Thankless in Death

by J. D. Robb

  Those dark eyes went huge. “No, ma’am! Sir! Lieutenant! My mama would skin my butt.”

  “Make the contact. And thank you for coming in.”

  “Detective Peabody gave me this voucher. I didn’t know you got paid to report. I didn’t come in for the money, but we can use it. And I can sure use a chance for the work.” She got to her feet, held out a hand to shake. “Thank you for the chance. Mama says doing the right thing’s its own reward, but she’ll sure be happy I got this. We’ll be saying a special thank-you before Thanksgiving dinner. Thank you, both of you. I’m going straight home to tell her.”

  “That was a nice thing to do,” Peabody commented when Juana hurried out.

  “This could be a solid break, and she gave it to us.” She shifted to block Baxter before he could pass. “Where are you going?”

  Wiggling his eyebrows, he smoothed the knot of his tie. “I’m off shift and onto a hot date.”

  “You’re back on, and your hot date will have to cool down some.”

  “Man.” He cast his eyes to the ceiling. “I was this close.”

  “Peabody, split the list of potential targets up geographically.”

  “Is this the Reinhold murders, Lieutenant?” Trueheart, looking eager, stepped beside Baxter.

  “That’s right. We’ve got a list of people who’ve pissed Reinhold off in the past, and any one of them might be next. They’ve all been notified, offered protection.”

  “You want us to babysit?” Baxter asked.

  “No. His tally’s four, and all were killed in their own homes. I want face-to-face interviews, in those homes, and a full report on the locations, the accesses, the security, the basic rhythm of the households. Also take note of easily portable valuables, keen eye on electronics. If said potentials know of other potentials not currently on the list, I want to know. Show them all the morph. If they have cohabs or family members living with them, show them, talk to them. If he doesn’t already have his next kill picked, he’s picking one now.”

  “How long’s the list?” Baxter wondered.

  “Your date’s going to cool off some,” Eve repeated. “If you can’t heat her back up, it’s on you.”

  He flashed a grin. “Heating up’s my specialty.”

  “Give them above SoHo,” Eve decided. “You and I will take SoHo and down. You get a model, reputedly frosty, as a reward,” she told Baxter.

  “Hot dog.”

  “Got it, sending to your PPCs,” Peabody announced.

  “Full reports,” Eve repeated before turning back to Peabody. “Split up ours. I want to talk to Morris before I work the list. You can take a uniform if you want any help.”

  “I’ve got it. Sending your share.”

  “Saddle up then. I’m checking in with EDD, then heading out. Anything pops, tag me.”

  Eve detoured into her office, grabbed her coat, a file bag, and avoiding even the thought of the elevator took the glides to EDD.

  Apparently half of Central had the same idea.

  Even braced for the blast of color and movement that was EDD, it rocked her senses before she made it to Feeney’s sane office.

  “I’m heading into the field, wanted to touch base first.”

  “Juggled you in.”

  Since it looked as if he had at least six programs going on his screens, she assumed he was doing considerable juggling.

  “You said this asshole flunked Comp Science?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he learned enough to keep her making the transfers without an easy trail. We’re bouncing, vanishing, popping, then sinking. I’m saying offshore and off-planet, at least for the bulk, but we’re not there yet. I’m saying, too, he’ll go numbered and/or sheltered. We’re going to find the money, sooner or later, but we may not get an ID out of it any time this decade.”

  He sent her a look out of basset hound eyes. “Not shooting straight anyway.”

  She jammed her hands in her pockets. “I don’t want to give him so much as a rat hole for his lawyers to shove him through once we’ve got his sorry ass.”

  “Some are good enough shooting angles not to make a rat hole. Not that I’m saying that’s the way.” He lifted his shoulders. “Roarke’s heading in.”

  And he knew every angle. Had probably invented some. “He likes to play with his nerds.”

  Feeney only smiled. “We can use him. I’m going to move into the lab once McNab gets back with the comps. I can run some of this on auto, for now. We may have quicker luck with the equipment.”

  “Let me know when … That was quick,” she said when Roarke strolled in.

  “Some luck with traffic.” His elegant dark suit and topcoat stood in contrast to the frenzy of color through the doorway behind him. He glanced at the screens, a quick scan with those wild blue eyes. “Ah, multishifts, cross-funnels, lateral dips.”

  “Yeah,” Feeney confirmed. “And then some.”

  “Won’t this be fun?”

  “Have at it. I’m hitting the morgue, then I have some interviews with potential targets.”

  And where, Roarke wondered, would any sort of food be in the mix? She looked, to his eye, tight and tired. “I’ll go with you.”

  She frowned at him. “What about the fun?”

  “I’ll work by remote, and have the best of both. You can send what you’d like me to do to my PPC,” Roarke said to Feeney.

  “Can do. If you hang until McNab gets back—”

  “He’s back,” Roarke interrupted. “I ran into him briefly. He was logging in evidence then bringing it up to the lab.”

  “We’ll log out one of the comps. See what you can do with it.”

  “Delighted. Should I meet you in the garage?” he asked Eve.

  “I can wait.” She stepped to the side, pulled out her ’link, and took the time to notify those on her list to expect a visit.

  She finished up with the last one walking with Roarke as he carried a sealed comp to the garage.

  “You’re supposed to have a minion haul stuff when you dress like that.”

  “Am I now? Are you volunteering?”

  She ignored that, keyed in her code to unlock the car doors. “How are you supposed to work on that while we’re driving all over lower Manhattan?”

  “Easily enough as you’ll be behind the wheel.”

  He unsealed the comp then took some sort of minidrive out of his pocket, attached it to one port, attached his PPC to another. Glanced at her as she pulled out of the garage and into perfectly miserable traffic.

  “You’re tired,” he said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You are, and you show it very likely because you haven’t had any real food since breakfast.”

  “I had a cookie. And I have a little box of them—which, damn it, I left in my office. Say good-bye to those.”

  “Real food,” he repeated.

  Had she? She couldn’t remember. “I’ll eat when we get home. Mommy.”

  He drilled a finger into her side in retaliation, then tapped and swiped on the in-dash ’link. “AC mode,” he commanded, “twelve-ounce protein shake, chocolate.”

  Received … Selecting …

  “AC mode? What AC mode?”

  “The one programmed into the system because my wife starves herself most days.”

  Delivering …

  He had to take off his seat belt, shift, reach through the seats to the back. She heard the quiet slide, little click, and frowned into the rear-view, but couldn’t quite get the angle.

  “Where is it? How is it?”

  “It’s in the backseat console. Just a mini,” he said as he handed her the shake. “It’ll only hold a few basics. A couple of shakes, coffee—”

  “Coffee?”

  He gave her a long look, dry as dust. “It must be love.”

  “Coffee,” she said again.

  “A few protein bars as well. You told me you’d read the manual.”

  “I did. Most of it. Some of it. A lit
tle of it,” she admitted. And because it must have been love, drank the shake. It didn’t suck.

  “Why aren’t you tired? Why don’t you have to have a protein shake?”

  “Because I had a decent lunch and a little tea with biscuits a couple hours ago.”

  “I was chasing a killer a couple hours ago.”

  “Maybe if you’d eaten something you’d have caught him.”

  “Would not. Lucky bastard. Who gets in and out of a health clinic inside thirty minutes? Nobody. But he does. It’s been breaking his way, but with this”—she jerked her chin toward the comp—“maybe it’ll start breaking mine.”

  She pulled up at the morgue.

  “If you don’t need me to come in, I’ll start working on that break.”

  “Yeah.” She started to get out, hesitated, then put her seat back. Reaching under, she tugged, then pulled out a candy bar with sticky tape crossed over the wrapper.

  “Clever girl.”

  “That damn candy thief can’t get into a shielded vehicle, so I keep emergency candy.” She broke it in half, handed him a share. “It is love,” she confirmed, then climbed out.

  Amused, and since he knew her feelings about candy, touched, he unwrapped it while he began the work.

  Interesting, he thought after his initial scan. And challenging, he added after a second, deeper one.

  He lost track of time with that interest and challenge, pausing only to make or take ’link tags if they were relevant or important enough.

  He came out of his work zone when Eve opened the car door again.

  She sat, put her head back, shut her eyes.

  So he set the work aside altogether, laid a hand over hers, said nothing.

  “Morris figures he had her for about eighteen hours. Taped and tied to a chair in her home office. He’d bashed her good, back of the head first. A bat again. She had a mild concussion, probably a blinding headache. She was severely dehydrated so it’s unlikely he gave her any food or water. Several blows to the face—hand, fist. Some of the blood and urine in her lap was canine. She had a little dog. He’d busted it up some, it’s at the vet. She’d torn her wrists, back of her hands, her ankles.”

  Ah, God, he thought, but said nothing.

  “She tore the skin off trying to get the tape loose. Dislocated shoulder. We think she did that right before or when he was killing her, smothering her with a plastic bag over her head. We think she managed to tip the chair over so it fell on his foot. He has a couple of broken toes and a hairline fracture in his foot. I think she did that. She didn’t let him stroll away. She made him pay a little. At least a little.”

  “Who was she?” Roarke asked quietly.

  “A good teacher, a good neighbor. A woman who loved her damn dog. I think he used that. Everyone said she loved the dog, the dog was her family. I don’t see her just doing whatever he wanted, but if he threatened to hurt what she loved, threatened her family, she probably would. At least try to stall him. And then hurt him when she knew she wouldn’t live through it.”

  “You’ll find him.”

  She glanced at the comp. “Will I?”

  “You will, yes. This part may not be quick, but it’ll be done. This unit wasn’t wiped by an amateur. It’s thorough and professional.”

  “He must’ve forced her to do it.”

  “When did she die? The time, I mean.”

  “Right about sixteen hundred.”

  “Then no. It was done shortly after.”

  “No way he could do it if you say it’s thorough and professional. He doesn’t have the chops. It’s … the droid,” she realized. “She had a droid, and she would’ve programmed it herself. He had the droid wipe the comps. There’s nothing there?”

  “There’s always something. It’s the bringing it back, the finding it that’s the trick. I’ll do better with this in my own lab. I’ll work the financial data Feeney’s sent me until we get home.”

  She nodded, straightened, then called up the list Peabody had sent her, and followed the computer’s suggestion for route.

  She was tired, Eve realized when she came to the last address. At this point she just wanted home, just to get inside her own space, work this thing through.

  “I’ll go in with you this time,” Roarke said. “I’ve done most of what I can this way.”

  “Okay. This is Reinhold’s former Little League coach. He benched Reinhold for not listening, so Reinhold basically picked up his bat and went home.”

  “And you think he’d kill this man for something that happened when he was a child?”

  “I know he would,” Eve corrected. She lifted her badge to the security scanner of the squat, six-unit building. Waited for verification and clearance.

  “They’re on two,” she told Roarke when they went inside. “Wayne Boyd, his wife Marianna. Two offspring, one in grad school, one in college.”

  She chose the whistle-clean stairway, then knocked on 2-B, held her badge up to the security peep.

  “Lieutenant Dallas?” came through the speaker.

  “That’s right. I spoke with you earlier.”

  “There’s someone with you?”

  “My civilian consultant.”

  It took another moment, but locks cleared, the door opened. Boyd stood cautiously studying both her and Roarke, a fit man in his late fifties who’d let a little gray sprinkle through his deep brown hair. He had a strong face, clear blue eyes, and beside him stood a burly, ugly dog whose study was anything but cautious.

  “All right, Bruno, rest.”

  The dog immediately leaned against Boyd’s side, and his tongue rolled out in a strange and goofy grin.

  “We’re a little edgy since we heard about Ms. Farnsworth.”

  “Understood. Can we come in?”

  “Yeah, sorry. It’s okay, Marianna! It’s the police. I told her to go upstairs, in case. Our kids are here, for the holiday.”

  He closed the door, stepped back into a large, high-ceilinged living space ringed by a railing along the second level.

  The dog padded over to a square of dog-haired red rug and immediately began gnawing on some sort of bone.

  Three people appeared on the second level—a slim blonde, a broad-shouldered man, early twenties, and a willow-slim brunette, a couple years younger than the man.

  “They’re old enough to argue,” the blonde told Boyd, “and I’m outnumbered.”

  “We’re all in this, Dad.” The young man led the way down.

  “Okay. Okay, Flynn, you’re right. We’re all in it.”

  “I should make coffee. Can I get you coffee?” Marianna asked.

  Eve decided she could kill for coffee, even fake coffee. “That’d be great. Mr. Boyd, is there anyone else staying here at this time?”

  “No, just us. Flynn and Sari will be here until Sunday when they go back to campus. We all have until Monday before routine starts again.”

  “You’ve seen the morph of Reinhold. All of you?”

  “Yes. None of us have seen him.”

  “I hope I do,” Flynn muttered.

  “Stop.” Boyd leveled a warning glare. “Flynn had Ms. Farnsworth in high school. We’re all shaken by what happened to her. Lieutenant, I benched the kid for a few games more than a decade ago. Maybe fifteen years ago. Not that he learned anything from it. When he didn’t listen at his at-bat, championship game and struck out, I didn’t come down on him. It’s Little League. They’re kids. You don’t dump on them.”

  “He was a little bastard then, now he’s a bigger one.”

  “Flynn,” his mother said wearily as she brought out coffee.

  “It’s true.” Sari spoke up. “Maybe I didn’t really know him, but I remember he was mean and spiteful. And maybe I didn’t have Ms. Farnsworth, but I have friends who did, and they liked her.”

  “I’m not making excuses for him. He’s sick,” Boyd continued. “And he needs to be caught, stopped. We’re going to be careful, just the way we talked about, but he’s got no
reason to want to hurt any of us. He probably doesn’t even remember me.”

  “Believe me when I say he does,” Eve corrected. “Believe me when I say he’s vindictive and he’s violent, and he’s looking to pay back every perceived slight. You’re one of them, Mr. Boyd. He used a baseball bat on three of his victims.”

  “Oh my God, Wayne.”

  Eve waited while Boyd took his wife’s hand, tried to keep her calm. The coffee, she decided, hit somewhere between the horrors of cop coffee and the joys of Roarke coffee. She couldn’t complain.

  “Listen, I haven’t seen or spoken or had any contact with Jerry since he was about eleven.”

  “Give me your assessment of him, at eleven. No filters, Mr. Boyd. Honest take, you worked with a lot of kids. You have a take.”

  “Okay.” He shoved a hand back through his hair. “Lazy, arrogant, sneaky. Not wild, not right-in-your-face, but he had an edge, and under the edge, he— God, he was a kid.”

  “Honest,” Eve repeated.

  “Soft. Look at him crosswise, he took offense. A backbiter. He was pretty good at the game, and he’d have gotten better with some discipline, some practice. He’d miss or come late for practice all the time, always had an excuse.”

  He still had his wife’s hand, and looked at her briefly before he turned his gaze back to Eve. “I didn’t like him, that’s honest. I was glad when he quit, and I felt bad about it. But he was a problem, and I wasn’t sorry to lose him.”

  Eve nodded, glanced at Flynn. “He was a little bastard, now he’s a bigger one. And he’s a killer. You’ve got a good place here, pretty good security, but it wouldn’t take much to get past it. Not with some planning, and he’s learning how to plan. He slips in behind somebody, poses as maintenance, delivery. You’ve got a nice family, Mr. Boyd.”

  “All right. All right. We’ll take protection.”

  “That’s good. When any of you go out, don’t go alone. If you see him—and this goes for you, Flynn—don’t engage, get to a safe place, back home or a public place, and contact the police.”

  “For how long?” Boyd asked.

  “I wish I could tell you. Finding him, stopping him, is my priority.”