by J. D. Robb
One of her last acts had been to place a hysterical transmission to a former lover, begging him for help, weeping about the screaming in her head.
Her last act had been to fashion her silk sheets into a noose and hang herself.
She wore only a white nightgown, obscenely soiled. Her hair was matted, her nails bitten down below the quick. There were tissues and washcloths, stained with blood, littering the bedside table.
Trying to stop the nosebleeds, Eve concluded, and picked up a medication bottle with sealed fingers. Trying to treat a brain on the point of exploding with ten-dollar blockers.
The laptop was still on the bed, its stark message filling the screen.
ABSOLUTE PURITY ACHIEVED
“Get this screen on record, Peabody. Victim: George, Mary Ellen, female, Caucasian, age forty-two. Body discovered in victim’s apartment at fourteen hundred hours, sixteen minutes by building manager, Officer Debrah Banker and Hippel, Jay, who placed the nine-eleven.”
“Record of scene and body complete, Lieutenant.”
“Okay, Peabody, let’s get her down.”
It was an ugly job. Neither of then spoke as they wrestled with the makeshift noose, as they shouldered the deadweight and lowered it to the bed.
“Visual evidence of blood in victim’s ears, in nasal passages. Indication of blood vessel eruption in the eyes. No head or facial trauma evident. There are no visible wounds other than the bruising around the neck, which is consistent with strangulation by hanging.”
She opened her field kit, took out a gauge. “Time of death established at fourteen-ten.”
Eve reached over, shut down the laptop. “Bag this, log it and have it transported to my home office.”
Then she stepped back and took a long, careful look at the bedroom. “She didn’t exhibit the same level of violence as the other vics. You can see she’d been spending most of her time in here, popping blockers and tranqs, trying to sleep off the pain. She got a little messy, a little careless with housekeeping and appearance, but she didn’t run around breaking furniture.”
“People handle pain differently,” Peabody said as she bagged the laptop. “Like you. You pretend it’s not there. Like it’s a personal insult and you’re going to ignore it so it’ll go away. Me, I go straight for the holistic stuff. Early childhood training. But if that doesn’t work, it’s better living through chemistry. And guys, like my brothers and my dad, they whine. A guy gets sick he reverts to babyhood. Which includes temper tantrums.”
“That’s interesting, Peabody.”
“Well, you know. Testosterone.”
“Yeah, I know. In these cases, the two males—three counting Halloway—tried to beat the pain and anyone who got in the way. And the female tried to suppress it with traditional methods. Everybody failed, everybody died. And here’s what else everyone did. Burrowed.”
“Burrowed, sir?”
“Holed up. Climbed into their nest, or the closest thing to it. Cogburn was locked in his apartment. Maybe if his neighbor hadn’t come along, hammering at the door, shouting, cursing at him, he’d have stayed there until he died, or until he killed himself.”
She studied the messy, makeshift noose. “Terminate and end the pain. I bet it’s programmed into the virus. Fitzhugh, holed up, self-terminated. Halloway, the only one who wasn’t a target, the only one who was exposed outside of his own home, burrowed into Feeney’s office. If we hadn’t kept him busy, I think he’d have offed Feeney, then turned the stream on himself.”
“Cogburn and Halloway.” Peabody nodded, following the dots. “They were the only two who had contact with anyone during the last stages of the infection. If they hadn’t . . .”
“Would they have just opted out, like Mary Ellen George? Shuts herself in, blocks her incomings, ignores anyone who comes to the door. Terminates.”
“Wounded animal instinct? The burrowing,” Peabody asked.
“Human nature. It’s logical. And it makes sense for Purity. They don’t want to take out the innocent, just the ones they’ve judged guilty. They’re looking for minimum negative fallout. They want public support for their cause. Even with the incidental casualties, they’re starting to get it.”
“They won’t keep it. No, Dallas, they won’t. I’m not going to believe most people really want something like this.” She gestured toward the body.
“We had legal executions for what, over two hundred years in the grand old U.S. of A.,” Eve reminded her. “Illegal ones have been going on since Cain bashed Abel. Under the polish, Peabody, we’re still a primitive species. A violent one.”
She thought of Roarke. And sighed. “Turn her over to the ME. Open the scene to the sweepers. I’ll be talking to Hippel.”
She turned on her own recorder as she walked into the small, cheerful office space off the living area. Officer Baker stood on post while a young black male with a muscular build sat with his head down and his hands dangling between his knees.
Eve wagged a thumb at the doorway, and Baker stepped out.
“Mr. Hippel?”
He lifted his head. His skin was a rich chocolate just now faintly tinged with the green of nausea.
“I’ve never seen . . . I’ve never . . . It’s the first . . .”
“Do you want some water, Mr. Hippel?”
“No, I . . . The officer got me a glass. My insides are too shaky to drink.”
“I need to ask you some questions. I’m Lieutenant Dallas.”
“Yeah. I saw you on-screen doing that deal with Nadine Furst.” He tried to get his lips to curve up, but they just trembled. “She’s hot. I always try to catch her segments.”
“She’ll be thrilled to hear that.” Eve sat down on a small, tufted chair. “Ms. George contacted you.”
“Yeah. I hadn’t heard from her in a couple weeks. We broke things off. Mutual,” he said quickly. “We didn’t fight or anything. Just time to move on, that’s all. Okay, maybe she was a little steamed. Maybe I wanted to move on more than she did, but we didn’t fight. Okay, maybe we had an argument.”
He choked on his own guilt, spit out information while Eve sat in silence and let him run through it. “Maybe we yelled at each other some. Jesus, Jesus, she didn’t do that because I dumped her, did she?”
“When did the dumping take place, Jay?”
“Maybe two weeks ago. It’d been coming on. I mean, hey, she’s a fine-looking, sexy lady and all. Plenty of coin, too. But I’m twenty-four, and she’s not. Guy needs a piece or two his own age once in a while, right? Only natural. And Mary Ellen, she was getting a little territorial. Crimping my style, got me?”
“Yeah. The last time you saw her, did you notice anything different about her?”
“Different? No. Same old Mary Ellen.”
“She didn’t complain of headaches or discomfort.”
“She was feeling fine. We went out to a club, had some laughs, got ourselves a privacy room and banged. Came back out for a couple drinks, and she sees me scoping out some skirts and gets steamed. So we had a kind of argument and broke it off.”
“And today, when she contacted you?”
“She looked bad. Man. Nose was bleeding, her eyes are all red. She’s crying and yelling. I didn’t know what the hell.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Said I had to help her. ‘Somebody’s got to help me.’ Said she couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘They’re screaming in my head’ is what she said. I tried to calm her down, but I don’t even think she heard me. I thought she said: ‘They’re killing me.’ But she was crying so hard, I’m not sure. I thought somebody must be hurting her, all that blood on her face. So I called emergency and got my ass over here. I work just around the corner at the Riverside Café. How I met her. I got here right before the cop, and I’m trying to get them to let me go up. Then the cop came, and we went up, came inside. There she was.”
He lowered his head again, this time all the way down between his knees.
When she fin
ished at the scene, she swung by the morgue. Morris already had Mary Ellen George’s brain removed.
Even for a seasoned homicide cop, the sight of that pulpy mass of gray matter on a sterile scale was a little off-putting.
“Definitely expanded her mind,” Morris said. “But it doesn’t appear she managed it by reading the great works of literature or exploring other cultures.”
“Har-de-har. Tell me you’ve isolated the cause.”
“I can tell you this. Preliminary scan shows a healthy forty-two-year-old female. Broke her left tibia at one point, healed beautifully. She’s had some minor face and body work. Excellent job all around. Have to wait on the tox reports to tell you if she considered her body a temple or believed in chemical enhancements.”
“Her body’s not a big concern of mine right now. Tell me about her brain.”
“Massive swelling that would have resulted in death within hours. Irreversible, in my opinion after the initial spread of infection, which is confirmed on the other brains in question by the neurologist I’ve brought in. The brain contains no foreign matter, no tumor, no chemical or organic stimulant. The infection, for lack of a better word, remains unidentified.”
“You’re not making my day here, Morris.”
He gave her a little come-ahead with his finger, rinsed his hands, then brought an image onto a monitor. “Here you’ve got a computerized cross-section of the brain of a normal, healthy fifty-year-old male. Here.” He tapped a key. “You’ve got Cogburn’s.”
“Christ.”
“In a word. You can see the increased mass, the bruising where it was squeezed as the pressure increased. The red areas indicate the infection.”
“It spread through, what, more than fifty percent?”
“Fifty-eight. Notice that some of the red is darker than others. Older infection. This would seem to be the area where it began. This leads us to believe it was an initial optical attack, and here . . . audio.”
“So, it’s caused by something he saw, something he heard.”
“He may not have been able to hear or see it—not with ears and eyes. But a bombardment on these two senses into the lobes of the brain that run them.”
“Subliminal then.”
“Possibly. I can tell you that what we found so far indicates that the infection can and does spread quickly, causing the swelling to increase, sector by sector. Whether it’s self-generated or requires further stimuli, we haven’t determined. I can tell you that the pain and suffering this process would cause is unspeakable.”
“Latest polls say most people don’t think that’s such a bad thing.”
“Most people are, academically at least, barbarians.” Morris smiled when she looked at him. “Easy to say ‘Off with their heads’ when you don’t have to stand in the blood and have that head roll between your feet. A little of it splatters on them, they start calling for a cop.”
“I don’t know, Morris, sometimes it splatters on enough of them, and they get a good taste, they turn into a mob.” She dragged out her communicator when it beeped.
“Dallas.”
“Lieutenant, you’re due at the media center in thirty.”
“Commander, I’m at the morgue with the ME, awaiting further tests on Mary Ellen George’s brain. I need to finish this consult and update my team. I request that—”
“Denied. In thirty, Dallas. Have your aide transmit your incident report and any additional data to my office ASAP. It will need to be reviewed and disseminated for the media.”
When Whitney broke transmission, Morris gave her a little pat on the back. “I know, I know. Sucks sideways.”
“They sicced the deputy mayor and Chang on me.”
“I wouldn’t wonder if Franco and Chang were thinking you’d been sicced on them. Run along now and go assure the viewing public that the city is safe in your hands.”
“If I didn’t need you, I’d be tempted to beat you up for that.”
She suffered through the preconference briefing, read the newly drafted statements, filed away what she was told could be discussed, what she was told could not. But she bared her teeth when Franco suggested she freshen up before the cameras and try a little lip dye.
“The fact that I have breasts doesn’t require me to slap on enhancements.”
Franco sighed and waved her hovering aides out of the room. “Lieutenant. I didn’t mean that as an insult. We’re women, and whatever position of power and authority we hold, we remain women. Some of us are more comfortable with that than others.”
“I’m perfectly comfortable being female. I’ll do what I’m ordered to do, Deputy Mayor. I don’t have to like it. I don’t even have to agree with it. I just have to do it. But I sure as hell don’t have to doll myself up because you’d prefer a different police image on-screen than what I might present.”
“Agreed, agreed, agreed.” Franco threw up her hands. “I apologize for making the insulting suggestion that you might put a little color on your mouth. I don’t think of lip dye as a tool of Satan.”
“Neither do I. Mostly I just don’t like how it looks on me, or the way it tastes.”
Franco let out another sigh, sat. “Listen, it’s been a rough couple of days for all of us. Likely to get rougher. The mayor wants me to work with you, your boss wants you to work with me. We’re stuck here. I don’t want to battle with you over every step and detail.”
“Then lay off.”
“Jesus. Let me say this. You and I are both women with a strong sense of public duty. We’re committed to doing our jobs, though we may employ vastly different methods and hold different attitudes. I love New York, Lieutenant. I sincerely love this city, and I’m proud to serve it.”
“I don’t doubt that, ma’am.”
“Jenna. We’re working together, call me Jenna. I’ll call you Eve.”
“No. But you can call me Dallas.”
“Ah, and there we have one of our key variations. You hold your line, as a woman, by employing more traditionally male methods. I hold mine with the female. I enjoy exploiting my looks, my femininity for my own uses. It works for me, it’s helped me get where I am to present an attractive package over the brains, the ambition, the sweat. Just as your method has worked for you. I distrust women like you. You distrust women like me.”
“I distrust politicians in general.”
Franco angled her head. “If you’re thinking to insult me enough that I’ll toss you out of this press conference, let me tell you, in the insult game, cops are amateurs compared to politicians.”
She checked her slim, gold wrist unit. “We’re due. At least comb your hair.”
Keeping her face carefully blank Eve raked her fingers through her hair, twice. “That’s it.”
Franco paused with her hand on the doorknob, looked Eve up and down. “How in God’s name did you manage to snap a man like Roarke?”
Very slowly, Eve got to her feet. “If you’re thinking to insult me enough that I plant a fist in your face and get myself removed from this investigation so you can toss the media a more attractive image as primary, I’ll tell you that while it’s very tempting, I’m going to see this case through. I’m going to close it. After that, all bets are off.”
“Then we understand each other. Whatever our personal feelings, we see this case to closure.”
Franco stepped out and was immediately swallowed by her pack of aides.
“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” Chang trotted after Eve, hustling to catch up with her long, angry strides. “I have your media schedule for tomorrow.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your schedule.” He handed her a disc. “You will begin in the seven o’clock hour of Planet with a two-minute interview with K. C. Stewart. This is global and has the highest ratings. At ten, we have arranged for a live feed from your office at Central with the crew from City Beat. Again, this is the highest rated—”
“Chang, do I have to explain to you where this disc is goin
g to end up if you keep talking to me?”
His mouth thinned, then pursed. “This is my job, Lieutenant, and I’ve worked very hard to arrange for these appearances in order to keep the agendas of the NYPSD and the office of the mayor at the forefront of this media blitz. The latest polls—”
“The latest polls are going to end up in the same place this disc does if you don’t get out of my face.” Riding on fury, she snapped the disc in half, then whirled around and stormed straight to the commander.
“You either want a cop or a media shill. I won’t be both. If, in your opinion, the media perception is more important than my investigation, then respectfully, sir, you’re full of shit.”
He caught her arm before she could spin away. “One moment, Lieutenant.”
“You can write me up, you can bust my rank, but I will not spend the hours I should be in the field doing my job as some talking head on-screen so the mayor’s office gets better numbers.”
“As long as you’re under my command, Lieutenant, you will not tell me what you will or will not do.”
Behind her, Chang smirked. Then carefully schooling his face, he held out a copy of the broken disc. “Commander Whitney, as Lieutenant Dallas has damaged her copy, I’ll prefer to give you her media schedule for tomorrow.”
“What media schedule?”
“We have several important segments booked, including appearances on Planet, City Beat, Del Vincent, and The Evening Report. We’re waiting for confirmation on Crime and Punishment and Speak Back.”
“You’ve booked my lieutenant on no less than four media appearances?”
Chang nodded. “We’re very pleased with the schedule, but it can be improved. We’re arranging a satellite interview from Delta Colony. The ratings are very high there for crime segments.”
“Are you aware, Mr. Chang, that Lieutenant Dallas is the primary in charge of a priority homicide investigation?”
“Yes, this is why—”
“Are you also aware that standard procedure requires that your office clear any such demands as this media schedule with my office before confirming the appearances?”
