44 Delusion in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “God has nothing to do with it. Man created torture.”

  “Yeah, we’re good with inventing ways to screw each other up. If the kid had family, they threatened to kill his mother or father if he didn’t cooperate. Or they’d say his family was already dead. Or tell him, again and again, his family didn’t care about him, no one was coming for him.”

  “Methods used throughout history to demoralize and break POWs, and to turn them when possible into assets.”

  “It’s worse than what happened to me.”

  She wanted to pace, to steam off the angry energy. Because she needed all the energy she could get, from whatever source, she continued to stand, rocking on her heels.

  “These kids lost families who loved them, or were taken from them, then systematically tortured and brainwashed. The older ones, the stronger ones were used as labor—and if a girl was old enough, they forced her to have sex with one of the boys. They had freaking ceremonies, Roarke, and watched. Like a celebration.”

  “Sit down, Eve.”

  “No, I’m okay. Working through being pissed. It’s harder to work clean pissed off. I’ve got records of over thirty live births through abducted kids. The youngest on record was twelve. Twelve, for God’s sake. They took the babies from the girls. Impregnated them again when possible. I have one who was fifteen when recovered. She’d had three babies. She self-terminated six months after recovery. She’s not the only. Self-termination rates among the abductees is estimated at fifteen percent, before the age of eighteen.”

  She took a long breath. “Most of the data on pregnancies and suicides came from Callendar and Teasdale. Nadine didn’t dig it up, because it’s classified. I’m not sure Summerset’s sources knew all of it or told him.”

  “No, he’d have told us if he knew.”

  “Why isn’t this public knowledge? Why wasn’t it screamed from fucking rooftops?”

  Difficult for anyone to think of children being tortured and raped, he thought. But when you’ve been a child who’d been tortured and raped, it hit harder, and it hit closer.

  “I think a combination of factors.” He rose to go to her, ran his hands up and down her arms to soothe them both. “The massive confusion during that era, the desperation of governments to cover up some of the worst. And the needs of the victims, their families, to put it all behind them.”

  “It’s never behind you. It’s always in front of you.”

  “Would you consider going public with what happened to you?”

  “It’s my personal business. It’s not …” She breathed again. “Okay, I get that. Or at least some of it. But burying it—not just here, but in Europe, everywhere it happened. That took work and purpose and a hell of a lot of money.”

  “The authorities didn’t, or couldn’t, protect the most vulnerable, and from a radical cult, one that wasn’t well funded or organized. Such things are worth the work and money to many.”

  “HSO was practically running things, at least in the States back then.”

  “And the power may have slipped away during the post-war rebuild if this had been public knowledge. I don’t know, Eve.”

  “They’re giving me the data now, or some of it.”

  “It appears Teasdale’s superior genuinely intends to run a clean house, or as clean as such houses can be.”

  “Then he’s got a lot of dirt to sweep.” Not her job, she reminded herself. “I need to get back to it.”

  “Why don’t we take a look at some of Callaway’s background first?”

  “You’re not finished.”

  “Enough to start.”

  “I can’t let this get personal. And I can’t stop it from being personal.”

  “If you could stop it, you wouldn’t be the woman or the cop you are.”

  “I hope that’s true.”

  “I know it is. Here, let’s have some of this.” He put his arms around her. “For both of us.”

  She held on. He’d given her someone to hold on to. A gift she never wanted to take for granted. She thought she’d known what darkness was, and despair and terror. Now she knew there were people who lived and worked and slept and ate who’d known far, far worse.

  She hoped they had someone to hold on to.

  “Okay.” She drew back, laid her hands on his face briefly. “Callaway.”

  “You know the basics. Born in a small town in Pennsylvania. His father did three years military service, as a medic.” They walked back to Eve’s office as he spoke. “He worked as a physician assistant after his enlistment was up. After he married, had the son, they moved six times in as many years.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Mother—professional mother status. They live in rural Arkansas now. They farm. Callaway was homeschooled until the age of fourteen. They moved twice more during his teenage years. He attended three different high schools. His record is slightly above average, no particular disciplinary trouble—on record.”

  “Which means?”

  “I found some reports. There was concern, initially, about antisocial behavior. Not a troublemaker, but not one to join in, not one to form friendships. He did what he was told, no more. He was encouraged to participate in extracurricular activities, and finally settled on tennis.”

  “No team sports.”

  “Again, he was slightly better than average, but it’s noted he had a fierce sense of competition, and had to be reminded, regularly, about good sportsmanship. No fights, no violence.”

  “That fits, too.”

  “He attended a local college for two years, then managed to get into NYU, by the skin of his teeth. He studied marketing and business. He showed aptitude there, for ideas and big pictures. He didn’t do as well at presentations or again, team projects. Not initially. He improved, and eventually joined Stevenson and Reede. His reviews give him solid ratings on work ethic, ideas, and less stellar marks on social skills, presentations, client relations. He’s moved up, based on his work, and it’s been a slower climb than it might have been as he has no real skill in articulating the product to clients or, basically, showing them a good time.

  “Just as a contrast,” Roarke continued, “Joseph Cattery’s reviews praise his client skills, and his ability to team think. While Vann may have the corner office, Cattery recently received a hefty bonus and was in line for a promotion and pay hike. The bonus was due to his work on a project he shared with Callaway. Callaway’s bonus for the project was considerably smaller.”

  “Smells like motive for Cattery. But not for a bar full of people.” She paced around her board. “It’s not some twisted religion with him. It’s not about Revelation and using kids. But there’s still some elements of Red Horse. The use of women to do the dirty work, the utter disregard for innocents, and the use of the substance to mass murder. He cherry-picks. And it’s still not enough.”

  “One interesting point. It’s been his habit, since college, to travel to see his parents once a year.”

  “That would be duty, not affection. Right?”

  “I’d say so. However, this year he’s traveled to Arkansas four times. Neither of his parents have anything on their medical to indicate an illness or condition. No particular change in their financials.”

  “He’s going back for something.” Eve shoved at her hair. “Something he needs, wants, something he found, something he’s looking for. I need more on the parents.”

  “I’ve done the father. He was nearly forty when he married Callaway’s mother. She was twenty-two.”

  “Big age gap. Could be interesting.”

  “He was doing some private nursing at that time, and came in to help her care for her father. The father had fought in the Urbans, had been wounded, and was suffering from complications of those wounds as well as depression. His wife was killed in a vehicular accident about six months before Russell Callaway met the then Audrey Hubbard. They married a few weeks after the father’s death.”

  Eve went to her computer to check. “I don’t hav
e a Hubbard on my list of kids—recovered or not.”

  “I’ve just started on the mother. I’ll be able to give you more shortly.”

  “What about the father’s war record?”

  “He retired an army captain. He saw considerable combat, but there’s no record of him being involved in any of the Red Horse operations. I don’t know if there would be.”

  “The mother’s mother.”

  “Barely started there. Give me some time. I’m picking through decades here, and all matter of records.”

  “And I’m holding you up. It’s good data. It fills in some blanks. Callaway’s an insular man, a loner by nature. Competitive. His mother married a much older man at a difficult point in her life and chose professional mother status, homeschooled her son. Kept him close. Lots of moving, no real chance to form outside bonds. Father’s likely the dominant. Changing jobs, uprooting the family when it suits him. Maternal grandparents dead, and he hasn’t maintained close ties with his parents as an adult. But now he goes to them several times in a few months. It’s good data to chew on. Get me more.”

  “I live to serve, Lieutenant.”

  She went back to it and sent Roarke’s data to Mira with a request for an eval asap. She moved through more names, let her mind circle.

  On impulse she called up Callaway’s parents’ ID photos, studied them. And began the slow, painstaking process of pulling up abductee photos, aging them.

  She got more coffee, considered, then rejected, a booster when the caffeine didn’t eliminate the growing fatigue.

  Then …

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Eve.”

  “Wait. Wait. I think I’ve got something.”

  “So do I.”

  “Look at this. Give me your take.”

  He came around to study the screen and the images on it. The first he recognized now as Callaway’s mother; split-screened beside it was a computer-generated image.

  “They appear to be the same woman, or very close. Different hair color and style, but the face is the same.”

  “The aged image is of Karleen MacMillon, an abductee at the age of eighteen months. Never recovered. But she was recovered and raised by the Hubbards as Audrey, because there she fucking is.”

  “The record of Audrey Hubbard’s live birth is fake. It’s a good one, but it’s fake.”

  “Because she wasn’t born to the Hubbards. She was one of the taken. But never listed as recovered.”

  “Hubbard retired from the army and moved from England to the U.S. with his wife and four-year-old daughter. His wife had a half-sister. Gina MacMillon. I’m still digging there.”

  “Gina and William MacMillon, listed as Karleen’s parents, both killed in the raid where the kid was abducted. It’s the link. It links him to Menzini and Red Horse. Not enough for an arrest, but enough to put a tail on him.”

  She walked to the board. “He found out his mother was an abductee, and it set something off. But how did a four-year-old kid get the formula, or have knowledge? Maybe Hubbard was in on the raid that took Menzini down, or in on interrogations. They have something—or had it—and Callaway kept going back to find it, to find everything he could, or interrogate his mother. I need to talk to her.”

  “Are we going to Arkansas?”

  “No, my turf. Teasdale’s got the HSO muscles to get the mother here. She told Callaway what she knows. Now she’s going to tell us.”

  “You need to sleep. I’ll put the run on the half-sister on auto. We’ll both catch a few hours. You’ve done what you set out to do tonight,” he told her when she hesitated. “You’ll want to gear up for tomorrow.”

  “You’re not wrong. I want to get this data to Whitney, get a couple men on Callaway tonight. I don’t want him hitting some twenty-four/seven while I’m sleeping.”

  “Fair enough. Get it done, and I’ll put what I have together for your briefing tomorrow. Then we’ll go to bed.”

  “That’s a deal.”

  14

  In the dream she knew for a dream, the world exploded. Fire plumes of murderous reds, virulent orange, greasy black lit the night sky to the east as blasts shook the ground and punched like fists through the smoke-stung air.

  She heard the boom of explosives, the crack, crack, crack of what she recognized as gunfire. There’d been a time, too long a time, she thought, when people had lived and died by guns.

  Now they found other ways to kill. But she wasn’t in the now.

  The canyons and towers of New York thundered with the sounds of war. The Urbans.

  A dream, she thought, just a dream. Still, she made her way carefully, weapon drawn, down the deserted street. Maybe dreams couldn’t kill, but they could damn sure hurt. She’d woken far too often with phantom pain screaming to travel unarmed, even in her own subconscious.

  But sometimes dreams showed you what you needed to know and didn’t recognize in the busy business of the day.

  So she’d look, she’d listen.

  She stopped by a body sprawled over the sidewalk, crouched to check for a pulse. And found the bloody slice across his throat. Barely more than a boy, she judged. They’d taken his shoes, and likely his jacket if he’d had one—and not long before as his body still held some warmth.

  She left him where he was—no choice, just a dream. But checked her weapon. And saw it wasn’t her police issue but a .38 automatic. She recognized the style from Roarke’s gun collection, checked to make certain it was loaded, tested the weight.

  Moved on.

  She passed windows and doors, dark and boarded, burned out husks of cars her subconscious must have fashioned out of memories of vids from the period.

  Chained fences barred the entrance to a subway station. Uptown train, she noted and skirted its black maw carefully. Streetlights—those that weren’t broken stood dark. Traffic lights blinked red, red, red, and made her think of the room in Dallas where she’d killed Richard Troy.

  It’s not about that, she reminded herself. It wasn’t about the child she’d been, but who she was now. What she did now.

  She came to a street sign, Leonard and Worth, and realized she wasn’t far from the first crime scene.

  Maybe the answer lurked there.

  She started to cross, heard the gunfire—closer now—the screams. She changed directions, ran toward the sounds.

  She saw the truck—military, armored, and the man at the machine gun on the roof. She heard more gunfire from inside the building the truck guarded, and the cries and screams. Children, she realized. They’d come for the children.

  She didn’t hesitate, but took her stance, took aim at the man on the truck. He’d be wearing body armor, she calculated, and aimed higher. Took the head shot.

  As he fell she raced forward, ducked into shadows as two men and two women dragged out struggling, screaming children. She sucked in her breath, held it. Fired.

  She took both men out, credited either the target shooting she did with Roarke or the luck of dreams. The women fled, one with a wailing baby in her arms.

  No, Eve thought, not even one, not even in dreams. She ran in pursuit, barely pausing at the huddle of terrified children.

  “Get back inside, block the door. Wait for me.”

  And ran on.

  The women split up, so she ran after the one with the baby.

  “NYPSD! Halt! Halt, goddamn it or I’ll shoot you in the fucking back. I swear to Christ.”

  The woman stopped, turned slowly. “That would be just like you.”

  She stared into her mother’s face, watched the blood run in thin rivers from the gaping wound across her throat.

  “You’re already dead.”

  “I just look that way. How many times do you have to kill me before you’re happy?”

  “McQueen killed you. I’d’ve put you in a cage, but you’d still be breathing.”

  “I’d be alive if you’d minded your own.”

  She had been minding her own, Eve realized. But why explain?
Even in dreams Stella would never comprehend.

  “That’s an old tune, Stella. I’m bored with it. Put the kid down.”

  “Why should I? You know what this little bitch is worth to the right people? I’ve got to get by, don’t I? You don’t know what it’s like now, here. It’s hell here. I lived through it. What do you think made me what I am?”

  “I lived through it.” Mira stood beside Eve, spoke quietly. “So many of us did. She made her choices, Eve, just as I did, just as you did. You know that. Nothing made her. She made herself.”

  “What the hell does she know? Fucking shrink with her fancy clothes, fancy ways. She just wants to fuck you over, like everyone else. I’m the one who carried you inside me. I made you.”

  Mira barely spared Stella a glance. “You know the truth, and you know the lie. You always have. Say it to me, say the truth.”

  “I made myself.”

  “Yes. Yes, you made yourself, and did it despite her. She never controlled you, not where it matters. Why do you let her control you now, even here?”

  “I can’t. It has to stop.”

  “Make it stop,” Mira urged her. “Make it end. Make a choice.”

  “Put the kid down, Stella, and walk away. Stay away.”

  “You can’t stop me. Put a bullet in me, go ahead. I’ll just come back. And maybe I’ll snap her neck first. It’s easy, all those soft bones. I thought about snapping yours. Whining, crying brat, just like this one.”

  “You left me with him instead, so he could beat me, rape me, torment me. But I got through it.”

  “By killing. The blood’s still on your hands. Richie’s blood. My blood.”

  “I can live with it.” That was the answer, wasn’t it? She could live with it. “Put her down.”

  “What do you care?” Stella closed a hand over the soft, tiny neck.

  Eve started forward, to end it, and the baby cried out.

  “Das!”

  Bella. Mavis’s Bella, with tears streaming, her arms held out.

  On a hot spurt of fury, Eve pressed the barrel of the gun to Stella’s forehead. “Let her go, you bitch, or I’ll splatter your brains on the sidewalk.”