by J. D. Robb
She gave the now desperate Galahad a portion from each plate—fair was fair—before carrying them back into the office. She saw he’d correctly interpreted her carbs as spaghetti, and had opened a bottle of red. He sat, sipping, and scanning her comp screen.
“Maybe he’ll cause you real harm.” Eve set the plates on her desk. “Then I’ll kill him.”
“Works for me. Interesting questions posed here, Lieutenant.” As if it were any casual meal—and for them perhaps it was—Roarke expertly wound noodles around his fork. “Interesting percentages.”
“Probability’s high Mira hit it with the reasons he’s come back to New York, and the reason he’s targeted me. Also in the high range he’s connected to opera professionally. I’m not sure I agree.”
“Why?”
“Has to be a lot of work, right? Focus, energy, dedication. And in most cases, a lot of interaction with others. Factor it in, sure,” she said, studying the display on-screen, “but when I rolled it around during my thinking time, it doesn’t fit for me. He’s no team player. My gauge is he likes his quiet time. You could, on some level, call his killings performances, but that’s not how I see them. They’re more intimate. Just between him and the vic until he’s done.”
“A duet.”
“A duet. Hmm.” She rolled that around, too. “Yeah, okay, a duet, I can see that. One man, one woman, the dynamics there, extremely personal. A performance, okay, without an audience, too intimate to share. Because, I think, at some time he was intimately connected to the woman all the rest represent. Yeah. They were a duet.”
“And his partner was killed.”
“Derailed his train. That’s why I think he uses chemicals to rein himself in for long periods—or conversely to free himself for short ones. There, the computer and I agree. So, I look for types of medications that can suppress homicidal urges. And if he’s sick, as we’re theorizing, he may be taking meds for whatever his condition might be. Do you know Tomas Pella?”
“The name’s not familiar, no.”
“He seemed to know you.”
“I know a great many people.”
“And a great many more know you, I get that. He used to own some restaurants in Little Italy. Sold them shortly after the time all this started nine years ago.”
“I might have bought them, or one of them. I’ll check the records.”
“How about Hugh Klok, antiquities dealer. You buy a lot of old stuff.”
“Doesn’t ring.”
“I’ll do a run on him. One of the others Newkirk remembered from the prior was this guy who did taxidermy. You know, stuffed dead animals.”
“Which always begs the question: Why in the bloody hell?”
“Yeah, what’s with that?” Eve slanted her gaze over to Galahad, who’d wandered back in to sit and wash up after his meal. “I mean, would you want…you know, when he uses up his nine?”
“Good God, no. Not only, well, creepy would be the word, wouldn’t it, for us, but bloody humiliating for him.”
“Yeah, that’s what I think. I liked the idea of the taxidermy guy for the symbolism. House of death and blah. But he’s clear. Lives on Vegas II, and has for four years. Checked out. So anyway, you want the background on these other two, and the third I questioned today, Dobbins?”
“I’m sure it’s as much sparkling dinner conversation as the philosophy of taxidermy and dead cats. Go ahead.”
Downtown in their apartment, Peabody and McNab worked on dueling computers. Because he worked better with noise and she didn’t care, the air blasted with trash rock and revisionist rap. She sat, hunched over, tuning most of it out and picking her way through a complicated search.
He was up and down like a restless puppy, alternately snapping out directives and singing lyrics. She didn’t know how anyone could get any work done that way. But she also knew he not only could, he had to.
The remnants of the Chinese delivery they’d ordered were scattered around both their workstations. Peabody was already wishing she’d resisted that last egg roll.
When she finally found the data she was after, tears blurred her eyes. The hot prick of tears warned her she was overtired and her resistance was bottoming out.
“Hey, hey, She-Body!” McNab caught the look on her face. “Music off. Computer, save and pause. What’s wrong, honey?”
“It’s so sad. It just makes me so sad.”
“What does?” He’d already come behind her to pat and rub her shoulders.
It was a pretty good deal, she thought, to have somebody there to pet you when you were shaky. “I found Therese—Therese Di Vecchio Pella. Tomas Pella’s wife, one of the guys Dallas and I talked to today.”
“Yeah, from Old Newkirk’s notes, from the first go-round.”
“They got married in April. They were with the Home Force. He was a corporal, she was a medic. And see, look.” She tapped the comp screen. “In July she was dispatched to this area, on the edge of SoHo and Tribeca. An explosion, mostly civilian casualties. There was still firing in the sector, but she went in. She was wearing the red cross—the medic symbol. But she got hit by sniper fire when she tried to reach the wounded. She was only twenty. She was trying to help wounded civilians, and they killed her.”
She sat back, knuckled away the tears. “I don’t know. It just rips me, I guess. You’ve got to have hope, right, to stop long enough to get married in the middle of all that. And then, you’re gone. Trying to help people, and you’re gone. She was only twenty.”
McNab leaned down, pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Want me to take this for a while?”
“No. We talked to that old man today. Well, not that old, really, but it seemed like he was older than Moses in that bed, with the breather on. And then I read this, and think how he’d been so young, and he’d loved this girl. Then…she’s too young.”
“I know it’s tough, baby, but—”
“No, no. I mean, yeah, it’s tough, but she’s too young to be the source of the pattern.” Tears—and some still clung to her lashes—were forgotten. “She was only twenty, and the youngest vic was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight to thirty-three, that’s been his span. So Therese Pella died too young, it most likely eliminates Pella as a suspect.”
“You were seriously looking at this guy?”
“He’s the right age, the basic type, connection with the Urbans, private home—and can you spell bitter? Got a tumor—or he says—Dallas is checking that. Lost his bride—bride and groom—who was a pretty brunette. But after that it doesn’t follow.”
Peabody sat back, shaking her head at the data on screen. “Doesn’t follow pattern. She’s hit by sniper fire, not tortured. She’s eight years younger than his youngest vic when she was killed. Misses the profile. But there was something. A tingle, Dallas called it. There was a tingle when we talked to him.”
“Maybe he knows something. Maybe he’s connected.”
“Yeah, maybe. I need to get this to Dallas, then try for deeper data on Pella.”
“I’ll give you a hand.” McNab gave her shoulders another rub, then toyed with the ends of her hair. “Okay now?”
“Yeah. I guess it’s not enough sleep and too much on the brain.”
“You need to take a break.”
“Maybe I do.” She knuckled her eyes again, but this time to clear fatigue instead of tears. “If it wasn’t so cold out, I’d take a walk, get some air, some exercise.”
“I don’t know about the air,” he said as she rose. “But I can help with the exercise.” Grinning, he laid a hand on her ass, gave it a squeeze.
“Yeah?” Her eyes danced; her libido boogied. “You wanna?”
“Let me answer that question by ripping your clothes off.”
She let out a laughing squeal as they tumbled to the floor. “I thought, you know, you weren’t feeling the bloom and spark.”
“Something’s blooming just fine,” he said as he dragged off her sweater.
She tugged his pants down ov
er his hips to check for herself. Looking down, she said, “I’ll say.”
“And as for sparkage.” He crushed his mouth to hers in a kiss hot enough she envisioned smoke coming out of her ears. “Any more, and we’d torch the place.”
She saw his eyes go dreamy when his hand cupped her breast, felt her stomach muscles tighten in response.
“Mmmm, She-body, the most female of females. Let’s see what we can light up.”
Later, considerably later, Eve studied the data Peabody had sent to her office unit. “She’s right,” Eve mumbled. “Too young, wrong method. Dobbins hits me as just too sloppy, just too disinterested. Klok’s coming across as straight and narrow. But there’s something here. I just can’t see it yet.”
“Maybe you would if you got a decent night’s sleep.”
Instead, she walked around her boards again. “Opera. What about the opera-tickets angle?”
“I’ve got the list for season ticket holders for the Met. Nothing on the first cross-check. I’ll try others.”
“He jumps names, jumps names and ID data. Covert stuff. Smooth, under radar. Where’d he learn how? Torture methods. Covert operations have been known to employ torture methods.”
“I can tell you my sources on the matter of torturers isn’t popping anyone of this generation still living and in business, or anyone who moonlights by targeting young brunettes.”
“It was worth a shot,” Eve mused. “Covert might change that. Someone who was in military ops, or paramilitary at one time. He learned the methods somewhere, and developed the skill to manipulate his data.”
“Or has the connections or the funds to hire someone to manipulate it,” Roarke reminded her.
“Yeah, there’s that. So. Why do we torture someone?”
“For information.”
“Yeah, at least ostensibly. Why else do you torture? Kicks, sexual deviation, ritual sacrifice.”
“Experimentation. Another tried and true rationale for inflicting pain.”
She looked at him. “We eliminate the need or desire for information, and the sexual deviation. No doubt in my mind he gets personal gratification from inflicting pain, but it has to be more. Ritual’s part of it, but this isn’t some sick religious deal or cult. So, experimentation,” she repeated. “Fits. Factor in that he’s very good at it. Torture skills are specialized. He isn’t messy about it, he’s precise. Again, where did he learn?”
“And you’re back to the Urbans.”
“It keeps crossing there. Someone taught him, or he studied. Experimented before the experimentation. But not here, not in New York.”
Circling her board, she studied, considered angles. “We ran searches for others before. I did a Missing Persons run on the victim type. But what if he experimented elsewhere? If he purposefully mutilated the bodies to eliminate the correlation, or disposed of them altogether?”
“You’re going to do a global search on mutilations and missing persons involving the victim type.”
“He might not have been as careful. If we find something…he might have left something behind.” She stopped, stared at the sketch of the man she hunted. “Still honing his craft, still finding his way. We did globals, but maybe we didn’t go back far enough.”
“I’ll set it up. I can do it faster,” he said before she could argue. “Then it’ll take a good long while for any results you can actually work with. I’ll set it up, then we’re getting some sleep.”
“All right. Okay.”
The dreams came in blurry spurts, as if she were swimming through fog that tore and re-formed, tore and re-formed. The clock ticked incessantly.
Over that endless, echoing tick, she heard the sounds of a battle raging. A firefight, she thought. Blasts and bullets and the wild shouts and calls of the men and women who fought.
She could smell the blood, the smoke, the burning flesh before she could see it. Carnage carried a sickly sweet aroma.
As vision cleared, focused, she saw the battle was on a stage, and the stage was dressed to depict the city in a strange, stylized form. Buildings, all black and silver, were tipped and tilted above hard white streets that jagged into impossible angles or inexplicable dead ends.
And the players on stage were dressed in bright, elaborate costumes that flowed through bloody pools and swirled in dirty smoke as they murdered each other.
She looked down on it all with interest, from her gilded box seat. Below, in a pit where bodies lay twisted, she could see the orchestra madly playing their instruments. Their fingers ran with blood from razor-sharp strings.
On stage, the shouts and calls were songs, she realized, fierce, violent. Vicious.
War could never be otherwise.
“The third act is nearly over.”
She turned, looked into the face of the killer as he took a huge stopwatch out of the pocket of his formal black.
“I don’t understand. It’s all death. Who writes these things?”
“Death, yes. Passion and strength and life. Everything leads to death, doesn’t it? Who would know that better than you?”
“Murder’s different.”
“Oh, yes, it’s artful and it’s deliberate. It takes it out of the hands of fate and puts the power into the one who creates death. Who makes a gift of it.”
“What gift? How is murder a gift?”
“This…” He gestured to the stage as a woman, brown hair bloody, face and body battered, was borne in on a stretcher. “This is about immortality.”
“Immortality’s for the dead. Who was she when she was alive?”
He only smiled. “Time’s up.” He clicked the stopwatch, and the stage went black.
Eve came rearing up in bed, sucking for air. Caught between the dream and reality, she closed her hands over her ears to muffle the ticking. “Why won’t it stop?”
“Eve. Eve. It’s your ’link.” Roarke curled his fingers over her wrists, gently tugged her hands down. “It’s your ’link.”
“Jesus. Wait.” She shook her head, pulled herself into the now. “Block video,” she ordered, then answered. “Dallas.”
Dispatch, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve. Report to Union Square Park off Park Avenue. Body of unidentified female, evidence of torture.
Eve turned her head, met Roarke’s eyes. “Acknowledged. Notify Peabody, Detective Delia, request Medical Examiner Morris. As per procedure on this matter, relay notification to Commander Whitney and Dr. Mira. I’m on my way. Dallas out.”
“I’ll be going with you. I know,” Roarke said as he rose, “you don’t make prime bait with me along, but that’ll be Gia Rossi left on the ground. And I’m going with you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Ah, Eve.” His tone changed, softened. “So am I.”
18
AS EVE HAD SEEN THEIR HOME IN ITS SNOWY landscape as a painting, Roarke saw the crime scene as a play. A dark play with constant movement and great noise, all centered around the single focal character.
The white sheet on the white snow, the white body laid over it, with deep brown hair shining in the hard lights. He thought the wounds stood out against the pale flesh like screams.
And there his wife stood in her long black coat, gloveless, of course. They’d both forgotten her gloves this time around. Hatless and hard-eyed. The stage manager, he thought, and a major player as well. Director and author of this final act.
There would be pity in her, this he knew, and there would be anger, a ribbon of guilt to tie them all together. But that complicated emotional package was tucked deep inside, walled in behind that cool, calculating mind.
He watched her speak to the sweepers, to the uniforms, to the others who walked on and off that winter stage. Then Peabody, the dependable, in her turtle-shell of a coat and colorful scarf, crossed the stage on cue. Together, she and Eve lowered to that lifeless focal point that held the dispassionate spotlight of center stage.
“Not close enough,” McNab said from beside him.
Roarke shifted
his attention, very briefly, from the scene to McNab. “What?”
“Just couldn’t get close enough.” McNab’s hands were deep in two of the many pockets of his bright green coat, with the long tails of a boldly striped scarf fluttering down his back. “Moving in on a dozen roads from a dozen damn directions. Moving in, you can feel we’re getting closer. But not close enough to help Gia Rossi. It’s hard. This one hits hard.”
“It does.”
Had he really believed, Roarke wondered, a lifetime ago, had he honestly assumed that the nature of the cop was to feel nothing? He’d learned different since Eve. He’d learned very different. And now, he stood silent, listening to the lines as the players played their parts.
“TOD oh-one-thirty. Early Monday morning,” Peabody said. “She’s been dead a little over twenty-six hours.”
“He kept her for a day.” Eve studied the carving in the torso. Thirty-nine hours, eight minutes, forty-five seconds. “Kept her a day after he was finished. She didn’t last for him. The wounds are less severe, less plentiful than on York. Something went wrong for him this time. He wasn’t able to sustain the work.”
Less severe, yes, Peabody could see that was true. And still the cuts, the burns and bruising spoke of terrible suffering. “Maybe he got impatient this time. Maybe he needed to go for the kill.”
“I don’t think so.” With her sealed fingers, Eve picked up the victim’s arm, turned it to study the ligature marks from the binding. Then turned it back to examine more closely the killing wounds on the wrist. “She didn’t fight like York, not as much damage from the ropes, wrists and ankles. And the killing strokes here? Just as clean and precise as all the others. He’s still in control. And he still wants them to last.”
She laid the arm down again, on the white, white sheet. “It’s a matter of pride in his skill—torture, create the pain, but keep them alive. Increasing the level of pain, fear, injury, all while keeping them breathing. But Rossi, she wound down on him ahead of his schedule, ahead of his goal.”