by J. D. Robb
“Then get on with it.”
“Take me back, C. J. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“Fine.” He drank again, as if his throat was parched. “I was coming into the station. I had the coanchor on the midnight report.”
“What time did you arrive?”
“About quarter after eleven. I went to the east side entrance, most of us use that end because it’s more direct to the newsroom. It was raining, so I made a quick dash from the car. I saw something at the base of the steps. I couldn’t tell what it was, at first.”
He stopped speaking, covered his face with his hands, and rubbed hard. “I couldn’t tell,” he continued, “until I was practically on top of her. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, really. Somebody took a hell of a spill.”
“You didn’t recognize the victim?”
“The—the hood.” he gestured vaguely, helplessly with his hands. “It was over her face. I reached down, and I started to move it away from her face.” He gave one violent shudder. “Then I saw the blood—her throat. The blood,” he repeated, and covered his eyes.
“Did you touch the body?”
“No, I don’t think—no. She was just lying there, and her throat was wide open. Her eyes. No, I didn’t touch her.” He dropped his hand again, made what appeared to be a herculean effort for control. “I got sick. You probably don’t understand that, Dallas. Some people have basic human reactions. All that blood, her eyes. God. I got sick, and I got scared and I ran inside. The guard on the desk. I told him.”
“You knew the victim?”
“Sure, I knew her. Louise had edited a few pieces for me. Mostly she worked with Nadine, but she did some pieces for me and for some others. She was good, real good. Quick, a sharp eye. One of the best. Christ.” He reached for the pitcher on the table. Water sloshed as he poured it. “There was no reason to kill her. No reason at all.”
“Was it her habit to go out that exit at that time?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think—she should have been in Editing,” he said fiercely.
“Were you close, personally?”
His head came up, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re trying to pin this on me, aren’t you? You’d really like that.”
“Just answer the questions, C. J. Were you involved with her?”
“She had a relationship, talked about some guy named Bongo. We worked together, Dallas. That’s all.”
“You arrived at Channel 75 at eleven fifteen. Before that?”
“Before that I was at home. When I have the midnight shift, I catch a couple hours’ sleep. I didn’t have a feature running, so I didn’t have much prep. It was supposed to be just a read, a recap of the day. I had dinner with some friends about seven, headed home around eight, and took a nap.”
He propped his elbows on the table and lowered his head into his hands. “I had my wake-up at ten, then headed out just before eleven. Gave myself a little extra travel time because of the weather. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
If Eve hadn’t watched him report on camera minutes after his discovery of the body, she might have felt sorry for him. “Did you see anyone at or near the scene?”
“Just Louise. There’s not a lot of people going in and out that time of night. I didn’t see anybody. Just Louise. Just Louise.”
“Okay, C. J., that’s about it this time around.”
He set down the glass he’d guzzled from again. “I can go?”
“Keep in mind you’re a witness. If you’re holding back, or if you remember anything not revealed in this interview, I’ll charge you with withholding evidence and impeding an investigation.” She smiled pleasantly. “Oh, and give me the names of your friends, C. J. I didn’t think you had any.”
She let him go and brooded while she waited for Nadine to be brought in. The scenario was all too clear. And the guilt came with it. To keep both fresh, she flipped open the file and studied the hard copy photos of Louise Kirski’s body. She turned them facedown when the door opened.
Nadine didn’t look polished now. The professional gloss of the on-air personality had given way to a pale, shaken woman with swollen eyes and a trembling mouth. Saying nothing, Eve gestured to the chair and poured water in a fresh glass.
“You were quick,” she said coolly, “getting your report on the air.”
“That’s my job.” Nadine didn’t touch the glass, but gripped her hands in her lap. “You do yours, I do mine.”
“Right. Just serving the public, aren’t we?”
“I’m not very interested in what you think of me right now, Dallas.”
“Just as well, because I don’t think very much of you right now.” For the second time, she started the recorder, fed in the necessary information. “When did you last see Louise Kirski alive?”
“We were working in Editing, refining and timing a piece for the midnight spot. It didn’t take as much time as we’d scheduled to finish. Louise was good, really good.” Nadine drew a deep breath and continued to stare at a spot an inch above Eve’s left shoulder. “We talked for a few minutes. She and the man she’d been seeing for the last several months were looking for an apartment together. She was happy. Louise was a happy person, easy to get along with, bright.”
She had to stop again, had to. Her breath was backing up. Carefully, firmly, she ordered herself to inhale, exhale. Twice. “Anyway, she was out of cigarettes. She liked to catch a quick smoke between assignments. Everybody looked the other way, even though she’d sneak off into a closet somewhere and light up. I told her to pick me up a couple while she was at it, gave her some credits. We went down together, and I got off at the newsroom. I had some calls to make. Otherwise, I’d have gone with her. I’d have been with her.”
“Did you usually go out together before the broadcast?”
“No. Normally, I take a short break, head out, have a quiet cup of coffee in this little café on Third. I like to—get away from the station, especially before the midnight. We’ve got a restaurant, lounges, a coffee shop in house, but I like to break off and take ten on my own.”
“Habitually?”
“Yeah.” Nadine met Eve’s eyes, veered away. “Habitually. But I wanted to make those calls, and it was raining, so . . . so I didn’t go. I lent her my raincoat, and she went out.” Her eyes shifted back, straight to Eve’s. And were devastated. “She’s dead instead of me. You know that, and I know that. Don’t we, Dallas?”
“I recognized your coat,” Eve said briefly. “I thought it was you.”
“She didn’t do anything but run out for a few cigarettes. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong coat.”
Wrong bait, Eve thought, but didn’t say it. “Let’s take this a step at a time, Nadine. An editor has a certain amount of power, of control.”
“No.” Slowly, methodically, Nadine shook her head. The sickness in her stomach had snuck into her throat, and tasted foul. “It’s the story, Dallas, and the on-air personality. Nobody appreciates, or even thinks of an editor but the reporter. She wasn’t the target, Dallas. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
“What I think and what I know are handled in different ways, Nadine. But let’s go with what I think for now. I think you were the target, and I think the killer mistook Louise for you. You’ve got different builds, but it was raining, she was wearing your coat, had the hood on. There either wasn’t time, or there wasn’t a choice once the mistake was realized.”
“What?” Dazed at having it all said so flatly, Nadine struggled to focus. “What did you say?”
“It was over quickly. I’ve got the time she left from the security desk. She waved to the guard. We’ve got Morse stumbling over her ten minutes later. Either it was timed extremely well, or our killer was cocky. And you can bet your ass he wanted to see it on the news before she’d gotten cold.”
“We accommodated him, didn’t we?”
“Yeah.” Eve nodded. “You did.”
“You think it was easy for me?” Nadine’s voice, raspy and thick,
burst out. “You think it was easy to sit there and give a report knowing she was still lying outside?”
“I don’t know,” Eve said mildly. “Was it?”
“She was my friend.” Nadine began to weep, tears rushing out, pouring down her cheeks and leaving trails in her camera makeup. “I cared about her. Damn it, she mattered to me, not just a story. She isn’t just a fucking story.”
Struggling to carry her own guilt, Eve nudged the glass toward Nadine. “Drink,” she ordered. “Take a minute.”
Nadine had to use both hands to keep the glass even partially steady. She would, she realized, have preferred brandy, but that would have to wait. “I see this kind of thing all the time, not so different from you.”
“You saw the body,” Eve snapped. “You went out on the scene.”
“I had to see.” With eyes still swimming, she looked back at Eve. “That was personal, Dallas. I had to see. I didn’t want to believe it when word came up.”
“How did word come up?”
“Somebody heard Morse yelling to the guard that somebody was dead, that somebody had been murdered right outside. That drew a lot of attention,” she said, rubbing her temples. “Word travels. I hadn’t finished my second call before I caught the buzz. I hung up on my source and went down. And I saw her.” Her smile was grim and humorless. “I beat the cameras—and the cops.”
“And you and your pals risked contaminating a crime scene.” Eve swiped a hand through the air. “That’s done. Did anybody touch her? Did you see anybody touch her?”
“No, nobody was that stupid. It was obvious she was dead. You could see—you could see the wound, the blood. We sent for an ambulance anyway. The first police unit was there within minutes, ordered us back inside, sealed the door. I talked to somebody. Peabody.” She rubbed fingers over her temples. Not because they hurt; because they were numb. “I told her it was Louise, then I went up to prep for broadcast. And the whole time I was thinking, It was supposed to be me. I was alive, facing the camera, and she was dead. It was supposed to be me.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be anyone.”
“We killed her, Dallas.” Nadine’s voice was steady again. “You and me.”
“I guess we’ll have to live with that.” Eve drew a breath and leaned forward. “Let’s go over the timing again, Nadine. Step by step.”
chapter thirteen
Sometimes, Eve thought, the drudge of routine police work payed off. Like a slot machine, fed habitually, mindlessly, monotonously, so that you’re almost shocked when the jackpot falls in your lap.
That’s just the way it was when David Angelini fell into hers.
She’d had several questions on small details of the Kirski case. The timing was one of them.
Nadine skips her usual break, Kirksi goes out instead, passing the lobby desk at approximately 23:04. She steps out into the rain, and into a knife. Minutes later, running late, Morse arrives at the station lot, stumbles over the body, vomits, and runs inside to report a murder.
All of it, she mused, quick, fast, and in a hurry.
As a matter of course, she ran the discs from the security gate at Channel 75. It wasn’t possible to know if the killer had driven through them, parked a car on the station’s lot, strolled over to wait for Nadine, sliced Louise by mistake, then driven off again.
An assailant could just as easily have cut across the property from Third on foot, just as Louise had intended to do. Gate security was to make sure that there were parking facilities for station employees and that guests weren’t infringed upon by every frustrated driver looking for a place to stick his car or minishuttle off the street.
Eve reviewed the discs because it was a matter of routine, and because, she admitted to herself, she hoped Morse’s story wouldn’t gel. He’d have recognized Nadine’s raincoat, and he’d have known her habit of cutting out for some solo time before the midnight broadcast.
There was nothing she’d have enjoyed more, on a basic, even primal personal level, than nailing his skinny butt to the wall.
And that’s when she saw the sleek little two-passenger Italian model cruise like a shiny cat to the gate. She’d seen that car before, parked outside of the commander’s home after the memorial service.
“Stop,” she ordered, and the image on screen froze. “Enhance sector twenty-three through thirty, full screen.” The machine clicked, then clunked, wobbling the image. With an impatient snarl, Eve smacked the screen with the heel of her hand, jarring it back on course. “Goddamn budget cuts,” she muttered, and then her smile began, slow and savoring. “Well, well, Mr. Angelini.”
She took a deep breath as David’s face filled her screen. He looked impatient, she thought. Distracted. Nervous.
“What were you doing there?” she murmured, flicking her glance down to the digital time frozen at the bottom left corner. “At twenty-three oh two and five seconds?”
She leaned back in her chair, rifling through a drawer with one hand as she continued to study the screen. Absently, she bit into a candy bar that was going to pass for breakfast. She’d yet to go home.
“Hard copy,” she ordered. “Then go back to original view and hard copy.” She waited patiently while her machine wheezed its way through the process. “Continue disc run, normal speed.”
Nibbling on her breakfast, she watched the pricey sports car whiz past camera range. The image blinked. Channel 75 could afford the latest in motion-activated security cameras. Eleven minutes had passed on the counter when Morse’s car approached.
“Interesting,” she murmured. “Copy disc, transfer copy to file 47833-K, Kirski, Louise. Homicide. Cross reference to case file 47801-T, Towers, Cicely and 47815-M, Metcalf, Yvonne. Homicides.”
Turning from the screen, she engaged her ’link. “Feeney.”
“Dallas.” He stuffed the last of a danish into his mouth. “I’m working on it. Christ, it’s barely seven A.M.”
“I know what time it is. I’ve got a sensitive matter here, Feeney.”
“Hell.” His already rumpled face grew more wrinkles. “I hate when you say that.”
“I’ve got David Angelini on the gate security disc at Channel 75, coming in about ten minutes before Louise Kirski’s body was discovered.”
“Shit, shit, shit. Who’s going to tell the commander?”
“I am—after I’ve had a talk with Angelini. I need you to cover for me, Feeney. I’m going to transmit what I’ve got, excluding Angelini. You take it in to the commander. Tell him I’m hooking a couple hours of personal time.”
“Yeah, like he’ll buy that one.”
“Feeney, tell me I need some sleep. Tell me you’ll report to the commander, and to go home and catch a couple hours of sleep.”
Feeney heaved a long sigh. “Dallas, you need some sleep. I’ll report to the commander. Go home and catch a couple hours.”
“Now you can tell him you told me,” she said, and flicked off.
•••
Like routine police work, a cop’s gut often paid off. Eve’s told her that David Angelini would close himself in with family. Her first stop was the Angelini pied-` a-terre, cozied in an affluent East Side neighborhood.
Here the brownstones had been constructed barely thirty years before, reproductions of those designed during the nineteenth, and destroyed during the dawn of the twenty-first when most of New York’s infrastructure had failed. A large portion of New York’s posher homes in this area had been condemned and razed. After much debate, this area had been rebuilt in the old tradition—a tradition only the very wealthy had been able to afford.
After a ten-minute search, Eve managed to find a spot among the expensive European and American cars. Overhead, a trio of private minishuttles jockeyed for air space, circling as they looked for a clear landing.
Apparently, public transportation wasn’t high on the list in the neighborhood, and property was too dear to waste on garage facilities.
Still, New York was New York, and she locked th
e doors on her battered police issue before heading up the sidewalk. She watched a teenager skim by on an airboard. He took the opportunity to impress his small audience with a few complicated maneuvers, ending with a long, looping flip. Rather than disappoint him, Eve flashed him an appreciative grin.
“Nice moves.”
“I got the groove,” he claimed in a voice that was hovering between puberty and manhood with less security than he hovered over the sidewalk. “You board?”
“No. Too risky for me.” When she continued to walk, he circled around her, pivoting on the board with quick footwork.
“I could show you some of the easy scoots in five minutes.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. You know who lives there, in twenty-one?”
“Twenty-one? Sure, Mr. Angelini. You’re not one of his nibbles.”
She stopped. “I’m not?”
“Come on.” The boy cocked a grin, showing perfect teeth. “He goes for the dignified type. Older, too.” He did a quick vertical rock, side to side. “You don’t look like a domestic, either. Anyway, he mostly does the droid thing for that.”
“Does he have a lot of nibbles?”
“Only seen a few around here. Always come up in a private car. Sometimes they’ll stay till morning, but mostly not.”
“And how would you know?”
He grinned, unabashed. “I live right over there.” He pointed to a townhouse across the street. “I like to keep my eye on what’s doing.”
“Okay, why don’t you tell me if anybody came around last night?”
He swiveled his board, spun. “How come?”
“’Cause I’m a cop.”
His eyes widened as he studied her badge. “Wow. Decent. Hey, you think he popped his old lady? Gotta keep up with current events and shit for school.”
“This isn’t a quiz. Were you keeping your eye out last night? What’s your name?”
“It’s Barry. I was kind of hanging loose last night, watching some screen, listening to some tune. Supposed to be studying for this monster final in Comp Tech.”
“Why aren’t you in school today?”
“Hey, you’re not with the Truant Division?” His grin turned a little nervous. “It’s too early for class. Anyway, I got the three-day thing, E-school at home.”
