Beauty & the Beast

by Nancy Holder

  “I can see why Rourke nixed the helicopter and the watercraft,” Cat said wanly. “We need to figure out how to play this. Let’s assume that if we’re right, and someone on board the ship is looking for the chip, they’re an underling working for someone higher up.”

  “Right.” Vincent raised his chin and frowned slightly.

  She swallowed down deep terror. “If that person broke into our apartment in New York, and not Ravi…” She started to lose it. “If they were following Ravi, and Ravi was trying to get to the jacket because Heather was wearing it…” Her hands shook. “If we let them know that we have the chip, their operative will try to collect and we can buy Heather some time.”

  “Catherine,” Vincent said, but she held up her hand. She refused to consider that Heather was dead.

  She said, “If they’re monitoring the ship, if they’ve planted bugs… or if they have someone on the payroll on the bridge, maybe even the captain… if I call Tess and tell her we have it, maybe the head of their operation will hear. They’ll know.”

  “Catherine,” he repeated.

  “I know it’s risky. But if they don’t know you’re a beast, they won’t know what they’re up against.” She gazed up at him. But he wasn’t looking at her. His faraway look and alert stance told her that he was sensing something that she could not.

  “I smell a dead body,” he informed her. “And smoke. Lots of smoke.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “JT,” Tess said, as she picked up. She was moving through Cat and Vincent’s apartment with an ear cocked for CSU’s field test results on the blood type on the couch. They had already confirmed the presence of bullets and bone and brain tissue. Whoever had been shot on the couch, the bullets had passed clean through the skull. The room was filling with people. They had detectives from the sixth precinct here now. She was the captain of the 125th, and on top of that, she knew the potential vic. She should stand down.

  No way.

  She had searched through Heather’s things for more clues as to what might have happened, and to whom. Because this could not be Heather smeared all over the couch. It could not. Heather’s cell phone was missing, and there were no recent emails between Cat and Heather about anything. Like most people nowadays, they texted. There was no way for her to reconstruct what had happened here.

  Yet.

  “Oh, my God, it’s been so crazy,” JT said on the other end of the line. “So there was this old guy. Do you know what Firefly is? Firefly, how wild is that? I mean, no one knows what Firefly is.”

  “JT,” she said again, her voice gravelly and tight.

  “But I know where Mochi is! Or at least, I have a decent lead. I have to wait until morning. But uh, well, I’m not sure what to do. There were these street kids and…” He paused. “Tess? Are you there? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m at Cat and Vincent’s.” She told him why, running it down clearly, concisely. Now that she had walked through it with Cat, she could keep her feelings out of it. Sort of.

  “So there’s no body,” she concluded. “I don’t know what I’m looking at, exactly. But I know what I’m seeing.”

  Death.

  “Tess,” JT said after a long silence, as if her name was his mantra. “I’m on my way.”

  She was moved. There had been a time—a long time— when he would not have thought to rush to her side when things went south. He had not put her first. Now he was.

  “Stay there,” she said gently. “This is a crime scene now, and I may need to move fast. Wait until—”

  Tess’s heart stuttered as the CSU tech glanced up from the microscope Tess had told them to bring. “Results in. Type O, Captain,” the tech announced. Tess sagged with relief.

  “It’s not Heather’s blood,” Tess told JT.

  “Thank God,” JT breathed. “Tess, what the hell—”

  “Captain Vargas, there may be linkage between this and the jumper.” That was Detective Kelly Goss. When the woman could see that Tess wasn’t following, she said, “We had a jumper off the roof of this building earlier this week.”

  “What?” Tess’s adrenaline spiked. “JT, gotta go.”

  “Wait, Tess, please,” JT said.

  Tess cut the call and put her phone in the pocket of her jacket. “What jumper?” she asked Goss.

  “A John Doe,” Goss said. “Assumed to be a suicide, so low priority.”

  “John. You’re sure it was a John.” That the victim had been male, in other words.

  “Yes. There were a couple of bad jokes about only being able to tell from the waist down. On account of no… well, other head,” Goss replied.

  “No head?”

  “Well, there were parts of a head. It’s a long way down.”

  “No ID? Prints?” Tess asked. It was incredible to her that she had not heard about this, but really, why should she have? If Heather had already been abducted—that’s how I’m going to see this, she decided—and Cat and Vincent were gone, it would be a miracle if a suicide in precinct six caught any interest from anyone in the one-two-five.

  “I’m not working it,” Goss said, “but nothing popped when prints were run through IAFIS. We used the NYPD database, too. And nothing.”

  “Do you still have the body?”

  “I’m sure we do. We’re backed up and again, this looks like a straightforward suicide. The shoes were on the roof ledge. You know that’s an MO for a jumper.”

  Or a cover-up for a homicide.

  “Do you know any other details? Missing person reports? Was this apartment canvassed?” Did anyone answer the door? If so, who?

  “I don’t know, Captain.”

  “Kelly, footprint,” the other detective called. Tess walked around the bloodstained couch with the detective. “A partial.”

  Tess bent over with Detective Goss. It appeared to belong to a woman’s heeled boot, judging by the shape and size. And she was pretty sure it was bigger than either Cat’s or Heather’s.

  “Hold on,” she said, and went into Cat’s bedroom. She retrieved a heeled boot and then went into Heather’s old room, where a suitcase lay open. Heather was working for a temporary agency, which meant packing a number of different styles of outfits for various jobs. There were no boots, but she did have some heels. Tess selected a sampling and carried all of them back to the two detectives and the photographer, who was snapping pictures of the partial.

  She gave each detective a shoe. As she had anticipated, Cat’s boot and Heather’s high heel were smaller than the partial. So another woman had been in the apartment during or after the shooting.

  “I don’t think you caught a suicide,” Tess said. “I think it was a homicide.” She ran down a mental list of precinct captains. “Is Devon Frost still your boss?”

  Goss nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I need his home phone number.”

  Goss gave it to her. Tess placed the call. It was late but Frost picked up on the second ring, just as she would.

  “Captain Frost, Captain Vargas, one-two-five,” she said, and ran it down. Then she said, “This is personal. This is the apartment of one of my detectives, Catherine Chandler. She’s on a cruise with her husband, and I’ve notified them. But her sister was housesitting, and she’s missing.”

  “And you think the body we scraped up off the street was a guy named Ravi Suresh.”

  “I don’t know. Suresh has no prints on file but we can get them at his apartment. He works at Chrysalis. If you can get us a warrant—”

  “Of course. Let me call the judge. I’ll call you as soon as the warrant’s issued. Is Goss there? I’ll send you with her. She’s good. Has a little sister, too.”

  Heather is like my little sister. Again, tears threatened her professionalism. I’ve got to stop being so emotional.

  “Detective Goss,” Tess said, and put the detective on. Goss listened, slid her glance toward Tess, and nodded at her.

  “Yes, sir,” Goss finished, and hung up. “Captain Vargas,
Chrysalis is close and we don’t have Ravi Suresh’s home address yet. My captain is calling the warrant in for Chrysalis. Let’s take my car. If Suresh has any kind of security clearance— and we both know he must—he’ll have prints on file there. We can get them.” As Tess began to object, the detective raised a hand. “We can get his home address at Chrysalis too.”

  Tess said, “As soon as we have the address, Captain Frost will send detectives to his apartment?”

  Goss shrugged apologetically. “Or you and me. The sixth is on a big case—another big case,” she corrected herself. “So we’re a little short on extra hands. But by the time Captain Frost calls with the warrant, we can be halfway to Chrysalis.”

  “We’ll be at the front door if you let me drive,” Tess said.

  Goss inclined her head and fished the keys out of her pocket. She explained the situation to her partner, a guy with a haircut close to non-regulation, who replied, “Happy hunting. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “Likewise, Steinberg,” Goss replied.

  On the way out of the apartment, Tess remembered to explain the situation to her own partner. She called JT and told him about the jumper.

  “Sit tight,” she told him. “Go look up everything you can find about Ravi Suresh and Chrysalis. I think he was the murder victim. See if you can connect him to anything. If there’s a woman in the story somewhere. I mean a woman besides Heather.”

  “You want me to go look up everything,” JT repeated. “On my computer. At my place.”

  Tess furrowed her brow. “That’s where you can hack into the…” Good stuff, she was about to say, but Goss had just caught up to her. “Call me if you find anything.”

  “Okay, remember how I was talking about the street kids?” JT said.

  Goss handed her the keys and they got into the elevator. “This call is probably going to get cut off,” Tess told JT. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” JT said quickly. “I’m just fine. No worries. I’ll go do my Robin thing.”

  “Good.” Tess hung up.

  We make a good team, she thought. Before she realized what she was doing, she pressed a protective hand over her abdomen.

  She asked Goss, “Do you have any kids?”

  Goss stared at her in horror. “Perish the thought.” Then she twisted her face into an apology. “I’m sorry. Do you?”

  “Not so much.” Tess shifted. “I mean, we’re dog-sitting and it’s like having a kid.”

  “Except dogs don’t need braces and prom dresses and college tuition. Dogs don’t post pictures of you asleep on the couch with drool on your chin all over social media.”

  Yikes.

  The elevator went down and Tess noted the assemblage of police vehicles. No press yet. She hated the idea of more publicity for Cat and Vincent. In his first attempt to rejoin society after eleven years in hiding, Vincent had been paraded in the media as a war hero with amnesia. Then the late, not-lamented Assistant District Attorney and former beast Gabe Lowan had manipulated the press to get Vincent labeled as a homicidal “vigilante” whom every red-blooded New Yorker tried to track down. After that, Liam, the ancient beast responsible for the death of Cat’s ancestor Rebecca and the beast Rebecca had loved, attempted to frame Vincent for his own crimes. They had kept that one out of the limelight, but only barely. Through it all, Tess had lied and covered up and would again for her two friends, but she was sick of it all. Sick to death of how many innocents were harmed from the fallout caused by her own government’s failed program to create super-soldiers. She included Cat and Vincent in that endless chain of near-demonic cause and tragic effect.

  Suresh wasn’t a link in that same chain, but if he had been killed because of some high-tech program, it was more of the same. And Heather, that most innocent of souls…

  Do not let Heather be dead.

  “Here, Captain,” Detective Goss said, indicating their ride, a nondescript sedan. They climbed in, Tess behind the wheel. The city was ablaze with lights and traffic. A couple strolled down the sidewalk arm in arm. The woman was carrying a bouquet of roses and she playfully bopped the man on the head with it. Tess gave one moment of mourning for Cat’s aborted honeymoon before she put on her game face.

  Goss’s warrant came in.

  “Good to go.” Goss couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice and seemed to know it, as she became more subdued and added, “I know this is very personal, Captain Vargas. I’ll do everything in my power to clear this case.”

  It’s not a case, it’s Heather, Tess thought, and a queasy roll of anxiety rumbled through her abdomen. Queasiness, or morning sickness?

  She nodded at the woman. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve followed your career. I know you believe in adhering to procedure, same as I do,” Goss went on. “Step by step, orderly procedure. Covering our bases as we go. That’s why you had such a high clearance rate.”

  Is she reassuring me or warning me? Tess wondered. She replied, “You must know that my clearance rate took a huge dip for quite some time.”

  The detective hesitated, then said, “Permission to speak freely?”

  What, are we on Star Trek? Tess thought. She nodded. “Please.”

  “Well, isn’t that because you were partnered with Detective Chandler?”

  Stunned, Tess pulled in her chin as she looked over at Goss. “Really? That’s what people think?”

  Goss nodded.

  “But the years when my clearance rate was the highest were the same years when I was partnered with Detective Chandler.”

  Goss shifted in her seat. “Well, ma’am, the belief is that you did the work, and that you got it done in spite of her, not because of her. After all, she got called into IA at least twice.” She grimaced. “This conversation has turned sideways, and I’m sorry about that, Captain. I know she’s your best friend and this is not the right time to have this discussion.”

  Tess looked at her hard. “I don’t think there will be a right time to have this discussion.” She felt bad for Cat. If her fellow cops believed that Tess had carried her for all those years…

  Maybe I did carry her later, when she was trying to protect Vincent. And I did put in for a new partner when I caught her destroying evidence. All that is trailing after her, Tess thought. She’s done stellar work since then, but a lot of it has been under the radar, for Homeland Security and ridding the world of Liam. But she’ll never get credit for it.

  “I overstepped.” Goss had gone a little pale. “I-I didn’t realize you hadn’t heard all this before.”

  Concentrate on the case, she thought. On Heather.

  “Let’s move on,” Tess said.

  Goss inclined her head. “Gladly.”

  “You realize we may be looking at a kidnapping in addition to a homicide,” Tess ventured. The detective’s lips parted but she said nothing, only nodded—reluctantly. The bead Tess drew was not comforting. I think she’s going to get in my way. I may have to peel off from her.

  It took twenty minutes and forever to arrive at Chrysalis, a towering octagonal structure illuminated with blue and purple lights. Badges got them into the private executive lot adjacent to the building, and into an elevator leading to the twenty-seventh floor, where Ravi Suresh’s laboratory was located.

  “Dude has a lab, wow,” Detective Goss said. As they got out of the elevator, they flashed their warrant at a very nervous security guard, who understood that he had to let them in, but started punching in numbers on his station console phone right away.

  Suresh’s office and lab were both listed in the warrant. They had to call the guard over to unlock his office door. Tess braced herself for an argument, but there was no pushback. Then as the door was opened, she half-expected a toss, but it was pristine. A well-padded leather chair sat behind a mahogany desk covered with as many computers and monitors as JT’s desk, only these were smaller and sleeker. The far wall was a curtain of glass that looked out over the city.

  “I’ll call in for some
IT support,” Goss said, taking out her cell phone.

  We don’t have time. We so don’t have time, Tess thought but did not say. “Good idea.” She did a visual scan of the desk for a plain old-fashioned notepad, a pile of receipts; something that could lead to additional warrants covering cell phone calls, credit card charges, anything that could create a trail. She felt like a runner waiting for the starting gun.

  Then she saw that the top drawer to the desk was pulled slightly open. And inside lay the unmistakable shape of the lower third of a smartphone.

  “I’m having trouble catching a signal,” Goss said. She indicated the wall of glass. “I’ll try over there.”

  The second Goss’s back was turned, Tess darted her hand into the drawer and plucked up the cell phone. She glanced at Goss, who was facing the glass. Could she see Tess’s reflection? She put her back to Goss and dropped the phone into her jacket pocket.

  “It’s Goss,” the detective said into her phone. “Yeah, I’m at Chrysalis, on my warrant. There’s a whole lotta sci-fi stuff here and… yeah, exactly. Do you think it’ll hold up? Okay, good. Yeah, we’ll be here.”

  She hung up and turned to Tess. “Captain Frost is checking with the judge to make sure our warrant covers the computers.”

  Tess stared at her in disbelief. “Of course it does.” Unless they didn’t word it correctly. “May I read it?” she asked in a calmer tone.

  Goss tapped her phone face and held it out to Tess. An attachment had opened. “Here, Captain.”

  Tess began to read. Everything looked fine to her. But she knew that until Captain Frost gave his detective the word, no one was powering on a single device.

  I have the cell phone.

  She said, “Okay, while we’re waiting, I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”