, I agree. Kirkendall and associates would want a place in the city. Why risk running into pesky commuter traffic, or pesky commuter traffic cops?”

  “I bet it’s Upper West.”

  “We agree again.” He came back in with two plates, and this time Eve sniffed the air.
“What is that?”

  “Lasagna.” Veggie lasagna, he thought. One of the easiest ways to get something green in her system that wasn’t a gumdrop was to disguise it in pasta.

  “Why do you agree? About the Upper West?”

  He set one of the plates in front of her, the other across the desk. Then went to get a chair, and two glasses of wine. When a man wanted to eat a meal with his wife, and his wife was Eve, Roarke thought, the man learned to make adjustments.

  “Considerable time and effort went into casing out the Swisher property. Not only the electronics, but lifestyle. They knew where to go and when to go. So—”

  He set her wine down, tapped his glass against it, then sat. “More efficient to have a location near the target point. You can do drive-bys, walk-bys, test your jammers and so on against their system. And you’d want to watch them.”

  She watched him as she cut into the lasagna. “Because you’d want to see them alive before you saw them dead.”

  “Oh yes. It’s personal. So though the kill is clean and quick, you’d want the rush beforehand. Look at them, they don’t know I have the power to end them. When and how I like.”

  “It’s a little strange being hooked up with someone who can think that much like a killer.”

  He lifted his glass to her. “I’ll say precisely the same. And make a considerable wager that your thoughts ran parallel to mine.”

  “Yeah, you win.” She sampled the lasagna. Something in there tasted like spinach. But it wasn’t half bad. “You come up with anything for me?”

  “I’m a little hurt you’d have to ask. Eat first. You’ve heard from Peabody?”

  “They’re on their way back. Want to hear the roundup?”

  “Of course.”

  She told him while they ate.

  “Torturing a pregnant woman,” Roarke commented. “Lower and lower. But he should’ve killed her, in hindsight. It seems his long-suffering wife learned enough from him to keep her location—more likely locations, as she’d be smarter to move every few months at least—from everyone. He kept the sister alive assuming that his wife would, at some point, run to her family.”