by J. D. Robb
And still no one spoke. It seemed to her no one breathed as the video played out on screen.
She saw, from where she stood, Jamie drop his gaze, watched his body shudder. And saw Peabody take his hand. The knuckles of his went white—he must have ground Peabody’s bone to bone—but she didn’t flinch.
And with that connection, the boy lifted his gaze again and watched the rest of his dead friend’s nightmare play out.
He’d make a cop, she thought. God help him, he’d make a cop.
Even when the screen went blank, and the vicious music silenced, no one spoke. Eve stepped to the front of the room.
“He’s going to pay for it.” Her tone was iced rage—she needed it; they needed it. “I’m going to say that first, and I want everyone in this room to believe it. To know it right down to the gut. He’s going to pay for Deena MacMasters.
“She was sixteen. She liked music. She was shy, did well in school and had a small, comfortable circle of friends. She had ideals and hopes, and wanted to help make a difference. She was a virgin, and he stole that from her viciously. He stole her life, her hopes and ideals viciously. Before he did he forced her to tell the father she loved that he was to blame, that she hated him for it. As of now there is no reason for the father to hear that, to see what we’ve just seen. The contents of this disc are not to be discussed beyond the members of this team until otherwise directed.
“Questions?”
Still the room remained silent.
“Feeney, you and your e-team will analyze the disc, and continue to work on piecing the hard drive back together. I want you to dig out any files, e-mails, notes, anything the victim put on her D and C unit in April. Any searches she made, anything she did around the time she met the UNSUB. She may have since deleted, or put any data pertaining to the meet in some cryptic file. We know the killer found nothing, so deleted nothing. Maybe we’ll be luckier.”
She picked up her coffee. “Baxter, you and Trueheart repeat the canvass of the neighborhood. It’s likely the killer scoped the house, the neighborhood, before Saturday, even before the initial meet. Find me somebody who saw a good-looking boy who could pass for nineteen on that block, frequenting a local cyber café, a twenty-four/seven. I have a list of the vic’s favorite haunts. Check them out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m working on MacMasters’s cases, have a few possibles. They don’t ring for me, but we’ll check them anyway. When you’ve finished the canvass, you’ll wade in there.”
She picked up a file with disc attached and handed it to him. “I’ll get you some help on that.”
“Why don’t you let us get started on it, LT. We can tap whoever’s got some room for it.”
“Fine. I’ll leave it to you. Meanwhile, Peabody and I will canvass the area of the park where the vic is reported to have met the killer. After which, we’ll meet with MacMasters here, and try to refine the search re his cases.
“Connections,” she said. “Connections between MacMasters and the killer, the killer and Deena, the killer and a wit, vic, perp, suspect, or person of interest in MacMasters’s files. If the killer isn’t in there, someone who matters or mattered to him is. We find the connection.”
“If it’s the killer,” Baxter put in, “it should be easy enough to narrow it by his age. Even if he’s got a baby face he’s got to be under twenty-six or -seven to pass for nineteen. It might be somebody who did some hard for illegals busts.”
Jamie shook his head. “It just doesn’t fit. If he’d been on any junk, or a real user, she’d have known and steered away. She knew what to look for there. She’d never hang with a chemi-head.”
“I agree with that.” Eve nodded at Jamie. “Added to it, someone who’s done the hard isn’t going to pass for a clean-cut nineteen to a cop’s daughter. Still, we check. We don’t skim over anything or anyone.”
She paused, then pushed the next button. “Jamie, I think you’ve seen him or met him.”
“What? Why? Where?”
“You know Darian Powders.”
“Dar, sure.” His puzzled face went straight to shock. “You don’t think Darian—”
“He’s clear,” Eve said quickly, “but I believe he’s one of the connections. His ID was stolen, most probably during a party in his dorm suite on New Year’s Eve. You were there.”
“I . . . yeah. Dar and Coby rock a party. I know them both, did some class time with them. They had a major bash for the Eve.” His face hardened, and it seemed to Eve the smudges of sleeplessness smeared under his eyes darkened. “He was there? You’re saying the guy who killed Deena was there?”
“Long enough, if I’m right, to steal the ID from Powders.”
“But Deena knew Dar—well, sort of. Enough to recognize him. If this guy used his ID and she saw it . . . Cloned it,” he said in disgust. “If he’s good and has access to the right equipment and programs, he could’ve cloned the ID, tweaked it just enough, input his own photo and data.”
“The basic footprints would need to coordinate.” McNab frowned over it. “To clone and counterfeit, you’d need to keep the tweaks minimal.”
“The same school, the same birthday,” Eve continued. “Probably the same height and build within a reasonable span. He has to know the campus, the routine, maybe he’d gone there, or worked there. The Columbia connection was a good ploy to gain Deena’s trust. You go there, Jamie, she’s planning to, and she knows Darian a little. His name anyway. He’d need ID to flash when he was with her, going to vids or clubs. You need to think, to go back in your head and start thinking about the party. Before the party, after it. See if you can remember someone who hung around on the fringes, blended, but didn’t do a lot of socializing. He doesn’t want to be noticed, doesn’t want to leave an impression.”
“It was a jam. I didn’t know half the people there. I—”
“He wouldn’t have stayed long—but I’m betting long enough to watch you, to see if you brought Deena along. This was business for him. It wasn’t a party, it was a purpose.”
“I’ll try. Okay, I’ll try.”
“He’d have been other places where you’d go. A club, the library, a cyber café, an eatery. Your eyes would pass right over him. He’s just one of the crowd. Think back to any time you were with Deena between January and April. Let it simmer in your head, and let me know if you think of anything. Doesn’t matter how small or vague.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s get to it,” Eve ordered.
As the room cleared, Whitney walked to Eve. “Unless you have objections I’d like to sit in when you talk to MacMasters.”
“No, sir, no objections.”
“I’ll meet you back here then. Meanwhile, give me an assignment.”
“Sir?”
“I’m still a cop. I still know how to do a run.” He snapped it out, then seemed to catch himself. He gestured the words away and spoke more calmly. “I can do legwork, knock on doors, run probabilities, chase down a lead. You’re primary, Lieutenant. Give me an assignment.”
“Ah . . .” The juxtaposition threw her off balance. Whitney gave the orders. But it was clear enough he needed to do more than that. He needed to participate. “I have a short list of possibles, gleaned from MacMasters’s threat file. To be honest, sir, I don’t think we’ll hit there.”
“But it needs to be followed up on. I’ll take it.”
“Most if not all can be done riding the desk. If any of them pop, then—”
“I do remember how it’s done. I’ll find somewhere nearby to work it.”
She hesitated, only an instant. “You’re welcome to use my office, and my desk here, Commander.”
The faintest glint of amusement lighted in his eyes. “I also know the sanctity of an office and desk. Maybe there’s another place in this house of yours I can set up.”
“Absolutely. I’ll see that Summerset takes care of that for you.” She took disc files from her desk. “This should be all you need. Peabody an
d I will be back before nine.”
“Good hunting,” he said, then turned back to study her murder board.
“We’ll split up,” Eve told Peabody. “Take it in zones, show the vic’s picture to every jogger, dog walker, nanny, flasher, kid, octogenarian, and sidewalk sleeper.”
“Somebody’s going to remember her because she was a regular. He’s another matter,” Peabody commented.
“Somebody saw him, and saw them together at the initial meet. He waited two months from then to the murder. People’s memories fade. We’ll push them back into focus.”
She stopped at the base of the stairs where Summerset, bony in black, skull face impassive, waited with the pudgy cat at his feet.
“Commander Whitney needs an office. He’ll be working out of here this morning.”
“I’ll see to it.”
That’s it? she thought. No smart remark, no sneer? She started to snark at his lack of snark, then realized he’d know what they were working on. The rape, torture, and murder of a young girl, as his young girl had been raped, tortured, and murdered.
There would be no sneers between them for the time being.
“Captain MacMasters is due at nine hundred,” she continued in the same even tone. “If I’m not back, you can take him up to my office, and inform the commander.”
“Understood. Your vehicle is ready.”
She nodded, walked out into the beautiful, balmy morning. If Deena had never met the boy she’d known as David, would she be heading off to the park on this soft, summer morning? Would she already be jogging along the path, feet slapping to the beat of the music playing in her ears?
Breathing in, breathing out, Eve thought, at the start of another ordinary day.
She slid behind the wheel, drove toward the gates.
“How’s Jamie holding up?” she asked Peabody. “I need to know if I should throttle back on his duties.”
“I think he’s riding it out. It’s rough for him,” Peabody added, “but he’s riding it out. He talked a lot about her last night. Good for him, plus it gives me another picture of her to add to my own. Or one of how Jamie saw her, anyway.”
“Is it different? His picture from yours?”
“Some, yeah. He didn’t really see her as a girl, as especially female. She was a friend, a pal. It makes me wonder if she felt the same, or if that was frustrating for her. It can be a bitch to be the girl the boy thinks of as just a pal.”
Peabody shifted, angling toward Eve. “It makes me wonder if that designation wasn’t usual for her, that—I mean—she was used to having guys see her that way. So she was maybe resigned to seeing herself that way. Not the girl guys looked at, and wanted to be with.”
“Until this guy.”
“Yeah. This one looked at her, wanted to be with her—or made her think that. And I think she was different with this guy because of it. It’s what happens when you go over for a guy, especially at that age, especially the first time. And from everything he said, I think this was her first major crush. Her first serious thing, so she’d be different.”
“How?”
“Well, not as shy—not with him. He makes her so damn happy. And a girl, that age, that background, with a college guy making over her? It’s all flutters and shudders. She’s ready to do what he wants, go where he wants, believe—or at least pretend—that she likes what he likes. She’ll make herself into what she thinks he wants. I figure that’s one of the ways he got her to keep all this on the down low. So much so she barely told her best friend any real details.”
“If you’re not already what he wants, why is he making over you?”
“That’s logic—and self-confidence, and just doesn’t apply to that first rush of romance, especially at sixteen. Just think back to when you were that age.”
“I didn’t care about any of that when I was sixteen. All I cared about was getting through the system and into the Academy.”
“You knew you were going to be a cop when you were sixteen?” The idea struck Peabody as nearly inconceivable. “I was obsessed with music, vid stars, and January Olsen when I was sixteen.”
“January Olsen?”
“This really adorable boy I had a crush on.” She could sigh over it now, fondly. “I figured we’d cohab, raise two adorable kids, and do important and world-changing social work. If he’d ever actually look at me or speak my name. You didn’t have a January Olsen?”
“No—which means it’s harder for me to get into her head than it is for you.”
“Well . . . I guess on some level Deena and I were kindred spirits. At least when I was sixteen. Kind of shy, awkward around guys, but casual pals with many. I was planning on doing big work. The stuff about her appearance? Her mother and the neighbor noticed she was taking more trouble. That’s a sure sign there’s a guy.”
Peabody began ticking off points on her fingers. “Updating your do, your wardrobe. That’s definitely one. Two, she wasn’t hanging with Jamie as much, something he didn’t think about until now. He’s busy with school and his college friends, so he didn’t give it much thought when she made excuses a couple of times when he tagged her to see if she wanted to catch a pizza or a vid. She was eking out her time for the guy, cutting herself off some from her core group.
“That’s three,” Peabody added. “A break or a little distance from your core. See you want your core group to meet the guy and like the guy, but part of you worries. What if they don’t? So keeping him to yourself is a way to avoid the possibility.”
“It’s awfully damn complicated.”
Sagely, Peabody nodded. “Being a teenager is hell and misery and wild delight. Thank God it’s only one decade out of all of them.”
Her own teenage years hadn’t been nearly as hellish or miserable as her first decade. But Eve understood.
“She got sneaky and secretive.”
“She was, in a way, having a rebellion. Only she was really quiet about it,” Peabody added. “I’m also inclined to think Jamie’s right about the guy not being on the stuff, or doing any of the hard. She’d have copped to it. And that kind of rebellion wasn’t in her. I don’t think he’s wrong there.”
“All this is telling us what kind of mask he wore. Not what’s under it. He’s taken it off now. No more need for it.”
She pulled into an illegal slot, activated her On Duty light.
“It’s worse than Coltraine.”
Eve got out, said nothing as Peabody walked around to meet her.
“We knew her.” Her eyes, dark and troubled, searched Eve’s face. “She was one of us. And she was Morris’s. I didn’t think it would ever hit home as hard as that one, working that one. But this? A cop’s kid, a girl like that, done like that? And I knew her. It’s worse.”
“He knows that,” Eve said. “He knows it’s worse than anything. He wants it to be, made sure it would be with the video. And he’s thinking he got away clean; he’s rocking on that. We’re going to prove him wrong, and take him down.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Peabody rolled her shoulders. “I guess that was a pep talk.”
“It was a fact. Go north. I’ll take south.”
A day made for strolling, Eve thought. Cotton-ball clouds dabbed across a sky of perfect and delicate blue. The air held the fragrance of flowers and flowering bushes she couldn’t name rioting in swirling islands. Green, green grass rolled like a carpet under tall, majestic trees. The wall of them and the madly flowering shrubs shut out the noise, the pace, the hurry of the city and opened a door to a sedate and verdant world.
The little pond sparkled like a liquid jewel under its pretty arch of bridge with the reflection of the trees and clouds a dreamy blur on its surface.
People sat on benches, drinking from go-cups, talking to each other or on ’links, consulting their PPCs. Business suits, sweats, summer dresses, beggar’s rags mixed together in the eclectic array that was New York, even in the green.
Nannies and professional parents took advantage of the wea
ther and pushed kids and babies in strange wheeled devices, or carried them in stranger harnesses. Along the path joggers bowled along with their ear-buds, headsets, e-fitness pods tucked on, colorful shorts flapping or skin-suits showing off bodies already viciously toned.
She imagined Deena running along the brown path, her life spread out in front of her like the green, green grass and the brilliant islands of blossoms. Until she stopped to help a boy.
Since they were closer, Eve approached a knot of adults with kids first—warily.
She badged the group at large. “NYPSD. Have you seen this girl?”
She held up Deena’s photo.
She got a lot of automatic head shakes. One of the kids—about the age she judged of Mavis’s Bella, stared at her with that doll-eyed blankness Eve found creepy while it sucked busily on the plug somebody had stuck in its mouth.
“Maybe if you actually looked at it,” Eve said. “She jogged here in the mornings, about this time, several days a week.”
One of the women, with a very small, round-headed child strapped to her front, leaned closer. Eve had to force herself not to lean back as the kid waved arms and legs like a human metronome.
“I’ve been here nearly every Monday and Wednesday morning since May. I haven’t noticed her. What did she do?” She lifted her head with an avid, fearful look. “This part of the park’s supposed to be a safe zone, at least in the daytime.”
“She didn’t do anything. Anyone else? She might have jogged here more habitually earlier in the spring. March, April?”
More head shakes, but Eve noticed one of the women taking a harder look.
“You’ve seen her?”
“I’m not sure. I think maybe. But it wasn’t in the park. I don’t think.”
“Around the neighborhood,” Eve prompted, “in a store, on the street. Maybe more than once, if she looks familiar. Or maybe you talked to her.” She glanced at the two kids riding tandem in the cart. “She liked kids. Take another look.”
“I think . . . Yes. Sure. She’s the one who helped me out.”
“Helped you out?”
“I had all these errands. The woman I work for, sometimes she doesn’t remember I’ve only got two hands, you know? I had both boys, little Max and Sterling. Sterling’s a handful by himself. And I had to pick up a dress for her, and the marketing, and she wanted flowers. Lilies. So I’m loading, and all of a sudden Sterling’s screaming like I stabbed him in the ear.”
