by J. D. Robb
“Did you know Bryna Bankhead?”
“No.”
“Picture Peabody.” Eve took the ID photo Peabody took from her file bag, held it out. “Recognize her?”
Louise drank coffee with one hand, dragged her other through her hair as she frowned at the image. A stethoscope and a red lollipop peeked out of her lab coat pocket. “Yes. I’d ridden in the elevator with her now and again, seen her in the local markets where I shop. I suppose I might have spoken to her, the way you do with neighbors you don’t have time to know. Was she murdered?”
“Yeah.” Eve held out a copy of the suspect’s image. “Recognize him?”
“No.” Louise set down her coffee, took the photo for a closer look. “No, I’ve never seen him before. He killed her? Why?”
Eve handed the photos back to Peabody. “You ever treat anybody for sex-inducement drugs? Whore, Rabbit?”
“Yes. In my ER rotation we’d have somebody coming down off Rabbit a few times a month. Mostly Rabbit clones, or Exotica/Zeus combo, because the real’s so pricey. I never dealt with Whore, don’t know anybody who has. You study it, and its derivatives in illegals training, but it’s on the inactive list.”
“Not anymore.”
“Is that what he did to her? Doped her with Whore? Whore and Rabbit. Jesus Christ.” She rubbed her hands over her face. “Mixed with alcohol, I take it. Why didn’t he just blast her brains out with a laser?”
“Maybe you could poke around, ask some of your doctor friends if they’ve seen any re-emergence of Whore.”
“I can do that. You know, a man had to come up with the street name for that crap. You know how it started?”
“No, how?”
“As an experimental treatment for phobias and conditions like social anxiety disorder. It was a little too good at it.”
“Meaning?”
“It also had an affect on the hormones. It was discovered that it worked more effectively as an aid in sexual disorders. In diluted and carefully monitored doses, it could and did enhance sexual desire and function. From there, it went into use as an aide for training licensed companions. Though nonaddictive, it was soon found to be dangerously unstable. Which, naturally, meant it became desirable on the street, particularly among your more well-heeled college boys and junior execs who would slip a dose into their dream girl’s drink to loosen her up.” She washed the rising rage back down her throat with coffee.
“That’s how it got its name,” she continued, “as mixed with alcohol it tends to loosen the system up enough so the ingestor would be amenable to being fucked naked on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. The ingestor wouldn’t necessarily have the motor coordination left to actively participate, and would unlikely remember doing so, but she’d be damn amenable to suggestion.”
“Add Rabbit?”
“Oh, she’d participate with the entire U.S. Marine Corps, until she passed out cold, until her heart rate went off the charts and her brain-wave pattern flattened.”
“A doctor would know that,” Eve prompted. “A chemist, pharmacist, nurse, med tech, anyone with a working knowledge of pharmaceuticals would know the combination was fatal?”
“Yeah, anyone should. Unless he or she is a moron, or just didn’t give a shit as long as it was fun while it lasted.”
“Okay, ask around. If anything strikes you, get in touch.”
“You can bank on it.”
“You did a nice job around here,” Eve added.
“We like to think so.” Louise finished off the coffee, two-pointed the cup in the recycle bin. “Your three million went a long way.”
“Three million?”
“I was ready to dive into the half million we agreed on. Didn’t expect the bonus.”
“When. . .” Eve ran her tongue around her teeth. “When did I give you the bonus?”
Louise opened her mouth, closed it again. Smiled. “Now why do I think you don’t have a clue?”
“Refresh me, Louise. When did I give you three million dollars?”
“Never. But your rep did, late February.”
“And my rep would be?”
“Some slick suit named Treacle, of Montblanc, Cissler and Treacle. Issued in two installments—the half mil as agreed, and another two point five if I contracted to donate my services to Dochas, a newly established abuse center for women and children on the Lower East Side. Dochas,” she said, still smiling, “is, I’m told, Gaelic for hope.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. You’ve got a hell of a man there, Dallas. You ever get tired of him, I’ll take him off your hands.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You gave her the money for all that?” Peabody demanded as she hustled out after Eve.
“No, I didn’t give her the money because it’s not my money, is it? It’s Roarke’s money. I’m a cop, goddamn it. A cop doesn’t have space stations full of money to make grand gestures with.”
“Yeah, but still. Does that piss you off?”
Eve stopped on the sidewalk, took a long breath. “I don’t know if it pisses me off.” But she kicked the base of a street lamp just in case she was. “He could tell me about this stuff, couldn’t he? He could keep me in the loop so I wouldn’t go into this sort of situation and come out feeling like an idiot.”
Peabody looked back at the clinic, her soft heart going to goo stage. “I think it was a beautiful gesture.”
“Don’t contradict me, Peabody. Do you forget I am the supreme bitch cop?”
“No, sir. And as your vehicle is in the same spot and the same condition as you left it, the neighborhood didn’t forget that either.”
“Too bad.” A bit wistful, she looked around. “I’d’ve enjoyed busting some ass.”
Back at Central, Eve snagged a candy bar in lieu of lunch, brooded, called up data on the chemicals pertinent to the Bankhead homicide, brooded some more, then called to harass McNab.
“I want an address.”
“Would you settle for twenty-three of them?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Look, I’m going to snag a conference room, your office is a box. Your level,” he said, working a keyboard to his left manually as he spoke. “Ah . . . Room 426. I’m using your name to finesse it.”
“McNab—”
“Easier, quicker to explain this face-to-face. Give me five.”
He broke transmission on her snarl, which gave her no choice but to finish her snarl at Peabody. “Conference room 426. Now,” she ordered.
She stormed out of her office, through the detective’s bullpen where the kill lights in her eyes discouraged any of her associates from speaking to her. By the time she shoved into the conference room she’d worked up a fine head of steam and only required a handy target to spew it on.
To his misfortune, Feeney strolled in first.
“What the hell kind of division are you running up there?” she demanded. “McNab’s giving me orders now? Hanging up on me? Booking rooms in my name on his own initiative, and . . . and refusing to give me data when ordered.”
“Hold on now, Dallas. I’m an innocent bystander.”
“Too bad, ’cause they’re the ones who usually end up bloody.”
With a little shrug, Feeney rattled the bag of nuts weighing down his pocket. “All I know is the kid tagged me, asked me to swing by here so he could fill us both in at once.”
“I’m primary on this case. EDD was requested to assist and consult. I have not yet formed a task force in this matter, nor have I been authorized by the commander to do so. Until I say different McNab’s a drone and nothing more.”
Feeney stopped rattling the bag, angled his head. “That go for me, too? Lieutenant?”
“Your rank doesn’t mean dick when I’m primary. If you can’t teach your subordinates proper pecking order and procedure, then maybe your rank doesn’t mean dick in your own division.”
He stepped in until the tips of his shoes bumped her boots, lean
ed in until the tip of his nose bumped hers. “Don’t you tell me how to run my division. I trained your ass and I can still kick it, so don’t you start thinking you can tear a strip off mine.”
“Back off.”
“Fuck that. Fuck that, Dallas. You got a problem with my command style, you spit it out. Chapter and verse.”
Something in her head wanted to explode. Why hadn’t she felt it? Something in her heart was screaming. But she hadn’t heard it. So it was she who backed off, one cautious step. “He drugged her with Whore and Rabbit. He covered the bed with rose petals and fucked her on them until she died. Then he tossed her out the window so she lay broken and naked on the sidewalk.”
“Oh Jesus.” Pity edged his voice.
“I guess it’s been stuck in my throat since Morris told me. I’m sorry I slapped at you.”
“Forget it. Sometimes you catch one that hits you harder than others. You gotta slap at somebody.”
“I’ve got his face, I’ve got his DNA, I’ve got his transmissions. I know the table in the club where he fed her the first of the Whore in drinks that she paid for with her own debit card. But I don’t have him.”
“You will.” He turned as Peabody strode in a step in front of McNab. Both of them had flushed faces. “Detective, did you request permission from the primary to convene in this room?”
McNab blinked. “I needed to—”
“Answer the question.”
“Not exactly. Captain.” He didn’t need to see Peabody smirk to know she did. “I apologize for overstepping, Lieutenant Dallas. I believe the information I have to, ah, impart, is important to the investigation and is better served in person than interoffice transmissions.”
The dull flush burning up his throat was enough to satisfy her. “Then impart it, McNab.”
“Yes, sir.” It was difficult to look stiff and cold while wearing cherry red trousers and a skin-tight sweater the color of daffodils. But he nearly managed it. “In tracing the suspect’s account from the fraudulent source location, I was able to ascertain the name used to register the account. It purports to be a business called La Belle Dame.”
“Purports to be,” Eve said.
“Yes, sir. There is no firm or organization by that name doing business in the state of New York. The address given for the company is, in fact, Grand Central Station.”
“And I’m to be excited about this because . . . ?”
“Well, I kept separating layers and hit on sources for the actual transmissions. The locations they were sent out from. So far, I’ve hit twenty-three spots. All public cyber-cafés and clubs, in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. So far,” he repeated. “He moves around, sends and receives from ports in public venues. The only e-mail sent or received from that screen address was to and from Bryna Bankhead.”
“He created it for her,” Eve murmured.
“The umbrella account could have other screen names,” McNab went on. “I haven’t been able to break through the blocks. Yet. Whoever created the account knows his cyber-shit. I mean, he’s good, and he’s careful.”
“Her best friend didn’t recognize him. So far none of the door-to-doors on the building have turned up any neighbors who recognized him.” Eve paced. “If Bankhead didn’t know him, if he wasn’t seen in or around her building before the night of the murder, then we have to assume he targeted her from the chat room.”
“He knew where she worked,” Peabody put in.
“But she didn’t make him, and neither did her friend who works the same department. So he’s maybe a casual customer. If he was a regular or an employee who spent any time in their department, they’d have noticed. You still notice guys who hang out where they sell women’s underwear. But we’ll run his picture through their human resources division.
“So he uses public venues. He either likes to socialize or he’s hiding in plain sight. Maybe both. We circulate his picture at the cyber-spots.”
“Lieutenant?” McNab wagged his fingers. “Do you know how many cyber-venues there are in New York?”
“No, and I don’t want to know. But you can start counting them off as you visit them.” She looked at Feeney. “You in if Whitney authorizes?”
“I’d say we’re already in.”
“Generate a list,” she told McNab. “We’ll split it up, work in pairs for now.” She gave a soft sigh. “McNab and Feeney are the experts in this area. I’m only going to ask this once, in this room. Does anyone here have a problem working with anyone else on this team?”
McNab stared at the ceiling as if fascinated by the dull white tone of the paint. Peabody simply frowned at her shoes.
“I take that as a no. Peabody, you’re with McNab; Feeney, you’re with me. Start on the West Side; we’ll take the East. We’ll do as many venues as possible until. . .” She checked her wrist unit, calculated. “Twenty-one hundred. We’ll meet at my home office tomorrow, oh eight hundred for a full briefing. Feeney, let’s pitch this to Whitney.”
Feeney strolled out after her, whistling. “You could’ve split us up another way.”
“Yeah.” She glanced back down the corridor and hoped she wasn’t making a mistake. “But I’m thinking this way maybe the two of them will duke it out and we can all get back to normal.”
He considered that as they hopped on a glide. “I got twenty on Peabody.”
“Shit.” She jammed her hands in her pockets. “Okay, but if I’ve got to lay down on McNab’s bony ass, I want odds. Three to five.”
“Done.”
Back in the conference room, Peabody and McNab sat just as they were.
“I’ve got no problem working with you,” McNab said.
“Why should you? I haven’t got one working with you either.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
They stared, ceiling and shoes, for another twenty seconds. McNab broke first. “You’re the one who’s been avoiding me anyway.”
“I have not. Why should I? We are so over.”
“Who said anything different?” And it burned him that she could say it, just that coolly, when he thought about her all the time.
“And you wouldn’t think I’d been avoiding you if you hadn’t been trying to get my attention.”
“Shit. For what? I’m a busy boy, She-Body. Too busy to worry about some stiff-necked uniform who spends her off-time playing with LCs.”
“You leave Charles out of this.” She leaped to her feet, rage boiling in her blood. And a new little tear in her heart.
“Me, I don’t have to hunt up pros. I got all the amateurs I can handle.” He kicked out his legs, worked up a sneer. “But that’s neither here nor there, right? We got the job, and that’s it. If you can handle it.”
“I can handle anything you can. More.”
“Fine. I’ll put the list together, and we’ll get started.”
Chapter 4
“You don’t have his face.”
Eve scowled at Dickie Berenski, the chief lab tech. He might have had a smarmy smile, an attitude that had earned him the not-so-affectionate nickname of Dickhead and a personality defect that deluded him into thinking of himself as a ladies’ man, but he was a genius in his little world of fibers, fluids, and follicles.
“You called me out of the field to tell me I don’t have his face?”
“Figured you’d want to know.” Dickie pushed himself away from the station, sent his chair spinning toward another monitor. His spidery fingers danced over a keyboard. “See that there?”
Eve studied the color-washed image on monitor. “It’s a hair.”
“Give the lady a prize. But what kinda hair, you might ask, and I’m here to tell you. This didn’t come out of your perp’s head, it didn’t come out of your victim’s head, or any other area of their bodies. Came out of a wig. Expensive, human hair wig.”
“Can you track it down?”
“Working on it.” He scooted his chair to yet another post. “Know what this is?”
There were colored shapes and circles and formulas on the monitor. Eve blew out a breath. She hated the guessing games, but knew her job when it came to Dickie. “No, Dickie, why don’t you tell me what it is?”
“It’s makeup, Dallas. Base cream number 905/4. Traces of it found on the bed linens. And it don’t match what was on the dead girl. Got more.” He switched the image. “We got here traces of face putty. Stuff people use to give ’em more chin or cheekbone, whatever, if they don’t want to go for permanent face sculpting and shit.”
“And she wasn’t using any face putty.”
“Another prize for the little lady! Guy was wearing a wig, face putty, makeup. You don’t have his face.”
“Well, this is just wonderful news, Dickie. You got any more?”
“Got a couple of his pubic hairs. The real thing—medium brown. Be able to give you more on him from that before we’re finished. Got his fingerprints on the wineglasses, on the bottle, on the body, balcony doors, and rail. And here and there. You find him, we’ll box him up real pretty.”
“Send me what you’ve got. Track down those brand names. I want that data by morning.”
“Hey!” he shouted as she strode out. “You could say thanks.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Goddamn it.”
She let it play through her head all the way home, trying to see what kind of man lived inside her killer. She was afraid she did see. He was smart—smart enough to change his appearance so the security cameras and Bryna Bankhead wouldn’t identify him. But he hadn’t taken her out, or gone back to her apartment with the idea of killing her. Eve was sure of it.
He’d gone to seduce her.
But things had gotten out of hand, she mused, and he’d found himself with a dead woman on his rose petals. He’d reacted, panicked or angry, and had tossed her. Panicked rang with her. It hadn’t been temper on his face when he’d come out of the apartment.
He had money, or access to it. After more than a year with Roarke she knew the signs. She’d recognized the exclusive cut of the killer’s suit, even the pricey gleam of his shoes.
But he’d let Bryna pay for the drinks. A two for one, Eve thought. No paper trail, and a boost to his ego by having the woman pay for him.
