by J. D. Robb
“No, that’s okay.” But she thought, yes, let’s sit, have coffee. Let’s just not do this thing.
He took her hand. “Who’s dead? It’s one of us.” His fingers tightened on hers. “Peabody—”
“No. Peabody’s . . . no.” Only making it worse, she thought. “Morris, it’s Detective Coltraine.”
She could see by his face he didn’t understand, he didn’t connect his question with her answer. She did the only thing she could do. She plunged the knife in his heart.
“She was killed last night. She’s dead, Morris. She’s gone. I’m sorry.”
He released her hand, stepped back from her. As if, she knew, breaking contact would stop it. Just stop it all. “Ammy? You’re talking about Amaryllis?”
“Yes.”
“But—” He stopped himself for making the denial. She knew the first questions in his head—was she sure? Could there be a mistake? There must be a mistake. But he knew her, and didn’t waste the words. “How?”
“We’re going to sit down.”
“Tell me how.”
“She was murdered. It’s looking like her own weapon was used on her. Both her weapons are missing. We’re looking. Morris—”
“No. Not yet.” His face had gone blank and smooth, a mask carved from one of his own polished stones. “Just tell me what you know.”
“I don’t have much yet. She was found this morning, in the basement of her building, by a neighbor and his son. Her time of death was about twenty-three forty last night. There aren’t any signs of a struggle at the scene, or in her apartment. No visible wounds on her, but for the stunner burns on her throat. She had no ID on her, no jewelry, no bag, no badge, no weapon. She was fully dressed.”
She saw something flicker over his face at that, a ripple over the stone, and understood. Rape always made murder worse. “I haven’t looked at the security discs yet, because I needed to tell you. Peabody’s on scene.”
“I have to change. I have to change and go in. Go in and see to her.”
“No, you won’t. You tell me who you trust the most, who you want, and we’ll arrange for them to do the autopsy. You’re not doing it.”
“It’s not for you to say. I’m chief medical examiner.”
“I’m primary. And you and I both know that your relationship with the”—she swallowed the word victim—“with Detective Coltraine means you have to step back from this part. Take a minute, take as many minutes as you need to come down to that. You can’t work on her, Morris, for your own sake and for hers.”
“You think I’ll do nothing? That I’ll stand by and let someone else touch her?”
“I’m not asking you to do nothing. But I’m telling you you won’t do this.” When he turned, started for the stairs, she simply took his arm.
“I’ll stop you.” She spoke quietly, felt the muscles in his arm vibrate. “Take a swing at me, yell, throw something, whatever you need. But I’ll stop you. She’s mine now, too.”
The rage showed in his eyes, burned them black. She braced for a blow, she’d give him that. But the rage melted into grief. This time when he turned, she let him go.
He walked to the long, wide window that looked out on the buzz and vibrancy of Soho. He laid his hands on the shelf of the sill, leaned so his arms could hold some of the weight his legs couldn’t.
“Clipper.” Now his voice was as raw as his eyes had been. “Ty Clipper. I want him to take care of her.”
“I’ll see to it.”
“She wore, always wore a ring on the middle finger of her right hand. A square-cut pink tourmaline, flanked by small green tourmaline baguettes. A silver band. Her parents gave it to her on her twenty-first birthday.”
“Okay.”
“You said the basement of her building. She’d have no reason to go down there.”
“There are storage lockers.”
“She didn’t keep one. She told me once they charged a ridiculous price for little cages down there. I offered to store anything she needed stored, but she said she hadn’t accumulated so much, yet, that she needed spillover space. Why was she there?”
“I’ll find out. I promise you. Morris, I promise you I’ll find out who did this, and why.”
He nodded, but didn’t turn, only stared out at the movement, the color, the life. “There’s a place inside, when you’re connected to cops—as friends, as lovers, even as associates—that knows the risk of that connection, of involvement. I’ve worked on enough dead cops to know those risks. But you have to put it aside, lock it away, because you have to keep that connection. It’s what you do, who you are. But you know, you always know, and still when it happens, it seems impossible.
“Who knows death better than I? Than we,” he said, turning now. “And yet, it seems impossible. She was so alive. And now she isn’t.”
“Someone took the life from her. I’ll find them.”
He nodded again, managed to get to the couch, sink down. “I was falling in love with her. I felt it happening—that long, slow drop. We wanted to take it slow, enjoy it. We were still discovering each other. Still at the stage where when she walked into the room, or I heard her voice, smelled her skin, everything inside me sang.”
He dropped his head into his hands.
Comfort wasn’t her finest skill. Peabody, Eve thought, would have the right words, the right tone. All she could do was follow instinct. She moved to the couch, sat beside him.
“Tell me what to do for you, and I’ll do it. Tell me what you need, and I’ll get it. Li—”
Maybe it was the use of his first name, something she never used, but he turned to her. When he turned, she held him. He didn’t break, not yet, but kept his cheek pressed to hers.
“I need to see her.”
“I know. Give me some time first. We’ll take care of her for you.”
He eased back. “You need to ask. Turn on your recorder and ask.”
“Okay.” Routine, she thought. Wasn’t that a kind of comfort? “Tell me where you were last night between twenty-one and twenty-four hundred.”
“I worked until nearly midnight, clocking some extra hours, clearing up some paperwork. Ammy and I planned to go away for a few days next week. Take a long weekend. Memphis. We booked this old inn. We were going to take a garden tour, see Graceland, listen to music. I spoke to several people on the night shift. I can give you names.”
“I don’t need them. I’ll check it out, and we’ll move on. Did she tell you anything about her caseload? About anyone she had concerns about?”
“No. We didn’t talk shop a great deal. She was a good cop. She liked to find answers, and she was organized and precise. But she didn’t live the job. She wasn’t like you. The job was what she did, not what she was. But she was smart and capable. Whenever we had our jobs intersect, that came across.”
“What about on the personal front? Exes?”
“We started seeing each other shortly after she transferred here from Atlanta. And while we were taking it slow, letting it all . . . unfold, neither of us was seeing anyone else. She had a serious relationship in college. It lasted over two years. She was involved with another cop for a while, but said she preferred the casual dating scene as a rule. That I was breaking her rule. I know there was someone else, someone serious, and that ended before she transferred to New York.”
“Any complaints about any neighbors, anyone in the building hassling her?”
“No. She loved that little apartment of hers. Dallas, she has family back in Atlanta.”
“I know. I’ll notify them. Can I contact anyone for you?”
“No. Thank you.”
“I didn’t bring a grief counselor because—”
“I don’t want a grief counselor.” He pressed his fingers to his eyes. “I have a key for her apartment. You’ll want that.”
“Yeah.”
She waited while he went up the silver stairs, and paced around his living space until he came back with a key card. “Did she have
one to this place?”
“Yes.”
“Change your codes.”
He drew a breath. “Yes, all right. I need you to keep me informed. I need to be involved in this.”
“I’ll keep you informed.”
“I need to be part of it. I need that.”
“Let me work on that. I’ll contact you. If you need to talk to me, I’m available for you twenty-four/seven. But I’ve got to get back to this, back to her.”
“Tell Ty . . . Tell him to play Eric Clapton for her. Any of the discs in my collection. She particularly liked his music.” He moved to the elevator, opened the grille.
“I wish sorry meant something. Peabody . . . she told me to tell you the same.” She stepped in, kept her eyes on his as the grille closed and until the doors shut.
On the drive back, she tagged Peabody. “Did the sweepers find the weapon?”
“That’s a negative.”
“Damn it. I’m heading back to the scene. Contact the morgue. Chief Medical Examiner Morris assigns ME Ty Clipper to this matter. He requests the ME play Eric Clapton during autopsy.”
“Oh, man. How is he? How—”
“He’s holding up. Make sure they understand these are Morris’s directives. I’m on my way back. You and I are going to go through her apartment, inch by inch.”
“I was about to start on that. I talked to Burnbaum and his kid. Nothing more there. The knock-on-doors hasn’t turned up anything. Security—”
“Fill me in when I get there. Ten minutes.”
She clicked off. She wanted silence. Just silence until the emotional knots loosened. She’d be no good to Amaryllis Coltraine if she let herself stay twisted up over the grief in a friend’s eyes.
At the apartment, she waited until the morgue team carried the body out. “She goes straight to ME Clipper,” Eve snapped. “She’s a cop. She gets priority.”
“We know who she is.” One of the team turned after the body was loaded in the wagon. “She’s not only a cop, she was Morris’s lady. We’ll take good care of her, Lieutenant.”
Satisfied, she went inside, took the stairs to Coltraine’s apartment. Using the key card Morris had given her, she found Peabody inside.
“It was hard,” Peabody said after one look. “It shows.”
“Then I’d better get over it. Security?”
“I took a quick scan. Nothing on the rear door. He had to come in that way, jam the camera. EDD’s on it. Front door cam ran the whole time. I’ve got her coming in about sixteen hundred, carrying a file bag—which is still here—and a take-out bag. She didn’t go out again, not by the front. Stairway has cams, and they were compromised. Both the rear and stairway cams shut down from about twenty-two thirty to about twenty-four hundred. Elevator has cams, and they ran through. She didn’t take the elevator. Neighbor confirms she used the stairs, habitually.”
“The killer had to know her, know her routine. Had to take her in the stairway.”
“I’ve got a team of sweepers in there now, going top to bottom.”
“Taking her that quick, that clean, the killer had to know she was going out. So either that was another habit, or he lured her out. We’ll check her transmissions, but if that’s how it went down, he used her pocket ’link, then took it with him. Someone she knew. A friend, an ex, one of her weasels, someone in the building or close by. Someone she’d let get the drop on her.”
Eve glanced around the apartment. “Impressions?”
“I don’t think she left under any kind of duress. Everything’s just too tidy for that, and that droid kitten?” When Peabody gestured, Eve frowned at the snoozing ball of fur. “I checked its readout. She set it to sleep mode at twenty-three eighteen. It doesn’t seem like something you’d do if you were in trouble.”
Eve studied the room as she wandered it. It had a female feel, a fussy woman’s order to it. “The killer contacts her, via her pocket ’link. Come out, meet me for a drink, or I had a terrible fight with my boyfriend, come over so I can boo-hoo all over you. No, no.” Eve shook her head, wandered into the small bedroom with its mountain of pillows on its neatly made bed. “She had her clutch piece. Most cops are going to carry a weapon, but I don’t see her strapping on a clutch to go have a drink.”
“One of her weasels. Meet me here, at such and such time. I got some good shit.”
“Yeah, yeah, that could work. We’ll talk to her boss, her partner, her unit, see what she was into. She could’ve been meeting another kind of source, or just meeting someone she didn’t completely trust. A little extra insurance with the clutch piece. And still he got the drop on her, took her down without a struggle.”
“She wouldn’t have been expecting to see him in her stairway. Her guard’s down, and that’s that.”
Eve said nothing. She needed to turn it over awhile, walk it through. “Let’s see what we can find here.”
They got to work, searching through drawers, in closets, through clothes, in pockets. The dead had no privacy, and Eve thought as a cop; Coltraine would have known and accepted that.
She found the goodie drawer in the bedside table—body oils, a few toys—and had to block the image that kept trying to lodge in her head of Morris and Coltraine rolling around naked on the bed.
“She liked pretty underwear,” Peabody commented as she went through other drawers. “All her stuff’s in the lingerie level. Sexy, girlie. She liked pretty things. The little bottles, the lamps, the pillows. Her drawers are neat and organized, nothing like mine. She doesn’t have a lot of stuff, you know. No clutter. And what’s here doesn’t match-match, but it all works together. It’s just a really pretty place, to keep dogging the same word.”
Eve stepped to a clever little corner table that held a compact data-and-communication system. In the single slim drawer she found a memo book. But when she tried to bring up data, it denied her access.
“She’s a cop. She’d’ve passcoded it,” Eve said. “We’ll want this tagged for EDD. I want in.”
She learned more about the victim on the search. Peabody was right, she’d liked pretty things. Not overly fussy and frilly, just female. But no clutter, not crowded, and everything in its place. The roses in the living area were real, and fresh.
She found a trinket box that held florist cards, all from Morris. He’d said they’d been exclusive for months. At least as far as flowers went, Eve thought, he was right.
That didn’t mean she hadn’t had something on the side. When a woman went out that time of night, it could be a booty call.
Yet, it just didn’t strike right. She’d seen Coltraine with Morris. She’d felt the zing between them.
“Secure building,” Eve said out loud. “A nice, compact apartment, droid pet. Nice furniture, nice clothes. Not a lot of either. She’s selective. Not much jewelry, but again, what she has is good quality.”
“Same with the hair products, the enhancers,” Peabody put in. “She knew what she liked, what worked for her, and stuck with it. Me, I’ve got a drawer full of cast-off lip dyes, eye gunk, hair crap. Perfume. One scent. There’s leftover Chinese in the fridge, vac-sealed, some health food, bottled water and juices. Two bottles of wine.”
“She’s got a lover, but lives alone. The men’s toiletry kit is probably Morris’s. We’ll check with him rather than sending it straight to the lab. The man’s shirt, boxers, socks, pants, they look like him. Not a lot of him in here, though. They probably spent more time at his place. It’s about four times as big as this, and the location’s prime for cafés, clubs, restaurants, galleries. How’d the killer know she was in last night? Stalking her? I should’ve asked Morris how often they were together, if they had a routine.”
“Dallas, you gave him a break. Gave him a little time. We’ll follow up.”
“The killer didn’t come in here. Too risky. Why chance being seen? No, no, he tagged her on her pocket ’link.”
“They could’ve set up a meet prior.”
“Why risk that? She might
tell somebody—Morris, her partner, her boss. I’m meeting X tonight, and then we’d be talking to X instead of wondering who the hell he is. Morris was working, she’d have known that. So she’s not going to tag him at that hour and tell him she’s headed out for something. She just gets her stuff, turns off her cat, and goes. She knew her killer, or whoever set it up.
“Let’s get the sweepers in here, and have EDD pick up her electronics.” She checked her wrist unit. “We’ll go by the morgue before notifying next of kin.”
“I’ll do that. You told Morris,” Peabody added. “I’ll tell her family.”
“Okay. Then we’ll both talk to her partner, her squad, her boss.”
In the car, Peabody sat slumped in the seat, staring out the side window. “Dallas? I got this thing eating at me, and I just want to get it out.”
“You felt bitchy and resentful because she hooked up with Morris.”
“Yeah.” Peabody let out the word, like relief. “I didn’t even know her, hardly at all, and I let myself think, like, who the hell is she, sashaying—I even thought the word sashay, because she was from the South—in here and getting all smoochy with our Morris? Stupid, because I’m with McNab and never had a thing with Morris anyway, except the occasional perfectly permissible and healthy fantasy. But I decided I didn’t like her, just for that. And now she’s dead and I feel like crap about it.”
“I know. I’ve got the same thing going. Except for the fantasy part.”
“I guess that makes me feel a little better.” She scooted up again, studied Eve’s profile. “You really never had the teeniest fantasy about Morris?”
“No. Jeez.”
“Just a little one. Like you’d go to the morgue one night, and it’s strangely empty, so you go into the main cutting room and Morris is there. Naked.”
“No! Stop filling my head with that crap.” But oddly, some of the sick weight in Eve’s belly eased. “Don’t you and McNab bang often enough to keep you from having prurient fantasies about a colleague? In the freaking dead house?”
