The In Death Collection 06-10

by J. D. Robb

  “Rudy?” She slurred the word, keeping her eyes closed but turning her face toward the sound of his voice. “Rudy, what happened? What happened? Where were you?”

  “I’m right here now.” A tear trickled down his cheek. “I’ll be right here.”

  “Simon, he’s hurting me. I can’t move.”

  “He’s gone. You’re safe.”

  “Piper.” Eve could read the panic under the sheen of medication in her eyes when she blinked them open. “Do you remember me?”

  “The police. The lieutenant. You wanted me to say bad things about Rudy.”

  “No, I just want you to tell me the truth. Rudy’s right here. He’s going to stay right here while you talk to me. Tell me what happened to you. Tell me about Simon.”

  “Simon.” The lights on the monitors scrambled. “Where is he?”

  “He’s not here. He can’t hurt you now.” Gently, Eve took the hand Piper waved as if to ward off a blow. “No one’s going to hurt you. I’m going to keep him very far away from you, but you have to help me. You have to tell me what he did.”

  “He came to the door.” Her eyes closed, and Eve could see the rapid movement behind the delicate lids. “Happy to see him. I had his Christmas gift, and he had a big silver box. A present. I thought, Simon’s brought a present for me, and for Rudy. I said, Rudy’s not here. He knew—No, you’re all alone, alone with me. He smiled at me and he—he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Dizzy,” she murmured. “I was so dizzy, and I couldn’t see very well. Have to lie down, feel so strange. I hear him, hear him talking to me, but I don’t understand. I can’t move, can’t open my eyes. I can’t think.”

  “Can you remember anything he said then? Anything at all?”

  “I was beautiful. He knew how to make me more beautiful. Something cool on my leg, tickling my thigh, and he’s talking to me. He loves me, only me. True love, he wants me to be his true love. I wasn’t the one, but I could be. The others don’t matter. Only me. He keeps talking, but I can’t answer. All the other loves are dead because they weren’t true. Not pure, not innocent. No!” Abruptly she ripped her hand out of Eve’s and tried to roll aside.

  “It’s all right. You’re safe. I know he hurt you, Piper. I know how much it hurt you, and you were so afraid. But you don’t have to be afraid now.” Firmly now, Eve took her hand. “Look at me, talk to me. I won’t let him hurt you again.”

  “He tied me up.” Tears streamed down her face now. “He tied me up on the bed. He took my clothes. I begged him not to. He was my friend. He dressed up. Horrible. There was a camera and he posed and smiled and told me I’d been a bad girl. His eyes, something was wrong with his eyes. I was screaming, but no one could hear me. Where’s Rudy?”

  “I’m here.” He choked out the words, pressed his lips to her brow, her temple. “I’m here.”

  “He did things to me. He raped me, and it hurt so much. He said I was a whore. Most women were whores, actresses who pretended to be different but were just whores. And most men just used them then left them. I was a whore and he could do whatever he wanted. And he did, he kept hurting me. Rudy, I kept calling for you to make him stop. Make him stop!”

  “Rudy came,” Eve told her. “Rudy came and made him stop.”

  “Rudy came?”

  “Yes, he heard you and he came and he took care of you.”

  “He stopped. Yes, he stopped.” She closed her eyes again. “There was shouting and noise and someone’s crying, very hard. Crying for his mother. I don’t remember any more.”

  “Okay. You did fine.”

  “You’re not going to let him come back?” Her fingers tightened on Eve’s. “You won’t let him find me?”

  “No, I won’t let him come back.”

  “He put stuff on me,” Piper remembered. “He sprayed something all over me.” She bit her lip. “Into me. His body, it’s been waxed. It’s hairless. He has a tattoo on his hip.”

  That was new, Eve mused. He’d had no tattoo in the videos she’d screened. “Do you remember what it looked like?”

  “It said, ‘My True Love.’ He showed it to me, wanted me to look at it. He said it was new, permanent, not a temp. Because he was tired of being temporary to everyone he loved. And I was crying, telling him I’d never hurt him. Then he cried, too. He said he knew, he was sorry. He didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Can you remember anything else?”

  “He said I would always love him, because he’d be my last. And that he’d always remember me, because I’d been his friend.” The glaze had cleared out of her eyes. Now they just seemed weary. “He was going to kill me. He wasn’t Simon anymore, Lieutenant. The man who did this to me, I didn’t know him. He became someone else in that room. And I think it frightened him almost as much as it frightened me.”

  “You don’t have to be frightened now. I promise you.” Stepping back, Eve looked over at Rudy. “Let’s step outside a minute and let the doctor examine your sister.”

  “I’ll be right back.” He pressed his lips to Piper’s knuckles. “I’m just outside the door. I don’t want to leave her,” he said to Eve as soon as the door closed behind them.

  “She’s going to need to talk to someone.”

  “She’s talked enough. She told you everything, for God’s sake—”

  “She’ll need counseling,” Eve interrupted. “She’ll need treatment. Taking her away isn’t going to help her cope. I gave her a card a couple of days ago, one of mine with a name and number on the back. Contact Dr. Mira, Rudy. Let her help your sister.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again and seemed to make an effort to level himself. “You were very kind to her in there, Lieutenant. Very gentle. And hearing her describe what happened to her, I understand why you were neither kind nor gentle with me when you believed I was responsible for . . . what was done to the others. I’m grateful to you.”

  “You can be grateful when I’ve taken him down.” She rocked back on her heels. “You know him pretty well, right?”

  “I thought I did.”

  “Where would he go? Is there a place, a person?”

  “I would have said he’d come to me or Piper. We spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, professionally and personally.” He closed his eyes. “Which explains how he was able to access the match lists. He wouldn’t have been questioned by anyone in the organization. If I had told you that, if I had opened those doors to you freely rather than trying to protect myself and my business, I might have prevented this.”

  “Open them now. Tell me about him, his mother.”

  “She self-terminated. I don’t know if anyone’s aware of that but me.” Absently, Rudy pinched the bridge of his nose. “He broke down one night and told me. She was a troubled woman, mentally unstable. He blamed his father. There was a divorce when Simon was a child and his mother never got over it. She was certain that her husband would come back one day.”

  “Her one true love?”

  “Oh God.” Now he covered his face. “Yes, yes, I suppose. She was an actress, not a particularly successful one, but Simon thought she was marvelous, stunning. He worshipped her. But he was often distressed by her behavior. She would slide into a depression and there were men. She used men to bolster her moods. He was the most tolerant of men, but in this area, he was very close-minded. She was his mother and had no right to give herself sexually. He only spoke about it to me once, shortly after her death when he was lost in grief. She’d hanged herself. He found her Christmas morning.”

  “It’s a perfect fit.” Peabody sat rigidly in the passenger seat as Eve fought through traffic. “He has a mother complex, and he’s replacing her, punishing her, loving her, every time he picks out a victim. The two males either represent his father, or his own dominant sexual preferences.”

  “Thanks for the bulletin,” Eve said dryly, then rapped the wheel with the heel of her hand as she was jammed in once again on all sides. “This fucking Christmas shit! No
wonder hospitals and mental clinics do booming business in December.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve.”

  “I know what the hell day it is, goddamn it.” She jammed the controls into straight vertical, veered sharply to the left, and zipped across the roofs of stopped cars.

  “Uh, the maxibus.”

  “I got eyes.” Eve skimmed past the bus with a stingy inch to spare.

  “That Rapid Cab’s going to—” Peabody braced and shut her eyes as the cab, obviously in the same mood as Eve, shot up out of the line of traffic.

  Eve swore, swerved, skinned bumpers, and hit the siren full blast. “Set it down, you stupid son of a bitch.” She tipped, squeezed over, and dumped her car so that it teetered half on the street, half on the sidewalk in front of a mass of irritated pedestrians.

  She slammed out and stalked toward the cab. The driver slammed out and stalked toward her. Peabody could have told him if he wanted to go nose-to-nose with a cop, he’d picked the wrong one.

  But, she thought, as she climbed out and elbowed through the crowd, maybe kicking a cabbie’s ass would put Eve in a better mood.

  “I signaled. I gotta right to a vertical lift same as you. You didn’t have your lights or siren going, did ya? The city’s gonna pay for that bumper, right? You cops don’t own the road. I ain’t taking the credit dip on the damage here, sister.”

  “Sister?”

  Peabody actually shuddered at the jagged ice in Eve’s tone. Behind Eve’s back she shook her head with pity for the driver and took out her violation coder.

  “Let me tell you something, brother. First thing you do is step back out of my face before I write you up for assault on an officer.”

  “Hey, I never laid hands on—”

  “I said step back. Let’s see how fast you can assume the position.”

  “Jesus, it’s only a skinned bumper.”

  “You want resisting?”

  “No.” Muttering under his breath, he turned, splayed his legs and laid his hands on the roof of his cab. “Man, it’s Christmas Eve. Let’s cut each other a break here. Whaddaya say?”

  “I’d say you’d better learn a little respect for cops.”

  “Lady, my cousin’s a cop with the four-one.”

  Teeth set, Eve whipped out her badge and stuck it in his face. “See that. It says Lieutenant, not sister, not lady. You could ask your cousin the cop with the four-one.”

  “Brinkleman,” he muttered. “Sergeant Brinkleman.”

  “You tell Sergeant Brinkleman with the four-one to contact Dallas, Homicide, Cop Central, and tell her why his cousin’s an asshole. If he explains this factor to my satisfaction, I won’t pull your license and report the fact that you cut an official vehicle off in air traffic. You got that?”

  “Yeah, I got it. Lieutenant.”

  “Now, get the hell out of here.”

  Chastised, the driver slunk back into his vehicle, hunched down, and waited patiently for a break in traffic. Because her temper was still on the boil, Eve spun on her heel and jabbed a finger at Peabody. “And you, you want to ride with me any more today, you yank the stick out of your butt.”

  “Respectfully, Lieutenant, I was unaware of any foreign object in that region.”

  “Your attempt at humor isn’t appreciated at this time, Officer Peabody. If you’re dissatisfied in your position as my aide, you can request reassignment.”

  Peabody’s heart clogged in her throat. “I don’t want reassignment. Sir, I’m not dissatisfied in my position.”

  Barely muffling a scream, Eve pivoted away and plowed through the pedestrian traffic, earned a few bruises and rude comments, then plowed back. “You keep it up. You keep using that academy tone on me, we’re going a few rounds.”

  “You just threatened to ditch me.”

  “I did not. I offered you the option of assignment elsewhere.”

  Peabody’s voice wavered, so she clamped down. “I felt, and still feel, that you overstepped the boundaries last night in reference to my relationship with Charles Monroe.”

  “Yeah, you made that clear.”

  “It was inappropriate for my superior officer to criticize my choice of escort. It was a personal matter, and—”

  “Goddamn right it was personal.” Eve’s eyes went dark, but not, Peabody noted with shock, in anger. There was hurt. “I wasn’t speaking as your superior officer last night. I never considered myself addressing my aide. I thought I was talking to a friend.”

  Shame washed up from Peabody’s toes to the top of her head. “Dallas—”

  “A friend,” she barreled on, “who was sloppy-eyed over an LC. An LC who was a suspect in an ongoing investigation.”

  “But Charles—”

  “Low on the list,” Eve snapped, “but still on it, as he’d been matched with one victim and with one of the attempts.”

  “You never believed Charles was the killer.”

  “No, I believed it was Rudy, and I was wrong. I could have been wrong about Charles Monroe, too.” And the possibility clawed at her. “Take the vehicle back to Central. Update Captain Feeney and Commander Whitney on the latest data regarding our current case. Advise them that I remain in the field.”

  “But—”

  “Take the fucking vehicle into Central,” Eve snapped. “That’s an order from a superior officer to her aide.” She turned and pushed her way through the crowd. This time she didn’t come back.

  “Oh shit.” Peabody slumped down on the hood of the car, ignoring the bad-tempered horns, the blast of insidious holiday music pouring out of the storefront on the other side of the packed sidewalk. “Peabody, you’re an idiot.”

  She sniffed, reached into her pocket for her handkerchief, then remembered Eve hadn’t given it back. Swiping the back of her hand under nose, she climbed into the car and prepared to follow orders.

  By the time Eve reached the corner at Forty-first, she’d blown off enough steam to realize she wasn’t going to walk another thirty blocks to the lab to pick on Dickie.

  One glance at the jammed humanity crammed onto the overhead people glides convinced her she wasn’t about to go that route, either.

  A new wave of pedestrians caught her full in the back and swept her another half block before she could manage to dig in and shove her way clear. She choked on the steam of a glide-cart doing a brisk business on grilled soy dogs, blinked the resulting tears out of her eyes, and dug for her badge.

  She clawed her way out to the curb, risked life and limb by stepping directly into the path of an oncoming cab, then slapped her badge on the windshield.

  Climbing in, she tried to rub the stress of the last few minutes off her face, then dropped her hands into her lap and met the driver’s miserable eyes in the mirror.

  Recognizing Detective Brinkleman from the four-one’s cousin, she let out one short bark of laughter. “It just figures, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s been a crap day altogether,” he muttered.

  “I hate Christmas.”

  “I ain’t too fond of it myself right at the moment.”

  “Get me down to Eighteenth. I’ll take it from there.”

  “You could walk quicker.”

  She took another look at the teeming sidewalk. “Go over and punch it. You get tagged, I’ll handle it with Traffic.”

  “You’re the boss, Lieutenant.”

  He took off like a lightning bolt, and Eve closed her eyes, admitting that the headache scrambling in her temples wasn’t going to vacate the premises without a chemical shove.

  “You going to get grief over the bumper?” she asked him.

  “The way these units get banged around? Nah.” He angled over the corner at Eighteenth. “I shouldn’t oughta’ve disrespected you, Lieutenant. This holiday traffic, it can turn you mean.”

  “Yeah.” She dug out credits, slipped them through his pay slot. “We’ll call it even.”

  “Appreciate it. Anyway, Merry freaking Christmas.”

  Her laugh was a li
ttle looser as she got out. “Same to you.”

  Pedestrian traffic was light in the sector that held crime labs and morgues and holding stations. Not a hell of a lot to buy, she mused as she jogged the half block over.

  She turned into the ugly steel building that had been some idiot architect’s vision of high-tech economy, crossed the soulless lobby, and went through the security arch.

  The droid on duty nodded to her as she slapped her palm on the plate, recited her name, rank, code, and destination. Cleared, she took the glide down, and frowned when she saw the hallways and offices empty. Middle of the afternoon, middle of the week, she thought. Where the hell was everybody?

  She cleared herself into the lab. And found a hell of a party going on.

  Music blasted over wild laughter. Someone shoved a cup with a suspicious green fluid swimming inside it into her hand. A woman wearing nothing but a lab coat and microgoggles danced by. Eve managed to snag the sleeve of the coat and spin her back.

  “Where’s Dickie?”

  “Oh, around and about. I gotta get me a refill.”

  “Here.” Eve shoved the cup into her hand and worked her way through bodies and equipment. She spotted Dickie sitting on top of a sample table with his hand well up a drunk technician’s skirt.

  At least Eve assumed the tech was drunk. How else could she let those spidery fingers between her legs?

  “Hey, Dallas, join the party. Not as classy as your little get-together, but we try.”

  “Where the hell are my reports? Where are my results? What the fuck’s going on around here?”

  “Hey, it’s Christmas Eve. Lighten up.”

  Her hand snapped out, grabbed him by the shirtfront, and yanked him off the table. “I’ve got four bodies and a woman in the hospital. Don’t you fucking tell me to lighten up, you little cross-eyed son of a bitch. I want my test results.”

  “Lab closes two o’clock Christmas Eve.” He tried to shove her hand away, but didn’t budge it. “That’s official. It’s after three, hotshot.”

  “For Christ’s sake, he’s out there. Did you see what he did to those people? Do you want me to show you the goddamn videos he took while he was doing it? You want to wake up tomorrow morning and find out he did it again because you couldn’t do the job? Can you swallow your Christmas goose over that?”