Big Jack

by J. D. Robb

  “He wouldn’t if she was with him.”

  “Point for that. But this girl, who makes her bed like a Youth Scout, doesn’t call in to work sick, doesn’t tell her sister she’s cozied down in a love nest, doesn’t want extra clothes or all the equipment females take on sex safaris. She risks her paycheck, ignores her family, stays in the same outfit? I don’t think so.”

  “You think she’s dead.”

  “I think she had the access code to Gannon’s place, and somebody wanted that code. I think if she was alive and well or able, she’d have seen or heard the media reports bombarding the screen about bestselling author Samantha Gannon’s recent problem and she’d have gotten to her sister if no one else.”

  “Three Jane Does last seventy-two,” Peabody reported. “Two elderly indigents, no official ID on record. Third’s a crispy critter, status pending.”

  “Where’d they find her?”

  “Abandoned lot,” Peabody read off her PPC. “Alphabet City. About three hundred Sunday morning. Somebody doused her with gasoline—Jesus, they had some credit to tap on—lit her up. By the time somebody called it in, she was toasted. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “Who’s primary?”

  “Hold on. Aha! It’s our good pal Baxter, ably assisted by the adorable Officer Trueheart.”

  “Simplifies. Tag him. See if they can meet us at the morgue.”

  Eve had to pace her cooling heels in the white-tiled corridor outside the exam room where Duluc completed an autopsy. Morris never made her jump through hoops, she thought. She wouldn’t be jumping through them now if Duluc hadn’t taken the precaution of locking the exam room doors.

  When the buzzer sounded, indicating she was cleared, Eve slammed the doors open, strode through. The stench under the smear of disinfectant made her eyes water, but she fought back the gag reflex and glowered at Duluc.

  Unlike Morris, who had both wit and style, Duluc was a stern-minded, by-the-book woman. She wore the clear protective suit over a spotless white lab coat and pale green scrubs. Her hair was completely hidden under a skull cap. Goggles hung around her neck.

  She was barely five feet in height, with a chunky build and a face of wide planes. Her skin was the color of roasted chestnuts, and her one good feature—in Eve’s opinion—was her hands. They looked as though they could play a mean piano, and were, in fact, greatly skilled at carving cadavers.

  Eve jerked her chin at the draped form on an exam table. “That one mine?”

  “If you mean is that the remains of the victim of your current investigation, yes, it is.”

  Duluc’s voice always sounded to Eve’s ear as if she had a bubble of thick liquid stuck in her throat. As she spoke she washed her hands in a sink. “I told you I’d send through my findings as soon as possible. I don’t like being hounded, Lieutenant.”

  “You get the tox screen?”

  Duluc stared at her. “Do you have a particular problem understanding me?”

  “No, I understand you just fine. You’re stringing me because you’re pissed I jumped on you this morning. You’re going to have to get over it because she doesn’t care we’re irritated with each other.” She moved toward Andrea. “She just wants us to deal, so we’re going to deal.”

  “Your on-scene was accurate, as far as cause of death. The single throat wound. A keen, smooth-edged blade. Stiletto perhaps. There are no defensive wounds, no other indications of violence. There was no sexual assault or recent sexual activity. Her blood-alcohol was a bit high. I’d estimate she had four vodka martinis with olives. No illegals on the tox. Her last meal was a salad, leafy greens with a lemon dressing, consumed approximately five hours premortem.”

  “Do you concur that the attacker was behind the victim?”

  “From the angle of the wound, yes. Given her height, I’d say he or she is about six feet tall. Average enough for a man, tall for a woman. All of which will be in my official report, delivered to you in the proper fashion. This is not a priority case, Lieutenant, and we are extremely busy.”

  “They’re all priorities. You’ve got a Jane Doe. Crispy critter, brought in from Alphabet City.”

  Duluc sighed heavily. “I have no burn victim on my schedule.”

  “It’s on someone’s. I need to see the body, and the data.”

  “Then give your case number to one of the attendants. I have other things to do.”

  “It’s not my case.”

  “Then you have no need to see the body or the data.”

  She started to walk by, but Eve grabbed her arm. “Maybe you don’t know how this works, Duluc, but I’m a lieutenant in Homicide and can damn well see any body that strikes my fancy. As it happens, Detective Baxter, who’s primary, is meeting me here as I believe our respective cases may converge. Just keep pissing on me and I promise you, you’ll end up drowning in it.”

  “I don’t like your attitude.”

  “Wow. Media alert. I need the Jane Doe.”

  Duluc wrenched away and stalked over to a workstation. She keyed in, brought up data. “The unidentified female burn victim is in Section C, room three, assigned to Foster. She hasn’t been examined yet. Backlog.”

  “You going to clear me?”

  “I’ve done so. Now if you’ll excuse me?”

  “No problem.” She swung back out the doors. How do all these people walk around with sticks up their asses? Eve wondered.

  She turned into Section C, gave the door of room three a push and found it secured. “Shit!” She whirled, pointed to an attendant who was sitting in one of the plastic chairs in the corridor, dozing. “You. I’m cleared for this room. Why’s it locked?”

  “Duluc. She locks every damn thing. Surprised the vendings aren’t wired with explosives.” He yawned and stretched. “Dallas, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Getcha in. I was just catching a break. Pulling a double today. Who you coming to see?”

  “Jane Doe.”

  “Little Jane. She’s mine.”

  “You Foster?”

  “Yeah. I just finished an unattended. Natural causes. Guy was a hundred and six, and his second ticker conked on him in his sleep. Good way to go if you gotta.”

  He unlocked the door, led them in. “This is not a good way,” he added, gesturing to the charred bones on a table. “I thought this was Bax’s case.”

  “It is. We may have a connected. He’s on his way in.”

  “Okay by me. I haven’t gotten to her yet.”

  He brought up the file, scanned it as he pulled out his protective gear. “Didn’t come in until Sunday, and I had the day off—fond, fond memory. You guys get Sundays off?”

  “Now and again.”

  “Something about sleeping in on a Sunday morning, or sleeping off Saturday night until Sunday afternoon. But Monday always comes.” He snapped on his cap. “Been backed up since I clocked in Monday morning. Got no flag on here from Bax saying she matches a missing persons. Still little Jane Doe,” he said and glanced back toward the body on the table. “No way to print her, obviously. We’ll send the dental off for a search.”

  “What do we know?”

  He called up more data on the screen. “Female between twenty-three and twenty-five. Five feet three inches tall, a hundred and twenty pounds. That’s approximate from the virtual reconstruct, which is as far as we’ve got. That’s just prelim check-in data.”

  “You got time to take a look at her now?”

  “Sure. Let me set up.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  He looked at her with love. “Oh, Mommy.”

  Appreciating him, she waved Peabody back and went out to Vending herself.

  She ordered three, black.

  “Love of my life, we can’t keep meeting like this.”

  She didn’t even turn. “Bite me, Baxter.”

  “I do, nightly, in my dreams. I’ll take one of those.”

  Reminding herself he’d come in at her request, she programmed for a fourth
, then glanced back. “Trueheart?”

  “I’ll have a lemon fizz if it’s all the same to you, Lieutenant. Thank you.”

  He looked like the lemon-fizz type with his clean-cut, boyish face. Adorable, Peabody had called him, and it wasn’t possible to deny it. An all-American boy, cute as a button—whatever the hell that meant—in his summer blues.

  Beside him, Baxter was slick and smooth and cagey. Good-looking, but with an edge to him. He had a fondness for a well-cut suit and a well-endowed female.

  They were good cops, both of them, Eve thought. And tucking the earnest Trueheart in as the smart-ass Baxter’s aide had been one of her better ideas.

  “To the dead,” Baxter said, and tapped his coffee cup lightly to Eve’s. “What do you want with our Jane?”

  “She might connect to one of mine. Foster’s doing her workup right now.”

  “Let me help you with those, Lieutenant.” Trueheart took his fizz and one of the coffees.

  Eve briefed them on the way back to the exam room.

  “Whether she’s your maid or not, somebody wanted her dead real bad,” Baxter commented. “Skull cracked, broken bones. Had to be dead, or at least blessedly unconscious, when he lit her up. He didn’t kill her where he lit her. It was dump and fry. We coordinated with Missing Persons on the prelim data and came up goose egg. Been canvassing the area all day. Nobody saw anything, heard anything, knew anything. Guy who made the nine-one-one saw the fire from his window but not the source. Statement goes it was too hot to sleep, and he was going to go sit out on the fire escape. Saw the flames, called it in. Call came through at oh-three-sixteen. Fire department responded, arrived on scene at oh-three-twenty—gotta give those guys points for speed. She was still burning.”

  “Couldn’t’ve lit her up too much earlier.”

  Foster glanced up as they came in. “Thanks, Lieutenant, just set it down over there. Hey, Bax, hanging low?”

  “Low and long, baby, low and long.”

  Foster continued to run the scanner over the body. “Broken right index finger. That’s an old break. Early childhood. Between five and seven. Scanned the teeth already. Running them in the national bank for a match. This one? The skull injury?”

  Eve nodded, stepped closer.

  “You got severe trauma here. Ubiquitous blunt instrument, most likely. Bat maybe, or a pipe. Skull’s fractured. She’s got three broken ribs, a fractured tibia, jawbone. Somebody waled on this girl. She was dead before he poured the gas on her. That’s a blessing.”

  “He didn’t kill her where he dumped her,” Baxter commented. “We found a blood trail from the street. Not a lot of blood. She must’ve bled a hell of a lot more where he beat her.”

  “From the angle of the breaks—see on screen here?” Foster nodded toward it, and the enhanced images in blues and reds. “It looks like he hit the leg first. Did that while she was standing. When she went down, he went for the ribs, the face. The skull was the coup de grâce. She was probably unconscious when he bashed her head in.”

  Did she try to crawl? Eve wondered. Did she cry out in shock and pain and try to crawl away? “To keep her from running,” she murmured. “Take the leg out first so she can’t run. He doesn’t care how much noise she makes. Otherwise, he’d have gone for the head first. It’s calculated, calculated to look like rage. But it’s not rage. It’s cold-blooded. He had to have a place where it wouldn’t matter if she screamed. Soundproofed, private. He had to have private transpo to get her to the lot.”

  The data center beeped, had them all turning.

  “Hit the match,” Baxter murmured, and he and Eve stepped to the data screen together. “That who you’re looking for?”

  “Yeah.” Eve set her coffee aside and stared into Tina Cobb’s smiling face.

  Chapter 5

  “Book us a conference room. I want to coordinate with Baxter and Trueheart when they get back from Essie Cobb’s.” Eve stepped into the garage-level elevator at Central.

  “Has to be the same killer,” Peabody said.

  “Nothing has to be. We’ll run probabilities. Let’s get all current data together into a report and send it to Mira for a profile.”

  “You want a meet with her?”

  When the doors opened, Eve shifted back as cops and civilians piled on. Dr. Charlotte Mira was the best pro-filer in the city, possibly on the East Coast. But it was early days for a consult. “Not yet.”

  The car stopped again, and this time rather than deal with the press of bodies and personal aromas, she elbowed her way off to take the glide. “We’ll put what we’ve got together first, run some standards, conference with Baxter and Trueheart. We need a follow-up with Samantha Gannon and a swing by the club.”

  “A lot of on-the-ass work.” Peabody could only be grateful. Her shoes were killing her.

  “Get us the room,” Eve began as she stepped off the glide. And stopped when she saw Samantha Gannon sitting on a wait bench outside the Homicide division. Beside her, looking camera-ready, and very chatty, was Nadine Furst.

  Eve muttered shit under her breath, but there wasn’t much heat in it.

  Nadine fluffed back her streaky blond hair and aimed one of her feline smiles in Eve’s direction. “Dallas. Hey, Peabody, look at you! Mag shoes.”

  “Thanks.” She was going to burn them, first chance.

  “Shouldn’t you be in front of a camera somewhere?” Eve asked.

  “There’s more to the job than looking pretty on screen. I’ve just about wrapped an interview with Samantha. A few comments from the primary on the investigation would put a nice cap on the segment.”

  “Turn off the recorder, Nadine.”

  For form, Nadine sighed before she deactivated her lapel recorder. “She’s so strict,” she said to Samantha. “I really appreciate the time, and I’m very sorry about your friend.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Dallas, if I could just have one word?”

  “Peabody, why don’t you show Ms. Gannon into the lounge. I’ll be right with you.”

  Eve waited until they’d moved off, then turned a cool stare toward Nadine.

  “Just doing my job.” Nadine lifted her hands, palms out for peace.

  “Me too.”

  “Gannon’s a hot ticket, Dallas. Her book is this month’s cocktail party game. Everybody’s playing Where Are the Diamonds? You toss murder in and it’s top story, every market. I had vacation plans. Three fun-filled days at the Vineyard, starting tomorrow. I canceled them.”

  “You were going to make wine?”

  “No. Though I’d planned to drink quite a bit. Martha’s Vineyard, Dallas. I want out of the city, out of this heat. I want a beach and a long cold adult beverage and a parade of tanned and buff male bodies. So I’m hoping you’re going to tell me you’re wrapping this one up in a hurry.”

  “I can’t tell you any more than the media liaison would’ve told you. Pursuing all leads, et cetera and so on. That’s it, Nadine. That’s really it.”

  “Yeah, I was afraid of that. Well, there’s always a hologram program. I can set it for the Vineyard and spend an hour in fantasyland. I’ll be around,” she added as she walked away.

  Gave up too easy, Eve decided.

  She thought about that as she headed off to what the cops called the lounge. It was a room set up for breaks and informal meetings. A scatter of tables, even a skinny, sagging sofa, and several vending machines.

  She plugged in a couple of credits and ordered a large bottle of water.

  You have selected Aquafree, the natural refreshment, in a twelve-ounce bottle. Aquafree is distilled and bottled in the peaceful and pristine mountains of—

  “Jesus, cut the commercial and give me the damn water.” She thumped a fist against the machine.

  You are in violation of City Code 20613-A. Any tampering with, any vandalism of this vending unit can result in fine and/or imprisonment.

  Even as Eve reared back to kick, Peabody was popping up. “Dallas! Don’t! I’l
l get it. I’ll get the water. Go sit down.”

  “A person ought to be able to get a damn drink of water without the lecture.” She flopped down at the table beside Samantha. “Sorry.”

  “No, that’s okay. It’s really irritating, isn’t it, to get the whole list of ingredients, by-products, caloric intake, whatever. Especially when you’re ordering a candy bar or a cupcake.”

  “Yes!” Finally, Eve thought, someone who got it.

  “She has issues with machines all over the city,” Peabody commented. “Your water, Lieutenant.”

  “You pander to them.” Eve opened the bottle, drank long and deep. “I appreciate your coming in, Ms. Gannon. We were going to contact you and arrange to speak with you. You’ve saved us some time.”

  “Call me Samantha, or Sam, if that’s okay. I hoped you’d have something to tell me. Shouldn’t I have been talking to the reporter?”

  “Free country. Free press.” Eve shrugged. “She’s okay. Are you planning on staying at the hotel for the time being?”

  “I—yes. I thought, as soon as you tell me I can—I’d have my house cleaned. There are specialists, I’m told, who deal with . . . with crime scenes. Cleaning up crime scenes. I don’t want to go back until it’s dealt with. That’s cowardly.”

  “It’s not. It’s sensible.” That’s what she looked like today, Eve thought. A very tired, sensible woman. “I can offer you continued police protection for the short term. You may want to consider hiring private security.”

  “You don’t think it was just a burglary. You think whoever killed Andrea will come after me.”

  “I don’t think there’s any point in taking risks. Beyond that, reporters who aren’t as polite as Nadine are going to scent you out and hassle you.”

  “I guess you’re right about that. All right, I’ll look into it. My grandparents are very upset about all this. I played it down as much as I could, but . . . Hell, you don’t pull anything over on them. If I can tell them I’ve hired a bodyguard and have the police looking out for me, too, it’ll go a long way to keeping everyone settled. I’m letting them think it was about Andrea.”