by J. D. Robb
“Mmm. Status and exclusivity are vital. And what’s more, I think, what they’re accustomed to. To deny themselves or be denied is intolerable. Under the sheen of romance is a fear and a hatred for women. Look for a mother figure who was either dominant and abusive or weak and abused. Neglectful or overly protective. A man, particularly in his youth, most usually forms opinions and images of women based on his opinion and image of the woman who raised him.”
She thought of Roarke and of herself. Motherless child. “What if he doesn’t know her?”
“Then he forms them another way. But a man who seeks to exploit and hurt and abuse women will certainly have some female figure in his life who these represent to him.”
“If I stop one, do I stop both?”
“If you stop one, the other will self-destruct. But he may very well kill on his way down.”
She did what she did when there was too much data, too many threads, too many angles to all mix and match and tangle.
She went back to the victim.
When she used her master to uncode the police seal and unlock Bryna Bankhead’s apartment, she blanked her mind of facts, and opened it to impressions.
The air was stuffy. There was no scent of candlewax or roses now, but the faint, dusty odor left behind by the sweepers.
No music. No softly glowing light.
She ordered the lights on full, checked that the privacy screen was in place, then wandered the room while an airbus rattled across the graying sky beyond the glass.
Strong colors, contemporary art, and still essentially female. The attractive nest of a single woman of very defined style and taste who enjoyed her life and her work.
A woman young enough that she had yet to form any serious or permanent sexual relationships. And confident enough to experiment. Adventurous enough to form a fanciful attachment with a faceless man over the ’net.
She’d lived alone, both tidily and fashionably, but was friendly with her neighbors.
Very eclectic music library, Eve mused as she flipped through the discs filed orderly in the entertainment unit. She came across Mavis: Live and Kicking, and despite the grim task felt the grin stretch over her face.
Her friend, Mavis Freestone, nearly always made her grin.
But it had been classical that night, Eve remembered. His choice or hers? His, she decided. It had all been his choice.
His fingerprints on the wine bottle. He’d brought it with him, opened it, poured. His fingerprints along with hers on one wineglass, only his on the second.
Handed her the wine. Perfect gentleman.
She walked into the bedroom. The sweepers had bagged the rose petals. The bed had been stripped down to bare mattress. Ignoring it, Eve opened the balcony doors, stepped out.
The wind lifted the choppy ends of her hair, streamed it back away from her face. It was starting to rain, soft, thin drops that fell soundlessly.
Her stomach pitched but she made herself step to the rail, made herself look down. A long drop, she thought. Long last step.
What had made him think of the balcony? There was no indication he’d been to the apartment before.
She replayed the security disc in her head and watched Bryna and her killer approach the front door of the building from the street. No, he hadn’t looked up at the building, New Yorkers never did anyway. They’d been completely absorbed in each other.
Why had he thought of the balcony?
Why hadn’t he just run in panic as he had in the cyber-café? Because part of his brain had stayed cool enough to click into survival mode both times. Had he thought the chemicals wouldn’t show on a tox screen? Had he thought that far ahead?
Or just the first desperate step? He lives in the moment, Mira had said. And the moment had been shocking.
She’s dead, and I’m in such trouble. What should I do?
Self-termination ploy. Toss her away. Out of sight, out of mind. But why not clean up evidence and leave it as a potential self-overdose and buy more time to escape?
To cause confusion, she decided, as he had in the café. He could have uploaded a virus in the single unit, but programmed it to spread. And was knowledgeable enough about those who frequented such places to be sure a riot would result.
A woman splats on the sidewalk, witnesses are shocked, stunned, afraid. They might run to the body or away from it, but they don’t rush into the building looking for a killer—and the killer gains time to rush out and away.
But how did he think of the balcony?
As the rain thickened and began to plop, as her stomach churned at the height, she scanned the street, the neighboring buildings.
“Son of a bitch,” she cursed softly as she read the sign:
COFFEE AND A BYTE.
It was hardly more than a hole in the wall. Ten tables fitted with low-end units. Counter service for six. But the coffee smelled fresh and the floors were clean.
The counter was manned by a droid of the fresh-faced, geek variety. His hair was styled to fall in a pointed brown flap across his forehead.
Two of the tables were occupied by the same type in human form, and the waitress was young and too perky not to be another automation.
“Hi! Welcome to Coffee and a Byte. Would you like a table?”
She had poofy blonde hair and lips the color of bubblegum. Her breasts were like two ripe melons that peeked rosily out of the bodice of her snug white top.
Eve imagined the geeks had nightly wet dreams with her name on them.
“I need to ask you some questions. Both of you.”
The waitress, Bitsy according to her name tag, replied, “Everything’s on the menu, including specials, but either Tad or I will be really happy to explain anything.”
Bitsy and Tad. Eve shook her head. Jesus, who thought of this shit?
“Sit down, Bitsy.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not supposed to sit. Would you like to hear about today’s coffee beverage?”
“No.” Eve pulled out her badge. “This is a police investigation, and I have to ask you some questions.”
“We’re programmed to cooperate fully with the police and security, the fire, the health, and the emergency medical departments.” This was from Tad, who whisked his flap of hair back with his fingers.
“That’s good.” She sensed movement and shifted to point at the thin-shouldered man who was trying to slide invisibly from behind his table. “There’s no trouble here,” she told him. “Just questions. Why don’t you sit back down, relax? You might be able to answer some of them.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Good. Keep not doing anything,” she advised.
She turned back to the droids, but kept her body angled so the tables knew she had them in her scope. “You know what happened across the street? The woman who died?”
“Oh yeah.” Tad brightened, a student with the answer for the teacher. “She got tossed out the window.”
“There you go.” Eve took the photo of Bryna Bankhead, laid it on the counter. “Did she ever come in here?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
He blinked rapidly at that, trying to process. “I’m supposed to call female customers ma’am.”
“I’m a cop, not a customer.” Except . . . She sniffed the air. “Is that real coffee?”
“Oh yes . . .” His face underwent several expressions, ended up baffled.
“Lieutenant,” Eve said helpfully.
“Oh yes, Lieutenant. We serve only genuine soy products, with or without caffeine additives.”
“Never mind.” She held up the photo so both men at the tables could see it. “Either of you ever see this woman?”
The one who’d tried to slither out the door shifted in his seat. “I guess I did. I didn’t do anything.”
“We got that part. Where’d you see her?”
“Around. I live a couple blocks down. That’s why I come here. It’s close and it’s not all crowded and noisy and fu
ll of freaks and slicks.”
“Slicks?”
“You know, the ones who cruise cyber-houses to pick up dates. I do serious work here.”
“You ever talk to her?”
“Nah. Women like that don’t talk to guys like me. I just saw her sometimes is all. Around the neighborhood. She was really pretty, so I looked at her. I didn’t do anything.”
“What’s your name?”
“Milo. Milo Horndecker.”
Doomed, she thought, from birth to geekdom. “Milo, you keep telling me you didn’t do anything, I’m going to start thinking you did.” She pulled out the three stills of the three faces the killer had used. “Do you know any of these men?” She laid them on the counter first for Tad and Bitsy. And got simultaneous head shakes out of them.
“But they’re really pretty, too,” Bitsy added.
The negative responses from the customers had Eve reevaluating. “Okay. You have anyone in here the past few weeks. Somebody who just started coming in recently, hasn’t been in since the murder? He’d want to sit near the front window. He’d come around in the mornings, but not after ten. Or in the evenings, but not before six.”
She had to shuffle through the files in her head to come up with Bryna’s regular work schedule. “If he came in otherwise, it would be on Tuesdays. He’d order fancy coffee. Slim latte grande with chestnut flavoring.”
“He came in two Tuesdays in a row.” Bitsy bounced on the toes of her pink slippers. “He sat in the front and he always had two lattes while he worked. And then he left.”
“Which table?”
“He always used station one. Always.” She pursed her bubblegum lips. “It has a nice view of the street.”
And Bryna Bankhead’s building, Eve thought.
She pulled out her communicator and tagged Feeney. “I’m at a cyber-club across from Bankhead’s building. I’m looking at a unit he used. I need an impound warrant and an image tech.”
Sitting at station one, Eve drank the genuine soy product with caffeine additives. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
She had only to angle her head to see the twelfth floor of the apartment building across the street. Bryna’s apartment windows. The little terraces.
“He likes to be thorough,” she said to Feeney. “He’s a data addict and needs his input fix. She told him in her e-mails what she usually did on her days off. How she liked to open the windows first thing to see what sort of day it was.”
I love to take that first breath of New York in the morning, she’d written. I know what people say about city air, but I think it’s so full, so exciting and romantic. All the scents and flavors and colors. I have them all, and on my day off, I bask in them.
“He probably watched her step out on the terrace. Maybe she’d have a cup of coffee out there, standing by the rail. Being a creature of order, she’d tidy up the apartment, get dressed, probably go out shopping awhile. Meet a friend. He would have tailed her, just to make sure what she told him in e-mail clicked with her habits. Want to make sure she lived alone, that there was no boyfriend or whatever to cramp his style. More, he wanted to see how she behaved, how she looked when she was unaware of him. She had to be good enough to fuck after all.”
She looked back at Feeney, who with his magic fingers and droopy eyes was giving the unit its first check. “He’s a creature of habit, too,” she said. “And the habits are a trail. Can you find him on this?”
“He used it, we can find out when and how. Gonna take time to filter through all the data and find his. But what he put in, we can get out.”
With a nod, she pushed away from the table and walked back to where the image tech worked with the droids. The one thing about droids, she thought, was no matter how annoying they might be, their eyes were a reliable camera.
Already she could see the face and features coming to life on the tech’s comp-canvas.
Soft face, bland features. A hairline starting to recede from a wide dome of brow and left to shag messily over the ears. The kind of face that passed through a crowd unnoticed, that blended to the point where it was a faint smear on the memory.
Except for the eyes. They were sharp and cold.
Whatever he did to his face, Eve knew when she looked into those eyes, she would know him.
There was no cyber-joint within view of Grace Lutz’s building. No coffee shop or little diner. There was a small, walk-in deli with one long narrow aisle, but Eve’s morning run of luck ran out there.
She’d sent for Peabody, and her aide walked in just as she was buying a candy bar.
“That’s a very childish lunch,” Peabody said, craving it. “Is that veggie hash fresh?”
“What have you got for me?”
“A big, gaping pit where my stomach used to be,” Peabody told her, and ordered a take-out serving of the hash. “I’m trying this new diet where you eat only the white of a hardboiled egg for breakfast. Then—”
“Peabody.” Cruelly, Eve unwrapped the candy, took a slow, deliberate bite. “Have you somehow mistaken me for someone who has an interest in dietary matters?”
“That’s really mean. You’re got a mean temperament because you’re spending your caloric intake on processed sugar and . . . is that caramel?”
“Bet your ass.” Eve licked a glossy string of it off her index finger while Peabody enviously followed the move. “Outside. I need to walk.”
“Oh well, if we’re going to exercise give me one of what she’s got,” Peabody demanded, and dug for more money.
On the street, she scooped up forksful of hash slowly to make it last and matched her stride to Eve’s.
“If you can manage to swallow, Peabody, I’d like your report.”
“It’s pretty good. I think they used dill. We listed sixteen possibles,” she said quickly. “Roarke, well, I don’t have to tell you, but he’s one mag tech. So fast and smooth. And when he does manual searches . . . Have you ever noticed his hands?” She ate more hash at Eve’s steely stare. “Yeah, guess you have. Anyway, we’ve had sixteen names that jibed with the purchases, and we factored them down to ten, deleting two guys who got married in the last two weeks. May and June, still big months for weddings. Another who got run over by a maxibus a couple days ago. Did you read about that? This guy, he’s walking along doing his stock checks on his PPC, and steps right off the curb in front of the bus. Blap.”
“Peabody.”
“Okay, well. We narrowed it down to ten most-likelies, going with the outlets McNab came up with in-city for the enhancements. The wigs are taking longer because he’s got to target the manufacturer, and he says there’s about two hundred who use that high-grade human material—then hit the brand, then the product name. The style used in the first murder is a pretty popular hair alternative, and goes by several names, depending on the brand and material used.”
She flipped her empty take-out carton into a recycler, and began to peel the wrapper off her candy bar with the slow precision and intense concentration of a woman stripping her lover.
“He wants to have pizza tonight.”
“What? Roarke wants pizza?”
“No, McNab. McNab wants to have pizza with me tonight. He says he wants to talk and stuff, but this morning we broke a couple of public moral codes outside your gates.”
“Shit. Shit.” Eve pressed her fingers under her eye where a muscle began to tic wildly. “There it goes again. Why do you tell me this stuff? It makes me spasm.”
“If we have pizza, we’re going to have sex. What does that mean?”
“It’s more than a spasm. I think it’s an embolism. One of those brain bombs, and you have your finger twitching on the button.”
“I don’t want to get messed up again. But I feel messed up anyway.”
Eve sighed. “What do I know about this kind of stuff, Peabody? It’s taken me more than a year to find my rhythm with Roarke, and I still screw it up half the time. Cops are bad bets.”
She turned, jamming her hands in h
er pockets. The street was dirty, the traffic loud, and the smoke that belched from the glide-cart they passed stank of fried rehydrated onions. She could see an illegals deal in the making a half block down and across the street.
“Trying to have a life off the job is work. Two of you trying to have a life off it, I don’t know. Damn it.” Her heart might have been going soft for her aide, but her eyes were still hard and clear. “That’s going bad. Call for the beat cops, then back me up.”
She pulled out her badge, pulled out her weapon, and was already zagging across the street when one of the men on the opposite sidewalk drew a blade.
There was a swipe, a dodge, then the second man flashed out a knife of his own.
They jabbed, circling each other. Bystanders scattered.
“Police! Drop your weapons.”
They ignored her, and she could see one was jonesing, the other high. That made both of them dangerous.
“Lose the stickers, or I drop you both.”
As one, they turned on her. The man desperate for his fix lunged wildly. She heard one of the pedestrians screaming. As the knife arched up, she took her man down with a stun across the knees.
He fell toward her. She pivoted, blocked, then brought the heel of her boot down hard on his knife hand.
While he wailed, flopped, she saw the second man had moved fast. He had the side of his blade lodged at the throat of the screaming pedestrian. And he had Zeus in his eyes, that elixir that made gods of men.
“Drop it. Let her go and drop it.”
“Fuck you. Fuck her. This is my goddamn corner!”
“You cut her, you’ll die on this goddamn corner.” The man on the ground was weeping now. She could smell the piss leaking onto the sidewalk where his bladder had let go.
“You put your piece down or I cut her from ear to ear.” He leaned in, running his tongue over the terrified woman’s cheek. “And drink the blood.”
“Okay. Looks like you’ve got me.” She lowered her weapon, watching his eyes follow it down. Then watching them jitter as Peabody stepped in from behind and laid her stunner against the back of his neck.
Eve sprang forward, grabbing his knife hand, twisting it. The civilian slid to the ground like an empty sack. “Stun him again!” Eve shouted as the drug-induced strength had the knife jamming toward her throat. She felt the prick, that hot sting of metal against flesh.
